Hi everyone.
The letter reproduced in this thread speaks for itself. It's something that I drafted and just sent to my old GCSE level English teacher, a fantastic old posh motherfucker who fancied himself as Robin Williams out of Dead Poets Society, and who actually had the eccentricity, intelligence and passion to pull it off. When we broke up and went our separate ways, he held an underage piss-up for us at his house. He seemed to particularly love my class: we were all the troublesome little anarchic fuckers from that school year group, and I guess he enjoyed our fighting spirit. When I saw him for the last time, I raised my half empty can and drunkenly toasted, "O Captain, My Captain." I was half taking the piss, and half totally genuine.
I had absolutely no intention of posting this on Barbelith when I wrote it, but after drafting it the idea struck me as weirdly appropriate. It deals with the direction my life has gone in the last ten years, and I was struck by just how much this message board has meant to me over the last eighteen months since I joined. I very rarely post anything personal on these pages, so I hope you don't mind if I go all sentimental for a second and say how much I appreciate all of you, and what Tom does every day in maintaining this place for all of us. You all fucking rule with fists of steel.
Much love,
Seth
Read on...
Hey,
Yeah, it was me e-mailing you. I think I'm probably the only Seth XXXXX in the country, so you couldn't go far wrong. There wasn't much in the e-mail: just me checking that you were the right [name removed](again, I doubted I could go too far wrong). As far as the virus semi-accusation, your opinion of my status as activist and scourge of the upper-middle class is sadly too high. Although you have put a few ideas in my head as to how I can re-introduce myself to a few other old teachers...
So, headmaster, eh? Congratulations, and definitely well deserved. [name removed] told me you'd moved up north a little while ago. How's the school? And the family? I haven't kept in touch with many people from King Edwards. I see [name removed] now and then (he's studying film in London), and I really should be doing a better job of keeping in touch with [name removed] (currently living in Birmingham having studied sociology).
I still live in Southampton, doing whatever work comes my way to pay the bills (currently mortgage advice for HSBC. There's practically no work to do, so I tend to spend all day either reading or writing). I got married last year to a primary school teacher, who I've been together with for the last six years or so. Her name's Snapping Turtle, she's a stunningly attractive Chinese girl who's lived here all her life, and I have no idea why she tolerates me and my bizarre obsessions. We were married in the church I've been part of for years (the minister was a close friend of the family, the service was a community affair, so it was a very personal and intimate event) and went to the Maldives on honeymoon (which I heartily recommend). Snapping Turtle teaches Reception and Year One at Rownhams Primary, and due to the high turnover of staff she's already one of the most experienced there.
They've got OFSTED this year. My one teaching joke: what's the difference between a plastic surgeon and an OFSTED inspector? A plastic surgeon tucks features...
After the fifth form at King Edwards I went to Taunton's and studied Media and English Literature, passing with an A and B respectively. It's actually a miracle that I even passed two subjects. Taunton's was one of the worst times of my life, and I went fairly spectacularly off the rails. My attendance was about fifty percent: my teachers used to joke that I was doing a whole other course in the time that I was absent from their classes. My form tutor tried to have me thrown out several times, and it was only the intervention of my subject teachers that allowed me to stay.
I started work straight after college, which I did for about six months before starting voluntary youth work for a Christian organisation based in Bristol. The idea was that the teams of volunteers would be grouped into bands, sent to towns where the kids had nothing to do, and set up club nights in conjunction with local churches. We got training in counseling, took school assemblies and RE lessons, and were the resident band for the length of time necessary to set up the club. The local church then carried the events on after we left using bands and DJs in the area. In total I spent about three months in Colchester and six months in Swansea. Again, I have to admit that I didn't particularly enjoy my time with the band: they were a shitty little guitar pop group with no originality or passion, governed from the top down with no creative input allowed for any ideas that didn't fit the status quo. I learned a lot from my time in the band, but more often than not I learned in spite of the working conditions rather than because of them. I have a certain amount of respect for the organisation I was involved with, largely due to the honourable nature of the way they conducted themselves in youth work. They were motivated by compassion and a sense of social justice rather than evangelism.
After this I moved back to Southampton and did crappy rent-paying jobs for a couple of companies, each time working my way up to positions of greater responsibility. The best of these was business improvement work for British Gas, a role in which I was able to use my English, media and communication skills to create national staff training campaigns, while learning business analysis skills and having an influence on policy and procedure. The story of my leaving the company is a long and sad one, so I won't bore you (too late!). Suffice to say I encountered corruption on a pretty major scale, causing me to lose any passion I had for the role. Better to leave than become apathetic. That brings things pretty much up to date.
