The inexorable sadness of pencils...

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate pubic places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Theodore Roethke

I feel almost guilty for enjoying this poem so much - Roethke's life, according to his wikipedia entry, seems to be full of heartache and catastrophe. He spent big chunks of his childhood in his father and uncle's jointly owned greenhouse - his poetry (though not Dolor) perhaps reflects this. At 15, they uncle committed suicide, father died of cancer. He dropped out of Harvard, taught English at various universities, was expelled from one of them. This was followed by an affair with a fellow poet; he also began to suffer from manic depression, which helped/hindered his creative life. (the constant dilemma) He married a different woman, had a heart attack in a swimming pool, and died at the age of 55.

God. Thankfully it is fairly rare to read one's own orbituaries. (It happened to Nobel, the journalist reported wrote an orbituary about the wrong Nobel - so he was in the curious position of having himself described as the 'creator of weapons of death and suffering', and repented. Peace prize to atone.)

the end of his triumph

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and
people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would
never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth
doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean> on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they
would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the
gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field
after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other
side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the
marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it
was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the
end of his triumph.

Piccadilly books

What's the point of books?

(this is a bit of a loaded, self-obsessed question for me, because I might as well be asking 'What is the meaning of my life?' I work in books. Although the fact thatI pathetically rely on work to give meaning to life is horrific, and not to be dwelled on here.)

I really love looking at what people are reading on the tube in the mornings. Marian Keyes got a look in this week. And a man in a very nice grey duffle coat (with those nice tuggy tag button things) was reading Peter Ackroyd on the night bus just now. There's a woman I see almost daily at Finsbury Park, she is almost through Les Miserables now.

But books are more than just passing time from one end of the Piccadilly line to another, no? Betsy Lerner (Elizabeth's Wurtzel's editor, now an agent) writes that the more popular culture fails to present the real pathos of our human struggle, the more opportunity there is for writers who are unafraid to present stories that speak an emotional truth.

Apparently the Writers who Matter to Us are the ones who dared to say 'I am a sick man'.

The Septembers of Shiraz

I can't decide whether I prefer the hardback or paperback jacket. I'm madly in love with them both.

The book itself is beautiful and devastating.

Humph

Beauty, dark goddess,

We met and parted
As though we parted not.

Like two stopped watches
In a dusty store window,

One golden morning of time.
- Charles Simic

I'm really not sure about this. Lots of reasons - mainly: isn't there something a bit equestrian about being referred to as 'beauty'? Somehow sounds like what one would whisper in the ear of some highly-strung racehorse who shows the whites of its eyes at every noise or rabbit leaping in its path.

Pollution

Feeling sentimental about London's urban beauty today.

Lady with the Braid

A friend emailed me these song lyrics. It seems fairly standard until that fatal final paragraph... Actually I think the whole thing is brilliant. Those desperately hospitable endless questions - are you too cold, which side of the bed, is it too bright - remind me of my mother. When guests come round to the house, she asks them what they would like to drink/eat with an eagerness that borders on hysteria.





Would you care to stay till sunrise?

It’s completely your decision,

It’s just that going home is such a ride,

such a ride, Going home is such a ride,

Going home is such a ride,

Going home is such a low, low, lonely ride



Would you hang your denim jacket

near the poster by Picasso?

Do you sleep on the left side, or the right?

Or the right?

Would you mind if I leave on the light?

Would you mind, if it isn’t too bright?

Now I need the window open,

So if you happen to get chilly,

There’s this coverlet my cousin hand-crocheted,

Hand-crocheted,

Do you mind if the edges are frayed?

Would you like to unfasten my braid?



Shall I make you, in the morning, a cup of homemade coffee?

I will sweeten it with honeyand with cream

When you sleep, do you have dreams?

You can read the early paper,

and I can watch you while you shave,

oh God, the mirror’s cracked

When you leave, will you come back?

You don’t have to answer that at all

The bathroom door is just across the hall

you’ll find an extra towel on the rack

on the paisley-pattern papered wall

There’s a comb on the shelf

I papered that wall myselfthat wall

myself



Would you care to stay till sunrise?

It’s completely your decision,

It’s just the night cuts through me like a knife,

like a knife

Would you care to stay awhile and save my life?

Would you care to stay awhile and save my life?

I don’t know what made me say that

I’ve got this funny sense of humour

You know I couldn’t be downhearted if I tried

if I tried

It’s just that going home is such a ride

Going home is such a ride

Going home is such a ride

Isn’t going home a low and lonely ride

Isn’t going home a low and lonely ride

but of course, it's My Truth

I really like what Elizabeth Wurtzel writes, as a kind of disclaimer, in her memoir Prozac Nation. She starts of with a quote from the Talmud: 'We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.' She goes on to state that 'every word of this book is the truth. But of course, it's my truth.'

I find that quite a touching admission, to recognise that one's own understanding of how things happened is not necessarily the Ultimately Accurate and Rational version. My truth is not The Truth. It's an uncomfortable thought. It reminds me of one of the quotes at the beginning of P.J. O'Rourke's book, 'Holidays in Hell'. 'Everywhere you go, there you are.' That You, that annoying warped lens/interpreter/opinionated head-noise, is constantly smudging and dirtying The Truth.

