Village of the Dolls, Garden Centres Out to Get You

Tonight I watched a documentary film called Village of the Dolls, it is about Mark Hogancamp, an American man who built a whole small universe of dolls in his back garden. He does this as a means of expressing something about his life after he was brutally attacked and left severely injured outside a bar. His World War 2 village is called Marwencol and within it he creates scenes that his dolls play out which he then photographs. If you haven’t seen this documentary, it is astounding. Its view of how a man, so badly physically and emotionally damaged by others, struggles to make sense of that event, had me wondering at times whether this was just a voyeuristic look into the life of a man who may not be fully able to protect himself from the intrusion of others. By watching was I colluding with this intrusion? This is of course the old chestnut that is served up with documentaries about vulnerable people but it is still a question I feel I have to at least acknowledge and address. I think the tenderness and poignancy of his work however and his need to talk about it, makes the documentary a study in the triumph of what the human psyche is beautifully capable of when it attempts to heal itself. The fact that Mark is a cross dresser and pours so much of himself into his girl dolls as well as into his alter ego male doll representation, is touching, particularly when placed into the context of the attack which was triggered by his cross dressing Here is a link to a trailer about the documentary which gives you some flavour of it. The one thing I found important about the documentary was Hogancamp’s emphasis on how the building of his world was the way he could make sure that those who beat him so badly could not rob him of his imagination, the thing that made him most himself.

Sunshine has been conspicuous by its presence. Always a good way to feel that soon it will be skies filled with aerobatic swallows and sharpened elbows at the garden centre for bedding plants. I have an intimate knowledge of garden centres as my mother loved them. In the last few years of her life, even when the Alzheimer’s had a firm foothold she would love an afternoon being pushed in her wheelchair down aisle after aisle displaying all things garden . When garden centres embraced coffee shops and crafts, clothes and even pets her joy was complete. We could spend hours moving from hamsters to geraniums, passing jumpers and jigsaws on the way to a frothy coffee and cake. We could also add to her stock of hoarded packets of sugar, sachets of tomato sauce and mustard, she was a contented woman in the presence of potted plants.

I do not have green fingers, I am a poor gardener and sometimes plants flourish in spite of, not because of my care. I am not likely to be pastoral poet, I might be able to spot a host of golden daffodils but anything more difficult botanically than that and I am reaching for my Guide to Wildflowers and blowing the dust off it. This is not to say I don’t rejoice in the wonders of nature but more that I can’t put a name to them and don’t seem able to nurture them personally. However my garden does grow, not just with silver bells and cockle shells but elder, hawthorn, Camellia, ivy, a lot of ivy, brambles, dandelions, orange blossom, honeysuckle, bluebells, holly, convolvulus, ceanothus, daisies, buttercups and grass – so many types of grass, more types of grass than you would believe grasses. Nature given a clear run can manage just fine without the use of grow bags and all purpose plant food. Let be and there would be ivy covering Canary Wharf in no time, daisies on the M25, dandelions on the hallowed lawns of Wimbledon. That’s what I most love about nature sometimes it is always out to get you of course this is written by the woman who was bitten by a squirrel and returned from six weeks away to find convolvulus and ivy half way up all the drainpipes.

Hyperthymesia involving Shatner, Heaney and Strange Things My Mother Said

I watched a rather dodgy American comedy programme called Sh*t My Father Says which is loosely based on a Twitter feed that gained a lot of followers. I am still recovering from watching William Shatner deliver I’m too Sexy for My Shirt at a kari-oke night, the man is eighty which cuts him some slack.

However I started to think about all those bizarre pieces of information or sayings my mother chose to pass on to me, sometimes at inopportune moments, sometimes with some strange twisting of vocabulary. Here is just a small sample.

Never go out with a man with thin lips.
Never wash your hair when it’s a new moon or you have a period and definitely not if both coincide.
Never carry an umbrella around nervous dogs.
You can’t buy experience you have to pay for it.
A long green dress is likely to make you look like a stick of rhubarb, specially as you blush easily.
Sitting on cold concrete will give you piles.
Your granny could read Guinness froth like the tea leaves but only saw a four leaf clover once and then the man got knocked over by a coal lorry the next day.
You’re only tall because I overdosed you on Rosehip syrup.
If they are too neat they are probably German.
Too much coffee can undo all the good a Guinness does you.(Bit of a theme here)
Robins bring a message of imminent loss ( that one was a bit of a nightmare at Christmas as cards with chirpy robins dropped onto the mat).
No red and white flowers together, unless there is ivy in the house.
All brass ornaments off window sills during thunderstorms as they attract lightening.
Over jiggled babies can become cross eyed.
Swearing in cold blood in like kissing an old uncle. ( Never fathomed that one)
Wearing a vest is essential for the health of your kidneys.
Tripe soothes the stomach.
You probably failed your driving test because the examiner looked Welsh.
Going into hospital on a Saturday is never a good idea, all the doctors are tired by then.
Your granny had more cats than money.
She ended up in Mapperley (a psychiatric hospital) because she was having celluloid delusions.
The car won’t start because there is condescension under the bonnet.
You can tell he loves her, he gets constipated when she’s in hospital.
Your granddad went to the barber’s to get his hair cut and that led to pneumonia.
Their neighbours sit naked in the conservative.
She had pantomime poisoning and just blew up.
I can remember the Battenburg disaster, it was all over the papers.

