The Blindboy Podcast - How James Joyce invented Cinema

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

A hot take about a James Joyce short short story via the Impressionist painters. And the post-lockdown mental health crisis   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Battle your farts, you startled barts. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I'd like to begin this week's podcast by reading a poem that was sent to me by Hollywood actor Meryl Streep. And this poem is called Conversation with My Postman. I'd like to give you a haircut with my teeth.

You can go to a proper barber afterwards and get your hair fixed. But first, just let me bite your hair. I'll start with the fringe. Really chew it. And crop your scalp like I'm a big blonde goat. Don't look at me like that. So what if I like the taste of other people's hair? What makes you so perfect that you can judge me?

Hair doesn't have nerves or feelings, only at the root. I just like a nice mouthful of another person's haircut. To chew it a little bit, feel the resistance of their curls against my teeth. To savour the memory of their curls against my teeth to savour the memory of their shampoo the enzymes of my saliva cutting through the aisle what age are you? you're a man in your fifties I'd say I can see it wilting above your forehead

the strands of what was once an auburn fire is now a few twigs in a starling's nest time makes its supper out of your hair every day. Let poor old Meryl Streep have her dinner. I've never hurt anybody by biting their hair. And it's always consensual. It's not like I want to eat a child's hair, cuz. I don't want to chew the hair on the head of a child.

You brought that up, not me. I only want to eat the hair of an adult who lets me do it to them. So how about it? Okay. And do you have any post for me or are you just going to stand there? A parcel. Good day. Thank you, Meryl Streep, for that poem,

which was called Conversation with My Postman. Hope you all had a charming week. It's near the end of March now. Days are getting longer. Temperature is getting higher. Last week was the first day I didn't have to wear a jacket when I was on my bicycle. Nice airy sensation. This week, I'm going to answer your questions i was gonna put out i was gonna

put out a live podcast but i said no i'll answer your questions instead because i'm up to dublin this week i'm up in dublin for three days because i'm gigging for two nights in vicar street so i'm getting this podcast out before i have to travel up to Dublin. And I gotta say, each time I return to Dublin, it becomes more and more bleak, unfortunately. When I cross over into Henry Street or Connell Street, you simply can't tell who's homeless and who's not anymore. Something I've noticed post-pandemic in Dublin is that homeless people don't look homeless anymore. Now I don't want to sound disrespectful or classist when I say that but a person who doesn't have access to the amenities you'd get when you have a home they tend to look homeless after a certain amount of time but what

you see in Dublin is people you look at them and you go is that person a backpacker or did they not have a home or you can have people in Dublin that are homeless who have a full-time job and they try their very best to meet their needs for food and personal hygiene using whatever amenities are available without actually living in a home so that's a lot more common in Dublin I've found post-pandemic the city centre feels very strange and it's also quite empty whether it's vacant properties that are being left there to rot because land is being hoarded or it's just office blocks that no one is showing up to

because people are working from home and then throughout that landscape you just have loads of tourists walking around looking really really surprised at everything I'm back reading James Joyce now I've always adored James Joyce but it's like the Sopranos or The Wire

you can revisit James Joyce, but it's like the Sopranos or The Wire. You can revisit James Joyce's writing at different points in your life and find new things that you didn't see maybe five years ago or ten years ago as you mature. His work is layered like that, but in particular what I've been going back to is his book Dubliners. It's his short story collection and what I've been reading and reading every night of the fucking week over and over is a short story called The Dead which

it'd be considered one of the best short stories of all time like if you went to a list of best short stories of all time The Dead would appear in that list. What has me obsessing about it, it's not necessarily the story or the characters or the setting. It's the way that it's written, the way that it's painted as such. The Dead is written in third person, but it uses a technique called free indirect speech, which is something that Joyce pioneered, which is a way of writing third person, which feels like first person. First person is, I walked into Supermax and they didn't have any burgers.

I was furiously angry. Third person is, Blind Boy walked into Supermax. They had run out of burgers in Supermax. Blind Boy became angry when he learned this. And then third person with free indirect speech is, As Blind Boy walked into Supermax, he noticed that there were no burgers,

and anger rose up inside of him so first person is great crack because you're writing in I I felt this I saw this and I enjoy using first person when I'm writing when I'm writing my short stories because with first person you get to play around with a technique called the unreliable narrator. When you read a story and it's the voice and inside the mind of the character who's telling you this story

on the page you can skew reality. You can lie to your reader. You can almost gaslight your reader. You can sell the reader a version of reality that's filtered through your character's mind and their perception of the world using first person. The poem that I opened this podcast with that was sent to me by Meryl Streep that's written in the first person

using the unreliable narrator because Meryl Streep in that story is using I statements and speaking about wanting to eat her postman's hair which is insane, that's nuts, that's utterly bizarre you don't eat your postman's hair but because it's told in first person unreliable narrator you can present the eating of a postman's hair or giving a postman a haircut with your teeth as something completely normal. Away from the objective judgments or rules or morality of society.

