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Jeremy Prynne Melanie Klein

Connected/Disconnected

“Each angled to its point of flux & so on & with so much its place removed, the leakage in moral sense to the “error signal”, making the rainfall restless, unstable: the loop not connected but open & induced to nothing.”  J.H.Prynne, “Air  (iap  Song”

“Somethin’ ain’t right. Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” Stereo MC’s, “Connected”

Get Yourself Connected #1: “The writing’s on the wall”

stereo-mcs-connectedA WH Smith newsagent window, Market Street, Cambridge, October 1992. Dissociated-me shoving a Cranks’ Date Slice into my gob, registering but not taking note of the over-saturated colours of this poster advertising an album that has not been branded in any way for my affinities: volcanic eruptions! psychedelic mushrooms! snakes! lubricious orchards and passion flowers! extra-terrestrial transmissions! the band as shamanic explorers pushing through the dubfunkacidtriphop undergrowth, whilst sampling/stealing hooks from more likeable, effortlessly groovy indigenes
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A few months after releasing Connected, the Stereo MC’s would flog both it and the instrumental B-Side (Disconnected) to Carphone Warehouse. The Warehouse, founded the same year I started university (1989), was soon to become one of the largest mobile phone retailers in the UK.

Referring to themselves as ‘Communication Centres’, they would use Connected and Disconnected for a decade or more as the stomping sonic backdrop to their incessant shlock-and-bore advertising, so that the memory of the song is now almost entirely blistered over with irritation and aggravation.

Carphone Warehouse 90s adMaybe you’d be watching X-files, or Frasier, or Friends, or The Big Breakfast Show, no matter. Wherever you’d be getting your primetime fix, the motivational neurocircuitry of your brain would also be getting “connected”, dosed up every ten minutes or so with the prescient message that virtual association via mobile telephony and this thing we now call the internet was going to be the answer to your most fervent prayers and fantasies.

Something ain’t right? Existential dread and ire? Gotta get yourself, you gotta get yourself gotta get yourself connected, bruv!

 

GYC #2: “If your mind’s neglected, stumble you might fall.”

Formal Hall - dinnerIt soon became clear to me, even by Christmas 1989, that I was not clever enough or sophisticated enough to maintain the kind of conversational connections that fuelled the intellectual and social life of Cambridge, so I disengaged, bypassing opportunities for affiliation, tucking myself away.

Rather than go to Hall each evening where my cohorts, begowned in their navy blue academic robes with black velvet trim, sparkled and shone with Brideshead Revisited wit and banter, I would eat my main meal of the day at an Indian restaurant, a fifteen minute walk from the University Library which usually shut its stacks at 7.15 pm.

I was particularly fond of the vegetable Jalfrezi, but usually limited myself to a side-dish, a Saag Chana or a Tarka Daal with some basmati rice. I liked the restaurant because it was as disconnected from the grandeur of the University and its social expectations as I could possibly find.

Me in 93Once I became a regular there, they would often give me a vegetable samosa or garlic naan for free. It was perfectly OK to sit and read my book as I ate my meal, no obligation whatsoever to engage “in wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, with  protocols promoting maximum civility…which can be educative at the time as well as lead to further networking beyond the confines of the occasion” (notes on Formal Hall from my college prospectus).

How far through this world could I go without exchanging a spoken word? Without any force, just not actually speaking when you didn’t need to? My record was two and a half weeks. This mealtime routine was one way of dispensing with the pressure to talk, to perform a self for which I had had no prior training up to this point.

So Lent, Easter, and the following Michaelmas Term passed with me living an intensely isolated life, increasingly aware that the profound joy and meaning I usually found in reading and writing (“You’re good at this sort of thing, have you ever thought about applying to Cambridge?”)  was progressively being drained away, until finally I stumbled and fell.

 

GYC #3: “Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick”

Madonna lactansThat we seek and need to be connected goes without saying, but is connection an end in itself or is the push towards gratification through other people the means to that end?

