Friday, May 3, 2013

The Rampant Heart (or Cooking the Books)


I’m still tripping over old notebooks even though I thought I put most of them in the attic.  It would be ok if I just let them be instead of dipping in and reading them – if I kept the lid shut.  Instead, I open the box (the hardback covers) and out they fly, all these unfinished stories, bits of almost-poems, chronicles of life with my constant companion, M.E.  I feel as though I am rifling through someone else’s writing, taking in the good, the bad and the ugly with a kind of dispassion.  Reading old notebooks is like spying on oneself, not altogether comfortable.  That person then is not this person now, but one is implicated.  She was not necessarily expecting all the words to be read by another, which I now am.  Grudgingly, because I want to be better than her, I admire her – particularly how she negotiates the business putting down words with being, at times, so ill that she can hardly hold the pen.  She keeps trying to push on, though she shouldn’t.  Some of what she writes is so overblown I want to rip out the pages.  But there are lines that take my breath away and I am half tempted to nick them.  I have in fact done this and cobbled together a poem from notes taken when she was in the far north of Scotland.  It was the image of a brown bird on a rock, perched on a leg as thin as wheat grass.  This is the image that stands at the heart of something-or-other, and my workshop group also liked this particular line.  But I have now looked up wheat grass and found that it is not what I had in mind (the dry kind with some kind of kernel and whispy stuff on top) – it is green and people use it for juicing and promoting health.  Bugger. 

 
But anyway.  I have other poems standing like greyhounds in the slips ready to go, but I’m not letting them.  I have submission block.  It takes a kind of courage to send work off, particularly if one has to put it in an envelope with a covering letter.  It takes a stronger heart than the one I feel precariously beating in my breast.  Ok, that last sentence is awful but now you can tune in to what I experience when looking over old notebooks.  Precariously beating is not good, by anyone’s standards, particularly if it is a heart.  Long ago my sister and I decided to compose the worst poem ever and present it at a family gathering.  We called it The Rampant Heart (even without the qualifier, this is a dodgy word to have in the title).  The last line went: it is too late, oh funfair of my fate!

 
Though actually, this does kind of speak to me now.  I’m going to send those damn poems off.  In the funfair of my fate, it’s not yet closing time.

 

 

 

6 comments:

Anna MR said...

I love "the funfair of my fate". In fact, it would make a fucking brilliant blog title (and not too far from "future of my past", actually, but not as poncy and more given to humour).

Go ahead and steal as much from yourself as you can. I'm sure you would have approved.

You are one of the brave hearts of this world, and I have nothing but faith in your work as well as you. So off those poems go, don't they.

x

Reading the Signs said...

It would make a brilliant blog title, wouldn't it. Future of my Past is the future and past of my present, though, so don't knock it!

Yes, off they jolly well go - in the fullness of - er - some time soon - when I can find an envelope.

Braveheart. Mwah! x

Anna MR said...

I am thinking we should set up a joint blog called Funfair of my Fate, you know. You can have more than one "blog administrator". It could be our joint playground for wonderful stories and like literary punishment tasks (sentinas, ghazals…stories with only e's…you know what I mean).

Whaddaya think?

x

Reading the Signs said...

I grow old, I grow old,
I will wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.

It would be too much of a good thing - another distraction to stop me from putting things in envelopes. And my increasingly cognitively-challenged brain would probably not be up to it. Let's face it, you are the brilliant one when it comes to such things.

Reading the Signs said...

I've been looking for Crimson Hood but can't find it - it's lost somewhere in the comments of something!

Anna MR said...

Damn. I don't even remember if we did Crimson Hood on my blog or yours? The Belle Sleepeth was certainly quoted in its full length on your blog.

I am going to insist that you and your rolled-bottom trousers join forces with me on this thing in one way or another. You could set the tasks. (I, by the way, am the Queen of Procrastinators, and this is my cunning plan to enable even more work-avoidance.) I will create the thing sometime soon, and that's final.

I don't know how come this just strikes me as the best idea I've had in weeks. Years, even.

x