Oh what a tangoed web...

At my first session of psychoanalysis I said “I have this image of myself as being stuck in a well.” Because of my accent, my analyst thought I had a Jonah complex. Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a George Orwell essay called Inside the Whale. Very interesting. Written in 1940; and therewithin I find “cold snap”.

I am used to brief bouts of intensely cold weather which I had alway referred to as cold spells, and I had the impression that I had only come across the expression “cold snap” recently. I decided it was somehow “wrong” and not to be adopted, or at the very least suspect because recent. Interesting to see the brain at work, rejecting the unknown, even in someone who rationally and consciously embraces it.

I was thinking about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a metaphor for desire, which, according to BM, is either prohibited or impossible. When part of you goes all out to get what you want, natural forces are unleashed against you. The old man caught the huge fish, but the sharks ripped it apart before he could get it home.

Prendre une décision in French, but in English, do we take them or make them?

Google is beginning to annoy me. I started to find strange cases of synchronicity; I searched for an article to buy online and the next day I was working away and saw adverts for that article on my screen… What a coincidence, I thought, until I realised that my browser was constantly spangled with articles I had looked at in online stores.

To make matters worse, be it Google or Firefox, someone has “enhanced” the search function. Used to be when I searched for a word or expression, the search box offered me up my previous similar searches which served as a useful aide-memoire. Now the search box offers me other people’s searches, or searches that it deems useful, which are of no use to me at all and further pollute my working environment. Because I am fascinated by the written word, I see combinations of words in their proposed search phrases and think really? Does that exist? Or what does that mean? And off I go on somebody else’s search, neglecting my own and wasting time...

... which, as we all know, is of the essence… As a translator, my main, bread & butter bulk per word rate has dropped 30% since the euro was introduced. Which means that to maintain a similar standard of living I should be working 30% faster… But I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers, etc. The competition seems somehow unfair.

 

Prosody,  Phrasé

Phrasing, Prosaic (the antonyms include pedestrian (belisha beacon) and I want to include poetic).

Typo of the day: pubic relations

Unfortunately, I learnt the meaning of a new French word:

détonner = chanter faux

Now, chanter faux = to sing out of tune, or off-key, but I can’t actually find that as a straight definition for détonner, and instead I find "to jar, to be out of place… " Oops! Some of my notes were slightly out of place. There are no grey areas in singing – it is either in tune or it isn’t. Our choir mistress made me laugh after a particularly laborious passage of a rehearsal when she said “c’est presque ça”. Which means we were rubbish.

I’ve always been proud of my heritage and the pivotal role Scots affirm they have played in everything, but even I found this amusing:

“In another attempt to circumvent its dependence on Chinese tea, the East India Company sent Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to China to steal and smuggle out of China tea plants, which were then taken to India, where by the end of the 19th century they matured and produced Indian tea.”

I watched Merrill Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Sad to say I worked for and with a woman like that in Paris once. I admired her energy and precision until one day I heard her demolishing someone on the phone to save her skin.

"la raison d’état de soi-même"

“The national interest, often referred to by the French term raison d'État, is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural.”

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?

Uncannily like vivacious

Vivace = perennial


Oh do not ask what is it
let us go and make our visit…





You would hardly believe this… I was listening to TS Eliot on the net, reading his poems, and finding fault with his reading… I had a “superior” voice in my mind. When we read silently I suppose we use the perfect voice of the Big Other.

picayune – minutiae - the time catcher. Rather like the feather structures designed by Red Indians to catch dreams, I imagine a fine net that would catch time as it flees too fast through our lives…

I continue to describe my milestones as they turn up regularly or irregularly. Irreducible parts of experience, the nuggets. I enjoy them, no matter if I'm repeating myself – I should apologise but I'm tired of apologising, and we never apologise for the right thing, anyway - the only way to be sure to mention them all is to mention them as they arise and you know you have come full circle when you see one for the second time… they say you have to hear something three times to assimilate it.  This is a restful feeling. No need to shout or emphasise anything in the moment. Because it is all going to have to be said again, and again... until...

This reminds me of the thrill of reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. From a few pages into the book you never know where you are, how much you have read, how many pages are left. It is a totally disorienting experience. Suddenly, just when you are wishing the book would go on forever so that you can stay inside it like in a friend’s company you realise that what you are reading is familiar to you and so you check and yes, you have already read that chapter, the book is over. A cruel ending, but an unforgettable, inimitable one.

Some books hang around, though, and I often drink maté, nowadays.

… though like a stone, unbothered by it…

About the difference between séduire in French = attract, and “seduction” in English, which is bad. (Laura Says Frank Sinatra was arrested for it!)

seduce
To lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct.
What chance have we got? The rest of the world is at it, playing the game and we British are worrying about the political correctness of being sexual.

and we run away from it all in the the passion to own…


jobsworth, noun
1. (context, mostly, British) A minor clerical worker who refuses to be flexible in the application of rules to help a client or customer.
Etymology: From the phrase "It's more than my job's worth . . ."

I have come up against or stumbled into the semantic minefield of the uncanny in analysis. The frightening aspect of the familiar.


“He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in.”

Being lost at home.
An African painter (Joël Mpah Doo) I was translating used the expression "exiled inside himself..." 
Sometimes, I see an English word in French – on my shopping list on the kitchen wall I had scribbled “pain” which stayed bread for a while then suddenly one morning I saw it in English and wondered why I had written douleur on my shopping list
The other day it was towards the end = vers la fin… and I saw fin as nageoire.
fish-ends
.aleas = contingencies – fringencies – sitges – singe – singer - someone who sings when looked at through French eyes becomes someone acting the monkey…


and death shall have no dominion
dylan thomas


Magpies make a helluva racket!

compunction

"The morning segues into the afternoon."             "they didst this"
 and I'll end with a nice typo - translitted - and some sunny pictures...  October and the weather is glorious.

plants 0909

Green and brown

The things that strike me most about Ayrshire are how green everything is, with even pavements and walls colonised by green moss, how brown the river is, and how much the water looks like beer.

I absorb the damp greenness when I'm there. When I see it I feel ravenous for it, it fills me up, it hits a spot. But I don't miss it when I'm away. I love the bright dryness of where I live.

The first picture shows the driechness of concrete bars on a bridge, browbeaten by the weather to a dull, dirty grey, expressing a capture attempt, me trying to capture the river, the river and the countryside having captured me, owning me through a bond that can never be broken, a birth bond. That I ignore most of the time but that grabs me when I come close...

Green and brown. So green, so brown.

The salmon ladder which was built to make it easier for the fish to swim upstream to their spawning grounds, back to where they came from, and which actually makes it easier for the locals to poach the fish, by covering the end with wire, the salmon are like sitting ducks, and can be wheeched oot the watter using a big hook called a gaffe.

Pictures 16 and 17 show what looks like a precision-cut leaf line, 16 from under the branches, seventeen from across the field. Why do the branches of all these trees stop in such a straight line? Did the farmer shave them?

Sorn bridge, from whence my mother's ashes were strewn.

Rowan berries for a touch of orange. Green and brown are rich and lush and ok but after a while a bit, err, boring.

Not mushroom for these celtic chanterelles... I have never seen such crowds of fungi.

Talking about sitting ducks, I took some stale toast along to feed the little quackers, but along came this nasty big white bird and chased the ducks away. Try as I might, I couldn't get crumbs to the ducks, the swans commandeered all the food. I used to think of the phrase "I AM a swan" (from the ugly duckling) as a marvellous realisation of being beautiful, but in fact these creatures are very aggressive and being one is nothing to boast about.