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.

 

 

 

Presence

                                                                               

It is three months until Christmas. This is not about shopping. You know about me and shopping and how the word has always conjured up an image of a basket with bread, milk, potatoes and eggs. These days one should probably add a tub of blueberries, a head of broccoli and a bag of carrots and take away the bread, the point being that this is all shopping means to me. Getting a basketful of the daily stuff. So when I say it is three months until Christmas, what I am doing is looking across the divide separating that time from this and wondering how, in the unsteady vessel that is the body of Signs, I will navigate the distance from now to then.

The same kind of thought sometimes comes at the very beginning of the day, as I open my eyes to the bands of light that filter through my trusty wooden slats (I call them trusty because they cost so little, being from IKEA, they have fulfilled their task so remarkably well and I have looked at them and through them with more intense engagement than is usual in a relationship between a human being and a set of window blinds). My first question is: what is the weather doing? This may or may not be significant in what I am able to do that day, but to know about it gives one some kind of connection to the world outside. What would our lives be without windows? It doesn't bear thinking about.

The next question, directed not so much at the window as to the day itself, is: what can I do today? Sometimes the answer that comes back is simply a list of boxes that need, by hook or by crook, to be ticked off. Get cat food, meds from chemist, post letter, ring dentist, do a washload, make evening meal. Choose from one or some of the above, or pick up the notebook.

Today (which is no longer newborn but not yet old) I have been to buy organic vegetables and I have come here to say that it is ninety-one days until Christmas Eve. And I am thinking that to come here every day and post something on blog until the day of the Eve itself would be something, wouldn't it? Not just a falling away - a journey to Advent. Parousia.  Or at any rate - something.  

First Writes

There were eighteen of us around a long arrangement of formica-topped tables. It was October, the sky darkening outside the tall, school-room windows. The teacher was reluctant to have the lights switched on. She said we should buy a small notebook, keep it by us and jot down images, as though we were taking snapshots. Jotting in the notebook was a good thing to do and we should make a habit of it. She asked us to think back to a place from childhood, capture an image and then write about it.

I wrote about a knitted lion. It had an orange and brown woollen mane, two red circles made of felt sewn onto its cheeks and black embroidered eyes. I wrote that the lion appeared to be smiling, that the eyes followed me around the bedroom and that its face shone in the moonlight that streamed through the narrow window above a forest of fir trees. The moon made the lion turn its head and look at me. It's face was also moon-like and looked a little pale behind the red cheeks. It took me in and knew my thoughts, and though it smiled, because this was the expression that had been stitched onto its face, the smile carried menace.

You have a good eye for detail, said the teacher. This is well-remembered and really evokes the inner world of a child.

The lion was not, in fact, from childhood. It sat on a pillow in my bedsit. Someone I knew had made it and generously given it to me as a present because I liked it so much. And it carried no menace in its being, I made that up to lend a sense of drama to the scene. The teacher said she enjoyed the disturbing vision of the apparently innocuous knitted lion as threatening and able to read thoughts. I sensed that the other students were less impressed but they were, in any case, waiting for their turn to read. If each of us took five minutes that would amount to one and a half hours, and several people took much longer than that.

Eventually lights were switched on. They were fluorescent, made our complexions look green and gave me a headache. I understood why the teacher had waited so long. One person after another gripped their notebooks or pieces of lined paper torn from some old school book, and read their piece: the teapot that had belonged to a grandmother, how mother had always used it for special occasions and one day a bit of spout was chipped off; an actual photograph - portrait of the artist as a young Scout, ready to dib dib dib and dob dob dob, and all about the different knots he learned to tie. I didn't mean you to think of an actual photograph, said the teacher - but that's good, that's very good.

I know, said the student, looking crushed, but that was the image that came to mind. He thought she thought he was being stupid.

Yes, she said, and it's very good - I just thought I'd point that out in case others had misunderstood.
 I didn't misunderstand, he said.

He was not the only one to refer to an actual photograph. There was a family holiday snapshot of a beach and another of a woman's father. The father was smiling in the photograph and a young child (the writer of the piece) sat on his knee.

He came into my bedroom most nights and touched me, and told me not to tell my mother. When I was fourteen he used to come and inspect my breasts, he -

You don't have to read it if it's upsetting for you, said the teacher

- tried to have intercourse with me. I will never forget the smell.

