Coming Home to Story

I was delighted last week, to come across the rope that Chris used during her clown workshops. I remember her buying it from a small chandlery near Lyme Regis. Designed for nautical use, the rope lies flat and doesn’t tangle. It’s used to delineate the boundary between the audience and the stage, where the everyday world ends and the world of the clown begins.

Stepping over the rope onto the stage is an invitation to embrace the possibilities that come from being fully present to whatever is and whatever happens. Don’t go on stage with a predetermined idea of what to do; don’t try to be interesting or funny. Breathe, feel, explore, allow the world to come to you.

Notice what happens when you don’t try to make anything happen. Be bold and generous (even when showing how scared and small you are). Clowns are whimsical, curious, sensitive, open to discovery, and wear their hearts on their sleeves. They say “Yes” to life and to death and to everything in between.

For anyone who knew Chris, it will come as no surprise that she was a natural and gifted clown. Some of our happiest times were spent clowning together at La Luna nel Pozzo, Robert McNeer’s theatre school in Puglia, Italy. I didn’t mind being in her shadow, it was so glorious to see her shine.

Chris’s genius was that she brought all those qualities that she so brilliantly exemplified as a clown into the rest of her life. She broke the rules and crossed the line.

“Clowning,” she once told me, “is the art of transgressing beautifully.”

Life too, perhaps?

I woke up a few days ago with the word redux going through my mind. It’s not a word I often use, though I was familiar with it from John Updike’s Rabbit Redux and I had a vague idea of what it meant. It was such an odd word to be mulling on as I crossed over the threshold into consciousness that I decided to check the dictionary definition.

adjective: redux
ˈriːdʌks/
brought back; revived.
past participle Latin reducere to bring back

I am reviving, I thought. I am coming back to life. There had been subtle changes in my body in the previous few weeks that seemed to signal such a revival. My hair, which had been dry and brittle for the past two and a half years, felt soft and silky and my fingernails had become stronger and stopped breaking.

“These are good signs,” I said to myself. “I’m doing well.”

But then I stopped to think about the word that had prompted this rather self-satisfied reflection. Redux: brought back. Brought back, not brought myself back. Reducere isn’t a reflexive verb. I didn’t do this to myself.

The truth is that I’ve been sustained by a filigree of love ever since Chris fell ill and especially since she died. So many friends – men and women – have held me in their thoughts; have written, emailed, called, skyped, and visited; have offered convivial company; cooked for me; walked and talked with me; have witnessed my tears and held me in their arms; and have insisted that I have a place among the living. Without your loving kindness I would have disappeared.

Some of you are old friends who stepped forward when I needed you most; others are new friends whose paths have fortuitously crossed mine or who have sought me out. And I confess, there is one recent and especially dear friend who makes my battered heart sing.

Chris taught me that love is manifested in what we do; that it makes itself known in the world not as a noun but as a verb. Together, all of you have taught me that there are many ways to love, even though we are deficient in language to express their various forms, and that they are all good.

Your love has brought me back to life.

Thank you.

Well super-dog fans, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It’s time to announce the winners of my New Year Quiz which, I’m happy to say, attracted a fantastic range of entries from far and wide.

If you remember (which might be difficult as some of the entries appear to have been submitted under the affluence of incohol) I asked you to help me track down titles of songs which I recorded during the lost years of my Winalot addiction.

For your delectation and delight here all the entries that made it through to the final round (swimwear and personality).

Sheelagh Wherity, Ireland
Hounds of Love (Kate Bush)
How Come There’s No Dog Day? (Tommy Cooper)

Johanna Cornelissen, Canada
The Dog Days are Over (Florence & The Machine)
Black Dog (Led Zeppelin)
Hair of the Dog (Nazareth )

Ron Donaldson, Up North
The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel)
Hey Bulldog (The Beatles)
Wild Rover (Dubliners)

Margaret Gearty, Ireland
Hounds of Love (Kate Bush)
Diamond Dogs (David Bowie)

Karen Karp, United States
Now That’s What I Call Dog #57 (Compilation)

Special mentions go to Ron Donaldson for best hair styling, Johanna Cornelissen for variety, Margaret Gearty for topicality, Karen Karp for ingenuity, and Sheelagh Wherity for obscure comedy.

