Little Father Time trilogy:
WhatsApp Mr Time?
Him they found to be in the habit of
sitting silent, his quaint and weird face set,
and his eyes resting on things they
did not see in the substantial world.
"His face is like the tragic
mask of Melpomene," said Sue. "What is your name,
dear? Did you tell us?"
"Little Father Time is what
they always called me. It is a nickname; because I
look so aged, they say."
—Part V,
Chapter IV, Jude the Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy
A message is spotted
too late from Little Time
a bitterly literal
interpretation
of something offhand
one of his parents
said in a moment
of deflated spirits—
that they were having
to do without because
benefits were capped
from the third child up—
mealy words like mouldy
bread swallowed by
a malnourished son
whose skin was a sickly
weak-tea grey
brow scrunched in earnestness
innocence twisted
in his harassed stare,
who tried not to eat
too much so his younger
siblings had more helpings
of processed slop
from foodbank tins
on their paper plates
as his parents scraped
each pinching penny—
Now he’s removed himself
to make more room
so his siblings’ bellies
be filled by his absence—
his parents found him
dangling from a coat hook
on his bedroom door
like an old discarded
jacket—
on his thrown bone
of a mobile entombed
on the bed like a miniature
sarcophagus (or
marbleised aborted foetus)
his last WhatsApp message
remained unambiguous,
unencrypted, impressed
permanently like an epitaph
chipped in stone or
the abbreviated Latin
inscribed on the reverse
of an old copper penny:
dun bc we r 2 menny x
Liskeard Eighty-Six
I first found my mind lost in
Liskeard
Like the deranged seagulls that
encircled it
Even though it was landlocked,
That slaty town of steep narrow
streets,
Grey-stoned, interminably bleak—
We’d been taken there on a rickety
ride
By obsolete ambulance over beyond
Rain-dark tussocky Cornish hills,
An inaugural Sisyphan pilgrimage,
One of numberless to come, to
consult
A Sphinxian psychiatrist to
fathom
The cause behind my epic
absence
From school, & the pathological
Intrusive thoughts that plagued me,
Made a monster of my mind turning it
Against itself—Stop trying to be God
The cryptic psychiatrist said,
referring
To my macro-conscience, my sense
Of Olympian responsibility for my
family,
For my unhappy parents & the
poverty
Of our lives, for everything that
happened
To everyone I loved (& everyone
I hated),
But I didn’t know how else to be,
took
My mother as example, her
martyrlike
Self-sacrifice for our sakes, her
aura
Of Catholic
guilt—obsessive-compulsive
Disorder was an obscurer
condition
Back in Eighty-Six, probably hadn’t
been
Properly labelled then but more
vaguely
Adumbrated as anxiety or obsessional
Neurosis—the psychiatrist, my
confessor,
With his penetrating stare, would
also
Comment, with an ambiguous smile
& a moral elasticity, that he
might like
A scrapbook of the images in my mind
That tormented me, attempting
to
Absolve me of moral agency so that I
Might readjust mentally to the
dreamlike
(More nightmarish) ambiguity of the
mind
Even in daytime, stop policing my
own
Thoughts & giving them
overimportance,
Omnipotence—but he’d try in
vain,
Even though I tried at times to
uninvent
My intrusive thoughts, untie the
mental
Knot I was in, it never prevailed,
because
Instead I ruminated incessantly—
The obsessive’s reversion—& each
time
I thought I’d ‘solved’ one thought,
I’d
Find several more would grow in its
place,
Mutate & divaricate in every
direction,
Hadn’t yet learned, as I would
never,
To burn the stumps of the severed
heads
Of this Thought-Hydra to prevent
them
Replenishing & growing again
which was
Impossibly done by some effort
Of supreme will no one had, not
even
A worried god—my mythology
would
Go on growing outwards in its
morbid
Bloom of mouldy Gorgonic
carageen
All along the walls of a Byzantine-
Patterned Carrara marble
labyrinth
Of deepening imponderables; back then
I’d not been diagnosed, it would be
years
Until I would be but I would come
close
Myself through focused reading,
ploughing
