Running on empty again

Succumbing to overwork again. Not even realising it until my eyes start burning and food sits in my stomach undigested. Repeat after me: I will not take on any more extra work for the rest of September.

Scrawled notes proliferate: blogging and writing ideas, inspired not least by Beth's recent thoughts, which I find both immensely inviting and immensely challenging. Unlike empty bottles, which can be beautiful in themselves, empty pages wait only to be filled. I will, I will find time and space to write as well as work.

The gift of rain

"The one impression that remains now is of rain, falling from a bank of low floating clouds,smearing the landscape into a Chinese brush painting. Sometimes it rained so often I wondered why the colours around me never faded, were never washed away, leaving the world in mouldy hues".
from The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

It's pretty damp, too, in the park, the air heavy with water, when I've finished the novel and the rain has briefly stopped and I venture out for a Sunday afternoon walk. Especially around the lake, a sodden, spooky micro-climate chimes with the misty landscape, rich cultural histories and terrible tales of war in Malaya that fill my mind. The Gift of Rain is a fine, deep, reading experience, as compelling as it is troubling.

Red in the water

(About to respond as usual with a sigh to a friend much given to puns and such, I realise: oh dear, blogging has activated this reflex in me too...)

Growing soft

"The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-axe. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way."
James Hillman
from The Force of Character and the Lasting Life

via Whiskey River - apposite as ever.


Yesterday I saw some old friends I hadn't seen for years. They no longer live in England. I'm always pleased by the thought of seeing them, pleased but also apprehensive. They are deep, complex people, not superficial, and once we knew each other rather well. Supposing one of them asked: So how are you these days? How are you, really? They probably wouldn't ask. Our contact now, after all, is scanty, more an honouring of memories than anything. But supposing they asked?

I might make light of the question: Ah, as I get older I'm less and less able to answer that. Don't you find the same? Or I might find myself saying: Not so good. It's so hard. Why does it not get easier? Although I still feel I keep growing, getting stronger, it only gets harder.

I might say: You know, I think what it is, however fucked up and stunted you are, if you stick at life, keep trying not to turn away, not to harden your heart, not to hate and blame everyone but yourself, you slowly get stronger and more sorted. You take more and more pleasure in music, literature, nature. The colours of the world get sharper, even as your eyes grow dimmer. What's more, though, your defences keep falling away and your loneliness and failure, entrenched since you were young - my loneliness and failure - hurt more and more. Would I put the defences back? I don't think so. But it hurts.

They didn't quite ask. Or rather, they sort of asked. And I sort of gave a 'what... doing' , not a 'how... being' answer. And then we talked of other things. But if they were interested, they'll have seen the answer in my face, I suppose, as I saw in their faces much more than we spoke of.

Lured

This exhibition of British Orientalist paintings from the 17th to 19th centuries has been on for ages. I only just got there before it closes, and was glad I did. So beautiful. So uneasy about finding it beautiful.

Like most woolly-liberal white European anti-racists, I've more or less internalised the basic thrust of Edward Said's famous book, although I haven't read it. That I'd not wish to be found, in my turn, exotic is absolutely incontrovertible. (Come to think of it, I have been found exotic - in some African countries my extreme whiteness was clearly exotic. It didn't feel good; had so little to do with who I am. And, of course, this wasn't in the context of a power relationship heavily weighted against me).
Mrs Baldwin by Joshua Reynolds, 1782

And yet, and yet, I found many of these paintings beautiful, exciting, strong and innovative. Some of them made my heart sing. Such force, skill, colour, emotion and lyricism. They represent much that I'm uncomfortable with, but also convey the genuine joy and inspiration of repressed, uptight British artists discovering landscapes and cultures more intense and vivid than their own. I identify so much with this. I identify, too, alas, with their narcissistic urge to dally with another culture, dress up, pretend to be part of it. I've known both this joy and this narcissism from the moment I stepped out into foreign travel from a narrow working-class background where no one travelled.

So I left the gallery both pleasured and troubled - which I suppose is what you look for, really, in a worthwhile cultural outing.

Hand in glove

I'll probably never see you again

Ghost in the office

My office at the university is a small, narrow room with a window at one end and a door at the other, sideways on to the desk. People appearing in the doorway register first as a presence, an outline, at the limit of my left-hand peripheral vision. I have to turn my head to see who it is.

