This was exactly the best thing I could have read first thing this morning. Even when nothing appears to be happening, something is happening. Thanks, Hanif.
I've been listening to your book 'Shattered' on the BBC and its driven home to me the appalling shock and horror of what happened to you. I'm an elderly woman, disabled but I can still walk. Even so my sense of lost agency, being able to walk ANYWHERE, to dance to a point of exhaustion and more..... but of course it brings home to me the sheer magnitude of what you are going through. Today though I picked up on something you said about the fantasy of moving again and it reminded me of someone I met in my dance experience. A young disabled woman who was confined to a wheelchair on a professional dance course was studying choregraphy which at the time I thought was totally wierd BUt she had moneyed parents and would disappear a week at a time to Switzerland to work with visulaisation (somatic) techniques to awaken her body. I don't know how that story ended but I know from my own experiece the enabling power of imagining movement e.g. a difficult step or leap. Its something I'd forgotten so thank you for reminding me. Forgive me if I'm telling you something you already know but possibly find someone who can actively promote and help your fantasy. Much love,hope and luck. xxx
Worth reading for 'nose butler' and 'Welsh Father Christmas' alone. Great little piece to read when feeling crap on a dull Saturday afternoon. I really look forward to these updates from you and Carlo btw (don't let this go to your head!). All the best.
I think this is one of my favourite posts from you and Carlo Hanif. I love the meandering conversation, the background of disturbances and mundanity highlighting modern life's dystopia and how best to deal with it's atrocities. Thank you for sharing x
Love this so much. What a great dramatist you are, Hanif.
Like your nose butler, and like so many people, I too have seen things this past year that I will never forget. I know Carlo is busy with his work as your amanuensis but might he be interested in supporting a young writer in Gaza through WANN (We Are Not Numbers?). I am helpless to stop the mass slaughter unspooling on my phone in between cat videos but working with this organisation has made me feel there is some small way in which I can help alleviate its agony for some individuals in some moments. It feels microscopic but the people I have worked with assure me it is important. They don't want to be forgotten. They don't want their experience to go unspoken - you can relate to this, I'm sure, Hanif.
I realise I have been misusing the word nihilism all my life and now I have to grapple with a new understanding of it, re Musk's 'manufactured nihilism'.
I'm sorry you are having night terrors. If you are a fan of sauna like Carlo, you might like to visit Stanmer Garden Sauna in Brighton. Bella, the woman who runs it, has an accessible tent sauna and delicious salt body scrubs. If you're lucky she'll thwack you with a birch whisk and make you a hearty soup to eat next to the fire afterwards... a way of maintaining contact with the world without going mad x
I loved reading your conversation. Yours is very much a real family and Carlo reflects how many of us feel at the moment. It was such an honest and humorous account.
It was reassuring to have an ongoing genocide of Palestinians acknowledged given the powerful and well financed propaganda of Israel and mainstream western media, which seeks to deny and obfuscate it.
Hanif, please tell Isabella that I admire her immensely, your description of her and her consideration and attention toward you is very impressive. She has patience and fortitude and clearly loves you very much. It would be great to hear something from her about the situation she finds herself in. Much love....Jane.
"One has to maintain contact with the world as it is—a horror show—while at the same time sustaining sufficient distance to avoid going mad,” I say...... Love these words.
It is strange how the mind will freeze certain people at a particular age. No amount of face-to-face encounters or contradictory evidence will alter that perception. We will politely entertain reality for as long as we must, and then return to our preferred mental image as soon as we are able.
The brother of someone who I knew while I was at junior school died a few years ago. The cause of his death was not given. Accompanying the newspaper obituary was a photograph of him running a marathon – a bald, grizzled man in his early 40s, with a tan rich enough in hue to be evident despite the black and white image. Regardless of the photo, I find that I cannot picture him as anything other than an eight-year-old boy – a beaming cartoon likeness of his older sibling, with a perfectly spherical head – the boy who never grew up, though of course he did, before somehow meeting his premature end.
