My work on Marvell and Private Lives took up most of 2011, and it’s been a wonderful introspective process because the way I’ve symbiotically linked our biographies together has given me license to think as deeply and darkly as I please.

But now, just as I come to wrap this up, there’s something quite subtle which doesn’t add up.

Marvell almost always strikes the reader as the shy, demure sort. Occasionally women are abruptly visible, but otherwise they are teasingly distant, obscured, or absent. He weaves threads of complicated desire behind fastastical themes and layers of honeycombed language.

But perhaps that’s just his writing. After all, his publishing history is thin, and there’s little sign that Marvell placed a great deal of value on the majority of his own poems. Perhaps he’s even embarrassed by them. Why would that be?

Because for all his privacy, secrecy, and eloquence in writing, Marvell never seems to have lacked confidence as a person.

• He disappeared off to Europe for three to four years in the mid-1640s, and mixed with a group of royalist poets on his return.
• He worked in private and public capacities for the most important men in the land, Fairfax, Cromwell and Thurloe, throughout the 1650s.
• He sought a place in government in 1653, and eventually got it in 1657.
• He became an MP in 1659, a position he held until his death 19 years later, and he travelled on embassies with the aristocracy in the 1660s.
• Evidently, he wasn’t shy of saying (or demonstrating) anything, home or abroad.

Perhaps he’s like a slightly more anonymous Tom Watson. [The January 2^nd tract reminds me of Marvell in prose. If you make a stand, you’re fair game - especially if you’ve got skeletons.]

There are obviously reasons for his intense privacy and secrecy, but a lack of confidence isn’t one of them. Back in the day, I imagined Marvell and Fairfax as a socially awkward friendship; one that communicated more in writing than it did in voice – MSN style. But there’s presumably plenty of substance to it. Marvell writes about landmarks within the vicinity of the Nun Appleton estate that he must surely have seen himself.

The connection between land and self in Marvell’s verse assumes, to a degree, that Marvell knew the character of Fairfax well enough to formulate the epic Upon Appleton House with the presence and power that it eventually assumed.

This confidence is where our connection appears to end.

Confidence is a flighty and fickle abstract entity. Where it comes from and what governs it are personal mysteries that I cannot begin to fathom accurately. Occasionally, if we’re fortunate, we recognise chains, of people and places, that bring and maintain positivity.

But ‘confidence’ doggedly eludes me. It shows its glaring absence in such a way that lets me witness it, like viewing treasures through a window.

It’s confusing, because I’ve been the exhibitionist in my time: singing, dancing, featuring on a DVD, performing a lead role, speaking on radio, and even compering a three-hour show. And yet, they’re all just day-release from prison, figuratively speaking. The net is closing back in.

• Three months ago, I spotted a tremendous opportunity that would have presented me with a prestigious international client. I didn’t take it.
• Last month, I offered to write up minutes of an event I attended concerning internal university politics. I didn’t send them.
• Last week, I was invited to do this class again. It’s already prepared, with no travel involved and good money. I’ve turned it down.
• Last night, I left a good crowd after just one hour. A house-party invite tomorrow has been declined too.

Crowds, communication, couples, are all difficult at the moment. It’s a place of increasing insularity and deterioration that makes me less comfortable all the time. It’s accepted, though, because the damage from last year warrants whatever defence mechanisms my psyche commands. Eventually, we know better than to try and defy what keeps us stable.

Willy Loman said in that wonderful play: ‘Man is not a piece of fruit’. Fruit is where we notice bruising because it’s prominent and never recovers. While a bruised apple can be thrown away, man is supposed to hang around that little bit longer, though he has to hope that his bruises will find ways to mend.

There has been talk about matchmaking for me recently. It’s deeply touching, because one suspects that’s the only hope I’ve got left, and because I don’t expect anyone else to care. Unfortunately, that method doesn’t match my copious failings. I don’t know what to say; I don’t know where to start; I don’t know how to ‘be’.

That extends digitally, too. I don’t add on Facebook now. With very rare exceptions, I wait to be added – my proof of mutuality. It’s the prime example of passivity that finds nothing but dead air and lost opportunity. I only know how to write, and under my own sovereignty. (Perhaps A.M. is looking down and nodding after all.)

But here’s the deal. (It’s not a nice thing to write, but I do so with composite calm.) After November’s catastrophe, the thought of me being attractive to anyone is so far away that I’ll take whatever measures I need to avoid adding further proof to the mountainous stockpile. We should base our lives on reward for effort; not punishment for effort.