Looking back it was probably the influence of my Christian background that swayed me against further study after sixth form college. There were a number of subtle unconscious factors involved; the mistrust of knowledge (stemming from the Eden myth), which was certainly something that I wouldn't have consciously acknowledged at the time; a lengthy time of paralysis due to feelings of pre-destination and wanting to live up to my father's legacy (he's a minister who specialises in Charismata, specifically prophecy); and my renewed involvement with the church after a period of personal crisis. University was just a qualification to me, and one that didn't seem to mean that much when I looked at the lives of some of my friends who'd studied. Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't trade my experience for the world. There's a degree of psychological stability that I earned through the choices I made, a myticism and set of values that I wouldn't trade for anything. LOL: reading this email you might find the psychological stability part to be slightly - or highly - questionable!
As you can probably tell, I'm that much more objective about that time of my life now. I've spent the last eighteen months revising my attitude to my faith, absorbing influences from as many sources as possible. Most of these are from the sphere that many would label esoteric. I've been helping to moderate an internet subculture community for the last eighteen months or so, where the focus is on radical theorizing and debate, including a wide demographic in its members and covering a vast spectrum of topics. I regularly contribute to the discussions, and a good deal of my personal growth over the last couple of years has been infleunced by some of the members of this community. Check out the discussion at:
http://www.barbelith.com/underground
Esoteric experience is actually what prompted me to get in touch with you. I've been keeping a dream journal over the last year, largely due to some shamanic experiences I'd had - wholly unprompted by myself - towards the end of 2001. An increasingly recurrent theme has been my old school, reconstructed in amazingly precise detail. In the last of this series of dreams (that I can remember), I enjoyed a field trip and discussion with you about literary theory. I get the impression, now that I'm actually typing this email, that getting in contact is largely an act of exorcism and evaluation, that I need to take stock of my development over the last decade before moving on to the things I want to accomplish. Hindus would make an offering to Ganesh, and drafting an e-mail to an old English teacher isn't a whole lot different in a sense (if you're familiar with Ganesh and the areas he presides over, the things he symbolises).
I've got a few bits and bobs that I'm going to be working on over the next few months. Firstly, I'm renting a rehearsal space with some other musicians, and I'm going to try to get some of my ideas recorded (mainly focusing on systems music and avant garde composition. As someone who only plays the drums it's pretty hard to write conventional pop ditties, and the equipment I've got doesn't lend itself to that kind of methodology. I've got some ideas to incorporate elements of musique concrete with the minimalist inspiration from some of the Twentieth Century classical stuff I've been listening to). The best case scenario would be to form a band, but I don't hold out much hope for that in the immediate future. Southampton's University caters for mainly technical and scientific students, and the majority of creative people head to Brighton, Bristol or London at the earliest opportunity. The chances of finding people with the right kind of bugfucked creative influences are slim. I'd like to see an artistic community develop in Southampton, but the odds don't seem favourable right now. We'll see.
I may also take part in National Novel Writing Month. It's been a while since I wrote anything besides corporate documents and contributions to internet debates, and I'm really wondering whether I'm capable of sustaining that kind of creative effort for long enough to produce something even vaguely readable. I'm an unashamed megalomaniac with impossibly high standards of self-critique: a volatile combination, prohibitive of results in the past. Having to force myself to complete something within a month won't give me time to second guess my writing decisions, and will hopefully tap into the kind of pressure-cooker mentality that produces my best work. The discipline of maintaining a dream diary and methodically journalling experience in other states of consciousness has started to convince me that I still have some talent, somewhere.
So, there you go. Apologies for the weirdness of this email, coming from out of nowhere on a highly questionable pretext. Don't know if it means anything at all to you, but it's been a positive exercise for me! The skull-fucked path of the numinous is peculiar indeed: it provokes all kinds of transcendent lunacy and misguided Grail questing. But it's rewarding. Contrary to the general tone of this email, I am happy and at peace, in as much as someone of my temperament can attain a measure of peace but never be content.
I'd love to hear how you're doing. God bless,
Seth
(PS: Don't correct my spelling and punctuation)
I bet you won't run into many people called [name removed] outside of my circle of friends. |
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