Sometimes, said the teacher, an image can hold all kinds of disturbing things. She looked at her watch and noticed that we had run overtime by almost an hour. Could the others perhaps wait until next time?

It was a mistake I would sometimes also make when I began to teach creative writing - holding work that students had written in class until next time. Already I was storing all this up for future use, taking stock of the situation: time-management was important; eighteen in a class was too many; everyone has something to say.

Water and Stars

I like poetry. Ever since coming across those lines from A Child's Garden of Verses by R.L. Stevenson (about the pail by the wall being half full of water and stars) it has had a place in my life - been important to me. But I hardly get to any poetry readings these days. Mostly, this is because of restrictions imposed my neurologically-challenged brain that isn't easily able to give the kind of sustained concentrated focus needed. But I have to admit that my preference is also to have a particular kind of one-on-one relationship with a poem that you get when it is just you and the words on a page. I often hear it said that a poem only really comes alive when it is spoken aloud, and it is quite true that to speak it aloud often tests where a poem is or isn't working; and it is true that when a poet has the gift of being able to deliver their words well, then it is a fine thing to hear them. I know one of whom it is said that he could read from a telephone directory or a Tesco's till receipt and make it sound like poetry (and perhaps, for the duration of his performance of such, it might become so). But there are good, even famous poets who don't do this well, and then I would prefer to meet their work on the page.

Perhaps I am making a virtue of a necessity. However good the poem on the page, one doesn't have the buzz of conviviality that comes from a room full of people sharing the experience. I have recently been in rooms full of people because they were occasions which I couldn't bear to miss: the book launch of a dear friend was one and the wedding of my youngest brother was another. The commonplace business of engaging in conversation in a crowded room, especially where there is ambient noise, has become something I can - almost - no longer do. It does something to the wiring in my brain that is hard to describe, but many PeopleWithME will know and recognise. Clearly there was a time when I managed better than I do now. But for now I will (have to) carry on treading the path of acceptance. Does this sound boring?

I am not bored. I have almost never been bored, even as a temp when typing figures all day on a manual typewriter or sitting in a classroom listening to the depressed geography supply teacher drone about where we got our wheat, cocoa and meat from. I took in none of the facts (I seldom did) but I remember everything about the teacher: how carefully he combed the few oily strands across his bald head, the texture of his tweed-like suit that picked up on the colour of his ginger sideburns, the earnest expression, as though there might have been something hidden in the dreary litany of facts that he would have liked to reveal to us. I remember how dust gathered in the corners of the large classroom windows that you could only open by using a long pole with a metal hook at the end, and the blackboard where there was always the ghost of something written in chalk, even once it had been rubbed out. I must have been paying attention - to something or someone. I still do. And the other day I read Billy Collins who said, while the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly on the windowpane. I don't think the one activity necessarily excludes the other, and however many flies you watch there is no substitute for writing words on paper (or screen). But it did give me the sense, or remind me, that the act of witnessing and paying attention means something and gives power and substance. The pail is still full of water and stars.

***

Practice

I am recovering from another spring virus, it is late and this is no time to be putting up a blog post. But I'm going to do it anyway because I'm going away in a couple of days and on 12th May it is M.E. Awareness Day, and I am mindful of it.

Either the number of PWME casualties has increased or I am just more attuned. Barely a week goes by that I don't hear about a death or about some outrage perpetrated by the medical profession. A woman with severe M.E. is about to be forcibly removed from her home on the advice of a psychiatrist who has never met her. Someone I have come to know through a Facebook group is denied the essential care she needs in order to live. Another has been told she must submit to an exercise regime that is not only unrealistic but dangerous, or risk losing essential benefits.

Being able to get about a bit, I remain one of the more fortunate ones, though twenty-five years along the road does not do me any favours and I am still sometimes asked if I am "better now."  I reply by giving a short lecture about the nature of M.E., not so much for my sake (if people have some understanding it's nice, but unless they or someone close has it then they probably won't and one must be realistic) but in order to spread the word a little - help raise awareness.

