Helen is clear!

There is a deep pleasure in endings. Indeed, one should only embark on something if the pleasure of it's end is already in sight. Helen's news was hanging over me all week and so, the relief of hearing she does not have cancer was expressed, interestingly, in my purchasing two tickets for a celebratory performance of Messiaen's Quartet to the End of Time. Clearly, I am desperate for something to end.

Gareth is avoiding me.

And Colin, that most contemporary of men, I find him one of the most subtly deluded men I have ever met. Unable to experience, deeply, his own unhappiness, he seeks the cause of it.

I sense Gareth is not hearing what he wants from Colin.

I have stirred my coffee in the kitchen, waiting. I have strolled the hallway with the nonchalance of an executioner. But no Gareth.

It took a while for Canto XVII to finish so I drove round and round the block and, as ever the counter of my mood, arrived at work to find my happiness meet Gareth, snarling in the kitchen. He tried to hide his mood by ridiculing the morning news. In response I poured my coffee, breathing deeply, trying to stay in the belly. Inevitably, my retreat incited him. He them ridiculed a very promiscuous Gestalist of our acquaintance, roped in the Motivational Interviewers, then finished with a low punch at Neil and his toilet. It was a fabulous display of complete horseshit and so, elated at Gareth's angst, I withdrew to my room to await the day, and to allow Gareth to expend his ire on other, perhaps more reactive people. And yet only later, taking an early evening shit to a little singsong by Bach, did it occur to me that Gareth's anger might relate to myself. Or rather, myself and Colin. It was a deeply gratifying idea. Indeed, tomorrow will tell, as it will the state of Helen's health. Very likely, I'll sleep like a peach.


.

I've just returned from George's and, thank christ, I never laid a finger on the Thai.

I'm a bottle of brandy under, my liver on fire, but my friendship intact. I wish for nothing now but to spread out on the cool grass of my garden, to close my eyes and wait for Helen's nipples to descend and enter my open mouth.

Instead, I shall have a cigarette on the terrace then it's lights off, a quick wank under my duvet.

I shall wake in the morning.

With or without soul, life goes on.

I can't say we did.

And yet, rather in the manner of Bergh's Nordic Summer Evening, there was an entire lake of desire between us. We did nothing but fake a gaze into the distance. Of course, we were talking over the desire, intensifying it. I was deeply unprofessional. It is my job to wade into these waters but in opting for the pleasures of restraint and the coy I have, therapeutically, failed her. And yet, she did not want it any other way, seeing my analysis of our desire as a weakness in me, and a rebuke to herself. And certainly, under this happy, willful denial an ancient imperative, nothing less than life itself, was grinding away. It is this fierce instinct that knows it is in client R.'s best and permanent life interest to use her unknown, unconscious needs in the service of the flesh. The dumb will of biology is the winner here. In short, she is too young for the therapy we practice. All the energy in her unconscious, defensive stratagems will make her career, find her a husband, and lend the final push in the happy conception of another, altogether different life. It's not for therapy that she needs me. Rather, she would like a confirmation of her power to achieve those life events and, with time running out, sex is the way to go. I could point this out to her, of course. I could do that, then recline with a half pipe and a slim volume of verse. Or I could meet her in the marshlands of our mutual need, and fuck the day to death. It could go either way, frankly.

Client R.

I considered my work with R. to have come to an end a few months ago but she doesn't feel the same and so, aside from considering that some things are only ended by sex and death, I have plodded along with her stale wishes. She says that her desire to continue therapy proves there are old dependencies and, therefore, the necessity of dealing with them. I am not unaware, of course, that in these winter months it is a peculiar thing to wear tops that reveal such a distinct outline to the nipple and it is this, rather then her own protests of dependency, that suggest a more cogent case for continuing our work. I will see her this morning and, assuredly, the ancient argument will arise for enacting desire, rather than it's articulation. Of course, the planet is going to hell in a handcart in the service of articulation and yet, inevitably, I shall ensure a pipe of O to hand, the better to collude with the necessary suppression, not to say the death of the planet.

Helen is quiet.

As for George, I accepted an invite to dinner. He allowed me to know the Thai friend will be cooking for us. I pictured George and I licking madly from the same bowl.

I was dreaming with a heavy heart. In short, I find myself fatigued at the idea of another onslaught of whispering, rumour and the unending, oedipal desire of Gareth to smear my name. I wouldn't mind but he is forever looking in the wrong places. He could do a lot worse than overhear my next session with R., for example. Indeed, I find myself wavering on the border of a misconduct. And for all my tiresome articulation of impulse, it is also a cultural provocation. Do we not, after all, require ever more sophisticated forms of transgression? And so it is in this mood I will entertain client R.

