free flame

I would like to tell you that I am writing this post from my sweet and slender new Mac Air book. I have one, it is up and running, lying with the cat on my bed, as it happens. But I don't yet properly know how to use it. I have to go to classes at the Apple place, not joking. For a not entirely modest amount you can get a year's worth of unlimited tuition, which is what I have got. But in the joy of the purchase (esp as not with my money but in return for certain services rendered - don't ask), and in an atmosphere of almost cult-like upbeat positivity (the shop assistants, if one can call them that, really believe in all things Mac and are radiant with the faith) it just seemed as though I would beam myself there and back, Tardis-like, whenever. Ha ha, I hear you say. Yes, and so I have not actually learned how to do the Mac word-processing thing yet. So this comes to you from my trusty Dell P C.

Well, so I am back, with a radical hair cut, short and spiky, all the old colour gone and the grey is - though I say it myself - pleasing. I was actually only away for a week, cavorting in Monaco harbour, the yachting playground of the disgustingly rich. The yacht that we were on was a mere dinghy in comparison with some of the floating hotels I saw. It was horribly hot and humid, but sailing out into the bay, swimming in the sea, was very good, and I slept well on the boat. But enough of that, I don't want to be telling you about what I did in my summer holidays. No, I have more pressing things on my mind.

Autumn is upon us, says the wind that has been tearing about in these parts, bending the boughs of the oak and ash. It is early, and summer didn't have much of a look-in, but never mind, it is here; and so it is time to review, re-dedicate and focus on what next because that is what I do in autumn, whether or not it seems practical because of the restrictions imposed by M.E. My plan is always, in any case, to be feeling, by whatever degree, better. If that is scuppered it won't be by me, but by M.E. So:

Out comes the new notebook and the intention of doing the Morning Pages again, because doing them is a good thing as long as one does not fall into a pit of writing only about illness and despair, and I do not intend to. My focus will be on process (creative) and the lovely incidentals of life in ordinary, which is good for the soul and for poetry.

The novel is progressing - so slowly that you can hardly see it move, and I've been so hammered with one thing and another that it hasn't been given much time, but still - the evidence is there in black and white word count that it is progressing, and it is still alive in me, the characters have not wasted away, as can sometimes happen when you don't give a story enough attention. A sizeable chunk is waiting to be transferred from notebook to computer. I still find composition best to do with pen and paper and even the beautiful Mac is unlikely to change this.

Not writing much new poetry. Can't be helped, I have promised the novel that it will get the best of my sustained attention. But there are readings coming up - one at the end of this month and another in October, and there is enough to be working on and revising.

Courtesy of lovely Kindle, I have been reading Titus Groan, the first part of the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, a wonderful, fantastical, poetic creation. From time to time the narrator makes an observation that I take to be Mervyn Peake, writer and artist, speaking about how it is when mind is fully present and engaged in the creative act. Here, one of the characters, a young girl called Fuchsia, entering her secret attic place:

As Fuschia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully.

This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.

It is always a work in progress for most of us, I think, to reclaim or inhabit that world more fully. To this, with the strong breath of autumn, I re-dedicate myself.


**

Rainy Monday

Alone in Brighton, doing what I needed to do, which was very little. Woke early, went over the road to the lovely, retro corner shop that is like the corner shops I remember from London childhood, with the same smell of mints and cigarettes and grumpy-but-friendly hunchback woman behind the till. Forgot about being a vegetarian and bought a packet of Walls bacon, six eggs, and a couple of oranges for squeezing. Relentless rain. A new antique shop has opened opposite our flat. Yesterday we bought a small wooden clothes horse there and the woman recognised me today in the road. I probably didn't smile enough so she asked me if I was all right. I said yes and remarked on the weather, wondering if a small transaction and the fact of her knowing that our flat is opposite her shop is enough reason for her to put such a question to me. But remembered also that people used to accost me in the street all the time when I was younger, telling me to cheer up. After breakfast and just one side of notebook-writing, fatigue and muscle pains drove me back to bed. Slept until nearly three, so not many hours of daylight today.

