faraway places

Oh the burden of non-stop online content creation. The internet never sleeps, but I must. (And when the weekend comes, I sleep a lot.) I have become something of a once-a-week blogger. I’m forming a theory. (But I’m always forming theories, and they never seem to do much, or go anywhere.) More on that shortly, maybe. On the currently-hatching theory, I mean.

A good weekend, made up of incredibly little. The highlight of the weekend was perhaps in the supermarket this evening when I got asked for ID buying wine (and chickpeas and haloumi and rockmelon and Strepsils… hardly the shopping list of the under-aged). It was awesome, being approximately 15 years over the age limit and all. (And the fact that the guy ID-ing me looked about 12 is completely immaterial.)

But so, to these photos. I set about unearthing them for a very specific reason. Last weekend I was reading Bill Bryson’s At Home and I learned stuff about Skara Brae (immediately below) I never knew. It got me thinking about Orkney (home to Skara Brae, Maeshowe, The Ring of Brodgar (further below) and The Standing Stones of Stenness, among other things). How it’s one of those crazy enchanted places I’ll always keep coming back to in my head. Although chances are I’ll never go back in real life, given it’s way off the coast of the top of Scotland.

I love how these photos have got a dusky pink quality about them. I also love how when I took them (about 14.5 years ago) I accidentally got them printed in the wrong size… and not just these ones, all my Scotland photos… so I ended up with paper wallets upon paper wallets full of huge photos. Consequently I also ended up paying a lot for them (possibly a precursor to/early warning signs of my bank-breaking Joycam Polaroid spree of 1999). I remember thinking at the time: Maybe one day they’ll come in handy. And, well, here we are, 14.5 years later.

Virginia and I ended up in Orkney by accident, really. We had reached the outer limits of our known world, pretty much itinerary-less, and with all the wisdom of 19 year-olds with time to kill, thought what the fuck… We knew nothing about where we were going when we got on the ferry, headed in a direction where there was nothing but an expanse of cold dark uninterrupted sea and a foreboding licorice-coloured sky. (And of course I knew the world wasn’t flat, but it did feel like we might fall off the edge of it at any minute, stupid as it sounds.)

I’m not (and I couldn’t if I wanted to) turning this into a travelogue. It’s probably enough to say we weren’t expecting to find a bunch of Henry Moores and Barbara Hepworths in an unassuming (from the outside, at least) pier gallery in the small fishing town of Stromness. Or strange and very significant neolithic shit (see above and below) going on in the absolute middle of nowhere. (Bill Bryson tells me Skara Brae is perhaps one of the most useful and untapped insights into our early civilisation’s domestic structures and habits, for example. And he’s a pretty knowledgeable guy.) There was also an excellent bookshop, where I bought some local poetry* which sort of blew my mind a bit. And a good men’s bar. Although we didn’t know it was an exclusively men-only bar until after we’d sat and drank our gin and tonics with every set of fisherman eyes in the place firmly fixed on us as we did. (Trouble was, we couldn’t understand a word they were saying, so to this day we don’t know if we mistook eviction for what we at the time thought was a gruff and somewhat surprised welcome.)

I called my parents from Orkney to tell them where I was. It turned out Dad was no stranger to Orkney; he’d been on a squash tournament there back in his university days in Aberdeen. Who knew.

It was a nice trip down memory lane, digging out these photos.

*I also dug out my favourite slim (very slim) volume of Orcadian poetry. It’s called Writing Like a Bastard, by Alison Kermack (now Alison Flett). My favourite poem from it is this:

WOBBULS

see if yi go

well

my hartz like

ma voice

in thi car

oan thi cobbuls

——————————————————

And now for the theory I’ve been forming. I can’t actually properly remember it now. It has something to do with action and inaction and how (for me) there never seems to be a happy medium/middle ground between the two. In frantic times all I want is quiet and respite and to know how to chill the fuck out. And when I’m quiet and relaxed (like this weekend, for example) I can’t ever just enjoy it. It feels a bit like my lifeblood is slowly leeching from me and that I’m destined for a life of television and naps. (And Bejeweled, which apparently I now have to take off my computer if I am ever to get anything done ever again.)