Since the clapometer isn’t working and I strongly suspect that the panel of expert judges chaired by Sepp Blatter has been nobbled, I have decided in the words of Lewis Caroll’s Dodo, that “everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

Actually that might be a bit expensive, so the prizes will have to wait until my lawyer recovers my share of the royalties. In the meantime, let’s just say:

Everybody has won.

Chris bought this sculpture for me from a local art gallery but died a few days before my birthday. Knowing how ill she was, she made a point of giving it to me straight away. “It’s my last gift,” she said. “I wanted to make it a good one.”

About 50cm high, the figure emerges from a rough-hewn base and, headless and armless, ends with a voluptuous tilt of the exposed neck and a hint of angelic wings.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I love it. Thank you.”

Chris quickly became gravely ill and I put the sculpture aside. When she died, I hung the mortbrod in the window by the front door concealing the sculpture from view. One year later, actually on my next birthday, I took the mortbrod down and rediscovered the sculpture.

When I looked at her carefully and ran my fingers over her smooth contours, she seemed to represent the many aspects of the feminine: sacred, sensuous, sexual, earthy, powerful – so much of what Chris had shared with me.

A week later, my friend Lycia facilitated a constellation for me at Folly Cottage to help me explore the question: “Who am I becoming?” We used artifacts from around the house to stand for various elements including the broken pieces of Sassy Bear to represent Chris and the sculpture to represent the feminine.

I learned a lot, much of it ineffable. But two things I can say with confidence: first, Chris has moved on and I have to let her go. That’s not to forget her or to stop loving her but to accept, deep in my bones, that she has truly gone. Second, and profoundly connected with this realisation, is that I yearn to re-connect with the feminine, both symbolically in terms of expressing my own creativity and literally in terms of conversation, close friendship, and physical intimacy. The constellation showed me that I can love Chris still and love again.

Then I realised that, wise and generous to the end, that was the real significance of her parting gift. She knew it would take time, but she was both signalling her understanding that I would have to let her go and giving me her blessing to live a full and satisfying life.

Things can happen very quickly after a constellation.

My heart is opening to the possibility of love.

Wherever Chris is, I think she’s smiling.

Captain Midnight here, calling all musically-minded super-dog fans. I need your help to compile a playlist of my greatest hits. Himself has found some in the back catalogue that we’re pretty sure are mine, but I’m having trouble remembering most of them.

I’ve been around a while and you know how the scene was back then: I did a bit of Winalot (we all did) and pretty soon I was mainlining marrow-bone. I lost the plot completely for a while. Like they say, “If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there.”

You should know that I’ve been clean for years. It’s macrobiotic dog biscuit and yoga for me now. Sobriety is great but you still can’t bring back the lost years. So, this is where your help comes in. If you listen carefully to the following songs (click on title for YouTube link) I’m sure you’ll recognize my dulcet tones harmonizing with the human front-person unjustly required by Equity.

It’s outrageous how we canines are treated by the so-called entertainment industry. Did you know that Lassie died broke and they actually shot Old Yeller for the sake of realism? But, I’m getting off the point, which is to ask if can you think of any other tracks that I might have appeared on during my drug-fuelled years as a “dog-for-hire” session musician as well as these ones?

Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton)
Red Rubber Ball (Seekers)
Walking the Dog (Rolling Stones)
Chasing Cars (Snow Patrol)
I Love My Dog (Cat Stevens)
Puppy Love (Paul Anka)
Spanish Flea (Herb Alpert)
Shake it like a Dog (Kane and Abel)
Leash (Pearl Jam)
Salty Dog (Procul Harum)
The Bitch is Back (Elton John)

That’s the quiz. Send me your doggy suggestions with url link, c/o Himself. But please note that I had nothing whatsoever to do with that god-awful dirge, How Much is That Doggy in the Window? I might have been boned out of my mind but I never sunk that low.

Get busy because the winner will be announced on 10 January!

Bye for now super-dog fans.

[Bill Nighy as ageing rock star Billy Mack]

Chris and I would often watch Love Actually at Christmas. I thought I’d continue this tradition yesterday so, after lunch, I lit the fire and settled down with Ted, popped the DVD into the slot and clicked PLAY.

Mmmmm.

