Tricky Little Imp’s Blog

“For those who would joyously march in rank and file, they have already earned my contempt, for they were given a large brain by accident when a spinal chord would have sufficed.” - Albert Einstein

Well, first of all, happy Independence Day to all cousins over the water.

But (s)elfishly, this posting is about a more personal independence. Three years ago today, your imp founded a company, having told the bosses where to go (with no small grinning glee). It was accidental that it happened on this day, but there you go. And like all important anniversaries, it makes you think. In this case, about…?

• the fear at the point of jumping
• the concern in the parents’ eyes (coupled with nervous laughter)
• the back-slapping confidence of friends
• the blind and single-minded (laser like) determination that it would work, that if in a three-month notice period, you couldn’t make it work, then you were nowhere near as good as you thought you were…

I’ve gibbered here in the past about work-life balance (argh: foul phrase) - about the importance of trying to make work pay for life, and believe whole-heartedly in enabling people to find ways of making their passions pay for their lives. I had always admired people who worked for themselves - it seemed a terrifying thing to do. It can be terrifying. But as my dad wisely said (I’ve got no dependants and no mortgage - not because I’m rich but because I rent), “failure will be ending up on our sofa: how bad is that?”

I went through some interesting inner conversations: what was I scared of losing? What did I have to lose? I had been working a 70-90 hour week, on-call 24/7, for an organisation I cared about passionately, but increasingly for people I didn’t respect. I’d ended up in hospital for a week after an overworking-related seizure and thought I had neurologically lost my ability with language (you might guess that for the imp, this was not a good moment), unable to find the words for simple things like the stereo. I’d gone very skinny and very (worst of-) Bridget Jones and I cried on Sundays because I’d spoken to no-one all weekend, unless it was to an angry journalist. So what was there to lose?

Working for myself - and not employing anyone else - has been one of the best decisions I have ever, ever made. Not building the empire is an important part of that - I can’t be responsible for someone else’s mortgage; and I don’t particularly like managing other people’s time. If there’s no work, I want to go for a run; not create it, file, or have to make cold calls. Those things have to be done (I spy the in-tray, with its legal and tax paperwork), but at my pace.

The interesting thing - and one that still annoys me, although I should just let it go - is that people say how “lucky” I am. It’s not about luck- I don’t have medical insurance, I don’t get free loans, I don’t get paid when I go on holiday, I have to generate the work, and if I’m ill and can’t work, hard cheese. As I’ve said before here, if you don’t have obligations to others (kids, a mortgage the size of Vesuvius), then working for yourself is less of a risk. It’s about asking yourself where you could fall to without your current security blanket (and how secure is that?), and what you’re prepared for. You don’t go marching off into the woods with nothing but a t-shirt and a chocolate tea pot, do you?

Anyway, please join with me in this happy third birthday - huzzah for independence!

“Who wants to live to be a hundred? What’s the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance” - Henry Miller

Longevity: living long. Something we humans, I would say, fetishise. Hang on, hear me out. I’m not, unfortunately, pointing to the respect that we all have for our elders - we know that’s not the case, sadly. No, I’m talking about how we seem to attribute things with authority if they are long-lived; or to assume that things we respect have long lives. By contrast, the ephemeral [from the Greek epi + hermera, one day] attracts less human respect. The elephant, the tree, the land or the May fly…Unless you believe in reincarnation, of course, when you can put yourself in the shoes of the laughing Dalai Lama, who giggled at a journalist who asked him what the previous Dalai Lama would have thought of what he was doing re: China (the point being, he is the same person, only in a new body).

But we look at the world around us, and measure it in our own terms; that is understandable. But do we forget that the “age-old” things we festishise are in fact as fleeting, as momentary as a split-second themselves? Pause for a moment. Remember the Philosopher’s Axe? Are you truly the same person that you were last week, five years ago, that you will be tomorrow, in five minutes? Or are you instead a constantly changing entity, more fluid than rigid, reacting to the world around you? If you listen to Richard Dawkins on the theory of the selfish gene, you can take the view to an even smaller micro-perspective: your very genes have a survival strategy, they are self-serving and are so - where necessary - at the expense of the larger organism: you. [Black widow genes mean the female will eat the male; not great for his larger organism, but great for the Black Widow genes].