And now I am going to go and wash my hair, which is another thing I do approximately weekly, just like writing here. (And I would promise to be better, but empty promises — however well-intentioned at the time — are the worst.)

the all-too-familiar gnomes

At a loose end before bed tonight (tired all day and now not at all… just looking out at three-and-a-bit quarters of the moon and feeling sad for my grandfather in hospital, and for the miners’ families) I went through the notebooks (not the diaries) from my years on earth as a 13 and 14 and 15 year-old. Mostly because I knew I had stuck a whole heap of other people’s poetry in there and I wanted to see what it was. Unfortunately it also meant I couldn’t help but accidentally encounter some of my own very early attempts at the poetic form. By god they are awful. Harrowed (then) and harrowing (now).

By the time I reach 15 I seem to have limbered up a bit. I mostly don’t sound like a blender-mangled dictionary, and there’s the surprising glimmer of the occasional okay line (but only in isolation) although it seems that emotionally overwrought (downbeat languor being my particular specialty… no lime-lit hysteria for me) is still the only state I know how to occupy with any confidence (although confidence is completely the wrong word to be using on this 15 year-old poetry attempter). If you can imagine Eeyore with a penchant for florid verse, then you probably have a fair idea of how my, um, adolescent aesthetic manifested… (I’m sure Eeyore would prefer aesthetic to shtick.)    

Anyway, I spent most of the time looking at my elaborate doodles (e.g. the one above) and admiring their ink-penned delicacy and marvelling at the exquisite lengths of time I spent idly spinning them (that’s boarding school for you, probably). Thinking: but my doodles are pretty good. If only the world needed more Elaborate Doodlers.

And (disregarding for the moment a shitload of the requisite Morrissey and Sylvia Plath), there were some interesting things pasted in the notebooks. Including this James K Baxter poem, Ourselves, which Virginia has written in the ‘NOTES’ section of our our old school diaries (I know this because the page says ‘NOTES’) and 15 year-old me has ripped out and stuck into my notebook.

The poem seemed like the perfect (or at least a very timely) expression of reflecting on a time very long ago and trying to make sense of it. It’s all written out in capital letters with only some punctuation. And the house is too dark and it’s too late for me to be finding the poem in book form now, so I will just type it out as-is and hope I am not causing anyone any great offence. (And if I am — well, you should come over and read my old notebooks — the offence would be far worse.)

Ourselves

LOOK BACK TO THE SUNK LAND,

WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND

THE HEDGES THAT WE CLIMBED

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN

NOT SIMPLE NOW AT ALL,

COWYARD AND WATERFALL

THE BEASTS NO LONGER LIKE

OUR HEAVY STRIDING

TO MOPE ON A HIGH ROCK

HANDS GRIPPED BEHIND THE NECK

THINKING OF FATHERS WISH

(WE ALWAYS DISOBEYED IT)

OR SKULL A LEAKING BOAT

ON WAVES MUCH TOO WET

HOPING THAT MOTHERS BLAME

WON’T WAKE THE KRAKEN

ALL-TOO-FAMILIAR GNOMES

BUMPING IN OUR DREAMS

REMIND US THAT WE HAD

A KEY AND LOST IT

A WAY OF BEING WRONG

YET ABLE TO BELONG

A SENSE THAT ANY BOX

WAS MADE TO BE OPEN

– James K Baxter

amphibian eyelids

This took my fancy. Paul Henry as the subject of Banksy-styled street art, Lambton Quay.

Notoriety is a curious thing. Being of a meek and shuffly disposition myself, ever-fearful of causing offence or bringing any kind of hurt whatsoever to bear on a fragile world, I sort of marvel at human trainwreck situations (figuratively, I mean). They are so utterly foreign to me, these cat-and-pigeon pyrotechnics. But of course, for whatever reason (and let’s call it love) I went and shacked up with the china-shop bull yin to my apologetically china-evading yang, because sometimes that’s just how it happens when pairs are formed.

Speaking of pyrotechnics, tomorrow there will be fireworks. Even sparklers make me startle a bit, although I do like the way they leave a retina-scarring trail behind them, even after they’re well gone.