Confidence
Is a great seed
Planted
In a great need.

I spent December wanting to stay out, drink, and not come home. Now, I’d rather not drink and just be home alone. Dreams of being a sociable, appealing, decent being have to be shelved for the moment. I recoil to my garret, as Marvell always did, consoled that keeping myself away is doing less harm than good.

The gorgeous secluded music of Crazyshow. I’m dedicating this post to a lovely lady in the US whose courage in speaking from the heart about difficult subjects inspires me to write these days when it would be so much easier and safer not to. X

Dedicated to the few who messaged on New Year’s Eve.

2011 was a story I don’t know how to tell. It’s a year that had so many structural positives, countered by surface negatives. Perhaps it’s best defined by what others have said.

Shadows

In the early summer, I was ‘strange’, ‘sick’ and ‘damaged goods’. Thanks. In the mid-summer, I was an expletive abomination. Consequently, in the late summer, I was branded a defeatist.

Victimisation does arise sometimes. Not because it is wanted – if there’s a brand of people who don’t want to be happy, this author is not one of them – but because it’s a way of dealing with the various angles of attack and the after-effects that cannot be disguised.

November showed a shy being far out of his depth. I wish it was different, but time, inexperience, grief (and so forth) all take their toll. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a little time for the right things to overwrite the wrongs; I never seem to get it.

When your back’s against the wall
That’s when you show no fear at all.
And when you’re running out of time,
That’s when you hitch your star to mine.

There’s a saying that good always comes out of bad. Desperation is not always detrimental. It can provoke change, and make things happen. In 2011 it brought new company up North, an introduction to nightlife, and a watertight relationship with my fabulous sister.

It also brought unusual decisiveness. In the late summer, out of nowhere, came a career opportunity that would involve a move to a new city. Hence, I find myself there. A cool apartment; a new life; a new chance. There’s been positives on the academic front too, doggedly defying occasional apathy. There’s some pride at making it that far, but there’s such a long way to go.

Time and Tide

The man up in the moon is shining
Good fortune down on me.

The moon is such an apposite subject for some of my favourite music. It’s mystical and distant; powerful and constant; an introvert and extrovert; a shadow and a presence. There’s something about its solitariness that’s arresting and romantic. Perhaps that’s why it captures our imagination.

Even if one has everything he desires, he can still find himself a lonely or lost being. There’s no single definition of loneliness, and no single cure. Is it because life is missing accomplishment? Is it because there’s a deep-engrained desire to want exactly what one hasn’t got, or what somebody else has got? Is it because one doesn’t make enough effort?

Or is it because, watching from up high, it genuinely is a lonely world, and the fallacy that we are all more connected than ever just spikes our expectations of ourselves until we never feel further apart? There’s something in this beautiful song about dreaming of the unattainable. I wonder if I make that a speciality.

Skies on Fire

In a solitary strike of ire, I criticised models of friendship last year, and with good reason. Why would people flatter themselves as selfless, all-encompassing, omni-sociable beings if they really couldn’t care less?

Despite this, I celebrate solid friends – real people, brilliant minds, dependable hearts – the sort that, ten years ago, I could only dream of. That is why I’m here; I believe it will be alright. Making poetry recordings for Radio Santa Cruz in 2011 was a different and amazing way to bond with people. It combined introspection, inspiration, experience and total humanity.

As a disastrous teenager, I always used to wonder how I would ever go on to become a normal person. The moves I’ve taken ever since have almost always threatened to keep me away from that, until recently. At the end of 2010 I sought further life experience. 2011 brought some, and was enriching in many ways. I could even return to Geneva and embrace the company of old.

If only I could take these slow developments (pace Prufrock) and try the last decade again, coming away with fewer failures, fewer regrets, and with stronger mental gumption. What others choose to say to me and think about me, I cannot prevent, but some more belief rather than a chilling satisfaction at watching waves crashing overhead would be a real victory.

It’s easy for belief to waiver if you’re a long-term singleton who lives alone. Work, university, home, 6/7 days a week, is a necessary way of life. For what else is there? Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus is true and false in equal measure, but sits in the context of retirement. Last year, more and more friends became partnered up. Before too long, I will be the last. When everyone retreats into their own family life, what is left then?

