Ann Hallenberg: A Precious Gift

The first time I remember noticing it was when I was a toddler. I had a picture book I loved to read. I would lie on the floor in the side room of the hotel my parents managed, head propped up on my arms, staring and staring at the pictures. I can remember everything about those times. How I would cycle between complete absorption in the pictures, feeling so in the scenes that I could feel, hear, smell everything in them, and then a sudden awareness of everything about me. How it felt to be stretched out, my feet swinging behind me. The carpet pressing on bare legs where they touched it. The sounds and smells of the hotel as its routines unfolded – lunch, afternoon tea, cleaning, guests checking in, guests checking out.

It didn’t feel like two worlds – one real, one imaginary. I don’t remember thinking that they were different. Just part of the same thing, the same experience of quiet absorption in the experience of life being lived. ‘Virtual’ and ‘real’ sensations tumbled about in my head. I could ‘feel’ the resistance of the hard typewriter keys with the little ridge of metal all around them as I listened to my mother typing in the office, could smell the pies fresh from the oven in the bakery of my book. My legs would tense a little in sympathy with the sound of a waitress walking by with a silver tray heavy with plates. Being in the world was a fluid thing, no need to fix, to formalise, to explain.

Sometimes (well, often really) at school I would get into trouble for not paying attention. I longed to be able to tell the teacher that I was paying attention, just not in the way she meant. I would try hard to concentrate on her voice but my mind would get lost in contemplation of the sounds of the heating pipes, or the feel of my fingers sliding along the grooves on the desk left by generations of others pupils. I would be writing when suddenly the tiny vibrations in my fingers created by the scraping of pen nib on paper would take me off into a world where things didn’t need to make sense in some intellectual way but could just be melded into you until the difference between ‘you’ and them was no longer important. I look back now and see school as the start of the binary time – when you were told that real life was the life of consciousnesses of self, of paying attention and making sense in ways that were prescribed and structured. Of leaving behind full absorption in the world, which we were taught had a (pejorative) name: day dreaming.

I often wondered if this was what everyone felt like, how everyone experienced life, or if others found this binary living, the solid world, easier than I did. It’s something I have carried with me through adult life. As a deeply shy teenager struggling to work out how to be in the world I struggled to let go of that need to ‘be’ like that (as the world wanted me to let go, I learned at school). As a more confident adult I can pretended now more easily that paying attention to the surface of things, the bits that lend themselves to rational explanation, to analysis, is what really matters. And then I go to a concert and all pretence is abandoned.

I have no intellectual engagement with music – much as a try to learn about, be interested in it, at that level. I can be curious about its mechanics, its logic, now and again. But as soon as I sit down in the audience the need to think is overwhelmed by the need to feel, to experience. I sat down a few days ago in the Wigmore Hall to hear Ann Hallenberg sing with the Classical Opera Company. As she walked out on stage I instantly felt myself let go of formal thought, I was here for this. For a singer so skilled, so powerful, that I could safely count on her to take me to that magical place where ‘being’ was enough. No need to think or rationalise or judge. Just sit there as these incredible sounds created such a tumble of sensation that sense of self, of life, of things to be managed, done, dealt with could slip away.

Effortlessly the sounds plunged so low you felt yourself falling with them, then just as effortlessly you felt sinews stretch up as the notes climbed up and up. I have no idea how a human being can do that, but I am so grateful she can. The world wants us adults to pay attention so hard to so much that removes us from our sense of simply being, that distances us from the essence of our spirit in the world, from that ability to be with others quietly, observantly. Perhaps for religious people this can be achieved through prayer or contemplation of God. I often think music must be my religion. Not all music, not always. But when music as beautiful as that is played and sung as perfectly as that, well then yes it does feel spiritual. I long for it almost physically, chase it like an addict.

I have no rational, technical, analysis of that concert to offer. I cannot explain if this cadenza was good, that aria better than another. But I can offer my experience – my experience of utter joy, of freedom from the endless impoverished world of rational thinking and surface level being, of time held in abeyance while life energy at its most fully spiritual is replenished. Our lives are so filled with noise, and busy-ness, and demands to pay attention to the surface of our experience here on this amazing planet. Ann Hallenberg’s singing cuts through that, her voice and artistry craft a magical place where we can once again simply be. Be thrilled, be absorbed, be stilled. Really with music as beautiful as that I need nothing else. I am that little girl lying on the floor again. I am neither here nor there. Neither this nor that. All is fluid, I am swept into the sea of experience, fully alive, experiencing life so directly and richly and fully I long for it again almost as soon as it ends. Could anyone give us a more precious gift than that?