The spirit is still strong (I have yet to meet a PWME for whom this is not true - practice makes perfect) but the disease takes its toll. It is time to take stock again, find new ways of doing things, especially those things I love, that give my life meaning. I carry on doing The Writing, but am having to embrace the idea I may never have the strength for a big project, and that - crucially - this will be ok. Good enough. I have rehabilitated the reading, for which hurrah, because I am as much a reader as a writer and I feared I might be losing the ability to properly focus - M.E. brain can lend one a kind of dyslexia whereby one takes nothing in. I have to be careful not to risk overloading the brain because this can easily cause relapse, and have come to recognise that I can take in much more if brain does not feel it is having to absorb Information.  Kindle has helped to some extent.  I don't know why it should be easier on the eye than a book, but it sometimes is, and you can adjust the font. I continue to meet with writing people, when I can, either to workshop poems or to sit in a kitchen (mine or theirs) with a notebook, to write and then share what we have made. When this kind of activity works, when people are focussed on the work and the process, there is a sense of community and it feels as though one has a hearth. Whether my words find their way into the wider world or not, I am still this writing person, as green as when I first began to do it, when I knew (a late developer) that this is what I was for. I need to put my ear to the ground and listen for what is coming, for what I really want to be speaking about, because unless I am true to that I won't have the strength to do it. Unless I can bring this kindness to bear on my practice, then I won't have the heart for it.

Today I went into the village for bread, yoghurt and a newspaper. I nearly didn't because it was cold and wet and I haven't been outside for a few days. There was a boot sale going on in the community centre car park and all the usual spaces in the village centre were full. I parked my car at a distance from the minimarket where I got my paper. Coming out of the shop, I saw a Big Issue man under an umbrella. As I shook my head at him, he held out his hand and said, "Please." He was ruddy, thick-set with dark wavy hair, and from somewhere else - foreign. I ignored him.  Perhaps it was just the easy habit of common and garden mean-spiritedness - I give now and then, but not often, not much - and also, I didn't want to stand in the wet, rummaging for my purse. But back inside my car, the look of him lit up like after-image and I felt him in me, familiar, there was something in his gesture I knew or recognised, as though he might once have been someone who mattered to me. He wasn't, I had never seen him before. I drove past the shop, left the car hazard lights on and dropped some coins into his hand. He nodded, as though he had been waiting for me. He looked tired.

There is something I need to put together again, something I would like to re-member. This too is work-in-progress.

**

Pith in the Wind

Awake at five - no choice but to go with it: fruit, coffee, quality time with the cat who appreciates the early breakfast. Fruit and coffee is not the best breakfast and could play havoc with blood sugar. But I forestall this by having a second breakfast of bacon and egg. Between first and second breakfasts I gather bits and pieces for a poetry idea I have brewing. I do it quickly and haphazardly but with a certain kind of method born of long practice: the words have been whispering themselves in the small hours, I get them down before they grow thin as smoke and disappear. Remembering them later will not be the same as being in their presence. I look up a couple of references, but don't get stuck on this. Whatever you do, don't walk through the magic door of the computer screen and lose yourself in the internet or La Belle Dame Sans Merci will have you palely loitering, all words lost.

I am writing a short sequence about my stepfather, who died last year, drawing on memories (his and mine) and imaginings. I want to set down things for which I have no adequate vocabulary because they are closely related to a landscape I never really inhabited. But I have discovered that the hard, spiky grass growing on the dunes by the sea at Montrose in the north-east of Scotland is called Marram grass. It is good to be able to name things, but for much else I will have to rely on commonplace words like stone, water, wind, mist, and bring my imaginative eye close, so as to feel their particularities.

My stepfather, who was mostly my ex-stepfather for the many years that I knew him, more or less disappeared ten years ago, when he cut off contact with everyone apart from the one person he lived with. It was a loss felt keenly by his friends and family who learned of his death ten months after the event. So the bits and pieces I am putting together are possibly an attempt at some kind of restoration. The imagined past, he once said, reflects the lived present.

I just remembered that I promised something short, pithy and unspeakably heroic - and this is hardly that. Damn. But on the other hand, these few words and the others are probably the most I can do in the short time available. And considering the mountain (well, small hill) of other tasks that clamour for my energy and attention, there is something of the heroic here, even with the lack of pith. But you can't have everything.

**

'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.