I fell in love with the fabulous Green Children in the summer through this yearning track that tapped into this very vulnerability. They are everything I could only wish to be: a beautiful pair, mystical, charismatic, lyrical, and philanthropic. They have fantastical belief and an enchanting fairy-tale delicacy to their plaintive sound. They find a depth of collective longing and belonging in this ambient melodic pop. The song reflects the most intense memory of 2011 when princesses and fairy-tales emerged, then remained fantasy, and out of reach. I have such fire for positive things – Love, Life, Longevity – but it’s often made to freeze rather than burn.

Reason Why

I’m not so far away. It just still feels far away a lot of the time. There’s a very fine line sometimes between success and failure; acceptance and rejection; the possible and the impossible – a fine line that creates a chasm in reality.

And a lot of 2011 has been spent asking why, in a sporadic stream of regret and doubt. We uphold liminal boundaries of our own existence that are sometimes just too pressing and too tense. Do we not get along with ourselves better when we have less time to dwell, think to ourselves, and talk to ourselves?

So as, that Greeke Sage, seeing a Young man privately retired all alone, demanded of him what hee was doing? who answered, he was talking to himselfe. Take heed, quoth he, thou talke not with thine enemie.

Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (1630)

I can only hope that viewing me is like how I view my work (a connection I’m never far away from any more). Take a little time to see beyond the awkwardness, and there might be a hint of something decent and worthwhile underneath it all.

There’s little that chills my spine more than the introduction to this song by the amazing Justin Elswick (aka Sleepthief). It’s not the perfect poignancy of Skimming Stones, but the two are intrinsically related – sibling songs. Longing and loss; absence and aftermath; the missing and the memory. Again, the title captures me. Self-sovereignty is governed by knowing. Being held in the void of uncertainty can bring the very best from us, and yet leave us in the worst predicaments.

I always think knowing is easier than not-knowing; self-questioning always leaves room for doubt. But sometimes, things happen, engrained into the fabric of life. There aren’t always reasons for everything, and actually that’s alright.

In 2012, I hope I’ll see those dearest to me treat themselves well, believe in themselves, and not blame themselves if times get tough. And if they’d like to keep visiting and sharing this little repose with me, they will forever be welcomed with open arms.

There’s a real internal challenge in play. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the art of quality writing. Some lucky souls can churn out thousands of quality words every day, but most of us mere mortals will always struggle with that.

I want my own page to represent a benchmark for thoughtful writing. If it takes a week or a month to make the right statement, then so be it. After all, if you’re hoping to make £150+ per day as a copywriter, the very least you can aim for is to showcase ‘quality’.

In 2011, I’ve finally embraced the rule that less is more. As a doctoral student, it’s natural for verbosity to take over while the 80,000 word target still seems distant. Pages – thousands of words – achieve nothing. Now that this pressure has relaxed, I’ve realised the pleasure in shedding words.

A trip to Geneva in October saw a 25,000 word chapter compressed into a 5,000 word presentation. It wasn’t a perfect transition by any means – over condensing is a flaw too – but it showed every scrap of excess. The extract on Upon Appleton House here represented a 40% trim on the draft, and read much better for it. I’ve learnt to edit – and not before time. There’s a pleasure in tighter, sharper, richer writing.

The Mechanical Writer

However, there are polarising forces at bay. A large part of my current job is to churn out SEO news content, and it’s tough to match my principles with the volume required.

Since replacing an agency, I’ve made some changes. Some are rudimentary. No integrated call-to-action, for example, was a shocking omission that needed rectifying. Some are more ideological. Making the material more relevant and less mercantile has been important. I’ve got enough experience now to understand the appeal to consumer behaviour.

Cold hard links are not going to sell credit cards. Everyone who applies for a card on our site, I imagine, is thinking in the back of their heads:

Why am I not doing this on Moneysupermarket / Meerkat / GoCompare / [ad nauseum]?

Volume-By-Numbers = Authority = Trust.

There are too many established competitors now to expect to make inroads without having the aura of expertise about the place: faces; warmth; confidence; reassurance. Bulk agency content isn’t geared towards that.

Quality news writing is surprisingly difficult. Journalism is an underestimated skill that warrants training and benefits from years of practice. It’s unusual grinding out writing every day, and news doesn’t suit my natural patterns. The finance blogs, though hidden away and little read, are a much better outlet, and offer some opportunity for creativity.

I grimace about the quality generally, though. On that score, I’m a £9 p/h hack, and I know it. An improvement on Adfero, but that’s hardly a compliment.

One of the oldest sayings in the book is ‘practice makes perfect’. But perfect doesn’t always mean good. We can become perfect at doing something badly, and writing falls right into this category. We may not wish to perfect the skill of writing trash, but that may inadvertently be our practice. I’d prefer to miss that boat.