Finding my way out

I already knew I wasn’t ‘right’ that first day I walked through the gates of Lanark Grammar, the below knee skirt my mum had bought for me at the start of the summer holidays nowmid thigh after a huge summer growth spurt. The boy’s shoes with the compasses in the soles, the shirt and tie and blazer, respite from the tights and skirt that trapped me in an illusion of femininity. A crowd of older girls were waiting to tease the new girls. As I walked awkwardly by a chorus of laughs greeted me. These were girls with breasts and ‘hair dos’ and eye shadow and all manner of signals that said ‘female’. I knew that this was not who I would be, or wanted to be.

I hated wearing skirts. I hated being a girl. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I didn’t want to be a girl either. Not if it meant playing with Barbies and wearing skirts and those ‘weird shoes’ that looked like ballet pumps. Or worse, heels. And not if it meant not climbing trees and playing football and getting dirty and building giant papier maché landscapes for my collection of Airfix WWII tanks and jeeps. I watched old movies on TV and struggled later to work out what it meant that I wanted to be Cary Grant kissing Sophia Loren. I hated being a girl, so why was I so drawn to her, the most womanly woman I could imagine? Shouldn’t I like Cary Grant more? And why though I hated everything girly did I feel such an affinity with Ma Walton, and dream of having lots of children? Nothing made sense. There was no one like me in my life, no one who could help me answer the question ‘what am I?’

A few days later the answer appeared. A beautiful, astonishing, breath taking senior. Ever time I saw her I could hardly breathe.  ‘Is that a boy or a girl?’ I heard people speculate. No one seemed to know. I suppose I must have been vaguely aware that the speculation was aggressive, not supportive, at least I knew I shouldn’t show my interest. And I knew something else, for despite the speculation I knew right away she was she, she was me, I was her. I had a role model.

I found out that she was known for being musical. I decided to try and get near her by joining the music club, and so my short lived career as a bongo player was born. I still think of her when I hear bongos and though I don’t recall how often my bongo bashing achieved its aim of closeness I do remember it was enough times to fuel my obsession. Times when I would sit in the music room, or the school hall when she was performing on stage, my throat burning for lack of oxygen as I held my breath in awe. In those moments my mind would race trying to take in everything about how she dressed, moved, wore her hair. I would hang around at the school gates at the end of the day hoping to see her. One day I very nervously followed her, I’m not sure with what intention other than simply to be near someone who made me feel less alone. She walked by the hotel we lived in and I almost burst with excitement to think that she had been so close to my home. For days afterwards I would gaze out of my bedroom window down to the street where she had been, conjuring her up in my head.

In the summer holidays I began to nag my parents to let me cut my hair (like hers, I didn’t say to them). I told them I wanted to go the barber on the High Street, and somehow eventually they relented and let me. I look back now in astonishment that they did, that I did. That painfully shy girl took herself off alone to the barber, sat in a chair waiting her turn, endured the suspicion of the barber when she told him to just cut it short. As I sat on that unfamiliar and exotic barbers chair, worn leather arms gripped tightly in fear and anticipation, I took in the smells of aftershave and balms so different from the hairdresser. I loved how stark it all was; no pink, no frills. I loved the look of the razors and shaving brushes arranged on the shelf. My eye caught in the mirror the scantily clad woman on a calendar behind me. The barber looked uncomfortable as he realised what I was looking at and shoved my head down roughly. As I watched the tresses fall away I felt for the first time the power of being in charge of my own identity.

We left Lanark in my second year. I couldn’t tell anyone why it broke my heart, though by then I had found another girl my own age who seemed familiar too. Even if I had told them they wouldn’t have understood why was I so sad to be leaving someone who didn’t know I existed. Wouldn’t understand that knowing she was in the world gave me a sense of being a ‘something’ I hadn’t had till them. I didn’t have any words for the something yet, and it would be many years before I would become comfortable, would find an identity that was my own. But for those couple of years when she and I shared a school, despite the fact that I am sure we never exchanged even a word, I had a sense of being with, of community, I wouldn’t find again until my early 20s.

Years later I would hear her name again, and with a shock realise that the singer my friends liked was her. My role model. The person who helped me feel a little less alone in a world I knew even then was going to struggle to let me be me. And years again before I would find tears in my eyes reading her account of those times – of how alone and bullied she was. A wash of shame as I realised that it never occurred to me back then how much she was suffering. I suppose that’s the thing about role models – we use them for our own ends and rarely think of their experiences. Back then she seemed supremely confident and powerful. I knew people talked about her but somehow never really thought about how she felt. I was so desperate to know that I was not alone and that it all might be ok after all I blocked out any notion that it was not ok for her.

