As my friends know and tell me, I have a relationship to authority that is one of masochism: don't I love it, the sense of having done something wrong, whatever it is, without knowing it, and then being corrected - told off - and brought back into the fold?
A child's book - Charmed Life - whose character, the passive Cat (like so many of Diana Wynne Jones' protagonists) sets himself on fire by striking a match from the book in which his lives are kept (he doesn't know it yet - and like, again, those others of Jones's protagonist - but he has great gifts, in his case nine lives and a powerful capacity for magic); sets himself on fire and then in comes the Enchanter, the owner of the castle where the orphaned Cat has found himself and lifts him into the bath - sweet smell of burning - and then rolls him in a carpet to be put out.
Ah, delicious memory - to be bathed thus, to be rolled thus, and after, like Cat to bathe in the attention of one who has hardly seemed to see him - and then to be recognised eventually as another Enchanter - as an heir to the castle and to a government position in this alternate world where magic is everywhere and technology far behind that of our world!
I remember the ghostly flames with which Cat seemed to burn and then understanding - was it then or later - that the nickname, Cat (his real name, Eric) was because, as an Enchanter, he had nine lives, and those left to him placed in that matchbook a match from which he had unfortunately struck.
Yes, to have sinned - though it was not your fault, and then punished, and then attended to, having sweetly burned, given sweet tea in bed: to be weak and tired from a temporary, involuntary transgression that let for the first time, the sense of the Law spring up around you - there are limits, prohibitions, against which you were brought - what reassurance to know the presence of the Law, even in its inscrutability. The Enchanter, the law's agent, the one who knows, attending to - you: who have you become?
I am reminded, also, of another book, long given away, so I can't check it - Denton Welch's A Voice Through A Cloud, the last of his three novels, unfinished at the time of his very early death, and recounting, in a manner that is more or less true, the story of his accident - a car ran into his bike - complications from which would stop him completing this novel.
Denton half falls in love with his doctor, that's what I remember. And doesn't he test the limits of his doctor's care - doesn't he transgress a little to enjoy all the more being brought back within the hospital Law? Poor dying Denton, who describes - he is a consummate food evoker - placing peppermints on his chest and watching them rise and fall with his breathing, and isn't there a very beautiful passage about a cat - I used to know it by heart, but it is twelve years ago at least when I last read it - beautiful because the cat plays its games in his memory, from a time before the accident that is killing him.
Didn't I have the fantasy as a child of being very ill, confined in some way - when was it I read of iron lungs? in the Guiness Book of Records 1977? - but then I also remember seeing in some programme or another a little girl falling ill and then being confined, but what old black and white film was that? and then some television series about an ill child and helicopter-carried doctors: all that, the medical world, the promise of being ill and then made better, the technical apparatus enticed me then because it seemed another embodiment of that wrong you would commit without knowing it was wrong, but that also elected you to the position of one who would deserve special attention.
Why that love of swooning (Barthelme's book on King Arthur's court has all the knights swooning), of illness? - and perhaps the same love now of a kind of falling - or is it the falling that engenders love (recalling the gaze of the boss in Sinthome's reading of The Secretary)? - of that sweet tiredness that give me the excuse of writing only what asks me to dream along with it, carrying me once again to the limits of the law - this time to what cannot be said, and consoling me by allowing these words I write to come back to me on the blog, pretty and distant and mine.
But then I also admit I enjoy being told off for what I write here and isn't that another way of being gathered up and loved by the law, like the Little Match Girl in the illustrated book of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales I had as a child, who is met by her grandmother in heaven? Gathered up - just as a little girl when I was young, might when she cried in class be sat on the lap of a teacher and cuddled?
Because to be told off is at least not to be neglected. Ambiguous desire, because I am in love, too with that word, 'neglect', and isn't it also that I want that another part of me writes, that part half-writing with me now, in relation to whom I am the master, I am the punisher although I feel tender towards him who loses himself in that wandering that sets him too far from the work I have to accomplish in the world?
How will that review get written, I ask him as I shake him - but don't I love him, too?; isn't he the one for whom I feel all tenderness and who goes out from that always wounded place I remember as belonging to my childhood?
It is a child that writes, or half-writes distractedly alongside me. Distracted because his gaze is caught by the field and the trees on the other side of the field, and that space beyond the school that is owned by he knows not whom the path through which he will not discover until when one day on a school walk he sees his own school, his classroom small and far away.
