The University of the Self #19

Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Placewriting Lyric Fragments i - vii

'Image title: There Are Planets Happening Here Image description: This is a piece of asemic writing. The paper is rectangular, portrait setting. The background comprises of large, scratchy, curved brush stroke in black on white paper. On top of that, some grey/white smudgy lines are brushed vertically down the page. There are 12 circle/oval shapes hand embossed into the paper, roughly in the centre. Around these shapes are lines of small white/black scribbly writing.

Content warning: some of these fragments make reference to trauma, abuse, anxiety.

Poetry as a Place of Our Own

i

Location, Location, Location.

This memorable tricolon was the title of a UK television series
screened in the UK in the early noughties. It attempted to reinforce the idea
that nothing was more important to our homes than where they had
been built—that what made our homes valuable, desirable,
indeed worth anything at all, was whereabouts in they were placed.
Beneath the jolly old fun of it, I couldn’t help feeling that it exacerbated
the narrative of better than and the worse than, of socio-economic divides,
of areas that must be escaped instead of supported.
It made us believe that we couldn’t be happy where we already were,
that we had to keep on moving on up in the world, and follow
the heady scents of gentrification.
Perhaps I missed the whole point of it. Perhaps I didn’t.
To me, it offered us place as something unattainable. 
What about the ones who were left behind?
Had I misunderstood the programme?                             

All those elitist buzz words. Future-proofing. Oasis. Idyll. Budget of £1m.
Windsor wonderland. Fast forward to 2024, and people are living
in worsening destitution, buckling under corporate profiteering, trying and failing
to scrape a paradise of their own from poverty. People are homeless.
People are subjected to incalculable cruelties. People are afraid.
People are terrified of eviction, or cannot afford a place to live,
or are holding onto that place by the skin of their teeth. Communities have suffered,
have begun to fall apart. The planet descends into further ruin.
People are displaced, in danger, desperate. What is home sweet home anymore?
Has place become the locus where too many people must forget about living,
because they only have the time and energy to focus on survival?
If that TV tricolon was rewritten for today, it could read like this:

Survive, Survive, Survive.

ii

Is place a door? Doors are complex. I think about them a lot. I have had many relationships with doors. I think about the many times a door has saved me. The times, as a child, it meant escape from bullies on the outside, a means of respite from them for a while, until I had to open it and expose myself to them once again.

Each time I open my door, I still feel, even for a moment, nervous and vulnerable. Closing the front door has represented escape from dangerous situations—the times
I have been followed home by men who refused to take no for an answer, for example—times when I have saved myself by being able to get behind the door first, and lock it as quicky as I could with fumbling fingers.

Closing the door on the world meant, and still means, that I can unmask, let the strain of smiling slip from my mouth, and be wholly and truly myself. I close my door upon stress, anxiety and fear. Closing my door means that nobody can see me anymore. Closing the door means that I am not homeless, and I am so very, very grateful every single day for that. I have written around this subject a little, after a brief period of homelessness when I was in my twenties. Here is an excerpt of a piece which was oricinally published here in 2017:

For Such a Long Time, I Was Afraid of Windows

Before I could leave the house, I would peep round frames, take deep breaths behind the door, hand on knob, straining through the wood for outside sounds. No wonder my skin hates me. It prickles. It has held my bones together like a purse for all these years and I have itched inside it, pulled it, squeezes it, scratched it. It has had a tough job of keeping me together. I still dream of flying from it – of unzipping my skeleton, letting loose the ivory bundle of bones, limbs shaken loose. This suit of flesh belongs to me. It could have belonged to someone beautiful. It could have belonged to an angel, but no. It’s mine. I have no seams. I look and pick and yet remain un-split.

I remember when I never had a home. Six and a half years into a relationship, and then well, sorry and all but there’s someone else. Then you are putting milk pans, clothes and photographs in bin bags. I never had much money. I didn’t know what to do. I was young — the man I loved wanted me out a.s.a.p. and I simply didn’t know where I was meant to go, nor how I was going to afford it. People can be so cold — can decide overnight that they want you gone, and you wish you could disappear that easily. Friends you thought you had turn their backs. This is how easily it can happen.

Does a door represent safety? How long have humans needed / wanted / craved doors? Thinking about this aspect inspired me to write this poem:

The Robenhausen Door
(discovered in Switzerland, at a Neolithic
pile dwelling site in the Robenhausen marshes, 1868)

Strong and straight against the sky, a silver fir
needled itself
to every season’s
         changing skin.            Beneath the bark and bast, it held
a doorway’s hidden shape,          waiting 
                  to be coaxed and hewn
with axe and adze—           a door to brace the wind, blowing cold
        across the lake. A door to secure.         To protect,
to pivot on its chiselled spur—              to swing
on sinew hinges, to be a wing     
                between the outside and the in—
to flank against the rain.          The door still wears
           a veneer of touch,       the history of hands
that palmed its timber open,
                            pushed it shut,
                                            that worked it smooth—
closed it upon an old, forgotten world.
Weights of sediment      seeped into its grain,    yet
      this door    unlatched       to let its stories
              through.      A portal to the past,      tawny, knotted,
                                            stained with marsh and age,
five thousand years have stepped across its sill.
Once, the mouth of a home,              it spat its people out.
                 It swallowed them whole,
drank the dawn—                  released each day’s light,
                           grew quiet beneath the dusk.
                                          Stopped the perils of the night.