**

February

We are out of January - good. I woke early today and sat with my cat in the kitchen, she with a saucer of Whiskas cat milk, me with my home-brewed latte and notebook. Yesterday I talked with the Daughter about writing because this is what she is doing, with projects on the go and deadlines, and coming up against the things that writers face from time to time - the sabotaging sabre-rattlers that fill you with doubt. Of course we all know that the only way out is through - writing through it, that is. But sometimes it helps to be reminded of that and to get a little support. So thank you Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Annie Dillard and a few others who sit on the shelf above my computer. My very first book about writing was a slender thing called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, written in the thirties. It is probably still the best and the one that got me started. As I spoke about the importance of writing first thing, I also reminded myself of this. The notebook is a lovely thing. Keyboard will never take its place and my back hurts when when I sit at it too much. But I am still drawn to the idea that the screen is a kind of Narnian door I can walk through.
In the morning, the silence here on Edge was beautiful. But I became aware of an absence of birds. There was a bit of twitter and song, a lone bird sending out tweets but nothing came back in reply. It led me, though, into the substance of my story, the project I am now working on. Then suddenly an intense fatigue came into me, it was not yet nine o'clock, and so much still to do, and I realised: so often I avoid doing this because I have to dip the pen into the ink of my vitality to get the story down. Still, because I began first thing, a decent writing session, and later on more of the same at weekly writing meet-up.

Prepared spiced chick pea supper, slept in the afternoon, sang Mozart's C Minor in choir later. Mr. Signs exceedingly busy with much on his plate. We are all, it seems, working hard.

Tomorrow I get my first Able and Cole fruit and veg box - Daughter's suggestion, to help simplify my life. I ordered milk, eggs, fish and cheese from them too. If all goes well this (plus slow-cooker at weekends) will significantly help with time-management.

Teaching Classes

When I first began to teach writing classes, in the early days, long before the new achievement-measuring, paperwork-obsessed regimes, and no-one even asked to see your lesson plans let alone learning outcomes, I used to keep a record of what happened in each class. I noted the paticularities of each student and these would inform the kind of lesson plans I created. At one point I was teaching three classes a week and because each group was different, so were the lesson plans. I had the freedom to change direction at any point if that seemed right. Later on, that would prove difficult to do because if you had put one thing on your Scheme of Work form and were then seen to have done something else it would create all kinds of confusion. What if an Inspector came and noted the discrepancy? How could anything be Measured unless you stuck to your pre-constructed Plan? Later on I would find ways to circumnavigate these difficulties, but in the early days I just kept notebooks. My brief - the one I gave myself - was to create an environment where whatever it was that wanted to emerge for a particular student could be enabled, that people should experience the intense play that is a part of the process of working creatively with words and language, that they should begin to express themselves in a way that was authentic.

The other day, in a hunt for something else relating to the project I'm now working on, I came across one of my notebooks where I had recorded the progression of a particular class. Lots of descriptions of students that bring them again vividly to mind, and I realise a large part of the work was this holding in my consciousness of the different people. So much of what happens in a class, or any group (or relationship, for that matter) moves invisibly, and slowly, before anything concrete or substantial manifests. Which really makes a nonsense of the idea that you can state a learning objective for a particular student at the beginning of the class and then measure to what extent it had been achieved at the end.

At one point, in the notebook, I recorded that "they want to know where I come from. No, not London, Primrose Hill, Hackney, but where I really come from, you know, originally, because of that look about me. Something foreign. And the way I speak. I tell them my parents were refugees from Germany before the war, but that I am from here and that I lived in Germany for some years as a child.
"Oh," she says, "I thought you had a speech impediment." Everyone laughs loudly to cover the indelicacy of such a remark and she doesn't understand why they are laughing. She noticed something about the way I lightened on the letter L and thought it was a speech impediment. That's all. She doesn't see what is funny about that."

LOL :)

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.

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.

The New Black

The background has, as you can see, gone dark here.* I felt like a change and was thinking about a poet whose study, the place where she did her writing, was a windowless room in the basement where the only source of light was from the computer screen. I would perhaps find that difficult, but see that it can lend you a kind of tunnel-vision state which is conducive to creative work. Whenever I am fully engaged in something the focus is like this. Even when sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook, there are moments, if all is going well, when everything around me goes dark and I feel as though I am inside the language. I experience this more often with a notebook than when writing straight onto a computer screen. This may in part be because if I am in front of a screen for any length of time I am affected by the - what do you call them - emissions, or something, especially with a laptop. A pity, because I do like the notion of screen as magical doorway into otherspace. But notebook is good too, the soft brown Moleskine cahiers with densely-textured creamy paper or larger A4 hardback.