Through therapeutic prose in
obsolete
Self-help pamphlets kept since the
Seventies
By a confidence-lacking father who’d
once
Tried to teach himself the
rudiments
Of self-assertiveness as advertised
in
Nerve-advertisements—nerves was
still
The vague, almost mystifying
Approximation of my ‘problems’—
Only a decade or so later would I be
Prescribed the chemical means
not
To burning but at least
numbing
The nerve-ends of that Hydra’s
severed heads:
Serotonin reuptake inhibitors;
But until then, I remained tangled
in
My homespun mythology of worried
gods,
Petrified at the potency of
thought-power
I perceived I possessed, & all I
wished for
Was to be powerless, not a worried
god
Looming over my loved ones,
surveying
Every movement & gesture &
vibe &
Suggestion, just as I sat there
feeling
Completely lost in that carpeted
room
In the clinic curiously furnished
with
Tatty old toys all along its
low-lying
Window-sill, discarded infantile
comforts,
& a sad little empty doll’s
house missing
Its miniature furniture, sparsely
decorated
With garish wallpaper, gazing in on
its
Half-enclosed shadowy interiors made
me
Feel as large as Gulliver, or giant
Alice
At the White Rabbit’s house cramped
in
The creaking rafters after having
drunk
From an unlabelled bottle &
grown to
Enormous size, the pebbles thrown
in
Through the tiny windows would
symbolize
My dropsical scruples, & any
little lizard
Sent down the chimney mutate
into
Anything from the fount of
metonymy
Just as the strange slaty &
scaly town
Of Liskeard, its hissing, spikey
name,
Like piskie, the Cornish for
pixy, become
An aural signature for the feeling I
had
At that time of fright, risk &
dread,
A slowly dawning sense of the
danger
In everything, every thought, every
feeling,
That augured so many headstorms to
come—
A chilly school morning sky flaming
red,
& all I wanted was to feel safe
& secure,
But one cannot escape from one’s own
head;
Maybe I’d not had enough discipline
Instilled in me in my liberal
upbringing,
But the sudden cold drill of a
martinet
School inspector who’d visit me at
home
To prod me with his Navy-grey iron
stare
& threaten to have me taken away
to
A ‘special school’ where I’d have to
board
During the week, if my school
attendance
Didn’t improve, was a bitter
medicine
Which only traumatised me further,
as did
His other threat to prosecute my
parents,
& the only way to get a stay of
execution
Was to agree to see a
psychiatrist
On a twice-weekly basis, & so we
did,
For four years, & not once at
any point
Did that psychiatrist attempt to
elucidate
My condition, only ever saying that
I
Was just “extremely sensitive”
or that I
Suffered from “nerves” &
never revealing
To me either the invisible
observers
On the other side of his treatment
room’s
Two-way mirror—I always had the
impression
That he had been more interested
in
The details of those intrusive
thoughts
& images & Byzantian
ruminations
For his own private fascination
than
In trying to find a way of treating
them,
But at the time he seemed to me a
friend,
The only person in authority
Who didn’t sit in judgement over
me,
Who didn’t threaten or criticise
me,
Who listened to my deepest
anxieties
With no hint on his face of moral
shock—
A phlegmatic Sphinx, archetypal
self-
Possessed psychiatrist, but the
trouble is
He only left me with—to mix
metaphors—
The memory of his mystifying
smile
Which, like the Cheshire Cat’s,
eventually
Vanished into vagueness unintrusive…
Bruised Fruit
"I should like the flowers
very, very much, if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few
days!"
—Little Father Time, Jude the
Obscure (1890) by Thomas Hardy
I
My parents were lapsed middle class,
They’d skidded down the rungs
Of the social ladder, & came to
work
Shifts in manual jobs—Dad’s once
white
Collar now blue, Mum once a
housewife
Now a mousy pink collar in a care
home;
We were—as sociologists might
Mythologise it—‘relatively
impoverished’,
Sometimes abjectly, & were
isolated
In our privations, part of no
community,
Suffering in partitioned
hardship,
Prisoners to an unaffordable
mortgage
In a dilapidated, unheated
cottage.
