The courage to be nothing, be bored, and to graft away for no reason: the craft of care
Contents
Fiction: Are we nearly there yet?
Boredom, maintenance, graft: the craft of care
Introduction
Last month, the notion of maintenance became a big thing in my thinking about how we operationalise our m/other tongue and live our lives as Theraplayers. At that point, I was too close to the intensity of generating fiction in November 2024 to step back and wonder what it may illuminate about the tacit maternal knowing I bring to the endeavour of operationalising our m/other tongue. This month, I feel able to at least stick my toe into the water of that data: we have two pieces of fiction to ponder.
The majority of the new fiction takes place between 14:00 and 22:00 on 31st October during a school half-term holiday. On a whim, Val and Graham have decided to visit Stonehenge, but need to pull into a service station not very far from where they live. As they do this, they hit a pothole and the car gets a puncture. While they are waiting for the recovery service, the weather deteriorates, the motorway becomes blocked due to an accident, and the service station fills up. One of the parties stranded there turns out to be from a specialist school that is run by Daniel. Daniel remembers Val from when he was an 18-year-old doing a year of work experience as a teaching assistant before he started his training as a teacher. What he saw of Val and the way she worked with Joe set the direction of his teaching. Sarfan is someone who would be classed as an illegal immigrant who works in one of the fast food outlets at the service station.
This piece of action takes place at about 18:30 as the power supply to the service station fails. Initially everyone is left in the dark, then the scene becomes partially illuminated by emergency back-up lighting.
Fiction: Are we nearly there yet?
Any change brings disturbance. Lights going. Lights coming back, but dimmer. The shiver in the room was palpable.
“Do you think the heating will go off?” Val asked Graham, not sure if her shiver was a reaction to the change or to an anticipation of cold.
“Surely a manager will appear now!” Graham responded.
The room was like a tide. You could hardly call it semi-darkness, but the lowering of the light level made the place feel like a seashore after the sun had set, but before the light fully faded. Eyes seemed unable to manage the semi-ness. There were trips, some apologies, some swearing. One tide seemed to be heading for the toilets, another towards the food counters, as if bodies needed to be comforted in the middle of the rip current of not sure-ness.
The stationery shop was pulling down its rolling screen, cutting it off from the rest of the service station. Val watched. A woman in a high vis jacket was ushering people out of the space, getting them across the carpet divider, that imperceptible in-shop/out-of-shop line in the sand — even more invisible in the gloom. She then pressed a button and the screen started to slowly descend, but very slowly the heaving throng of watery people crossed back over the in-shop/out-of-shop line until she had to push the button again to stop the screen’s descent.
Too far away, Val couldn’t hear the words; but she could see frustration in the woman’s body — and fear. She scuttled forward, ushering people, then back to press her button. Forward to usher again. Back and forth, back and forth, like a manic wave until the barrier got low enough that it would take an effort to be inside the shop, not outside. Val could see the relief on the woman’s face and in her shoulders.
Closer were the food outlets. Other people in high vis jackets were trying to pull down barriers and screens. The noise here was close enough to be heard as words.
“No, sir, we can’t leave them open. We can’t run the tills because we have no connection.”
“Why not?”
“We are on emergency power, that’s not enough to run the network. No network, no tills. We can’t sell anything.”
“But don’t these people need feeding?”
Really these people didn’t need feeding, the sense of emergency only cut-in as the lights cut-out. And it was only a sense of emergency. All were under cover. For the moment all were warm and, really, they were not far from civilisation. It wouldn’t take much for services to reach them if a real emergency occurred.
But for those stuck, not knowing, the emergency felt real.
“How long will it be?”
It was the question on everyone’s minds, but it was being voiced at the food outlets.
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know, madam. I don’t know. I don’t know when we will know. I don’t know who will let us know. I just don’t know.”
Sarfan looked out from behind the counter. He could feel his eyes get big. He, too, was reminded of the sea. The not knowing. The endlessness. The cold and the heaving of movement of people crammed in. The stomach, not sure if it was fear or sickness or hunger — or all three.
“Cookers not work, no?” He said to his colleagues.
“No mate. We’re done for today.”
“We give this food?” He asked.
“No mate. We’ll just have to chuck it. The order system won’t work.”
“But it’s food.”
