1 00:00:05,560 --> 00:00:13,840 Robert, it's great that you're here today. Um, you're here because you brought out this book, Metamorphosis of Life in Pieces in 2023, 2 00:00:14,170 --> 00:00:18,670 which is, uh, a memoir of your illness, but also a memoir about Kafka. 3 00:00:18,760 --> 00:00:22,510 Um, well, first of all, why is your book called metamorphosis? 4 00:00:22,840 --> 00:00:29,590 Uh. Good question. Um, so it's about multiple sclerosis and my experiences with with that disease. 5 00:00:30,100 --> 00:00:33,970 Um, given the mess the Ms. makes of your insides. 6 00:00:34,270 --> 00:00:40,990 I could have just as easily called the book mess. Uh, or mysterious or any other word that begins with M and ends in us. 7 00:00:41,290 --> 00:00:47,439 But the reason that my design and my brilliant designer chose, uh, to highlight the M and the s, uh. 8 00:00:47,440 --> 00:00:55,450 Or the beginning. The ends of the word metamorphosis, uh, is because, of course, it's a disease which, like other diseases, changes you. 9 00:00:55,780 --> 00:01:01,000 It changes your insides. It also changes the way that you approach the world and your place in it. 10 00:01:01,330 --> 00:01:09,220 And one of the models, I suppose, that I had at the back of my head when I was starting to think about it, was Kafka's story. 11 00:01:09,640 --> 00:01:17,800 Uh, and that was partly catastrophizing, because at the back of my mind, I was thinking, what's going to happen to me in the future? 12 00:01:18,040 --> 00:01:25,300 Will I be abandoned? Will I end up being there, dying and being chucked out with the household rubbish, as happens to Gregor Samsa? 13 00:01:25,450 --> 00:01:33,340 And of course, that's not what happened. Uh, but Hardy says in one of his poems, um, if way to the better there be it exact a full look at the worst. 14 00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:37,330 Uh, and that's what I was doing, I suppose, when I was thinking about a Kafka story. 15 00:01:38,200 --> 00:01:43,330 Um, the production of metamorphosis that's on at the moment in London by, uh, Lemn Sissay. 16 00:01:43,750 --> 00:01:49,780 Um, talks about exactly that, the shift from breadwinner to burden and the anxiety that comes with that. 17 00:01:50,050 --> 00:01:55,890 So I found that very powerful in a book, but it's also about a change in the relationship to your body as well. 18 00:01:55,980 --> 00:02:06,640 Um, yes. So, um, your body becomes a kind of foreign body to become something, not one that you inhabit unthinkingly. 19 00:02:06,850 --> 00:02:13,960 Instead, it becomes sort of strange flesh that you carry around and have to work out how to deal with, 20 00:02:14,170 --> 00:02:16,750 not just from day to day, but from moment to moment. 21 00:02:16,930 --> 00:02:21,999 So, for instance, today, uh, a little peek behind the scenes for anyone watching this is that we are, 22 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:25,660 um, sitting in a rather grand room in Queens College. 23 00:02:25,900 --> 00:02:30,430 Uh, my own college is maudlin, which is about 300m away. 24 00:02:31,030 --> 00:02:34,330 A few years ago, that would have been a two minute walk for me. 25 00:02:34,660 --> 00:02:36,190 Uh, I would have thought nothing of it. 26 00:02:36,280 --> 00:02:46,120 Today it took me 15 minutes of very slow, very measured, very patient walking, uh, checking every possible crack on every paving stone, 27 00:02:46,120 --> 00:02:57,010 every change in level to make sure I didn't do what I often do, which is fall over, uh, and, you know, crack my ribs or, you know, smack my wrist. 28 00:02:57,340 --> 00:03:05,620 Um, so, yes, one of the things you have to do with any kind of disease like this is you have to recalibrate your place in the world. 29 00:03:05,680 --> 00:03:09,610 And that's not just physically, but I suppose emotionally, intellectually as well. 30 00:03:09,850 --> 00:03:14,470 You have to work out again where you fit in because the world seems different. 31 00:03:14,680 --> 00:03:21,580 Uh, and you seem different as well. Well, I'm sure there are quite so many cracks and bumps on the paving stones in Queens. 