I'm always ok

There is something as unstable as water in me, and when things get tough I go away. I haven’t got what the English call ‘guts’. – Jean Rhys {x}

I know what she means, Jean Rhys. There was a strangeness to her life: she had a rare ability to survive wherever she was planted, but little ability to do much more than that. She would find herself in the cross-hairs and take herself to Paris or find some money from some man or walk into someplace and find herself a job. But then she would quit and leave and give up, and she spent most of her time living on the narrowest of margins, in a bedsit with a bottle of gin, writing dark things. A sad, bitter survival – but one which was surprisingly strong, surprisingly unwilling to die. She lived to 88.

I have that same thing. I have been very good at achieving things, but all of it is done with single-minded necessity. There's nothing else to be done, so you must do it – not because you want to move across the country or go to this university or get this therapy, but because that's just what comes next. After that, something loosens: I stop being able to manage my own life. This is the way it has run for years, bewildering stops and starts, deadlines just met and then months spent in dark rooms with the curtains closed and bills late. Like Jean, I've always trusted that money would appear from somewhere, and generally it has, but I have no idea how to go about getting it (I'm talking scholarships, grants, benefits & donation websites, here, not rich parents). One day I'll decide that it's time to pull myself together, and I will do what has to be done, and once it's done I'll float apart again – I get back into uni only to leave again; I move into a house only to lose all ability to care for myself and all understanding of money. I don't have guts, either, or much sense or fitness for the world. But I survive.

I was reading an interview the other day with the real Christiane F, where she says, "This isn't what I'd recommend: this isn't the best life to live, but it's my life." It's a thought that echoes a Cat Marnell line that comes into my head a lot: "It was and is OK: it's just a different life. It's just different." It's where my thoughts go every time I tell someone a story and they respond with pity or sadness. My life isn't sad, though I spend a lot of it being sad. It's just my life. It's fine.

I don't like the feeling when I think that people are worried about me. [...] I wanted to write a song to tell all of my friends and family to shut up [laughs]. 'Cause I'm always ok. – Fiona Apple {x}

Anyway, this is really just a love letter to all the strange girls who don't get it, who might never hold down a long-term job or collect all those markers of success, but who are always fighting tooth and nail to keep living and might keep fevered notebooks in a suitcase for years to later open them up and find the seeds of a book or a collection of poems or an album. Big, well-formed ideas pulled from the sludge of a badly-lived life. I love you. May you never find yourself in jail for failing to pay your council tax bills (or, like Jean Rhys, for stabbing your neighbour with a scissors because she thought you were a witch).

a hunger too divine

Winter is a time for freezing. In the winter I remember the ice at the centre of my bones that no warmth could break. In the winter I feel my hands go numb and purple. I remember a body hollowed, sterile and inhospitable. I freeze over like these fields. It's a ritual I half-remember and a rhythm my body sinks into, year after year, with the shortening of days.

Sometimes, all my body knows to do is reject. To make itself smaller, concave, as if flesh itself is recoiling from the world. To become untouchable. To be entirely self-sufficient, feeding by cannibalising itself.

But last winter something toppled this logic and up-ended my world.  I was choked with Valium and at the centre of increasingly elaborate religious delusions: I was special, chosen, a reincarnated fallen angel with important work to do. I felt desperately that I should go to midnight mass.

I approached the altar to receive a blessing. Psychotic as I was, I knew, somehow, that I wasn't ready for the bread and wine. The priest put his hands on my head and I remember how it passed through me like a shudder but warm, full of something. That night, I walked out of my flat barefoot and walked a mile or so through slushy piles of leaves to jump off a bridge. I have no idea what was going through my mind, no idea if I would have done it if someone hadn't pulled over and wrapped me in a coat seconds after I climbed onto the ledge in the early hours of Christmas Day. It's only after a year that I understand what happened.

I had tasted love and it made me want to die.

Faith, it turns out, is not the sedate and gentle thing I imagined it to be. It is confusing, often brutal, often violent, and transformative in the sense of losing the ground beneath your feet. I was baptised recently, and for three weeks afterwards I descended into an all-out breakdown. I was drunk constantly. I didn't eat. In sober moments, I screamed and writhed because I couldn't stand to occupy this body, this brain, to be so raw at the mercy of my own self. I was blank-eyed in confusion. Baptism was supposed to be about being wrapped up in God's love – like a hug, right? It felt more like a punch in the face.

