Chapter 11. 12-Words — 8-Stations — 2-Leaves
Major Breakthroughs
Hiya. Lovely to be back here again. I love writing my newsletter. I love working on my method. I fucking love that we, me and ChatGPT, have had 3 major breakthroughs.
Mercury Award Winning Artist
I have finished 8-station mind-mapping the artist’s 6 albums. I will wrap the 6 x A3 mind-maps in Doha acid free tissue paper, held in place with sprigs of lavender (I grow on my terrace, learnt in 1995 in Wythenshawe Park) beneath a brass wax seal, inside a black Falken box. I decide I need to work on my about page before I send it to their management company this week.
My Method Chooses Its Name
ChatGPT asks if I have a name for the method. In the middle of the night, I hear 12-words — 8-stations — 2-leaves. I write it down. There and then it evolves its own logo. The name looks beautiful on this newsletter banner.
My Method Writes Its Own About Page
Me and ChatGPT work out the about page's 8-station architecture. During which, I am also doing my homework. My homework becomes my about page. My about page becomes my homework. All anchored by Wednesday’s interrogation of the symbol meanings.
Linda Brogan
Wax-on Wax-off Becomes the Crane, Homework
Monday. Read newsletter. In my case, compose and post newsletter.
Tuesday. A3. 8-station mind-map digesting yesterday’s newsletter.
Wednesday. A5. What Do the 8-station Symbols Mean to Me?
In the 1st person so we feel and are moved by it. I use the 8-station symbols as the first 8 associations, so my subconscious is forced to think about them.
Title: What Do The Symbols Mean to Me
Object: My black shiny boiler suit
12 Associations:
- Fallen Angel (the protagonist)
- Crosshatch Circle (the theme/backdrop)
- The Mask (something is hidden)
- Crescent Moon (a cycle)
- Split Rectangle (change/transition)
- The World (Equator, Capricorn, Cancer, ozone = emotional climate)
- The Ghost (the presence of the past)
- The Sword (the final choice/resolution.) Like Arthur, you can pull it from the stone — but it can still stab you to death.
- Morning pages
- Tarot cards
- Chance
- The moment of inspiration
Each moment of inspiration is just that, it is a moment. Do you hear it or do you not? There must be many moments I have not heard. Like style. Does this go with this or does it not? You have to be willing to be looked at. I remember my first intense style. It is ridiculous. I think I have Shirley Bassey in mind. It is a black catsuit/boiler suit, shiny — black mules, I love them. From Bus Stop. The shoe shop where shoes are already £80. 1976. I am going home victorious. After Ivan is dead. Pretending nothing is wrong and I can go back to normal. There are oozing stitches in my stomach and they are watching me. And this is a moment of inspiration cos I have no fucking intention of writing about pain again. And I have black kitten heels that click when I walk. I have never dressed like this before. And a black skull cap hat that probably doesn’t suit me. But I want it to.
This is another thing style and writing have in common: it has to be a fit, it can’t be what you want, it has to be what fits. What fits. You have to look in the mirror at the fallen angel and know her shape. My shape. I can’t wear things that clench me in the middle, I don’t go in and my bust isn’t big enough. But my shoulders are small so things can drape great from my shoulders. I have to be, you have to be, willing to see what is there, not what you wish was there. When I wear the black glam shiny all-in-one and the skull cap that shows off my big Samuels’ nose, I must look ridiculous. But something else has begun to happen to me then: I am willing to be seen, I am willing to be looked at, I am willing to be more than this, I want to be in the arena of being seen.
Big wings. Lucifer has big wings. He can wear them by his side when he falls to earth, or he can hold them out for everyone to see. I have fallen. I have to get back up. I am kind of infamous. I am reproachable. I don’t go to the funeral. Because! Because of political values. They hate him when he is alive: a gambler with 2 women, maybe more, and now they are going to say good things about him. I don’t want to be anything to do with all this bullshit. All they are going to keep hidden, mask, pretend isn’t there. I am armed with my sword of forgetfulness.