A couple of Thursdays ago, I was assisting my mother as she navigated the food aisles of Marks & Spencer in search of “interesting” mincemeat. We bumped into his parents as they entered the store, both grey-haired and stooped. They acknowledged us, but clearly didn't want a conversation. I suppose that it must be exhausting to have the death of your son either brought up in conversation by people who you haven't spoken to in years, or for you to be put in a position where you have to bring it up yourself. There are loose threads of grief that you wish people would leave well alone.
My mother and I loitered on Southend High-Street until the Waterstones opened. Having realised that I could purchase Shattered there and then, or go home and purchase the book from the same store online at a more favourable price, I did exactly that. After receiving a confirmation email informing me that the same volume I had picked off the shelves a few hours earlier was now ready for collection, I placed six house bricks inside a rucksack (which is how I am currently managing my fitness) and hiked back into town.
Shattered falls serendipitously between two books I was also reading, one factual and one fictional, one of which I have still not quite finished. The final book in Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy – The Sum of Things – is set mostly in Egypt, during the Second World War. One of the protagonists, Simon Boulderstone is badly injured by a landmine at the end of the second book. He spends most of the sequel in hospital. At first, he believes he has lost his legs but is nonetheless euphoric at having survived. Later on, he discovers that his legs are still there but that he cannot feel them or move them. Slowly the reality of his situation sets in and his optimism is replaced by depression. After he is visited by Edwina – a fickle and self-absorbed woman, who is governed by her petty anxieties and an abundant libido – and sees her reaction to his condition, he realises that he might not recover. The scales fall from his eyes. It dawns on him that he has willfully misheard a line in the song that is a favourite of his fellow patients: “I've been out in Shiba too fucking long” is in fact “I've been here in plegics too fucking long”, plegics being the name that these men, many of whom will never walk again, have given to their current digs.
The other book is Richard Morton's biography of Nick Drake, which I assume will become the definitive word on the short life of the musician. The problem with what amounts to a very well-researched and articulated tragedy is that it dispels the layers of abstraction and humanises its subject to a degree that is distressing. The growing appreciation that exists for Drake's slender body of work is as close as you will get to a happy ending and of no consolation to him.
Shattered stakes out ground between these two poles. There are overlaps between the plight of the fictional Simon Boulderstone and your own experiences, though of course he does not exist and vanishes like a Berkeleyan entity when no-one is paying attention. Nick Drake, who was real, could not, despite his great artistry, surmount the challenges that life threw at him.
Despite the extent of your injuries and the deprivations and limitations that it imposes, you managed to come out swinging, figuratively speaking, unbowed and with your humour and your intellect intact, and your drive to create rewired to your new circumstances and bolstered by your family. I regard Shattered as a story of hope and resilience in the face of tragedy.
I am also reading a book about sea snakes, but am currently unable to draw any definitive parallels between your life and the lives of these inscrutable marine reptiles.
This is such a perfect post. I am reassured that I’m not the only one trying to reason with horror-saturated youth. I think, I hope, that you were more successful than I have been of late. Their nihilism is entirely justified, but these conversations are so important.
This is a brilliant piece of writing - there's so much here: Youth & Maturity; The State of the World & Art's Place In It; Gloom & Ebullience; One In & One Out; LIFE! It reminds me of A Clean Well Lit Place - doesn't look like much is going on, but EVERYTHING is going on. Such brilliance, such adroit handling of all of the elements here, should be saluted. Have been reading your Substack for a while - there's a steady stream of such brilliance but this today... Somehow this rises above even all of those other great posts. Many thanks!
As so many people have already said. I loved this one. How can we all carry on with so much terribleness going on in the world? How HAVE we? Art does make the pain bearable, does make it seem important to be alive. This portrait of one day in your house is perfect! Thank you!
This was exactly the best thing I could have read first thing this morning. Even when nothing appears to be happening, something is happening. Thanks, Hanif.
