Image and text

Two years, six weeks and five days, two years, six weeks and five days. This is how she counted the time he'd been gone. She counted between town and countryside, by mountains and by the sea. Between rising at noon and sleeping at the zenith of the moon. As she sewed sparkling tulle, as she painted pretty faces.  Her counting became a part of her. As ropes were coiled and sawdust swept.     No wall or steps escaped; she counted them all.  Counting became the thing that knit her together as her stitches unraveled around her.

And now he was returning to the only life she'd ever known.  The boy who ran away from the circus to become an accountant.  Coming home on a unicycle, that was what hurt the most.

Good luck Thea

Emperors large and small

Two weeks' holiday is supposed to re-calibrate the senses, get perspectives sorted and re-prioritise important features in one’s life. Sure. ’Hope you come back with a short story’, one supportive writer said; there were many short stories on that holiday but few were written down and even fewer made the cut into possibilities, which seems a failure.

However renewed strength came from removal from many of the external social and artistic structures that govern one’s life, many of which are supposed to generate creativity. And this despite some creatively strategic middle-class posts on Facebook depicting the best of the holiday. In fact all of the two weeks was good simply because those awful dominant structures were absent. Good,except for the constant philosophic revision that played over and over in my head; the conclusion being much the same as my thoughts at the holiday’s commencement: that it’s all so bloody pointless.  That competition is divisive and futile.

Watching early relationships flourish, celebrating processional success, admiring the indomitable re-enactment of a misguided heroic culture, I was able to observe my own part in the stupid machine.

The past twelve months have been full and wonderful with trips to international galleries, theatre and concerts, local engagement with creativity and the arts and the realisation that I had acquired a volume of skills that could be converted into useful currency. But only if I chose to convert them. There’s the problem. I don’t wish to join anyone’s travelling circus. Or even sell my own brand of snake oil.  If a recent trip to New York taught me anything, it confirmed that everyone’s hustling all the time. I’m exhausted to the point of boredom with incessant Tweets, Blogs and Facebook posts about ’writing’; how to write, how agents view writers’ blogs, the cost of self-publishing, writers’ festivals, writing cvs.  The seemingly endless babble gives a sense of an industry that perpetuates itself by constant re-invention. The eighteenth-century explosion of print culture was only different, it seems, in its use of technology. For crowd-funding read publication by subscription, vanity publishing - no change there; personal connections, read north London networking.  

While on the subject of simulacrum, I don’t want to lose the enlightening connection that emerged this morning reading Saturday Guardian’s Review. David Hare commenting on Dan Davies’ biography: ’In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile’ describes how this individual (who I believe was the embodiment of deep cultural misogyny) got away with it. He says, 

[Savile’s] ’technique for dealing with his victims was always to keep on the move. “If anyone makes demands, they don’t make them twice, pal, because they get the sack after the first time.”’ 

This was a reference to Savile’s avoidance of the type of simple human relationships I was part of on a family holiday. In the absence of the usual displacement activities that accompany my life, and other party members, there was no keeping on the move; the world was moving around us and we were adapting ourselves to it, establishing and maintaining a pleasurable existence. No more than that. No politicians, writers, celebrities, bishops, priests or professors at our table. Just us and our simple love of a simple family structure, which if it could talk, would shout, ’them emperors are naked, we don’t need them, we got one of our own.’

In juxtaposition to the David Hare review, is Gaby Hinsliff’s on Laurie Penny’s ’Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution’. Despite Penny’s primitivism and short cuts, Hinsliff finds much to commend in her ’raw, bright, urgent voice’. Notably, in the concluding paragraph:

“Deep down, I know if I choose not to play the good-girl game, I might not get as many kisses as I want. And that’s so much more terrifying,” she writes. Women don’t edit themselves, starve themselves and worry endlessly about getting it right because they’re stupid but because they “fear loss of love”.

If only boy culture could teach that wanting to be loved is not a weakness and girl culture could teach that equality, companionship and communication leads to the best kisses then the ridiculously contrived importance placed on prescriptive sexual allure and material status might start to fade. Narcissus why, oh why, did you look at yourself when you should have been looking at others?

As usual, this blogpost ends where it should begin but that’s another story for another day.

Naivety

To be overtrusting and unworldly with a natural or unaffected simplicity is something prized and protected in the very young.  Maybe that's why we gravitate towards these unspoiled new people who can look deep into our souls with the wisdom of ages in their eyes and still find it in their tender hearts to forgive us.

Yesterday this child's mother sang him an Irish lullaby with two uninvited female voices joining in the chorus.  His mother's voice, so sweet and gentle as she rocked her babe, unashamedly betrayed the nakedness of her love.  Our chorus could only hope to follow the pure tones she set, and little wonder as her own mother used to sing with the Bach choir and she herself sang for il papa twice in the Vatican. Nevertheless we gave what we had spontaneously and generously, and she was generous in return.

For us, the simple little ditty that called to us to join in drew on the core of our own trust and unworldliness.  Activity halted throughout the house as various people stopped what they were doing to listen, to experience.  Thereafter the pace of movement was altered, each one more gentle with the other, changed by the sublimity of the moment. 

As this little boy wanders through his life I wonder if he'll ever give the world to hear his mother sing that song to him again. 

Waiting

Truly this procrastination is a wondrous thing.

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she'll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.

It could only be the man, with Jennifer Warnes:

Colours

I'm supposed to be
preparing a portfolio
of work for a deadline
about to whoosh
over my head, leaving
me diminished by
my lack,
feeling stupid.

The magic button works
the first time; this nihilism
requires the severest application
of cognitive behavioral therapy,
self-medication or
total despair.

One thing is certain:
dissonance with everyone else.
No-one exists precisely
on my plane;
there will only be
rescuers and the indifferent.

What better thought is there now than to pick up poetry and convince oneself that the time will be well spent.  'Colours' by Yevtushenko

When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.

Homonyms and anagrams

A word having the same sound, or even the same spelling, as another but having different meaning or origin. 

Nyseo, yones, soyne, ensoy, osyen, are words made up from two different words - anagrams of Yes and No. They are words that straddle the binaries of positivity and negativity. They are not real words. They are not homonyms. I made them up to fit the title.

I made them up because the definition of a homonym is a useful way in to discuss character.  There is a character type who, upon being asked to attempt something new, untried, potentially risky, will say yes.  Then there is the type who, being asked the same question, will say no.

The character who says, 'yes' can be described as foolhardy, inconsiderate of risk, excitable by nature. This character is unreliable. This character takes on too much responsibility.  This character might fail.

The character who says, 'no' is sensible, cautious, does not over-extend his/her energies. Is calm. In refusing risk, this character makes fewer mistakes. This character can be depended upon. To say no is a good trait.  After all, where would we be if everyone said 'yes' to new things? Who would be blameless then?

To examine the origins of 'yes' and 'no' characters would be an interesting exercise.  To ask which type is likely to be happier would be another interesting exercise. So there it is, a writing exercise just made: define a challenge for a character-type to encounter and overcome.  Choose either a 'yes' or 'no' type...

A development

Adelaide Morris MA (Soton) BA (Hons) MMRS; a string of hard earned letters that impress some people enough to trust that I know a thing or two.  Maybe I do and maybe I don't.  Like a lot of people I just haven't been found out yet. There's been more flying by the seat of my pants than real flying.

However, all those suffixes have been bookended by a bruising new development - a small person - new in the world who confers a grander title. No role profile has yet arrived but I rather suspect I'll be flying by the seat of my pants again. At least this time I get a chance to fix some errors from the past, and make some new entirely ones.