So, as a chicken is a way of making more eggs, you are a way of making more genes. Simple.

Looked at in this way, you can see longevity as less about the single lifespan of one large organism (the elephant or your great grandmother) and instead as a unified and as-yet unbroken chain of smaller units of organic life, cells, genes and so on. And when the larger, carrier, organism (whether we’re talking about Dumbo or Nana) ceases to live as a whole, the lives that make it carry on: the cells will go into the earth or similar, be eaten, become energy and so on; the genes will at an earlier stage have tried to propagate themselves through the larger organism’s reproduction. IE everything can be reduced into these smaller units of life and life-span, because ultimately, life is driven by those smallest units.

Or is it…?

A very interesting piece on the foully named Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 today about male and female teachers and how adults in general impact on the development of boys and girls. As teachers, apparently women overly verbalise whereas men use silence and non-verbal direction. Boys react better to fewer words said in lower voices. Now, is this about a gendered neurological difference (eg to sound and incoming communication)? Or something about effective and ineffective teaching?

The expert, Celia Lashlie, author of He’ll Be OK, says the boys performed brilliantly when left with a silence to fill. But the girls want it filled and do fill it. Men do the non-verbal, women almost nothing but. Lashlie says that boys often report just feeling ‘wrong’ in primary school, because of the lack of male role models in the school (and later down the line, a lack of “good men” role models in wider public life has other negative impacts). A line in her book from a boy goes like this: “If you tell your mum something voluntarily, she’ll just ask a whole lot of questions. It’s rude to say “Enough”, so it’s best just not to talk at all.”

Recognition all round…? So what’s it all about? The other programme guest was Prof. Carrie Paechter, author of a book called Being Boys; Being Girls. She talked about a study where parents underestimated 10 month-old girls’ ability to climb/crawl up a slope and over-estimate boys’ abilities. How terrifying to think that subconsciously, (some) parents think their girls can do less than they would if their child was a boy (or in cases like this, involving the physical, do so to be more protective, perhaps).

But if it’s down to mums and dads, we all know you can take two girls brought up in the same family and one will be a tom boy and the other a baby-doll-loving pink-fetishist; as many a shrink will say, eg Oliver James in They F*** You Up, even identical twins are brought up very differently - each upbringing is on a case by case basis and each parent reacts differently to each child.

Is it fair to say that some of it’s nature, some nurture? I’d say so. But the important thing is not the “how we got here” perhaps, but the fact that there is difference that needs to be recognised if adults are to do the best by each child, helping it reach its best (for which I mean happiest) potential.

She put the red shoes on, thinking there was no harm in that either; and then she went to the ball; and commenced to dance… She danced, and was obliged to dance, far out into the dark wood…She was frightened, and wanted to throw the red shoes away; but they stuck fast. She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet. She danced and was obliged to go on dancing over field and meadow, in rain and sunshine, by night and by day-but by night it was most horrible. She danced out into the open churchyard; but the dead there did not dance….She danced, and was obliged to go on dancing through the dark night. The shoes bore her away over thorns and stumps till she was all torn and bleeding; she danced away over the heath to a lonely little house. Here, she knew, lived the executioner; and she tapped with her finger at the window and said:”Come out, come out! I cannot come in, for I must dance.” And the executioner said: “I don’t suppose you know who I am. I strike off the heads of the wicked, and I notice that my axe is tingling to do so.”"Don’t cut off my head!” said Karen, “for then I could not repent of my sin. But cut off my feet with the red shoes.”

- Hans Christian Andersen, The Red Shoes, 1845

I want to go back (hop sideways on the spiral) to that thing about skin-shedding. Because every action has its opposite: if we shed skins, then we must have put them on in the first place. We manky old adults have a lot of extra, surfeit, skin, I believe. And sometimes we work deliberately to acquire it, sometimes we put it on without even realising.