First person is very intimate. It's very close. And it allows you as a writer to give people internal dialogue. The internal thoughts of a character's head on a page. dialogue, the internal thoughts of a character's head on a page. Now one of the limitations of first person is that the prose that you write, prose is the brushstrokes of words. It's the musicality of writing. When you're writing the first person, your prose is limited to the parameters of your character's vocabulary. So everything has to be written in their voice. If your character is a chef, they're going to speak about food with much greater detail and

understanding than they're going to speak about a bicycle. But if they repair bicycles, they're going to have a wider vocabulary around bicycles than they might have around a burger. If your character is eight years of age, a first-person story from an eight-year-old should sound like it's an eight-year-old talking to you. And if it's a story about Meryl Streep really, really wanting to eat her postman's hair because this is something she does and something she thinks about a lot,

then it's okay to have instances of poetic prose when referring to the last remaining hairs on a man's head, on a postman's head. The line that she wrote was, the strands of what was once an all-born fire is now a few twigs in a starling's nest. But then when the conversation moves to the postman's world, which he's not that interested in, it's like, what are you doing standing here? Oh, you've got a parcel. First person also means that you can be limited by your character's perspective.

You're trapped inside their mind as such. You can't suddenly change scenes and be in a different room with different characters unless your central first person character is there to witness the incident or to record it or tell it back to you in some way. So then you have third person. And third person, like I said, is blind boy walked into Supermax. With third person, you can kind of do whatever you want.

Third person, you're the voice of God. You're the voice of the author. And you describe everything as you see it. And you can go wherever you want. can you can be in dublin one second and if you like you can turn the page and now you're in china for me the the least enjoyable books that i read is when the writer has used third person but done it in just a really boring functional way just plodding along in third person to tell a story a lot of genre fiction is done like that not all but some horror romance detective thriller fantasy airport books airport books that you read in the airport that you read on the plane

the worst of those is quite boring functional third person. You have this complete freedom, almost too much freedom, to do whatever you like with third person. And you can be as flowery as you like with the prose, because it's the author's voice. But then where the limitations come in are around intimacy, around the internal world of your characters when you're writing about them in third person.

You have to be very creative in third person through the use of dialogue or the weather or the scene. You have to be quite creative in third person to reflect your character's internal world. And this is what takes me to the James Joyce story The Dead which is written in third person with free indirect speech. It's like your central character in the story is writing the story. There's no I or me but it's he, they or she but even in third person you're allowed into the thoughts and the mind of the character that's being observed. And the opinions and emotional reactions and the internal emotional world of the character can inform the third person prose.

I'll give you an example of free and direct speech from the James Joyce story, The Dead. And I don't want to give too much away about the story because it is spoiler warning but really the whole story it's about a lot of people who know each other having a dinner around Christmas time in Dublin and the central character is a fella called Gabriel and it's Christmas and he's seeing people who he loves who he hasn't seen in a long time and he meets his aunt Julia and his aunt Julia is quite old and at Christmas when you meet elderly relatives who you maybe haven't seen in a year there's kind of a universal feeling of will I see them next Christmas? Is this the last Christmas I'm going to see this person that I love

who I don't see a lot of? So in the third person the character of Gabriel in the dead sees his Aunt Julia and then in the third person the story says poor Aunt Julia she too would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Markin and his horse. Now Patrick Markin is some fella who's dead but what the story is saying there is the character of Gabriel is wondering oh poor aunt Julia she's going to be dead soon but it's third person so when you're reading it you're going who the fuck is saying this this is third person is is James Joyce is the writer James Joyce the real human being who lived in Dublin is the writer James Joyce saying poor Aunt Julia she too would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Markham and his horse because that's weird you see why

would James Joyce who's writing the book have such a strong opinion but it's not it's the character of Gabriel his thoughts and feelings and observations and emotions are infiltrating the third person narration because sometimes when you're reading a story and it's in third person he walked in the door the sunlight came crashing through the window sometimes you're reading it

