Short Stories - Alex Reads 'The Fall'

Transcript

Nobody give me sin for this That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this Out against mental illness Out against mental illness Some of the themes covered in here are ranging on all sorts of mental health issues, panic attacks, depression, suicide, autistic meltdown, shutdown, you name it, it’s all there So if that’s going to bother you, a particularly raw and personal depiction of that, then please shuffle on or go back and listen to the previous episode or go and listen to something cheerful Or don’t listen to anything at all, go and listen to the birds cheap outside your window I’ll see you all again soon folks, good luck with this one, bye Out against mental illness So it’s worth me rewinding a bit to explain what it is I’m just about to recite to you all So I started this podcast in 2024, so last year, just over a year ago, around May And it was in the midst of one of the most profound mental health crises I’ve ever had and I’ve had a few And I’m not going to go into yet again into what precipitated that and why I found myself in such a position If you go and listen to various bits of this podcast from the past, yeah you’ll get all of that, all of that sorry story But lots of positive things came out of that rather unpleasant episode, one of which I have a podcast The other one is, I wrote a little book, it’s called The Fool It really is a very short book of paintings that I have made and words that I have matched with them That all sort of tumbled out, I guess, probably this time last year Let me have a look, have I got a date in this? Was I that forward thinking? It just says copyright 2024 by Alex Loveless, that’s me people So probably this time last year and it really started off as me feeling like I needed some sort of catalogue of my work to put on my website So that people had something to download and that maybe I could print out and have exhibitions and stuff And it was somewhat ill-conceived in retrospect, that wasn’t a particularly great idea And I think that the general consensus is that taking along leaflets and cards and brochures to exhibitions is actually counterproductive But that’s for another day So I started trying to sort of, I took some pieces and I started trying to think about what words I would put with them And ended up, it ended up as an outpouring of emotion, of the frustration and the anger and the sadness And the general emotional turmoil I was feeling at the time And every time I picked out another piece it resonated with me in a slightly different way And I ended up just dumping these words down without really thinking about it And sort of going with the flow as I tend to do And about six paintings through this process I looked back and I went, well firstly this isn’t a brochure Secondly, these almost look like poems And thirdly, it had taken on the shape of a narrative that both represented the state of mind I was in when I made those paintings Because they were painted scattered throughout my more recent years as an artist But also my current predicament and the current arc of my life I felt like I was recounting it It became very autobiographical So as you’re going to hear, I sort of take on characters as in the characters in my paintings for each piece I bounce between the genders and the voices and so on They could be taken as standalone pairings And indeed you can take either the painting or the words as standalone as well And although they read reasonably well as a narrative, if not a slightly abstract disjointed one But all of the characters in here, all of the main protagonists that turn up are all just avatars of me And various other people in my life make appearances if in a very abstract sense and they represent them And when I had that realisation that this was really somewhat of a narrative The final pieces all fell together And I selected the artworks that seemed like they would complete that And tried to sculpt the third act if you will And to round it off so it felt like it finished rather than just hung And I sort of put it away for a bit thinking, wow that was a bit indulgent And then took it out again and reread and I thought actually this is quite affecting I’m not a person for words in that sense I’m quite articulate and I can express myself but I’m not a poet I’m not particularly poetic, I’m not amazing with metaphors I didn’t even know if these were poems And so the original intro to this book proclaims very specifically that they’re not But since I unleashed it upon the world Several people who know and love their poetry have said that they are definitely poems And several people have said they’re good I don’t see how that’s possible since I’ve written about ten poems in my whole life I don’t read much poetry because I’m dyslexic and I find it really hard to pass them So the idea that I could just rock up and write some poetry and it be decent seems nonsensical to me But I’ll take the credit, I’ll take the praise Because whether they’re great, you know, Keatsian, Yeatsian poems, Wordsworth and so on Or not, you know, I doubt they are But if they affected anyone, if they resonated with anyone then I don’t really care whether they were good or not And they seem to resonate with lots of people and to some people very, very profoundly And people after reading these would come up to me and say, I think I understand you much better now And I understand myself because I’ve been through similar experiences and you helped me make sense of those And that’s very touching and very amazing, which is part of the reason I’m sharing these here I did release it, I have