In my first year of university I kept on psychotically trying to hop from one degree discipline to another. When I told my mother that I wasn't carrying on with Psychology and Physiology but was contemplating Medicine, French and Arabic or possibly Physiotherapy she brought me back down to reality quickly with a cutting, 'whatever course you run to, you can't run away from yourself.' Utterly unhelpful, extremely annoying, perfectly true.

In the end I switched to Theology.

Rushes - Fragments of a Lost Story

This is a photo from Rushes, a new piece the Royal Ballet is performing this month. I usually don't really like ballet photos that much - you lose all the poignancy of the movement and music and get stuck with the silly tutus (my sister calls them 'those farcical parasols bobbing round their hips). But this photo captures something of the piece. More photos here http://http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/apr/22/dance?picture=333676334

You lie bent up in embryo sleep
below the painting of the blue fisherman without a pillow.
The cover kicked and tangled on the floor
the old house creaking now
a car going by
the wind
a fire engine going up the hill.

I've disentangled myself from you
moved silently,
groping in the dark for cigarettes,
and now three cigarettes later
still elated
still afraid

I sit across the room watching you---
the light from the street lamp coming through the shutters
hysterical patterns flash on the wall sometimes
when a car goes by
otherwise there is no change.
Not in the way you lie curled up.
Not in the sounds that never come from you.
Not in the discontent I feel.

the first part of Stanyan Street, Rod McKuen

This just happened to be the first page of the poem as it is laid out in the book, it is actually much longer. But I really loved that line, 'not in the discontent I feel'. Picked this collection from a second-hand bookshop last weekend. It is this intoxicating place near World's End, full of excellently witty gruff misanthropes, 'discontents'.

I'm reading On the Road. (though I am told that this is the kind of book most people get over by the time they're sixteen.) I read it on the tube, mainly. I'm going from SW to NE London on the Picadilly line, shooting through Green Park, Covent Garden, Holborn. And Sal is going from East to West. God, just the very sound of the places he passes through sound so intoxicating. Testament, Georgia, New Orleans, New Mexico, Arizona, Denver, the mysical and revered 'Frisco'. He writes of purple darkness, a heaven of a sunrise, red mountainsides, transmuting clouds of gold. The sentence 'We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn' isn't remarkable or poetic in itself, but somehow it makes me so itchy and hopeful. I met a woman today, a colleague from our sister company in America, who mentioned a post-Wellesley road trip to Denver, and I nearly passed out with excitement.

Exact diagrams of...

Read this on the tube this morning, found it strangely comforting.

Time + consciousness = foreknowledge of our passing. Our only unique gift; we can act knowing, in some sense, that we are already dead.

The trees in winter, those exact diagrams of all our dead yearnings.

(Don Paterson - The Book of Shadows)

It just felt nice to think about non-essential things, rather that my usual: 'how many minutes late for work will I be if I go and get a sneaky coffee from Starbucks first?' / 'Did I file those invoices?'

I thought about the coffee and the invoices on the 3 minute journey between the station and the offices, instead.

With a foetus eye

A new record - I managed to get coffee, icing (from delicious danish) and blood (from surprisingly deep paper cut) onto my white shirt this morning, all before 9 am. A friend told me that 'coffee, icing and blood' sounded like something Plath would write about. He then sent me this -

Sylvia Plath tells the story of Goldilocks - Sebastian Faulks, Pistache
	I am the doctor who takes The temperature of each bowl. Daddy Bear, your gruel, Grey as the Feldgrau, Pungent as a jackboot, Rises under an ailing moon. I have been sleeping In your bed, Daddy. Mother's oats are blebbed With ruby stains of fruit preserve Beside the glass fire Of her blood-orange juice. The baby's porridge bubbles With a foetus eye. I swallow the sins it is not His to shrive. I devour The cancerous pallor With spoons of handled bone. I plough the winding-sheets Of each bear bed with my Surgical breathing, as I die and rise Three times before dawn. My golden hair is electric With the light of Borrowed stars, spread out On my pillow of skulls.

Now I really like Sylvia Plath's work - Bell Jar is hysterically funny - and I'm not so keen on sex scenes being described by using key and lock terminology, but this was a Very Good way to start the day. Thanks, M. xx

all you need to know

Found an old poetry book I used to really love, 'The Breath in the Flute' by John White. Some of the poems are in Waka form (31 syllables) but most are Japanese Haiku (17 syllables) though they don't always follow the strict five, seven, five syllable pattern, nor do they always have a seasonal reference. A couple of my favourite:

I have lived
in so many ways
a despicable life,
and when I have done,
or tried to do,
what seemed right,
there was no merit,
nothing to praise.
I did it because,
by my nature it pleased me.
*
But life
is unjust
and I
am a happy man.



What is
this strange
thing
in which
I live,

this me
which is
unknown
to me?



