Steve_Bamlett_blog

Source: By http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/images/penandpress/large/15c_bta.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19429923

In Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_Acts), the crisis of the life of Miss La Trobe, the creator of a pageant of English life that ends by turning a literal mirror of their life takes place in reflection afterwards in the village pub of the events in and between the acts of her pageant.

It struck me that I was in my small way reliving this kind of stuff between the blogs, although unlike Miss La Trobe or Woolf I will not kill myself as a result, much as some might like that. Lol. In a blog I wrote on June 25th 2023 (not long ago – https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/06/25/this-is-a-speculative-blog-based-on-the-klaus-manns-play-siblings-and-novels-novellas-namely-the-pious-dance-the-childrens-story-alexander-pathetic-symphony/), I wrote:

Yes, this is about love of one man by another that is frankly about the substance, even the tissue of flesh (I feel it as a current in my present life and it feels ‘divine’ in the truest sense of that word), but the issue is not about these individual men (or me or the man I love) but about being able to say that he: ‘did not regard it as an aberration. It never entered his mind to reject it or resit it as “decadence” or “morbidity.” Such words have so little to do with the truth that come from another world. Rather he well and truly pronounced this love good, ….’.

The blog of July 3rd (https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/07/03/an-update-based-on-actually-seeing-the-production-of-the-faggots-their-friends-between-revolutions-based-on-the-cult-book-of-that-name-by-larry-mitchell-illustrated-by-ned-asta-a-br/) strikes a different note: no longer confident in mind or flesh, I praised people in Manchester for their warmth in helping me when lost because ‘ I was alone on this part of the trip (given Geoff preferred to dog-sit) because I had been dumped by the friend that I was coming to meet in Manchester two days ago, and hence wandered around half lost in emotions based on feeling rejection and self-doubt. However, I did reach the theatre eventually, although finding and choosing just one of the three empty seats awaiting me made me gulp with an intensity I can only remember from adolescence’. On July 6th (https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/07/06/an-update-based-on-actually-seeing-the-exhibition-of-yayoi-kusama-at-factory-international-manchester-on-tuesday-4th-july-at-11-15-a-m-as-part-of-a-selection-of-the-items-from-the-manchester-interna/) I write: ‘Suddenly deep in a low cycle of depressive pain, I really did not want to face the day and was making the same kind of mistakes that follow from dyspraxia I make on many such days as a result of depressions that appear to give me two left hands and a tendency to drop things, but especially memory for recent things. I lose things that lead to stressful searches. No wonder people find me a trial! The things ‘between the blogs seem as psychoactive as a stimulant, if acting rather in the different direction as alcohol does (though not to the consciousness of the drinker whilst in the first throes of it).

By 8th July (https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/07/08/on-not-finishing-like-the-person-who-does-not-say-goodbye-but-instead-exits-untainted-by-valediction-this-is-a-blog-on-christopher-neve-2023-immortal-thoughts-late/), I am trying this early for some distancing caused by though: ‘I suppose I need to learn that a stop in a relationship caused by someone else has deeper urgency for me, if not for the other involved, precisely because their existence for me has just been simply stopped in effect, and explanation is foregone. In a relationship an end is as much really as you get. To keep holding on is to invite the death of all free will around you, which in the end has to be respected in the loved one.

I don’t suppose it will get any easier having said this with regarded to the end of the thing I called a relationship, but he didn’t. But it shows that using time reading, however remote the project from life in appearance, is often more important in the process of its remarkably broad human statements, its apparently brilliantly random marks than in its reduction to simple explanation.

 But is all this splurge of words really thinking or is it overthinking? Does it qualify as what Freud calls ‘remembering, repeating or working through’? It all depends on what happens between the acts, or between the blogs, – not just on what is in them, which is too often rationalisation and defence from pain. But it is all I have got.

Love

Steve