Swimming into the abyss

The places we don't like going

Three things people have often told me – in various and passionate ways – that they reject as valid, don’t understand or find silly or unseemly, are poetry, dreams and therapy.

Three things that have given me life beyond the prosaic every day of work and food and logistics are poetry, dreams and therapy.

I am not employing hyperbole when I say that one of these is the reason I am here to notice what the early light is doing to the oak tree in the park outside the window, and to be excited about lunch and a swim in the Ladies Pond at Hampstead Heath with friends later.

To make the contents of the unconscious mind conscious is something that people would rather disdain or scoff at than do. I understand. Talking to a friend about the unconscious this week, I said that it’s like going swimming alone in that part of the ocean where lantern fish lurk.

Angler (or lantern) fish have a lurid pull on artists’ imaginations. Nightmarish images are manageable when they come from anywhere but the self. PICTURE: I couldn’t find the original source, but it’s from a little website about ‘queer fish’.