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.

 

 

 

the other life

When going through the notebook, one often comes up against the self that wrote things one has no memory of writing.  It happens because I tend to use one notebook for everything, including journal-writing, the ongoing prose thing (I will not say the N word) and poems.  It works best for me that way.  When one notebook fills up I buy another of a different colour. 

Much of what I write in the notebook is not shared with anyone and there are good reasons for this.  But I have recently felt the impulse to communicate something more about the reality of life with M.E., not so much on my own behalf (I already do this) but because I know people who have it in a more severe form.  They live, you might say, in "another country."Very occasionally I touch its borders.  The fact that I set this down is testament to the fact that I am, at time of writing, in a stronger state:

The slats again.  I see the sky through those, and only if I have been awake enough to ask M to open them.  In the daytime I don't like to be shut away in the dark.  Sometimes I ring his mobile from the house phone, or I ring the house phone from my mobile, on days when he is working from home, downstairs or in the garden studio.  I say, please can you open the slats for me?  And if I know he is coming up I ask for a drink of mint tea.  If I get up too quickly I feel faint, dizzy and sick.  That is why M walks up two flights of stairs to open the slats so I can see the sky through them.  Often there is just white, and raindrops on the window pane.  My eyes are still hungry for the light.

If it is a bad day and I know I will be lying there for a long time, I ask him to lift the blinds completely.  Then I can see the branches of a tree across the road, and I can see the tops of tall evergreens further away.  The more I raise myself the more I see.  But if I carry on lying down there is mostly just sky.  That square of window has been witness to what no person has ever heard. 

What is the sound that comes in the silence from someone who has looked out of the same window at the changing sky for many years?  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  It is nothing.  It is nothing.  It is the sound of time that moves past in clouds, in blue sky, in moon-bright or moonless, it moves through seconds and minutes and days and weeks and years.   One time you looked at the sky with a child's warm head near you.  Then the child was gone.  Or you looked at the sky while hearing your daughter's voice as she talked on the telephone and you smelled the tobacco smoke from the cigarette she was smoking at the bottom of the house.  Then the voice was gone.

I cannot begin to express how the outline of bare branches against the sky consoles and grounds me - joins me to the earth where I live so precariously.  If someone were to come and cut down the tree it would leave me emptied into sky.  All of us, those people who are like me, fear death.  We fear it because it stalks our living, our lives.  And the truth that has no strength to speak its name is that twent-five per cent of two hundred and fifty thousand of us lie each day in almost complete darkness, and no-one knows what to do for them.  They are too sick to live, but still they live, and though some might choose to die - to have death pure and simple rather than life that is deathly - still many do choose to live the life they have, even so.  They greatly desire life, and they love it and grasp the nettle of it.

Sometimes when we lie there looking at sky, or at the slats or curtains that keep the light from hurting (if we are not strong enough for sky) we feel connected to the earth, we feel her bones, her ravaged body, we put our mouths to the breast of the earth.  Her milk is poisoned, her body violated, she is holding us to the best of her ability.  Look how the black branch puts out shoots.

My road is an unadopted road, it is rough and uneven so not many cars pass by.  People walk their dogs or parents come with children.  These are the voices I might hear.  I miss the cockerel.  When I first came to this house, this room, a cockerel sounded each morning many times over:  cock-a-de-doo!  He annoyed the neighbours but never me.  I loved him from a distance for his voice which came into my consciousness like the sound of someone beloved, I could sleep through it or when I was awake it put life into the morning.  He has been gone for a long time.

A Frayed Knot

You have to picture it for yourself.  A string walks into a bar.  If it is capable of so much thought and will as to conceive of going into a bar then it will find a way of walking, even if it means splitting itself at one end. Before it can ask for a drink, the bartender says that they don’t serve strings.  But suppose the string, either at this point or before the bartender has a chance to speak, opens its mouth (if it can split in order to walk, it can split in order to talk) says in a clear voice: I thirst – or perhaps, more colloquially, I am thirsty.  There is a silence in the bar as people take in the string’s words.  For some there will be a deep resonance.  And when the bartender says, as he must for the story to be fulfilled, I’m sorry, we don’t serve strings here, there will be a sense of disquiet, of something having occurred that is wrong.  For where there is thirst there is a moral duty to do what one can to alleviate it.

The string does not argue but walks back outside where it begins to contort and twist itself many times.  Why?  In an attempt to make itself into something other, more acceptable to the bartender so its thirst may be quenched.  Perhaps this, yes; or to give expression to the emotion that passed through it at the blanket rejection – for a piece of string cannot hide emotion, inner and outer are visible and tangible.  Or perhaps it seeks a way of coming to some deeper utterance.  When it goes back inside and the bartender says, hey, aren’t you the string that just left? It is able to reply quite truthfully that it is a frayed knot.  It is both frayed and afraid, and it is twisted into another shape from the one it originally presented.