We don’t like to think of ourselves as inherently selfish which is why a narrative of relational reciprocity (connection for connection’s sake) now dominates the discourse in most fields. But perhaps President Trump and those for whom he speaks and rules might be asking us to revisit an older, Freudian narrative?

In this Connected/Disconnected Story, we begin with some kind of bodily tension, a libidinal impulse for food, sex, or the latest Netflix offering. This then gets converted into an aim or setting (a supermarket, Tinder, or streaming media), where we might look for as well as serendipitously find the object of our desires.

Add to this a set of elaborate defence mechanism to keep more socially unacceptable drives repressed or diverted into harmless activities like writing cultural critiques or watching music videos on YouTube, and you’ve got the transformation of neurotic misery into the more bearable state of everyday unhappiness.

Sebastiano_del_Piombo_The Martyrdom of St AgathaMelanie Klein, the psychoanalytic Mama of the Connected/Disconnected fairytale goes one step further, by splitting off the connective drive and our disconnected resistance into two separate containers: good breast and bad breast. Or in the parlance of popular culture: good cop/bad cop. Or as political ideologies: Hilary and The Donald (if you’re a Trump supporter: The Donald/Hilary).

If connection to the object (person, song, piece of writing) releases our libidinal buildup, we are rewarded with the happy life-sustaining sensation of gushing nutritious goodness. However the same object, or some variant of, can just as quickly flip to a deprecatory position, where our empty bellies and aching needs become projectively identified with the Bad Breast, against which we might hold some pretty intense and destructive retaliatory fantasies.

“Ya dirty tricks, ya make me sick,” howls Psychic Baba at Bad Breast, gnashing down on its impervious nipple. A minute later, spotting Good Breast hoving into view, oblivious to the fact that both offer ways of connecting to a caregiver, he turns away from the “Bad” to the so-felt “Good”, humming all the while: “Gonna get myself, I’m gonna get myself, gonna get myself connected.” [Slurp].  

 

GYC #4: “I see through ya, I see through ya.”

prynnebigI’d now like to say something about Jeremy Prynne’s breasts. Jeremy Halvard Prynne, described by the Paris Review last year as “the mage of the Cambridge School”, but also, in 1993, the Director of Studies at my college. Prynne having thus played an important role in the connective matrix of my academic psyche, a double-breasted Attachment Figure of sorts.

In my drop-out year, I’d pushed myself to read more of the people he liked and admired  (Olson, O’Hara, Dorn, Wordsworth, Celan) thinking I might try and write a kind PoMo mash-up so as to make up for being a negligible presence in the two years preceding my stumble and fall.   

This began as a little chapbook called More Games For The Super-Intelligent, the poems emerging from the detritus of all my lecture and reading-for-essay notes that I had spent the last three years accumulating in what seemed to be depressing, and increasingly useless quantities. Working in this way, I could somehow deflect the input of personal preoccupation so that the interior of the poems was sometimes interchangeably positioned with the exterior, there being at some point no clear arbitrated priority between those aspects.

I presented the manuscript of More Games for The Super-Intelligent to the most intelligent person I knew (Prynne), the chapbook at this point serving the multi-media purpose of a script for a play that clearly needed to be performed. The other day I googled the names of the three people who performed More Games with me on 15-20 February 1993  at the Cambridge Playroom (Eva Czech, Dallas Windsor, Natasha Yarker), and not a single LinkedIn or Facebook profile could I find. Was the whole thing a psychotic episode, the poems, the play, me studying at that university in the first place?

vitruvian manPrynne read the poems and in his somewhat mannered and formal way was very kind and generous with his comments. I asked if I could get a discount on photocopying 100 copies to give away at the performances the following month and he suggested I use his non-carded photocopier in the librarian’s office, coming down to open up for me at midnight. I also photocopied a number of A3 posters of myself as Vitruvian Man, the thought of which now fill me with horror. It was the same image used on the cover, a gaudy self-indulgent Gesamkunstwerk in a desperate bid for connection through the warped lens of indecent exposure.