Dear Hanif,
I've been listening to your book 'Shattered' on the BBC and its driven home to me the appalling shock and horror of what happened to you. I'm an elderly woman, disabled but I can still walk. Even so my sense of lost agency, being able to walk ANYWHERE, to dance to a point of exhaustion and more..... but of course it brings home to me the sheer magnitude of what you are going through. Today though I picked up on something you said about the fantasy of moving again and it reminded me of someone I met in my dance experience. A young disabled woman who was confined to a wheelchair on a professional dance course was studying choregraphy which at the time I thought was totally wierd BUt she had moneyed parents and would disappear a week at a time to Switzerland to work with visulaisation (somatic) techniques to awaken her body. I don't know how that story ended but I know from my own experiece the enabling power of imagining movement e.g. a difficult step or leap. Its something I'd forgotten so thank you for reminding me. Forgive me if I'm telling you something you already know but possibly find someone who can actively promote and help your fantasy. Much love,hope and luck. xxx
I loved today's conversation with its interruptions, conflict, and every-day drama. One of my favorites, thus far. xx
Worth reading for 'nose butler' and 'Welsh Father Christmas' alone. Great little piece to read when feeling crap on a dull Saturday afternoon. I really look forward to these updates from you and Carlo btw (don't let this go to your head!). All the best.
I think this is one of my favourite posts from you and Carlo Hanif. I love the meandering conversation, the background of disturbances and mundanity highlighting modern life's dystopia and how best to deal with it's atrocities. Thank you for sharing x
Love this so much. What a great dramatist you are, Hanif.
Like your nose butler, and like so many people, I too have seen things this past year that I will never forget. I know Carlo is busy with his work as your amanuensis but might he be interested in supporting a young writer in Gaza through WANN (We Are Not Numbers?). I am helpless to stop the mass slaughter unspooling on my phone in between cat videos but working with this organisation has made me feel there is some small way in which I can help alleviate its agony for some individuals in some moments. It feels microscopic but the people I have worked with assure me it is important. They don't want to be forgotten. They don't want their experience to go unspoken - you can relate to this, I'm sure, Hanif.
I realise I have been misusing the word nihilism all my life and now I have to grapple with a new understanding of it, re Musk's 'manufactured nihilism'.
I'm sorry you are having night terrors. If you are a fan of sauna like Carlo, you might like to visit Stanmer Garden Sauna in Brighton. Bella, the woman who runs it, has an accessible tent sauna and delicious salt body scrubs. If you're lucky she'll thwack you with a birch whisk and make you a hearty soup to eat next to the fire afterwards... a way of maintaining contact with the world without going mad x
Hi Hannah,
Would you email Carlo about this, he'd love to help.
He's on:
carlokureishi@yahoo.co.uk
Thank you!
I loved reading your conversation. Yours is very much a real family and Carlo reflects how many of us feel at the moment. It was such an honest and humorous account.
It was reassuring to have an ongoing genocide of Palestinians acknowledged given the powerful and well financed propaganda of Israel and mainstream western media, which seeks to deny and obfuscate it.
Ha! Funny and tragic. As a wise old bird once said, everything is copy…
Hanif, please tell Isabella that I admire her immensely, your description of her and her consideration and attention toward you is very impressive. She has patience and fortitude and clearly loves you very much. It would be great to hear something from her about the situation she finds herself in. Much love....Jane.
"One has to maintain contact with the world as it is—a horror show—while at the same time sustaining sufficient distance to avoid going mad,” I say...... Love these words.
It is strange how the mind will freeze certain people at a particular age. No amount of face-to-face encounters or contradictory evidence will alter that perception. We will politely entertain reality for as long as we must, and then return to our preferred mental image as soon as we are able.
The brother of someone who I knew while I was at junior school died a few years ago. The cause of his death was not given. Accompanying the newspaper obituary was a photograph of him running a marathon – a bald, grizzled man in his early 40s, with a tan rich enough in hue to be evident despite the black and white image. Regardless of the photo, I find that I cannot picture him as anything other than an eight-year-old boy – a beaming cartoon likeness of his older sibling, with a perfectly spherical head – the boy who never grew up, though of course he did, before somehow meeting his premature end.