Only someone who had experienced no food and starvation to the point of eating anything, would know. He’d never managed to cope with the waste these people made. He thought about his grandmother who cared for them after his mother went, not able to go out because she was a woman, not prepared to send them out for fear they would be picked up and made to fight. Until she just stopped.
Sarfan had found her cold in her bed in the morning. He and his brothers looked at each other and knew they had no choice. They left her there, taking any jewellery, anything that might have value if sold, anything they could carry, and they left.
Sarfan tried to never shut his eyes. When his eyelids slid down, when he could not resist it any more, the noise was too much. Every scene, every sort of transport, every bang and bump, every gun and terror, every illness. Every death of every kind. The times when he wished it had been his own death, for relief.
He wrapped up the burgers that had been cooked ready for expected orders. He boxed up fries.
“Here,” he called to the people. He put them on the counter.
He used the water in the water boiler and filled up paper cups and put out tea bags and the whole box of cartons of milk.
“Here,” he called to the people.
The drinks, the fizzy stuff, he left. That never went off and could be sold tomorrow when the world was right again. But he would not waste.
“You’re toast, mate,” his colleague said. “Your wages would never cover all of that.”
Sarfan sank to the floor behind the serving counter. He couldn’t care any more. He’d wait till they’d all gone and clean down the equipment, as he always did. He only liked this place when it was shut and he could clean out the stale fat smell and scrub the floor and take the leftovers and give them to the people who slept under the bridges and flyovers in the town that he had to drive to, to the house that he shared with fifteen other men who also had jobs that they had to keep silent about. They took turns in the beds. They were pleased for whatever food someone brought back from their job. They had food and board deducted from their illusionary wages, but at least this way they actually got to eat something. But it was more than Sarfan’s heart could bear, to take the food from his job to what was meant to be his home.
He wished the lights were brighter. The intensity of the lights here, at all times of the day and night — he liked it; there were no dull gaps for the horrors to creep in, and it helped him stay awake as much as possible. He may have reached the purported golden land, but he was still travelling, trying to find safety. Mostly when he shut his eyes, he saw his Gran’s eyes open and her limbs stiff and her light of love gone.
Fiction: Churn
Daniel checked around his staff. Sally couldn’t knit as it was too dark, but no one would know as the needles kept clicking, and her hum kept going. Next to her, Kian was still looking at his book. Maybe there was enough light to read, maybe not. But they were keeping going, holding together.
He could feel Jacob and Mia tightening beneath his arms, and he soothed with his voice, explaining what was going on. At the same time, he texted the school asking them to contact parents and carers, trying to sort out some video calls so that the children could be reassured. At least there was a strong signal here, even if the tills and ordering systems had gone down. The mobile data bill on his phone may end up big, but this was an emergency.
Yasin was checking the charge on the phones of the children who he’d been playing games with. He was talking with them about how they might change to games that didn’t need electricity…or much light. Daniel couldn’t quite work out what was going on, but there were ripples of laughter from the group, and he knew Yasin was quite a magician in turning tech into imagination games. Marley was holding a torch so that Jayden could continue with his very serious game of chess, and she’d now taken Nina onto her lap.
All was well. All were cared for. All were calm. Bigger catastrophes had already befallen all of these children. Yes, this was unpredictable, and unhelpful, but it was what it was. It was life, and these children were living life because his magnificent staff were keeping the things that could be kept predictable, predictable. No matter what, they kept the whole show on the road by keeping connections ticking over.
His phone rang. It was his deputy at school letting him know that she’d managed to get through to the police and explain the situation. The second school minibus was on its way to the north side of the motorway. The 20-minute journey was going to take about an hour, but the police were going to escort the minibus there and the children could cross to the other side. The minibus would then take them back to school via back roads. Some carers and parents were making the same journey if they had cars. She’d send Daniel all the details as they became available and let him know when the minibus had arrived so he could keep the children in the safe space they’d created until it was time for them to be rescued.
Daniel had to admit he was relieved. It could have felt on a knife edge, so much noise and confusion and uncertainness, and he had been worried about all the children, and his staff. It was so easy for any of the children to suddenly find it was all too much and throw chairs or scream or do something that drew negative attention to their need to manage. He gave Jacob and Mia a bit of an extra hug, sighed, and smiled. Let others churn, he’d be still.