and you're going, who the fuck is saying this shit, like I'll even get that when I'm writing the third person I'll go, who the fuck is saying this shit is is it blind by is it me am I narrating this story is it my voice or am I the sterile voice of God or am I trying to be the internal monologue of the person who's reading this story but with free indirect speech you get to write in the third person with the voice of your central character and that's what I love about The Dead by James Joyce but also that's what cinema is

directing a film or directing a piece of tv cinematography the language of the camera lens to tell a story, is quite similar to free indirect speech, except you're not using words or using images. When you watch a piece of TV or a film, the camera isn't situated in the eyeballs of your character. Sometimes it is, like Peep Show, that comedy show Peep Show, absolutely brilliant. like Peep Show, that comedy show Peep Show, absolutely brilliant. That's a rare example of a TV show that is entirely first person perspective. The camera only exists in the eyeballs of every character and they really played with that and they had a lot of fun with it. And the writer Jesse Armstrong who spent nine fucking years writing Peep Show in the first person

he now writes Succession which is in the third person. And he's spoken about the difficulty of moving from the first person to the third person. But most often, the camera is following your characters around. You become an observer. It's third person. Let's just say your character is walking down the road in a film. And you're following this character walking down the road. Your character turns and they see a dog being beaten.

Then the camera angle changes to show us the dog getting beaten. Which means we know that that's what our character is looking at. Then a new angle, the camera shows us our character's face. They're sad because they're watching a dog getting beaten and now we understand their internal emotional world that's three shots three different angles we've shown what our character is doing what our character is seeing and what our character is feeling all while standing back as observers in the third person. That's free indirect speech. And it's how cinematic storytelling happens. And obviously it's a lot easier

to do free indirect speech using a camera than it is to do it with writing on a page. But it's this fact here that has me fucking obsessed with the dead and with James Joyce's collection Dubliners the past few weeks. This is what has me obsessed. So James Joyce was a modernist.

Okay. When you say that an artist was a modernist, it refers to a specific time and a specific movement within art. Usually the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. In the simplest terms, modernism is when art reacted to an explosion in technology. Technology gave art a little bit of an identity crisis. Let's take modernism in painting, for example, right? So the mid-1800s, mid to late 1800s,

the camera is invented, the camera. So for fucking thousands of years, humans had been painting. You paint what's there, you paint it on a canvas, and there's your image. And all of a sudden, there's this new invention called a camera.

And it's like, we don't need paintings now. We can take a photograph of something. And then painting shat its pants and said oh fuck what's the point of painting now because cameras exist did painters give up and say better stop painting now cameras exist no painting as an art form responded to the threat of the camera and said what can we do that cameras can't so the impressionists came along people like Monet or Mary Cassatt and the impressionist said

well a camera can take a perfect black and white photograph of this field an image of it but what we can do is we can paint an impression of this field. We can paint not only what this field looks like but we can paint how we feel about this field in this very moment or we can paint how this field startles our eyes because the sun is so bright or we can paint our memory of this field. A camera can create a copy of this field. We can create an impression of this field using human emotions and the human brain and our eyes. We can create something new and that there is modernism. That's art responding to technology. This is where I'm getting at with James Joyce because James Joyce was a modernist. He was a writer, but he responded to technology and advances in science in the early 20th century. The most obvious example is his novel Ulysses.

It's heavily informed by the emerging theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud about the human unconscious mind. So with Ulysses, Joyce isn't just writing words as they come out of characters mouths but he's writing the words as they form inside the characters heads before they leave their mouths. He's trying to write the unconscious mind and the word associations of the character inside their head. But here's my hot take

about the dead. This fucking short story that I'm talking about that I'm obsessed with. Like the impressionists were responding to the camera, the fixed photograph, 40 years earlier. I think Joyce, with the dead and his use of free and direct speech, was responding to the emerging technology of cinema. Here's the thing. Imagine it's fucking 1910 or 1914 or whatever you've never seen a moving image like it's impossible for us now to not imagine things from the perspective of video cameras

we shoot videos every day on our fucking iphones me as someone who writes, when I write a short story, it's nearly impossible for me to not imagine a camera in my head as I write. I know what camera angles look like. I know what it looks like to see footage of a drone flying over a city. I know what it's like for a camera to be on top of a car and to see it moving through a city really fast we're quite a visually literate culture we know fucking cinema we know cameras it's almost impossible for us to divorce our mind's eye from what we've learned from looking at moving images since we were kids James Joyce didn't have that when he was writing books anyone writing books