I started writing something for my little china-shop boy the other day. I write it on the bus, on my way home, when I remember, and when I have writing utensils on my person, and when no one is sitting too near me. I have set rules. Each individual section has to be written and finished within a single bus zone, and then put away and not looked at until one day I figure I’m done. And then I’ll piece them all together. It will probably be fucking terrible. That’s okay, though. I kind of hope it is a bit fucking terrible. I don’t know why I do. It’s maybe the self-saboteur in me (while I’m incapable of wilfully bringing strife or conflict to those around me, I seem to be pretty good at inflicting it on myself).

So far the bus poem starts: you and your amphibian eyelids. That’s all I remember. I’m not actually sure where I’ve put any of the scraps of paper, either. Maybe they’re lying on the floor of a bus somewhere. Doesn’t matter though — I have the opening line, and that’s further than I usually get.

to sleep on the heart side now

I haven’t been here much. The other day I went through old bits of paper and found a whole heap of stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere electronically. That’s for a very good reason, mostly. I had been looking for this one for a while though. So I typed it out. It brought back 12 years ago pretty much good as new. I think I was crying a bit at the end of it. It wasn’t even wince-crying. (Not the usual Jesus that’s bad slimy cloying shameful destroy-it-quickly-and-be-done-with-it crying/whimper.) It was like I was hovering above myself. No, it wasn’t like that at all. That makes it sound like The Lovely Bones or something. It was more like a giant smack in the face, but in a sort of nice way.

……………….*.*.*.*.*._._._._.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.>>>>>>

 

ST KILDA dream sketch                                                               for Caroline

to sleep on the heart side now

………

To sleep   on the heart side

now

To find  the other half

of this Manichean world:

snapdragons & snow-

………drifts

…………………………………………………… . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .   .   . . ….    . .    .   .   .   .   .   ..   ..   

To sleep    on the heart side

now

To unreveal THE THOUSAND

SORDID IMAGES that constitute

your soul

To rewind the old   granular movie

of mizzling days    gone by

                                                            The ceiling flicker

                                                            the

                                                sticky

                                                            dreams

………………………… . . . . . . . .   .   .   .   .  . .   ….      .    .    .   .  ..   …   ….    . . . . .    .   .   .   . . .

                                                                        To sleep      perchance to dream

 

  

ST KILDA (un)true-life skit                                     Melbourne, July 1998

 

WE FOUND HER SLIPPER IN THE GUTTER IN THE REDLIGHT DISTRICT

 dear caroline     I write you a postcard (it has pink flamingos & palm trees & a traffic light sunset)

You are in your space    staring at a stretched canvas  /  empty easel  dreaming of bagels & lucky breaks  (I am dreaming of lucky strikes & just out of interest   how can anything be lucky if it is broken? Oh    wishbones are & fortune cookies can be     but nothing else comes to mind)

dear caroline  the next door neighbour doesn’t like us singing showtunes    I saw him by the Teflon rollergrill in the 7-11 & he asked if I was a bit-part in some fuckedup musical  (& chortled like all truly funny people do when taken aback by their own hilarity)  & I said   funny you should ask   I’m actually writing the great American novel    (& felt all shit at the horrible untruth of it all    holding my sugar donut like a dumb trophy   like it was the western frontier   or something) & he said   yeah   you do sound a bit American

dear caroline    we didn’t win the lottery this week     sorry

dear caroline     I am now writing on the back of the lottery ticket (in really small writing) I have just made a shopping list of wishes:

1. I hope that you can sleep tonight
2. I hope that I end up writing something before I leave
3. I hope your paintings of suburban housing estates are working out okay
4. I hope funnyman goes out this evening so we can do porgy & bess

dear caroline     I have just made up a skit for us    no    well it really happened to us yesterday when we found the stiletto in the gutter on the way back from the milk bar    the scuffed strappy thing outside the delights of delores massage parlour    no one told me Cinderella was a slut   I guess it hit 12 & she got a pimp & not a pumpkin    I guess she ended up on the wrong side    of town   unable to write the bestseller unable to paint the perfect poster unable to sleep on the heart side       now

