If the shoe fits

A few years ago, there was a door in Glasgow airport arrivals corridor with a sign on it saying: “this door is alarmed”. It always made me feel sorry for the poor door. Now I wonder if I am alarmed or if the news is actually more worrying than usual. Britain is claiming a chunk of Alaska - we need more frozen assets? A new planet has been discovered - not alarming in itself but given the current prevalent mentality on this one I can’t imagine it being shared out equitably. Rivalry, mainly unconscious, seems to be insurmountable for most of us siblings.

Whatever the case, it won’t do any harm to sign a petition against France’s introduction of DNA testing for family reunification.

I watched a video in the Guardian the other day of the police following Jean Charles De Menezes into Stockwell tube station, and then of his dead body on the floor of the carriage. The CCTV footage in between, i.e. the actual killing, mysteriously went missing. We see the back of Jean Charles as he goes down the escalator to the platform. We know he picked up a newspaper before he got on the escalator. He looks like any other commuter. The escalator is swallowed up by the tunnel. Then, singly and in groups, the armed pursuers go down the escalator after him. The result is horrific. Suffocating. No way out. You can feel the unstoppable heavy machinery of human error grinding into action. Seven bullets to the head while restrained.

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I have added a link to Laura Gonzales, who is lucky enough to be living in Glescka. Funnily enough, when I went to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (her home town) I did in fact come back with several pairs of shoes... The Spaniards certainly know what they're doing when there's art afoot.

Captain ad hoc

Talking about her small daughter’s drawings, a friend said “Ruby’s people have now got fingers and eyebrows – wonder what they’ll grow next week...”. Her words immediately reminded me of two lines from Sylvia Plath's Love Letter,

"I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg."

When I was looking for an online version of the poem to link to, the first six I opened all had the same two mistakes: “mice-scaled” (!!) for “mica-scaled” and “An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg”. (vaguely reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s “as a wife has a cow, a love story”).

I also remember quoting those words early on in analysis, (the Plath, not the Stein) when I felt that parts of me were coming alive, coming back to life or coming into being. I was overly optimistic at the time, believing naively that progress would somehow be sort of linear.

Not according to the brilliant article by Todd McGowan in the latest edition of The International Journal of Žižek Studies; “Violence of Creation in "The Prestige"”. (see left sidebar). Coincidentally, I watched the film recently, failed to recognise David Bowie, and at the end was convinced I had missed at least some of the points. I was not mistaken.

As I also failed to grasp how to put categories on this blog, or to put the blog posts into categories, I created two parallel-universe blogs for my own writing, one in English (Vita Text) and one in French (Vita Texte). I will be adding things on an ad hoc basis, as and when they are brought to mind through an association of some kind.

I am also adding a link to a bilingual blog hosted by a French translator who lives in England, naked translations. I have not been following it closely but intend to do so because it is very interesting.

Talking about translation is a minefield I am scared to wander into, because I am bound by confidentiality agreements. I don’t always trust myself to know where to draw the line, restraint not being one of my strong points.

After a period of heavy rain I was watering the plants around the house that are deprived of rainwater by the eaves, and I thought of the expression “eavesdropping”. (Etymology: Anglo-Saxon yfæsdrypæ a person who stands under the eaves to listen to conversations.) . I suppose that is part of the phantasmagoria of the blog, that some mysterious other is lurking on the edges, either deliberately to steal information for dastardly purposes or simply because the rain started when they were passing and they stopped to keep dry.

Another high window

A shimmer of hope

in the pool with the ghoul

and I danced to disturb the fashionable mother.

Some greater other croaked

And a long-lost brother soaked

In the irony of a perpetual inkling.

This, then, is the drift, when the goalposts shift, make sure you know that

Love is being with the right person at the right time and realising it.

Stains

Po, it tree.

Roots in soot, shoots leaving for the sky

Knotted boughs branching out elegantly from the

Great trunk of human experience.

The years laid down in eccentric circles,

Budburst too early and your apples will be pipped by the frost, lost

- timing is everything.

Blue earth

Autumn has always been my favourite season, although this year, for the first time, I got such a kick out of spring I almost changed favourites. One of the things I love about the autumn is the colour orange. Photographs are frustratingly dull compared to the splendour of the countryside, but they do convey something of the excitement of the hue.

I gave this picture to a friend.

This is an attempt to paint the aftermath of sungazing.

La terre est bleue comme une orange