A couple of Thursdays ago, I was assisting my mother as she navigated the food aisles of Marks & Spencer in search of “interesting” mincemeat. We bumped into his parents as they entered the store, both grey-haired and stooped. They acknowledged us, but clearly didn't want a conversation. I suppose that it must be exhausting to have the death of your son either brought up in conversation by people who you haven't spoken to in years, or for you to be put in a position where you have to bring it up yourself. There are loose threads of grief that you wish people would leave well alone.
My mother and I loitered on Southend High-Street until the Waterstones opened. Having realised that I could purchase Shattered there and then, or go home and purchase the book from the same store online at a more favourable price, I did exactly that. After receiving a confirmation email informing me that the same volume I had picked off the shelves a few hours earlier was now ready for collection, I placed six house bricks inside a rucksack (which is how I am currently managing my fitness) and hiked back into town.
Shattered falls serendipitously between two books I was also reading, one factual and one fictional, one of which I have still not quite finished. The final book in Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy – The Sum of Things – is set mostly in Egypt, during the Second World War. One of the protagonists, Simon Boulderstone is badly injured by a landmine at the end of the second book. He spends most of the sequel in hospital. At first, he believes he has lost his legs but is nonetheless euphoric at having survived. Later on, he discovers that his legs are still there but that he cannot feel them or move them. Slowly the reality of his situation sets in and his optimism is replaced by depression. After he is visited by Edwina – a fickle and self-absorbed woman, who is governed by her petty anxieties and an abundant libido – and sees her reaction to his condition, he realises that he might not recover. The scales fall from his eyes. It dawns on him that he has willfully misheard a line in the song that is a favourite of his fellow patients: “I've been out in Shiba too fucking long” is in fact “I've been here in plegics too fucking long”, plegics being the name that these men, many of whom will never walk again, have given to their current digs.
The other book is Richard Morton's biography of Nick Drake, which I assume will become the definitive word on the short life of the musician. The problem with what amounts to a very well-researched and articulated tragedy is that it dispels the layers of abstraction and humanises its subject to a degree that is distressing. The growing appreciation that exists for Drake's slender body of work is as close as you will get to a happy ending and of no consolation to him.
Shattered stakes out ground between these two poles. There are overlaps between the plight of the fictional Simon Boulderstone and your own experiences, though of course he does not exist and vanishes like a Berkeleyan entity when no-one is paying attention. Nick Drake, who was real, could not, despite his great artistry, surmount the challenges that life threw at him.
Despite the extent of your injuries and the deprivations and limitations that it imposes, you managed to come out swinging, figuratively speaking, unbowed and with your humour and your intellect intact, and your drive to create rewired to your new circumstances and bolstered by your family. I regard Shattered as a story of hope and resilience in the face of tragedy.
I am also reading a book about sea snakes, but am currently unable to draw any definitive parallels between your life and the lives of these inscrutable marine reptiles.
The illusion of returning to one’s previous condition never goes away.
This is such a perfect post. I am reassured that I’m not the only one trying to reason with horror-saturated youth. I think, I hope, that you were more successful than I have been of late. Their nihilism is entirely justified, but these conversations are so important.
This is a brilliant piece of writing - there's so much here: Youth & Maturity; The State of the World & Art's Place In It; Gloom & Ebullience; One In & One Out; LIFE! It reminds me of A Clean Well Lit Place - doesn't look like much is going on, but EVERYTHING is going on. Such brilliance, such adroit handling of all of the elements here, should be saluted. Have been reading your Substack for a while - there's a steady stream of such brilliance but this today... Somehow this rises above even all of those other great posts. Many thanks!
As so many people have already said. I loved this one. How can we all carry on with so much terribleness going on in the world? How HAVE we? Art does make the pain bearable, does make it seem important to be alive. This portrait of one day in your house is perfect! Thank you!