There's a poem for advent by Kathleen Raine called Northumbrian Sequence 4. One part of it goes:

"Let in the dark,
Let in the dead,
Let in your love tonight."

Loving, especially loving God, is usually caught in the language of kitsch and sentimentality. Honk if you love Jesus. Jesus as best friend, holding your hand, taking the wheel. But love is terrifying: as it warms, it burns. At the centre of love are five still-bleeding wounds. This is never going to be easy.

When I tasted my first communion, the chaos fell into place. This is love, I thought. Perfect, unconditional, all-forgiving love, given to everyone whether we think we deserve it or not. I didn't think I deserved it. And yet there I was, turning up to a nearly empty church on a Thursday morning, because I needed it.

I opened my hands. I ate.

theses on magic

WRITER'S STATUS: CONCUSSED, DRUNK, SEDATED. It is best that the below is taken with a fistful of salt.

Magic: the borderlines, the uncomfortable homoerotic tension between teutonic plates. old misplaced recognition across a room interpreted as a sign. the traffic light changing from red to green. lipstick smeared on your chin. flickering lights (neon). the accidental, the failed, the inevitable but unexpected.

Lana Del Rey is magic, blurring the lines between real and the fake. She's too honest and way too fake, fuck her! I'm in love with the first half of Honeymoon and I just really fucking want to move to the US and put on a leopard print fur coat and a fake-but-way-too-real persona of Lana proportions (there's a definite California theme for me this year - Halsey's Drive and Grimes' California are some of my most played songs. I start to live on signs).

There are roses in between my thighs and a fire that surrounds you 

I saw Lana talking about David Lynch and David Lynch talking about her a few days ago and I've just been !!!!!! since. They're both exploring this border of perfect, seductive, manicured beauty with its obvious underbelly of demons and disgust and self-hate and total unbearable pain. I feel like that's magic. Magic comes out of that border and the accidental slips, the reveals, the doorways and dark red-lit rooms and Lynchian electrical crackle and Lana Del Rey's smile.

In the land of Gods and Monsters I was an angel 

So much garbage will never ever decay
And all your garbage will outlive you one day

Trash is magic and I will stand by this until I am rotting next to all my fag ends and crisp packets. Trash will outlive you. Trash does not degrade. It repulses and entices (tell me you've never wanted to put your hand in something gross and I won't believe you). Trash is the ultimate survivor. Trash is immortal, the survivor is immortal. We also smell. Call it a curse or a blessing but you sort of want to set it on fire. You want to kill it but also save it; an honest-to-God baptism by fire. Out of the trash I rise, with my red hair...

"I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful."- David Lynch

Suicide is also magic. The moment on the bridge is magic. A cigarette that hasn't been ashed in the hand of a dead man is magic. A body surfacing on a riverbank is magic. It's also totally pathetic, but most magic is, right? Like, everyone hates angel dust for a reason. You want to see it but it can get the fuck out of your life.

Anyway, I'm writing this because I've been listening to Lana a lot this year and experimenting with magic and I feel like that has been the essence of my 2015. An edging against psychosis, violence, a circle of candles, out-of-body sex, a prayer, a dance around death, a Catholic Church. I've chosen ritual over real every time.

turning into my mother: a horror/love story

My mother used to drive me to school every day, our old car spluttering through ten miles of lanes and sharp bends. I would burn CDs for the journey, and my favourite had every Laura Marling song ever released on it (this was pre-I Speak Because I Can). As I mouthed the words to New Romantic, my mother driving me to private school, I was aware of the boundaries, visible and invisible, that I was transgressing; the tension I was stretching between us. She was driving me to a world that she could not enter.

//////

The working class (single) mother is not the salt of the earth, she is dirt. She is the meat and bones. Fat, stupid, too sexual, too emotional, vulgar and loud and violent. She is the Other, the deviation from the norm of bourgeois femininity, its monstrous underbelly.

