Evening in

Not writing is a way of letting time slip through my fingers exactly like the sand in an egg timer… funny how clichéd images are often the most appropriate.

 otiose

If donjon is "keep" then what is "dungeon"?

mur d’enceinte

Why does 'pregnant' in French translate as “enclosed”? and how can the same word mean hi fi speaker?

Traduced - shame and traduce them - Inner sanctum - Trémie

Came across trémie for the first time in a translation about cement milling (translated it as 'hopper') and then immediately afterwards, the same day, in a press release about a department store ('atrium')!!!

Not insuperable. Pell mell

Emissaire = outlet stream

 …the Financial Times How To Spend It magazine… muffled …  Shagreen … Peau de chagrin … apocryphal)??

to play its part in evening out the imbalances in the global economy

Becoming increasingly allergic to the way women are depicted by male writers, even Nobel prize winning novelists... men seem to be described and judged by what they are and what they do and women described and judged by what they're wearing and what they look like. It feels like a very bad joke. An omnipresent very bad joke.

years ago before the Stade de France was built I saw a friendly rugby match between the British Lions and France. The atmosphere at the Parc des Princes was electric, they played Chariots of Fire on a glorious sound system and the event would have been worth it for just the crowd and the music. But there was a moment during the match when the ball travelled through a series of elegant passes right across the pitch, seemingly right across the team. It was very exciting and pleasing to witness. Later I found myself describing that moment as “poetry in motion”. Reading George Szirtes’ post made me want to think about what that actually meant for me... the thrill of things falling miraculously into place, a good poem is language at its most miraculous…

Still thinking about the film, Atonement.

The first time I have deliberately watched a film instead of reading a book to get at content.

The Day of Atonement. Leviticus 23:27, 32 (CEV) says "Everyone must go without eating from the evening of the ninth to the evening of the tenth on the seventh month which is the Day of Atonement."

And it works. This reader/viewer, at least, sort of 'excuses' the writer because they are the one to produce the cultural artefact… which brings us pleasure. This harks back to the killing fields and the journalist who wins a prize because he let someone die and the question of living or observing life. However, I think this is a false problem as far as writing's concerned because writing is not really a choice in the usual sense of the word. Something decides to write itself through someone and not the other way round.

I've just translated the subtitles for a documentary film. I found myself almost crying at the end of it. It's not a sad film. Nothing "tragic" happens. It's the story of one French woman's love for England. A crazy quilt is a Victorian quilt with no pattern… Françoise Lebrun says you just assemble bits of cloth of different sizes, shapes, textures and colours, and try to create a kind of harmony.

In the plink

Cherries

Le temps des cerises.

Contrast between the usual connotations of an annual ritual that is aesthetic, poetic and nostalgic and has something languorous about it – Japan – take your time to drink tea – draw back the bow string, hold onto it, don't be impatient for the twang, admire time passing…

And the absolute urgency of eating the damn things as soon as they are ripe, in an extremely narrow window of time from the moment they become deep red and ripe enough to eat and the moment, very soon after,  they turn brown and blue mould appears.

 

Wurds.

On radio 4 the other day I noticed that “interstices” is pronounced “Interstice-seize”. Reminds me of Tom & Jerry and “I hate these me-seize to pea-seize”

J’ai eu quelques frayères – at the spawning grounds?

Superfétatoire – big Greek salad for party?

cudgerie

a large tropical rutaceous tree, Flindersia schottina, having light-coloured wood. Also called pink poplar.

the agalma

Europe's top banker calls for calm - Jean-Claude Trichet wants more…  - Tricher means to cheat

invidious

 Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent...

So when your friends arrive with a huge bag of cherries and you take a bowl out of the cupboard (love that word) thinking to yourself oooooooooo yes, life is a bowl of cherries – but not just that, luckily - then you are already starting to feel guilty about not being able to eat them all quickly enough, as if it was somehow your shameful fault that they were going to rot.

Tooth and nail

Je vous lis en juillet, au bord de l'eau, quand il fait très chaud.

