In this first of the Autumn season workshops we thought about the various ways in which we can sometimes feel like we are seeing ourselves from the outside, or perhaps suddenly become very aware of our own bodies, or of our place in the world.
We began by reading a short anecdote about an experience of disrupted communication in the brain in which vision became staggered rather than smooth and objects and people appeared strangely static, and yet would also appear and disappear without warning.
We then moved on to read a poem by the contemporary Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti, called ‘Once in a While I am Reminded’. You can read it here. We were especially struck by the opening lines and many stories were shared of related feelings:
I am not at the center of anything. Seen at a distance
I am hardly seen. Excruciating, how here
I am, how little
it means. I use my mouth to make sounds
which approximate my innermost thoughts
but often bungle it.
For our final text, we turned to the late 18th-century poet John Clare, and his extraordinary poem, written during a period of mental distress, entitled ‘I Am’.
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.
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