There is also a simplicity about black - the little black dress that I never actually owned, but I can understand its appeal, the core of simplicity which you can build on. Here every possible moment, which is to say the moments that I am able to "do" anything, is taken up with the stuff of daily life and the getting together of our soon-to-be new place by the sea. A whole day can be spent getting handles for kitchen units. I didn't know. Signs Cottage is, by ordinary standards, unmodernised. I have only just realised this. So in every possible way, there is the urge to simplify, to have what is necessary, beneficial - essential. Working on it.

*nice for a day or two, but too hard on the eyes.

The Writing

I am back on the prose project again (I won’t say the N word in case it comes and smacks me on the head for leaving it so long). Still keeping an eye on doing something with poems but last year was not hugely encouraging. I need to keep sending out, and will.

The project I’m working on has a first person narrator and draws from autobiographical experience but the narrator is not me. This is something of a relief as I wasn’t sure at the outset because she and I share so many details, including some years at an inner London primary school in the 1960s, which is where I am now with it. I wish I’d known how childhood stays with you forever, I would have eaten even more sweets, my teeth couldn’t have been any worse than they were. Whatever difficulties had to be negotiated in the classroom, the playground or at dinner time (slugs hiding under the salad cream, gristle in the stew and fearsome dinner ladies) you knew that sweets would always be there for you – cheap, reliable, plentiful. Even the poorest kids seemed able to afford those. You could get four chews for a penny and a generous bag of fluorescent sherbet for tuppence. Actually, I am not writing about the sweets at the moment, but it’s good to know that they are there in the background and the writing, I feel sure, will want to go there at some point. Sweet cigarettes, though (remember those?), have made an appearance. They were basically the same as what are now sold as “candy sticks”, but with a red tip at the end so you could pretend you were smoking them, and they used to have cards with pictures of footballers that you could swap with the boys for a bit of liquorice shoelace. Bazooka bubblegum could last a whole day if you stuck it under the desk in between sessions.

It seems hardly believable now that the girls and boys playgrounds were separated by a brick wall, but that is how it was, and we had our own entrances too. If a girl tried to play in the boys playground she was called a Tomboy and if a boy came into the girls playground he was a Cissy. You wouldn’t want to be called either of those things, but being a Tomboy was fractionally easier than being a Cissy as it carried with it a smidgeon of respect borne out of fear.

The narrator has an easier time of it than I did, not having lived in Germany and come back to England with an accent (not to mention the weird haircut and Lederhosen), but there will obviously be other complications in her life because, as Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) says, “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” She is, though, optimistic and resourceful and it is another child’s predicament that becomes the catalyst for events that unfold.

But why am I talking about it when I could be writing it? Well one reason is that I am bog-tired after driving through a pea-souper of fog in the small hours to collect Son from somewhere or other in the middle of blasted heath after his return from Dublin. And then I couldn’t sleep. And when I did I woke again after only a few hours. And today I have a trip to Lewes. And – most interestingly – whenever I sit down to write the Project I kind of gear up for it because it counts as Work, but whenever I sit down to put words onto blog, I just do it.

Yes, I know.

when

when the flat field you saw from the attic window
shines with early winter frost

when the goose is cooked, its dark flesh
carved on a bone-white plate

when we sing don’t let the stars get in your eyes
don’t let the moon break your heart

when ground softens to crocus-gold

when summer is almost come, it is your birthday under a green canopy
and the table is empty

when apples are tight and hard and sour
when apples are ripe and red and sweet
when apples lie bruised and rotting

when the cat comes in and howls at nothing anyone can see

when the year turns and keeps on turning, the year ends
and we are at one more remove

a wide river running between us
no ferryman to bring me over

my hands cup the dark water
and the boat, my love,
will not come in

Shine on Signs

I went to see my LP practitioner today, two hours round trip for a free-of-charge follow-up session. We agreed that it would probably be counter-productive for me to push the process any further with the M.E. and that being a proper grown-up meant taking on board the fact that life ain’t perfect; also, that it made sense not to put too much strain my hard-won acceptance of Living With It. She mused that some practitioners might have tried to persuade me that I was allowing myself to be ruled by “self-limiting beliefs.” We laughed in recognition of the potential trap in this and recognised in each other the capacity for opening to new possibility as well as the need to question. I felt, as I did when she conducted the training, that I liked her very much – that whatever she did was coming from an authentic “place”, whether it worked for me or not. I spent a lot of money, but it was worth the risk and I haven’t walked away with nothing at all.