De temps à autre, je garde ma place avec un doigt,

planté sur un point comme un piquet de cerf volant,

ta phrase fait le tour de moi comme l'hirondelle fait le tour du ciel,

comme le vin fait le tour du palais

et quand je suis loin, très loin du point de départ, je reprends le fil de ma lecture,

mon regard re-penchant sur ta page comme un oiseau qui picore les signes, bibliophage sauvage, haletant entre les espaces et les paragraphes.

Parfois, ne trouvant rien, je cours, puis un mot me ralenti, et je te suis, et tuez moi.

Je vous ai lu en juillet, deux fois, autour de la cinquantaine.

Entre la première et la deuxième, vous avez oublié mon nom

C'est sans importance

On a le droit de n'exister pour personne

Être sans importance pour un autre…

Je vous lis, je vous ai lu en juillets,

l'écris vain jeté du lit, je vous le dis, jujitsu à ta virgule près ; lits crevants, juvénile jubilance,

vous, juillet, lu.

I bought a recording of Bach's Cello suites played by Yo Yo Ma on Itunes so I went to buy blank cds at the supermarket bookshop/multimedia outlet (which you may remember is called "l'espace temps").

As I waited for the sales attendant to finish her conversation with a friend and come and take my money, I noticed two copies of a book for sale, propped up on the counter, right in front of the cash register, some distance from the books. I noted the name of the author. BG.

In the evening I switched on the news and the main headline was that BG had died. The same day. I felt a sudden revulsion at the society we are living in. It couldn't be a coincidence. They put that book there because they knew it would have a good chance of selling because the author had just died. So we cash in on death. We are actually using death as a selling point. Do we have no scruples left? Or did we ever have any?


Amitiés bizarres…
The Heads of State and Government confirmed their determination to fight translational threats together.

I had never come across "nous" in English before...


A French question from a satisfied customer and an English sentence from the Guardian..
Ne vous ai-je pas encensée à la réception du document ?
Obama team 'incensed at being kept in the dark' as company denies underwater oil clouds

avoir les dents longues does not mean to be long in the tooth

Painting over the map.

People tattooed acupuncture pressure points on their bodies gazillions of years ago, but we have painted over them. The new layer hides the old layer which is eventually forgotten…

Come to the disco

Picture a March morning

I still find the sight of the snow-covered Pyrenees uplifting, awe-inspiring, in the same way as a vast expanse of open sea. Unfortunately it is impossible to ignore the irritating fact that when you can see the mountains clearly from my kitchen window it means rain is on the way. This reminds me of the cycling conundrum – there are those who enjoy pedalling uphill because they look forward to freewheeling down the other side and those who fail to enjoy freewheeling downhill because they can't bear the thought of having to cycle back up.

I really do feel now that my position towards words has shifted. There is something decidedly not new about the language, about language, about the language I use.

Laconic – lapidaire - scissors – scission – iconoclast - demotic (popular).

And the words are no longer mine. They don't belong to me in any way, I did not create them… putting them together in a particular sequence is not such a big deal… It's just like throwing a handful of sand up in the air and "reading" how it lands.

I feel like I've been barking up the wrong tree, or staring down the wrong well. This intellectual uncertainty is certainly related to the feeling of "uncanny".

And it is possibly related to a recent borderline experience … if that is how you describe the feeling of touching a limit. Last week my reading group "à livre ouvert" was invited to read some poetry during an aperitif in honour of the "Printemps des poètes" ... the theme was "couleurs de femmes". One of the colours we chose was black, and my take on it consisted in a list of words that rhyme with "noir" –

Voir, soir, croire, boire, foire, loir, poire

(see, evening, believe, drink, fair, dormouse and pear)

Not only did I read each word with my entire being, but I also mimed the word and the group (there were six of us) backed this up.

It was an extremely satisfying experience. And I definitely touched some kind of limit, my dégré zéro de l'écriture maybe. In any case, it made me feel that the words stand up by themselves. They don't need any fancy sentences to give them meaning.