before James Joyce didn't have that their minds eye when they close their eye and they imagine things and they dream things none of that internal imagery was in any way informed by

video cameras because they didn't fucking exist they might have seen a couple of photographs but the mind's eye of a human being back then was very much about what's happening inside your own brain and your own eyes you and i can think of can think in terms of editing now even the example i gave you a couple of minutes ago a camera follows a man down a road from behind the camera is slightly above him from behind he stops then the camera shows a dog being beaten now the camera is looking up at our character's face and he's sad three shots three edits you saw all of it in your mind.

A person living in 1910 hasn't a fucking clue what I'm talking about. So when James Joyce was writing The Dead, and doing it in third person, and using free indirect speech, sometime around 1910 when he wrote it, I think he was trying to imagine what cinema could be like. Why do I think this?

Ireland's first cinema was opened in 1909. It was called the Volta cinema. It was opened on Henry Street in Dublin. Guess who opened it? James fucking Joyce. James fucking Joyce cared so much about film cameras and cinema in 1909 that he opened Ireland's first cinema. Now film at that point, moving images, was in its absolute infancy. Moving images in 1909 were maybe 15 years old, 16 years old. Films in 1909, they weren't particularly sophisticated from a cinematography point of view early films of the 1910s

were much more like stage plays the camera didn't move it was on a tripod and it was pointed at actors acting technology hadn't become advanced enough the creative leap of thinking about cinema as a separate art form to theatre

hadn't advanced enough. Editing would have been very, very rudimentary. So this is what I'm getting at. James Joyce wrote The Dead, using this free indirect speech, at the same time that he gave so much of a shit about cinema that he opened the first cinema in Ireland I believe that The Dead by James Joyce

maybe without him even knowing it was his attempt at imagining what cinema could be like imagining what you and I now completely take for granted imagining cameras that can move through a scene and give multiple perspectives at once cameras that you can hang from a ceiling he was imagining what a camera would look like on a helicopter if it flew over fields in Ireland. The final paragraph in The Dead,

it's third person but we dissolve into the thoughts of the character of Gabriel as he looks out his window at snow falling and then we go to his mind's eye as he imagines the snow falling all over Ireland and Joyce describes this visually almost like a camera that's stuck to a snowflake that's drifting and falling but also the journey of a soul leaving a body and escaping the physical restrictions of the human brain and the human eye that's stuck down here on earth. Something that cinematography would free us all from eventually. What I mean by that is,

right now, imagine the view of a camera stuck to a drone and it's flying over your house. Your mind's eye could recall that almost instantly because we're visually literate. We've seen footage from the skies. Someone in 1909 didn't have that.

So here's the last paragraph of the dead. There's no spoilers. Yes, the newspapers were right. Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain. On the treeless hills. Falling softly upon the bog of Allen. And farther westward, softly falling

into the dark, mutinous shenan waves. It was falling too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard, on the hill where Michael Fury lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns, his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead. And that's just fucking beautiful, but it's not just beautiful prose. It's cinematic. That's cinema. That's James Joyce as a modernist in 1909 running a fucking cinema,

imagining what this art form could eventually be. He's probably up there in the projection room watching these fucking films where the camera is locked off on a tripod thinking to himself jesus christ what would it look like if you get one of those movie cameras and stick it to one of those those new airplanes that they have because you have to remember this is 1909 1910 airplanes are literally just invented seven years ago in 1903 so you have James Joyce writing in this this heritage art form of words on a page which humans have been doing for thousands of years here he is with this heritage art form like a painter and now you've got cameras and the

possibility of sticking a camera onto a plane. And what might that look like? And that's why I'm obsessed with the dead at the moment. I think James Joyce was trying to write a film, what films would be 40 years in the future when Citizen Kane comes along. I think he was trying to write what a film could be with editing and angles and drone shots and dollies but none of this existed yet none of it was invented yet so it just happened on the page as a short story and what it also is is it's pure modernism that is pure modernism when art such as writing, painting, music existing comfortably, relatively unchanged as heritage art forms for a long time

suddenly thrown into an identity crisis because of new technology so art has to respond but the other thing that has me thinking and talking about the dead because I didn't intend to speak about this for 27 minutes I'll be honest the thing that has me thinking and talking about it

is I'm going up to Dublin I'm going up to Dublin and I want to I want to visit the fucking house where the dead is set I want to

I want to go to the actual building where James Joyce set the story in so I can see it. So I had that all planned. In the story it's this beautiful Georgian mansion and you can smell it and feel it. The freezing cold of winter. It's a real place. 15 Ushers Island is the address. Conveniently it's at the very foot of the James Joyce Bridge and the Liffey. It's right beside the Guinness Brewery.

