L’amour bursting out of la cage

The mountains were so clear the other day. Such a joy.

“Mercurial” is a nice, interesting word I have come across quite often, recently, which took me to mercury. "Mercury occurs in deposits throughout the world as cinnabar (mercuric sulfide), source of the red pigment vermilion."

I immediately want to put another “l” in vermillion and I thought cinnabar was a town… On second reading, pigment and vermilion become Pygmalion.

I’m looking forward to reading Alain Badiou’s “L’hypothèse communiste”; found an article called “L’hypothèse de l’émancipation reste l’hypothèse communiste”

- which seemed to resonate with another Shakespeare quote - "Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery."

Ad Libitum - At one's pleasure, usually abbreviated ad lib – ad libido (and shake).

Speare definitely said it all. There seems to be a quote from him for everything. I found great comfort in “Time and the hour run through the roughest day” when I was a child. I remember repeating it to myself, clutching at the words like a talisman. Now it seems tame, as if the spark has gone out of it; it just doesn’t seem to mean much now. Could it be that quotes (like words) have a set amount of energy in them and once you have used it up you must move on to new ones? That would coincide with the experience of learning to sing a song. First you are attracted to the song, strongly enough to make you want to learn it, experience it, master it. Eventually, you overcome the difficulties and by the time you can almost do it with your eyes shut it no longer produces the same excitement, the energy has changed...

But not the energy of the song... which is surely fixed ... the energy of the singer, which is free to vary... Two energies, two vibrations = resonance or dissonance, harmony or dissharmony. Britta was intrigued at the fact that you cannot burn one log. To have a fire, you need at least two pieces of wood.

Rather than loudness, there is a kind of intensity, when a sound is just voiced - there is a kind of vibrational threshold, when you can hear voicing, that is where the greatest emotional intensity lies.

I seem to have managed to throw the wolves off my trail. I am no longer swimming in shark infested waters. I have found temporary respite on a kind of island or at least beach. Who knows how I got here. One Shakespeare quote that I find comforting now is “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.” If the path is the important thing, then a destination (or direction) is maybe not indispensable. Hoc omnia quibus egeo est.

I found some Physalis at the fruit counter of Aldi. I had never considered it edible and I did not intend to eat it, but as soon as I saw it I had to have some. I took it home and left it lying on the counter for a while, hoping it would do something to surprise me. It didn’t. It stayed remarkably the same for a long time. It didn’t even seem to be drying out or shrivelling up. So I stuck two of the fruits, inside their cages, into a pot, and put the pot on the window sill.

A short time later I was amazed to see zillions of seedlings bursting out of the cages. I assume they will grow up to be more Physalis; time will tell. If you click on the photo to enlarge it you can see what looks very much like a clover leaf in there.

Toast to jube jube

My son had set the toaster to “2” which merely warms the bread, in my opinion. Maybe he doesn’t want butter to melt in his mouth… When I noticed this I turned it up full. The toaster got confused, or did both settings at the same time and the toast came out burnt. As I looked at the black edges the word “carbonised” tip-toed across my mind in slippers. We are carbon-based creatures. I had never made the connection before! When we say someone “is toast” we mean they are finished (the complete opposite of saying they are “the toast of”…) but we are all the product of cosmic combustion, so we actually start out as toast. We could well be the black bits scraped off the breakfast of some mysterious greater entity…

The village of Catrine. Cotton mill built 1787, demolished 1963

Catrine was a hamlet of eleven houses when a cotton mill was built there in 1787. The mill burnt down in 1963. When I was growing up, my father worked in the nearby Barony pit and my mother worked in the textile industry. The shops in the village included a fish monger and an ironmonger, where you could find everything from nails to washing machines. Today, most of the shops are boarded up, except for five or six pubs. The coal mines have closed down and the cotton industry has been delocalised. Wikipedia says Catrine is now “a picturesque village”.

Someone asked me where the cotton came from to run the mill, and I replied America. Glasgow also flourished as a port importing American tobacco. I am currently taking a drug called Champix to stop smoking. It makes me field weird, depressed one day, elated the next.