Boredom, maintenance, graft: the craft of care
As I ponder the fiction and what it elucidates about my tacit knowing, three ideas have kept going around and around in my head: boredom, maintenance, and pointless activity (graft). My resistance to innovation started this wrestling stage, this immersion in ideas at the start of my five-year research project into operationalising our m/other tongue, and I’m faced with three sweaty giants that I need to take on in this wrestling ring of research.
Years ago, I read Phillips’ On kissing, tickling, and being bored (1998), and I found myself going back to it. It made me think again about the in-between spaces and how they are managed. Reading Phillips and then contemplating the fiction made me question how this unexpected space of stuckness, the experience of enforced doing nothing, is held differently by Daniel from many others stuck in the same space. In being held differently, very different creative outcomes arise.
Sarfan, because of his exposure to the appalling experiences involved in being a migrant, cannot bear the spaces, the emptiness, and the boredom. What comes rushing in during those moments is the loss of his mother figures, especially his grandmother, who had held safety within non-safety. His identity is lost because the space is not managed and maintained for him in a non-exploitative way. But Daniel and his team — they maintain the space, the boredom of nothing happening. They are facilitating ontological security despite the potential for the children in their care to, like Sarfan, be lost in the churning of distress that comes when boredom has not been maintained by the facilitating maternal environment at a developmentally appropriate phase of infant development.
So what does the fiction tell me about this operationalisation of m/other tongue in our practices as clinicians, as therapist educators, as researchers, or as managers of caring organisations?
On the surface, in my reflexive writing, Daniel and his team are a response to the focus you wanted explored about how teachers might use tacit maternal knowing in their professional practice. But what is it that my tacit understanding of space and time and nothing happening — no initiative, no innovation — is trying to tell me about how tacit maternal knowing can be used by us all as Theraplayers?
Daniel is male. Sarfan is male. Despite all my resistance to maleness and fear that the powerful but silenced experience of m/other tongue will keep getting sidelined and drowned out if I let maleness and men back into my thinking, my inner space is obliging me to have males centre stage in this fiction. For some reason, I don’t want to change the notion of ‘craftsman’. ‘Craftswoman’ or ‘craftsperson’ doesn’t feel right. My embodied sensitivity is perhaps telling me that these three actions — boredom, maintenance, and graft — are necessary in understanding how m/other tongue can be operationalised, and that theorising something around malesness in the caring space is part of how to make sense of that operationalisation.
Sennett (2009) has been an interesting read in terms of trying to make sense of craft and craftsmanship. There are resonances in his writing: some sort of edge-of-awareness bouncing around of ideas between his writing, the fiction, and an understanding that I am crawling towards in bafflement and a significant amount of frustration. At this stage of this Heuristic Inquiry, I am wrestling to get those resonances out into the open.
Sennett (2009, p.254) says the craftsman is focussed on “how the work itself is done”. It seems the craftsman is process focussed, as my notion of maternal sensitivity is process focussed. He talks about the good craftsman being able to work with the not knowing quite what you are about when you begin and being able to avoid perfectionism: knowing when to stop and focusing on the relational aspects of the object that is created. Such commitment, Sennett suggests, is a hallmark of vocation, a gradual accumulation of skills and a conviction that this is the purpose of your life (p.263). Within this, the routines of craftsmanship are not static, but evolve. He sees the craftsman’s workshop as a place where issues of autonomy and authority are played out through ritual and religion, something that I would see as a commitment to the ineffable and tacit (see last month's post). The workshop, he says, should balance tacit and explicit knowledge (p.78).
People do things in the workshop. They have a joint endeavour, not everyone making a whole object but all connecting, under the canopy of the master, to contribute to the creation of something material. The final product is a pinnacle that rests on the foundation of the labours of all, much of which is repetitive, boring, maintenance-focussed, and plain hard work (graft).
Is this blog, as practice based research, a workshop space? Can I use the routine and ritual of writing as a place where boredom can be facilitative, and graft lead to creativity? Will this craft, through the situation of this labour as Heuristic Inquiry, illuminate the tacit to make explicit how we might operationalise our m/other tongue and be Theraplayers in all realms of our working lives?