32 00:03:21,970 --> 00:03:28,480 Um, but, um, as you were saying that, it reminded me precisely of Gregor in, uh, metamorphosis, 33 00:03:28,480 --> 00:03:35,440 when he wakes up and finds himself in a new body and has to recalibrate, uh, for his own movements. 34 00:03:35,740 --> 00:03:41,470 So it leads me in asking, what role does Kafka and his metamorphosis play in your book? 35 00:03:41,860 --> 00:03:45,580 So largely to begin with, it was just catastrophizing. 36 00:03:45,850 --> 00:03:51,250 Uh, I was trying to work out through my reading what kind of literary models I might have 37 00:03:51,340 --> 00:03:55,630 to try and decide what was happening to me and what might happen in the future. 38 00:03:55,900 --> 00:03:59,770 And I think that's true of any kind of book, isn't it, that we all use books as lenses, 39 00:04:00,130 --> 00:04:04,360 uh, that help us to focus attention on our lives in a different way? 40 00:04:04,540 --> 00:04:14,470 Or, uh, we use them as kaleidoscopes. They help us to refract our surroundings, uh, in a slightly new pattern, to look at them with, with fresh eyes. 41 00:04:14,770 --> 00:04:16,720 So I suppose it began like that. 42 00:04:16,840 --> 00:04:24,910 But then, as I reread the story, when I hadn't reread for many, many years, I started to realise that there's a kind of subdued comedy, 43 00:04:25,240 --> 00:04:32,830 uh, in it there's a kind of, um, so deadpan, sort of Buster Keaton style slapstick, uh, to it. 44 00:04:32,920 --> 00:04:36,640 Now, I don't speak German, so I don't know whether this is true in the German as well, 45 00:04:36,650 --> 00:04:43,540 but the certainly in all the translations I've seen, uh, there's elements in which we are rooting for this character, 46 00:04:43,840 --> 00:04:52,270 but at the same time, the battles that he's having against this indifferent or hostile world is not unlike that of a silent comedian, 47 00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:56,680 uh, who finds himself in a world that seems to be set against him. 48 00:04:57,070 --> 00:05:05,020 Um, and as I got more and more ill, um, I started to realise that was a decent model for how I was going to tackle my, um. 49 00:05:05,100 --> 00:05:09,330 Illness to think of myself not as a tragic figure, but as a kind of comedian. 50 00:05:10,540 --> 00:05:15,699 I love that because everyone reads Kafka so often as full of disaster and despair. 51 00:05:15,700 --> 00:05:22,839 But actually it's very funny. And particularly this, the sort of sense of him waking up as a as some kind of vermin insect. 52 00:05:22,840 --> 00:05:26,170 And his first thought being, how am I going to get to work? Home. 53 00:05:26,670 --> 00:05:31,930 Um, you talked about, uh, literature as a kind of homoeopathy. 54 00:05:32,010 --> 00:05:41,530 Mhm. Um, uh, I think in, in the work and in interviews and I'm wondering does that so it inspired you but did it also enable you to, 55 00:05:41,560 --> 00:05:44,920 to some of the, the difficult things. Yes, probably. 56 00:05:44,920 --> 00:05:49,209 So reading um, some of my Beckett's, uh, plays like Happy Days, 57 00:05:49,210 --> 00:05:54,910 in which Winnie begins the first act buried up to her waist, but can move her top half of the body. 58 00:05:55,150 --> 00:06:01,750 Um begins the second act buried up to her neck and can't move anything apart from blinking and puffing out her cheeks. 59 00:06:02,200 --> 00:06:08,350 That, in some ways, was a sort of parody of the decline that my own body was going through, 60 00:06:08,620 --> 00:06:13,689 and the fact that she has this fixed smile and keeps talking about it being a happy day. 61 00:06:13,690 --> 00:06:17,770 This has been a happy day in some ways, was a kind of joke, 62 00:06:17,920 --> 00:06:25,390 but in some ways was a serious attempt for me to think about the attitudes that I could have to what was going on around me. 63 00:06:25,660 --> 00:06:28,870 So yes, homoeopathy model lens. 64 00:06:29,260 --> 00:06:37,930 I think the key thing is the books aren't just, um, for me at least they're not just sort of Tardis is, uh, that's transport. 