I suppose I should have anticipated the tsunami of tears that flowed over the next 90 minutes, but I didn’t. Poor old Captain Midnight got so used to me bursting into sobs that after the first three or four times, instead of leaping onto my lap to sort me out, he stayed on the sofa across the room, briefly raised his head, opened one eye just to make sure I wasn’t about to stop breathing, and went straight back to sleep.

It’s easy to be sniffy about Richard Curtis films: middle-class characters (mostly white and mostly straight) falling in and out of love in posh surroundings. But, with a willing suspension of disbelief, both the beauty and pain of love are there to be relished. Love Actually has joy and passion and grief and loss in it; and love of many kinds from first love to last love; likely and unlikely couples are matched in requited and unrequited love. And not just romantic love: friendships, families and foolish fancies also have their place.

Chris especially liked the flawed Harry – Karen (Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson) pairing and Billy Mack’s (Bill Nighy) unlikely love for his manager Joe (Gregor Fisher). Over the years I’ve been touched by the plights of all of the film’s love struck and lovelorn characters but yesterday, inevitably I suppose, I identified most strongly with the recently widowed Dan (Liam Neeson) both in his obvious love for his late wife and – I confess – in the fact that his misery diminishes somewhat when Claudia Schiffer takes a fancy to him.

The scene I find most moving though, is the one that both opens and closes the film: dozens of people greeting each other in an airport arrival lounge. The candid shots were taken by hidden cameras (with permission later given by subjects for their images to be shown). The joy on people’s faces reminds me of what a dear friend said to me the other day: “Ultimately, everyone is loveable.”

This morning, I woke up thinking of Chris and with a song going around in my head. It wasn’t used in the film as it happens, though I think it should have been. Happy Christmas sweetheart.

You’ve got to give a little, take a little,
and let your poor heart break a little.
That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.

You’ve got to laugh a little, cry a little,
until the clouds roll by a little.
That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.

As long as there’s the two of us,
we’ve got the world and all it’s charms.
And when the world is through with us,
we’ve got each other’s arms.

You’ve got to win a little, lose a little,
yes, and always have the blues a little.
That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.
That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.

[Benny Goodman with Helen Ward, 1936]

Well super-dog fans, it’s been quite a year.

Obviously, the main thing is that it’s the first one without the Mrs. She went away 12 months ago but she hasn’t gone completely. That will only happen when I can’t smell her any more and I can still smell her, especially when Himself gets her clothes out of the wardrobe. Anyway, it makes Him very sad and I have to leap into action to supply healing wags and slobbery kisses.

Nice people have invited us round for meals and parties this Christmas, but He has decided that we’ll be hunkering down on our own instead at Folly Cottage, which is lovely for walking in the woods, apart from the pheasant-murderers banging away, and then we’ll be going to Lyme Regis for New Year so I can take him walking on Charmouth beach. People are more civilized down there… at least they don’t take potshots at the seagulls.

There’s a rumour of roast beef for Christmas dinner and the promise of a roaring log fire to follow, with the inevitable watching of old movies. I hope he doesn’t make me sit through Lassie again. I hate all that an-throp-o-morph-ism (big word for a small dog, I did have to ask Himself to spell it for me). You wouldn’t catch me getting involved in anything like that, it’s so demeaning.

We’ve had lots of visitors this year. Old friends from near and far including Australia, Canada, America and Scotland have called by to take Himself out for walkies (I go along of course) to cheer him up. I’ve also arranged for Him to meet some nice new people too, using my “babe magnet” super-power, because He’s a bit dopey at that sort of thing.

His lady friends – the tall one and the short one who come round and make him laugh and make sure he has nice food to eat – have gone to South Africa (wherever that is, somewhere the other side of Dursley, I think). Apparently they’ll be back, lithe and suntanned, in the Spring. Himself seems a bit put out but good for them, I say. I wouldn’t mind going; chasing a few Springbok, that sort of thing. But, I digress.

Himself says that he’s quite happy staying at home “being a writer” thank you very much. It took me a while to find out what he meant but I’ve now discovered what “being a writer” is. It’s sitting at the kitchen table staring at a blank screen until his head bleeds. I give him lots of encouragement by snoozing on the bench right next to him. He says it helps but I can’t really see how anyone’s going to be interested in his stuff when they can read mine instead, can you?