Dirt and uncleanliness are horrors coded as working class; when brought together with the body, particularly the sexual body, the horror produced is explicitly that of the working class woman. In the Exorcist, Regan's swearing/pissing/vomiting/masturbating routine constitutes a violation both of accepted modes of female sexuality and of the bourgeois order. Through horror history, the zombie is allegory for the working class (or even the "underclass") monster, lurching along behind its upper class vampiric overlord, flesh falling off in chunks.

Kristeva writes that "is is not lack of cleanliness of health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules." And there is nobody who disturbs order better than the working class single mother, who breaks all the laws of femininity. According to Kristeva, the two types of polluting objects (menstrual blood and excrement) both stem from the maternal, who is involved in the toilet training and first menstruation of her daughter. The mother-daughter bond, therefore, is a natural site of horror, and none so much as the bond between the working class single mother and her daughter, who are terrifyingly close, who sleep in the same bed, who, when they fight, will tear out each others' throats.

The mother is gradually rejected because she comes to represent, to signify, the period of the semiotic which the paternal symbolic constructs as 'abject'. Because the mother is seen as effacing the boundary between herself and her child, the function of ritual becomes that of reinforcing separation. The ideological project of horror films such as Psycho, Carrie, The Brood and The Hunger, all of which feature the monster as female, appears to be precisely this - constructing monstrosity's source as the failure of paternal order to ensure the break, the separation of mother and child. This failure, which can also be viewed as a refusal of the mother and child to recognize the paternal order, is what produces the monstrous. - Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The bit that has really stuck with me is the relationship between Tereza and her mother:

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation. She took after her mother, and not only physically. I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's.


I related to Tereza. Her flight away from her mother/her boring town where "nobody reads" echoed my own, as did her profound feelings of shame about her body and sexuality. She is the quintessential upwardly mobile daughter, clinging to bourgeois values as tries to distinguish her own authentic identity from inside the overpowering shadow of her mother's. Here, again, that place of horror: the continuity of two identities, the state of flux, the impossibility of a border.

For upwardly mobile girls, securing a break with the mother and a stable identity of one's own is necessary to defend one's new life, especially with the awareness of the fragility of it all, that one misstep can land you straight back in your mother's shoes at middle-age. Your mother lives in you, unconsciously, her presence tracing the lines of your face and the gait of your walk. But the new world you live in tells you to hate everything about her. Here in the ivory towers of rationality and Received Pronunciation, where a woman can never be rich or too thin, exorcism is the only solution to the persistent shadow of the working class mother.

Women who occupy a different class location to that of their mothers may fear, not just becoming their mothers, but becoming their working-class mothers. Their matrophobia may be bound up with a fear of coming to inhabit this position of pathology, constructed as lacking, as 'other'. - Steph Lawler, Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects 

MIND

"‘Cleverness’ or ‘intelligence’ may be a metaphor for a form of knowledge which is highly class-specific – for a world of knowledge which the daughter has entered and from which the mother is excluded. The designation of this knowledge as ‘intelligence’, and its lack as ‘stupidity’, naturalizes both, constructing them as innate characteristics. In this way, not only does the possession of this form of knowledge act as a form of distinction between mother and daughter, it also marks out that distinction as located within the ‘selves’ of each of them." - Steph Lawler

As the educational worlds that I entered became more and more exclusive, sharing my experiences with my mother became more difficult. When I moved away for sixth form, our phone conversations became punctuated by silences as I tried and failed to share my new knowledge about moral philosophy. By the time I got to university, the minutiae of my life were essentially incommunicable. She wanted to understand and I wanted to confide, desperately, but attempts to convey anything brought only misunderstanding and irritation. She had left school at 15 with a few O-levels. I was at Oxford. The silences grew solid.

In my head, I called her stupid. My mother is not stupid - she is incredible in business, invariably successful in her projects, in possession of that rare practical intelligence known ironically as "common sense". But in those thoughts, I chose to ignore those forms of intelligence in favour of the class-coded forms in my possession - the kinds that are useful in Oxbridge tutorials and The Southbank Show and practically nowhere else. Even Virginia Woolf wondered whether "all the lower classes are naturally idiotic."

Academic success has always been my way out (of bullying, illness, trauma, my hometown and, yeah, the working class). It has been the rope I have clung to when I've felt a noose around my neck. For my mother, academic success looks more like the noose itself. She was there for me, would drive to London or Oxford (something my middle class friends' parents never did) and stay for as long as I needed and buy food and coax me back into the land of the living. But her advice began and ended at "come home". Drop out. Give up.

