The Mailbag: Man Hands on Misery to Man

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How are you doing?

This is producer Andy, and you're listening to Here Comes the Guillotine: The Mailbag, with Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, issue, or a dire need just to be heard, then email hctg at global.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Hi, Susie, Christopher, and Frankie.

This is from Jeanette, by the way.

Hey, Jeanette.

At 31, I have developed a new recurring dream.

Since you're my favourite Jungian podcast, I was hoping you'd help me decipher its meaning.

I am by some sort of body of water, sometimes a lake, sometimes the sea, and my mother is there.

The weather is about to turn, and she invites me to go for a swim before it does.

I say yes, but I get distracted by other people, usually a man or a group of men.

While I'm being distracted, the body of water begins swelling rapidly to catastrophic proportions and overflows to the extent of a natural disaster, washing away everything in its sight.

Immediately, I am gripped by panic over having abandoned my mother and stricken by guilt.

However, the water goes back to its borders, and my mum emerges from it smiling.

She's either in the water herself floating on some sort of colourful raft or she's standing on the beach.

She looks young the way I've only seen her in photographs.

I feel relief that she's alive as she calls me over into the water, yet I don't join.

I plan to join, and that's when I wake up.

For context, my mum is alive, but we live far apart.

Grateful for your thoughts and prayers?

Love the podcast.

Jeanette.

31?

31 years old.

Fascinating.

Young for the name Jeanette.

Yeah, maybe it was a cranky revival a little bit then.

I mean, my immediate thought is

sex.

You know, she feels like she'd rather be with her mum.

like childhood

youth

you know when you spent time with your mother

but here are all these guys here's all this cock

suddenly everything starts to get wetter

right

I'd be interested

here's my interpretation your mum saying hey you need to get in the sea there's all these guys in the sea her mum wants

guys aren't in the sea

The cock is on land.

Oh, it's the mum that's in the water.

So she's having this dream going,

Look, these are your dick years,

but don't worry after dick years are over, your ma will still be there.

Do you know what I mean?

You're only 31 now, older ma fucking in her 60s, probably.

Sure, your ma's still going to be there once you've fucking burnt all your rubber on Cork Highway.

It's also possible to achieve a balance in your life, a cock mother balance.

We all need one,

but I think it's like the pressure to give a grandchild, and the mum is like,

you just go out and get it sorted, and then I'll be here to help when it's all over.

It's not going to be a case that you get a baby, and you, and then I'm not going to be here to help.

I'll be here to help, even though the world has ended, the water has broke.

Oh, all right, yeah, it could be that too.

It's also the thing of like your old parents know that you don't, they know it's ridiculous, right?

That's why there's you go around to see them, there's fucking cushions everywhere.

Do you know what I mean?

So you can sit down.

You essentially

buy loads of cushions.

Yeah, you essentially children's hearts, so and so.

Yeah, you essentially need to build a kind of nest to be able to sit and have a cup of tea with them on fucking Mother's Day or whatever.

They know this.

How does union therapy work, Frankie?

What is it?

What is can you sum up Carl Jung for me and all of that?

You've asked possibly

like the second

worst person in the world

with you being the worst.

Okay,

nobody could know less.

I think it's about the shadow self, isn't it?

And it's about your secret desires and things of this.

There's also your animus and your anima.

If you're a woman, you're masculine side, and if you're a man, you're feminine side.

The whole seems nowadays to be much more

relevant and indeed self-evident than it was then certainly okay

and okay

basically freud it's your maw largely but sort of your upbringing and young it's kind of a mythic horse do you know what i mean it's a collective there's a collective unconscious that you're dreaming into

um he believed he walked around his garden with a spirit who was called phaedrus or something a demon who would fold his wings and just walk around the garden how we we chat with him.

May have had frontal lobe epilepsy.

I don't think you're the second worst person to ask, aren't you?

I know.

Several million down the table.

I know some trivia.

Yeah.