I can’t know what the end will be. I can’t know if you will receive my crafting as a thing of utility or a thing of beauty, and at this stage I have to keep doing the routine and the ritual and let them evolve into greater understanding and purer theory. That is the stripping away aspects of the Heuristic Inquiry process, but we are too early in the process yet for it to be anything other than messy. Things must come apart and the consistent elements examined before our object can be reconstructed into the material product of the workshop.
So we come back to maintenance, the committed deliberate sticking with the process and letting go of the outcome or, as Bion (1990) would have it, entering the space without memory or desire. Not to innovate, not as an artist, no creative leaps of individualistic genius (Sennet, 2009), but slow, slow building up of layers, sanding down of shapes, knitting, reading, playing chess — but most of all, using the space to stay in touch relationally. This is what I think Phillips (1998) was saying about how boredom, when managed by the interested but unimposing maternal figure, enables such experience to inform the human capacity to take one’s time — an essential part of crafting, I would argue.
But boredom that is an abandonment, too much emptiness, is a threat to ontological security. It becomes a falling into nothingness (see Davis and Wallbridge, 2014, for a good summary of Winnicott’s ideas around early psychic functioning) or a major threat to ego integrity, a too-much-for-too-long-with-no-one-to-help-you trauma. Phillips (1998, p. 77) says that boredom “protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting”.
So what does all that actually mean in our attempts to operationalise our m/other tongue and to be Theraplayers?
There is some weird process of the Theraplayer being utterly essential but in the background. As I said last month, it is a tricky place in our world because of the lack of recognition of this state and an emphasis, as I see it, on innovation and the individual leaps of ‘progress’. However, Sennett (2009) implies these ‘leaps’ become unsustainable because they are individual, not built on communities of practice and commitment to the joint endeavour of creativity. In our roles as Theraplaying professionals — clinicians, therapist educators, researchers, and professionals running caring organisations — our commitment is to the craft of care. In those roles we are not individuals, we are part of a workshop, a community, each doing their bit to make the whole.
To be a craftsman of care takes courage because it is a signal that one is not playing by the individualist rules of the capitalist game. One is not giving power to those who are already powerful, but one is apprenticing, as Sennett (2009) would have it, to a family-like system of learning and making together. That is a tricky place to hold against the power of ‘the bottom line’ in our current economically driven climate.
My fiction is not an art but a craft. My cultivation of theory from the fiction is a craft. The ‘boring’ bit of churning out these words that at this stage are not transformative or inspirational or luminous is somehow (I think?) a maleness, maybe a paternal aspect of moving the tacit to the explicit in our craft workshop here.
So that then leaves me pondering how I can integrate a maleness that is not subsumed by a destructive misogynistic capitalistic patriarchal shadow to create a place where the creative master can facilitate (not the Master in Lorde’s (2018) terms).
This pondering brings me to another piece of reading that I have been unable to shake off. This piece about Annie Ernaux’ play about abortion suggests that (some) men do not have a theory of mind when contemplating the experience of women. I would see this as (some) men not having the ability to empathise with a women’s embodied experience — in the context of this play, women’s experience of abortion. In terms of the operationalisation of tacit maternal knowing (m/other tongue), it’s the experience of conception, gestation, birthing, and feeding the very vulnerable infant.
So to be confronted with something that is beyond words, something that has no language to convey meaning but whose meaning is conveyed anyway (the epistemological responsibility of last month) via the visual realm of theatre is overwhelming to the point of men passing out. But the men are there, and they are allowing themselves to be impacted, and it is a step to at least an awareness that empathy is something to be cultivated. Daniel is able to be both mother (the children who use his body to manage the boring space of nothing happening) and father (the organisation of other people coming to take the children out of an experience of too-muchness).
At the moment, I don’t know how he does it. But I wrote the character, so somewhere inside me, I do know. Just as I speculate (some) men may not have enough ‘theory of mind’ or desire for empathy for women’s experience of tacit material knowing, it seems I must confront my lack of theory of mind or relational embodied empathy (Finlay, 2005) about fathering and maleness that is facilitative, that is part of the craft workshop of family life and therefore can inform our m/other tongue.