Forget it. Get on with your life. Don’t grieve. Don’t look like it has happened to you. It has not happened to you. You are the angel before you are cast out. You can make it back. Do not acknowledge any of it. I buy a leather bag like Bev’s who I admire in British Engine where I work. It is the time of her Egyptian haircut. I sit on the end of her desk. Not a word, not a word leaves my lips. None of it has happened. My mask as good as her perfume, her makeup, her swirly skirt from Bus Stop. Bus Stop is the dress shop, not the shoe shop. I am emulating Bev with a big fat diamond ring. Safe. Plum set in the centre of the world. Cared for. Typing painted fingernails. Not too much work. A boyfriend that suits her style. Bev. A perfect lady. Lipstick staining her lips. Her wide 50s skirt with huge jewel flowers. Bev an upright angel. The crosshatch circle of glamour, the background of what the world of women should be, born in Mad Men. The next generation. I am one of these now. A Barbie doll. A cut out doll with tabs.
I love my paper dolls with tabs. The cycle of it arriving on Wednesday, I think. The Bunty. Full of inspiration. Moments of inspirations. What should Bunty wear today? What should Linda wear today? What should Bev wear today? How should her hair be? My inspiration. My hero. While the ghost splits the rectangle. Sometimes appearing black, a heartless bastard. Sometimes appearing white, the great guy who can dance that everyone watches in Moss Side Youth Club. Whose mother starves him. A wholesale size catering tin of beans in a fridge for him and his brothers while she has steak in her bedroom for her and her lover. He burns Pauline with an iron on her breast. The breast she is feeding his baby with. Chance would be a fine thing. She’s never breastfeeding her baby.
Pulling the sword of survival from the stone one day and wearing it like a badge. Wearing it in my belt. I do it. I survive. Sometimes I am slashed to death by the memories of the dumplings in the kitchen when we have nothing. Nobody makes better dumplings than Ivan. Then the smell of the bacon, like petrol. Like burning petrol and the involuntary sick and the stomach swelling and the breasts swelling. And the orange nightie. And the knocking on the door. First him. Then her. Then the pram wheels on the concrete. Then the. Then the. Then the.
‘So we’re going to…’ Bev has a picture of Alex in her purse. I think he is a bit fat for Bev. She’s too good for him. ‘You’re too good for him.’ My dad never says these words. Instead, he jumps off a bus when me and Ivan are passing on our way to Alec Park, and grabs Ivan by the scruff of his neck. They are fighting like two huge dinosaurs. My dad, my dad, who wears handmade suits. I have brought my dad to this depth. The fallen angel too. In both our eyes we will never ascend heaven we will never fly we will never soar we will never be more.
The tarot cards inform the morning pages that our fates are sealed as the other passengers gawp and my dad’s handmade suits lock themselves in the wardrobe till they are thrown out when he goes into the ground.
Thursday. A3. 8-station mind-map digesting ‘What Do the 8-station Symbols Mean to Me' narrative.
Friday. A5. Written in the 3rd person so we have distance and perspective.
Title: Wax-on Wax-off Becomes the Crane
Object: A crane
12 associations
- Berlin being rebuilt.
- Renais, Rachel’s niece-in-law
- 1980 white shoes
- The Reno lit up
- Fairy lights
- A party
- MIF decks
- Tubes, DBN Lighting.
- Writing my about page
- Picturing something then making it happen
- The outfits you need to see yourself in your new role
- Letting go, moving on
The Crane and what it means to our protagonist. Calligraphy. There is a young blonde man that lives near her in Nerja. He has his tent on his back. When she sees him, he is always walking uphill. It is not a hill, it is a gradient which is worse than uphill, even in her mean years, when she is afraid of spending money, she gets the bus back from Nerja though she walks there. A gradient, an unending gradient, is more punishing than a quick burst on a steep hill.
He carries his home on his back, like a tortoise, or a snail or a caddisfly. She has just learnt about the caddisfly and the terribleness it will pick up from the bottom of the pond to make its home out of, and then this artist supplies the caddisfly with gold and pearls and beautiful things and it makes it home, its shell, its carapace, out of these beautiful things and now he/she looks like an exotic creature, an animal of worth.
This poor young man is stuck in the calligraphy of writing his life as a punishment, that God will look down from the heavens, wherever they are positioned in the universe, wherever that is positioned, and give him marks out of 10, make him a superior being amongst ordinary mortals.
