Brandy Jensen wrote a column about forgiveness where she said that people would often rather be disliked than misunderstood – this is why I think writing is such an edifying all-purpose remedy. It is, to quote a supervisor for whom I have little respect, a process of thinking through, except unlike in conversational stand-ins for this process, no one will finish your sentence to say ‘…and reminds you of your dad, yeah’, or tell you you’ve done that bit a couple of times before (I invariably have). That same supervisor, for all his exaltation of the neat thinker and the complete thought, will not ‘stop you there’ to tell you ‘what I think you’re trying to say here’. It isn’t happiness, it’s dauntlessness, which is a much more stable currency in a world where establishing a coherent sense of self is a losing battle. I will not be misinterpreted here.

(This was written quite drunk, in the ascending from very drunk. I’ve fixed the punctuation and spelling for intelligibility, but left it almost entirely as was.)

There’s a bottle of whiskey on the floor by my desk. I’ve had remarks that this is definitely for reasons of dandyish affectation, presenting as I’d prefer to as an elderly academic type in tweed with a complaint of the upper thigh for which a remedial and highly expensive armchair is somehow requisite. Some of my closer, more worrisome friends assume it’s suggestive of a more self-destructive quality, (a manic-pixie shade of darkness perhaps, if I were to be uncharitable to some male friends), in any case an elusive vice which attenuates a self-fashioned air of the just-visible, the performed repression. I hate this: there’s too much of it about, that particular flavour of vain self-sabotage that stands in the place where a personality should be. There is, unfortunately, some truth to this: I wish there wasn’t. It’s a vulgar quality to my personality that I enjoy the sense that people think that I am strong enough to struggle with something that I wouldn’t debase myself by showing them. But this is not entirely it; I drink too much and reveal too much for either of these explanations to be satisfactory.

I’m writing this half a bottle down a fine Lidl vintage of some insalubrious-piss coloured Scotch, and having passed the first two more unpleasant stages of this sort of evening, I feel a need to investigate why exactly I do this to myself. Why I close whatever more interesting, cerebral project I’m working on, shut my laptop like a day I know I’m abandoning having done around half of my lowest estimate for the day’s work, and pour myself a slog of off-colour, medicinal-tasting spirit which purports to be from Scotland, but which I can only assume has been created by the organic distillery of a slightly ulcerous urinary tract. Why I acquiesce to experience the most depressing possible hangover the next day: the completely debilitating, ibuprofen-at-6pm kind of hangover which is rendered about six times more acute because you know that you have absolutely no good memories to make such a thing justifiable.

I have another piece in me about how I think hangovers are the currency of the realm. This is a recuperative one, I think, and there is truth to it: I have many memories which are fig-scented and of unparalleled loveliness of days written off in aid of multiple breakfasts and conversations predicated on the exchange of grunts, inexplicably hysterical nonsense-speak, suggestions of better uses for the hours you all know will pass without a bra on. This, however, is not that piece, because I’m quite drunk and I’m listening to that Blur album that you only listen to if you live in London and are on a bus after a break-up with a girl that has a too-short fringe because she does art history.

I know I will have to write off most of tomorrow because of what I’m feeling now. It is not happy. But it is a pleasant sort of heavy which gives one the illusion of being self-possessed. When being happy feels more like hard work than it used to, the most you can hope for is to be, at least, an individual. If only to myself, I feel finally interesting again. But I will get to that when this Blur song has finished.

Approaching an explanation of why I drink so much, why I have smuggled bottles of my mum’s beer to my room since I was 14, requires an assessment of the places I have passed to arrive here, at this open word doc. This has, over the years, been a notes app, a post it note – more rarely, its been a phone call. I am, unfortunately, in love with all stages of it. When you drink with other people, the more melancholy stages are costly. The more abject stages even more so: it is generally unpleasant to be around very drunk people, but even more so if it comes with the implication that there is a wealth of emotional labour that needs to be done that the person will never instigate unless their mascara is running and they smell of a cheap slightly alcoholised body spray with a name like ‘Shh…Floral’; people who will only ask for help when they’ve done the interpersonal equivalent of shitting themselves. But these stages are all that is really left to someone who has been drinking since before they knew that drinking in that way was psychologically suggestive. Tolerances change, the frontier between pleasantly tipsy and affrontingly loud and just-coherent is meteorically quickened by the nervous tip of the wrist.