self-printed, well, vanity published hard copies but not many And it has a cover and it has inner sleeve notes, I don’t know what you call these things, I’m not in publishing But it’s got all the paintings in it and it’s got all the words in it and it says copyright, Alex And it was said first published in 2004 and it makes it all look a little bit like a proper book But it’s just me saying some stuff I haven’t sold many, it’s been distributed reasonably widely in PDF form I will include a link to the PDF in the show notes if you want to go and look at that I’m not the next Stephen King or anything, this has not been seen by millions of people And it probably never will be, but I wanted to share this because I think, especially with some of the things I’m saying on this podcast Little projects like this that come out of nowhere are so vital and important to the process And things that you just do because you feel that you need to do them often turn out to be some of the best things you’ve ever done And if you asked me to recreate this, you said here’s another portion of your life, can you do the same thing? I’m not sure I’d be able to, this was very stream of consciousness And I don’t really want to try, I’m not ruling out ever doing poetry again But I think if I did this again I’d be so self-conscious It would either not get done or it would turn out to be actual drivel or dog roll as poet enthusiasts like to call it And given that I don’t really know how I managed it in the first place, I’m very hesitant to do that I have actually read these aloud before, some of them anyway, an open mic night locally and they went down pretty well And so I’m going to read them to you, I’ll intro each one individually with a quick description of the painting so you can make a bit more sense of it But other than that I’m just going to plough in and get on with it And I don’t think this is an enjoyable journey by any stretch But hopefully you might find it a cathartic journey or you might take something away from it that makes you feel a bit better about yourself Or maybe there’s some turns of phrase in here that resonate with you, whatever But this is a piece of me, probably about as raw as it gets So I hope it doesn’t terrify you and I’ll see you soon for hopefully the next episode, the next part of my momentum series Right, here I go, I’m reading this from the book itself so you can hear the pages and stuff I’ll quickly read the introduction, it kind of repeats what I’ve said but I might as well be thorough here Right, introduction, this is a collection of pictures of my artworks with some words to accompany them The artworks weren’t made to be accompanied by words but since I have little or no mind’s eye I think about these pictures in terms of words and emotions So I’ve tried to write both down Although each is a story in its own right, there’s a narrative of sorts, perhaps a journey that runs through them This may only be visible to me though, it’s not a happy journey but it is a real one Many of the humans depicted in these artworks are avatars of me, regardless of the gender and regardless that most of them depict real humans that have existed and in some cases continue to exist The pictures and words herein are pieces of me They are raw, intimate, confessional, angry, despondent, joyous, confused, desperate and probably a bunch of other things They are messages to myself from past iterations of me, they are sacrifices at the altar of my mental illness They are yours now, interpret them how you wish Oh here we go, Alex Loveless, April 24 Wow, I did this in April Oh, I did this before I even started the podcast Wow, there you go First, the first painting, this is David, so this is probably my single most personal prized paintings that are unlikely to ever sell It’s one of the earliest I did of my recent reprisal as an artist and it depicts Boris Karloff as Frankenstein who’s a consistent avatar of me in my paintings Indeed, it was also the avatar for the earlier episodes of this podcast, different painting He’s depicted in pasto, day glow, fluorescent oranges and pinks and blues Over a collage of bits torn out of magazines and stuff and newspapers And you can just sort of see words poking through saying where to begin, label, nerves, broken, I’m broken And lots of smaller things that I can’t read on here, but it’s quite a big piece So if you ever see it, you can go up close and read them It’s called David because it’s my dad’s middle name and it’s also my eldest son’s middle name And it speaks to a sort of a line, a continuum of the males in my family who depict very similar presentations of autism and ADHD And I sort of felt like I was creating a connection there and this painting’s very much about ADHD because it was painted soon after my initial ADHD diagnosis And it just sort of flowed out like the rest of the words in this And it was a bit of, you know, one of my earliest realisations of art as therapy So here we go David, a jagged line scratched through flaking plaster traces a root through generations Father, son, brother, sister, children, of minds at war with themselves A 43-year-old man is scared and confused, prescriptions, pills He stands in front of a canvas An image emerges depicting a human created from bits of other humans His journey begins Right, the next one is called The Others Says this was painted in 2022 Well this is from a picture of Carol Lombard who was in the 1920s, 1930s silent movie actress Probably among the most photogenic humans who ever lived And she’s looking pensive and she’s got her hand on her chest just under her chin Depicted in somewhat art, nouveau art deco style