Simple longing

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  





The sky is so blue I wish I were alone with it

Swish wish this.
Here I am knuckling under to the obligation to work
And part of me wishes it could be ideal
That’s not good enough for a poem.

You need images, abstraction, more feeling

I really really want this.
This is no indistinct yearning but a gut desire

a chain saw snores. I remember the smell of the sap.

later, I wander out into you
I’m no fool
lie back under your vast canopy and dream around the tree tops
singing of distant places
the beauty of the spot
appeases my spirit

is it the best I can hope for?


*************************************

a love of my own

Keith Jarret playing over the ocean sailing, the wind the spray the freedom the openness the sheer beauty of the music

takes me back to the first time I heard it and I blame you

in the story I tell myself, you introduced me to Keith Jarret and when I hear a single, immediately recognisable bar I remember how much I loved you, how much I longed for you, how much I yearned for you, how much I concentrated all of my longing and all of my yearning onto you

and I didn’t have you
which is why I could do that

and I lived in constant lack of you, to this day I miss you, I am lacking you, I never succeeded in making contact with you

I wanted you to be my man
I wanted you to be my lover
I wanted you to be mine

And you walk away oblivious
You live on oblivious

And I listen to the Köln concert and I scream my longing out over the sea

It is no longer a longing of you
It is no longer a longing of the past or for sex or for love
It is the anguish of a human being caught in mid-life, realising it is alive and has lived and still not knowing what it’s all about

And that music is too beautiful to have existed, it makes a mockery of the rest of life and yet no-one, not even Keith Jarret can live in a piano solo, improvised or not, one-off or not

Fascination

While I work, I occasionally listen to the podcasts of Eckhart Tolle talking about his book – A New Earth, Awakening to your life’s purpose – with Oprah Winfrey. I find it helps to keep me in an English-language word-order frame of mind to have English in the background, but as I’m concentrating on other words I don’t hear all of what they say. Every time I listen I hear different snippets.

Last time the words that caught my attention were Oprah saying “lead me to the rock that is higher than I”.

These words reminded me of the opening words of a story I wrote, called What did the spider say to the elephant?

 

“She is sitting on the soft grass, near my rock, looking up at me. I love my rock. It is too hard for her, too high.”

I got that once more uncanny feeling of magical undercurrents, things being connected, not being free to write just anything but that every word counts. Every word is connected to every other.

Webs and networks, hypertext patchworks and links, quantum leaps and simultaneously being everywhere. Or nowhere. The collective unconscious that anyone can dip into. The structure which is rendered dynamic by the fact that there is a missing link, an empty box, a blind spot. A weakness, an imperfection. Something I have that you don’t have and vice versa. Something human, living. In a mechanical system, there is nothing missing but there is no stopping it…

Claude Levy Strauss has just died, and that makes me want to read him again. He spoke on television and it was such a delight to listen to him, so wise is he. I didn’t understand a word about how mythology reads like a musical score but it made me want to understand…

In the meantime, there is

lucre

the excess of revenues over outlays in a given period of time (including depreciation and other non-cash expenses); net profit; earnings

and

sedulous

picked up from Lionel Shriver

I am now singing in two choirs. Practising "O come all ye faithful", I was sitting in silence with the sopranos listening to the other voices when I found myself whipped away back to childhood, singing hymns at school or at school ceremonies in the church. I didn't want to but couldn't stop myself and ended up with tears streaming down my face...

That moment when you decide not to allow yourself to feel an emotion because it is simply scarily too big.

Potentially overwhelming.

At the prize-giving ceremony we were arranged in rows and had to go up and receive our prize and then go back into the wooden pew and shuffling along one place at a time it feels like being part of a mechanical process that can't stop...

peristaltism. 

 

“Ecritures silencieuses”

forêt sempervirante – evergreen forest

choc pétrolier = oil crisis

< people starve not because there isn’t enough food, but because they lack the money to buy it. Rising prices reflect the anarchy of the capitalist system. Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’s special rapporteur on the right to food, said last weekend, “Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time – just as Marx thought. This is silent mass murder.”>>


“…to be a worker you have to lack the economic independence to support yourself out of your own resources.”

own resources. owned resources.

"Also each device added to this milieu must not unnecessarily or unintentionally contribute spurious emissions that do not perform any particular function."

There was a documentary about some underwater river system in Mexico and divers going in with tanks and following a rope (they call it Ariadne’s rope in French) and getting to a place 30 minutes away from natural light. Obviously I am struck by this because my father was a coal miner till he retired and I was always horrified at his stories of having to walk 5 miles underground to the next pit to keep the right of egress open.

This makes me think of fascination and the character at the end of Le Grand Bleu who swims off into the void with the dolphins (oops! sorry, hope you've seen the film and I haven't spoilt it for you!) that to get anywhere, do anything, we need to feel a tug, a pull, to want to follow, find out, go further… but just when does healthy curiosity turn into morbid fascination?