“I hear 4-7 voices, all the time… They talk to each other, talk to me… ‘Janey’s doing this, Janey’s doing that… should she be doing that? … why don’t you do this?’ It’s very distressing, it’s very obscene… I hate it.”

Janey Antoniou is a mental health service user and freelance trainer and writer on mental health issues, and she was on Radio 4 this morning. Today’s Between Ourselves discussed schizophrenia and you can hear the highly recommended programme again (for a limited time) on the show’s site. Janey’s responses to the interviewer’s questions were, unsurprisingly, pretty heartfelt:

“Are you hearing them now?”
“Yes. I don’t want to talk about it otherwise I’ll have to start concentrating on it.”

But there is another side to the voices, one that we talk about more often in literary terms, but which becomes sidelined when we discuss mental health issues. Janey’s fellow guest, Dolly Sen, explained that “I also hear voices and I also hear them all the time. When I’m feeling depressed then the voices will be negative, but likewise when I’m feeling a bit high or a bit elated it can be actually quite beautiful to listen to my voices. I’m a writer and a poet and I do sometimes get my poetry from the voices I hear.”

Dolly’s poetic voice, as well as various other guises, can be heard on her website. She is one of a number of writers published by Chipmunka, the world’s first dedicated mental health publisher, who believe that mental health will become part of the social norm, and are doing all they can to ensure a smooth, informed transition. You can read more about Dolly, Chipmunka and the Mad Lit genre in an article by Ben Watson over at Mute magazine.

You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East. My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards. You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people.
- Khalil Gibran, from You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
- John Keats, from The Eve of St Agnes

There is none like her, none.
Nor will be when our summers have deceased.
O, art thou sighing for Lebanon
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,
Sighing for Lebanon,
Dark cedar, tho’ thy limbs have here increased,
Upon a pastoral slope as fair,
And looking to the South, and fed
With honey’d rain and delicate air,
And haunted by the starry head
Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate,
And made my life a perfumed altar-flame;
And over whom thy darkness must have spread
With such delight as theirs of old, thy great
Forefathers of the thornless garden, there
Shadowing the snow-limb’d Eve from whom she came.
- Alfred Tennyson, from Maud

He was following orders.
And the children already lying in puddles of filth,
their mouths gaping,
at peace.
No one will harm them.
You can’t kill a baby twice.

And the moon grew fuller and fuller
till it became a round loaf of gold.

Our sweet soldiers
wanted nothing for themselves.
All they ever asked
was to come home
safe.
- Dalia Ravikovitch, from You can’t kill a baby twice

Other sites, quicker and more verbose than STML, have already noted the sad demise of Ivor Cutler, poet of the Scottish sitting room. STML has little to add bar personal reminiscence (John Peel, sadly missed, Andy Kershaw, Summer Lightning &c.), and as with all the best things the most suitable memorial is not biography but the work itself. So we are proud to present, in association with The Mic, eine kleine Cutler posted in accessible format for your pleasure. Sit back, press the play button, and enjoy…

• Shoe Hangers (Monday Night at Home, BBC 1953)
• Bounce Bounce Bounce (John Peel, 1969)
• I ate a Lady’s bun (John Peel, 1976)
• Get away from the wall (John Peel, 1977)
• A mouse asked a rat (John Peel show, 1978)
• Melon (John Peel, 1979)
• A Land of Penguin (John Peel, 1981)
• On the Harmonium (BBC Radio Three, 1982)
• Women of the World (John Peel, 1983)
• The Wren (John Peel, 1983)
• The Revelation (John Peel, 1984)
• My Next Album (John Peel, 1984)
• I built a house (Saturday Live, 1984)
• Country Door (John Peel, 1985)
• Loneliness (BBC Late Lineup, 1986)
• Questionnaire (John Peel, 1986)
• God’s Blessing (John Peel, 1986)
• Roget (Andy Kershaw, 1986)
• The Clever Night Doctor (John Peel, 1987)
• A Romantic Man (Andy Kershaw, 1987)
• Picking Your Nose (Andy Kershaw, 1986)
• Footsteps (John Peel, 1991)
• The Following (John Peel, 1991)
• Pstola (John Peel, 1993)
• Ros Vulgaris (John Peel, 1993)
• Sharks (John Peel, 1994)
• A high treat (John Peel, 1994)
• Five or Seven (John Peel, 1995)
• 80 metre race (Andy Kershaw, 1996)
• Laughing Poker (Andy Kershaw, 1996)
• A Real Man (Andy Kershaw, 1997)
• Good Morning How Are You Shut Up (Andy Kershaw, 1997)
• The River Bends (Andy Kershaw, 2001)
• Once A Fortnight (Andy Kershaw, 2002)
• A Touching Surprise (Andy Kershaw, 2002)
• Little Black Buzzer (Andy Kershaw, 2002)