Reading Zizek,

 I come across perspicuous, which I had never heard of. It is neither perspicacious nor conspicuous.

Zizek reminds me that the unconscious does not take negatives into account. I'm trying to write a short piece about the uncanny in psychoanalysis and I can't get past the fact that I'm a "canny Scot" – in fact, "canny" in my Scottish dialect means "can't". "Ah canny dae it" = I can't do it. "Cawnie" on the other hand means cautious. "Caw cawnie" means take it easy, don't do whatever you're doing quite so hard.

Audio, video, disco - I hear, I see, I learn

Leap forward

I bit into the bergamot, that cross between a lime and an orange that is yellow, and the next day the skin round my teeth marks had turned orange. Decidedly strange. Had only ever heard of it before in tea.

The word has a ring of “Bergman” to it, which is German for miner. My mother was a “krankenschwester”.

Now, I'm not an anchorite.

Nor am I shipwrecked – naufragée (je suis navrée…)
Stranded - marooned (macaroon) seranora – serendipity.

mangrove (twas brillig)
mongoose
corrigected.

The crocuses have flowered yellow and spring is on its way and so am I. I walked down to the village feeling extremely light-hearted and fell heavily on the pavement. Pride before a fall.

I broke off a dead geranium stem and was surprised at the distinctive smell.
Poetry is a kind of web of mnemonic devices… I see a dead geranium. The distinctive smell tells me it’s a geranium. This reminds me of TS Eliot’s dead geranium and from there to the rest of Eliot’s poetry –

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

So there. So here. As I am about to write “So what” I hear the music … And I’m surrounded.



I am surrounded by a web of poetry, music, literature. Other people have created harmony, beauty and new combinations of signifiers… And I am grateful for that. There is something reassuring in depth.

Today is February 28th. Tomorrow will be March 1st. What about the people who should have had a birthday on February 29th? There is a slight problem with the seamlessness of our reality. The world is not 100% round. Our systems do not 100% work. We live in an approximation that we mistake for an absolute.

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

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

Blue bananas

"Allons y donc, toi et moi"

I came across an old attempt to translate Prufrock into French, and started to look for an official French version online. I found one which starts “Alors allons y, toi et moi”. I prefer my version, for the rhythm. There is something elusive about foreign stress. The ambiguity, or complexity of the rules - the rules of your native language are transparent, you only feel them in transgression, but the rules of a foreign language you fear by anticipation - that weak “s” at the end of alors, you feel it should be pronounced, but you can’t, that would make the phrase “alor zallons zy” – clearly not acceptable. So the “s” is kind of swept under the carpet like a guilty secret, like an awkward person who has just arrived at a party and doesn’t know where to put itself and skulks to the walls – to become a wallflower or, as in French, “to act like wallpaper”.


Thank you Laura, for introducing me to the work of Francesca Woodward.

That uncomfortable feeling generated by the “s” on “alors” – which would not occur in isolation but only because there will soon be another one in the phrase, and which would not affect a native speaker because they would instinctively know what to do or feel entitled to feel comfortable about their version… reminds me of a similar discomfort I felt recently working on Monk’s Blues with Françoise. There is a shift, skip, change in the tempo. Half way through our second three-hour session working on this I felt I had assimilated it, was able, in a group, to reproduce it, stay on the beat, in the tempo, but it was very unsettling and made me feel giddy, as if there was a décalage between what I was doing on the outside (clapping my hands or singing) and how it felt on the inside...

This is one of the reasons I love music.

While I was searching, I was amazed to find TS Eliot reading Prufrock. Such an unexpected treat! I do appreciate it, but I found myself at times frustrated with the way he reads his own poem. Especially “If one,” line 96. That is not how it should be read, at all. Not it, at all, I thought to myself. I suppose I was comparing it to a sort of ideal reader in my head, a mixture of Richard Burton on the War of the Worlds CD and Anthony Hopkins in the Remains of the Day… Or even real life voices of men that I know, Jean-Marie who knew it off by heart, other voices of friends and acquaintances that are my reference points, defining what the male poetic voice is for me.