with very pronounced lines, a little bit Alphonse Mutcher And in sort of mainly blues and greens and a bit of cyan and lots of cyan actually And all behind her she’s got these, like a cluster of archetypal alien faces of the type You know, the close encounters type, some of them look like emojis, some of them look a bit cute, some of them look quite disturbing And it very much is an expression of my feeling Of being an autistic person in a neurodivergent world and all of these almost alien beings The neurotypical people peering in at me and looking at me like I’m some sort of, and I’m an alien to them So here we go, the others They say that the eyes are windows through which they must peer to see what lies beneath They say that you must sit still to show that you are present and attentive That you must not talk about yourself, what you love, only what interests others You must be more like them, but not too much They say, they say, they say they are looking, seeing, curious, but they only want a mirror Who is trapped inside that mirror? Who have you engaged to make you master and what have they lost to give you peace? Okay, the next one’s called Somebody This depicts, it’s from a picture of a photo of Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby Which is quite a haunting film in its own right And a book, but I’ve never read the book It’s depicted in complimentary sort of purples and mauves and yellows and oranges And she’s sort of sitting there looking nervous, clutching her bag Very sort of stark, bright highlights on her face and hair And she’s depicted quite almost a little bit expressionistically, but still realistic And behind her there’s lots of cuttings of people from magazines that are smiling, just smiley faces Mostly women, and I don’t know about anyone else But to me, I can see those smiles are fake That they’re only doing them for the camera And it’s always felt a little bit to me like when someone smiles for the camera like that That they’re fake, they’re lying And that it bothers me that no one else seems to be able to perceive that these people are lying When you see me smile, it’s almost always because I’m feeling good or happy or comfortable I can’t really smile on demand It doesn’t look good and I feel weird and it feels ingenuine So this one’s called Somebody Those smiles are not real They’re glances, words, mannerisms cast effortlessly Chip away little pieces of her that are invisible to them They add to a thousand stinging cuts, invisible cuts Pain is invisible too, she thinks But if they could see the wounds, they would have sympathy Assume the pain, pay attention, offer help But they don’t see her snicked skin Or the ruthlessly tender swells of prior damage only part healed They only see her as aloof and broadcast their disdain, or worse, indifference Somebody just trying to protect herself from further damage Right, this next one’s called Dissociation It’s a long, tall piece that depicts a scene from Dracula’s Daughter Which is a 1930s horror film It just depicts a lady looking a little bit terrified Certainly very worried With her hand up to her face It’s all in blues, blacks with some oranges And stark contrast and thick lines And there’s lots of scribbles of writing behind it And a few bits of comic strips and stuff I don’t have this painting to hand I can’t read the writing, but if memory serves it was just random outpourings And my writing’s largely illegible anyway, certainly as to me This is about just being out there in public and effectively You know, that feeling you get before a panic attack hits you That feeling that something’s not right And that the world starts to waver And starts to feel like an alien, weird and scary place And you have no idea why So here we go, Dissociation The world quavers, like a record skipping or a stream briefly buffering It’s not dizziness, the disturbance is with the world Reality twitched, she merely observed But why? Again, a twitch, longer this time She checks her environment, humans, lots of them Coming and going, surging back and forth like waves on a beach This then is the cause of the twitch The world is too much, her mind tries to detach itself again She looks for a bench, somewhere to rest and a respite Twitch, twitch Right, this next one is a self-portrait of sorts It’s called signal equals noise It’s a picture of me, I appear to be wearing no clothes But I’m swimming, I’ve got at least a pants on under there I’m sort of curled up almost in a ball Like sitting cross-legged and with my head down So you can’t see my face, so it could be anyone But I don’t tend to have a model, so it’s definitely going to be me And it’s got no hair And there’s sort of circles and geometry around it But behind it is a whole bunch of Twitter feeds And it was Twitter, not X And I can see Boris Johnson in there And Guardian article and various other things And I think these were actually taken from my Twitter feed Very much as an expression of how this particular type of window into the world was making me feel And I found myself constantly worried and distressed When really most of the stuff that was coming in was just mindless noise And the algorithm was just trying to bait me into having an emotional reaction So I would stay on their platform But it precipitated me falling into a particularly bad state Although I was smart enough to turn off my social feeds When things started to get really bad last year This sort of depicts the early parts of that realisation So here we go, signal equals noise He calls in on himself, folding and folding because there is nowhere else to retreat The pressure comes from everywhere at once