So I went online onto Google Maps going, right, I'm going to, when I'm up in Dublin, I'm going to visit. I'm going to visit the house where the dead took place. I need to do this. I've been obsessed with this fucking story. I'm gigging in Vicar Street. It's behind it. It's behind it. It's in the street behind it. I'm going to be up on stage and I'll be trying to concentrate on doing my job up on stage because I'll be thinking about the fucking house where the

dead took place. Around the corner. I need to go there and I need to go to Henry Street where the Vault of Cinema was. And then I look it up. And the place is derelict. It's derelict. It used to be called James Joyce House. And I don't know what the fuck happened to it. But this building. Where the story takes place. This short story. Which is.

It's not just any short story. It's considered one of the best ever written. As Irish people. This is our fucking Mona Lisa. This is our Picasso. It's our Raphael. This is our art that changed all art around it, around the world.

And the fucking James Joyce house is derelict and they're turning it into a hostel. And if I do go to visit it, it's just a fucking derelict building. You can't go inside. It's a piece of shit. At the foot of the James Joyce Bridge. The dirty capitalist bastards. And that's the thing with James Joyce has been co-opted by the tourism industry. And they'll name a bridge the James

Joyce Bridge and then won't preserve the house where the dead takes place and don't listen to these people who say that James Joyce is overly complicated or that it's highfalutin which is a word I believe he popularized in the book Finnegan's Wake which is highfalutin but James Joyce's work is heavily gatekept and that's harsh shit. Pick up a copy of Dubliners. Pick up a copy of Ulysses. Ulysses isn't complex.

It can be if you want. If you want to read Ulysses in a very complex way, you can. But there's also nothing wrong with just cracking it open on any page and admiring the beauty of the language in particular the use of Hiberno English and how Joyce elevates Hiberno English into the most beautiful prose. Ulysses sounds like a drunk uncle singing so don't don't fall into this trap of being told that James Joyce's work is

inaccessible. It's like a plate of food. If you get yourself a nice burger and chips, you can eat it, you can enjoy it, you can savour it on your own terms and your own words. Or you could bring in a food expert and they could explain

why this burger is so tasty. Art is like that too. But on the subject of Dublin and the dystopia that it has become, especially the renting crisis and the homeless crisis, something I do want to speak about is throughout the winter there was a ban on evictions in Ireland.

I guarantee you lives were saved by this. Kids were not displaced and thrown out into the streets. Families weren't thrown out into the streets. I'm sure it did happen illegally, but it was illegal over the winter to evict people in Ireland. This ban is now being lifted at the end of March. Come the end of March, April, thousands of people who are renting are going to be evicted. They're going to be evicted into a rental market where there's now less property, inflation. Thousands of people are going to be

forced into homelessness in Ireland. Families, children, homeless services are going to be swamped with people. It's going to be particularly bad in Dublin. Rory Harn, who I've had on this podcast a couple of times to speak about the housing crisis in Ireland, is running a petition on uplift.ie to keep the ban on evictions to stop people being evicted and forced into homelessness. So if you'd like to sign this petition, look for Keep the Eviction Ban by Rory Hearn, which is on uplift.ie. Just type it into Google and you'll find it. And this petition is to the Minister for Housing, Dara O'Brien.

So what we need is a petition with thousands and thousands of signatures so that the Housing Minister might actually fucking listen. Or email your TD. Or tag your TD on social media. Or upload a video explaining why you want to keep the ban using the hashtag keeptheban. Because a lot of people are going to be made homeless in April because of this.

Right, I didn't intend to speak about modernism and James Joyce in April because of this. Right, I didn't intend to speak about modernism and James Joyce for that length of time. I didn't know I was going to speak about that. That was a bit of a rant. But now I'll do a small little ocarina pause because I was going to answer your questions. I don't think I even answered one question. No one asked me to speak about James Joyce. Here's the ocarina pause. I'm going to tap my fingers off a mouse mat because I'm in my office. On April 5th,

you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen.

I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real.

It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen.. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who did that? The First Omen, only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care.