I am researching memory for my second novel. I studied psychology at University both for my first and Master’s degree and have always found it a fascinating subject. Some traumatic experiences may be blocked out for emotional reasons, others experiences may be so small as to be immediately discarded. However under hypnosis the mind can summon up minute details that we think we have forgotten. There are those that would argue that these retrieved memories can in fact be constructed after the event and like eyewitness statements can be compiled unknowingly from a mish-mash of clues or expectations and bare only a small resemblance to the actual event. There are some who believe everything we experience is stored in the brain somewhere but that good memory is the art of retrieval, some can do it more easily than others. How we store information is embedded in all the memory skill exercises that you can find in books and on the internet. Attaching information to items along an imagined walk or as you move through a house is a tried and trusted memory aid going back to Socrates, yet everyday pieces of information and experiences cannot easily be recalled in such a precise and practised manner.

I was fascinated to find a programme that examined the phenomenon of super autobiographical memory when researching. There are a handful of people (five in this programme but probably more who don’t even realise they possess it) who have perfect recall of everything that they have experienced usually from ten to twelve years old onwards. Ask them what happened on 22nd March 1991 and they can recall with perfect clarity, what day of the week it was, what they did, the weather, any important event that happened in the news etc. They were all subject to a battery of tests that verified that they could do this accurately. Everything is filed away, stored and accessible with immediate vividness. One person who has this kind of memory finds this constant torrent of memory almost intolerable whereas the others in this programme seemed to be quite pleased and comfortable with their ability. They seem to be able to put the memories in the library and only visit it when they want or need to.

The neuroscientist involved in the study presumed he would find nothing special in their MRI scans of their brains and was surprised to find they had significantly bigger temporal lobes (the place where memory usually happens) and large caudate nucleus, a site deep in the brain associated with higher order motor control and sometimes with those suffering from OCD. It could be that some people can develop an obsession with memory to the point where nearly everything gets stored and recalled yet this does not seem to become dysfunctional. There may be others who exist with this kind of super memory yet have not been identified, some younger people may not even be aware that we do not all have this ability and others may hide the ability in case they may be seen as some kind of freak. We may be in X men territory here, powers that some may hide or channel into acceptable channels. The concept of photographic or eidetic memory has been dismissed by many scientists but those with this super autobiographic memory (Hyperthymesia) have something that comes pretty close, this ability coupled with high intelligence to channel it may be as good.

The constant accurate recall of past events may be a blessing or a curse, to the poet or the writer it certainly makes autobiography easier but all those poems about their own past would probably be no different, no matter how vividly something in conjured up or rerun like a DVD, complete with emotion and smell; the art is always in the way we see it and the way we tell it. The poem does not rely on accuracy, the truth of a poem never lies on perfect recall, it is not important if Seamus Heaney ever really watched his father digging, or Wordsworth happened on a lot of daffodils.


When I was giving out The selected Works of Seamus Heaney for World Book Night, I was distributing some in a sheltered housing accommodation complex. I came across a very elderly man, who turned out to be Irish, digging in his tiny garden (a strange coincidence). He asked me to read one of the poems from the book, so I chose

The Old Smoothing Iron

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at the anchor.

To test its heat she’d stare
and spit in its iron face
or hold it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

After I finished reading it, his eyes filled with tears and he told me about watching his mother do exactly the same thing when he was a boy. Then he said how touched he was that someone could use such a simple thing and simple words to make something so beautiful and real. So the right words in the right place and the memory is more than just a finely detailed description of a past event and yet it is also that. The tension between what the moment was and what the moment still is creates something dynamic and universal.

Have You Heard The One About Bishop, Marquez and the Whale

I have been busy researching in preparation for the series of workshops I am running for The Poetry School with Jane Monson. It is exploring the concept and practice of narrative in the poem. This subject has always fascinated me as the story is something that has been with mankind for as long as we have used language. I am sure the story was part of Neolithic man’s life. Cave paintings suggest that man understood the power of the imagination wrapped as it was in concepts of sympathetic magic. Perhaps all stories are forms of sympathetic magic a conjuring of the ‘what if’ for us to try on for size. Stories do have a purpose not necessarily as in a moral as such but as a playing out of scenarios. Are stories sometimes our way of being the kittens swiping away and a dangled piece of string in order to hone the skills of catching our prey? Do we unconsciously rehearse our own reactions to situations through the medium of a story? How would we cope with that eventuality, why is someone behaving in a particular way, do we think he or she should have done that. Of course the old great stories, the ballads pin us to our history, to where we have come from, what we owe, what we admire in ourselves and others. Beowulf told tales of monsters, what hides in the dark , what we fear and what we can aspire to in courage, how we can overcome fear. Such things were important in times when fear and death were constant companions. Fairy tales, even putting aside Jungian interpretations, hold universal themes, a certain kind of rough mirror up to our sophisticated faces.
Exploring poems for their narrative always seems to tempt me, what story do we create from the best of words in the very best place? I do not of course suggest that poems are always stories dressed up or cloaked from the reader but it is surprising how we cannot help but join up the dots sometimes; create a whole from the sum of the parts. There can be a ghost narrator in the machine now and then. I know a couple of well known poets who often speak about listening to what the poem has to tell them, sometimes that may be a story.

