Yesterday would have been my brother’s birthday and I thought about it on and off all day. Memories came and went like visitors in rain-splattered macs carrying variously, ice-cream, smiles, beer and fists.
How different would things be; would we be, if… but I realise that there is no ‘if’ really. It is all what it is, and it is what it is, because it was what it was and there is no use fretting about it, feeling guilty about it or worse, resentful about it.
So tomorrow. Throw off the mac and stride naked and proud through the streets of London? Or maybe just stride inside the usual clothes, just naked inside like most everyone else, having to exist within whatever shell God, grace and genetics has gifted us. When I look at people in passing (not those that catch the eye for their pretty shells) but just in passing, I wonder sometimes who is really inside, looking back. Who they are. What they are, what they were and why.
Just as I do when I look in the mirror.
Hello to you
face in the mirror;
tidy man in your suit and tie
with the button undone
just there so the soft spot is naked and exposed
did you mean to do that?
Why are you smiling?
that button is a signal –
the soft pulse crying out ‘touch me’
and when your eyes do just that
I feel them like a finger stroke
run down below the belt
where there’s nothing
beneath the braces
and the shirt-tails tickle the soft spots
that no one else can see
in a still, erotic memory.
Right. I seem to have deleted several posts while trying to shift them about. Have hit ‘restore’, but something is awry.
Ah well, I don’t suppose they are any real loss. If I can find them, I’ll put them back, but what are they after all, but my rambling, self-focused bullshit?
Light is swelling here, 22hrs of daylight and the snow fleeing away. It’s hard knowing when to go to bed, especially for me, who doesn’t sleep much anyway. I need to decide soon whether to apply to stay, or return home and decide what to do from there.
Well, I’ve nothing to say of any stonking gravity or poetry, or, really, any self-focused bullshitting to do either. The long daylight is not conducive to naval-gazing, and in any case thinking, right now, is off the agenda for the sake of self preservation.
So, in case my battallion of fans comes searching and finds all the missing posts – fear not, it’s just a glitch caused by my trying to be smart and reorganise. I should know better.
Now. A cup of something to help sleep come and another long day of light tomorrow. Back to London next week for a visit and some decisions.
What I have enjoyed are the legends and myths, and the old poetry:
Hávamál – Hávamál, the second mythological poem in the Elder Edda, The poem goes back to the Viking Age (c.793 – 1066 AD) and the virtues presented are temperance and sobriety. The moral is practically oriented and sometimes balances on the edge of cynicism.
21.
The cattle know
when it is expected home,
then it walks to the farm from the outfield;
but unwise man
never knows
his own limitations.
23.
Unwise man
is always lying awake
thinking of many things;
he is tired
when the day comes,
everything is in imbalance as before.
35.
Bid farewell
do not always visit
the same place;
it may easily happen
one gets tired of the dear one
if he forgets to leave.
I’m just an unwise man who never tires of his dear one. And I do have 27% Scandinavian dna, so maybe that’s why I like this part of the world. Still. Perhaps it’s time to go home.
Mornings find me achy and reluctant. The alarm beeps and I realise that though I’m tired, it isn’t really about not having much sleep. Outside is frost. Inside is a chill. The feeling of walking on a beach when the tide is coming in and has you trapped between wave and breakwater. you want to be off the beach and in a cafe drinking tea and eating eggy bread, but there are only cliffs.
Somewhere, there was an iron ladder that someone had hammered in to the rock – swollen with rust at the water line like the joints of an old man; iron cold above, but leading through the air to the grassy top, where you used to sit back, feet over the edge, head back, biting the salt air, hands in the dewy grass.
The walk that followed that climb – along the headland to the village and the waiting pub – granted a good, earned weariness that you knew would be washed away in the glorious langour of a fire and a pint of beer and a sandwich. But this tiredness now is not that. Beer won’t touch it. The fire would only startle me with its spit and crackle, the drink would sit in my guts like washing up water, and the chat of the locals would make my ears shrink.