Their primary concern of wanting their children to be happy at school was for some working class parents a response to extremely difficult but often unconscious feelings about their own unhappiness and failure at school. [...] All they wanted was for us to be happy, as happiness was the most they could envisage in an education system that had only brought them failure and unhappiness. - Valerie Walkerdine, Growing Up Girl

For working class parents who carry the anxieties and failures of their own schooldays into adulthood, who have never reaped the benefits of education, encouraging their children to struggle through the pain and stress of school/university comes less naturally. Happiness and academic success seem like fundamentally discordant values. Working class children who prize academic success, therefore, are often left to fight their corner alone. They are usually self-motivated from an early age and deft at hiding any sign of difficulty in school. Unlike the children of middle class parents, they don't grow up with the expectation of higher education, with an understanding of its benefits. They must continually convince themselves of what their parents cannot: that the pain will be worth it.

...she denied the anger, pain and loneliness by imagining defensively that she had need of no-one and could do it all by herself. [...] the defences Nicky exhibited were the very things that would ensure that she got to and succeeded at university. - Valerie Walkerdine, Growing Up Girl

BODY

Her mother marched about the flat in her underwear, sometimes braless and sometimes, on summer days, stark naked. Her stepfather did not walk about naked, but he did go into the bathroom every time Tereza was in the bath. Once she locked herself in and her mother was furious. Who do you think you are, anyway? - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This year, my body has filled out to my fourteen-year old weight, my highest weight. I've seen my father and sister's features slowly overcome by those of my mother - a battle waged through all of my tissue, played out on my face. At fifteen, that Laura Marling song had extra resonance. I would no more give up trying to be thin than I would become my mother. I was starving.

As Laurie Penny says of female rebellion, "we have been taught to turn our anger inwards, to turn our rage inwards, to hurt oneself rather than hurting others." While boys may externalise their inner conflicts, playing them out interpersonally, girls more often retreat and take up arms against ourselves. The eating disorder is the perfect weapon against a body/self that fails the tests of an unfamiliar bourgeois environment: it shrinks, quietens, de-sexualises. The eating disorder performs physically the same task of self-policing that the upwardly mobile girl must practice on every aspect of her life. The flesh is a good stand in for every other source of disgust.

The eating disorder is peculiar in that its extreme violence can be hidden from anyone but the sufferer, and sometimes even them. It is total war, all-out class war, conducted within the quiet boundaries of the skin. Unsurprising that most eating disorder narratives situate restrictive eating disorders - particularly anorexia, which is less physical and rude than bulimia - as illnesses of the middle class. It is a polite suicide, the practice of which brings one closer to the celebrated values of bourgeois femininity.

("Who do you think you are?" asks Tereza's mother, humiliatingly reminding her of her class position. Shame is a virtue reserved for the bourgeois, and Tereza's ideas are above her station.)

SURVIVAL

I believe that the pain of everyday exploitation and oppression has worn so deep into working-class life that it exists there as patterns of conscious and unconscious coping, passed down through generations. ... Oppressed groups, such as the working class, have to survive in a way that means that they must come to recognise themselves as lacking, deficient, deviant, as being where they are because that is who they are, that is how they are made, an insidious self-regulation. - Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy's Girl

Now: I've been working out a new narrative for myself. A sludge and slime narrative of survival, where dirt and rot signify life and and not shame. My hair is in a worse state than ever since I cut most of it off and I've been too ill to keep up my skincare routine. I live with my mother again. Sometimes I leave the toilet door open.

Still, insecurity sits in my throat. I'm never sure what accent or intonation will come out and I'm embarrassed by the fluctuation. Slang and academic vocabulary feel as uncomfortable as each other in my mouth. I keep re-writing and deleting and re-writing, years of class trouble coming through in my words. Should I use feel or think? One or you? Sometimes words come out that my mum doesn't understand and I'm embarrassed. I don't have any friends from my hometown any more, so she's my only outpost of a culture that I never made any secret of wanting to escape. An outpost that I cling to with love and hate in equal measure.