But in pondering this fiction I am wrestling with something about the interface between an at home, lived experience of the daily grind in caring for an infant, and the application of the daily grind as a theory to professional practice as clinicians, educators, researchers, and managers. Is that where the male/fatherly bit comes in — craftsman rather than patriarch, as an expression of maleness? There was a little flash of this in the first novella, A Necessary Life(Story) in Brenda’s husband, a banker turned shaker chair maker (see The call of the kites)
Is it something about doing the same tasks but facing different directions while doing this? I wonder if the key point of the fiction is Daniel being able to manage the space, what I am calling boredom, in a way that is both mother and craftsman because he is not overwhelmed, while Sarfan can’t because the space is destructive and unhealed.
I think there is a better understanding for me, or at least a preferred understanding, of the Daniel position — because of whiteness? Because of his westernness? Maybe there is something in the writing of the fiction that holds for me the possibility of moving from destructive patriarchy and misogyny (that destroys the lives of people of all genders) to a more creative relationship between fe/male-ness? I must know something of this, because I’ve written it into the fiction somehow, and yet my consciousness still will not yield it to the world of words — yet.
Maybe this month’s addition to the m/other-us-all (not a man-u-al) is about how I acknowledge the boring, repetitive actions I do as a creative part of using m/other tongue, even though it feels like graft. Even though the development or evolution of understanding feels opaque. It is like the daily grind of mothering an infant. You don’t know what the future may be, but you attend to the process of feeding, cleaning, holding — and in terms of this research, immersion and questioning.
So my new question for our growing ‘m/other-us-all’ is:
What boring graft I have gifted to humankind, and how will I take pride in that?
The rest of the ‘m/other-us-all’ can be found here, although I think outside of the tongue-in-cheek use in this blog, I would call it a handbook maybe? What would you call it?
The growing glossary can be found here.
I want to emphasise that I am not writing about ‘real’ mothers and fathers. This is about taking the traditional biological and sociological family functions of women and men and turning them into a theory that means they can be used by anyone, regardless of gender, who is trying to create environments of care whether that is in their therapy room, in the education of therapists, in research, or in running organisations that care.
Research update
What I’ve been doing this month:
In terms of Heuristic Inquiry, I am in the first stages, those of initial engagement and immersion (see last month’s diagram). The processes are identifying with the focus of the inquiry and being open or receptive to experience. The self-dialogue for me is the ‘eye’ that I now bring to the ‘data’ (fiction) generated in November 2024. As part of the openness to experience, I would also see myself as being open to literatures (of many forms) as an information super-encounterer (see Seeking Fulfilment through our m/other tongue).
What I want to do next
This month's post has highlighted for me how operationalising our m/other tongue and identifying as a man could be connected. I want to go back to Blaffer Hrdy’s Father Time, see what Winnicott, Bowlby and Bion say about fathers and maleness, read David Myrow’s chapter Men in Theraplay in Theraplay Innovations and Integrations (I’ll reference any I use properly next month). I’ll make the space, then, for being receptive, and I may turn over a cog into the incubation phase of the Heuristic Inquiry cycles within cycles.
What you can do to be part of this research
If you identify as a man or as male, would you be interested in having some conversations with me about being a Theraplayer, or using Theraplay, or what this notion of our m/other tongue might mean to you in your professional practice? I have a very specific perspective as someone who identifies as a woman (and mother) and who was assigned that way at birth. I both want and need to be able to see that from multiple perspectives.
Those conversations might be via Zoom calls, maybe with a group of you, or it could be an email exchange. Such conversations would be part of this research, and so I would provide you with participant information sheets and ask you to fill in a consent form if you would like the conversation to be directly included in my Heuristic Inquiry research journey. Informal, anonymous thoughts from anyone on this subject can always be put onto this Padlet. If you want to be included in a more formal way, then please contact me directly.
Bibliography
Bion, W. R. (1990). Notes on Memory and Desire. In Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique (pp. 243–254).
Davis, M., & Wallbridge, D. (2014). Boundary And Space: An Introduction To The Work of D.W. Winnincott. Taylor and Francis.
Finlay, L. (2005). ‘Reflexive embodied empathy’: A phenomenology of participant-researcher intersubjectivity. The Humanistic Psychologist, 33(4), 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15473333thp3304_4
Peacock, F. (2020). A Necessary Life(Story): A Novella as Research Process and Findings. Peacock Counselling.
Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.
Phillips, A. (1998). On kissing, tickling, and being bored: Psychoanalytic essays on the examined life. Harvard University Press.
Sennett, R. (2009). The craftsman. Penguin.