She was in the back of my mind when some friends and I decided to open a gay café in Edinburgh – the Blue Moon – in the late 80s. We’d all been involved in gay activism, fighting Clause 28, running demos and dreaming of a world that wouldn’t find the need to spit on us in the street or deny us a place in the everyday. The idea of creating a space where people could see each other, could find each other, was an idea not to be let slip. I’d watch them come in, clutching their distinctive paper bags from Wilde and West bookshop, nervously sitting alone, watching intently everything and everyone around them,as I had watched her. The alone finding their home. There amongst the outrageously out, the quietly out, the not very out, they would find their way out too. It was the first gay café in Edinburgh, at a time when finding each other was still always hard and often dangerous. Maybe it was the Ma Walton in me, but I loved seeing them slowly find themselves. The day they would first talk to one of us, or appear one day with a friend on their arm. It makes me a little sad to think that all these years after the Blue Moon we still need role models, still need those places of sanctuary. Sad, but grateful that they are still there. Sad, but reminded of how precious they are.

And Horse – well, she’s still being a role model, still being musical, still helping people understand that a world in which so many feel that they have to be careful about being themselves is not ok, and not inevitable.

The Non-Sense Body: Technology to the Rescue

It confused people – the woman cycling through the forest happily who then has to engage in a rather complex set of manoeuvres to get off her bike, pulls a stick from her bag and limps off. But MS is nothing if not inconsistent and unpredictable.

For a long time after MS really started to affect my walking, I was able to cycle. Foot drop means my left foot drags and my leg is very weak. First a brace, the later carefully selected shoeware and one or two crutches depending on the surface allow me to walk but not easily or comfortably, or even these days safely since trips and falls and ankle sprains are par for the course. The worse and more exhausting the walking became the more I loved the times on the bike. On a moving bike, no-one knows you have MS. My weak leg just needed enough strength to keep my foot from slipping from the pedal and I was off, my strong leg doing all the work. It wasn’t without its dangers; poor balance and slow reactions meant road cycling was off the agenda, and stopping and dismounting became harder and harder, but still I was able to reclaim that non-sense of body that used to be my accompaniment when walking when I was cycling. Moving through space was a combination of upper body movements for direction and lower body movements for power. When walking is difficult the sensation of moving easily and largely unthinkingly through space is like that ice cold beer in Alex in the film of the same name – more welcome than any beer ever was. The benefits of cycling are perfect for MS -the motion of pedalling gives spastic muscles a stretch. Moving means a cooling breeze to help keep temperature down (a real problem for MSers exercising is that symptoms are triggered by heat), and whilst aerobic exercise via walking is impossible as I can’t move fast enough to get heart rate up it is possible with cycling.

Before MS, like most people I was very rarely  aware of my body as I moved about. I didn’t need to think to walk. I just did it. But after MS every move is like those early attempts to ride a bike – frustrating and difficult. Ironically because of a sensory problem in part – my ability to sense where my left leg is has been damaged and my balance is affected by that, weakness and vertigo. Normally we are utterly unaware of that ability to sense where our limbs are in space (it’s called proprioception). It’s only when we lose it that we realise we had it (Joni Mitchell was right, we don’t know what we’ve got till its gone). Walking , going up or down stairs, moving around something, none of these are difficult if you can without even knowing it be constantly adjusting the position of feet, making tiny corrections, judging where to move your foot and when, firing muscles at just the right point. But without it, well it all gets very effortful, and scary.

Like a lot of people who acquire disability my feelings of loss and grief are really challenging. When balance issues finally meant that cycling was became too dangerous I felt the loss dreadfully. Having those moments of freedom, of non-sense of body, taken away was painful. As a young woman I had been a really keen cyclist, that I was still able to cycle was a real emotional boost. A stationary cycle in the house felt like such a slap in the ego – a poor substitute for the real thing. I tried to convince myself a tricycle might be ok. But my heart longed for that feeling again. Until recently it seemed a dream, but technology has come to the rescue.

A vertigo training programme on the iPhone has meant that slowly but surely I am getting a bit more stable, the spinning and tipping feelings have become a little less intense. Suddenly the prospect of perhaps one day getting out on my bike again seemed less fantastical. And then I discovered the world of virtual trainers. So this week for the first time I set my beloved Trek up on a trainer, got myself a virtual ride app, and with a bit of faffing around to attach my weak leg with brace on to the pedal so it wouldn’t slip, I was off. On my bike, not some sad pretend bike. It felt so real. I selected an easy ride around part of Australia (!) on the app – the screen displaying video shot by someone actually cycling the ride while the trainer resistance adapted to the details of the route.

