Chapter 12. The Canary in the Tunnels
Hello. I hope you are well.
Exciting week again. One that ends with me lying on my back on my pool terrace for 10 minutes looking up at the blue-blue sky. Just looking at the endless blue-blue sky. You do not understand how difficult it is for me just to be. I am addicted to being better than I was yesterday. Hence, more Major Breakthroughs:
Mercury Award Winning Artist
I phone my Mercury Award winning artist’s management company. They agree I can send my 8-station mind-maps of the artist’s 6 albums. These gifts are now wrapped, lavendered, boxed, sealed, posted. How fucking brave am I.
Glamorous Editorial Website
As soon as they open it, they are gonna look me up. As my method 12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves commandeers this newsletter’s About page, doing the heavy lifting, me and ChatGPT decide to have a glamorous pic-only website.
https://www.lindabrogan.com/twelvewords
I use association again. The photos I remember. Therefore, they must be significant. Me and ChatGPT discuss the story behind each image to excavate their significance. This gives us the narrative of the images. And tells us 2 pictures are missing. Which I find.
The Essence of 12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves
You don't have to become a writer.
You have to discover the writer who is already there.
And in that discovery, there is freedom.
You can write anywhere. About anything.
Because that person is always there.
12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves leads you through a mechanism that unequivocally does that. And this week I find proof of how, why and when.
My homework is a knock-on day late because of a prolonged doctor’s visit on Monday.
Wednesday. 28.10.26
A3. 8-station mind-map. Digesting Monday’s newsletter.
Thursday 29.10.26
A5. 12-words/3 morning pages. Interrogating what the symbols mean to me.
Title. What do the 8-station symbols mean to me?
Object: Boxes
12-associations
- Is the angel being judged by herself or others?
- How far is the journey?
- Who is the orchestra?
- What is being played?
- Journey from where to where?
- What is on balance lose and gain?
- What would the fallen angel fall into?
- Who is the old ghost making the journey in the old tunnel?
- What if the weapon isn’t a sword, what if it is a Kung Fu pole?
- Portfolio
- Work method
- 12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves
What if her weapon isn’t a sword, what if it is a Kung Fu pole? What if it is held between her left hand and her right hand and can help her cross ravines as well as talk to the ghost that is coming down the old mining tunnels on one of those push-me pull-me things that you lean on, pump, and make it move down the tracks. I’ve looked it up; it’s called a pump trolley, a handcar or jigger. The seesaw-like lever is called the walking beam. What if the ghost has lived down there for years? What if that is judging her? What if it has been judging her for years. Waiting. What if it can’t believe its luck when she pushes the first shovel into the Reno excavation. It will be let out to breathe.
What if the tunnels are miles and miles long. How long is the journey? No, what if it has an orchestra playing the whole time in the dark, just playing and playing and serenading the ghost and its memories or else the ghost will be lonely. Do ghosts feel loneliness? Do they remember? Do they miss? Do they miss the living? Long for the living? Long for their attachments? Are they never buried? Do they stay buried cos they are thoughtful? Cos, I am presuming if they want to, they can come to the surface. They can pass through walls.
Is everything we think nonsense and we don’t have a handle on anything. We don’t know why we are alive for a start. How we are alive for a start. How the energy courses through our body unaided. That tiny little thing called breath. Prem Rawat talks about this. How precious your breath is and once you stop breathing the journey is over. We all understand this, the final bit. But what about the journey bit? Where the fuck is the breath coming from and where is it going and how the fuck does it know how to do this. How the fuck does the gut know to be the immune system and protect us. We are so protected. We are so cared for. We don’t take a minute to appreciate this.
This is my minute to appreciate it. It is as simple as that breath fleeing. One day it will flee and I wonder, I wonder do we say goodbye to it. The orchestra is playing us. We are an orchestra. I read this weird thing the other day, just the title, about bacteria living in our body masquerading as Mitochondria. So, we are not even real. We are a symphony of other creatures. Those in our gut. Those in our blood. The proton orbiting the nucleus. The neural pathways allowing the chemicals to make the journey, to push down and up, pump their jigger through the tunnels of our mind, incubated by these terrible things called memories. Cos rarely are they pleasant or beautiful. They are always tinged with sadness. If you look long enough down the tunnels, light a torch, or if there is gas, there is a modern torch that does not have a spark, an LED.