How did I repay Mr Prynne’s kindness? For starters, by stealing a valuable first edition of White Stones from his library (not on the night itself, but later), the college library, which he presided over as part of his duties in a Mother Hen kind of way. But worse than that as far as propagating shame, I then spent the next 25 years selectively remembering Prynne not as a mage but a Wizard of Oz, a kind of impenetrable and frustrating twit.

How in my imagination had he become so lopsidely Bad Breast? What was the empty belly frustration about: his shyness and obtuseness? The resistance and difficulty of his own position? This position was put forwards as a kind of manifesto in an essay Prynne penned his early 20s, an essay describing how the reality of the external world can’t help but be predicated on the resistance it offers to our awareness. “The stone’s hard palpable weight is the closest I can come to the fact of its existence,” he writes, ”and the reserve or disagreement of my neighbour is my primary evidence for his being really there.”

 

GYC #5: “Ya terrified (I wanna do it again)”

toffs_and_toughs_by Jimmy Sime_1937
Toffs and Toughs, Jimmy Sime (1937)

“Humiliation,” writes Wayne Koestenbaum, like other educating experiences, “breeds identity”. He cites Jayne Eyre, whose identity as “unlovable outcast” evolves in response to being locked in a red room for stealing a book that she too cares little for, utilising it as a kind of shield-cum-escape-hatch against the dreary November day and her punitive guardians, the Reed family. “Humiliation isn’t merely the basement of a personality,” notes Koestenbaum, “or the scum pile on a stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event  that paves the way for self to know it exists.”

I think he’s right, although I would rephrase that last sentence by saying that humiliation paves the way for “a self” to know it exists: more specifically the besmirched, exposed, shamed self, a self that all of us spend a good amount of time either repressing or covering up, deflecting and sublimating through other selves. Selves that have socially valued skills (I’m a psychotherapist), selves broadcasting their affiliations to groups they want to be included in (“Can I write an essay for your literary magazine?”), selves trying to connect with more powerful selves through the language of “Liking” and “Replying”, a game of Impression Management that make the Carphone Warehouse TV and radio ads of the 90s now look like child’s play.  

I wonder how the Stereo MC’s deal with their tainted selves when the Carphone Warehouse jibes start piling on? Or maybe they’re no longer a trigger for shame, maybe the MC’s did good things for themselves and others with their advertising moolah?

Rob BirchMaybe for them, the shamed self is more liable to pop up like a weed from the soil of humiliation when critics lay into their follow-up efforts with the sadistic glee of Bronte’s truculent John Reed or the castigating clergyman Brocklehurst. “Generic self-help guff,” carps Reed (aka The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey). “An uninspired stew of stale ideas and careless execution” moans Brocklehurst (aka fellow music critic/gravedigger Peter Petridis).   

I can try and neutralise some of my own University shame and humiliation by sending that stolen copy of White Stones back to Gonville and Caius Library, or by writing about the oftentimes puzzling and worrying antics of my younger self as I have done here. But how does one finally lay to rest and meaningfully disconnect from the chiding chatter broadcast forevermore on that exterior searchable channel called Google, as well as the interior associatively connected circuits of memory, the inner-net?

White StonesThe other day I asked a colleague to EMDR-me-up whilst I sat and read aloud from this text. This involved her, after each segment, waving her fingers back and forth about ten inches from my face, so generating bilateral eye movement, checking in occasionally with my humiliation appraisals via a Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale. Visualising my naked self on that photocopied cover of More Games For The Super-Intelligent gave me an initial SUD rating of about a 9 (out of 10). We got it down to 6.5.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing as kooky as it looks and sounds is a well-respected treatment for meliorating traumatic memories. A more ancient treatment comes in the form of writing essays, short stories, poems, and maybe even slightly naff songs like those on the March Fadness roster. The academy of course frowns on writing-as-therapy, but in the words of Mr Robert Birch and Mr Nick Hallam, Stereo MC’s, “I ain’t gonna go blind for the light that is reflected. Hear me out, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, I wanna do it again, I wanna do it again.”