There is nothing that comes after this.  We don’t hear what the bartender’s response might have been: well in that case, what will you have?  Or perhaps some kind of an apology for mistaken identity.  No, because the rules are the rules and it is still, whatever shape it has felt obliged to assume, a piece of string.  The bartender knows this, the clientele who watch open-mouthed from their stools or benches where they drink their pints of lager or sip at their glasses or wine or tumblers of whisky know this.  And the string – particularly the string – knows this. 

What if the story ends unexpectedly and the bartender serves the piece of string a drink?  Will everything change, as it does in the tale of the Frog Prince who is thrown against the wall (or given a kiss, depending on the version you read)?  The frog becomes what it in truth really is – a prince.  The string reaches a hempen finger to grasp the pint of beer, draws the glass to its lips and before our eyes a human creature appears, one that we recognise and welcome. 

I thank you.

Notebooks

With a new year impulse to clear the decks, I gathered all my spiral notebooks yesterday and put them into an empty Able & Cole cardboard vegetable box which Mr. Signs then put into the loft with the Christmas decorations. There is something both freeing and awful about this. They won't be taking up drawer and shelf space, wailing and whining at me every time I go near them because yes, they are full of unfinished business, work that is unlikely ever to see the light of day. But in the loft no-one can hear them scream, so that's ok.

They are also (just saying) home to the birth of things that did go on to become visible creatures, poems and such - two of which are e'en now in the current edition (16) of Scintilla magazine.  I have not yet discovered how one actually goes about ordering a copy but you can take my word for it that a couple of my poems are there.

Well I thought I had them all safely locked in the loft, but I missed a few.  They leered at me today from a crammed shelf - do you spot them on the right there?  I took one at random, opened it up and saw something about a piece of string that walked into a bar and asked for a drink.  I can't remember writing this or why I did, but that also was the purpose of the notebooks: to catch the random thoughts and nonsense that flitted in and out.  It's called writing practice and it is what some of us do - must do, as singers sing and runners run whether or not there is a performance scheduled or a race to be run. 

The piece of string, refused a drink by the bartender, goes outside and ties itself into a knot.  When it goes back inside the bartender says, hey, aren't you the string that just left?  The string replies, I'm afraid not.  A frayed knot.  Why should this joke (not mine) have given rise to three pages of scrawl?  Looking over old notebooks one discovers oneself, for better or worse, in the act of something.  But what? 

Watch this space.

Cuckmere Haven

I like the sea in all its aspects. Yesterday the surface of it was wind-prickled, unsettled, a hard metallic shining in slow motion, a severity of grey along the curve of the horizon.

I have always thought: if you look at something for long enough you do, to some extent, become it for a space. I wanted not to be this human thing stranded on dry land with my two thin legs, the laces of my Doc Martens all unravelling on the rough stones by the mouth of the river that comes and comes to the father/lover rush of sea. I was jealous - landlocked in unsuitable footwear, I wanted to be seagull. There is something hidden in deep sea that even the sky can't read. It is said that the moon has power over sea, but I don't believe it.

I wrote: I could have been stone at the bottom of your bed, moved from this place to that, grey flint with a hole in my heart, a grain of sand - something, or almost nothing. This yearning on the shore by white cliffs is the farthest I can go - the closest I can get.

**

'Home'

I was clearing out our tiny study space the other day and came across bits and pieces of notebook-writing from sessions with a friend about six years ago. One of the things we did was to have a pick-and-mix of words, and I think this piece probably came from the word 'Home'. We used to go back and underline bits afterwards, for whatever reason. I have kept those in.

The question of how to keep the fire burning is ongoing:

I still don't know where it is. Am only just beginning to feel that England may after all be it, because after all, where else? Germany - but we were nearly wiped out there, and home should never be in a place where they once tried to kill you off. And anyway, this is where I am - this England, this particular village which I may or may not move from. I have a restlessness inside that both looks for home and seeks to avoid it. I want roots, to feel connected to a place, yet I don't want to be tied and constrained, unable to leave in case a move kills me. You have to be careful with roots. P (friend) always talks of renewing the ancient hearth. He has a ready-made hearth, one that he also tends, at (place of work). My hearth is where I light my candle or, failing that, where I come alight in a group of people with something to share that is more than just a box of chocolates. Though, a box of chocolates can be a hearth too, for a few minutes, and perhaps in this time and place we can't expect more than a series of temporary homes and hearths. The I Ching has told me, The wanderer has no place to lay his head; and once I wrote, I lay my head on my lover's shoulder, it smells of grass and reminds me of home.