In the skit we’re walking along    trying to find money on the footpath & weighing up the nothingness of everything    the everythingness of nothing   & I’m telling you how my next project is going to be entitled 101 ways to fuck yourself in the head without genital assistance   &   you’re not really listening because you’re too busy looking down at the cracked concrete for the miraculous flash of a gold coin     & then we find the magic slipper      the silverlined whore’s shoe &

We sit down for a breather & a lucky strike    we try on the shoe  & IT FITS (conveniently we both have the same sized feet)

It’s our prince charming jackpot   our lottery ticket to ride    it’s the coin we never found   landed

sunnyside up       it’s snapdragon & snowdrift city

& I sing sweet caroline    the good times never felt so good   in my best neil voice   (& funnyman is bystanding & not finding it funny)

& we live happilyeverafter    just like Cinderella did

in (un)true life

 

ST ALBANS postscript                                   Christchurch, October 1998

 Caroline           I write this        although I know            that words        don’t work

I write this                    although I know                        all your images are mizzled

your easel    gone now              the hysteria of the heart side annulled

& you tiptoe the borderline of binary oppositions

light & dark /ecstasy, nightmare                         bridging both & feeling neither

just watching the worlds revolve

like the old women we may one day become    as they              gather fuel

                                                                                                           in vacant lots

 

p.p.s. I have rearranged my room in accordance with advice from feng shui experts so that my creative energy can flow more freely     & I still haven’t written the great American novel

safety, danger and a muse in slippers

It’s been a while. I probably wouldn’t make a very good correspondent in times of upheaval, disharmony or even minor crisis. 

If I had a muse (s)he would probably be wearing slippers and drinking peppermint tea. And we’d probably contemplate things like paint charts and lamb shank slowcooking techniques more than we would actually do anything actually worthy of having a muse in the first place. I would probably want her/him to massage my feet for a bit and then I would play Bejeweled whilst lamenting to her/him about my mental congestion and floating sense of psychic displacement.

I need everything to be just so in the lead-up to non-work writing. Just so in my head, I mean. Which sometimes necessitates a strategically arranged outward state, and sometimes not. My comfort zone needs to be clearly demarcated. I need to be able to see the floor. Ideally, Venus will be in the house of Mars and it will also be raining, but only slightly. Just the merest drizzle. A hint of of mist, and preferably around nightfall.

I always did want to be a spy though. Not a correspondent, so much (the idea of journalism soured for me in about 1994, round about the time the then Herald Tribune published my first, um, news story — a few lines on a major weekend heist in the heart of Hastings — two plastic chairs and a length of hose stolen from outside a state house on Heretaunga Street). But apparently I wouldn’t be very good at being a spy, either. 

This (above) is what our books looked like a couple of days ago. I estimate we have jettisoned about 7% of the whole lot. It was a start. I can mostly see the floor now. In most rooms, at least.

Speaking of comfort zones, on the bus home tonight I was reading an article about Technology and Distraction. Long story (well, not the story itself but where I ended up going with it in my head… all the strange little cul-de-sacs of thought I kept tripping into/snagging my brain on), but it got me thinking about humans as downy pink creatures perpetually stuck between states of danger and reward, barricading themselves against one and clambering after the other. And I thought about how that really sums everything up. How that’s us. The pleasure and pain thing. The need for shelter and ringfencing and cups of (peppermint) tea, etc.

My house moving disorientation is not quite so alarming now. It might have something to do with finally having all those fucking books out of the way. It’s sort of exposed and sickmaking when you strip your shell away and stand back and take in all the rubble of your life strewn in contextless piles. I don’t really like it. It makes me feel pink and downy, a bit startled and bung and King Lear-ish. I don’t plan to move again anytime soon. 

There were all sorts of things I was going to write about between then and now. Like the boy on the bus drawing with his finger in the condensation, and how the toes of my stockings were wet all day. And some other stuff. But part of the reason I’d make a shit spy is that I have a slippery-at-best grasp on my short term memory. And so I don’t remember any of that stuff now. I used to write things down as I thought of them but now that’s too much like hard work and another thing to always be carrying on my person.