II
At school—at least when I
intermittently
Attended—my classmates were working
class,
Some were abjectly
impoverished,
Indigently thin, etiolated for
lack
Of vitamin, & I had to pretend
to adapt
To their idioms & affectations
feeling
An imposter not in material terms
but
In terms immaterial: I was of a
different
Sensibility, a progeny of shabby
gentility
& nostalgic residues still yet
to be fully
Extinguished, expunged, bruised
fruit
Of a chipped China fruit bowl,
splinters
Of brittle eggshell-light
crockery
Curated by a declassed father mentally
Trapped in the rapt trauma of
vanished
Familial comfiture; translucent
in
The unenticing sun that exhausted
me,
Rinsed me with indiscriminating
light—
A deracinated Oliver
Twist-cum-Little
Father Time cast into
unsympathetic
Circumstances unequipped for
The physical sphere, left to figure
out
How to be in a place where I had
no
Agency, to find & define
indefinable
Fear—fear of losing
self-identity,
Petrified of forever being
defined
In the critical macro focus of
others’
Consciousnesses, to be reduced to
empty
Components, to become complete
unperson.
Thus was the curse of
classlessness,
Of rootlessness, to be part of
no
Community, to share no common
Bonds with other
schoolchildren,
To have habits & hopes &
interests
& ways of expressing these that
were
Out of place among one’s
classmates,
Never to be accepted as one of their
own,
Yet sharing in their
immiseration,
Material limitations, reduced
Circumstances—all the while
looked
Down on by those better-heeled
but
No more sophisticated in
tastes;
To be in limbo between social
stations,
Misplaced in purgatorial
triage,
Tacitly sent to a Coventry of
restive
Nerves & distanced relatives, my
comfort
Clothes confiscated, neither one
thing
Nor the other, neither fish nor
fowl,
But some strange amalgam, a
chimera
Of characteristics, mixed class, a
hybrid,
An aberration, & to feel nothing
but
Numbness, emptiness,
interspersed
With fleeting terror, to regard
oneself
To be in error, faulty,
non-functioning,
Unconnected to the scenery,
Insubstantial, an aberration, to
start
At beautiful mutations of one’s
own
Shadow-aspect, a thought’s
desolation,
All the beauty & wonder to be
always
Spoilt by the prospect of
inescapable decay,
Slow bruising shadows—to take no
joy
In fruit for anticipating its
inevitable
Bruising & souring long, long
before
Its ripening in the fruit bowl has
happened—
That is the nature of my affliction,
Anxiety, dread, apprehension,
A praecox of trepidation—to not
be
Able to enjoy the flowers for seeing
them
Withered while their petals are
still in bloom.
III
Unreconstructed soul,
Out of place, out of time,
An imposter of my species,
Burdened by an incurable
Sense of responsibility
For everything & everybody,
For everything that went wrong,
Weighed down by shadows,
A mind’s overcast skies,
& underneath everything,
Every thought, every feeling,
An overwhelming sense
Of dread, of loss, of absence,
Of something fundamentally
Wrong with the world—
No matter how I masked,
No matter how I clowned,
Under it all, the sadness,
Always sadness, washing
Everything in its lachrymose rinse,
Immovable, unfathomable,
The deep & bottomless
Inexpressible sadness
Of existence—the sadness
That is limitless, spaceless,
The stuff of the universe,
The substance of the stars,
The paints of Dutch Vincent...
To only be able to see
The withering in the bloom.
Alan Morrison is author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Anxious Corporals (Smokestack, 2021), Green Hauntings – New & Selected Poems (Caparison, 2022), and Wolves Come Grovelling (Culture Matters, 2023). He was a winner of the Bread & Roses Poetry Award 2018, and highly commended in the Shelley Memorial Poetry Prize 2022. Journal appearances include The Fortnightly Review, The London Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Vsesvit (Ukraine).
He is editor of international webzine The Recusant and its sister site Militant Thistles. These poems are from his forthcoming twelfth volume, Rag Argonauts (Caparison, 2024).
Links:
http://www.militantthistles.com
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