Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Sunday people

A hot afternoon in Amanda's garden, twenty guests in a circle, wine, food, an ageing DJ type plays weird compilation discs - Debussy, REM, Springsteen, Satie.

Laurie, the new boyfriend, says a propos of nothing "I suppose Jesus was a Capricorn." A butterfly lands and stays on a plate of onion rings. Grainne, Scottish, with long hennaed hair, is on a carpentry course, she speaks silkily of lime and yew, walnut and cherry.

A handsome man is sour and silent, drinking beer. Amanda shows an ankle tattoo, half finished since she couldn't stand the pain; someone's son has had his tongue pierced. The small round lady, hitherto quiet, says loudly "Personally, I have enough trouble with the holes I was born with, without adding to them." Sourpuss cracks a smile.

Several prettier girls arrive, slim, showing skin. The men's eyes watch them, narrowed conveniently against the sun. Wives rearrange themselves restlessly.

I am put suddenly in mind of the old Losey film "Accident". An academic couple hold a summer lunch party in their country home. They appear to have everything. The wife (plain Vivien Merchant) organises garden, food and comforts. She is the hub, hospitable, liked. But her husband lusts after the young girl student brought by a colleague. The pleasure provider is served up a dish of pain.

Ideal Homes - Suburbia in Focus
This is the most staggeringly well-researched archive I have seen for a long while. The history of the South East suburbs of London in words and pictures. It's a gift for the Sarf Lunnun local studies libraries. Or anyone, for that matter, interested in social and architectural development. I have been printing off pages wholesale about my old stamping grounds in Lambeth and Norwood.

No oil painting....
I have just been searching for Lucian Freud's nudes. I saw a TV programme about the outrageous Leigh Bowery, his frequent model, and it sent me to look again at the powerful way Freud paints flesh. Specifically white flesh in shocking, often unattractive detail using a sickly palette - all greys and ochres; yet the flesh glows. Wonderful, powerful use of paint. It occurred to me that, as far as I know, he has not painted a black nude. I have hunted the Net and my books, but found none. I would dearly love to see his approach to the tones involved.

There is a physical shock in standing before canvases of bodies seen with his merciless (but not clinical) eye, and in his choice of larger than life models opened wide to view. Even beauty is exposed with an unsettling candour.

An artist with the same eye, if not such a magnificent technique, was Stanley Spencer who painted scenes from his own very strange sex life in a brutally accurate style - being particularly honest in his view of himself.

Alec and Jack
"More bloomin' poetry", I hear some of you say. (I came across a blogger the other day who claimed proudly that his site was 'poetry free'). Tough. I found the poem below moving - particularly having watched swallows darting under the thatched eaves of the village street for at least twenty minutes this morning.

It's by the Australian poet, Alec Derwent Hope whose work I knew not. I have read more and like it very much. He adheres to form in his work. Here is a whole page of Hopes.

I like free verse, but traditional form pleases me. I think this comes from listening early to my Uncle Jack, reciter and raconteur, whose star pieces were nearly all narrative and in rhyming couplets.


Death of the Bird

For every bird there is this last migration;
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.

And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
And exiled love mourning within the breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;
The palm tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;
That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,
Custom and fear constraining her no longer,
Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place,
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.

She feels it close now, the appointed season;
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will, the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign;
Immense,complex contours of hills and rivers
Mock her small wisdom with their vast design.

The darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.

The hermit of Hull
Larkin by Motion - good stuff.

A couple of blogs to check out
Bird man, English teacher Peter Cashwell's site is so very pleasing to look at, I am really enjoying working back through his archives.

That Rabbit Girl- mix equal parts books and arts, add rabbits, shake well. A librarian's site from Chicago with lots of meaty chunks.

Ozzymandias - look on my works, ye mighty, and despair...
I got roundly told off by a young friend for not knowing my Osbornes from my Osbournes. "Are you losing it?" he asked. Mind you, he wouldn't know Black Sabbath from black pudding. I have made the spelling correction. Having referred to A.J. Rowling the other day, I am beginning to wonder whether I am quite on the ball. Of whom was I thinking - A.J. Cronin? A.J.P. Taylor?

Further to which, I am halfway through 'Order of the Phoenix', rationing myself to half an hour at breakfast and as much as I can read when (if) I get to bed, usually about twenty seconds before the lids lower. I think it's well up to scratch and beginning to build nicely by page 409.

Somewhere out there is an actress who will suggest herself to those casting the film part of a disagreeable bitch with a high pitched, little-girlish voice, protuberant eyes and a pink cardigan. She surely will be mortally wounded to be lined up. Who will play Dolores Umbridge?

Pancakes as the moon comes up
Dinner outside this evening with J and his very unusual girlfriend M. She is thin as a whippet, very pale in Nicole Kidman mode, with light blue eyes and dark hair, softly spoken with a Jamaican lilt from her girlhood there. She wears silver rings on her fingers and toes. I like her, she interests me; bright, intense and very warm. She does unexpected things, brought me a fascinating book on Krakatoa and pretty stones from Idaho; she organised an eccentric meal.