The Copywriter

Recently, I’ve been tasked with sorting out the site text on certain high-profile landing pages. Perfect! First move: I trimmed 1,100 words down to 400, and turned a rather tacky gimmick into an FAQ and a Glossary.

‘Much better’, thinks I. ‘Not so’, thinks the boss. Concerns about how SEO may or may not penalise the page for being without its deadweight text means that I’m now having to build the text back up again.

Looking at competitors, Moneysupermarket’s equivalent page has only 350 words, while a site of roughly the same market share but (annoyingly) better Google rankings, has about 1,200 words. On that example alone, word count is inconclusive. If anything, succinct wins the day.

But the overriding prerogative is that it’s better to flood with words and plump for SEO benefits rather than having a slick, accessibile and readable page. It’s a crying shame that we’ve come to believe in excess just for the sheer hell of it.

Our competitor’s page makes painful reading, and it’s not pretty to look at, but it’s stolen a march on ours (before my changes were implemented) and we need to get that back.

I’m not giving up on the quality principle, though. I need a page plan that combines aesthetic value with volume and concision. And I think I’ve got it.

With that, I realise that I’m not a hack; I’m a serious player in this game, as I chip away currently at less than half the daily rate I’ve worked at before for smaller sites and lesser impact. Make inroads here, on pages that have had three million hits, and words might yet bring me a living.

But it’s an ongoing challenge, especially for a quality-driven individual. SEO is an ugly, destitute sport, especially in the heavily competitive market for financial products. The mechanics of an optimisation system that would frighten us into smearing shit over the walls just to cover more white space shows the degree of filth and trickery at work. And isn’t it always messy, getting to the top?

The sites that really earn their keep – other than those with an endless pot of gold for Google – are those with content masters and excellent whitewash, hiding all the signs. I’d prefer to catch that boat.

(Says the man now many miles from the sea, and terrible at fishing.)

What is said, matters. How it is said, matters. To whom it is said, matters. When it is said, matters.

The little nuances of our communication are more intricate and powerful than we often care to believe. How much value do we place on the words ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’? When does ‘never’ mean never? Why does one person’s way of speaking catch our imagination in a different way to another?

After the Fact

I’ve had the privilege of hearing the inspiring Tom Lockwood twice before: at the British Milton Seminar in 2008, and at his Chatterton Lecture on John Donne in 2009 (I’m heard 67 minutes in). His recent presentation at Leicester’s Early Modern Seminar on ‘agency’ presented a particular conundrum which is encountered – as often happens – in study and life combined.

What agency do words have after the fact? If something is said too late, does it matter that it was said at all? What if something is not said, or revealed too late?

It is agency that distinguishes Andrew Marvell from the typical manuscript poet. It is thanks largely to attribution that we know Marvell wrote ‘occasional’ poems in his early career. Other occasional poems of his may never have been seen by their addressee.

Who was the enigmatic ‘Horatian Ode’ for? Who eventually got to read it, if anyone? Answering the first question might help to unpick the entangled ambiguities that enshroud the poem. The second prompts a different kind of response.

Agency holds all of the power here, but it’s unreachable. Manuscript expert Harold Love says that the poem was ‘almost definitely meant to reach Cromwell’s hands’, but this is purely guesswork. He’s using his reading of the poem to inform the agency because he’s unable to use the agency to inform a reading of the poem. We don’t know who it’s for, and so agency cannot tell us more about Marvell’s complicated personal and political sentiment in this most public of private poems.

The 1653 ‘The Character of Holland’ might be the clearest example of a Marvellian job application. But it’s another strange case because its audience is not clear. Perhaps the Rump Parliament was the intended target, and its dissolution around the time of composition made the poem an opportunity lost, so it got tucked away as a silent statement. But why is it then published twelve years later in 1665?

A manuscript of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ released in the 1670s has an interesting kind of agency. The different life scenarios – a lonely late-20s male in the late 1640s when the poem was supposedly written, and the potentially married politician in the 1670s – raise many issues about the poem in these different settings.

There are many poems where the agency remains a mystery. Was lyric poetry such as ‘The Garden’ written in the early 1650s in the seclusion of Nun Appleton, or in the 1660s during a hectic life in Westminster? It’s written to nobody, for nobody, and perfectly devoid of attachment to any one particular moment.

In all these examples, the vastly differing circumstances render it different verse at different times.