I remember it still, that view. I dream of it. What does it see in me? What gaze did it send towards me? - and by what gaze am I still watched? I indulge him, this child who almost writes. Sometimes I promise myself to use the words cuddle and pretty - a child's words. And the word toy, for which, as a child I already felt a great tenderness.
Didn't I know that to the heart of childhood, to those smallest of children who play side by side without mixing and in whom, Deleuze said, one only sees the play of a life, there belonged only those toys? I was perpetually too old for the toys with which I wanted to play. And easy to tears I when told off I also loved those tears and to cry. Marvellous humiliation, and in front of the whole class.
It became annoying only when to be told off was not enough and the teacher had another child take me to the most junior class in the infants and made me sit with the smallest children. What a baby! But didn't I know I was approaching the heart of what was already lost? - that it was childhood that was drawing me towards it, and that I was living what could not return for the too-old child I was?
That was the perfection of tears, as they gathered me then to the edge of what I was losing. And the perfection of the view that saw me from the field on the brow of the hill beyond the school that always let my tears dry up.
Seeing a friend of mine enthuse his poor son to take karate lessons and then when he cried in front of the other boys and their fathers (it was all fathers) not to take him from the hall of crash mats somewhere private, I thought: he is breeding a masochist.
No surprise years later when the boy denounced his father, and, as I hear, was taken away from his custody. Unfair - cruel - and I think unjust though I know little of the particularities of the case - and the boy is with his mother now, suffused by her tenderness, exalted by her mercy.
Poor Denton, poor Cat and that poor lad, then, though what is he becoming now? Remember what happened when Francis Bacon's father had him whipped by stableboys? - wasn't it lads like stableboys who Bacon would henceforward seek out to whip him to his father's shock? And what is that line by Prince from Come where he sings, don't abuse children or they'll turn out like me?'
What strangenesses can be hatched in the minds of the young. Happily or unhappily, conventional relationships are enough for me - I am rather passive, I let things happen, but they eventually harden into an ordinary heterosexualism, into relationships in which nothing is unusual - but then I wander what writing has unleashed, or rather that fallen writing written here. Whose law am I breaking? Whose punishment do I seek?
To be sick, to be made better: a child's game. A game I might have played with my soft toys as a child, making my voice higher than it was, and seeking by way of those 'transitional objects' (Winnicott) passage upstream to what had already shut me from the heart of childhood.
Time was already carrying me along, and those toys were binbagged and put into the lost where they wait still, keeping place for what has no place - indices of what retreats as childhood in childhood. I think I never made the transition, and something of me is as though snagged back there.
Is it the same for all of us? From what do we love, or cuddle? Who is it that looks for the pretty? Didn't I love pretty girls as a child? And pretty things? And pretty writing? I think these are dull times, and consensual reality is such that you can play with nothing, and relationships are part of the great clampdown.
Wasn't there a short period in my life when other lives were lived as possible? Ah, that was back in Manchester. And don't I like now my zipped up fleece and being just like anyone else? Like anyone else - but excessively so, and this 'too much' becomes a metonym, I'm sure, for something else.
How strangely desire leads us. I am learning more from the notes I take from Sinthome's instructive posts on psychoanalysis, which I paste into Word and annotate.
Vaguely and stupidly I dream of a time, a place where fantasies might be lived in body and soul. Like the vanguardist, I would want what is found by way of writing to be discovered in all parts of life. To live what is written. To complete what is begun here, and in the sphere of life.
But don't I also love the Law that keeps the spheres separate? Don't I love those arbiters who tell me that I've sinned and why, that I might correct my ways. I am a penitent. But then, like an attention-seeking cat, I begin again.
One night, at the end of my first year at university I remember lighting tissues and throwing them out of my first floor window. It was my tribute to the festivities around me. I think I was very bored. And you came over and said, 'you want attention' like a father to a son. And didn't you tell me what to do to overcome my boredom? Didn't you make all kinds of practical suggestions?
I was pleased to be acknowledged, and happy to be so addressed, and with such care. But I also knew I was turned away from you and from myself, that someone in me had turned his head and dreamed inside me.
Boredom - was that the word? I think I was close to where the Law sent great shafts of light into the sky. At its edge. I think I thought, I am alone. I wrote something in a journal about the head of all waters - a phrase that when I use it I always fear will bring me bad luck.
Do you see - I've cursed myself now, and this will be a bad post, I will have confided too much and at too great a length and should lead it home now, like a horse by its nose. Home: you have been out, and now it's time to come home; the Law opens to enclose you. The Law welcomes you back.