And for those minutes once again (some correcting for tipping aside that vertigo still produces – though at least this was not happening while travelling at speed along a road, much less scary!) I felt the beautiful feeling of a non-sense body moving through space. My target of course is to get back out in the real world, but for now this virtual world will do just fine.

If you are interested the set up I am using is:

• Wahoo Kickr Snap trainer which I have found really easy to use. The big plus for me is no need to take the rear wheel off. You just need slip the rear wheel onto the trainer and snap the mount in to place and you are done. It also folds up for storage.
• Wahoo Fitness app on iPhone to control it and save ride details to the Apple Health app so I can monitor training effects
• FulGaz app on iPad for the virtual trainer.

 

The Real Rainbow Family: A Change I Can Believe In.

Being the victim of homophobia – It couldn’t happen to a better person than Sarah Drummond of service design firm Snook.

Well now I have your attention, let me rephrase. If someone had to be the victim of homophobia on a train to Alloa, then that it was Sarah Drummond at least ensured a degree of attention for the thoughtful and honest reflection someone like Sarah would bring to it. Her painful to read account of her experience, and her reaction, has shone a light into our dirty little secret. The secret we all (L, G, B, T, I and straight) harbour about what has changed in society.

Like most dykes* of my age I have long felt torn between a sense that younger LGBTI folks have benefitted from the efforts of my generation and those before to drag us out of a world in which getting your head kicked in of a Saturday night was an accepted part of life for us queers and the unsettling feeling of a sure and certain knowledge that ‘no it hasn’t, not that much, not reliably’.

Of course we all know it hasn’t changed at all for the queers thrown from rooftops, the dykes subject to ‘corrective gang rape’, the lovers hung from lamp-posts and the gay men forced into a sex change to confirm to the mores of a society that cannot conceive of man who willingly could love another man.

We know that bad stuff – really bad stuff – happens to those like us elsewhere. And sometimes some of us older ones shake our heads a little sadly at how many younger LGBTIs happily holiday in places where just outside their resorts or hotels our brothers and sisters suffer some of the above. For they are my family, however unfashionable the idea of a queer community or a gay ghetto now seems to some, at least if we define family as the place where one is supported to become your best and truest self. In my day the list of places lots of us queers did not go in solidarity with the family was very long.

But my earnest desire to ‘believe the change’ in my world is daily compromised by my sense of worry. The worry that those ‘gains’ are not so well embedded as to be counted on. I was not allowed to be officially in love with the woman I loved, and then I was. What is given can be taken away. Thirty years ago I had several shades of terrified kicked out me by a gang of young men who saw the queer flaunting it in the street as an easy target. Irony of the fact that they thought I was a ‘poof’ and not a ‘lezzie’ aside, I felt no shock at this. I had grown up not just aware that my ‘lifestyle’ was not normal, but that discrimination, harassment and violence were part of the deal. Within the family we bemoaned, raged, sometimes fought back – chasing the men who’d just chucked yet another brick through our café windows, campaigning, Larking in the Park. But mainly, we understood. We were ready. My bruises and cuts didn’t hurt any less because I knew that could, probably would, happen. But the damage to psyche, to sense of self and safety, was protected at least a bit by my knowledge and by my family.

Sarah isn’t the first younger person I have known in recent years who has been subject to the kind of homophobia we once expected as a matter of routine. But she’s someone whose energy and perception can tap into and give voice to the kind of protection that I think lack of familiarity with everyday homophobia has killed. Though now, unlike in my day, it’s not the family of queers that are gathering around her. It’s the family of human beings who get that loving someone of the same sex is about as worthy of comment as whether or not you part your hair to the left.

Young LGBTIs in our community are less likely to experience routine outright homophobia. Less likely, not unlikely. And how much less likely varies from community to community. Sarah’s instinct to be afraid, to drop the hand of her lover, was not the instinct of someone fearful but someone smart. I last did exactly the same thing on a train home from the Edinburgh Festival last year. What has changed is that the family that cares for them is now the true rainbow we always dreamed of: L, G, B, T, I and straight. Now that is a change I can believe in.

* Yes. Dyke. A word I fought hard to own and use back then but which I have shamefully let slip from my vocabulary to collude in the illusion that ‘it got a lot better’ while excusing myself on the grounds I let it slip to spare the blushes of the welcoming, evolved, pro-LGBTI straight world.