lift-off

Well at last - something. Meaning that I have actually felt able to sit down and do a couple of hours at the notebook; a small idea that came to me the other day in Brighton as I stared out of the window. Nothing to do with immediate surroundings, but everyone knows the importance of having time to stare out of windows. Not so much an idea as a title out of which something can be unpacked that I may be able to work with - taking into account the limited strength available to me. I will shut up about it now, I have a tendency to ramble a little incontinently when beginning or thinking about something new and it really does not help to talk too much about a newly-born idea, especially if one tends, as I do, to write out of a kind of inner pressure. Talk about it and the pressure subsides, or the idea itself suffers from exposure.

I will not stop to think about the number of half-baked projects that have been left to go cold or in a state of suspended animation. The reason is M.E./CFIDS and not lack of will, in spite of which I can thread small achievements like pearls on my necklace of shining things, which I wear close to the heart.

And something else: you see the shadowy image there in my profile - me walking on the beach in Caithness, not so very long ago? I'm blonder than that now, since the day before yesterday, in preparation for the silvering of Signs. No more artificial colour - not that I wouldn't have been happy to continue for some time to come. It is part of my genetic inheritance that we silver up early, before we are ready for it. But even the least toxic product I can find makes me feel bad afterwards and is too much for me to process. The hairdresser's name is Marie. She is young, French, slender, thoughtful, pale - her raven-black hair is certainly from a bottle and it suits her. Looking at my parting she smiles. It is a good colour, you are lucky. Many women like you are turning to silver.

Meanwhile, until the rest grows out, it has been lightened with blonde streaks (my first time in foils), looks rather yellow and a bit - I don't know - Worzel Gummidge. Still hot, though, obviously - if Worzel Gummidge floats your boat.

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.

"no way out but through"

Already over two weeks into the new year, I'm still reviewing the one just gone. A difficult year, though we took possession of the Brighton flat, which continues to give us and others its light and beauty. The difficulties are not easy to name - not because one is coy about the naming but because they do not offer themselves up easily for it. Something my sister and I recently found ourselves in agreement about, and something it has taken this long for us to properly acknowledge (we are both in our fifties) is that we carry an almost imponderable, impenetrable something from being children of holocaust survivors. To say anything more than this is to risk either being unforgiveably glib or having to write a whole book in order to make sense of the predicament.

At my poetry workshop yesterday the workshop leader said, in response to the piece I brought, that my poem made her feel ill. This was not an insult - she was alive to something in it that may be experienced as illness, though a couple of people have also experienced it as beautiful. And she did like the poem. Someone wondered whether it was inspired by Greek mythology. No, she said, this comes from fairytale - and she was right, though it didn't come from any tale one could give a name to. I have always, in a sense, known what it is to be lost in the forest, both powerless and powerful, learning how to read the signs because my life depended on it, or might. Grimms fairy tales I took from the big black book in the living room, but reading them I knew I was already in the territory. No way out but through. Someone put a notice with those words on the inside of the toilet door at the place where we have the poetry workshops, and when you think about it what a perfect place to put such a notice.

Just now, a day at a time is probably the best way forward. And one foot in front of the other, as before, but this time, perhaps, with a little more - what is the word? Attitude.

Well I may as well come right out and say it: I am having a bad spell. After close to a quarter of a century of this disease it isn't exactly news. People who have M.E./CFIDS have bad spells, and I'm not speaking of the severely afflicted who rarely, if ever, have anything else. It is not something one particularly shares with others any more because that is one of the things about a chronic condition: after a few years there is nothing more you or anyone can say about it. But still - here I am saying it.

The relapsing seems to have become a January thing whereas my worst months used to be in the summer. Actually, I no longer know what my worst/best months are. I think I am less able to override these days. There are several poetry-related projects I would like to turn my attention to, places where I am scheduled to be in the next few days - but I need to be better than this.
Fortunately I have a packet of magickal incense wands - a Christmas present - and I am hoping that these, plus incantations of the uplifting and melodious kind in a ritual of my own devising, will do the trick. But on the other hand, I don't think I'm in a fit state to conduct this yet.

Pass the co-proxamol.

small boat

I woke up early, a few minutes after six. Anything before six counts as night-time so at least I made it to morning - but with only five hours sleep. Whenever I plan to do something on a particular day, I wake early. Today I am having some poetry people over for lunch in Brighton. The flat is set up for uncomplicated cooking. I have prepared vegetarian chilli and coleslaw with dill dressing. Will make beetroot with chopped herbs, and saffron rice. Fruit crumble for dessert, I have used plums and added some brandy butter left over from Christmas.

I walked into Brighton town yesterday, thinking to do various errands all at once. I exchanged some Moroccan slippers (lumpy inside so not comfortable) for a kilim cusion cover that I will probably take back to Signs Cottage. I went to Waterstone's to pick up a book I had ordered: What To Look For In Winter by Candia McWilliam, highly recommended to me, and the ability to read and focus has improved somewhat. Hallelujah, even though I can't read anywhere near as much as I once did. At Waterstone's I thought I would have a coffee then do a food shop for today's lunch. PWME are familiar with the wall of exhaustion that one can run into. I could feel it coming (a tsunami wall) and tried to ignore it. Ridiculous, as was the notion that I could have got myself plus shopping up the steep incline. A taxi back from town is very cheap and makes this kind of excursion possible. Near the Clock Tower there is always a small line of taxis waiting. I took one. Brighton is kind in so many ways, and beautiful. The Brighton Waitrose, however, is not a good experience - nothing like the one I pictured here which is still more or less supermarket heaven. Bad muscles and malaise after, and what is sweetly referred to as "emotional lability" - one of the side-effects of neurological disorder. The image: a small boat in bad condition suddenly having to negotiate storm conditions; you look out and see nothing but a grey wall made of water that may at any moment engulf you. This was actually a real situation, on my return from Gozo via Malta about twenty years ago, returning from a wedding I should probably not have attended in the first place. The boat was a relic from the second world war and a small group of us nearly perished in the sea. But lived to tell the tale. As one does.