I read a great piece whose author I now forget about drinking and childishness – it was probably one of those eloquent left-wing twitter women that we all have a crush on whose selfies incur about fifty replies from men who are too woke to be horny – which expressed precisely the embarrassing realities of disordered drinking. She suggests in the piece that getting very drunk is an interesting impulse, gesturing as it does towards a desire on the part of the drinker to put oneself in a state where you have to be looked after. It’s a willing admission not only of absolute submission and vulnerability, but an acceptance that no one is under any illusion that you are a victim. Every party knows you to be responsible. It is absolute candour: it’s saying “I self-destruct. Watch me. Help me.”

I want to make this piece explicitly about abjection, because it already is abject, which I think can be usefully differentiated from the childish. Simply, when I was a child, I was happy. I was an immensely popular 3-year old, and sustained the qualities that made that the case much further than was ever really going to be sustainable (it worked until about year 12, then impishness began to lose its novelty). The thing that defines the place I enter before this heavy-eyed, slow-breathing proto-hangover which has yet to reach only the finger tips and the frontal lobes, is adult ugliness. It is the acute and totally certain sense that you have split your skin by growing so quickly you don’t remember when or how you became this hulking. It’s a licensed lunacy. Here, you can scream because no one is looking after you, because no one has any idea what it was like to suffer as you did. It is an atemporal misappropriation of past trauma into the fabric of the petty inconveniences of adult life. It is not childishness. It’s a splitting at the seams so obscenely out of time, that only the language of childhood will do – because we do not know how to say things as animals do. ‘It’s not fair.’ ‘No one will ever love me like I have been loved.’ ‘My skin is too much and not enough to hold this fatty feeling.’ ‘I am alone. I know I am not alone. I am alone.’

All of this is sanctioned. I can scream this at my desk with my laptop closed, my phone unreachable by foreign agents and my door safely and needlessly locked – I have generally decided in this state that tomorrow I will be as a secluded nun. No one will see or know me, I will build a new life for myself in this room. (I am invariably drawn out for breakfast, or a door’s knock, or needing to wee. I never remember at this point that an ascetic lifestyle is not possible where there isn’t a chamber pot.) I think this is why drinking in this way tends to afflict people of my disposition: those who live under the burden of an entirely self-imposed vow of silence in the wake of the emotionally crippling, and consider this imposition an unconscionable injustice. Abjection is an outcry against one’s own principles, a revolt against how you yourself have chosen to fashion yourself. Perhaps this is why I have fallen in love with hangovers – for their righteously punitive quality. Perhaps this is why I love the warming taste of £10 whiskey, even if I never reach the stage at which I am presently, the stage I pray for in a pub with fifteen people around whom I should by rights feel more comfortable – because the stage before, the rash-scratching rage against that corner of the mind which is thirteen in a too-big body, which voices the grievances which become heavy and political in a shut vault, is itself a freedom.

Eventually, these states lead to confessions which put to reasonable prose that which is unreasonable. I should be reading a book. It is 3:27. I should be sleeping. This playlist is diabolical: Radiohead is playing. ‘Nude’. Men on tinder with disposable print-outs as their first and penultimate profile pictures would go hog-wild for this scene, if I had left my makeup on. But when I am at my least interesting, it’s at this time that I rediscover in visceral technicolour, snotty and singular, the importance of becoming civilised again. Of picking yourself up from the oil spill of any feeling you could pin the wet landslide upon, and moulding yourself from butter into a person that deserves to be spoken to.  I finish the last slog. I wipe my eyes, forget the lardy midriff that announced itself earlier like a ledge. I write something.

When people say it gets better, they’re right. It doesn’t make you unfeeling to admit that smarts fade and ten years down the line you aren’t still coiled in the agony of the unthinkable shattering, frozen in that same scream. We people put other things in our hearts faster than we think is seemly; before we know it the furniture of our lives is rearranged and we can scarcely remember what the room looked like before. I have spent too long lying about grief, sitting in my pants at 1:43 on the Notes app, or drunk and weeping with a mouth shut utterly at a picture of him by a cherry blossom tree looking lovely and a bit bored. I have in these silly moments sought to render it in obfuscating Tennysonian lace, or else the gleeful iconoclasm of unfettered anguish.
(Those poems were all, perhaps mercifully, lost on a stolen phone. They had too many dashes, and were snotty to read.)