On the flip side, I think about the times a door has made me feel unsafe. When it is closed, you can be trapped inside. When you are trapped inside, bad things can happen to you. When I am in a strange room (a doctor’s surgery, a shop, train station, classroom, for example) I must mark where the escape route is. When an unfamiliar door closes, I am always in various severities of stress. If I can, I sit by the door.

Some relationships I have had through childhood and adulthood have caused much trauma. ‘Behind closed doors’ is an ominous idiom. The levels of safety behind any door depend on who has been or who is closed in with me.

iii

What is place? Is it where we put something down?
                                            (I placed the trifle carefully upon the table)

Is it where we set ourselves down?
                                            (Home is where you hang your hat, said Leon Redbone)

Is place love?
                                            (in his long poem Don Juan (Canto 3), Lord Byron
                                             writes without hearts there is no home)
Is place safety?
                                            (Maya Angelou, in her book, All God’s children need
                                              travelling shoes, said The ache for home lives in all of us,
                                              the safe place we can go as we are…)

Is place where we are made unsafe?
                                             Abusers who make home a place of terror deny us
                                             sanctuary—of that feeling that we can, for a while,
                                             close the door upon the world. Such a cruel, calculating
act—a deliberate inflicting of placelessness within place;
a morphing of place into pain. A denial of our humanity.

iv

Is place loss?                       
                                             We lose our place in the book we are reading;
                                             get fired and lose our place at work.

Is place something we must earn, luck into, or wait for?          
                                             We earn a place in history; take our place in the queue.
                                             Sometimes we are in the right place at the right time
sometimes we are in the wrong.
                                              
Is place is a song of love or loss?
Queen sang There’s no place for us; Billie Holiday would
be seeing you / In all the old familiar places; Chuck Berry had
no particular place to go; The Beatles sang There are places I’ll
remember / All my life.

Is place trauma?
                                              Remembering where we were when we receive devastating
                                              or complicated news will influence our grief-coping
mechanisms, can form a grief map or trauma map, where
our experiences become bound forever to landscape.
                                             
The bad things that happen to us have to happen somewhere.
Remembering these things has to happen somewhere too.
From my own experiences, I believe that trauma memory
refuses to stick to any predictable geographical schedule, builds
up a complex cartography between Where I Was and Where I Am Now.
An episode of post-traumatic stress can be triggered by a particular place,
as it can be by another location which reminds you somehow of that place.
Trauma can connect place past to place present, to place future.

Trauma is something that we cannot relocate from.
No matter how many times we change horizons, it haunts us.
Follows us wherever we go.
Trauma shapes and alters us within the environment of the self, as coastlines
are shaped and altered by the sea.

I used to think that all mountains were made by earthquakes
but scientists now believe it’s also the moments of calm between that raise them—
the countless years of slow crusting, layer by layer in defiance
of a fault line’s momentary cataclysm.

Earthquakes erode mountains. Cause them to crumble, slip and slide.
Yes, I can make a metaphor of this (I’m a poet, not a scientist).
I am mountain made from breaking, then from healing, time and time again.

Trauma is the shattering of solid ground.
This is why I am afraid of cracks.
This is why I love mountains.

v

Is place happiness?
                                            The good things that happen have to happen somewhere too.
                                            On the Isle of Skye, I met Highland ponies for the first time.
                                             I was in La Linea when I went to a small, open-air cinema
                                             and ate sunflower seeds with my brothers.
                                             I went to Scarborough for a holiday with my son when
he was twelve years old and every simple thing
could still be turned into a magical experience.

Is place the everyday?
                                             The purgatory of drudge has to happen somewhere
too. The drudge rigmarole operates between the kitchen
sink, washing machine, bathroom and the cheapest local
supermarket. It has also operated in and around all the
shitty jobs that I have had.

Is place surreal?
                                              How else can we explain déjà vu, that curious feeling
                                              we’ve been somewhere before? Or the machinations of
                                              a University’s PhD application process, each venue’s
individual application requirements more Kafkaesque than
the last? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night,
wondering where the heck you are? Sometimes, I worry my
whole life is one giant confusional arousal.

Unless parallel universes actually exist? Perhaps, instead of confusional arousals,
I am slipping and sliding around the multiverse. I could be an out-of-this-world tourist. I could be a time hopper. I could be way more well-travelled than I previously thought.

vi

When I was a child, place was geography lessons. The best part for me was shading around the intricate coastlines with blue pencil or blue felt tip. I have always loved blue—have always held on to the idea that it somehow holds everything together.

The blue sky stops us bumping into space. The blue water stops one piece of land from crashing into another.

Colouring around the land offered hours of contentment, beautiful repetition; an absorbing activity inside which I felt complete. Completely safe. No man is an island,
said John Donne. I like to think of myself as an insignificant and undiscovered skerry, tucked right at the top of the map, just before the world finishes and becomes something else. I love to imagine colouring blue all around my own body—the fjords between my torso and arms, the faults and fissures, the coves, like a blue halo. An uncrossable moat.

vii

At the age of eighteen, I read A Subaltern’s Love Song by John Betjeman
and was mesmerised by the thought of Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun—in my mind’s eye, I saw her as a golden being,
born, it seemed, from the sun itself—a creature-god, gorging on rays,
growing plump and tennis-capable upon a diet of yellow light.
Light specifically from Aldershot—what a curious thought!
This notion of a human being so embedded into place, so formed by place,
so influenced by and so dependent on place has stayed with me always.
But what exactly is place? I ask myself this question many times a day.



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