After I thought about safety/danger/pleasure/pain/damage/repair/shelter/exposure on my way home, I got this stuck in my head, from The Two Fires by Margaret Atwood:

Two fires in-
formed me,
(each refuge fails
us; each danger
becomes a haven)
left charred marks
now around which I
try to grow

That’s [part of] one of my all-time favourite poems. I wanted to have that bit at the start of The Linoleum Room but we figured it was worth more than every paltry royalty cheque scraped together. Also I didn’t know how to go about asking. I did try. That was back in the days before Twitter, though, and now Margaret Atwood is my Twitter mate. So if I had my time again, in 2010, I could just go: @MargaretAtwood can you hook me up?

at the edge of the universe

 

I live at the edge of the universe, like everybody else.

That line has been stuck in my head for days. I think I know what it’s doing there. I think I do.

I just wish I knew how the poem goes on, off the top of my head, but I don’t. And I have empty bookshelves, so I can’t even pull out every Bill Manhire book I own and find it. Soon, though.

Magnus took the photo of this globe. It made me think of the edge of the universe line even more. I used to have the great privilege of having Magnus as my own personal in-house on-call photographer. He is an excellent photographer. Then he went and moved back to Sweden. He still is an excellent photographer, even in Sweden, but I no longer get to have his excellence on tap and abuse the privilege.

Digressing slightly (but only slightly) I ♥ Sweden so much. I miss my Annie.

I miss lots of people right now, more so than usual. The universe is very big and we’re all so far-flung. I miss Bex in Sydney and I miss LP and Mr America in Boston. I miss Marie in Paris (because even Google  failed to track her down). I miss Minx and Lou. I miss the farm cousins, even though they’re not far away. I miss Mogwai (RIP). I miss Lily and Liam (and damn they just won’t quit their growing).

I swear if I were 10 years younger I’d probably be hugely into emo. As it is, and as I am, though, I stand on the cross-trainer at the gym listening to ELO’s telephone line up really loud, getting all cut up and dewy-eyed. Oh well, I come from a very long line of emo. It’s genetically hardwired (i.e. not my fault). I’ve yet to pinpoint the Italian in the upper branches of our family tree, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere.

no evil star

Or maybe I should call this My Secret Internet Life, but I’ll get to that later. If I can get rid of my dead leg and hold the most utmostest concentration, that is. Ow.

I typed that about 10 minutes ago and then lost complete concentration. As I am wont to do. But in my dithering I did (re) find this:

… I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come

which is from this.

And I also found some other stuff. Plus I remembered the sleep game I played last night with myself at about 2 in the morning.

It went something like this (and I think you’ll see the pattern forming if you squint at the sequence very closely and cross your fingers and toes all at once):

Alvar Aalto, Basil Brush, Coco Chanel, Danny de Vito, ee cummings, Fred Flintstone, Greta Garbo, Harry Houdini, … , James Joyce, Ku Klux Clan, Lucy Liu, Marilyn Monroe, … , … , Peter Piper, … , Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek……

Okay and I’m bored with that now. It didn’t actually help me get to sleep, anyway, because I kept getting stuck. And when I got stuck I got agitated. And I also sort of overheated (in that cloying itchy-wool way you get when your mother tries to pull a tight jumper down hard over your head and it won’t go and you see stars and your skin flashes and prickles… and really you were warm enough already without the jumper).

I have a frustrating head. Sometimes I don’t know what to do about it. But night time head is the worst. Night time head can be a bad, bad thing to be lugging around (and so firmly attached) in the dark.

Today I noticed the daphne in my garden for the first time. I walked into town and saw girls with bare legs. It just seemed so audacious and wanton. And strangely summery. Bare legs! I cancelled appointments and felt good about it. I wore jeans to work and felt a bit scrappy.

This evening I accidentally discovered a blog I had set up and completely forgotten about, called NO EVIL STAR. I was trying to bluff forgotten passwords and hack my way into another blog (not this one). I thought I’d finally cracked the pesky code, set about my business, only to discover I was in an entirely alien blog (but also one of my own making, apparently, which was vaguely worrying to me but also perfectly harmless).

I still haven’t worked out the code to the blog I really need the code for. But I think I might do some resuscitation work on NO EVIL STAR anyway. God knows why and what rambling paths I will take it down. But why not.