‘Fuck off,’ I’d want to tell them. And ‘fuck off’ is what I want to say to too many people. The ones I don’t even know who want to do nothing with the gift of life but rip it from others. Stupid men who have no imagination or charity. No love or desire. Not just them though. Everyone. Even the harmless passerby who smiles at me. Even the shrill pleasure of the kids. That’s wrong.
I dream of beaches. Of headlands, of long roads without a destination. In reality I know I’d be restless and whiny. I might be stuck forever with the terrrible strip of duct tape that seems welded to my mouth. I might go down with this ship. but still – I might take some time off.
Oh, musn’t forget the fucking miserable song. Wouldn’t be the same without one:
I watched lilting while I was doing the ironing for my trip away. I chose it because it looked interesting, and because Ben Wishaw looks beautiful in it. I think I’m glad I did.
On the surface it looks… well, what is it? Quiet enough to watch between strokes of the iron without missing much? Although, with some of the dialogue in captioned Cantonese, I had to watch, but that was ok. It’s beautifully filmed, but oh.
The film is about a lot more than it seems to be on the surface. Or maybe that was just me. It’s when Richard brings in a translator to bridge the gap – those gaps – in what was said, and – ‘no, don’t say that. Don’t translate that…’ what was not said, that the pain started.
It’s about hiding, and about guilt, and about what we don’t say, and don’t do, and what we do say instead, and the repercussions of that. The repercussions of trying to fill a gap with something not suitable. The repercussions of silence.
Wouldn’t it be better to say it, because we only think we know what the outcome will be. Wouldn’t it be better not to put reasons and explanations and meanings on what people say. To understand that what they don’t say matters too. To get that sometimes they just need a translator. Not from Chinese to English, but from themselves to fucking English first, and then onwards.
Sometimes I think we are all speaking Chinese, and instead of listening to the translators, filling in the gaps ourselves. And then, if we stop speaking, sometimes people hear better. If my plane crashes tomorrow, there will be no more blog, and no more stumbling speeches. Only what I wrote from my heart, without fear.
The part of the film where the healing begun was at the end, when the translator stopped, and they just spoke. Said what they wanted to say, in their own language, because they weren’t afraid of being understood. And then, despite not knowing a word that was said, understood each other completely.
It was a long and difficult day, and it was also Leavers Day.
Out in the quad were strange young men and women, who only yesterday had been boys and girls in scruffy uniforms, arguing the toss with ‘Miss’ and ‘Sir.’ There were many over-large, or too long suits, and a goodly number of way-too-short dresses teamed with heels so killer high the effect was ruined by the bent-knee shuffle. Some, born beautiful, looked elegant and achingly promising. Others, passed over by the brush of physical perfection looked on with longing, not realising that their own individual sparks were just as bright.
It was endings. It was almost five years of knowing them, and some farewells were especially felt. The boy who came to us angry and neglected, who could barely write his name and whose only response was to throw chairs, punch desks and scour us with a foul mouth stood beside me and whispered ‘Sir… I’m worried that I might cry. I’m going to miss it here.’ ‘Funny isn’t it,’ I said, ‘How we think we know how we are going to feel at a certain time, on a particular day, and then we don’t.’ He nodded. ‘I never thought I’d miss it,’ he said.
He looked spruce, pink cheeked, and he came specially to certain people for autographs in his leavers book. Unspoken testimony to the knowledge of the journey we’d been on with him – through more tragedy than many people know in their whole lives. I like to think our care and affection for what was a pretty unlovable guy, who still shone with the wonderful, lovable personality he always was underneath, and is now, made a difference.
I like to think that once, when I begged him to come inside (after I’d followed him all round the outside of the school) because I was freezing and wouldn’t leave him alone, and he asked me ‘Why the fuck can’t you leave me? Just fuck off back inside.’ and I told him it was because I was worried about him and wouldn’t go inside without him, and that because no matter how many chairs he threw, and curses he flung, all we did was duck, and try to offer him a better way to respond (not for our, but for his benefit) that we made him realise that he was worth it. I like to think that.
I felt so bloody proud of him today. And certain others who’ve had it tougher than most, because although all of them are worth it, some of them you ache for, and really hope will fly straight where otherwise they might not have. And that makes it worth it.