From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. That was the Ocarina Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you find yourself listening to it regularly, if it brings you solace, comfort, distraction, whatever, please consider paying me for the work that I put in to make this podcast.

Because this podcast is my full-time job this is how I earn a living I adore doing this job but it's how I pay my bills it's how I get to live and work as an independent artist but if you can't afford that don't worry about it you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast also it keeps the podcast independent not beholden to any advertisers. No advertisers can change the content in any way.

I get to speak about what I'm legitimately passionate about each week. I don't have to make content to get more listeners. I don't have to do anything other than focus on where my creativity and curiosity takes me. And if I can do that, then I can do my fucking job. Rather than getting fully sponsored by some brand and they're like, we need more listens. Why not debate a racist

or start saying that wokeness has gone too far to get some daz listening. Alright, gigs. If you're listening to this in the morning that it came out, which is Wednesday the Wednesday the I don't know what fucking day it is let's all on

Wednesday the 22nd of March I'm gigging tonight in Vicar Street and I have a lovely guest and there's probably 10 tickets left if you're in Dublin and you want to come to that I'm in Vicar Street on Friday that's sold out

then I'm in Drogheda on April 1st oh Drogheda oh Drogheda we're going to have fun in Drogheda we're going to make Drogheda work we're going to make it happen and it's going to be amazing and then I'm in Canada

I'm over in Canada and they're sold out I don't know when I'm in Canada I'm over in Canada and they're sold out I don't know when I'm in Canada I'm not great with dates lads dates and numbers I'm not pretty good with those things I'm not pretty good at promoting gigs either but

it always seems to work out it always seems to work out so I'm going to answer a question and I doubt I'm going to I'm probably going to get around to answering one question in the whole podcast where I said I was going to answer a lot of questions Sharon asks

did you see that BBC article it said the mental health crisis from the COVID pandemic was minimal I thought that it was quite an irresponsible article because my mental health has been terrible since the pandemic ended. Can you speak about this and do you have any techniques that you'll be using to guard your mental health after the pandemic? So I did read that fucking

article. BBC had this, I don't know what they were thinking so they had this article and the headline was the mental health crisis from the COVID pandemic was minimal and the article itself went completely viral from people just going nuts, disagreeing with it

saying like no, my mental health was horrendous during the pandemic and it's still bad I don't know how the BBC Like, no, my mental health was horrendous during the pandemic. And it's still bad. I don't know how the BBC, I think they were very selective with their studies or something. But it felt quite ill-advised. It felt insulting. And it felt like being gaslit.

It felt like the media trying to define our reality for us and telling us to move along quickly and don't be thinking about any of that pandemic shit. And that's a feeling that I have in general around the pandemic. We're still in it, really. We're at the tail end. Our lives have returned to normal

for most of us. People who are quite vulnerable to COVID, they're still living in a world of restrictions. But for those of us who aren't, for most of society, things have returned to normal and it feels normal. What we don't have is we have no space whatsoever to reflect on those two years we have no space to reflect on that we don't have a space to bring it up most of us don't want to bring up how difficult lockdown was online in particular because it could mean chaos like a few weeks ago i retweeted

there was a really good tweet and it was a psychologist and they were speaking about the collective trauma of the pandemic they were speaking about how all of us in the world are carrying around some level of trauma because of what we all went through for the past two years now I retweeted that because I agree with it it was a psychologist saying it and it was on the ball

and then someone just started attacking me someone started going you don't know what trauma is with your little podcast. Like insulting me, insulting my job, belittling me for no reason other than they believed that their pain was greater than mine and that their experience of lockdown was more painful than mine. And the thing is, maybe it was. Maybe it genuinely was. But their anger and their need to identify with it and their need to perceive my retweet as an attack

and their identity really revealed to me how much they were hurting. And I see it a lot on the internet where people don't speak about the pandemic. They don't speak about the pain of it because we don't know how. We don't know where the space is to express that. And also it's something we've all been through. Like a thought experiment I often go through myself is

imagine no pandemic happened, right? There was no pandemic. like a thought experiment I often go through myself is, imagine no pandemic happened, right? There was no pandemic. And just you personally, you, just you, caught this virus, okay? You caught a virus. And it meant for two years, you couldn't really leave your house and you couldn't go to the gym and you couldn't see

your elderly relatives in case you made them sick and when you did manage to go out for one hour a day to the supermarket you had to wear a mask and keep two meters away from everybody else. And you had to work from home. And every single aspect of your life was turned on its head. For two years solid. But just you. Just you alone. What would that be like? You'd be the most famous person in the world.