Laika the space dog

I expected a lot from Berlin. I was studying the Berlin airlift, the ultimatum and the building of the wall, Ostpolitik. I was well-versed in the historical interpretations: a microcosm of the Cold War, the physical manifestation of all its absurdity, a beacon of capitalism deep in Soviet territory. They say the Cold War ended when the wall came down. The following two months saw the whole of Eastern Europe implode, its bureaucrats switching to jobs in the new institutions of capitalism. Fukuyama called it “the end of history.” I expected to go to Berlin and find history in the air, to see it on street corners. In this city of upheaval, I expected history to be tangible.

The first dog ever to go to space was called Laika. She orbited the earth for three days before dying due to lack of oxygen. At the time, this was blamed on a fault with the craft. But Wikipedia says this: “The craft was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika was always intended to die."

My hometown is famous for a chain of suicides that hit when I was in year seven, the year that school toilets became shrines to older girls I didn’t know. The doors were covered in RIPs and there were photos stuck to the mirrors with blu-tack. They cleaned it up occasionally but left most of it, I guess out of respect. I sat in my school canteen eating chicken and talking to a friend about the glory of suicide. Everyone was saying the same things. It was a ticket straight to fame, straight out of town. And then the next year we came back and it was all gone. Kids still kill themselves there but the media can’t report on it.

The first time I wanted to die, I was sitting on my bed, facing the window (outside was all movement, that slanting rain that seems to animate everything). I was rationally considering the height of a building necessary to ensure that I would not survive the jump. My first storey window would not be enough. The motorway bridge might be, though. Until I left town four years later, the bridge was always a possibility. I was always a ten minute walk from death. Once, I rode across it in a shopping trolley in the snow, the sides of the trolley slightly higher than the railings. I felt fear, considered that maybe I did not want to die, felt disappointed with myself for this. But I felt, and for years I would seek out similar thrills, skirting death, feeling like the eye of a tornado, wanting nothing more than to be taken by the swirling wind. A friend’s brother was picked up by the police for scaling the outside of the same bridge.

Standing at the Berlin wall felt like presiding over a failed suicide. There’s a stillness, when you’re watching someone in bed, throwing up, feeling with them the mix of stupidity, embarrassment and missed opportunity that follows the attempt. You want to laugh: this is all so ridiculous, so banal. You make dark jokes. The danger has passed. Everyone is trying to forget because they don’t know how to deal with this messy aftermath, like how doctors throw away the placenta before the mother has to see it. In three weeks nobody will remember this night.

The Berlin Wall came down because of a botched press conference. It had been decided that travel restrictions to the West would be eased but the official who was supposed to announce this hadn’t been at the meeting or properly read the document. It was 7pm and he was very grey, very Soviet, like all those men in Brazil but he was the man who brought down that wall when he said that travel restrictions would cease that night. When people went to the wall they were confused; they’d been told they could be through and this permission made them adamant. Never underestimate the power of people who’ve been given permission.

The guards let them through; they didn’t have permission.

The men who ran the project that sent Laika into space have expressed regret about their participation.

I think what I wanted from Berlin was the wall. I wanted to be barricaded in and feel the heavy light from the search towers. But all I saw was Ostalgie: nostalgia for the old East, the fetishisation of the little green men on traffic lights with the wide-brimmed hats; Checkpoint Charlie the Tourist Attraction. Men sell Soviet badges on the pavement in Alexanderplatz. This is all that remains of East Berlin.

I blogged about going to an illegal demonstration and got a week of anonymous hate because it sounded crass and self-involved. But at the demo I had an enemy; I ran; I hated. When I put my hand on the Berlin wall I couldn’t figure out who the enemy was. I consider myself a socialist but saying that feels like empty air. I walked to Lidl and bought some sparkling water and blueberries and ate them on the U-bahn. Sometimes I feel like 50% of my life is spent on underground trains.

Susan Sontag wrote something like “we live in the time that is the end of everything, or more accurately just past the end.” She wrote something like this in the 90s. I think the longer it goes on for the more panicked we all get.