There is no perfection, and tant mieux. At this point in analysis I seem to have come full circle and am back at the beginning, struggling once again to accept symbolic castration and break free of the omnipotent magical infant position… I’m stuck at a crossroads…

I have just acquired a small amplifier for my microphone and we had a laugh the other day at the idea of me taking them to a psychoanalysis session… "Now listen here, you big Other, you subject supposed to know!" Seriously I am trying to learn to listen, to myself and to everybody else, and making progress thanks to Olivier Capelle’s voice workshop on a Tuesday, trying to light candles in the dark corners of the cathedral I inadvertently swallowed. (I don’t know why she swallowed a sky, perhaps she’ll fly).

On the translation front, I am working on an anechoic chamber. A fascinating concept, if ever there was one… they say that a duck’s quack does not produce an echo.
This one looks like a bunch of blue bananas.

Sunday

Sunday is a day like no other. I wrote a prose poem about it a few years ago in French.


Last Sunday was a degree beyond every other Sunday. I swear it felt like Christmas. It had the same fullness about it, everything being available, being in place - it didn’t matter that it was raining… or maybe the rain helped, by making inside cosier and outside palpable.

I got to the village shop before it closed – they had a farm chicken left for Sunday dinner. It felt like the opposite of the feeling in “Sunday morning coming down”…

“and there’s nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound”

… the empty city sidewalk with the Sunday smell of someone cooking chicken. For once, I was the one cooking chicken. I had crossed over to the other side. I was “in”.

and yet just the day before, I had been observing my awkwardness, my inability to make small talk, my uneasiness in company, and feeling very “out” of it.

Life is full of this kind of up and down, extremes that are connected, you feel excluded and a few seconds later you feel accepted. Just like this house. I was so excited about how great it is and how pleasant to live in and when I had finished sending the photographs I looked around and knew I was over it already. It’s not that it’s not important. But it isn’t everything.



Whenever I think I have mastered something I fall, fail, trip. Like learning to go a bike. When I think “I can do this” I lose my balance and fall off. But when I do master something, it becomes pointless.

I sat down at the piano and played, like a child with a toy. Starting at opposite ends I hit every key several times, moved up and down and thoroughly filled my mind and the room with the random sounds of the keys. Freedom.

I thought about the octave again and about repetition and how the most infinite of fields – music – on a certain level can be broken down into a small number of units and consists in how they interact.

Just like human beings…

But when I do master something, it becomes pointless… or, a related feeling is when I finally manage to accept something, it is too late – like when I began to feel I could psychologically cope with my periods, I was menopausal, they had already started to stop. Is there a connection? Was I able to achieve the feeling that I could cope with menstruation because it was secretely over?

There’s something about a Sunday that brings out feelings of finite and infinite…

Langwitch

NON SENSE

This poem has no meaning. Poem has no meaning this. Has no meaning this poem. No meaning this poem has. Meaning this poem has no. This meaning has no poem. No, this poem has meaning. (c) Linda Herbertson	Ce poème n'a pas de sens Sens ce poème n'a pas de De sens ce poème n'a pas Pas de sens ce poème n'a N'a pas de sens ce poème Poème n'a pas de sens ce Ce poème n'a de sens pas Ce poème n'a de pas sens Ce poème sens de pas n'a Ce sens n'a pas de poème (c)Traduction de Linda Herbertson
Este poema no tiene sentido. Poema tiene no sentido este. Tiene no sentido este poema. No sentido este poema tiene. Sentido este poema tiene no. Este sentido tiene no poema. No, este poema tiene sentido. Traduction de Rebecca Behar	Ce Poème ne veut rien dire Ne rien dire ce poème veut POème dire ne veut ce rien RieN, ne veut dire ce poème Dire Ce rien poème ne veut Ce poèmE dire ne veut rien Ce dire POEME ne veut rien Ne dire poème VEUT ce rien Ce rien ne veut DIRE poème Ne veut rien dire Ce poème Ce poème ne dire vEut rien Rien dire ne veut Ce poème Ce poème veut ne rIen dire Traduction Rebecca Behar

I love playing with words. I suppose I'm a bit of a Langwitch.
Here, I can't get the bold to work on the last translation, but the uppercase letters stand out a bit. Laura will tell me (if she ever comes back from vacation) if the Spanish works.