Words,
words,
wasted words;

the wind blows,

winter is here,

and the silent
snow.



You of pure
faith,
I,
who am certain
of nothing,

travel
the one
road.



Consider
one leaf

falling.

It will tell you all
that you need
to know.

'a weird bug colony nestled between my ears'

My brother has started learning this Beethoven sonata. He's been playing it all weekend. He stopped playing it about ten minutes ago - I think he's gone to bed - but it's still dancing around in my head. By mid-week it will be like having eaten too much great cake - just the thought of the opening chords will annoy the hell out of me. But right now it is still beautiful and exciting. It has these 'frilly' bits, sort of trills, which I try and sing at him. He laughs at me, and tells me that the noise coming out of my mouth could just as easily be identified with 'Billie Jean' as with the sonata.

I couldn't sleep last night, and was flicking through an old book I read years ago, 'Ophelia Speaks' (edited by Sara Shandler). The subtitle is toe-curlingly embarrassing: 'adolescent girls write about their search for self' but it includes some clever essays. An extract from one, 'Psychiatrist's Garden', by Willow:

I am seated on an ancient-looking sofa, overstuffed with polyfill, covered with coffee stains and Victorian blue roses. The woman is standing behind me. If she would keep quiet for a moment, I could pretend the stink of heavy perfume is coming from my resting place - from my little bed of roses. I could seize each wrinkle of fabric, crush it between my fingers. But she is watching my every move right now, pen in hand, so grasping for the flowers probably isn't too brilliant an idea.

I feel like an exhibit in the flower show from hell.

Behind me, she drones on and on, until her words are lost in the buzzing of insignificant sound. Funny, isn't it? A drone - a male bee among flowers. Strangely appropriate. I consider sharing this thought with her. But if I spoke, it would only give her an excuse to move closer, to strangle me with the scent of fake flowers as she tries to plug herself into my brain.

Though I'm sure she could come up with a million great theories. Maybe my thoughts indicate a subconscious belief that men, like bees, sting the hell out of any girl who gets too close. Maybe it means I'm afraid to love. Maybe it means I'm a lesbian. Maybe it means there is some kind of weird bug colony nestled between my ears.

'life events'

How long should condolence cards be left displayed for? On the 6^th of January the pavements are littered with Christmas trees. So for Christmas, ten days is considered to be a suitable recovery period. Obviously, a death is (usually) more traumatic than the festive season. Although in my AS level Psychology course I distinctly remember both being termed ‘life events’, a clinical and bloodless term for heartache, catastrophe and acute stress. A life event such as Christmas was given a score of 12, whilst ‘death of relative’ was given 63. Moving house was surprisingly high, I seem to remember, about 40. Anyway, the point was that if you have more than 150 points in a given year, you are more likely to suffer a breakdown, or depression, or similar. I was enthralled by this way of quantifying the ghastliness of one’s life. (By the way, ‘Change in Church Activities’ was given 19)

I’m well aware that the opening question is about as stupid (and bloodless sounding) as trying to assign a score to the ‘event’ that is ‘death of relative’, but I’m still intrigued. I noticed a few days ago that my mother had quietly removed the twenty odd cards we had displayed on the shelves in the living room. I noticed their disappearance immediately, because I would look at them every morning, arranging them in my head from the most vile (three pink butterflies, and a purple bow) to my favourite (a Rossetti detail of hands entwined), with special note made of the comedy ones (anything using a euphemism for ‘death’, anything religious, anything so eye-bleedingly hideous as to make one glad that the dead in question is indeed dead, so as not to be subject to this horror). But anyway, now they’ve gone.

When I would see the discarded Christmas trees in the gutter on my way to school – or this year, for the first time, on my way to work – it was always a grim reminder that the holiday, with all its manufactured nauseating cheer, was firmly over. It was the beginning of January, fucking freezing, whipped by wind, grey and flat skies, work to do, the Christmas tree star packed away in the attic, and that is that.

And so the cards have been packed away, I’m never going to ask her where, I don’t look at them anymore over breakfast, and that is not that.

(On a brighter note, I am well within healthy levels of ‘life events’ so far this year. Recent calculation show that I’ve got at least another 40 points before I hit 150, where the depression and breakdown kicks in… Although a Change in Personal Habits (20) combined with Outstanding Personal Achievement (28) could quickly change all that. I’ll work hard at keeping them both at bay.)

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass

Age gaps

No one has ever stared more
tenderly or more fixedly after you…
I kiss you—–across hundreds of
separating years.

Marina Tsvetaeva

I have absolutely nothing (good) to say about today.

Should be nice, but isn't

I got two things in particular by email today which I very much enjoyed. Three sentences from one of my best friends living in Paris, and a photo from a friend who works on the floor above me, a world away in the art department - I see him less than my Parisian friend.

My parents are here this weekend which is the usual 'could-be-nice-but-isnt' nightmare (...) Right, i have been summoned by my aunty to go to her house, which is a real pain beacuse i have to go on the RER train which smells of wee. oh well.