We all know there is so much that is bogus, disappointing, sick, and warped about what is ‘organised religion’ today, but…
I like to think that whatever lies behind all that is real, and not representative of the sordid, jealous, hypocritical and petty bigotries and cruelties that so many people have made of it.
Didn’t sleep well for the second night running and deprivation mingled with an outsize case of angst saw me arrive at the eye doctor’s large Georgian pile. It’s odd when you should be at work and you’re not. There’s almost a holiday feeling. I like to notice things I wouldn’t have seen if I was in work – a wren tucked in a bush outside the window, the sun, fuzzy and bloated across a field – even an unexpected poem that you write, unable to see the paper or writing clearly as you sit waiting for the eyedrops that will dilate your pupils to do their work:
In an ideal world
there would be a chair
and a fire cracking jokes with the wood,
spitting small bright embers
onto the slate.
You’d sigh and relax
and we’d cradle whiskies
like warm amber babies
between our hands.
Outside the world would try to gain entry,
testing the locks and bolts;
the weak section above the lintel;
the blind chimney where the bird fell down.
Remember the battering of wings
fluttering like a heart behind the brickwork?
How we considered breaking it down –
or entering roofwards…
realising in the end that it was hopeless,
that there is no way out for some of us,
not once we have fallen.
Remember how the sound grew fainter, day by day?
While we crouched pretending that we couldn’t hear?
gripping each others hands and howling
in the speechless terror of so much fear.
Now, no one could claim it’s a great poem, but what is it? What’s it about? Where did it come from, un-thought about and unplanned? While I sat with my eyes closed. Perhaps we should all take the day off and just go walking in the woods or along the seashore, to see what we can see, and jot down whatever unspoken words are in our subconscious – or maybe not.
I only know I sat and blinked and blurred and went in and was told it was alright. It was looking good and I could go home and come back in six months. I drove back to work and spent the rest of the morning in dark glasses, unable to see the computer screen but able to take a class and write on the board and show someone how simply enunciating the sound each letter makes in a word, instead of pronouncing the ‘a’ ‘buh’ ‘cuh’ could allow them to read a word and know what it said in a way they couldn’t before.
A small thing, perhaps, along with the unreadable writing that can now be read because I promised a doughnut to a reluctant boy who insisted he couldn’t change but did it for sugar. Small things, but maybe I do something right, for someone, just sometimes.
Otherwise, a beef about St. Patrick’s Day. First, what’s with calling it Paddy’s day, or Patty’s Day? Is it because we’re all ‘secular’ now? Pfft. It remains what it is – St. Patrick’s Day – the other is offensive to the ears and totally irrelevant. Apart from this though – what the hell is it with St. Patrick’s Day? You can’t turn round without something green smacking you on face like a damp dick. Leprechauns, shamrocks, on breakfast tv, on billboards, and all those people who haven’t been near Ireland for a hundred years turning out in the streets and spitting out bits of gaelic.
What happened to St. Andrew or St. David, or even St. George? What the hell? Rant over.
Finally, I had to share this. I mean, I like a nice pair of boots, but… I was looking for a new pair of boots, I swear but stumbled across this. WTF? And look at the comments! Man, I feel SO normal:
And here: It’s not Friday, but so what. I’m not whingeing, I’m dancing about. Make the most of it.
‘Naked came I into the world…’ and sure as hell, we go out the same way. Our ‘must have’s’ and our precious necessities and our belongings dwindle away to nothing but a pair of trousers we wouldn’t once have left the house in, a pair of trainers and a rather dubious hat acquired from somewhere. In a cupboard in the house we have sequestered a family of jars of jam, and tins of ham like refugees in an attic. These are what we have taken to stuffing under our jumpers in supermarkets for no reason that can be found.
We come to need nothing, really. Even the possessions sometimes piled round us – furniture, cups and plates, books, mean nothing. They become little more than theatrical acoutrements – the props of a life once lived, which puzzle us now to behold.