(And what we have here, with NO EVIL STAR, by the way, is not an enterprising digital spirit creating yet another floaty ego in the digisphere. Oh, well, it might be a bit of that, minus the enterprising. But really it’s just old fashioned procrastination wearing very modern clothes. And on that note, back to some shit about symmetrical communication or something. Bye.)

frozen horses, crusty bears

Ironing listening to Lawrence Arabia on a Sunday night. I haven’t been in the most people-friendly mood this weekend. It happens sometimes. I have been decidedly off colour. I’m hoping it’s just the clutches of winter getting the better of me. I will write a things to do list that will navigate me out of this mess. There’s [almost] nothing a things to do list can’t fix. Only because it deals to an idle/divergent/inward-looking mind.

I ironed a lot of shirts, watched a lot of Film Festival movies, slept a lot, studied, read The 10pm Question. I went into work for a bit, only to try and feel ever so slightly on top of things. We looked at houses and just might be inching a little bit closer to a desirable outcome. I never thought I was a particularly fussy human being. Turns out that I am.

It’s funny having young house guests though, when they come home drunk and amuse you at 2.30 in the morning and then appear at 10.30 in the morning completely ashen and contrite.

We just saw HOWL this afternoon.

If two thirds of our poetry books weren’t in storage I’d pull it out and read it. But thank heavens for the internet.

Who needs a real live library when you have this.

thirteen images from the dark land

Today it felt like winter. I haven’t felt much like writing. I think about Frankie every morning. I think about what to wear and whether to bother with makeup. I think about not much. I get downstairs, unmade up but presentable enough. Sylvie is usually sleeping on the newspaper on the kitchen table, curled up like a tiny woodland creature.

I consult my phone to work out my appointments for the day. A clear-ish schedule bodes well lately. It’s the season for tucking my feet under my desk. Big meetings make me a bit wide-eyed at the moment. They make me feel like maybe I should have bothered with makeup (if only I’d consulted my phone for my daily schedule before making the sometimes arbitrary call on facepaint).

In the weekend we biffed my broken 12 year-old filing cabinet. It had been sitting in our garden shed since forever, its runners buckled and awry, all the drop-files behaving badly, like malfunctioning coathangers or tipsy partygoers, impersonating vertical.

I rescued a lot of notes. I don’t even mean halfway practical lecture notes or cutesy school exercise books. I mean mind-boggling stuff like this.

I mean notes as old as – or older than – the filing cabinet itself. Maybe they should have been given up over the edge of the mucky Happy Valley precipice along with the warped beige husk of my old office storage system. There’s got to be some sort of catharsis in that, surely. (Like burning love letters in a metal drum at dusk once it’s become clear that the paper has outlived — for one person, at least — the very emotion that once upon a time brought the paper to life).

But they wouldn’t make such a satisfying metallic smacking sound as they hit rock bottom. They’d probably waft away halfheartedly on a putrid breeze. They’d snag themselves limply on the wire fence barricades, ensnared along with all the city’s forgotten grocery bags, just as pitifully diaphanous and flappy.

So, no, I didn’t sacrifice my bundle of notes to a new life of decomposition, unlikely bedfellows of whiteware and disposable nappies and hopelessly three-dimensional television sets. Instead I sat cross-legged in bed in the very early hours of the morning some days ago and attempted to type them out. It wasn’t that I wanted to preserve them. I just wanted to maybe get a handle on what the fuck they might have meant. To cut a long story short, I didn’t work out what the fuck they meant. I actually called it quits about halfway through the task (because I wanted to preserve myself).

But I did find some interesting stuff. Like this. Not some Rorschach experiment but my first forays down the Girl Cat path.