65 00:06:37,930 --> 00:06:45,100 You, uh, or, um, uh, allow you to look at your life kind of in a slightly different way. 66 00:06:45,520 --> 00:06:49,630 They allow you to slip on someone else's skin. Try it on for size. 67 00:06:50,140 --> 00:06:56,920 Um, in the case of Gregor Samsa, it's a very kind of scaly and kind of awkward skin, uh, to try on. 68 00:06:57,070 --> 00:07:05,229 But it is that sort of, um, sort of cast catastrophizing narrative that allows you to imagine what might be 69 00:07:05,230 --> 00:07:09,910 worse and how might you deal with things if and when they do get much worse. 70 00:07:10,950 --> 00:07:15,050 One of the other central characters in in the text is Bruce Cummings. 71 00:07:15,060 --> 00:07:20,670 Um, and you write about him writing a journal, um, as therapy. 72 00:07:20,850 --> 00:07:28,230 Um, so that links again, doesn't it? Uh, I guess it was I was writing this through Kafka, also a kind of therapy. 73 00:07:28,620 --> 00:07:34,680 Yes, I think it probably was. So one of the things that Cummings, who publishes under the pen name Bob DeLeon. 74 00:07:35,590 --> 00:07:41,860 One of the things that he does in his diary is he treats himself like, um, uh, like an insect. 75 00:07:42,100 --> 00:07:48,940 In fact, he was an entomologist. So he writes pamphlets on, on lice, um, and, um, bedbugs. 76 00:07:49,420 --> 00:07:55,500 Um, and in some ways he treats himself like one of his own specimens, uh, 77 00:07:55,510 --> 00:08:02,800 and calls himself, um, uh, he describes what he's doing as a study in the nude. 78 00:08:03,590 --> 00:08:08,000 Um, and so, yes, in some ways that was another possible model, 79 00:08:08,210 --> 00:08:16,280 because I started myself writing a diary on the understanding that we make sense out of our experiences by making up sentences about them. 80 00:08:16,460 --> 00:08:22,370 Yes, we we frame we compose our experiences by putting them within some kind of story. 81 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:31,210 Um, and whether you're journaling or blogging or tweeting, uh, or simply telling someone at the end of the day how your day is being, 82 00:08:31,640 --> 00:08:41,390 that sense of narrating what's happened to you is a way in which you can control and manage what might at the time be disorderly and unmanageable. 83 00:08:41,810 --> 00:08:50,690 And of course, then reading reading other people's journals, like Reading Kafka, becomes a way of then testing your experiences against other peoples. 84 00:08:51,410 --> 00:08:57,800 Yeah. Um, like Kafka, writing metamorphosis in a sense, was a way of him dealing with his own situation. 85 00:08:57,920 --> 00:09:01,760 I was very struck. Um, Kafka is not the only writer that comes up. 86 00:09:01,770 --> 00:09:08,030 Um, uh, I was I started writing down, you know, all the ones I spotted and what you heard about Beckett. 87 00:09:08,030 --> 00:09:12,709 And there's Lewis Carroll in there. Um. David Bowie. Um, so the greats. 88 00:09:12,710 --> 00:09:16,910 Um, and one of the things I've noticed very often is that writers. 89 00:09:17,750 --> 00:09:23,420 Well, it's it's sort of like dealing with a pantheon of the greats. It's also about measuring yourself against other writers. 90 00:09:23,690 --> 00:09:30,140 Does that play a part for you? Not. Not really. Um, not measuring against perhaps trying to find some company in. 91 00:09:30,500 --> 00:09:41,060 So, um, like a lot of writers, um, I suppose, uh, I look for, uh, points of connection, uh, and opportunities for conversation. 92 00:09:41,390 --> 00:09:45,680 And you might think that talking with dead people is a bit of a one sided conversation. 93 00:09:46,070 --> 00:09:54,950 Uh, but if you listen closely, you see that they do still have things to say to you, but also sometimes to say for you as well that you realise that, 94 00:09:54,950 --> 00:10:01,010 um, uh, the people that you're reading can articulate your own thoughts better than you could manage yourself. 