And George has invited me over.

Something will break, I suspect.

And where was I, 4 am this morning?

Idling gently past her driveway. Upon which, of course, there were no unknown, nor even foreign cars. I remembered Lowell and his own madness, each blood cell sobbing. Whereas I simply went home, buttering my toast to my overloud, yet always ferocious quartets. And so it was I was rather unprepared and overexcited in my investigations, entering the kitchen to greet Gareth with a wheeze, and faking, too, a little asthma. This allowed me to mutter something about exercise and fitness whereupon Gareth, to my delight, poured my coffee and said there was, indeed, a sharpness in the air. While I can imagine him not making any mention of badminton, it is rare for Gareth not to place himself in the centre of any gambit, and even more unusual to hear of the weather. Clearly, he was avoiding any link between himself and Colin and so, by default, the conspiracy was confirmed. I took my coffee to my room, aching for a little negative consolation, but instead, heaved my shoulder to the wheel and read up, from a fifty year edition, on the pathology that is homosexuality.

I was on the phone, consoling Thom over Arsenal's woeful display when, while aware my son will bear his losses heavily in later life, I also sensed that he was keeping me on the phone for some other reason. I made a mental note to check his mother's driveway in the early hours. I then whoofed up the Gorecki and took a slow, almost mournful shit and it was then, with the toilet door ajar, that I could just hear a message recording itself onto my machine. It was an old Rogerian friend informing me, as requested, that he does, indeed, know a little something of Colin, that most contemporary of men. He told me that Colin, in fact, plays a weekly game of badminton. I was shocked, pleasurably. Had not Gareth mentioned playing the game himself? I took a warmth, almost a gratitude, in imagining their conspiracy. After all, it is a relief to know one is not surrounded by dullards and, really, what can they possibly do to me? And so it was I took a dose of O and opened my Mapplethorpe, all the better to explore our unlovely and, perhaps, finite outcomes.

So, he sends a card.

I woke this morning to a postcard from George. It is from a film the artist K R Buxley has made showing herself having an orgasm. Of course the very meaningful, if slightly laboured point, lies surely in that all one sees is the face of the artist. Yet beyond Buxley, what is George trying to say? That he is back to his old powers? What is this if not another provocation?

I spent the day with my father. He says he is in remission.

I agreed, heartily. All the while his leg gets bigger and bigger.

Yesterday I saw Colin, the most contemporary of men. After the session, as an antidote, I spent awhile cleaning and polishing my Russian pipe, circa 1880. I am still no wiser as to what Colin wants or who he knows but I am aware of Gareth. He passed me in the hall, smiling, as if his mind were elsewhere.

I heard the Gustave Dore fall from the letterbox as I sat on the can, taking an uneventful shit to the dying strains of my favoured Gorecki. The Dore is a scene from the Inferno and yet, while I have listened to the recording in my car every morning, the purchase of the print was somehow bound up with George. In short, I wanted to share it with him. Our friendship began in hell and, assuredly, will end there. Why, perhaps we are closer to that end than I ever imagined. These are ruminatons that have no basis anywhere but the id. Oh god, I am infinitely subtle when it comes to men, but in dealing with women I lack manners. How can I ever take seriously his ridiculous Thai girlfriend? Of course, mine is a very artful barbarism, and one that has served me well. No, I am under no illusions. It is the manner of my controlling the beast, the art of it, that delivers, not the beast itself. Are we not all burdened with what we don't yet know? Oh, I have tried, but I simply cannot imagine entertaining George without taking the bait and pouncing upon the Thai. And George? He expects nothing less. And so it was I spent the night alone, indulging the Dore, taking a dose of O, on my guard against the passive, sleeping early and dead to the world.

My weekend exertions maintained their occult power this morning as I breezed into work and, following some buffoonery with Gareth in the kitchen, I entered Helen's room and, blithely ignoring her victim self, asked gently but most firmly why she had taken my parking space. The low note in my voice awakened her and, entering adult, she said she took my space on the assumption I was walking to work. But is it not my space, whether I drive or not? She accepted this as the case, maintaining a level, adult smile. I heaved my voice into it's deepest timbre, sensing a certain relief on Helen's part and prompting, too, the further renegotiation of these states that occured later in the afternoon, in my room. Sex was not my intention and I was genuinely furious about the parking space. Of course, it's also my fault. Most recently I drive to work while listening to Dante's Inferno and I refuse to park my car and switch off the Florentine until I have reached the end of a canto. While I may insist on the perogative of poetry, it did make me late for a client last week, as I drove round and round the block until the end of Canto Xll. Aside from my exertions, it is also this heightened priority that is deepening my strength. I write this on the train, returning from Arsenal, Thom asleep on my shoulder. I may not have earnt this peace but I have owned it and that, I suspect, is much the same thing.