In my dream last night I turned, at my desk, and stared, puzzled: who was this bulky figure bundled in a big overcoat, woolly hat pulled down over the brow? I looked again and gulped to see it was a old love, unseen for many years, much older now, his face wan and blurred. He stared back. I opened my mouth, but no words came. His face wavered, grew increasingly blurred, and then I woke up, my mind vividly retaining the vision and the memory of feeling, in sequence, puzzled, confused, alarmed.

I've never had such a dream. I woke wondering if he'd just died, or yelled out somewhere in anguish. When hearts have been close, when you've felt another's consciousness beating next to your own, I don't think the link ever quite dissolves - alone and together, we're much more than we know. But, equally, it could have been a thread of recent thought that led to a random memory, sparked a synaptic connection in sleep.

In the office this morning, I found myself casting sidelong looks towards the doorway, a bit bothered.

Stripiness

So this is what hope does: feeling tired and sick, trouble concentrating, most upset by an unexpected dose of virulent criticism, although rational judgement says it's not very justified and mostly the critic's 'stuff'.

Going home to another house last week, I saw a potential me, the same but different, happier. Sitting in the meditation hall on retreat, I saw a potential me who gave more of her heart to this practice, happier. Reading, writing, thinking, I saw lately what I would like to take my mind more deeply into, happier. A 'different me' is not quite it; more like just fewer boundaries, limitations. The merest intimations of such a thing make my soul curl up in fear, leave me weary, ill, unfocused. How tight is the grip of habit, the fear of letting go!

So drawn by this stripey building, I kept taking photos. It's not even a nice building, a gaudy, plastified warehouse across the canal. What I love is the way it's not just one thing, but alternating opposites. Its shimmering, stripey reflection draws me even more.

Wanting to embrace my own stripiness, but it's so hard: hard work holding the illusion of one solid, monochrome self, but harder still to let go and let your stripes shimmer.

The other way

I walked along the canal the other way, which was quite different: no backs of houses and flats, but hedgerows with flowers and people picking blackberries, scrubby open land and small, shabby industrial buildings, more barge-dwellers, in scruffier boats on makeshift moorings. Only the still, dark water and the narrow concrete path the same, and another sunny day with storm clouds flitting over.

click to enlarge

Change the frame and everything looks different. That's what I found, too, staying in another house most nights this past week or so, cat-sitting. Going from there to my office and other accustomed haunts, nothing felt quite the same: a small, quiet shaking up that made things lighter, less oppressive. We sink so deep in our daily ruts, the view out gets harder and harder to see. Enlightening.

It wasn't just this. It was the recent two-weeks retreat, which was my longest ever. I think it was also blurting out to friends the other day some bad, bad feelings that I never mention. That didn't seem a big deal, since I think those things every day. But something seems to have burst, a painful pressure diminished.

So, what with one thing and another, a lifting and opening of mood, more words, more life. There is even a small germ of a not-so-small plan for... well, let's see if it comes to anything. Who'd have thought?

Blue Studio: performed in language

"We write to find what we believe and what we do not believe: there are things we believe or want to believe or think we believe that will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem", said George Oppen.

Message-bearing poetry where the message has been fixed beforehand, not tested in the acts of language, will make me, as a reader, fly away in the other direction and hide in the eaves. One might then subscribe to the loosely projectivist idea of discovering content/as form and form/as content in the act of writing, or in the practice of writing. This is my position. But I can't be naive as all that. I know damned well that poetry is full of ideas and positions that preceded the writing of any particular poem... people have ideas, and they don't put the ideas aside when they write. So what am I talking about? Is it that the ideas are enacted or performed in language, as if discovered anew in language and structure, inside all the means and mechanisms of poetry? Yes, something like this. As if the language discovers that these ideas are 'right' - right for this poem, right here, right now. The poet forgets and then remembers. The reader may remain agnostic, or entranced... I think that the poem I want is the poet's real struggle on the page inside language, inside poetic traditions, inside ideas, inside her time and place.
from Blue Studio: Gender Arcades
by Rachel Blau Du Plessis

I love this. I think I love Rachel Blau Du Plessis, feminist, scholar, poet, refuser of boundaries and assumptions (thank you, Wood s Lot!). I hope she will not prove too often too difficult for me. I seem to be coming around to some of the kind of writing and thinking that defeated me all those years ago as a student.