95 00:10:01,550 --> 00:10:10,580 Um, and that too, is something I found helpful, uh, in the months and then the years after I was diagnosed, realising that writers, 96 00:10:10,580 --> 00:10:19,040 whether they are pop lyrics like David Bowie or they are of children's literature like Lewis Carroll or adult literature, uh, like like Kafka. 97 00:10:19,310 --> 00:10:21,280 Um, they, uh, they met. 98 00:10:21,290 --> 00:10:29,030 You realise that there are things you recognise as your own in their writing, but you could not have formulated those thoughts on your own. 99 00:10:29,310 --> 00:10:31,820 And that's that's why they've become so important. 100 00:10:33,080 --> 00:10:40,610 Um, that was a sentence that really struck me when I was reading, um, which comes up and you said links with just what you were saying. 101 00:10:40,880 --> 00:10:46,370 I started to think of myself in the first person and the third person at once. 102 00:10:46,730 --> 00:10:53,990 Um, and one of the things which is so striking about this text by Kafka and which students struggle with, 103 00:10:54,380 --> 00:10:57,710 is the mixture of the first person and the third person. 104 00:10:58,280 --> 00:10:59,910 Can you talk a little bit about that? 105 00:10:59,940 --> 00:11:06,530 What was that feeling that came with the illness, or was it something that was inspired also by reading the text? 106 00:11:06,980 --> 00:11:11,540 I think it's something that's always been there, partly because, like a lot of people, 107 00:11:11,540 --> 00:11:14,810 I've always had a slightly, um, awkward relationship with my own body. 108 00:11:15,110 --> 00:11:21,890 Uh, and I've never thought of it as as being me rather than something which I, uh, live in. 109 00:11:22,040 --> 00:11:28,310 So I suppose I've always had a slightly kind of semi-detached kind of sense of, uh, of myself in relation to my body. 110 00:11:28,580 --> 00:11:29,750 Um, but also, yes, 111 00:11:29,750 --> 00:11:39,860 one of the things that happens when you do have what is a very physically damaging illness is that you do start to think of yourself, 112 00:11:40,070 --> 00:11:44,840 uh, both in the past and the present and the future tense simultaneously. 113 00:11:45,290 --> 00:11:50,150 Who I was, who I am, who I might be. And things carry on getting worse. 114 00:11:50,630 --> 00:11:58,790 Um, and you also start to think of yourself as, um, uh, the person who is presenting to the rest of the world, 115 00:11:59,180 --> 00:12:09,680 and then the person who is inside and perhaps isn't seen, uh, who is exactly the same as in my case, he always was. 116 00:12:10,040 --> 00:12:17,120 But there is perhaps a growing gap between that self-perception and the way that the self is perceived by others. 117 00:12:17,480 --> 00:12:22,250 And one of the things that you can do when you write about that is you can reconcile those two selves. 118 00:12:22,700 --> 00:12:26,600 So there's a lovely line at the end of one of the the sonnets in Astral and Stella, 119 00:12:27,080 --> 00:12:33,620 uh, by Philip Sydney, uh, where um, astrophysics says I am not I pity the tale of me. 120 00:12:34,870 --> 00:12:44,260 Because by writing himself down, it might be that that can allow other people, uh, to, in this case his his lover, Stella, 121 00:12:44,620 --> 00:12:53,800 to appreciate and understand him better than if he were simply presenting himself as himself because she can imagine him as a romantic hero, 122 00:12:54,220 --> 00:13:01,780 a lead in a story, rather than just the kind of shambling, bumbling figure who presents himself to her. 123 00:13:02,050 --> 00:13:05,650 And I guess, like a lot of writers, that's also true for me as well. 124 00:13:05,860 --> 00:13:11,560 You know, if I'm writing about my own experiences, I want them to be helpful for other people. 