Neither is true. The truest unpleasantness of the matter is that it makes one a cultivator of useless and potent artefacts. There are few more covetous than a person who has lost a person that they loved very, very much. All this kind of healing really means is quarantining horror to the corners of rooms, keeping jam for eight years knowing that you cannot throw it away, you simply can’t. It is an inheritance of cobwebs and inedible things. Turmeric. Unopened protein shakes. Pickled garlic. Things which become powerful because you ignore them. It’s seldom that you open the brackets and hurt: but be well advised, this hurt is not remembering. It honours nothing but the item itself, like a poem. (Yellow rice – it’s good for your health, you know.) (He’s so thin.) (There must have been a reason he bought this. Perhaps he still has plans for it.) My fridge is a mausoleum.

I have moved on: I am warm and my cheeks are pink and I am in love all the time with people and the soft pace that consequence treads nowadays. But in my house are many frozen things that pay no one homage but their own redundancy. The spice rack did not whisper to me “Remember me. I too wanted to do something beautiful.” While writing this, not once did I hear his voice.

The following is a university essay which was meant to be assessing two texts in reference to the idea of list-making, whether the impulse to make one gestures to something quite fundamental in human nature. One text was bad history, and the other was the death-bed speech of a Shakespearean king. Lacking in time and wherewithal, I did something quite out of character and decided to write something personal instead – with abjection, you tend to be able to get away with being light on the quotes.

In dialogue with the ‘crumbling into darkness’ element of Spears Brooker’s comment on the list-making impulse, is the inescapable phenomenon of one’s remembrance being executed poorly. I would argue that, while at best underwhelming, and at worst funny, the bad eulogy shares with the process of making lists that furious attempt to ‘snatch our best’ from the onset of the inevitable small service and doily-topped bathos that is the family funeral at one’s local parish church. (Particularly if you live in Essex, as some people ultimately must.) I would also argue that, like the truly useful list, it is almost impossible to execute remembrance well, because the poetic or ceremonial articulation of grief is in my experience either the failure to remember a person entirely, or the failure to communicate the sense that that person was ever actually alive.

Spears Brooker’s defence seems to be based on saving it from the criticism that it is necessary trivial, but the implication is that ultimately, they mostly do fail: I see in the list the implication of reduction to arbitrary consecutiveness. More broadly, the process of writing a list is mostly a misuse of time that could be spent doing the things on the list: I have never succeeded at completing every task on a list in the near two decades in which I have been alive. I also think that grief inspires writers to list in a way that is related, but not the same as the impulse to compose a blazon: it is much more reconciled to failure, and similarly concerned with the triviality of its form with contrast to that which it details. After all, while it is complimentary to misrepresent the traits of a loved one that is still living, there is something skin-crawlingly disingenuous about deifying a loved one that is now dead.

When I was twelve I was preparing to attend the funeral of a family member of whom I was more than moderately fond, whom I will call Peter, and found two things out, to my dismay. This first was that the poem that was going to be read out was appallingly bad, and the second was that I had no idea how to begin writing my own improvement upon it. [2]The poem, called He Is Gone, begins:

‘You can shed tears that he is gone

Or you can smile because he has lived

 You can close your eyes and pray that he will come back

Or you can open your eyes and see all that he has left

 Your heart can be empty because you can’t see him

Or you can be full of the love that you shared…’

I have never met David Hawkins (based in Cumbria), but I can say with total certainty that I despise him. This poem goes on to assert that the reader should do ‘what he would want’, and move on. This is the most offensive aspect of the piece. The central issue with this list, other than the fact its appalling, is that it makes an itinerary out of the process of grief while completely abstracting itself from any sense that a person ever inspired it. [3] This is the first form of list that grief seems to inspire interest in: the totally generic. These lists storify the psychological process of the grieving in a way that mostly acknowledges themselves as heedless of the dead themselves. They do not simply cheat time, they interact only tangentially with it, figuring death as a transformative event from which nothing can be retrieved. The perspective of grief-stricken subsumes, strangles and swallows that of daughter, brother, friend. This reminds me of the irony with which Auden’s “Funeral Blues” was so repurposed from a satirical elegy about the posthumous deification of the politician, to a heartfelt eulogy delivered in teary, snagging Scottish tones to Simon Callow’s casket  in Four Weddings and a Funeral. ‘He was my North, my south, my East, my West / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,/ I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.’ Such lists are moving because they are so temporally irreverent, seeking not to figure a systematic cohesion of the life or thoughts or personality of the dead, or even pick out the Greatest Hits, as I will detail later, but are more a sort of primal yell. They proliferate, and pay homage only to their own constructions, like lists people write to feel productive.