Susan was thirteen in Warsaw when she heard about Laika going into space. For weeks she couldn’t sleep, kept going to the window and looking up at the sky but seeing nothing. She couldn’t stop thinking about this dog surrounded by so much emptiness with meteors and UFOs coming straight at it and not knowing what to do (how could a dog call mission control if something went wrong? What was the Laika thinking, staring at all that space?) She stood by the window even when Laika had died but she didn’t know.

I remember a story in the paper of a girl who hung herself with the tie of her dressing gown on the top of the stairs and her mother came home and found her there. She probably stopped on the bottom step and her life probably ended on those stairs too. Maybe I’m imagining all of this.

When I was thirteen I was thinking about suicide and researching American boarding schools because I wanted to go somewhere very far with solid walls that would stop bits of me breaking off. My mother loved the beach and went there every day. My grandma would pick me up from school sometimes and say “let’s drive around and see the sea” and I would sink down in my seat and not look out of the window and feel all stuffy and prickly. I hated the sea.

If I go in the water now I get heart palpitations and have to sit down for forty minutes to an hour. A chiropractor told me it’s because my ribcage is too small for my heart to pump but I don’t think that’s it. I think my heart feels the water against it and it gets confused about its rhythm and tries to be the sea and a heart at once. Sometimes this happens in the bath. Sometimes my heart tries to be the wind. This is why the sea and the sky terrify me and I like to be in cities with tall buildings and no air. Berlin has too much air.

If you go to my hometown you can feel suicide in the air in a way you can’t feel history in Berlin. I don’t know how they did it. How can you erase history from a city but keep the wall, keep the museums and the old airports? Maybe it’s because they painted over the wall. After going to the East Side Gallery and taking photos I tweeted two of them and said “my favourite piece of art is the Berlin wall.” It got some retweets and lots of favourites. Maybe the way to erase something is to turn it into something else. Or turn it specifically into art. You can’t turn suicide into art but you can turn something that caused 251 deaths into a gallery. Maybe I can feel the suicides at home because nobody talks about them.

In Centre de Pompidou and there was footage of Ceausescu’s execution interspersed with footage of a dog and other adverts from the 80s. I couldn’t work out what the dog was advertising. The dog went to sleep as they covered the Ceausescus’ bodies with a white sheet. Their bodies didn’t look like bodies at that point but I guess that’s what they were. It faded out afterwards. There was a video of Regina Jose Galindo carving “PERRA” into her leg with a blade. In front of the video, two young men were grinning at her. Her face was invisible, focusing on keeping her thigh skin taut to make straight lines. “Perra” means bitch in Spanish. I had a panic attack and left.

When I go home I feel uncomfortable going outside so I stay inside and get depressed. I slip too easily into my past. I can still see the blood in my wardrobe. I smelled you once, in a charity shop in town. I haven’t visited our old places. It’s not raw any more. It’s scar tissue. It doesn’t grow or heal: it stays; it shines and softens.

Living alone in London, I would leave college and feel so overwhelmed by all the potential routes home that I would black out and find myself in the middle of the city hours later with no idea how I got there. In Daisies the two Maries goose-step down the street chanting “We exist.” I can’t say we because I get me and them confused (I keep slipping into “we” while writing this essay; I have trouble understanding that my experience of the world is not totalising). When I was a child I suspected that everyone else was a robot who only switched on to create an elaborate illusion of there being a universe outside of me. Now I have to write down everything I think on the internet for other people to see so I know I’m real. I still can’t look in mirrors because I don’t recognise myself. I’m still stuck in the mirror stage. I need another person around me all the time so I can say: “that is them, they are not me, I am myself”. I don’t know if I’m an introvert or an extrovert. I stick every orange train ticket I have ever bought on my walls so I can wake up and think, that was the past, today is now, I am here, that is another place. I exist, I am, I was. I can’t tell if these are coping mechanisms or ways of maintaining a delusion. I used to self-harm to bring myself back into my body but I have learnt healthier ways of doing this now.

I googled historical forgetting and this came up: “it seems to be rather strange that no one has really set out to explain why exactly during this particular period, from 1980 or so on, there has been such an obsession with memory studies.” But really this field should be called forgetting studies because that’s what we’re doing. That’s what I felt in Berlin. The forgetting was tangible. I tried to ask a German girl about it on the balcony of a party, sounding earnest and smoking my cigarette. She left after telling me that maybe Berlin needs to forget; maybe memory is more dangerous. I spent the rest of the party iMessaging my friend about this:

Lana: omg I feel this so hard. I feel like we were born in such a limbo state of history.

