Essay - Corpus

Attentive curiosity: a methodology of presence.

20 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Philippa Ranby

Sustained engagements and entanglements with the activities of massage therapy, counselling, arts therapy and teaching have taught me a lot about the potency of presence in the phenomena of healing, learning, creativity and renewal. There’s a particular quality of presence – both of a person and a process of encounter – that makes a difference. Such a presence, in my experience, is a mediation of a number of influences and practices, one of them being attentive curiosity. Attentive curiosity could be considered a methodology of presence.

The heart of the matter

13 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Pat White

Three years ago, in the grip of a sudden, near fatal cardiac ‘event’, I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, only to be taken to a larger hospital system by helicopter. At the time it seemed likely I would need urgent cardiac surgery. As it turned out, I was treated medically, eventually learning, but only after some months had passed, that what had occurred was most likely a viral inflammation of the tissue surrounding my heart: pericarditis.

Within the space of a few hours I was jolted from being a healthy active seventy year old (admittedly a bit tired after shifting house), into an old person, on heart medication for life, who needed to ‘take care of himself’.

Here be Lavender

13 March 2017 1 Comment

David Goodwin

The word “mapping” usually gets my attention, so I was intrigued to read Laurence Fearnley’s Corpus post, Scent mapping, Signal Hill. I imagined that she would have created a depiction of Signal Hill with delineated areas where certain scents predominated, probably colour-coded and overlapping syllogistically in places. In other words, scents experienced in real life would be mapped to defined areas on a small scale pictorial representation of real life. Captions would be along the lines of “Here be lavender,” and “Bracken, with the bouquet of gorse in season”. This was a map that I really wanted to see, and to sniff at. But Laurence’s article and a subsequent email disabused me. She saw her map as “dynamic rather than static, with ‘map’ being more of a verb than a noun.” More along the lines of what Alfred Gell refers to as a “mental map”: a process, not a picture. The Signal Hill scent map existed in Laurence’s brain, not on paper.

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On rabies

13 March 2017 1 Comment

Dr Anna Holmes

I first encountered rabies in Trincomalee, Ceylon, in 1947. The father of one of my friends at school died suddenly. I remember sitting quietly while the adults talked in hushed voices about “hydrophobia” and how “their throats close up when they want to drink”. The other thing they said was “The treatment is ten days of injections into the tummy”. I felt sad for my friend and her family, and anxious at the thought of ten injections – I loathed being stuck with needles. I was also upset that the puppy, which our mother had found for us, was sent away. In those days there was no immunisation for dogs.

Later, at medical school in Edinburgh, we were told about rabies and what a scourge it was in many parts of the world. The treatment was serial injections with immunoglobulin as soon as possible after infection.

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Ageing poetically

6 March 2017 1 Comment

Janet Wainscott

Gary Glazner and Poetry Project participant

Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.

I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.

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Unbelonging

6 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Majella Cullinane

In her early twenties, Majella Cullinane set out to explore Africa, the continent she had longed to visit since reading Out of Africa as a teenager in her homeland, Ireland. But in Mozambique, Cullinane suddenly found herself in the grips of a culture shock so severe that it threatened to overwhelm all her previous notions of personal identity. Now a writer herself, Cullinane reflects on the visceral terror of that experience:

Unbelonging

You lie awake in a small room. Lightning illuminates the dressing table, the chair, the curtains. Thunder bruises the night sky with a fist of rage. The rain comes down hard, like a deluge of nails on a corrugated iron roof. It is this sound that takes you back. Up and away to a ninth floor apartment, to another continent. A levitating memory. Where you find yourself in another room, this one marble floored with a high ceiling.

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