Things are better. I don’t know quite what I mean by this or how I can begin to measure, but I have the sense that this is so, and so does Him Outdoors who sees, more than another, how things lie in the soul of Signs. And it is a soul thing, (for this read feelings, emotions or what you will) probably down to a number of variables, of which LP is one. Body still begs to differ when I say this. Things are as bad as they were, it says, you’re just putting a shine on things. Yes maybe I am, but if so I’m doing it because - at this point in time - I can. When I asserted today that things were better I was aware that it was a partial truth. I liked the smile it brought to the face of the practitioner and was pleased to reflect something good back at her, and anyway (I told body), what did it cost me to put a bit of a shine on things? But I couldn’t have done that if it were just a lie, and it feels qualitatively different to the times when I used to simply over-ride and push myself to the limit regardless.

Feelgood substance I do not despise: went to see the film Juno twice in a week because it hit the exact spot, and then I downloaded the music, including this, and (by all that's wonderful and 1970s) this! from iTunes to play on my peppermint-green iPod. Having said this, I am writing some pretty dark poems – moving from the Edge into the dense forest where there be wolves, witches and thorns and the signs are everywhere saying go deeper. I will, of course. I may, in a manner of speaking, be gone for some time.

A Writing Meme - IN COLOUR

This is all my fault - I asked Moon Topples to give me this one, it seemed a good idea at the time, better than getting down to actually Doing It. What can I have been thinking of?


What is the last thing you wrote?
A poem this morning.

Was it any good?
Not bad – but I liked yesterday’s one better. It’s still raw though, poems need time to cook.

What’s the first thing you wrote and you still have?
I’d need to go through everything in the loft to find out. I liked fantasy and magic and tended to do re-writes of the stories I enjoyed reading.

Write poetry? Angst?
I write poetry.

Favourite genre of writing?
No.

Most fun character you’ve ever created?
Someone who was apparently dull and plain but turned out to have extraordinary powers and magical clothes, a gift from her witchy grandmother.

Most annoying character?
Someone’s mother who I kept trying to visualise as Gwynneth Paltrow but she wouldn’t be pinned down.

Best plot?
Whacky serial killer steals nurse’s clothes, escapes from psychiatric unit and kidnaps senior consultant psychiatrist before having sex with him and bumping him off.

Write fan fiction?
What that? Oh, just looked it up. Not my kind of thing really, but give me time - I love Doctor Who.

Type or write?
I always write poetry in longhand first, then revise on screen. Prose can be either or, but all new projects are best begun in longhand, and anyway I like pens and notebooks.

Ever go back to an old idea?
No – have lots of half-baked ideas grumbling around in files. But I don’t chuck anything out.

Favourite thing you’ve written
Whatever it is I’ve just been working on.

Do you show people your work?
Poetry and short stories – yes, I workshop with people, do readings and have published some things. Long prose pieces need privacy until firmly established, is my experience.

Did you ever write a novel?
I hate this question: two thirds of one and then I took a break. Big mistake - the characters got pissed off and left.

Favourite setting for your characters?
The one where the action happens to be, innit?

How many writing projects are you working on?
What, counting this one? Don’t know. I’m in poetry bootcamp for Lent, working on lots of things.

Do you want to write for a living?
I write for my life.

Ever written anything in script or play form?
Yes, but as poetry rather than something intended for stage or screen.

Five favourite words
Perhaps. Substance. Moon. Wolf. Death.

Which character most resembles you?
All and none.

Where do you get your ideas for other characters?
They are everywhere - enough already!

Ever write things based on your dreams?
Many writers have free access to night-vision. I am one of those.

Do you favour happy endings, sad or cliff-hangers?
Tragical-comical-ironical-satirical. And redemptive.

Ever written anything based on an artwork?
Yes, especially the work of Edward Hopper.

Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?
No – as it comes.

Ever write entirely in chatspeak?
ROFLMAO!

Entirely in L337?
What are you suggesting?

Does music help?
It’s appreciated before and after but not during.

Quote something you’ve written.

That’s poetry, he says and rubs his hands,
what more do you want? Earth and stars and
nothing in between but this.


So anyway, never being one to keep a treasure to myself, I'm thinking about who else I can tag with this. I know - Ms Pants! It's been too long since I landed one of these on her and she is a writer, so if the cap fits wear it, I always say. And Mr. Witnessing - there's another, forsooth, who deserves (in the best possible way) a meme.

Hoping that this finds you as it leaves me - in the pink.