I am enjoying Candia McWilliam's new book, even though I haven't read very far. She was a successful writer and quite a beauty, then became an alcoholic and was afflicted with a strange condition that meant she could no longer open her eyes. She turns her gaze on herself - her past, her family relationships, and she looks inside herself, is honest and unflinching. I am wondering if it is more intrinsically satisfying to know about where people fall and fail, and how they deal with that, than about success and achievement. I don't know. The writer Susan Hill has been in the papers recently - her life an extraordinary catalogue of achievements, though she was never glamorous. Even so, she often worked through, and out of, pain and bereavement. One of her best books, In the Springtime of the Year, was written after the sudden death of a man she deeply loved. She lost a prematurely born daughter.

She had no patience, she said, with writers who moaned about how difficult it was to write - made a song and dance about it. Just get on with it, is the thing. After all, you don't have to do it. I don't know what she would have made of my one-page effort today.

Tomorrow a gathering at Sussex University - to launch Poetry South East.

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.

bashing on (because sorry, I really can't think of a title today)

Well, that was good. One of the benefits of building up to doing a reading is that it makes you polish things up a bit and think about the various themes you are working with. It may sound a bit fey, but that isn’t always clear – at least not to me – when one is writing the poems. It is the work itself that tells you. I had the pleasure of reading with Sarah Salway and Julie Corbin, I was nicely sandwiched between the two, and I see that Salt writer Vanessa Gebbie (whose short stories I’m coincidentally about to read and who I briefly talked with last night) has written about the evening on her blog. Chuffed. And lovely that Daughter and a couple of dear friends were able to come, despite difficulties thrown up by the London tube strike.

Thanks to those who commented in the previous post, and – wouldn’t you know – as it turned out I didn’t have time to read the poem. But your efforts were not wasted! It was one that was almost headed for the virtual bin, but I have decided that Version Two will stay, and in the fullness of time (how I love that phrase, so adaptable) it will find its place.

Yesterday was also the day that Son did the last of his finals exams which, because of the R.S.I. (which became Tennis Elbow and then something else) he wrote entirely on a keyboard in a room with (his words) “all the other cripples” – may the angels bless their endeavours. So now it’s party-time for him, and a space with nothing scheduled but whatever it is he fancies doing.

And today is the Signs wedding anniversary, which we almost forgot (though Mr. S swears he didn’t). No chance at all of my cooking anything, we’re going for a curry. I am almost excarnated with sleeplessness but in that Mickey Mouse kind of state where you can keep walking on air and not fall into the ravine as long as you don’t look down. Tomorrow a friend is coming to stay, there is a big bash of a party we have been invited to, not usually my thing but it’s hosted by one of my lovely weekly writing people, there will be beautiful music and ambience and I will enjoy.

Have a good weekend yourselves, Peeps.

Laters.

and counting

I went to my first book group last night. I never thought I would join one of those – as far as I’m aware they came into being after I got M.E., I had enough on my plate to attend to and anywhere one heard such funny stories about what happens in book groups. I loved watching The Book Group on Channel 4, but that was for watching, not being part of. But anyway, it was great and so was the book we discussed, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Reading a book as good as this and then getting together to talk about it with other reading people who have things to say and enjoy tossing ideas about makes a lot of sense. The So What? factor didn’t come up for me with this book at all, but if it had then I might have been motivated to go through that barrier because of the group.

It will be just me and the cat here for four days because Mr. Signs is off to a psychotherapy conference. I have plans, but they are so often sabotaged by the Malignant Entity (I just came up with that, not bad) that I dare not even say what my plans might involve in case it hears. I think I must either be an incredibly positive and motivated person or unbelievably stupid because every day, well almost every day, I wake up at whatever time it happens to be, depending on the state of me and sleep disorder, and I think: today is the day I will do whatever it is that I am wanting to get on and do. And I really believe this. It’s as though some clown has programmed my default setting to think that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, this new day brings untold possibilities, all of them good, even when I wake up feeling properly horrible. On better days there will be an hour or two when I carry on believing this, but then the invisible egg timer appears and I see the energy sand running out. Last week I managed to write two poems in the time between becoming egg timer-conscious and flaking out. This week (well, it’s only half way through the week and Monday was bank holiday) I haven’t been doing so well. Yesterday I cleaned the kitchen and today I went shopping. On the other hand, I also went to a book group – that counts. Actually, it all counts, as I have said more often than I care to remember. But if the writing isn’t happening then the inner core of me feels diminished. I have ways of getting around that, but daren’t look over my shoulder too often on account of time’s winged chariot etc.

But everything is going to be ok, it can’t miss, it’s in the bag. Because tomorrow is another day.