Day 31 - 31st Jan
NICOLE
I sit in a foxhole,
sitting up.
My brothers some way away.
I might die in this hole.
I should have listened to Mrs. Trolan,
who hinched boys who thought they were tight
right
out of the corridor.
She and her compatriots played us songs
it was always the songs that got me
about the history
of the places
where we weren’t.
“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
with a cane that he twirled round his diamond-ringed finger
at a Baltimore hotel, society gath’rin.”
And I understood
much more than I should.
Other teachers, whose names I forget,
in the history department,
did similar.
I sat in muddy trenches,
with the lads.
Young lads.
Thick boys
With big, wide faces.
And over the top we all went.
But we didn’t give a fuck about the football game
between the Germans and the English—
because we were all part of Jackie’s army.
It was Willy McBride who was seen,
as he was sung about,
whose bayonet was wiped clean
as he flailed about,
whose death was slow and obscene,
as his soul snuffed out.
Which one of my countrymen
has gone through such lands,
such glorious restored lands,
on a family holiday - with the kids
or bourgeois friends,
and not got
some sort of bends?
I don’t know why,
but I can feel them all now.
As I sit here
in this foxhole.
All the lads.
But I dug it for myself.
Someone told me to dig it, and I fell to my work,
like everyone else.
I did not go berserk,
like Cú Chulainn or Achilles.
No barrel of water for me to hunker into and cool down,
no maidens to take it away when it explodes.
A shittier abode
I have dug for myself.
No song of my own did I sing
with any veracity or volume.
The glory we surrender
to belong.
But a song—
your own song—
is never wrong.
How the fuck did I end up here?
Every man asks that of himself, at least once.
The odour of sanctity
stank out the life
like a magic tree
hung from the indicator—not the rear-view mirror.
I don’t want anyone to see.
I hum my own song now,
under - not yet atop - my breath.
If a sniper locates it in the dark,
that will be my death.
But to what, exactly?
A respawn to another dawn
some other somme.
Once song is sung in the foxhole, and cover’s blown.
You’re on your own.
I can’t exactly go back to the foxhole, now can I,
once I’ve heard that chorus?
Whistle some rinky-dink soldier’s tune?
Taken in that celestial fragrance—not burnt toast?
I’ll tell you when I smelled the roses, Padre Pio
when I was making love to Nicole
in the back of the Clio.
Cramped all the same,
but doable,
and you can climb back easy enough
and drive away.
The radio can go on
in that foxhole,
and you two can have a wee dance
I will drive across -
(with a beautiful girl in the passenger seat),
the green fields of France.
Niall Campbell
This is the last day of the month where I’ve posted a poem and a short essay associated with it.
Writing in the first person, onto a personal blog post, is a difficult thing to do because it reeks of low-grade solipsism.
“Nobody cares — this is indulgent, pointless, self-serving, amateurish, narcissistic, of no value or impact, an elaborate procrastination, avoidance, a folly, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-everything. Tragic, pathetic, cringe, try-hard escapism, nonsense, mid-brow, dull, long-winded, tedious”.
These are just the adjectives my inner critic used to describe the writer of all of this work. The work itself gets the following treatment:
“Derivative, lacking style, lacking substance, amateurish, worse than it thinks it is. Dull, parochial, limited, grammatically all over the place. Predictable, repetitive, so derivative”.
I put this all up here because I want you to see how simultaneously generic and bespoke the voice of resistance is. I speak now with very intimate and recent experience of what comes up when resistance starts to see that you’ve turned pro. It will throw everything it has at you.
It has been a very revealing month.
This is not a big deal in the sense that it was a soft launch to a personal blog by a therapist who has never really focused on social media and has no reach or following.
It opens to crickets.
But 31 days in a row, I have shipped 31 pieces of original work.
I have been consistent and open.
It was difficult, but not hard, if that makes sense. I was intrinsically motivated to do it.
I strongly, strongly encourage you to do the same.
There is absolutely no external achievement in this.
This is hard to take.
I worked hard on something, and it is for nothing.
But it is for something.
I am subtly changed by this.
Big-picture problems bother me less.
I have discovered that I have some unpotentiated talent.
That sense of self-confidence is growing. The more evidence I give myself, the more confident I will become.
There are three phrases I’ve mentioned to clients this week—little phrases in the coaching and therapy space that are actually useful. I’m not snobbish about using them. Clients love them, and there’s a reason: when you’re spent, frightened, operating from your lizard brain, or just tired, you need short, sharp, quick-and-dirty phrases to remind you of all the hard work you’ve put in. They act as totems.
Here are the mantras:
Love is love.
The unreasonable request is honoured in the way that the reasonable demand is not.
Confidence loves evidence.
Wisdom is nothing but taking your own advice. I wrote these on the whiteboard this week for clients and for myself—they also pertain to me.
Love is love. I love writing. I have so many things I love to do. If I just keep loving doing them and do them more, I will get better and better. They will increase in value as a result. That will take care of that element of life.
I give myself permission to only engage professionally in pursuits that I love. For those of you who were raised in cultures and families where that was a given, this may seem like a small breakthrough. But if I’ve learned one thing from this month, it’s that permission must be self-given.
For some, considering your passion when choosing a job, a country to live in, or anything else may sound alien. But if you write or create or sing with relatively pure intentions, you want your work to find its audience.
I need to learn how, starting next month, to throw as much against the social media algorithm wall as I can. Not for vanity reasons, but because even a small audience deserves the chance to connect with what I’m creating.
I haven’t done this before because I’ve been afraid I won’t succeed, and that fear makes me hesitate. But as Steven Pressfield says, the tribe doesn’t care. That’s a relief.
Not putting your stuff out there is thinking you’re the main character—that the story will be about your success or failure. The truth is, the story isn’t about you at all.
The third quote I gave, about making unreasonable requests and them being honoured, also applies to the artist’s life.
I demanded a life I wasn’t entitled to—an upper-middle-class life as a dentist. But I am not a dentist. I am an artist. So, let’s embrace the woo-woo metaphysics for a moment: the universe said no, that life is not for you.
Love what you love. Build confidence through evidence. Then make your polite, unreasonable requests, devoid of demands.
Let’s see what happens.
I read T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi this month—thankfully one of his more accessible poems.
The simple story of the three wise men belies a deep conclusion:
You can’t go back.
They return to their kingdoms, but they can’t go back.
Fiefdoms become foxholes. We all experience this as we grow. It sucks and is painful.
You don’t live happily ever after.
You grow painfully ever after—or you stagnate in a foxhole.
Both are hard.
Choose your hard.
But one involves play.
I’ve gone the other path. I’ve driven across the green fields of France with a beautiful girl beside me in the car. I intend to keep going as far as I can, with kids, with love, with life.
Nobody wants to see their dad in a foxhole.
It’s only a few feet away from six feet under. Don’t go that way.
Come with me.
This poem was inspired as much by an awesome client as it was by T.S. Eliot, a master craftsman. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Here’s T.S. Eliot’s poem all the same—a big thank you to both men, one famous, and one who shall remain nameless.
The Journey Of The Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.