Look down the tunnel of your life and there is always disappointment, but what if we are looking at the wrong place in the wrong way. What if the portfolio of our life is skewed. A bit one-sided. Lopsided. What if that is not what we are supposed to remember because it is not what we are supposed to have done with it. The journey from where to where, from birth to life, what is on balance. What is to lose and to gain. I ain’t writing cos I have an answer. I wonder what we were supposed to do with our life.
I have huge blood pressure this week. The doctor is giving me diazepam. Instead of feeling scared about my health, I feel happy for my life. For the sun on my skin. For the uneven Spanish pavements. For the love of the Spanish pavements. For the tiny little streets. For the village feeling. For not understanding the language. For seeing it like a holiday, not a location that fits into my problems. For wearing sun dresses all year round. For the women in the doctors. Spanish women with their best clothes on like we used to wear our best clothes to go to the doctors. For the way they know each other and say hello. For the doctor’s attention. For the blood pressure thing on my arm. For the beauty of it all. For the sparkle in the air. For life itself. What a fucking privilege.
This is what the angel falls into this week. Instead of judging everything she has seen, the beauty of her life, not cos it is a Zen notion and her sword is not a sword but a Kung Fu pole, but because 5 mg of diazepam gives her a break from taking it all so seriously. The scare of death makes her see the wonderfulness of life. The angel is definitely judging herself. All angels are busy judging themselves. Unless they accompany another angel to judge another angel, so they look good to themselves.
There is always a method to the madness of the ghost in the tunnels of our mind. Pumping away at its seesaw lever in the tunnels. Lonely. Come out of the tunnels. There is light and sunshine and hope and coffee and cake and good things. No fucker knows why we are here and no one is ever gonna give us a badge or a trophy. Wouldn’t it be a shame to have my revelations on the day when tomorrow is not coming, and today is my last day. 12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves have been worth spending my adult life on. I love that it works. I love that there are 8 boxes. 8 tarot cards by which to burn your light.
Friday 30.10.26
A3. 8-stations mind-map. Digesting yesterday’s what the symbols mean to me.
Saturday 31.10.26
A5. 12-words narrative. Informed by our investigations.
Title: 12-words, 8-stations, 2-leaves
Object: Tunnel
12 associations
- Halloween
- The Beverly Hillbillies
- Canaries
- Cornwall
- Tin mines
- Barbara Hepworth
- Stone floors
- The attic
- Challenging the status quo
- What has really happened has really happened
- 2012
- There is no good way to tell a story
She is in Cornwall when she first decides there is no good way to tell a story; when she initiates challenging the status quo. Every day like Cathy and Heathcliff she wanders the moors in Cornwall, the bit where the tin mines are. She is on her own. Always on her own. Then she goes to her room, an attic room, in the most beautiful twee house that is down a ginnel with stone floors that continue into the house and into the kitchen that is all higgledy-piggledy. The girl who owns it is nice. It is Calstock she thinks. Picturesque. Horses. She is on her own retreat.
She visits Barbara Hepworth’s house. She doesn’t think much of the art and marvels at the story about Barbara’s kids being put into care or farmed out so Barbara can do her art — her fella is an artist too but not as famous as her. There are her tools still in the shed in her little garden. Then she goes to her attic, and she knows, she knows, she knows there is no good way to tell a story. There should be no such thing as a beautiful sentence. That is just showing off, like a great note by Bach. Mind you, she thinks she hates classical music but is surprised by the free concerts in the RNCM. She has to admit the one that fires her up is The Rite of Spring. The wild one. The equivalent of jazz. And there are loads, you know, just through adverts and the beginning of films. She walks all day and writes all evening in her attic that looks over the river. She follows the river, right, to the medieval house in the beautiful garden with medieval weapons displayed all over the foyer walls. How small it is for a kingdom. How tiny the beds. People from another place.
The tin mines are still open. Yesterday, she thinks, she imagines, she even asks ChatGPT how she should close her mines full of ghosts. How should she let them go now? Live her life now. A boy dies. And a woman goes to prison in her mind for killing him. A mum loses her son. Brothers and sisters lose their brother. 2 children lose their dad. And one of his babies loses their life. Her dad has had his life and did what he did with it. Her mum has had her life and did what she did with it. Her sister has her life and will do what she does with it. She has her own life, and it belongs to no other now. She is willing to share it with Rachel. And Rio. She is learning to draw boundaries. Like, asking Rachel not to honk at the people in the car in front. This is planting trouble. They are the 2 new leaves on new land. Like, her dad from Jamaica and her mum from Ireland are 2 new leaves in England.