A Bit of Boot Camp

The good news is I’ve been given this award by Ms Minx


She has awarded it to people she reckons are less lazy than she but I suspect she is probably a hive of industry compared to me. Some of the most industrious people I know seem to be so without looking as though they are doing that much. On the other hand, there are those who do very little and I wouldn’t call them lazy. Why is that? It’s to do with the quality of attention that they bring to life, I suppose.

At the many schools I attended I was often thought of as being lazy, dreamy (a euphemism) or at any rate someone who “could try harder.” As a child one tends to accept whatever label is given as true. But looking back, I don’t think I was at all lazy; bored, disorientated or alienated is something quite different and I certainly was one or all of those for substantial amounts of time. When I walked out of the school building the day of a biology exam and went to Hampstead Heath instead, it wasn’t laziness that drove me but a sudden conviction that I knew what I needed – to get out. The English teacher there liked me because I was good at books and poems and writing stories (especially those) but it didn’t stop me from being Asked To Leave. Actually, had they known, I was a tireless worker for anything that had to do with the life of the imagination, which was all I cared about because it was all I understood. I played elaborately and inventively and created for myself and my young sister an otherworld that sustained us through difficult years. I read everything and when I ran out of children’s books I took from the adult shelves, no-one stopped me, so I have a store of read books inside me. I taught myself to cook and steal and play the guitar, all useful skills in their way, though I only really use one of them now.

But I’ve got this Lent thing I’m doing: instead of giving up chocolate I’m working on poems, with the idea that I’m actually going to send stuff out. It’s a kind of recognition that there are things I haven’t got round to doing that I should be doing. Call it laziness (one could) or not being sufficiently grounded. I have this idea, you see, that if editors can’t be bothered to come looking through my files for my poems and get them sorted and published then, you know, sod it. Well nothing has happened so obviously something has got to change – and I suppose it has to be me. A bit of self-imposed boot camp is in order. And gold stars.

Try Hard

I am trying to organise myself. By saying this I have already got off to a wobbly start because one is supposed to be thinking along the lines of either doing something or not. Trying to write the novel/drive the car/climb the stairs doesn’t cut it - you either do or you don’t. Apparently. But, like I said, I’m trying. Mr. Signs, who has begun part-time psychotherapy training (Transactional Analysis), has identified one of my so-called “Drivers”, and it is Try Hard. As drivers go, it’s not such a bad one - Be Perfect is a real stinker to have in the engine.

The thing is that living with a chronic condition (see profile) for so long means that one is often applying the will negatively, in the sense that one has to discipline oneself not to do things. Times when a glimmer of relative wellness opens the possibility for taking action are potentially dangerous because all of you wants to rush in and do it. But overdoing it is easy and subsequent comedown hard as nails. So you learn to walk the line between yes and no.

I am feeling a bit better than this time last year. This is basically down to the fact that I am living life at a pace I can manage and focussing on possibilities. I had hoped for some more radical change with LP, but small steps are good and I was/am nothing if not realistic and, in any case, on we go. I have taken up Pilates. What I mean is I have had a one-to-one session with a practitioner and can now do lying on the floor and sliding my legs forward and back whilst breathing out. This is apparently not nothing. Next I will join the group and basically do what I can. The practitioner asked me if I had ever had whiplash or been in a car accident. I said no.
“You’re lucky then,” she said. Whatever. Tomorrow is pancake day, and after that Lent, for which time I am planning a project, in the company of a fellow Creative. Without going into details (for to name it feels jinxy), it will involve a certain amount of daily activity in the sphere of pen-wielding. Or is it pushing? Anyway, so tomorrow we will eat pancakes and talk about it – always the best part.

The rhythm of my life, though, remains eccentric. There are times, like today, when I do not climb into my body until nearly mid-day. I have just telephoned Waitrose - my supermarket of choice because of this – to see what time they closed and wonder why it has not dawned on me before now (especially now I have no young children) that I can shop, when I must, in the early evening, and actually this frees up a small but substantial portion of daytime energy so that I can write, eat, walk, do chores, see people (or at least one of those). And read.

I think I may only have read one novel last year – from beginning to end, I mean. Poetry and short things, yes, but novels ask a more sustained engagement which I wasn’t able to give. But I want to. So the rhythm of my life must take this into account. I’m reading What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. Trying.