You'd be on every talk show. You'd be the subject of articles talking about oh my god this poor person this poor individual the terror and horror of having to spend two years stuck indoors not able to see your loved ones not able to do anything afraid that they might have a disease that could kill them not being unsure oh my god this poor person and you'd have so many people who would outpour compassion and love and they'd have ears and they'd listen to your story and people would go oh my god that must have been so difficult for you two fucking years of that jeez and oh my god and you were only allowed out of the house for how long only five kilometer walks for wow for months and two years this happened oh my god that would be your life and you would genuinely have a lot

of support you would have a huge amount of support and a lot of people interested and willing to listen to your story the problem is that happened to every single fucking one of us they're going through the same shit. So collectively we're kind of drifting along pretending it didn't happen. I attend therapy and even when I'm in therapy with a psychotherapist who I'm paying money to, to listen to me speak about what's upsetting me. Even with my therapist, I hold back a bit when I speak about how upsetting and difficult lockdown was. Because it feels selfish. It feels fucking selfish because my therapist went through the same shit.

And what I compare it to. And what it reminds me of. And I've said this before. If you've ever lost a loved one. If you have ever lost an immediate family member. I lost my dad. If someone in your family has ever died. And your entire family has been grieving and hurting

because you've all lost one important the same important person the toughest thing about that is you don't get to express your grief selfishly and when I say selfish there, I mean an appropriate level of selfishness. My da is dead and I hurt. My ma is dead and I hurt. This hurts me, my life, my perspective, my experience of reality. This hurts me and me specifically. You can't say that to your brother or sister who's also grieving because they're going through the same shit.

So all of a sudden you have this unbelievable pain and the people who you rely upon for support, they don't have ears anymore because they need to get their pain out. So you go to a grief counsellor. You go to somebody outside of your family who isn't involved in that grief, you go to this person and then you get to be selfish, you get to cry and weep and speak to your grief counsellor about my daddy's gone, my ma's gone, I hurt so much, me, me, me and then you get to experience the catharsis and release of that

process you get to deflate and then return to your family but that's gone with covid all of us are grieving grief is the suffering that accompanies loss any type of loss and we all last two years that's a given everybody lasts two years some people last loved ones some people last their health some people lost who they used to be and now aren't too sure who they are right now some people lost they are right now some people lost their most important years of their teenage life like I entered the pandemic in my mid-30s and left in my late 30s so what but like starting at 18 now you're 20 or 21 that's a big deal and what we've all lost as well is the capacity and the structure and the space to vent and complain. Take it back to how I started this. Imagine you were the only person in the world that this happened to.

It never became a new normal. It never became unprecedented times. It became a thing that happened to you, one person. The leaven of compassion, support and love that you'd receive from everybody would be off the charts and unbelievably healing and healthy and no one will come up to you and go you made up that disease, it's not real, take off your mask you sheep. So we have no structures to process this and it is manifesting itself as trauma in a lot of people and that's not me saying that that's quite a lot of psychologists are saying that and me from my personal perspective

I've been in therapy for the past few months and it was confirmed to me by a professional that I've been exhibiting a trauma response specifically the trauma response of hypervigilance. Now, also for me personally, most likely why the pandemic was traumatic for me is because I'm also autistic. Now, for me, my experience of autism, just imagine dyslexia, which is a type of neurodivergence. Imagine dyslexia, but instead of me having difficulty

understanding or reading words I can have difficulty around the rules of how you're supposed to behave in a group of people in a society. Now I'd manage to fucking nail it. I'd manage to learn and teach myself how to navigate the unwritten rules of human interaction and communication I'd done a really good job of that

up to that point in my life and then all of a sudden those rules changed overnight because of lockdown everything changed all of a sudden I have to stand two meters away from people all of a sudden I have to be concerned with how far away a person is or how they're wearing their mask. The rules that don't come to me instinctually that I had learned now flipped on their fucking heads. So for me I experienced it as terror.

I experienced quite a few moments of terror throughout the pandemic and terror is when my fear response is up at like a 9 or a 10 and that happened to me enough times over enough months that I developed hypervigilance I couldn't return to a base level of calm.