We come to nothing much but a small foetus – just less pristine. Hairier, thinner, uglier and with less sap. When people think of us it is perhaps sometime later when they are stuck in traffic or queueing in a shop, and recalling the funeral that has been, or is to come and they remember us in a snapshot – that particular smile, on that day when they were amused by us. That way of walking, the back of our head, the intent expression we had when opening that present, or looking upwards at the stars, and then they’ll cry, because when someone is gone, they’re gone for ever and cannot be consulted again, or held, or cussed, or asked. Their uniqueness has passed and will never come again, and that part of our history is gone too. Who will know us then? Who will remember?
You leave a suitcase stuffed with old photographs – one of a grandfather never known, a grandmother as a girl – a set of great grandparents – and older people – older as in wearing Edwardian hats and dresses or miners helmets. There are letters too, and autograph albums filled with beautiful copperplate handwriting ‘Roses are red…’ And a memory ‘Remember, Iris, that day on the beach…?’
Well, they are all dead now. All gone. Once it was ‘today’ for them. Everything was urgent and of concern and now, nothing.
Perhaps it was this thought, or the coffin, or the singing of ‘How Great thou art’ and the held in tears, that tired me out and strained my nerves, but the week following has been difficult. I think my nerves are ‘strained’ because I feel delicate and anxious and fit for nothing. Reading my list of ‘To Do’ for that week, one of the items was: ‘Phone Ron.’ Well, too late now.
We bring nothing with us, and we take nothing away. We are missed, or not missed, and everything that was urgent and current and so necessary and precious slips away with us into a tiny knot of limbs beneath a heap of bedclothes being discussed by other people outside the door of a room we do not even own.
We just had the Winter Soltice. Shortest day, longest night. Another year has come and gone in a circle that is part of both a smaller and a larger circle, because everything is that – a circle – from your rising up in the morning, bleary with sleep and unknowing into the light of day, through to the dying of the light at evening and the sleep that rounds it – to the making of a cup of tea, or eating a meal, or even falling in love. The same beginning, the same apex, the same fall. A day, a meal, a life.
Also, everything is a microcosm of something else, like in dear old Mice and Men that we study at school. Everything is something else, in a little nutshell. A metaphor and a nothing or perhaps everything (sometimes I can still think that).
So we are interconnected in our ways, from that other circle of human development: hominid to Sapiens, to whatever slide we are on now.
How they do the solstice in Brighton: (no good footage from this year yet.)
Pagans all, even how we feel. Cold and clemmed beneath the soil, murmuring our prayers and supplications for the cold to pass, victims of the way our reptile brains react to the modern wiring. Victims of the deep and dusturbing joy of being alive.
So, no decent post to offer you, I’ve been doing this so long, but don’t want it to become a whine-blather-wtf place, so I’ll just say Nadolig Llawen to you, and a wish for what you wish.
“St David of Wales or ‘Dewi Sant’ (in Welsh), was a saint of the Celtic Church. It is thought that he was born near the present town of St David’s. The ruins of a small chapel dedicated to his mother Non may be seen near St. David’s Cathedral.”
Many years ago, when I was very young, I was first taken to this place, built in a scoop of land in a relatively unknown part of Wales. I remember it as a woody, watery place, filled with small movements and green spaces. Inside, I wandered off alone in the stone cathedral, where voices rose like sighs to fill the upper reaches of the space and fall again on the heads of visitors, half heard.
I remember going into the Lady chapel and hearing what I could swear was a mysterious, distant singing, the words of which I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like monks. The adults smiled at my imagination and refused to let me stay longer, or to sit and listen so they could hear it too. They were probably right, it was just the wind in the eaves, or my fertile mind, but to this day I can’t be sure.
I was half pagan, half Christian, rejecting what didn’t seem right about what I couldn’t have known then was hypocrisy, or human prejudice asserting itself behind a screen of piety. I only knew that things were not that simple, perhaps because I’d seen the green man behind the pillar and seen the mason’s mark behind the rood screen.
“…and in that quiet Cathedral close
The Green Man sees me. Longs to
tell me what you whispered when
you passed beneath that day,
despising my feet of clay,
your face regarding stone…”
What was really the truth about Dewi Sant? What was really the truth about what I heard. What is really the truth about anything after it has filtered through the sensibilities and fears and mistrust of the human heart? Perhaps it’s always what it is, but we just can’t see it.
An experiment in normality 