And some oblique things that may or may not have been intended as poems, like this:

  

dumb

you say words are over as soon
as we say them
& when we write them
the words are dead
before we even begin

you say
look at the pause
at the end of the line
it is the end of the line
you say
look at the way the dark print
swims
in spaces
all around it there are spaces
that it cannot fill

we spill over
into the drumless beat
of sleep
& silence

I keep a box of words
under my pillow    you
keep a burr of quiet
on the tip of my tongue

you say
a page is
a cage that catches
nothing but itself
in its own hook
of letters

you say
this room
is hollow but
for our bodies
which will soon
be in some other room

& that none of the rooms
will remember us

but i only know this language

it is a driftnet
catching fireflies
sometimes

it is an umbrella of
echoes & reflections

it stands between
me &
the sky

you have made
it into an origami heart
you have made
the surgery 2dimensional
& painless

& now we do not feel
anything we say
to each other we
don’t say
anything we feel
to each other

we live in the same city     one day

we will live in different cities
& the cities will not remember us

I imagine one day
we will live in different languages
rendered dumb
with this

whatever this is
so unsummupable, so enduringly papery
 

all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me

I thought about this poem a lot today. I’ll explain – in a circuitous kind of way – in a minute (first let me finish my lazy copy ‘n paste and compose myself).

*

Soliloquy of the Solipsist

Sylvia Plath

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

*>*.*>*.*>*.*>*.*>*.*[{{*}}]*^*>*^*_*-*_*-*_*+*+*~*~*~*.*.*<*|*|*|*\*/*\*/*(*)*(*)*.*.*^.”^.”*……..

Today I was talking to the Radiant One. (Actually, we weren’t talking so much as we were communicating via a rampant and quite revolutionary corporate instant messaging set-up which has wrapped its super-effective interruptive tentacles tightly around my working day… to mostly good effect.)

The Radiant One is on the brink of international fame in some circles. We *talked* about that for a bit. We chucked in a few emoticons. (Well, how better to encapsulate our enduring bonhomie than with some well-chosen smiley faces with pokey-outy tongues?)

Then, moving onto more pressing matters, I asked the Radiant One to get a stamp made for me. Not knowing too much about the ink stamp world (other than I like to make excellent wrapping paper with them), I assumed the Radiant One would have to call for her carrier pigeon, plump its feathers tenderly, fuel it with breadcrumbs and tepid water, stuff a rolled up instructional scroll in its micro-chipped collar and send it on its way.

From there I pictured the pigeon winging its way to a far-flung, highly altitudinal place (most likely an attic or turret of some description – that seems to make the most sense) perched atop a barren hill,* enmeshed in the dewy gauze of the finest clouds. The old stamp maker would receive the pigeon on his windowsill, painstakingly unravel his directive, put plainly, double-spaced in Arial font 12, so as to avoid confusion.

Then the old stamp maker would set about with his supply of bubblegum-pink rubber and his suite of fine engraving tools. His cup of mead and wheatmeal crackers put to one side in order to ensure the utmost concentration. His hands trembling ever so slightly, eyes half closed as he made the first incision. 

The old stamp maker would work through the night. And the following night. And the one after that. Until he had in front of him, in his saggy hessian-aproned lap, the finest ink stamp known to humanity.

And by the time he had affixed his business card of gold-woven parchment and wrapped the stamp in layers of gossamer, saddled up the half-dead-from-waiting pigeon and sent it back to whence it came, it would be about three years too late for me. I wouldn’t have need for a stamp any more.

That’s what I pictured, anyway.

So I said to the Radiant One: How soon can you get me this stamp made?

She said: How soon do you need it?

I said: Now. Then I reconsidered and corrected myself. No, actually, I said, yesterday would be good, if you can manage it. 

Sure, the Radiant One said, probably cursing me. (Not that I’d blame her if she was. I make some fairly outlandish demands, on a fairly regular basis. Oh, but only with the best intentions, and always nicely.)

Apparently I am getting the stamp hand-delivered by tomorrow afternoon. Who knew they could turn around stamps so quickly!! A late night and sore wrists for the old stamp maker, maybe. But we will pay him handsomely, so I cannot let myself lose sleep at the thought of his RSI and droopy eyelids, or his hoarse early-hours-of-the-morning stammer as he watches a drizzly sun come up through itchy, unblinking eyes. Such is the cut-throat nature of commerce.

I thanked the Radiant One profusely for her swift stamp-brokering skills. I drew attention to her radiance, her irrefutable powers of persuasion. We talked some more about her imminent fame and whether the world is ready for it.

It was good fun. We carried on in this vein until we hit the outer reaches of absurdity, a mid-afternoon cul de sac of lapsed logic. And it made me think of this poem.

*Kinda like where Gargamel lives/lived