When you lose a lover, a marriage partner, a close friend, you feel a sense of exile. The lay of the land is suddenly different. I feel this all the time, the ground shifting beneath my feet; also, the fear of coming home to oneself and no fire in the hearth, no lamp lit, nothing to eat. I have my own hut, and a good one too, but the walls have gaps in them where the wind whistles through and I forget to bring in the wood so I have something to burn, to make fire with. Without fire, no home.

**

Notebooks

Clearly I'm not ok and I hear that the virus is a nasty one - the effects linger. I hunker down with bell, book and Kindle, little black radio, cat purring at the end of the bed. I should just lie back and let it all be, really. But I don't. I am not comfortable being there for too long, even though the bed itself is fine, the mattress good etc. Apart from the fact that too much lying down in the day usually makes my muscles feel worse, the room, already too small for the stuff that is in it, fills up with my restlessness. Get up, go downstairs, fetch hot water bottle, shiver, crawl up stairs but I have forgotten to bring a drink - down again, up again, listen to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour and have no idea what anyone is talking about. I catch sight of myself in the mirror in my red and white pyjamas and grey V neck pullover that I probably found at the same time I found my purple trousers, in a charity shop. I look cool - yes, even in my reduced state - dramatic dark shadows around my eyes and the unmistakeable silver/grey halo framing my head, real roots, old brown Uggs on my feet.. I am still the Queen of Grunge.

Why have I got so many old notebooks lying around the place? I was trying to find something in them but damned if I can remember what. Something to do with teaching classes, I think. Open one at random and read an entry about encouraging students to keep writing in the holidays. I feel as though I'm spying on myself:

"They asked me what they should write about. I am weary but don't show it. Write about the candle you noticed bleeding wax onto the shag pile carpet. Write about the pine needle lodged in the arm of the sofa. Write about the crack in the turning of the year when things don't quite fit together and angels slip through and young men become werewolves howling in the forest and the girl in red treads a path through the trees. Write about your grandmother picking her teeth. Write what you see, write what you don't see, make believe. Pretend. Or don't pretend. Just watch. I don't believe in magic either but I pretend I do. Or rather, I do believe and pretend I don't and the pretence is killing me. That's why I write, to keep alive - what's your excuse?

Last year at Epiphany I went to hear the a poet who said he had woken up that morning with words speaking in his head from a dream. I took the words home and wrote them in my book with leather covers. They seemed like a key to something, or perhaps they were just words. Putting the words down on paper is important - a subversive act, especially if you don't get money or fame or nobody sees the words in your notebooks. At the end, when you are asked to account for yourself, you will have the notebooks along with the time you gave the last biscuit with jam on it to someone who looked sadder than you. Jack Kerouac said that only first drafts are preserved in heaven. In other words, the notebooks that never see the light of day."

And so to bed.

touching in

It is going well, this new phase I have stepped into. I am not entirely sure what makes me say this, other than a sense of something small but vital having clicked into place, despite the usual health and strength issues. Sometimes the simple fact of making a decision is enough to get things moving in a different direction, and I have recently made three decisions, one of which already promises to bear lovely fruit.

I have realised that I am screen-sensitive to a degree I had not appreciated. In other words, it is much better for me not to spend very much time in front of one, especially if it belongs to a laptop, and more especially if it involves a great deal of reading. Typing up what I have written, which doesn’t take long as I am a speedy touch-typist, is fine. Thank goodness for the notebook. I have still to find the completely perfect ballpoint – but perhaps one never does.

writing the dreams

Stressed of Signsville. Son of Signs has a bastard throat infection with ulcers thrown in for good measure. He is on antibiotics and gargles of every description and due shortly to go to the USA for a two-week singing tour with his group before returning to uni. Painkillers are having no effect and he suffers. It’s all looking a bit grim and I haven’t much else to say until it resolves, my psychic energies being directed to this end.

It is National Poetry Writing Month, NaPoWriMo for short (sounds a bit like a disease though). The idea is to write a poem a day for the whole of April. That’s thirty. Well I’ve missed the first two – other stuff to do, and I’ve only just emerged from Poetry Boot Camp for goodness sake. But I’ll be there, I’ll be there, I tell the angels. And make my son well, you hear me? The angels are (I have noticed this before) inscrutable.