Me: yes!! It’s like we have no real culture/history to hold into and everything feels brand new and disconnected. maybe fresh starts are good? Regeneration etc. But I am disturbed by it.

Lana: it’s too swift. I feel like its just happening to quickly, like ripping off a plaster before the wound has fully healed because you need that finger for something else

Me: yesss I agree. like surely this never happened before? Countries took hundreds of years to digest, heal, evolve

Lana: the Berlin wall fell 25 years ago??? There are people who’s lifespan is that long like wtffff I can’t

Me: Yessss but it’s already SO distant

Lana: I think they need to take that time to evolve. There feels like a gulf between reality

I woke up in the morning with no memory, threw up in a plant pot and caught my flight to London. I wonder what happened to Laika’s body after she died. I wonder what happens to corpses in anti-gravity. Do they decompose or remain forever, empty-eyed and circling?

Susan was twenty-one when she caught the trans-Siberian railway to the sea and saw more sky than she had ever imagined. Staring at all this space, she thought for the first time that she would like to be pregnant.

We’ve gone to war six times in the last decade and I can name two of them. Knowing about where your country is bombing is a voluntary act. Our politics is history before it is history and our history is ancient after twenty-five years. When it gets to the hour and a new programme starts on the TV, that’s a suicide. Suicide is walking into another room and forgetting what you came there for. Suicide is this era’s necessity.

When I was sixteen I bought a one-way ticket to London and committed identity suicide on the Great Western. I don’t remember anything prior to this except by reading diaries and blogs. My personal history erased itself while I travelled through the Midlands. I’m recreating it in therapy because I’ve learnt that you can’t be a sixteen year old newborn and get away with it. But it was necessary at the time. The suicide and the rebirth are as important as each other. I’m learning how to forget and to remember.

David Maljkovic’s Scenes for a New Heritage III shows people standing around a monument erected in the 1970s in Yugoslavia. They are not looking at it. They stand in groups, they dissolve, they kick a makeshift football and then give up, rearranging into small groups, drifting. The suicide presides over them. They are trying to keep it dead. They are trying to forget but they can’t help remembering. There are cars and a camper van covered with tin foil. This is an attempt new rituals on the dead bodies of the old. But the wounds are still too raw. The foil reflects the monuments; it reflects memories which should be erased. The people can’t look at the monument but they can’t look at the foil and they can’t look at each other because they’re all thinking the same thing and they’re afraid to say it aloud. There is lost significance and yet they can’t create anything to fill its space. There are no new rituals. There is forgetting; there is survival.

Apparently art ended in the 1960s. Susan Sontag ended art. There are no artistic movements now because there are no more walls to tear down. Everything is permissible. Susan Sontag wrote in her afterword to Against Interpretation, “We had entered, truly entered, the age of nihilism.” I can’t figure out if Nietzsche thought nihilism was the end goal or just a necessary stop on the way, after which we find real morality and a real way of living. But Susan was right when she said that we’re just past the end of everything and there’s nothing new in sight. I am drowning in broken glass with no idea how it got broken. More windows are shattering all the time. I can’t see the missiles.

Susan the thirteen year old girl drew dogs in her notebook, dogs in astronaut suits, dogs running through the air after astro-mice. She dreamt of Laika and flashing lights. She dreamt of the surface of the moon and compared it to her thighs which were covered in chicken pox scars and stretch marks from her last growth spurt. She dreamt of Laika re-entering the atmosphere and plunging into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where she could live out the rest of her life on a desert island with other retired service dogs.

Susan only found out about the craft not being retrievable when she was sixty and had forgotten that she’d ever dreamt of Laika but she felt a knife right through her heart. She realised that the knife had been poised over her heart for forty-seven years. She realised that she had never really hated anything before.

Susan had a nervous breakdown shortly after this event.

The wall isn’t rubble; the wall still stands but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if I break a bottle I can pick up a shard of glass and dig it into me and see blood and that feels continuous. With self-harm, with suicide attempts, we maintain faith in cause and effect.

Susan couldn’t escape the sentence “The craft was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika was always intended to die.”