From every direction From outside and from within He must find new directions in which to retreat New dimensions Crevices made from unworldly angles Splitting and dividing into countless quantum morsels An infinity of a human mind Now an origami of infinite focus A point of perfect distress Impossible to observe but boundless in its gravity I loved being able to introduce some of the concepts of physics Quantum physics and geometry and maths into both my writing and my painting It amuses me This next one is called Meltdown The painting is adapted from a photo from, I think it’s Evil Dead But it might be Evil Dead 2 This is Bruce Campbell playing the legendary Ash The protagonist in all the first wave of Evil Dead films They’ve since been reimagined or rebooted With I believe a female protagonist but I’ve not seen them This one was actually called Meltdown No. 2 There’s four Meltdown paintings This one shows Ash sort of looking up to the sky with a contorted face In one of his various on-screen Meltdowns Because he’s being pursued constantly by very odd undead beings Saying things like, I swallow your soul, I swallow your soul They’re quite brilliant films but they’re not for the faint-eyed They are way better than they sound on paper I recommend them for anyone who likes a bit of horror This one and all of those paintings were very very specifically about the feeling And the act of having a Meltdown Which is not as people think it is tantrum It’s a total loss of control So reaction to loss of control and autonomy A complete loss of spoons A total loss of self-control Due to overstimulation or an environment that we’re no longer capable of dealing with And they can manifest in lots of different ways with lots of people Some people just go very quiet and non-verbal I’ll do that after basically exploding with substances and noise It’s really really unpleasant and it’s even worse for the people around me I don’t get violent but I do get very distressed So this one’s called Meltdown The storm was brewing for days, weeks perhaps, but he didn’t notice He didn’t see the anvil, its menacing shadow on the horizon He wasn’t looking up, only down, pushing forward through the brambles and the mud Knowing only that he must keep going When the storm came it caught him off guard It came from within and forced an eternity of too much out of every pore and orifice Snotty and acidic Those around him had no time to take cover When finally it was over he knew it would not be the last He now saw all the anvils, rough beasts slouching towards him I was having perhaps several meltdowns a day at that point And panic attacks as well sometimes at the same time That final line is a reference to a homage to W.B. Yates’ Second Coming Which is arguably my favourite poem of all time I don’t have lots of favourite poems but it would be the top of my little pile Even though it is incredibly dark The next one is called The Fool Which is what the book is called This one depicts, well this is actually from a picture of Janet Lee And that is, I think that’s Robert Newman I don’t remember what film it’s from He’s depicted Din, the very Art Deco style He’s predicted almost blending into the background She’s much more prominent and almost glowing And they’re on the background of yellows And the whole thing is mostly yellows and ochres and a bit of brown and black And some oranges And I made the base of the canvas by taking bits and pieces of leaves And stuff from around my garden and putting them on the canvas and then spraying them And so it really evokes an autumn feel of leaves on the ground Hence The Fool But The Fool is both metaphorical and actual And sort of pretty much depicts the most unpleasant section of this And it’s also a bit of a love letter, a thank you letter to my wife Who had to deal with all of this Just as much as I did Here we go The Fool She cradles him, hoping, pleading that he doesn’t fall again It’s like cradling, comforting, a grenade, she thinks Let me not slip the pin, please There will be buds again, regrowth, she knows this, there must be For now, withered and spent pieces of him fall slowly to the earth For the wind to toss around She would sweep them away, but so many drift down she worries that they’ll be buried by them This is really dark, isn’t it? I’m sorry people Feel free to skip on to the next episode Right, this one’s called Shut Down This one has the other painting avatar of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein The one that was used for the original cover of this podcast It shows him with his hands holding up to his face looking very distressed In just blues and the odd bit of indigo and mauve Lit from underneath with the words shut down and slightly less visible The words please, please, please are any outside and help written on the bottom Shut Down is another issue, particularly predominant with neurodivergent people Where things have got so bad we retreat inwards And become less responsive and less capable of functioning as a human It may look like we’re calmer, but it’s really not a nice place to be So here we go, Shut Down It came after the storms, so many storms, electric and accurate Insinuating all his cells, infecting and corrupting his spirit They, the others, had asked too much Obedience and conformity, to be like them, day in, day out, like a performing squirrel When it came it was not a relief, was not a respite, it was more of the same But now coming from within him, he shuts himself down, he shuts them out The war continues, and it continued, it did Don’t worry folks, we’re nearly over Right, the next one, this one’s sad as well They’re all sad This