My favourite one, as you know, is

Reich, William Reich and his Reichian therapy.

So at the time of Freud, he studied under Freud.

And

he said, which I think is true and has to be factored in.

Look, there's all this stuff that Freud says, but what about material conditions?

You know, so he has a kind of almost Marxist reading of Freud, which is like, yeah, but what about how you were brought up?

I would think the conditions I was brought up in would have shaped me as much as anything, right?

Sure.

So he's quite respected.

Then he goes to America and embarks on a course that sees him become the subject of the Kate Bush song Clyde Busting.

He done all the cloud stuff.

He did cloud stuff.

But he became obsessed with the idea that the air contained a kind of

freeform sexual energy called Organon.

So that's why the song starts with At Night I Dream of Organon.

Which is an amazing first line for a fucking pop song.

And he built these kind of cabinets that were supposed to store the sexualised Organon energy.

So in Woody Allen in Sleeper, when he gets that Orgasmatron, that's a kind of William Reich thing.

But William Reich would believe you have all kinds of like traumatic memories stored from early childhood and Reich and therapy that I've heard of people going on that sounded really fucking fascinating.

Yeah, um, do you think his kind of

sexual cloud

phase

detracts from the uh

absolutely does because like the FBI became convinced that he was trying to start a cult, so he started cloud busting and he had some success, he got paid, he made built a thing that clearly didn't bust clouds but looked mental.

And the FBI were like, this guy's running a cult.

And he sort of almost certainly wasn't.

He was just

mental, mental guy.

Sounds like he was a kind of socialism-adjacent psychiatrist.

And you know, you're going to get fucking short shrift for the American government if you try your commie pinko brain science over here.

I don't think it was the it was it wasn't the socialist side of it though, it was the kind of like getting people to strip and jump in wardrobe kind of side of it.

So they put him in like an asylum and his kid watches him get taken away it's really really sad this kid wrote a really good book about it's called the book of dreams

um

yeah that's right it's really funny you could have such an understanding of how a childhood could play into

uh trauma as an adult and then

you do that to your child this is john lennon you know john lennon grows up without a da yeah and then he has julian lennon and he abandons him yeah you know and it's the formative event in his life and you know he does it yeah man hands-on misery to man it deepens like a coaster channel anyways it's been a great episode here comes the chemical king

uh here's here's just a wee one dear susie christopher and frankie not question such but i've been listening to christopher's now defunct joint artwork podcast and in one episode he says that when he was 10 he wrote a poem about 9-11.

I think I can speak for most listeners when I say that this would be amazing to hear.

And I'm sure his career won't be affected at all.

Please, can we have a reading next time there is a lull in the come chat?

Lull?

I dare they accuse us.

These are lulless

content.

All the best, David.

Thanks so much, David.

Unfortunately, thank you for listening and enjoying the album.

But

David, I don't have access to that poem.

It's lost.

What's it called?

Lost media?

Lost media.

Only the most dogged archivist of outsider art

could seek to find that.

Would uh if you've not heard of this, basically in primary school you had to do it.

Was like, do you know what Alistair Gray does or like Irvin Welsh in the Mariboo Stork Nightmares, where it's like typographical experimentalism, where the words will be printed like in the shape of a snake or to convey

the thinking of the character at the time.

It'll be really explosive out in all different directions, other words.

It's interesting stuff.

But we were getting taught that in school, and we had to write a poem that was in the shape of what we were talking about.

So I wrote a poem shaped like the Twin Towers about

the horrific attacks of September 11th.

Two Towers of Texts.

Two Towers of Texts.

With smoke, I think.

Was there plain text coming?

It wasn't plain text, unfortunately.

It was just the towers.

I can't remember what it was but it was like it was about

I think I'd seen like a article on the internet as a 10 11 12 year old boy and it was about this the face do you remember used to that other stuff about the faces in the smoke there was like demons faces in the smoke of the September 11th attacks and this was about the the demon faces and the smoke this poem that i wrote in the shape of the twin towers.