Let me explain what I mean by these skins we put on. They’re like coats for different kinds of weather, to help the intrinsic You deal with the world outside. For example (I can only think of these two just now), there is:

• Defensive skin for reactive defence, for armour, to stop yourself being hurt again (I was “too” kind, “too” trusting, “too” hopeful)
• Costume skin for outward appearances, to seem like a particular creature to others (I want them to think I am “beautiful”, “foxy”, “confident”, “a winner”).

Now, you know I’m talking metaphorically here, about layers, but it applies just as well without the metaphor: our skin is our barrier to the world outside and we use it like that, to say stuff about ourselves (listen to how some tattoo artists talk about their work, helping others to undergo a Shamanistic transformation, expressing their inner selves through their outer skin, or look at how important tanning or skin-lightening is to some people).

Now, both those ways of applying layers of skin (defensive and costume/masking) are reactive, would you agree? But of course, layers, skins - our use of them should, if we’re gonna be healthy about it, be proactive. We should be in control of it and use external layers positively: to protect our innards, to keep ourselves together, to allow us to cohere, to be an individual. The same stuff through a different lens; the same perceptible outcomes with a different intent. This is truly liminal, in many senses.

The thing is, you can forget you’re wearing them. The armour and the costume become you (how very David Lynch); organically, the once-external skin begins to inhere, to become you, and so to alter you. We are, after all (at least in part) the summation of our experiences. And if you forget you’re wearing them, then have you lost a little bit of your own consciousness, of where you began? Who’s dominant - you or the new skin? It’s like the tale of the red shoes (without the Christian and anti-fun didacticism)- at first when the little girl put them on she danced and danced so happily - but they cleaved to her feet and she could not take them off; she danced and danced until she begged to have her feet amputated. [He seems to have had a thing about feet, and motion, that chap; the little mermaid surrenders her tail - her USP - for feet, so she can get her man, but every step is agony. For him, I'd suggest, feet are a metaphor for free will and/or its surrender.]

And if we forget the skins we’re wearing, we can become numb: the costume or the armour is so thick, it takes quite a lot to pierce it, to reach the “real” you, to reach the core. Because the skins never really become completely part of you. You know those times when you’re not sure what you really feel? Whether you really want something or just think you do? That you’re not sure whether it’s you or your pride that’s hurt? Whether you’re annoyed or think that you ought to appear annoyed? That’s the difference between you and the acquired skins.

And how did we get here today? The inner imp took me by surprise this morning and she had a little cry, like a child does when it’s sad, just as it laughs when it’s happy. And I remembered all those childhood times when we were so deeply saddened (or perhaps it was just me) when the world seemed as though it was going to end and we cried, by ourselves. And then everything came alright in the end and we realised we weren’t gods, and the world would not rise or fall on our tears and our fears. So the crying, just like that, without an “adult” context, let me know that I really did feel those things, unequivocally; that it wasn’t about the layers - they’d gone or been pierced. Which got me thinking…

Joseph Campbell, brilliant mythologist and anthropologist, said, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”

“Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.” - Julie Cameron

There is much to be said for being nice to oneself. And a yawning gap between the thought of it and the experience. “I should”, “I will,”, “When I’ve…I’m going to…”. Takes me back (oh, the damned spiral we’re on in this blog) to that Walter Pater thing - he was Oscar Wilde’s tutor and said that you should live every moment at its fullest, “burn with a hard, gem-like flame”. Nothing can replace experience in itself - not the imagining, the memory, the planning, the writing.

The brain has a need for newness, for the fresh, for surprise (etymology of “surprise” - to take over, in meaning linked to “overwhelmed”) and new experiences do just that. The brain builds new neural pathways all the time (no road of perception ever has to be fixed - you always have the ultimate power to change it, even if you are stuck paralysed - the brain is everything). And this surprise from experiences (the old and the new - you don’t have to go white water rafting to refresh the grey matter) is - for me - one of those keys on the great clanking key chain of life.