one’s called Black Dog This is a painting of our now sadly departed dog, Ollie He was a huge ex-racing greyhound Who was lovely, but worshipped me And wouldn’t leave me alone I had a slightly better sweet relationship with him Because I can’t be round another being all the time Especially if that being is tuned so well into my state of mind as Ollie always was Because I’m hyper empathic, so I get into empathy feedback loops And at this point in my life that was not helpful And I do miss him, he was amazing But I’ve got a picture of him here, it’s all black and white with some brownish tones in it It depicts him lying down on the floor looking up with his doleful eyes He was probably quite happy at that point, but he looked sad It’s over lots of cuttings of pictures from men’s magazines and also from medication And you can see words like brave, enjoy every minute, failure, act, reality, envy, win And over the top of it, along the edge it says, I have no reason to be unhappy And this is really about male mental health Both my mental health and the wider subject of men, mental health Having to live up to unrealistic social expectations And the constant and unrelenting problem of male depression and male suicide That seems to other people to come out of nowhere But comes from, and it’s not just men but this is about men It comes from trying to seem or be strong and not feeling able to express it And not feeling allowed to express that, and it just builds up And the black dog is a metaphor for depression So here we go, black dog I ain’t got time to bleed, he thinks, hoping, pleading that his fortitude and resilience will be enough But knowing he only delays the inevitable My resilience got me here, he tells her, buried this deep I needed to make the time to bleed But where was that time? When did the earth stop spinning? When did everyone pause all at once and give me a little space to suffer in peace, to heal? But there must be progress, momentum, important things, more important than me Who has time to bleed, to risk being left behind or washed away? We believe regardless, the black dog waits patiently This is the last one I hope this one feels a little bit more positive It does for me, but other people felt like I ended on quite a bleak note I guess it’s all how you frame it The picture is, this is actually a picture of a movie star How do I look that up? It’s Gary Cooper I should remember that, it’s the Gary Cooper that isn’t the British boxer So I think Gary Cooper was gay I don’t know, I need to double check that This is just him looking downwards and to my left looking sort of forlorn and sad and there’s lots of different colours mainly sort of oranges and yellows and reds but with some blues splattered over the canvas that dripped down behind his face It just dribbles and drips It took me almost no time to do this I really quite like it It’s just another depiction of male sadness but maybe he looks a bit more resilient there a little bit more determined It’s called ordinary Here we go An ordinary day, that is enough Nothing good, nothing bad, nothing special An ordinary moment, a moment of peace is all it will take An unexceptional instant, a gift, a blessing I’ll take it, I’ll take that moment and multiply it by 10 10,000, 10 infinities It’s still just a moment, still ordinary but more so like every other ordinary moment and all the others too There we go So that one has a very strong waft of Zen There is only one moment and it is this one and when that moment is painful it can be hard to accept that fact but when these bad moments can yield beautiful things and when you can survive and come out the other side and take something away from it every moment was worth it and every moment is worth hanging around for Just keep hanging on people and keep using creativity to improve your life If you’re in a dark place like I was then I hope you’ve got someone around for you People who can support you I was so lucky and so blessed to be surrounded by so many amazing people Thank you all, I love you all but not everyone is so fortunate and it’s worth noting that this can happen to someone like me who’s considered quite resilient despite the fact that I’ve got a strong support network Life happens and our brains don’t always play ball If you’re suffering in silence, don’t It’s not worth it Go find someone to talk to Go talk to someone you can trust or go try and find some professional or service who can help you There’s lots of things out there I don’t think I’m a particularly good source for this Go and find support Just remember that every moment matters Every moment you’re alive matters to someone Every moment you’re alive is a moment to cherish and a moment that you can bring some light into someone else’s life Also remember that people exist to help other people We’re not just a network of individuals We’re a society, we have communities People want to help people who are struggling They get a lot out of it Don’t be afraid to ask People care about you, people want to help you and there’s lots and lots of places to support people who are truly incredible out there that are ready and willing to help you So don’t suffer in silence and I promise you you’ll come out the other end Things will look so much better like they have for me But that’s enough of that for now What I need to do is go back to the beginning of this and record a content morning because I forgot just how bleak that was Right, I’m going to go and hide in my studio for a bit and try and remember actually my life right now is pretty damn good So see you all again soon and stay chill folks, stay happy Bye Ask against mental illness