I was consistently and continually on edge about everything. So that meant a knock at the door was no longer a knock at the door. It felt like someone had come to kill me. An email wasn't just an email. It was someone telling me that my career was over. A plane flying above too loud meant that it was someone telling me that my career was over a plane flying above too loud meant that it was going to crash I'd gotten to a state whereby I interpreted every part of my reality as being terrifying and threatening and worthy of a fear response that's up around a nine or a ten

and that there is trauma now it's what would be called little t trauma. Not big t trauma. But little t trauma. I'm not that way anymore. Because of. Putting in the work. And going to a psychotherapist. And having someone to speak with. And using a combination of.

CBT. And also. Mindfulness around my emotions and I don't think I'm the only person like that and to be perfectly honest the only reason I'm even mentioning that me being autistic was part of why the pandemic was so stressful

I'm only saying that to protect myself to protect myself to protect myself from someone coming in and attacking me for saying how dare you say that your experience of the pandemic

was traumatic you didn't have it as bad as me because that's what I see frequently online people hearten so much that someone else's expression of their pain is interpreted as an

attack so one thing i'd say about that is everybody's difficulties and pains and wounds from that pandemic are valid they're valid and you have to recognise the validity of someone else's pain. Even if your subjective experience of that pandemic was worse. There's also a small minority of people who are like, I fucking love the pandemic. I'd been going too fast. And finally this thing happened and told me that I need to slow down. These people exist too.

We all went through similar shit. But how we respond to that. Comes down to the uniqueness of each of us as individuals. So for me. Having all the rules flip. Like I spent years with severe mental health issues, with agoraphobia, a fear of people, afraid to go to supermarkets,

afraid to live a normal life. I spent years doing that. And when I was living that life, I was classed as a mentally unwell individual. And then I got well. and I learned that to live that way was not rational and then all of a sudden the world flips and this is how I'm supposed to live again. Now I'm supposed to stay indoors. Now I'm supposed to be afraid of people. That elicited terror in me and that's valid for me and it doesn't take away from your experience in any way.

So we need to try and work towards listening to other people. One of the things that gave me hope about that BBC article where its mental health crisis from the COVID pandemic was minimal, when that went on Twitter, it went viral because people were taking the piss out of it. It went viral because people were taking the piss out of it. People were posting examples of how insane they went during lockdown. Mainly manifestations of their boredom. One woman held a birthday party for a washing machine. One woman fucking made an art museum for her hamster. We all did insane shit to try and cope with all that stress.

But I loved seeing that people were willing to laugh about it. Because laughter has a purpose. Humour is a way to process pain when other avenues are dangerous. If I had a magic wand, right, now this is purely my opinion. If I had a magic wand tomorrow, what I'd love to see all around the world would be the equivalent of AA meetings. Except it's about lockdown. Group work. meetings except it's about lockdown group work people like the reason I give AA as an example is I've been in groups before not addiction groups but when I was training to be a psychotherapist I did a full year of having to be present in a group of 13 people where we share we share our pain we put faith in

the safety of the group the trust of the group and you disclose and divulge your pain to a group of people who you truly believe care because you've established trust within that group. That was one of the most healing things I ever did in my entire life. I was about 22 years of age. I'd grow into the person that I am now because of a year of group work. And I use the AA model as an example because AA is just pretty fucking good at setting up meetings and groups for people who are in need

and it's civilian led and you just have these places where you can go be in the presence of other people in a little community where there's trust and safety in the group and people have space

and time to share for other people to listen I think a model like that to recover from the stress and pain and anger of that two years of lockdown I think setting up groups like that could actually have a beneficial effect but again what the fuck do I know i'm not a professional i'm basing this purely on my personal experience of having done group work for a year and borrow from elements of the aa model not necessarily around addiction but around here is a group we put trust in the group. Be respectful. Listen. Give everyone space to talk.

Sharing pain, sadness to a bunch of people, knowing that they're listening and knowing that you're not being judged because the group feels safe is a fucking incredible feeling and it's really healing. And I think we all need that. We don't have that space at all. We don't have that space.

Especially not online. I was going to do a list. A list of techniques that I'm actively using. To improve my mental health. But we're up to the hour point there. I might do that next week. Because I want to get a vibe for what you felt about the second part of that podcast.

I want to get a vibe for how you felt about that. Alright, dog bless. I'll catch you next week. Maybe I'll come back with that shit I was talking about there. We'll see what the story is. This was an odd podcast. This was an odd podcast about modernist art and then the collective trauma of the pandemic.

Rub a dog, kiss a swan, cuddle a worm. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game. And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.