Wheelie

The pleasure this gives me is quite disproportionately immense.

Pondweed

Ibis

I feel like this should come with poetry. The soft blue sheen on the bronze that seems to drift up from the lake and turn everything bluey-bronzey. These long, singing curves and shy, endless beak. Still thinking of beak and stillness, waiting to pounce, when this creature rose up at the other end of the  lake - the mythical version. What a lovely statue. It is poetry. The pictures must be their own song.

Very red

 Tree outside the very red Serpentine Pavilion.

No metaphors

It's when life gets too small for metaphors that you're in trouble, I think - when there's space only for the baldest, most literal and immediate realities of things. That's when you can't write, when you have no stories.

Reading Beth's and Peter's engaging discussion of Faulkner's novel, Absalom, Absalom!, I appreciate how allusive, how multiple it is, how it's about themselves and each other, their own intellects and accumulated knowledge and opinions, as much as it's about the book. How every shape carries [metapherein] their conversation towards another, related, shape. How they have much that is rich to say because every exchange brings them to something else the book reminds them of, and so around and back to the book itself again. This is why I will continue reading.

Metaphor is necessary as the ground beneath our feet, the food and drink in our mouths. WIthout it, no flow, no fiction, no poetry, no art - no human as distinct from animal.

On bad days in the invisible prison, I'm an animal. A legless, eyeless, earless kind of worm, at that.

How to make a space

Why is it that when I’m despondent, when I feel trapped, I cannot write? The sense of imprisonment repeats itself over and over in my head, the words reducing to a smaller and smaller box of closed-in thought: I hate this. It makes me crazy. There’s no way out. Bored. Empty. Burdened. I hate this…

It helps if I focus on other people, shifts the energy, restores a sense of myself as more active, less isolated. But it’s also tiring, and there’s so little oxygen in the closed-in place. I hide away because my resources are so small.

It helps if I take my mind somewhere else by reading, watching a film, looking at paintings. This is a respite, but it dumps me back in the same place, because it’s losing myself and what I need to do is find myself – the self, the words, the visions that get stifled in the trapped place.

It helps if I move, walk, just breathe, pay attention to something other than the thoughts. But the thoughts are loud, loud: I hate this. It makes me crazy. There’s no way out…

I have to keep pushing and digging, keep the doorway open. Life cannot be this. I have to make a space to nurture stories, metaphors; a space to spin a multi-layered cloth; a space to spin and spin until I’m laughing and dizzy - I’ve forgotten what that feels like. I don’t think I’m too old. As long as I’m still breathing, I am not too old. I have to stop the trapped place getting so small I can’t breathe.

Heron in Hyde Park

Grey-green in the rain, a heron by the Serpentine, like a statue by a garden pond 

- a long, still minute... then a barely discernable twitch of the head. 

Movie sequels: no

Oh dear, no. Not even when number one was one of my favourite films ever. The Girl who Played with Fire was a big non-event, alas not subtle, absorbing or delicious at all. And now I come to think about it:  how could it have been otherwise? A feature film is quintessentially a single, self-contained artefact, a quite specific form that builds, climaxes and resolves in a couple of hours. And the building, in order to satisfy, must be a building of scene, characters and relationships, as well as of plot - the arc of climax and resolution then sweeping all of these along together. But the makers of a sequel are not, of course, going to spend time on constructing all over again the characters and scenario already constructed in part one, the assumption being that the viewer already has all that information. This must have seemed like a gift to the makers of The Girl who Played with Fire. Faced with the impossible task of adapting a 600-page novel, at least they could leave all that stuff out and proceed directly to the narrative. This meant excising the first, enchantingly digressive, one-third of the book, along with all the poignant personal detail throughout which is what makes us (well, me anyway) care about these people when they start rushing around and risking their lives. Frustratingly pointless. I may have to see the third film for the sake of completion and as the maximum gesture of fandom towards the novels I enjoyed so much. But not for any other reason. Shame.

Vicarious travels

Stuck in London myself this August, I've been privileged to travel vicariously to China and Nepal. While philosopher and novelist Will Buckingham, more often to be found at ThinkBuddha, journeys around China to research his latest novel and blogs a travelogue as immediate and funny as it is learned, artist Samantha Zaza, whose beautiful blog Harika comes usually from Istanbul, is volunteering in Kathmandu and sharing her sketchbook, photographs and writing from there. An almost daily flow of words from a terrific writer. The eye and heart of a talented artist far from home. This is the internet at its most miraculous.

Sitting in the sun