(And yes, you can also click the links to download the tracks themselves. Thanks to the excellent ivorcutler.org for the files - check them out for more info. More Book Fair gossip on the way.)

A Guardian article by the well-travelled William Dalrymple (author of the excellent From the Holy Mountain and The Age of Kali, among others) reveals that the best-selling poet in the United States in the 1990s was not Frost or Whitman, or any European versifier, but Rumi, founder of the Mevlevi order of Sufism and composer of verses now, if reports are to be believed, set to music and used as the soundtrack to Sarah Jessica Parker’s workouts. The shame is that Rumi’s work is now almost forgotten, if not deliberately suppressed, in much of the Islamic world; the order which he founded outlawed by Ataturk in 1925, ironically, in an attempt to make Turkey more ‘western’. (What is it with cross-cultural confusion this week?) Dalrymple touches upon the sources, much debated, for much of Rumi’s work: his love for his favourite disciple, which can be understood both within the framework of Sufi teaching, and without. STML, for whom the Sufi Meditation of the Heart is a shamefully infrequent source of joy, would like to recount a little of his life…

Jalal al-Din Rumi, Sufi mystic, poet, and dancer, was born in Balkh (then in Persia, now part of modern Afghanistan) on September 30th, 1207, and moved to Konya (now in Turkey) when he was a small child. By the time he was six years old he was having visions, engaging in philosophical discourse, and fasting.

At Konya he was exposed to Sufism and in 1230 he began a nine-year initiation into the Sufi brotherhood, thereafter becoming a spiritual master. He was nicknamed Mevlana, which means ‘Our Master’, by his disciples.

In 1244 he met and fell into a passion for the dervish Shams al-Din Tabrizi, a “rare beauty wrapped in coarse black”. As the shahed (the disciple who incarnates the Divine Beloved) of Rumi, Shams inspired desire “to exalt the soul”. Shams convinced Rumi to discard his dusty theological texts and begin to experience life to the fullest.

They left Konya, living in the desert together in “close communion and discussion of mystical philosophy”. The disciples of Rumi became extremely jealous of their closeness - there is an echo here of that “disciple whom Jesus loved” - and persecuted Shams, forcing him to flee their desert hermitage.

During the separation, Rumi wrote a great number of poems describing their love for one another and their mutual love of God, in the form of ghazals, the traditional Persian poetic form of couplets sharing a rhyme and refrain.

“Be drunk with love,” he wrote, “All is love. / Without performance of love there is no access / to the Loved One.”

In Arabic, ghazal literally means “speaking with women”, but in Persian and Urdu it has a different meaning: it is the last melancholic cry of the deer cornered by hunters. After Shams came out of hiding in May 1247, he was murdered by the jealous followers of Rumi.

For forty days after Shams’ death, Rumi, putting on mourning robes, a white shirt open at the chest, a honey-coloured wool fez, and rough sandals, began a whirling dance of lamentation and love around the the poles in the garden in which Shams had been killed. From this dance emerged the sama, the trance dance ritual which is central to Sufism.