I have, though, been given a notebook by a writing friend in London. It’s really a jotter, one of those pads you flip over and when you’ve covered all the pages on one side you turn it over and do all the pages on the other side. But it has an elastic strip holding the pages together when not being written on, and it has yellow-gold covers. I have it beside my bed and have resumed the practice of recording dreams, something I used to do but haven’t for years. The other thing I haven’t done for years is to write regularly in jotter-size notebooks. I buy those big bash-you-on-the-head A4 things. Very nice when you are up to your neck in NaNoWriMo, not to be confused with NaBloPoMo (both in November), but they are heavy, whereas my new little golden sweetheart is light and easy, will fit anywhere, take anything and give you a satisfying flip every minute or so as you cover the slim pages with words. Perfect for NaDreReMo. That’s National Dream Recording Month – I’ve just invented it so remember you heard it here first. I haven’t decided which month it should be yet, am still test-running the process. I will keep you informed.

A Roar and a Whimper

I have been honoured and bestowed with a Shameless Lions award for "Powerful Words" which I am proud to add to the collection of trophies on my sidebar, particularly as it comes from House of Pants whose lovely poems I have just been reading in Obsessed With Pipework. Funnily enough, I had just decided to subscribe to this on the strength of the name alone, before I even knew that House of Pants was in it (and hers are the first three poems). This is, of course, a Sign – of what, I don’t know and really, one can’t be expected to do everything. Reading the signs does not necessarily mean interpreting them (though I do sometimes have a stab at it). Enough just to know a Sign when one appears, and to trust that all will unfold in the fullness of time.

But where were we? Roaring words. I haven’t made so much as a squeak on the blog for a while but have been bleating elsewhere, in shocking pink notebook to be specific. Being somewhat more than usual energy-challenged, I’ve only had the wherewithal to do one or the other, and the other won out. But don’t think I haven’t missed you all or that there haven’t been loads of things I’ve been telling you – in my head, that is. Just to prove that this is true, here is a snap from a recent trip to Homebase.

I was having another Stepford Wife Moment and thought, I must show them this. I had so much to say about it too but you’ll just have to take my word for it and try and imagine what it is I had to say because it’s all gone now – wiped. That’s what happens if you don’t get the words out quick as they come, you see. They bugger off. All I know is that at the time – Wednesday evening of last week, to be precise (which for some unaccountable reason I feel it behoves me to be) – I had returned to Homebase with one of their standing lamps that was so hideous when unboxed, and so defiant of being assembled into anything resembling the picture on the box that decided I could not give it houseroom for one minute longer. I looked at the Christmas tinsel and the lights, took in the fact that I was the only punter in the store and was brought to my knees. Take me now, I said to no-one in particular, but there may have been an angel at my side and you can see the brush of its wings in the bottom right hand corner, or I may have been struck by a combination of unearthly fatigue and opioid prescription drugs. Reader, no-one came. So I stood up, got a bag full of slow-burning tea lights and lived to do another blog post.

I thank you.

The Written Word

I like what Paul Auster says:

"It is the only place in the world, I believe, that two absolute strangers can meet on the deepest level. It's something that reinforces our common humanity. That's the power of writing. You don't feel that in a movie. You don't quite feel it when you look at a painting, although that can be close, but the articulated word and articulated thoughts communicated from one person to another is the province of Literature writing."

And where, I wonder, does The Blog stand in relation to this? I know I am talking to people - even if there were no comments I would know that because I can see from the stats that they look in, and though some flit in and out again, there are those who stay and read. But it isn't the same as the "I and thou" connection I experience when writing in my notebook, even though there is no guarantee of anyone actually reading the words. My stepfather, before he went mad and cut himself off from the world, wrote in the journal that he shared with me:

"Who is the stranger who lives with me?" He was a writer. It is my opinion, though I can't be sure, that the stranger was the "thou" he had become separated from.

preferences

I prefer the tick of a grandfather clock.
I prefer tock to tick.
I prefer a fairweather friend who drinks to my fortune to the trustworthy kind who feasts on my disaster.
I prefer relatives with brown eyes.
I prefer the smell of my father’s hands to sandalwood.
I prefer my coffee hot as hell with the kindness of warm milk.
I prefer wildflowers I can’t name.
I prefer hard apples that hurt my teeth to ones that are soft and easy.
I prefer hard people with soft hearts to soft people with hard hearts.
I prefer people who don’t talk about hearts.
I prefer people who notice the stars
I prefer the waning of the moon.
I prefer my own children to other people’s.
I prefer not to mention this.
I prefer gardens full of weeds.
I prefer kitchens that smell of old kippers to ones that smell of disinfectant.
I prefer the mongrel to the thoroughbred.
I prefer the migraine to the toothache.
I prefer counting sheep.

From the notebook, after reading this.

Taking a short blog break.