It opened with champagne, small raw carrots, satsuma segments, raspberries, black olives, cheese sprinkled with tabasco, dip and crackers. Main course, pancakes, maple syrup, bratwurst and crispy bacon. Then salad with blue cheese and coffee and warm cinnamon rolls. J was in high humour and we screeched with laughter all the way through. Vive the special relationship.

Dysfunctional family
A pair of crows has raised a brood of two in a tall alder over by David?s pond. They are hilarious ? the bird equivalent of Chez Ozzie Osbourne The father caws incessantly with an insistent middle note - this I now hear as Ozzie?s ubiquitous ?F---?. Mum was patient and harassed, but now the endless feeding?s done she watches from a pine stump, head turning from side to side in disbelief.

The juveniles are simply nuts, they do formation strutting on the lawns until one breaks ranks and wheels round to reverse. They trip over fallen pine brush and play with cones, they nag and quarrel all day, only pausing when Ozzie cusses. Passionate for sultanas, they try to shove their great black backs under the bird table roof; I sit typing sometimes gazing up a crow?s end feathers. Apart from the racket, I?ll be so sad when they move off.

Faces
This man could make Yasser Arafat look good! Mark tidied up a mediocre old black and white photograph of me from the sixties and made it presentable. I have been quite bowled over recently by some of his portrait work.

I am not Hopi
I mentioned candles. Yes, well, in an attempt to tackle a nasal problem I had a go at Hopi ear candling performed by the very straight, nice lady who does my occasional Indian head massage. You feel a total prat lying with a burning candle stuck in your earhole and I rather think you feel an even bigger prat at handing over ten quid for the privilege. No improvement to report so far, frankly I subscribe to the skeptical view.

Summer, bah!
I hate being hot. I hate sweating. I hate insects. I hate sticky sunscreen lotion. Wet T-shirts are not pretty caused by an hour of grass cutting on a humid day. I don't want a beach holiday in a island paradise, nor a dream home in Florida, Provence, Tuscany or any other broiling place.

On a day like this I wish to be an Edwardian grande dame sitting serenely in a shady room - or terrace, if you insist. A crystal glass of iced something beside me, toes on a foot stool, I lower the novel in my cool hand to gaze out at my magnificent garden and the five handsome gardeners sweating out there on my behalf. Dream on.

Honest.....
Tomorrow at 4.30 p.m. I am going to have candles stuck in my ears.

Uncontradicting solitude
I saw the famous Philip Larkin quote "Depression is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth" in the paper today. I read 'Aubade', perhaps his greatest poem, at Eeksy Peeksy. A colleague emailed a link to this pretty harsh article last week. So, a lot of Larkin about. I had previously been thinking about the wish to be alone sometimes, about the hidden self, the person whom one shows to no-one and often does not acknowledge to oneself. As usual Larkin could find the words. I know the truth of this one, for sure and the last verse is stunning in its honesty:

Best Society

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Independence Night

Oh, the shrill and thrill of fireworks,
Their brilliance lights my eyes.
Such brevity excites me,
As glitter blooms and dies.

Breath held in waiting darkness
Releases as they ebb,
Red stars amongst the moonlight
Burst in a silver web.

We jumped in the car at 9 and drove hell for leather on darkening forest roads to Feltwell USAF Base to see a huge display mark the end of the celebrations. Youngsters sat on the grass in lines along the perimeter fence and oohed and aahed in a properly excited way. I longed for it to go on and on, but red white and blue cloudbursts climaxed and all that was left were puffs of smoke below the clouds.


A childhood prayer

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray that God my soul will keep.
If I die before I wake,
I pray that God my soul will take.

Back then it was always muttered into the pillow with total confidence that morning would come. I was reminded of it today.

Another Kensington garden
A Portugese woman in Swaffham told me the other day that she loved the parks of London more than anything else she had found in the city. Her favourite is Regent's Park, she liked to sit by the water and listen to the distant hum of traffic. I mentioned this unexpected acre of wildlife I had just heard of. "Ah, no, I shan't be needing that now, I've got here."

Hurt
A cathartic account of a disturbed mother/daughter relationship which is almost unbearably sad, and the unexpected beauty of the image makes it more acutely so.

Chitra Talkies
This link is to a typically fascinating article on 'under the fire star' - one of my favourite blogs. It is entered in a New Blog Showcase contest at 'Truth Laid Bear' - you might like to add a link to your site if you rate it as highly as I do."
From The Truth Laid Bear's New Webblog Showcase: under the fire star:

Cloth ears
Listening to local radio today I was completely baffled hear that the county council was concerned about the cost of cedar fences in North Norfolk. It took a good twenty seconds to register my error. I keep doing this, the thing I hear makes textual sense, but is crazy. In fact I now have an image of our shoreline embraced by orange lapboard.
Another good one was during a heated discussion on US diplomacy, or lack of it, in the Middle East. They kept talking about this bloke Arabanga who was being provoked. The penny dropped ages later.

Star 'Chambers'
What would I do without this gem on my links bar? I just wrote 'contextual sense' above and thought it looked wrong. It was; (contextual adj.=out of context without regard or reference to context).