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.

Les Granges

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

- William Blake

Rather than move the blog to another platform to implement categories, I have decided to use a method devised by another blogger (thanks will go here later) to put my writing online; separate blogs, one in English, one in French, which are shown as links in the left-hand column (Vita text). Eventually I will remove “stories” that have been posted as blog entries and generally tidy up.

Here is a tiny picture of a house I lived in when I was an English assistant in France in 1978 - don't know the date of the picture, found it on the internet. It is in a small village near Limoges, in La Creuse, called St Junien la Brégère. The lady who ran the local grocer's shop was in her eighties and assured me she had never been outside the village. In the attic of the house I found a trunk full of letters...

Upliftment

While I was looking for information about Dylan Thomas'

“Do not go gentle into that good night
[…]Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I found And death shall have no dominion. As uplifiting as Dianne Reeves, in its own way.

Egg tooth

I was thinking the other day I don’t post often enough or spontaneously enough. The blog is not lively enough. That reminded me of a Sylvia Plath poem that starts “These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.” The poem is called Stillborn.

The lines I remembered were:

“They are not pigs, they are not even fish,

Though they have a piggy and a fishy air – ”

Egg-tooth. Some creatures develop an egg tooth to crack the egg they are in and hatch themselves. Once they have cracked the egg, the tooth falls out and doesn’t grow back.

My father's garden is across the road from his house. It is world-famous; a beauty spot, part of the national heritage, or should be. My father’s garden is a magical place. Here are some pictures of it, one with the man himself.

Another one is of a corner with a solar-powered fountain. I had to wait a long time to get the picture of it working, clouds kept coming over and blocking the sun.

[...] for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

Sara just sent me an article in the Guardian arts blog that has links to Gormley and Goldsworthy. I will put it in the side bar eventually, when I have time to work out how to do it. And I will work out how to create links between words inside the blog.

When I posted "the ties that bind" I searched long and hard for a Philip Larkin poem I remembered about a bow tie walking down the street. I couldn’t find it, but found this be the verse.

Strange I never noticed him in Stevie Smith before:-

Not waving but drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

I'm off on holiday on Saturday, two weeks in a boat, two weeks in the great outdoors, far from blinking screens. I'll miss you.

Lonely as a cloud

When I typed “psychoanalysis” as a tag in my last message, I saw the “anal” morpheme in the word for the first time. My analyst (there, it happened again, I never noticed the “anal” in “analyst” before) is called Brooke Maddux. For the first couple of years I babbled on about the Brooke part, unable to cross the great divide of the space between the two components and cast my mind upon the first three letters of the surname and their possible relevance to me.

Smother love

Tangled and fangled, wringing and singing, frizzed and tizzed,

That there, hair again gone to borrow.

You thought I was going to express sorrow

In the daily rut, glutting about strutting to tell tails to some avail

Every time finding no excuse, and no use for such despondent ab

jection

‘She wasn’t what I wanted her to be’

someone didn’t turn out quite write,

the reason ignored

perhaps just board, stiff or white, like the interminable knights we slept through, me and you, you and me, together.

You didn’t kill me so I have to kill you,

I sup o’s

Why only one survives I cannot fathom, but separation there must be

Cut the chord and let me be

in harmony with what I see and feel and hear and am

Between my two loves I kick and scream, shove and push, try to find my place

Until my egg tooth grows and off I goes out out into the bright

They’ll find the skin and realise I was the snake

But if I stay they’ll burn me at the stake, or tie me to the shore and let the rising tide rid them of the whore

And all those who are not she, cannot, no...