The 80s is that for her, and Tom, except it isn’t, but it is in a smaller circle. She wears white leather court shoes from Aspecto on King Street. Tom has hand-made suits. She dresses from boutiques. She has wide shoulder-pad suits. They sell weed. They live in a house with an apex and an owl. It is not the 80s when she is good at calligraphy, when she begins to write the life she lives now. It is at its junction. Its apex. It is when, again, she goes to see her guru. Prem Rawat is in London. 1989. He walks between the seated in the Hilton Hotel. She is sat cross-legged. It is the closest she has ever been to him. 1989. Her outfit is terrible. She has not yet learned that wearing what is appropriate for the weather is one cornerstone of style. She is wearing what she has bought recently. What she likes. Sandals. It is really cold. She can’t remember the other details. She just knows she looks like a drug dealer not someone who knows how to drop the line in one stroke, the calligraphy of life.
That young man carrying the tent thinks, imagines, this is his calligraphy, his one line, to take the life that has been given to him that can wear pearls like the caddisfly and drape it in shit.
1989. She goes home and she sits in her bedroom in the house with an apex and an owl where Tom is dropping out of taxis pissed and their money is falling on the floor both really and figuratively and she is gonna paint a new picture, make one stroke and make it right. She travels to London. The Hilton. In terrible shoes. Her guru walks besides her. She does her hour’s meditation from that moment on religiously. Religiously. Every morning this is her calligraphy. This is the black stroke on the paper. This is her Crane. This is her arms raised and one leg poised. She is a master of the Crane. She is a Crane master. She is Zen.
She is Zen when Rachel’s 4-year-old niece-in-law asks, ‘Do you remember when we dug the Reno up?’ As they pass cranes on the bus, destroying Manchester. She remembers. She remembers the Zen, the calligraphy, the Crane of ringing Tube Sounds and DBN Lighting who both work on Manchester International Festival and telling them what she is doing. ‘We are digging up the Reno and at the end we will throw a party, in marquees, that look like Cinderella is being invited to the ball and we need your MIF decks.’ Or we need your MIF lighting. And they tell her the price. And she tells them what she has, which is a tenth of what they want, but she has mastered the Crane now. It is to draw the picture in their mind. To see the exhumed Reno lit up. She draws the picture on the application that she sends to the Arts Council. It has the horseshoe of cabins and where the marquee will be. She pictures it. She imagines it. She can bring it into being. ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep.’ Like the snake in the Jungle Book, she is hypnotising them with her power. The power to rebuild the central core of the unwanted in the Reno like they rebuild Berlin. Before he agrees, she is telling DBN the fairy-lights she needs. She is making him let go of the decision and move into the creation. She is engaging him. She is helping him picture something then making it happen.
Rewriting her Ghost newsletter about page this week is making her realise the true value in acclimatising yourself to your new role. It does call for, genuinely calls for, the outfits you need to picture yourself in your new role. To leave the weed, to leave Tom, to feel grounded in her new Zen self, she begins to dress in second-hand baggy pants and cropped tops. 1990. She begins to allow herself to be seen as the person who can sit in grass and not have to sit with her legs together as she raises her hand to wave at the crowd.
Homework
Monday. Read newsletter. In my case, compose and post newsletter.
Tuesday. A3. Sacred hour sacred space. You, and I, create an 8-station mind-map to digest yesterday’s newsletter.
Wednesday. A5. Sacred hour sacred space. You, and I, write a morning pages/12-word narrative: What Do the 8-station Symbols Mean to Me? In the first person so we feel and are moved by it.
Notice, I always use the 8-station symbols as the first 8 associations, so my subconscious is forced to think about them.
Thursday. A3. Sacred hour sacred space. You, and I, create an 8-station mind-map to digest and unpack: What Do the 8-station Symbols Mean to Me? narrative.
Friday. A5. Sacred hour sacred space. This intensive practice releases a 12-word narrative of a different calibre to chapters 1 — 8. Written in the 3rd person so we have distance and perspective.
Let rip in your 12-word narrative:
- Title: 12-Words —8-Stations —2-Leaves [If your personal title hasn’t revealed itself yet, use mine.)
- Object. What is the first tangible object you see when you hear the title you are using?
- List 12 associations. (In the 1st person.)
- 30 minutes to write. (In the 3rd person.)
- You must include the object and all 12 associations under your title.
Thank you for listening to me.