The other kind is the kind of list I encountered in the mouth of the priest who attended the service, who clearly was aware of The Life and Times of the person who I’d lost, but only in the passing sense of an underutilised journalist who’s googled a minor celebrity of waning popularity for an obituary in The Scotsman. Even the specific list, I find, makes the recent dead into the essentially dead: the elegy, as a form, is awfully presumptuous, and turns the end of a life into a selection of shiny narrative items. While this was upsettingly underwhelming to hear as a child, I can now at least appreciate its broad faithfulness to the general process of speaking or writing about grief of which I suspect people to be generally capable. When I was speaking to Peter near the end of his life, I found myself trying desperately to list things we had done together, and only really managing to conjure around three events of low hilarity and only middling fondness for the both of us, because they were quick to tell and required little explanation that I didn’t have time for. They were also entirely things that made sense to my ill-formed child’s brain, and, to make reference again to Spears Brooker’s remark, I’m not sure when I embarked upon it I had any real belief that Peter could even hear me. I think it is a human impulse to convert memories into a glittering currency in the wake of sudden and imminent catastrophe, and it is perhaps this that Strachey tries to imitate. I am certain, though, that this is more the penchant of the dying-adjacent than the actually dying, and for the most part I consider this biography to suffer from that annoyingly spurious psychological fictitiousness that these sorts of historical texts can in order to engage their reader. Indeed, textual grief invites a third member to a two, and if we are honest, mostly one, person dialogue that death inspires in those close to the action. This thought makes me question what kind of anecdotes I would have listed if I had been alone with Peter.

When Strachey lists memories like ‘Lord Palmerston’s queer clothes and high demeanour’ I am however reminded of the, I think, quite admirable attempt to figure these things in terms of the funny, or at least interesting. It is a strange, personless performance. Writing about the dying, or even it seems, speaking to them with a third-party present, encourages one to aestheticize and itemise someone’s whole life. The aspect of the biography I find most convincing as an analogue to the kind of listing that grief makes most unavoidable, is the focus one has on items, ‘her mother’s feathers’, ‘a great old-repeater watch of her father’s in its tortoise-shell case’. Naturally this is to deploy some material history and create a more evocative sense of her childhood, but nonetheless it does speak to the listing I understand well. Grief of this kind is domestic, and so imbues objects with a kind of useless potency – for this reason, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Morning in the Burned House’ is one of my favourite treatments of the subject of the dead. It is honest about grief’s self-defensive, magpie quality, and acknowledges the sooty stains of afterness that death tarnishes things with. Listing of this kind, then, feels trivial, but really, really isn’t. Lists acknowledge the spaces between things where meaning growls untapped.

The less depressing conclusion this begs is that grief is fundamentally forgetful, and so it does one well to list. All eulogies are bad eulogies, and all elegiac poems and speeches are insufficient: part of reconciling oneself with the reality of losing someone one loves is a reconciliation to the arbitrary consecutiveness of the either ineffective or self-torturing memory. It is a project of noting things down as one has it, because mourning is self-obsessed and reactive, and so defies chronology. Trying to inhabit the actual mind of the dead, even if you loved them very much, is not to be attempted. There is a grim necessity to appropriating the dead for the purposes of the living: the best we can hope is not to refer to them with lines such as ‘perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too.’ All Eulogies are controlled failures, but the best one can expect in the process of clumsily gesticulating towards the recent dead is to not say anything too embarrassing.

[2] To be fair, I was twelve.

[3] I acknowledge how intellectually insincere of me it is to frame this argument specifically about elegising loved ones through two extracts about dead royalty. Perhaps there’s a point here about the abstraction of the grief poem, that I can still make these relevant. Or perhaps I don’t.