There is no real, right way to write a story. In the Cornish attic she writes. Writes whatever comes into her head. There is no audience. Then destroys it so there will never be an audience and she can’t show off. In her flat, after the Cornish retreat, the leaves of the Whalley Range trees are where she is sat. She practises day-in day-out, wax-on wax-off, mind-map, mind-map, mind-map, mind map. Making the characters more active. Making the actions count. Making the actions add up. Making them make a circle. Then one day 8-stations, in their entirety, walk onto the page. She begins to walk with them. She has mastered 12-words, the elements in the jars that she has been teaching her students over the years. Practise — burn — no praise. And now, one morning in February 2012, 8-stations walk onto the page. They tell her who they are and what they want and what they do. They want her to draw better pictures. More intentional pictures.
Grasshopper who lives inside of her says: ‘Pictures travel into people’s minds. Pictures are objects. Objects cause action. Actions cause dialogue. These are the proponents of a story. Not a clever line. Show people a picture. Show them the tunnel of ghosts.’
Grasshopper has a new message today: ‘Stop visiting the tunnels of ghosts. Allow them to sleep in their ossuary. They had their own life then — they have their own death now. It is over. Your pain is over. It was never real. It is a story you tell yourself to heal. What has really happened has really happened, there is no healing. It is a scar — like the tree on the side of The Bedruthan Steps grows slanted by the wind, it does not consider itself maimed. It considers itself alive to the wind and the sea and the pigeons and the seagulls and the lovers carving their name and the caddisfly taking a tiny bit of its bark to make a beautiful mane cos when all is said and done every last fucking bit of it, every atom on this earth, is precious.’
Come and listen to my story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
And then one day he was shootin’ at some food,
And up through the ground come a bubblin’ crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol’ Jed's a millionaire,
The kinfolk said, ‘Jed move away from there’
Said, ‘Californy is the place you ought to be’
So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly
Hills, that is. Swimmin’ pools, movie stars.
The Beverly Hillbillies
And they all run to the telly. And he, her dad, loses his teeth laughing. His favourite character is granny with her bad ways and her bad mouth. And Margo in The Good Life. And any woman with a slicing tongue. Like her mum. He admires her mum who gets out the ginger biscuits, the fluffy ginger biscuits, from the Irish shop, to make sure Gilligan’s Island is a treat. And all the girls scream, ‘I’m the Movie Star.’ And their little family is surrounding them; they don’t give them away to be sculptors.
Grasshopper: ‘The tin mines in Cornwall roam free. They have had their use. They are monuments to a life that has been. They are a history. They are artefacts. They are part of Cornwall. Ivan and Pauline are part of you. They are under glass. Like the excavated Reno. Your glass. You dig them up. Look at them from every angle. Show your heritage. Exhibit them. Entry is over now.’
Halloween. Monday. 31.10.77. Not 1976. 49 years ago, today. Elaine comes to see her at work. No doubt she is sitting near Bev. Elaine says, ‘Lin, he’s dead. They have turned off the machine.’ When Pauline stabs him and the doctors stitch him and he coughs and they stitch him again, a nurse forgets to turn the machine back on. It is too late when she does, he is brain dead. Without Ivan’s death, she very much doubts she would have this:
https://www.lindabrogan.com/twelvewords
Ivan’s death is the canary in the tunnels.
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.
- Title: What do the 8-station symbols mean to me?
- What object do you see?
- What 12 things do you associate with the object you see.
In the first person so we feel it, you and I, are gonna write 3 x A5 morning pages. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is right. Keep writing till you fill the 3 pages. You must use all 12 associations and your object.
Thursday. A3. Sacred hour sacred space. You and I, create an 8-station mind-map to digest and unpack yesterday’s What do the 8-station symbols mean to me?
Friday. A5. Sacred hour sacred space. This intensive practice releases a 12-word narrative of a different calibre from chapters 1 — 8. Written in the 3rd person so we have distance and perspective, let rip in your 12-word narrative:
- Title: The Canary in the Tunnels [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.