And so finding myself in good time for my afternoon appointment I spent a few minutes in an anteroom, waiting for Madame C to appear. An elderly coffee table carried an array of disappointing pornography so I closed my eyes and shifted my focus inward. I quickly sensed that I wasn't here for my upper thighs or to reawaken my regressions, but simply to clutch any woman's arse and bury my head in her cunt. And so it was, exuding a nonchalent benevolence, I renegotiated with Madame C and she agreed to an extended oral, the price unchanged. I spent an hour working on the thighs, the clitoris and the vagina of madame C and, aside from straying to the nipples, ensured a concentration of purpose and, assuredly, as she writhed towards her several ends, I knew that I had summoned and wrangled and, finally, mastered the mess of all my guilts and regret over Helen. I heaved a deep breath and, as Madame C lay below me, eternally realised, I felt like the priest of her and all women and, in keeping, sought no reciprocation and felt, in fact, quite indifferent as Madame C laboured with my dick. I kissed her hand and put it away.

Oh, George.

What farce our middle years. After a week of various hysteria, including my own in a public park, I decided to spend the day alone. I boiled up a mug of Burdock tea (is there nothing I will not do for my bowels), and browsed my eighteenth century copy of Ficino and yet, while curious to know what my Renaissance master has to say on the nature of grief, I was also aware of my breath, shallow and slight, a state I increasingly felt could only be resolved by a thrashing on the back of my upper thighs. I was aware that Helen's uncertain health lent her an unwarranted power and, therefore, hoping to balance this and resolve the tension in my lungs, I lay aside my Ficino and put in a few calls, finally making an appointment for myself tomorrow, along the coast, with a mistress who, if I remember correctly, used to work in a pet shop. She had a voice as hard as diamond.

I called Thom. We discussed his physics homework and after, on a whim, I projected, as fathers and sons tend to, all our dilemmas onto the astronomical and, thereby, asked what he knew of how the planets revolve around the sun. His answer nearly made me cry. So, lifting us onto firmer ground we then made plans to travel to Arsenal for monday night. Yet it was later, in the supermarket, seeing George and his new girlfriend in the alcohol aisle, that the uncertain emotion in my chest cohered into an obscene and horrible guffaw as I saw George's girlfriend was hardly more than a teenager, a Thai bride, in fact, and the innocence on the face of my friend as he pottered around with his girl was so profound, I had to depart the shop and unsure if it was misery for us both or admiration for him, I could do nothing but stagger home, breathing deeply, laughing like a loon.

Oh, George.

Are they spying on me, are they?

I pay my professional body sixty pounds a year for the privilege of practising my trade and now, in gratitude, they spy upon me. And so it was, searching for Canto XXV of Dante's Inferno on my car stereo, I left for work reflecting that paranoia is, indeed, the most tiresome of all defence mechanisms and yet how else can I explain my new client, Colin. What a prick, is Colin. He has come to me to explore his depression. Normally, I would approve the humility of this and yet something in his tone wanted me to understand, rather desperately, that in this exploration we were equals. It soon transpired, of course, that Colin is a counsellor himself. He failed to reveal who recommended me and, aside from admiring his absolute baldness, I spent a fair portion of the session wondering if he was a plant, a spy, and if not from the BACP then perhaps a friend of Gareth's? He was clearly gay. Also, like many contemporary men, he is an expert on his feelings but knows nothing of soul. Of course, his access to his feelings allows us the semblance of a therapeutic session and yet I grew tired of his quick and felt discriminations for they are always temporary, without the reach of soul. It was a deeply superficial session but Colin seem to like it. It occurred to me that Colin, in his choice of career, may have wasted his entire life and I began to rather hope that he was a spy, a plant, if only for his sake. I shall send out some feelers, but if Gareth is behind this then I shall break his spine.

Am I not done mourning?

Oh, mother.

I've had nearly forty years of nothing else. What have I been playing at?

Well what, then?