125 00:13:12,040 --> 00:13:19,720 But also I'm thinking of myself partly from the inside, partly from the outside, and saying I am not I. 126 00:13:20,260 --> 00:13:24,640 If not pity, at least think about or I try and understand the tale of me. 127 00:13:25,480 --> 00:13:28,510 Although that also goes precisely back to comedy, doesn't it? 128 00:13:28,520 --> 00:13:33,250 Because it's that discrepancy between the two viewpoints that allows the comedy to come in? 129 00:13:33,340 --> 00:13:37,780 Yes, absolutely. What Bowdler calls the power of being yourself and someone else at the same time. 130 00:13:38,170 --> 00:13:47,840 In his essay on comedy. Um. And it's what then gives rise to puns and double acts and all the other, uh, kind of physical features of comedy. 131 00:13:47,860 --> 00:13:50,890 And in my case, I suppose it produces slapstick. 132 00:13:51,480 --> 00:14:02,470 Uh, we began by talking about the, uh, the, the tone of Kafka as being a kind of refined, uh, a kind of deadpan form of slapstick. 133 00:14:02,740 --> 00:14:10,090 Um, and what I found is, when writing about my illness or indeed just trying to cope with tripping over and, 134 00:14:10,120 --> 00:14:15,370 you know, bashing myself up, it helps to think of it as a form of, um, 135 00:14:15,400 --> 00:14:23,350 accidental slapstick rather than a tragic fall, because that is a way of putting it in perspective, uh, 136 00:14:23,350 --> 00:14:29,020 and then start to realise that a sense of humour and a sense of perspective are more or less the same thing. 137 00:14:30,170 --> 00:14:34,129 And that's really helpful because that's what's going on in Kafka, I think, as well. 138 00:14:34,130 --> 00:14:37,550 And it's one of the things that's quite difficult to get people to understand. 139 00:14:37,850 --> 00:14:45,320 Um, so that's, um, that's wonderful. The book kind of embraces Kafka, and there's a beetle very prominently on the cover. 140 00:14:45,620 --> 00:14:56,599 But how how is the work different? I mean, you you talk very, um, fascinatingly about this sort of drawing close to the various writers, 141 00:14:56,600 --> 00:15:00,650 but also pulling away in the kind of self and other working in the text. 142 00:15:00,780 --> 00:15:04,880 So but how is the book? How does it go beyond Kafka? How does it differ from Kafka? 143 00:15:05,150 --> 00:15:13,370 So I suppose the key difference is that, um, the trajectory of Kafka's story, uh, is a slow, steady, 144 00:15:13,370 --> 00:15:19,670 inexorable decline, uh, leading to, uh, being chucked out by the maid with the rest of the rubbish. 145 00:15:20,210 --> 00:15:29,270 Um, my story begins. The first chapter is chapter 42, and then it gradually counts down like a clicking metre down to zero. 146 00:15:29,420 --> 00:15:36,110 Zero is when I had a stem cell transplant, uh, which involved main stem cells being removed, frozen. 147 00:15:36,440 --> 00:15:39,350 My immune system, uh, being, uh, 148 00:15:39,620 --> 00:15:46,189 basically destroyed through chemotherapy and then the stem cells being reintroduced in the hope that it would stop my, 149 00:15:46,190 --> 00:15:56,060 um, immune system from attacking itself, which is what Ms. basically is, and it seems so far to have been a pretty qualified success. 150 00:15:56,510 --> 00:16:00,739 Uh, so that's although my walking is perhaps getting slightly worse. 151 00:16:00,740 --> 00:16:08,240 Everything else is as it was, I'm still working full time and so on, which is why the last chapters of my book start ticking upwards. 152 00:16:08,450 --> 00:16:10,370 1234567. 153 00:16:10,490 --> 00:16:20,960 So whereas, uh, Kafka's story is one directional, uh, mine, I suppose I hope, uh, has, uh, more of a kind of an upward curve at the end of it, 154 00:16:21,260 --> 00:16:24,250 except that Kafka's book isn't one of decline in the end, 155 00:16:24,260 --> 00:16:32,120 and the last paragraph allows the sister that's true to go out to the family, leave, and go out into the sunshine. 156 00:16:32,120 --> 00:16:41,870 The sister stretches, uh, and is about to become, uh, an adult and maybe marry and maybe start a family in which maybe somebody is going to be. 157 00:16:41,870 --> 00:16:49,520 I mean, this seems to be as though you're you're actually right. It's one of those weird, um, genres, a tragedy with a happy ending, isn't it?