Even those she has been won’t let go of the habit, the train, automatic closing to keep out a pain, a danger, a possibility that would have led away from the

Straight sharp right path that keeps the roof

over my head, body

(the safe, dark, warm spot, calm place to lie down in after the human race)

rush, sclamber and frush to do do do their bidding

A sickening anguish in the pit of the stomach

haven’t had enough sleep yet, haven’t had enough rest yet, haven’t had enough,

yet

not ready to skip through the loops and hand over my poops for inspection (or possible rejection)

On, on, on it goes, throbbing toes, acrid nose, coffee at the Denfert Rochereau’s then swallowed by the sub-urbs

Some other time, in another place

Croy shore – the electric brae – in an Anglia

(I stared too long and too hard down a well, well, that’s what they say I

should have moved on

left behind

looked elsewhere, further up –

------------but I stared into space equally?

Then it was not the direction of your looking that was wrong but the intensity

You stared so hard that you prevented any awareness from penetrating

You wanted to understand so much that you only succeeded in grasping the fact that the brain can’t do it, can’t comprehend the universe at a glance and not take a chance on a false god

You were so far up your own r’s you didn’t see the farce going on all around you, and the superficial sideways glances that were winning smiles

By the time you were found, the trees were bare in that square

Oh my sponkyandulating pandelpopliminskiffslot

What if no-one cuts you down? For all I care_…

Link in a chain, I’ll say it again, explore mine until I find the seam

then dig dig dig until I’ve sucked it clean and you – oh my inaccessible Other – why wouldn’t you let me have a lover? -

The golden cow is here

And we valiant fatted calves must fight in the muck for the right to a suck

Methinks I should have had a tit of my own - toil and struggle, double hubble

Hungry, lonely and afraid

I could see a pale glimmer of light in the distance. My life of darkness was coming to an end, it seemed. Soon, things started moving and I was painfully and inexorably expulsed from my hiding place. They let my mother see me. I don’t think she was very impressed. I cried a lot. Eventually, the nurse took me away, and locked me in the linen cupboard so that my mother could rest.

I cried and cried. I screamed till I was blue in the face. I was tied up tightly in a shawl and couldn’t wriggle and kick. I writhed, ranted and raved. I never gave up hope. I fell asleep, still expecting to be saved. When they let me out it was too late, my relationship to the world had been laid down once and for all. I would go through life thus, a strident, unanswered demand for my needs to be met by someone outside myself. Anger at the lack of response. Determination to elicit a response by screaming louder, longer, to reach ears ever further away. I was persuaded that the fact that nobody answered my cries meant that nobody had heard them and that if nobody had heard them it was because everybody was too far away and I wasn’t screaming loud enough. Thus my future behaviour was programmed as a quest to hit a further spot, to be heard and elicit an answer from someone or something that was out of my reach, out of earshot, off limits. It was only a question of time, I would break through the silence barrier and touch the other, be heard, be perceived, and it or them would come running to fulfil my every whim.

The fact that nobody ever answered the demand did not allow me to call into question the legitimacy of my attitude. Obviously the world was at fault in this, it couldn’t have been brand-new, pristine, unspoilt, undegraded, perfect me. How can the behaviour of a new-born baby be considered in any sense wrong? I was my song, and my song was me, and it was loud and painful. It was full of longing, a lament, a cry from the soul that nothing could soften, since it hadn’t been answered at the right time and now never could be.

So much for the baby in me. It is still unconsoled. But it is no longer alone and no longer free to scream as much as it likes. Its future states came into contact with the reality principle in a variety of different ways. Each time, I suppose, the thwarted élans regressed to the cradle rat whose cries went unheard and therefore unmodulated. All in all, it was a felicitous event, for the being that grew never doubted for a moment that the point was to get a message across, and, never having succeeded, the will remained undiminished.

Reaching puberty, it wrote poetry that it likened to “a pathetic cryptic message for the Martians” – as indeed, in a way, it was. They never responded, either.