Oh a fake, certainly a fake, please god, yes.

But a buffoon I am not and yet, this morning, after a few songs by the hearty, if oververrated, Wolkenstein, I was ready to go to work and extinquish Gareth with an indifference that was so complete it was almost, in fact, religious. And yet, barely on the perimeter of the park, I felt a hot, oily ache. Initially, it reminded me of a certain insane lust, yet quickly I felt the need for the ground, for earth. The hot ache, like a ball, was roiling around my chest and I yearned for a place to lie down and clutch, or comfort myself. Quickly, the sobbing came. I imagined myself returning home and breaking down in front of the Nude Maja. It felt a vain and stupid thing to do and, rebuking myself, I was then distracted sufficiently to swallow the sobbing. So, having made no scene in my local, public park and, finally, pretending I had lost something, I made an exasperated, sweeping gesture and continued on my way. The charade, as ever, was entirely accurate for I had, indeed, lost something. If only the grief I have so long coveted. And so it was, I entered work in a broken and, it occured to me, a very modern state, desperate, as I was, to process something that not yet happened. And aware, too, of Gareth's voice in the kitchen.

Well, he doesn't make it easy, does he, St. John? If my soul is made of anything it's wet and mud and steaming horseshit, and so it was I put down St. John of the Cross's Ascent and lifted the phone to call my own dear Helen whereupon I learnt, at last, that she has, in fact, found a lump. I may have thwarted Gareth but god, this was no consolation. A lump? And so, forever calculating, my second consideration was to wonder why I hadn't found the lump on friday. Had we not groped? My sense of occassion was failing me but, within the whirr of my defences, I was aware that I would have to deal with this in a physical way. I imagined diving off the pier and swimming to France. Helen mentioned a six week waiting for a mammogram and I found myself on firmer ground, lambasting the health service and offering to pay for private care. She made it clear she could fund her own needs, a statement I felt was sexual, as well as financial. And besides, the waiting was based on medical grounds. I could feel myself turning, sensing the involvment of unknown others, as well as Gareth. And it could, after all, just be a lump. Before signing off I had already decided to take a pipe of O to the bath, the better to explore the crushing failure of my instincts as well as, what I can only describe as, my position.

Oh, I am grown old for this town.

I should move, no I should. It's a town for children, it really is. Everything here aspires to the condition of the infant, adoring of both innocence and incontinence. Oh, oh, an example. I was taking a quick brandy with an antiquarian friend when I spotted a flyer for an Ibsen play. Having a weakness for the Norwegian's cruel determinism I decided to go but, once again, it was another fusion of dance, jazz and camp, a mix of everything and therefore nothing, all, obviously, in the manner of Ibsen. I was appalled at this dissolution of a text into an onanistic showcase. The town is known for its liberality but it tends to extend this into a celebration of any personal expression whatsoever. It is such a gullible place. You could chew a piece of gum and it would draw a crowd. No I have to leave, I really do. One could make a postmodern apologia for the place, but no. It has an unbearable innocence and, under that, an inevitable pit of despair, depression and drugs. Yet it relentlessly celebrates youth and youth alone. And, of course, the old come here to be youthful, too. But they are missing a trick. Assuredly, one of the deep pleasures of life is accepting the age you are. No, I have to go. I shall ring George and tell him.

Later, after the show, I sat with an Australian girl. We spoke of nothing. However, I noticed her thighs and, after that, sat there, admiring her conversational skills.

This place will be the death of me.

I was in a mournful mood and, rather pathetically, reading St. John of the Cross, when Gareth knocked. I had no desire for either good or bad news so I held my breath and said nothing. He didn't try the door and, always seeking rejection, I soon heard him walk away. Soon after that, to confuse him further, I made a racket as I left for lunch. Aside from a brief urge to throw my pork pie at the head of a deathly teenager, there was no reason to expect the surge of lust that overcame me in the queue at the cashpoint. If not for the efficiency of the machine, my behaviour may have turned criminal. But how ungainly, the way my femme snatched her money. Surely that, the discourteous consummation, would have put me off? I sat on a bench and tried to summon a little mentalese. Plainly, my relationship with Helen, while containing tenderness, is almost exclusively physical and yet I have grown so accustomed to liasons of this nature I sometimes forget that verbal intimacy is even an option. Inevitably, the silence is filled with something, usually my horrors. So, clearly, just because Helen and I don't talk much, it doesn't mean she is dying. And so, having confirmed the value of logic, I swept back into the house, ready to see my very famous client.