Steve_Bamlett_blog

How would you describe yourself to someone?

If I try and see how I might look, I think I possibly look and sound extravagant, outward going, easy-going and fun-loving, sometimes funny and other times failing to be so in a quite spectacular way. Lol. I am always, when the synapses are zinging, perhaps overly so, thinking and talking things out, sometimes to only myself in blogs or self-talk. Then it can look as if I want to be entirely intellectual and focused, though that would be to miss the driven nature of the intellection, which is psychodynamic and emotional. And the need to connect is ever-present. ‘Only connect’ says the wonderful E. M. Forster.

And to see intellectual ambition here is to miss the loss of perspective and focus that can occur, which betrays the drive’s nature. And when this outward show of being-in-control fails, it does so spectacularly. At one or two points in my life I have been reduced to a kind of involuntary mute, catatonic in talk, action and ability to respond. Those are the bits I fear the return of most but they are very rare fortunately.

Interiority though is a frequent visitor – where the insides of things to my vision of then become so cavernous they engulf the external world and shut it above an unseeable ceiling. I imagine this, as did Thomas De Quincey in his ‘Confessions of an Opium-Eater’ as like living in Piranesi’s ‘Carceri’ or Kubla Khan’s ‘pleasure dome’ but wherein I see, like Coleridge’ appeared to do, only where: ‘Alph, the sacred river ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea’. Those lines run through my head in place of thought and feeling sometimes. Those too are rarer I hope except in conditions of extremity of loss, wherein I sometimes flounder.

I am not sure how I can describe myself then in a way I trust. It depends on the purpose of the description I suppose. I know I can enact a person people might want to see and be with and often the act becomes the truth or part of it, at the very least.

When I trust, then danger bells ring for in trust we let control of the outer carapace, often looking wonderfully self-contained and joyous, slip and what is more consuming of the patience of others is let slip. Hence trust is a double-edged blade.

Trust can shave off the grim hoar of everyday life’s uncomfortable conditions but it can also cut deep and show ones viscera too clearly. Not the convention of the heart only but those processing organs : that obsessive fatty liver and automatic-emotion-surrounded kidneys. They can look ugly but are really only vulnerable. Latterly I have maintained health and appearance, as much as you can at upcoming 69, by trying to live that vulnerable inner child who makes himself look ugly to increase the chances of rejection, which it at least understands. It works sometimes except in the face of rejection, or what feels like it.

In fact I am lucky beyond most. I survived my working life (just), I love my husband and I am beginning to find new friends, one in particular, who wants to help. We look good together hubby and me. In Edinburgh at the end of the month we will trip the cultural life fantastic – even a Dusty tribute which he loves. I can look good when I smile. And I am going to smile again. I am. Xxxx

Enough of that.

With love

Steve