The amygdala (a little nobbly, prehistoric part of our brain, way at the bottom and back) is where your fears live - it’s the scary dark forest of those irrational nightmares, the unspeakable dreads, the uncanny intuitive unease. It’s the bureaucrat that dictates how you’re going to respond emotionally to the world around you: simplistically, fight or flight. And like all efficient bureaucrats, the amygdala gets used to things - viz: “Aha, she looks a bit angry, she’s going pink in the face, that glass of water doesn’t look as though it’s heading for her mouth - DUCK!” It sees what’s coming - it gets good at predicting. Now….here comes some scientific but fascinating stuff.

Researchers back in 2001 realised something pretty good - that we respond better to surprise than we do to the pleasurable. I.E. things being unpredictable is important: it’s not just about knowing that the holiday or the yoghurt with honey will probably be very nice, as you imagine it, but it’s about the surprises - the unknowns - that arise from those (and completely random) situations which give the brain its biggest hits. In this study, interestingly, when you asked the human guinea pigs what they preferred (before they experienced it) and then measured how their brain reacted to the preferred thing and the other option when it came as a surprise, the surprise won every time.

So what is the gain, the big picture?

Well, if your brain gets tickled in its reward zones (and that’s what is happening here), it helps stave off depression (all forms) and boosts the immune system. A rewarding surprise gives you a dopamine rush (a disappointment gives you a dopamine deficit - your levels fall). (Dopamine is also responsible for your movements and the flow of information, such as memories, around the brain - a boost can be no bad thing, even for any hair-shirters out there). And it seems to be that these fluctuating dopamine levels make us get up and go seek more - without consciously being aware that we’re reward-seeking. Some extreme examples of the behaviour of “vulnerable” dopamine systems are thought to be gambling, super-pleasing, bulimia, anorexia. And for “normal” behaviour, when you feel good, you’re healthier, happier, and you of course impact on other people, you take action, and so on and so forth. The society gains.

So, dear readers (no Jane Austen I), give a surprise today and wherever you can, don’t disappoint!

Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning.
Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder

The Waste Land, TS Eliot (1922)

Some time ago here I wittered on about the seven year cycle of life, about regeneration, phases, circles. And in other places here, I’ve wondered about time. The first is the pathway, the second the channel, you might say; the path might spiral round and round, but it will not be the same place as before, because the channel (or current?) has moved you forwards. As Heraclitus (and Herman Hess in Sidharta) said, “You can’t step in the same river twice.”

So why the backwards look now? I have slipped on a new theme: skin-shedding. Just a new way of looking at the same thing, in fact. It started with some footage of a fat old frog in Australia - the rains came, the land rejuvenated, life took all it could of the moisture while it lasted. It was positively orgiastic for all kinds of plants and creature, and completely necessary for life to continue. And then, before the drought returned, the fat old frog came out of the mud and began to peel off a layer of old skin, in preparation for its next period of living. And I had a little giggle, because he looked a bit ridiculous. And because - as anyone who’s had horrible eczema will tell you - we humans can also peel off whole layers of our own skin, just like the frog. Massive, crinkly strips of the stuff. Yum.

Well, I was remembering all this, and looking down a tunnel close to my home, and musing on regeneration and the body’s seven-year cycles….Doh! Obviously, it’s metaphorical, too, innit? Every so often, I remembered, we have to adapt our outside, our shell - what lies between you and the world - in order to survive. That could be how we relate to other people, for example, forcing us to review why we’re uncomfortable in a job / relationship / town / hobby that once gave us so much satisfaction. And to stay healthy, we have to shed the old skin and find a new one that allows us to live comfortably.

That’s why, I decided, we need both the path and the channel/current - time as well as the cycle. If we just went round and round, no matter how good the ride (and as I keep quoting ole Bill, it is only a ride), we’d

(a) probably be sick and

(b) ultimately throw ourselves out the car, just to escape.

“No going back” (to old places, old skins and old ideas of who you were) is a wise way of living for very good reasons. Some reunions, those backwards toe-dips, are good; some are atrocious. I’m missing my college reunion this weekend, through no design of my own (and funnily, the same happened with the last one), but had another of sorts, an informal one, last weekend. You know those dreams where there’s a “flavour” of a time that’s past for you? You didn’t realise it ‘til now, but the air of that time is tangibly different? That was my sense of that party. Great fun, brilliant people, love them, but to be home, to be here and now, and not then and there, was a great relief. Skin shed, skin found.

