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.


**

silver lining

I have a meeting with my dentist shortly. The situation is complicated. My usual dentist is no longer able to do what they call 'precision work' - the kind that I need and have been putting off, not just because of my problems with the treatment, but because he keeps changing his mind about what needs to happen. So there are a couple of new, younger guys to take his place. I will meet one of them today for an in-depth talk and kick off a new, expensive but hopefully less complicated relationship. I ought to be trying to make myself look good (it matters, you see, if you look good people often thing you are good and treat you better - that's what they say), but a) I'm sitting here talking to you and b) I went to the hairdresser yesterday and came out with hair looking even more yellow than last time. The silvering of Signs is going to be a slow process, but worth it in the end. Inner DJ is on a roll with this one:

"You're everywhere and nowhere baby, that's where you're at
going down the bumpy hillside in your hippy hat,
flying across the country and getting fat,
saying everything is groovy while your tyres are flat" - oh yeah!

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.

Substances

Awake in the small hours again, just me and the birds and the sun coming up as it does this time of year, as though we’re living in the first days. “Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird”. With me again, my old companion migraine, not the full-blown thing but the beginnings, which I knock on the head with a couple of those lovely pink pills. Drugs, eh? Reasons to be cheerful, as if I needed to look for them, can be found in any number of chemical substances that enhance the quality of my life by blocking or modifying nasty symptoms that are part of the package that is M.E. A respectful nod in the direction of homoeopathic and herbal products that have a significant place in the house of Signs, but what I really have in mind is the magic bullet effect of allopathic substances that go to work predictably and immediately. Of course their effects are temporary and they cure nothing, but they and I have an honest relationship. I do not ask for more than they can deliver. I am particularly happy that Co-proxamol, a combination of the humble paracetamol and an opioid called dextropropoxyphene, has been granted a temporary reprieve, having been withdrawn from the market. What they give is a few hours respite from muscle pain, and the difference this can make to how one manages a day is hard to describe. I don’t want to give the impression that I am a pill-head. It’s just good to know they are there for the times you really need something more than inner fortitude.

There are things I want to do in the next couple of days: another poetry café event to be prepared for and attended, a whole day’s workshop on the poetry of Sappho and some writing to get done for a workshopping session on Monday. I won’t manage all this without drugs, caffeine and sugar and yes, the system pays for it later. But it is, as I have said before, worth it.

Speaking of substances, I have been reviewing the hair colour situation and, though not exactly chickening out of my recent decision to let the grey shine out, I have put it on hold by using a bit of temporary colour while I mull things over a bit. It may be that for a while I will be neither one thing nor the other before I properly come out or it may be that I carry on being in the closet for a few more years. I know this sounds lame after my brave words about doing cold turkey and possibly starting a revolution but the Signs character is inclined to be fickle in some respects and is, in this season of strange, exuberant and unnaturally warm spring, not inclined to be wintering down just yet

Grey Pride

I first hit the bottle about ten years ago because the grey happened so quickly and I wasn’t ready. Actually, there is no such thing as grey, there is just white. For a while you colour it aubergine and look funky with purple streaks which go pink as the colour fades, then you use the Clairol “Loving Care” non-permanent tint, persuaded by the photo of the brunette with post-coital eyes. It is a bore because you have to re-do it every other week and it makes an unholy mess of the bathroom and towels. So you graduate to Clairol “Nice ‘n Easy” which isn’t nice or particularly easy. It stinks of ammonia and bleach however much they try to mask it with fragrance. When the roots grow out you have to keep touching up so as to hide the evidence. You read about all the nasty chemicals in hairdye (particularly brown ones) that might give you cancer and Alzheimer’s but you carry on because you don’t want to look like Cruella deVille or Ann Widdecombe with the white streak down the middle, before she went blonde. You don’t want to go blonde. You remember the early days of your courtship with Mr. Signs when a friend of his described you as a sultry, Levantine beauty (you mention this once in a while just so everyone knows that this is what you really are or, at least, were). And then you think, sod it.

I’m giving it up, doing cold turkey, going on the wagon. I don’t know how I’ll look until I’ve done it and everything grows out, and it wouldn’t be true to say I don’t care about how I look. I may be grunge but I can still be sharp. I have been inspired by a couple of women who are bottle-free natural and look fabulous. One of them, a poet who leads the monthly workshop sessions I attend, recently gave a reading after which person after person came up to compliment her – not for her poetry but for her hair which is a combination of snow-white and raven-black. Understandably (being a poet with clout) she was a bit pissed off about this, but still. The other woman is the owner of an extraordinary sculpture garden and is completely white-haired and – I can’t think of any other phrase – drop-dead gorgeous and stylish. It has to be said that there wasn’t a hint of grunge about her, but sharp’s the word and I’m up for it. My “greydar” is already identifying all the women who should and could be throwing off the shackles. I might start a revolution.