Is it regretting what is gained? Regretting what is lost?  Marvell’s manipulation of agency is such that it’s difficult to make biographical sense of much of his work. It’s written to be elusive, furtive, and private.

Words Never Crossing the Bridge

The most powerful and painful aspect of agency is the power to conceal; all that is lost by words never crossing the bridge. How different would life have been if I’d always shared what I wanted to say, or kept quiet when I knew that was better?

I’m very conscious of ‘too little, too late’ – fabrication churned out by desperation and guilt. Most of us are probably guilty of this at some point. But there is a different brand – the ‘too much left unsaid’ folk – wary of laying their cards on the table due of guardedness.

In the film Three Men and a Little Lady, the architect, Peter, is finally forced to admit to best friend Jack that he loves Sylvia, after many years of living together and with her on the verge of marrying an Englishman and moving away. Those words unspoken would have been his downfall.

Jack: You love Sylvia – and she loves you!
Peter: She loves me?
Jack: Yes!
Peter: Then why is she marrying Edward?
Jack: Because you never asked her!!

Silence always wanted to win the day, but agency is what grants this film a happy ending. As chance would have it, there’s time in the film to set the world to rights.

We don’t always have that chance. We just need to know a risk is worth taking.

As a child, I remember keeping two football posters for any length of time. One was Chris Waddle at Sheffield Wednesday, the other was Gary Speed at Leeds.

Sad times. I lament saying that when encountering the headline ‘Gary Speed found dead’, I knew what the cause would be.

Removing the football side of this story, there was a universally liked and respected individual (which is a real challenge in football), with talent, good looks, a wonderful family. Everyone spoke highly of him, admired his energy, and said how happy he always seemed.

A life, alas, defined by its too-perfect happiness. It’s not a new phenomenon to believe that the happiest people are often the most unstable, and there’s sociological suggestions that the happiest states have the highest suicide rates.

Perfect happiness is a symptom. It’s the perfect mask to the secret invisible self. Nobody questions. Nobody suspects. Happiness brings a lot of friends, but a surprising amount of loneliness. The world is full of narcissists. If you’re special enough not to be one, sadly, you’re on your own for that reason alone. Silence, after all, is silver.

An invisible self is not difficult to imagine, and it’s not unfamiliar. In a dark mental alley, you’re lucky if anybody comes looking. The idea of counselling seemed, and still seems, barbaric – for the same reason I would never visit a “gentleman’s club” – the thought of being paid attention because someone’s being paid to do it is quite tragic. If the last fragments of one’s sovereignty are all that can be kept, then so be it. I’ve let ‘recovery’ be my own, and lived with the consequences that still haunt.

But the invisibility is all about sheltering. There’s a deep-rooted responsibility towards family and friends, to distance them from the darkest corners. It’s the day and age where one can publish a puncturing statement online, aware that close friends, family, those in neighbouring rooms, will see, concern themselves, and sit in awkwardness wondering how to react. There will be many who consider unlikely victims ‘cowards’, but it should be understood from the other side too: that swallowing negative feelings to protect others is so difficult, and requires such discipline. Such traits I enviously admire.

Poor fellar. Had he checked into a clinic for depression, it would have been all over the papers – a living version of his death story. So unlikely a victim, invariably it’s big news. It becomes a stigma that surrounds him, and shock that greets his family and friends. Sometimes, imagining that only worsens the problem, and makes exposure impossible. Ultimately, the shame was only conceivable in death rather than in living. The hardest thing for close ones is the not-knowing; being kept in the dark, about darkness.

This story, and thought process, has touched an uncomfortably raw nerve at this time. It reveals how good it is to know. There’s a bastion of strength in the understanding that ‘something isn’t right’.

Daylight cracks again on the grey old lime
In Marchmont town. How it breaks the scene
To force out night, and thrusts out pains and gains
For those that have to face it in its time.
Listening out front, where taxi cabs have been,
Cigarettes and birds compete with their remains.

This is the doctrine, simple still, but true;
Such is life’s trial, as one both acts and knows.
The world still spins without a care for those
Without a place, and only poking through
Lowly curtains, closed again, this fagined
Prisoned self, whose worth is not imagined.

KaM

There have been times this year when the following day was not wanted. I’ve faced abuse and inadvertently adopted the label ‘damaged goods’, submitting to its own stigma. There’s a sinister beauty to the mystery of the human mind and the great unknown of the other. And yet, when something beautiful comes along, I don’t know how to handle it properly. December comes, and I don’t know what I’ll do without it.

Something I was never meant to find … An Answer.