New pome up.

I've just posted a new poem, 'Elegy in a Brazilian Churchyard'. It's meant to be just slightly on the side of funny. Not laugh out loud funny, you understand, more like, 'heh, I could smile at that if I wasn't so damn cynical' funny. 

This offering comes after my other recent one 'each/other', which shows I am clearly stuck in an alphabetical rut as regards titles. 

Comments, naked pictures and floral bouquets spelling the word 'twat' all most welcome. 

Eating Chocolate Makes You Gay.

At least, if does if every chocolate advert ever made is to be believed.

Consider how a girl eats a chocolate bar. She accepts it tenderly into the front of her mouth. Her moist bee-stung lips close gently over the perfect sheath of cocoa. Her eyes close in rapture. Her spine arcs. Nearby, something symbolic happens (a bath overflows, a diaphanous curtain is furled in soft winds). Surely, the advert tells us, this pleasure is too much for one extremely attractive and successful woman to bear?

Compare this with a man eating chocolate in an advert. He sticks the chocolate bar into the side of his mouth and tears off its head, emitting a silent roar of conquest in his imagination as if the chocolate bar was a gazelle in some blurred ancestral memory of flames and animal skins and spears.

So. Women eat chocolate bars face-on to make us think about sex; the pretty lady is fellating the chocolate bar, good for her. Men, conversely, eat chocolate from the side of their mouths to make sure we think about anything but sex: that nice man is absolutely definitely not thinking about penises. Hence, by deduction, we must conclude that every time we mortals eat chocolate face-on, we are revealing ourselves to be gayer than Mr Humphries.

Mmm. Willies. 

Round The Corner.

Just back from a trip round the corner to the gas station to buy some water. It’s a little after twilight, newly dark, and the pavements are thinning though the roads are still choked with stationary traffic, belching trucks, vacant faces in bus windows. What I want to think about is why I get such a sharp little thrill from these moments out in the city on my own. It’s not the city which does it. Sao Paulo is far too ugly, big and unmistakably western for anyone to romanticise it as either beautiful or extraordinary. There are no hooded lepers begging for change, no muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, only poor people working hard, occasional beggars and prostitutes discernible among the regular folk and those random outbreaks of violent crime which everyone prays not to get caught up in. So, no, what I get off on at such moments is not the city itself but the sensation which I get at such moments of being far away, immeasurably far away. Accomplishing something so mundane as buying water here, with its autopilot assumptions of where to go, who might be working at the gas station tonight and what I will say, brings sharply into focus the extent to which I have become embedded in a place and a life which has no connection, and no knowledge, of the country I am from. This is liberating, and I feel the weightlessness of it for a second as I’m wandering home through the exhaust fumes and glare of headlights: the possibility that I have, at least for now, escaped.

Underemployed.

Brazil doesn’t offer its citizens any unemployment protection. The absence of unemployment benefit means everyone needs to work. This is why you’ll often see middle-aged and older people working as waiters and shelf-stackers, and seeming to take a degree of pride and enjoyment from their work which is conspicuously absent in the UK. However, there are some unintended consequences of this policy.  

Gone are the sulking teenagers from your coffee shop, gone is the self-checkout from your supermarket. In their place stands a mass of eager and subservient functionaries ready to do every kind of work imaginable so that you don’t have to raise a finger, unless it’s to point at what you want. If you choose, there’s someone to do quite literally everything for you, and often there are several of them. Two people come round to put up your shelf. Three people are involved in watering a lawn. Four people will put up a sign (one up the ladder and three watching, offering advice and passing tools).  I once saw a whole crew of guys doing some street-sweeping, with one guy obviously the overseer. Remember, this is street-sweeping: not so much to oversee. Consider it. ‘So, what have you got there? Looks like a leaf?’ ‘Yup, leaf.’ ‘Well, sweep it up, will you?’ ‘Yes, boss.’

In a domestic setting, it all gets a bit Lives of the Eminent Victorians. It’s quite common for a wealthy family of four to have a maid, a cleaner, a couple of security guards, a cook and gardeners. The family has the money, the poorer members of society need some of it. An understanding is reached. This imperative to find work permeates every level of society; there’s none of the industrialisation and automation we associate with mass production. Take bread. In the UK a bog-standard loaf of bread is always sealed by those strips of clear sticky tape, clearly administered by some clever little machine. Here in Brazil they’re sealed with wire pipe cleaners. So, instead of a machine doing each loaf of bread, they’re done by hand, each one, in some factory somewhere.

Perhaps best of all was the time my wife and I went to get some passport photos done. We took ourselves off to a shopping centre and found a booth. It looked exactly like a standard coin-op booth, except a bit bigger. My wife went inside and was just adjusting her chair, when a hand snaked in from behind the screen and adjusted the overhead lighting slightly. My wife emitted a polite scream appropriate to the situation, and a little old lady’s face peeked round the corner to ask if she was alright. That was her job: to squash herself in behind the screen and wait for people to come along and get their picture taken. It’s not a vocation, I imagine, but it is a job. 

Male Madness, Female Despair.

Being a scruffy and hastily cobbled-together thought about stuff I don't understand. 

Could it be said that men tend towards grand existential madness while women find their madness (and depression) in the social expectations placed upon them by their sex, the million tiny cuts of the quotidian? Could it possibly be the case that female psychosis tends to be less egocentric and self-regarding?

Of course, drawing a simple two-part distinction based on gender is a fairly ghastly and reductive trick. Men also suffer from OCD and depression and women no doubt go mad in ways I dread to imagine. And yet I still wonder whether men, being more confined, in my experience, to linear or singular thought processes, are effectively derailed and whirled away to god knows where by their mental illness, while women are embedded deeper into their own setting. I suppose I’m thinking of Woolf and Plath in the latter case.

Medea is the obvious contradiction to this hypothesis. Her actions constitute a spectacular and horrific repudiation of the bonds of domesticity and motherhood. Except what if her actions didn’t emancipate her, but rather tied her in more closely to the role she was condemned to live and die for? Hmm.

I don’t know.

Perhaps a better question would be whether or not female mental illness is commonly associated with the home. That is, do the house and the domestic pressure of house-holding cause the physical space to become an extension of the body, with the house becoming a living thing which breathes back and whispers new forms into the anxieties of the sufferer? There’s a clear lineage of that in literature, after all, from Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre through to The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

And, if this is the case, does it explain why the main action of King Lear must be transferred to the heath, away from the nexus of the hearth?