A Podcast For You

3. Travelling Light?


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Primarily an excuse to play you Tindersticks' gorgeous "Travelling Light", but also an attempt to unravel in 15 minutes the world of referential delusions, where ordinary events assume personal significance in ways that cross the boundary between quirky beliefs and mental disorders.

Meet, my ex-client 'Eric' and his unshakable notion that love signals are being played to him, and him alone, from a DJ's playlist who professes to have no romantic interest in him at all.

The poem mentioned in the episode is this one by Elizabeth Bishop:


One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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A Podcast For YouBy Free Association Radio