Autumn tide

Memories of

In the mid 1980s I went to work for the small, under-resourced, but occasionally extravagant London secretariat of a global political network and my working life began to fill with exotic new people, objects and experiences that were to make the following decade and more both wonderful and nightmarish. One of those exotic new objects, a few months into the job, was an Apple Mac computer. We were early adopters. It was my first computer: a serial love affair that continued for the whole time I worked there, and I miss them still, my morphing parade of appley better halves. I’m long since reconciled to life with a PC, but it’s never been the same – like leaving a land of sweet little purebred stallions for one of shambling but serviceable donkeys. Long before laptops were conceived of, those early Macs –  smooth and chunky and lovable and quickly grubby grey-beige boxes about 9 x 9 x 12 inches – flew with us to conferences in Africa, Latin America and Australia. Many’s the overnight flight I’ve spent with one parked under my feet (cramped uncomfortably in an Economy-class seat, I still find myself thinking: well, at least…). So many feelings and memories: not unmixed, but far from the grateful-but-alienated emotions inspired by the current PC and other techno-tools. I feel rather old, remembering 1985 and my first Mac - a few months older than Steve Jobs, who was too young to die, wasn't he?

Ruminating

Waiting to hear about something (not life or death, well only metaphorically). There’s nothing more I can do to influence the outcome, and I’ve no idea, really, what the probabilities are. So I need, of course, to just put it out of my mind. Keep active. Stay in the moment. Thought I’d been doing this fairly successfully - I’m not consciously thinking about it much. But clearly my sub(not very sub)conscious is at it the whole time, because I note wearily that I'm eating voraciously (without chewing - another characteristic of rumination), sleeping very little and having nightmares when I do, and I can’t concentrate for shit - not on work (which is less busy, but not much less), but also not on music or fiction or art or escapism of any kind. Oh dear. Well, I can watch my mind, I suppose, and be amazed at its self-defeating capers. And try not to take it out on other people. And be glad that I’ll only have to wait a few weeks.

Ground and form

by Jaume Plensa at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

August and September: where did they go? Juddered past in a miasma of work and worry, and it's hard now to find the edge of it. Instead of groping forward, better to sit still and feel down into the ground, sit still and paint pictures in the foggy air. Form is only contrivance, only stories, but it's everything.

Herded

Eek

Done much more than I could do. Hurt everywhere and my head's on fire with this damn cold. Breathe hard through the chest and back pain. Open, open to the coming weekend; hope that if the door is open wide enough the dead hand of anti-climax, depression will stay outside waving wildly and not bother to come in.

Today's forecast was for ninety degrees, which never happens here in October. Darkness at 7 pm and still hot means you're not in England, but much further South. I was right then: these past few weeks have been in a strange country.

I know some people don't mind working all the time and would not understand my distress and exhaustion. We all have our own limits and, wherever they lie, to be repeatedly pushed through them is perhaps a good definition of stress.

Careful

We're having warm, golden Autumn weather, in odd contrast with the fires of mental hell. This is day eleven on the trot (gallop?) of too-long hours before the computer screen and, around the fierce heat of resistance to tedium and exhaustion, the edges are getting very blurred.  I'm a bit scared walking down the street: my grip on reality can waver at the best of times, and right now I don't entirely trust myself to tell a red light from a green.

Look, too much work is not as bad as many things - chronic physical pain, or catastrophic illness, or chemotherapy... of course it's not! But it's not good. You know that feeling that, if someone pokes you, you'll start making strange, uncontrollable noises? So you hold yourself carefully away from everyone, hold yourself very carefully together.

Not so long ago

Et in Arcadia ego (it rained, but still...)

So

So, size of workload getting very silly.

So I start to wonder: once you've been pushed to your limits and beyond, as I was long ago in that job I eventually left, do you wear it on your face, ensuring that sooner or later it's going to happen again?

So look up, look out once in a while and notice something, at least; keep trying to see something, touch something, however fleetingly.

Just don't let the inner sense of panic be the only thing.

Outside in