Here is a sestina by Elizabeth Bishop that manages to make that often difficult and boring form play to the strengths of what a story might demand; a series of events, a tantalising suggestion of who the ‘we’ might be, a switch of perspective from we to I and back, a beautifully described clear setting but with a surreal quality to it, gestures towards another story ( The Sermon on the Mount), the back history, if you care to investigate, of it having been written during the depression. What also sets this poem apart is that the sestina form can often just whirl around like an interminable carousel; this word, that word and here they come again, which can play against any sense of linear advance.

A Miracle at Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

This poem has always reminded me of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. One of his quotes I have had in my journal for years is, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” He also very famously remarked that fiction was invented the day Jonah got home and explained his lateness to his wife by saying he was swallowed by a whale.

The Führer of the Streptococcracy

I have a cold, the Full Monty of a cold, pounding head, blocked nose, sore throat, sore eyes, temperature, cough, general weighty sense of self pity that usually descends with most colds. I stress this is a cold, not flu, Avian or Swine. It is just a common cold yet at the point of experience most colds do not feel at all common; they are uncommon, particular to you, always a cut above the average, run of the mill cold. I have long felt some sympathy for men when women mock their hypochondria, calling it ‘man-flu’ as if the fact that women bare children or have periods allows women the moral high ground on the cold. I think women may soldier on with a bad cold because of circumstances but secretly we would all like to take to our bed, be brought chicken soup, soft boiled eggs with soldiers, all the drugs the pharmacy can muster that purports to alleviate symptoms that prevent us raising our throbbing head from an unplumped pillow.

No one in Hollywood films seem to have colds, indeed the common cold in singularly absent form most movies. Would Norman Bates have turned out to knife Janet Leigh in the shower if he was suffering from a bad cold? Gary Cooper might have postponed his shoot out in High Noon if he couldn’t stop sneezing. John Wayne certainly couldn’t have held his reins in his teeth in True Grit if he was so bunged up with a cold, breathing was impossible except through his mouth. Kate Winslet would never have climbed out onto that prow of the Titanic if she was full of snot, indeed would she have ever managed an affair with Jack if she was confined to her cabin with a box of tissues and a hot water bottle. Arnie never has a cold, Rambo didn’t sneeze once, since 1988 John McLane in the Die Hard movies has never caught a cold from running around in just a vest in all weathers.

In literature, the odd women in Austen novels may take to her bed with a snivel so some gallant can angst or pace floors but indisposed never seemed to cover looking like shit and having a nose that can glow in the dark . No one seems to deliver their greatest speeches with a bunged up croaky voice, could Mark Anthony have got away with it if he had sounded like someone from Birmingham with acute adenoidal overtones? How would Lincoln have got away with the Gettysburg address if he had to stop to keep blowing his nose, would Elizabeth I have cheered on her troops before The Armada so well if she had to admit that she had the heart of a lion but with a bit of a bunged up nose? The common cold seems to have avoided the pivotal moments in history, if Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t gone to Sarajevo because he had a headache and couldn’t cope with his bunged up sinuses then World War I might have been delayed a little at least. If Lee Harvey Oswald had sneezed maybe his aim would have been off? The three hundred Spartans may never have fought so bravely and gone down in history or myth as brave men if they had managed to all have colds spread by their use of communal drinking bowls and shared washing facilities?

So I apologise dear reader that this blog is not the best blog I or anyone has ever written, it could have been if it weren’t for the fact that I had to stop to blow my nose, thence losing my thread amidst the grey cells that seem to be wrapped in a grey cotton wool at present .

I leave you with Ogden Nash, whose light humourous verse is sometimes dismissed by the poetry community. His surreal creation of rhyme by word invention has sometimes been under appreciated, I think a poet that understands my cold so well and can even invent the phrase The Führer of the Streptococcracy deserves some praise.

Cold
Ogden Nash

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!


Despite the cold I managed to give out all my Seamus Heaney books for World Book Night and had some interesting conversations with people along the way. I also managed to host an event in the evening which was fun and brought back to me again how important the reader is, without them books are merely paper with marks on.

Off now to watch Spartacus on the TV, nothing like a cuppa and an old film on a Sunday afternoon to help your cold feel loved and nurtured. That’s another one, imagine the famous ‘I am Spartacus’ scene if everyone was unable to get the words out for sneezing or a sore throat.
If you want to hear Ogden Nash read one of his poems that always struck a chord with me you can find it here.