The first word that caught my attention since my last post is “inadvertently”.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin inadvertentia]

I just like the word, as I also like jeopardy, which, who would have guessed, comes from the French ‘jeu parti”

1. Risk of loss or injury; peril or danger.
2. Law. A defendant's risk or danger of conviction when put on trial.

[Middle English juperti, from Old French jeu parti, even game, uncertainty : jeu, game (from Latin iocus, joke, game) + parti, past participle of partir, to divide (from Latin partīre, from pars, part-, part; see part).]

Phonetically so close to leopard, no doubt some Martian trying to decipher English would think the meanings were related. Not so, not even the origins of the word:

“In Antiquity, it was believed that a leopard was a hybrid between a lion and a panther, as is reflected in its name, a Greek compound word derived from λέων léon ("lion") and πάρδος párdos ("male panther")”.

Another single letter change takes us to leotard, as in tutu (jube jube...)

“Writing is a performance art, so expect to experience performance anxiety, almost every time you write. Think of it as page-fright. :-)”

One of my favourite artists in one of my favourite newspapers:

I was reading in the aforementioned news-paper about arms being shipped to Mugabe via South Africa and the wooden language of diplomacy clunking out “we don’t have the authority” to not deliver this cargo when all of a sudden the sun came out:

“Dockers in Durban were refusing last night to unload the ship. The SA Transport and Allied Workers Union's general secretary, Randall Howard, said: "Satawu does not agree with the position of the government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons. Our members will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road."

Phew. There are still some people alive in the world.

Fulcrum
n., pl. -crums or -cra (-krə).

1. The point or support on which a lever pivots.
2. Zoology. An anatomical structure that acts as a hinge or a point of support.
3. An agent through which vital powers are exercised.

[Latin, bedpost, from fulcīre, to support.]
(point d’appui, pivot.)

“Pivot” in French is also the name of the presenter of the longest-running book programme, and so his name has become synonymous with literature.

I had never heard of an “Interest-only mortgage” before. The mind boggles.

And the last word of today is allay:-

“Research allays fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels”

Oh, I’m so relieved. I think of the little Dutch boy determined to save his community by sticking his finger in the hole in the dyke, but the adults can’t decide where the hole is, or there are so many holes they can’t decide which one he should be allowed to try to dam with his finger, and meanwhile the tsunami approaches...

And the myth isn’t based on true, European experience. There was no little Hans the Dutch boy. The Americans made it up.

And its one, two three, what are we writing for?

Today’s headlines - "Another Eight killed and five wounded in US mall massacre" – "The woman described the killer's behaviour as bizarre, including his shooting the stuffing out of a teddy bear". – I wonder if it was the bear called Mohammed.

Connections. Last night I read a magical passage in a book by Nancy Huston, Le Journal de Création, which Françoise lent me. It was about being in the middle of writing a novel and on a kind of semantic plateau where everything makes sense, where every detail is highly significant. I immediately felt pangs of nostalgia for that feeling. I don’t have much time to write at the moment. Fascinated by the prose of an Anglophone woman who writes in French, I started to look for information and found an article about one of her books:

“focusing on language, especially bilingualism (broadly understood as the capacity to communicate in two languages) as a site where trauma is expressed and mediated.”

In a recent personal crisis I felt supported by my mother’s words which came to me in French. Apart from a few songs she learnt from the Free French soldiers stationed in her village during the war and the ability to order a café au lait and a croissant on her frequent trips to visit me in France, she does not actually speak French. Why, then, were the words that provided me with comfort in a foreign language?

“Ta force c’est dans ta capacité de travail”.

I remember the day she said this to me, in English of course. I do not remember the exact words. I mentioned this to my analyst and mentally pinned it on the wall inside my cave to take a closer look at sometime. It seems to me that it is a sign of something not being straightforward in my use of language or affect or emotion… my immediate impression was of a crossed wire or a snag in a circuit.

Also, when she said it, I was hurt. I did not want to be told I was a good pack horse, I wanted to be praised for my wit, intelligence, beauty or something else exceptionally meritorious. The same thing happened near the beginning of analysis when BM congratulated me on being a good translator and I felt crestfallen. What possible good could it be to anyone to be good at their job? I thought at the time. Feels like a million years ago…

Semantic-Pragmatic Disorder (SPD) is a developmental disorder that many experts believe is closely related to autism and Asperger's Syndrome. The name refers to the fact that people with SPD have special challenges with the semantic aspect of language (the meaning of what is being said) and the pragmatics of language (using language appropriately in social situations).