Outside, a brilliant blue sky today. Timely and welcome.

Changes

There are moments when I think I might have said everything that I am ever going to say. As if to give weight to this thought, the sky this morning, when I was writing, grew dimmer and dimmer. Lit candles were not enough, I had to switch lights on. If there is nothing left that I want to say, would that matter so much? Put down the pen, box up the notebooks: will the world take breath, feel the loss of my scribbled or tapped out words? I do not think so. It would not be so terrible. It is a work enough in progress to keep step with the meticulous work of a day's rising and falling.

Outside, the crows have been making their unseemly noise that sounds like heckling complaint from a raw throat. The ice has melted and life is presumably easier for them. What sounds like complaint is probably exultation. They have found sustenance of some kind. My dead butt of Golden Virginia, hidden in the long grass. Not that. They will ignore that. I will ignore it: a blip. I will give it up again, along with the other bad habits. I will give up cream in my porridge, the extra scoop of coffee in the morning, the sugar later in the day, the butter, the biscuits, the negative thoughts that clamber claw around hamster-like on a thin metal wheel, going fast and nowhere.

It isn't true. I have no real intention of giving up my bad habits. To acquire good ones is what I should advise myself to do. But why should I? Shed a little light on the situation, is all. Learn from the click of the switch as the electic light comes on and makes everything clear. The natural light from candles does not shine so brightly but at least one can see to read and write. Learn from the sugar fix and caffeine scoop that get you through the moment, the pain-killing medicine that gives you an hour or two of believing that nothing is going to hurt so much that you can't keep moving forward. Learn from the tin-a-ling of the mobile phone when a text message comes: instant connection to someone or something; the sliding switch of the Kindle - words appear on the screen as if by magic. You can buy a book, or several, by pressing a few buttons. Learn from the jars of spices already ground, labelled and ready to throw into the pot. Who says you must take pestle and mortar, get substance by the sweat of your brow?

We do not need luxury, said someone. We do not need expensive holidays, furnishings, fine wines, boxes of chocolate wrapped in silk. We need light, space and air, an apple and a glass of water. But if we cannot get these, say I, if they are harder to come by than the naming of them suggests, then flicking a switch, opening a can, unwrapping a chocolate from the expensive gift box, are also acceptable and may do one good.

The I Ching says it furthers one to have somewhere to go, and then changes (it is The Book of Changes) to it does not further one to go anywhere. It says that the times are not auspicious for setting out, risking, making oneself too visible. One should rather stay put, hold fast, not draw attention to oneself, lie low. Anything else is unsafe. Learn from the inanimate object that remains itself in all but the most extreme conditions. Learn from the stone that warms when the sun shines and grows cold when it withdraws. Learn from the objects that lie for years under beds, sofas and cupboards, gathering dust but remaining what they are, ready for use when the time comes for them to be uncovered; from the golden angel who did not sit on the Christmas tree this year but stayed in a cardboard box and did not mind. The ultimate Zen attitude.

Learn from the sun and moon that allow themselves to be eclipsed.

splitting apart

So lets talk about lard. I have jars of it in the fridge, courtesy of an unimaginably expensive goose that we cooked for Christmas. I have been eating some of it (temporarily lapsed vegetarian) on toast. It reminds me of the schmalzbrot I used to eat as a child. In case you don't know, schmalz means lard - pork lard, usually, made flavoursome with onions, apples and juniper berries, perhaps. It doesn't figure much in what most people hereabouts nowadays think of as a healthy diet. But if you're going to kill a goose at least give it the respect of eating and appreciating every bit of it, even if most of it is lard. I boiled up the carcass and made two substantial soups out of that. The lard, though, is going to be a problem unless I can find a way of sharing it around, unlikely as I'm surrounded on all sides by vegetarians. People used to make soap out of goose fat and ashes, or rub it on wounds. Perhaps I'll get to work making useful products out of lard and set up a stall in the village centre where there is much enthusiasm for recycling of all kinds. I might even recycle myself as I am fast turning into a tub of schmalz. Yes indeed, I feel a meltdown coming on. Actually, lets stop talking about lard. But lardy cake, just saying, is a wonderful thing, especially if you want to gain a pound or two in the eating. Which I don't.

So lets talk about resolutions. You don't need to have made any to talk about those, but I actually did make some on the cusp between last year's end and this one's beginning, which is already feeling some distance away. Something to do with managing my emotions better so as to conserve energy - and what writing project to focus on. Poetry was what I decided but, like I said, that was then, and I am drawn also by the idea of continuing with prose project. Last year I wanted a clear Sign as to which way I should go and I did win a poetry prize. But on the other hand I also got a story short-listed. On the third hand, poetry is probably going to win because it's simply more practical for me to focus on that now. So managing emotions is going to be much more of an issue, but as I've made a resolution about those it's all in the bag. Sorted.

The post heading, by the way, is from I Ching and the less said about it the better, although it could by a stretch of the imagination be referring to my trousers if I carry on with the lard. The judgement says: "It does not further one to go anywhere."