Eating the Elephant

So there was this guy who did the Process and on the first day he got out of his wheelchair and walked from from Crouch End to Marble Arch. I don’t know what he did on the second day, but on the third and last day he went home and cut down a tree. A woman who had been bedridden for years got up on day two and answered the door herself. Another threw away her crutches. And Signs? She went to Borders Bookshop in Brighton, had a coffee and bought a book by Ann Lamott called 'Bird by Bird'. It’s a book about writing and so far I’m enjoying it. Reading about the writing process is the displacement activity of choice when I am not writing, and writing about not writing is a close second. The title of the book gets its name because of a story she tells about her brother:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write [it] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Well that was day one. On the second day I came home and went to sleep. Then Mr. Signs and I did a reasonably thorough uncluttering job of a room in our house and that felt very good. On the morning of day three I noticed that I woke up and felt normal – meaning there was nothing weird going on in my head, limbs, stomach, or anywhere else in my body. And then I went on feeling normal for the rest of that day. I had a sleep again after coming home in the afternoon and when I woke up I still felt normal. You might think I had forgotten what normal feels like, but I haven’t. Normal doesn’t feel like anything at all, but when you are used to having shackles, normal feels like you are a piece of polystyrene floating on the water. Buoyant. The only reason for polystyrene not to float is if something is attached to it, holding it down. When it becomes detached from what has been holding it down, it surfaces again and floats – no matter how long a time has passed.

Well, but today I overdid it, and I haven’t had much sleep. And on this, the first day of the rest of my life, I went supermarket shopping. Cupboards were bare and son has just returned from the Arctic with a head cold and an overdraft. Life goes on and I am not looking for hallelujah moments. I am happy to take it “bird by bird” and notice that climbing the stairs is easier and for several days I have not particularly thought of needing to take prescription painkillers. I did think about it on day two but then I did the Process and the pain went. Today I have taken one because that is what I feel I needed to do and there is no benefit to be gained from pretending otherwise.

There were three of us in the group, plus Mr. Signs who accompanied me. The trainer was a woman who had had M.E. for eighteen years and now doesn’t. The process is used to treat all kinds of things, not just M.E., and it is recognised that this is a physical illness – not “all in the mind”, even though mind is used to bring about a change in the body’s response. Some illnesses appear to respond well to it, others not, nor would it be the right thing for everyone. The process itself is learned in three stages and is simple – but needs to be done regularly and consistently and my inclination is to look at the results after someone has practiced it for a while. Even so, it has taken me by surprise to witness how mind and body (mine) are willing to engage. Therefore I am hopeful. And mindful of the answer to the question: how do you eat an elephant? Answer: bite by bite.

The Lightening ?

It is a dark and stormy night and I thought it was time to put up another blog post. Why this should be I can’t quite say as nothing remarkable has happened in the world of Signs or, at any rate, nothing that I would care to properly identify, though I should perhaps mention that the poet Collin Kelley, who I invited to a Poetry Café at Lewes Library, gave a splendid reading last Friday, even though the number of people that showed up was disappointing, and this in a town so chock full of poets you can hardly move for bumping into them. But no matter – the ones that did come were glad to be there.

I have a silence in my head. I am not sure whether I want to hear something or not: on the one hand it is disconcerting to drop a stone into the deep well of the mind and find that there is no splash, no echo; on the other hand when the sound that comes back is not a splash but a strange sound that makes one back away from the edge, the silence is not necessarily such a bad thing. I am not in the vein to meet Grendel or his mother.

I have been re-reading bits of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and find I am still carried away on the sheer energy of the writing as he (whoever) travels from east to west and from north to south, hitch hiking, scrounging petrol, drinking, smoking. It is the progenitor, I suppose, of all the road movies and strongly romantic. There is something about the beat writers and their lives that has always drawn me, a vicarious pleasure I get from the vitality that drives them – perhaps because I myself have never been what is called “robust”.

I have signed up to do a certain Process in December to see if I can bring about a change in my long-standing Condition. You will notice how coy I am being about naming anything – this is because I would rather not draw a host of desperate, hopeful or angry googlers; there has been much heated debate about the various Processes currently around that are meeting with varying degrees of success. There seems to be a belief that it may be possible to reprogramme oneself, or at any rate the hypothalamus, so as to bring about extraordinary changes in the body’s responses.

I have nothing to lose but a few hundred pounds. When I told my mother that she thought I was planning to go on some kind of crackpot diet – in which case it would have been a story of the incredible shrinking, not to say disappearing, Signs. And I have no intention of doing that – yet.