Totally everyone else’s efforts, but so sharable…

The Washington Post annually asks readers to submit alternative meanings to common words.
Here are a few of the winners…

Flabbergasted (adj), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

Abdicate (v), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Esplanade (v), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

Negligent (adj), describes a condition in which you absent mindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

Gargoyle (n), olive-flavoured mouthwash.

Flatulence (n), emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

Balderdash (n), a rapidly receding hairline.

Oyster (n), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

Freibeetarianism (n), The belief that, when you die, your soul flies up to the roof and gets stuck there.

Circumvent (n) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

and my favourite…

Lymph (v), to walk with a lisp.

It is. So very, very wrong. I just know it. There’s a sense of shame, of chagrin, even. Hence this confessional. After all, it’s what blogs are for, isn’t it? Yes, I - you will come back, won’t you? I mean, you won’t look at me too differently after this? I can trust you…?

I want to lick my own vinaigrette.

It started last night - innocently whipped a little something up, very hungry, didn’t have any bread to hand. I was very hungry, please understand. Well, before I knew it, my fingers were all over the plate. Thankfully, I stopped myself in time.

But today - well, the innocence is no longer there, is it? I know what I’m doing. I made that vinaigrette; with oil, mustard and knowledge. I won’t lie: I loved it. There. Judge me as you see fit. Food porn, here comes the imp….

Sapped and stupid I lie upon the stones and I swoons
The darling little dandelions have done their thing and changed from suns into moons
The dragons roam the shopping malls, I hear they’re gonna eat our guts
If I had the strength I might pick up my sword and make some attempt to resist.

Absolute genius. Who said this? Check it out.

That man is a bad, black, bleak and belligerent balladeer. I bought the last album when it came out and (blush) thought it wasn’t all that good. At least I’m honest. Obviously, I have matured since then…..Indulge me in another moment of hero-worship:

You race naked through the wilderness
You torment the birds and the bees
You leapt into the abyss, but find
It only goes up to your knees
I move stealthily from tree to tree
I shadow you for hours
I make like I’m a little deer
Grazing on the flowers

Everything is collapsing, dear
All moral sense has gone
It’s just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on.

(listen here)

We’re going to hear soon who our next Poet Laureate will be. I like Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, but the tradition of tale-telling through rhythm, through performance ain’t with those guys, it’s guys like this. Nominations, anyone?

The Imp is has acquired some potentially very visible, big, impressive (if I do say so myself) self-inflicted bruises and a cut or two: hmm. They would look OK on a 9 year-old, but on a quasi-respectable woman, they might raise some eyebrows. But she’s done worse: two smashing black eyes and a gashed-up forehead in June ‘04, a back-belt of purple ‘n’ blue from opening 101 canal locks in ‘01, not to mention the ant-hill head bumps collected in her days of playground olympic pole-body-swirling. Yes, very technical.

But, oh, God, I’ve just found a sneaking pleasure in Marilyn Manson (thanks, Last FM) and it (and the bruising) remind me of yimpish goth days. Everyone (parental) thought we were self-harming, suicidal, depressed, junkie, unhinged, sickly weirdos. Actually, my goth friends are - c20 years on - still my friends, in great comparison to the straight guys I went to school and university with [day one, imp college: everyone in Arran junpers and blue jeans; Imp in biker jacket, shorts, DMs and tights, eye of Horus and a bat hanging from her right ear. Existential angst.]

The same panic’s now doing the rounds about Emo - thanks to the broad-minded tossers at the Daily Mail (big Arran jumper / blue jeans fans, I hear). They call Emo a suicide cult, paint teenage music fans as weak-minded sheep - when in fact these are often the kids who are most independently minded. Yes, I am sorry, of course, that some children decide to end their own lives, but it’s not music or teen culture that causes it. Being a teenager can be shit, but condemning any individuality they might feel brave enough to express is hardly going to help. Rant over.