I can't remember

the actual content, but remember any social worker visits around that time?

It must be so crazy being a teacher.

You would know this as an ex-teacher.

Did you ever have anything handed in like that?

No, but it was like way worse.

Like what?

Like stuff where it's like

really worrying.

No, I don't think mine's what's worrying about it.

No, no, no, mine's worrying for the kids, you know what I mean?

Right.

So you're like, oh my god, what the fuck is going on in our life that we've been missing?

You wouldn't think that about a child if he wrote a poem about 9-11, though, would you?

That would be a light relief for me.

I might steal it.

Publish it.

Yeah.

Do you ever do anything like that?

And you look back on and you're like, I can't believe I

wrote a poem about 9-11 or or something like that.

I remember this one thing that was like there was a drawing competition at our local library to do a Christmas drawing and you know when you're really little you don't not even really I guess like nine or ten or something like you don't know that you're not really good at drawing or maybe you're in denial do you know what I mean and that you're not talented and I drew some snowman like a pretty basic snowman I was really proud of it I gave it to him it was like one of the first up and then as other people's drawings went up, my thing started to look

really bad.

And, like, people can really draw, huh?

So, there's like you know, photorealistic recreations of Santa and fucking you know, all this kind of stuff.

And

I went and I asked them, Could I take my drawing down?

Because it was so shameful, kind of thing, and they wouldn't let me.

And it was just, I can remember it sitting up there and my name being quite big on it as well.

Prominently,

Oh man, I can't wait for it, can't wait for Christmas Day.

That's so sad.

That's so sad.

My friend at school, he went, well, we'll have a competition who can draw a rock at the best.

And I'd got my ruler out, I was really proud of.

Remember, it's like the space shuttle.

That's a big thing at the time.

Did the space shuttle with the ruler and all the bits and that?

And he'd just done this.

almost like a photo just like in this you can see the little scientists you can see their shadows falling on them.

There's a guy on a ladder, and his shadows kind of split on this ladder and stuff.

And it was just like the most

you know, and Charlie Brown.

When Charlie Brown's like building a snow fort or something, and Linus is like, yeah, me too, and Linus is in like a castle, kind of like a Dr.

Manhattan style Mars class castle.

Yeah.

Forgive me if I've spoken about this in the past, but in my primary school,

there was a girl called Cara,

and she was the best artist.

I prided myself in nursery.

This is early, it was three, four, five.

I drew Buzz Lightyear, and the teachers thought it was so good that they copied it in the copier.

They said, This is the best drawing anybody's ever done in this nursery.

I was like, Wow.

So, this was kind of like, oh, this is the thing I'm good at.

I derive, and in hindsight, I derived some kind of self-worth from being good at drawing.

Got to primary school, and I was absolutely fucking blown out of the water water by Cara.

I remember drawing that Battle of Bannockburn.

You were supposed to draw Battle of Bannockburn, and I'd done it.

So we're being taught about the bridge, and I'm like, all right, so great land here, bridge here, land here.

People fighting on the bridge.

We beat them because of the bridge.

And I was so happy with it.

And it was red blood everywhere and green on the grass and this type of stuff.

And then Cara's came up and she

used perspective.

So the people on this side were bigger than the people on that side, and I was just like, fucking.

It's like playing football with someone,

like in the early days of the ball, and then someone's like, oh, we can kick the ball up.

Someone's just using a fucking different dimension.

Essentially, your art was rooted in the Middle Ages.

Yeah, I was still making tapestries.

But I mean, it really upset me that she was better.

And she

tripped over running once.

She endured her arm.

And secretly, I thought, good

anyway.

Thank you so much, Kat.

I hope you're doing well out there.

And thank you so much to the people we've sent in.

Thank you.

Thank you for assisting us.

Thank you for listening to Here Comes the Guillotine Mailbag for Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, dilemma, or issue that you think Frankie, Susie, and Christopher can fix, email hctg at global.com.

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