Another big thing this year was the five weeks we spent En France in the mobile kennel. It was pretty cozy, I can tell you (see picture above). I managed to get a long rope so he felt less constricted on the lead but he’s very slow so I had to drag him along. I watched a bit of The Dog Whisperer last night to get a few ideas but frankly I think he’s untrainable.

I’m OK now but I have had a few medical mishaps this year: the tail incident and some accidental “self-harming” on my foreleg, to name but two. Any excuse to bang on the cone of shame! It’s a bit undignified but I’ve got used to it. Speaking of undignified, he’s just discovered “dog shampoo” and is experimenting on me regularly. I’m pretty sure he’s in cahoots with those evil G.R.O.O.M.E.R.S.

Well that’s probably enough for now. I only opened the laptop to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.

With much and many kinds of love

From your faithful friend

Captain Midnight

[and Himself]

When Chris was alive, I saw myself through her eyes. When we met, she was 34 and I was 51. We were together for 14 years and the difference in our ages was never an issue between us. I suppose the tacit logic of our relationship was that she would probably one day have to take care of me and that I would die first. In fact, our fates were the opposite of what we had imagined them to be.

Now she has gone, I see my reflection only in mirrors hanging on the wall. I expect to see myself as I was when she and I first met but, when I catch sight of my image, it’s as though I’m meeting someone I haven’t seen for a long time. I do a double-take: is that really me?

The cognitive dissonance between the person I expect to see (the one with whom Chris fell in love) and the face in the mirror, is shocking. I no longer know how the world sees me. Am I becoming invisible or am I still interesting and attractive and, if so, to whom?

I’ve known for a long time, because it’s much talked about, that invisibility is an issue for some women as they age. I hadn’t ever thought about it in relation to men, and certainly not in relation to myself. Arrogance perhaps, or maybe just the natural consequence of being in a mutually loving relationship in which each is seen by the other.

I felt profoundly seen by Chris. She perceived my weaknesses and wounds, but she also saw through them to the best and most expansive part of me. That generous gaze was her great gift as a partner, friend and teacher. Apart from her physical presence, being seen in that way is  what I miss most.

So maybe this is what I’m striving to understand by writing this blog: I haven’t disappeared completely – I do good work in the world and have many friends – but in the absence of an intimate, loving gaze, I am learning what it is to be unseen. If I am not beloved, who am I? I look for glimpses of myself in the eyes of others but I’m realising that I have to find new ways to calibrate my sense of self.

Of course, Captain Midnight thinks I’m brilliant.

But that’s his job.

It’s just two years since Chris and I got married. Our wedding spread over two days: on 13 December we got “street legal” as Chris called it, at Stroud Registry Office in the morning, then joined 20 close friends (our soul buddies) at Matara for a convivial afternoon followed by dinner. On the following day, we were joined by 50 more guests for a hand fasting ritual, feast and ceilidh.

Our friend Sue Hollingsworth, who describes it as the best wedding she’s ever been to, has been staying with Ted and me at Folly Cottage for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversaries (she too was married on 13 December and she too is widowed). In the evening, we sat by the fire and shared stories about our partners’ lives and deaths, and of our lives in the aftermath of bereavement.

During the days, we’ve been sorting out Chris’s stuff and putting Folly Cottage straight, ready for Christmas and a fresh start in the New Year. I’ve even got an office now, with a clear desk. Regular visitors will be amazed to see tables, floors and windowsills free of clutter. Though, just to make sure things don’t run too smoothly, it looks like the central heating boiler has packed up overnight.

According to tradition, the second wedding anniversary should be celebrated with artifacts made of cotton, which put me in mind of the piece of embroidered fabric Chris bought in Minho, Portugal on her birthday 21 August 2013, just three days before she had the seizure that signalled the presence of a brain tumour. Made these days for tourists, these elaborately hand-stitched squares were once made and given as love tokens by young Portuguese women to their fiancés.

Chris and I had spoken about getting it framed, but I realised as I showed it to Sue that it’s really something to be touched and held, rather than just looked at.

Chris loved craft work and I think this lenços de namaduros (sweetheart handkerchief) is a fitting marker of what would have been our second wedding anniversary and a bitter-sweet memento of our last days in Eden, before the fall.