31/12/2020

 

 

Quelqu'un d'autre

someone else

 

 

Personne ne t'aimera comme tu voudras être aimée

No-one could ever love you the way you want to be loved

 

 

Fait de ton mieux et moi

You do your best and I'll do the rest

Fais c'que tu peux et moi je ferai mieux

Do what you can and I’ll better it

 

 

 

 

 Someone else had to write it. I couldn't. I was too involved in it, too … the stakes were too high for me, I had no emotional distance no cool, no "recul" – yes, it had to be written by someone else.

 Il fallait que quelqu'un d'autre l'écrive. Je ne pouvais pas. J'étais trop impliquée, l’enjeu était trop fort, je ne pouvais pas prendre de la distance, rester zen, avoir du recul – oui, il fallait que ce soit quelqu'un d'autre qui l'écrive.

 Et au lieu de trouver quelqu'un d'autre pour l'écrire, j'ai gardé le stylo en main et j'ai écrit autre chose.

 And instead of finding someone else to write it, I kept the pen in my hand and wrote something else.

 Who's who and what's what

Qui est qui et quoi quoi

 Je m'amuse, j'ai ma muse

I'm having a good time, I'm inspired.

 


 

 

 

 

19/12/2020

Yes, this could indeed become a habit. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump the gun.

 

Take a rain check. A lovely expression I guessed meant to check the weather before confirming an appointment. In fact it means “a ticket given for later use when a sporting fixture or other outdoor event is interrupted or postponed by rain.”

 

Take a rain check — politely decline an offer, with the implication that one may take it up at a later date.

 

However, this is not a postponement. It is a writing offline with the intention of putting it online by clicking on a button called “publish” but with no expectation anyone will read it. Years ago, when I started this blog, I had some kind of expectation of a reader stumbling on it randomly and I did, in fact, find such a reader once (or more precisely, she found me, or she found y prose) and she very much appreciated a tiny impro on the theme of a phrase from Shakespeare. Today my friend is bringing dessert from a well-known frozen food chain and calls it “Monsieur Picard” and I think why does she assume it was Monsieur who started the company and not Madame? The can of worms does not shrink just because we try to ignore it. There is a difference between men and women and it makes me think.


 

16/12/2020

Going Dutch again

 

 

 

So tomorrow came and went. Didn’t make a dent in the urgency of conturgency. Compulsion to play, nay: to trickle and spurt. No-one needs to get hurt. It can all be achieved amicably.

 Founding myths. Stories that structure our experience. As I mentioned in Toast to Jujube

  "There was no little Hans the Dutch boy. The Americans made it up".

 We were told that Hans saw water trickling through a dyke and stuck his finger in and saved his entire village from flooding. Because the small stream would have grown to a bigger stream and burst the dyke. I am using that idea by writing a tiny amount with the intention of using the power of the stream to burst the dyke.  Write a sentence or two every day and soon the words will swell to pragraphs and even pages.  We are entangled in narratives. We are caught up in and made up of meanings which have no direct relationship with reality. We must write our own stories in order to exist.