Yes, you are quite right with your maths; it has actually been seven months since my last entry. In the spirit of feeling the imperfection and doing it anyway, I am going to pick up where I left off (albeit on completely different subjects). My excuse(s): a highly spirited toddler, a soul searching nine year old boy and about twenty different students whose experiences of life have kept me awake at night. Anyway, onward.
Today: Sisterhood
My mum is my new hero. Growing up, it was always my dad. He and I were both creative; loved a good debate, both always needed to go swimming if we'd had a bad day, pored over Dylan lyrics and howled our way through Fawlty Towers episodes. He was funny, cheeky, took charge, had a great memory, told stories, was late for everything, knew lots without ever seeming to read, would listen to my weird head until 3 in the morning, planned our holidays meticulously and expected very high standards from me and my brother. He was a great dad. Still is.
My mum was more backstage. She shopped and prepared the meal that dad and I would debate over. In fact, looking back, she was probably also doing the washing up as the debates stretched through the long evenings. She quietly taught us the life skills of the proper washing up protocol, how to put a duvet cover on without looking ridiculous, the importance of putting rice in our salt shaker (it absorbs the moisture - changed everything). Dad taught me the therapy of a good swim but mum took me to the endless lessons that earned me my neat strokes. Parenting is, obviously, a team sport; they were on the same team but I always saw my dad as the captain.
Is it because the man was still the head of the house in the eighties? Is it because we were more similar and I always place 'relatable' people on more of a pedestal? Is it because he was funny? Humour is a big draw for me. Was it that I was a child, so always too self centred to realise that I needed a lot of background maintenance that I took for granted? Or was it the old classic that dad was fun and mum did the discipline? I'm not sure.
I've just spent a Christmas week with my parents - their forty second as a married couple - and my mum blew me away. How have I never realised how selfless she is? Everything she does, and that's a lot of things, is in order to make someone else's life easier or a bit sweeter. When I asked her which cheese she'd like for the cheese board, she said, "Your dad likes St Agur." She got up at sunrise on Christmas Eve so she could get to the supermarket and back in time to not delay us all going out for the day. She prepared every meal while we were obliviously relaxing in the living room, enjoying our holiday rest.
Cups of tea were continuously brought out. My children had her 'climbing' the hallway with hiking sticks in a line when all she wanted to do was sit down and watch Doctor Who on iplayer. She didn't even flinch when yet another bowl of shreddies landed milk-side-down on her dining room carpet, courtesy of my two year old. Of course she knew a great tip on how to clear it up using just a kitchen towel and some baking ingredients.
I've always liked Edward Hopper's paintings because they seemed to celebrate the quiet characters in life; the peripherals you could call them. Standing looking at the figures he painted, I always imagined a Hollywood star or a suave Wall Street banker was being photographed flashily just a few feet away but that Hopper was more interested in the quiet lady leaving her house in the background. He put her in the centre of the frame and forced us to ask questions about her.
I don't think I am doing my lovely mum a disservice by comparing her to these peripherals. I'm sure she would be very happy in their company; just this morning she wouldn't let me take a close up photo of her in her new hat and mitten set. She ran to the other side of the field and told me I could take it from there.
My revelation is that, although I'd liked Hopper's peripherals, I'd always taken for granted that I should want to be the focus of the photographers a few feet away. That we should indulge the quiet mystery of these characters then get back to the business of starring brilliantly in our own lives. My revelation is that I would rather be with the quiet lady leaving her house in the background, I would rather be on the other side of the field with my mum's new hat and mittens because their quiet acts and clear words are world changing. Turns out, while my dad was busy being the captain, my mum was busy being the ship.
Monday 28 December 2015
Friday 15 May 2015
What we can learn from water
Something I love about T.S Eliot's poems is his understanding and love of the theme water. Having grown up by the sea, I can appreciate how Eliot always said his childhood spent by a river affected his whole world view. It is impossible to be a child near the sea or a river and not develop a sense of other. By this I mean you see that there is an alternative to land, you know that journeys on the water will take you places you can't imagine, you watch waves build independently and you wonder whether there is a greater power out there.
Eliot's third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, said to be named after some rocks off the north east coast of Massachusetts, was written during the Second World War. In it he asks such interesting questions about nature and science, about the point of progress and whether something timeless is watching us all stumble away from the point of life.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
How interesting that the river starts this sentence as a strong and untamed god and ends as a mere problem to be overcome. I think Eliot was exploring a Christian faith when he wrote this so he is perhaps playing with the convenient ebb and flow of faith in a God that is struggling to find a place in a modern world. Not only is he personifying the river here, but he seems to be enabling it to grow through human stages - starting as a sullen and difficult child and maturing as it finds its uses.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
It's so easy to forget that the planet was here long before we were. I'm sure that watching the war unfold around him, Eliot was particularly conscious of man's poorer decisions and the planet paying the price. How quick we are to dismiss the natural world in favour of worshipping the machine - whether that machine is a gun or a mobile phone. Quite right to characterise the river as periodically reminding us that although we can ignore, pollute or attempt to control it, it could wipe us all out in one wild rage. What I find most unsettling in this extract though is the notion that nature is our spectator - a knowledgeable spectator - witnessing us all charging in the wrong direction. What is he waiting for?
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
Here Eliot weaves time into his exploration again. He takes the presence of the river from the nursery, through April and autumn to the evening - a lifetime. The river is ever present. Like a god. This introduces notions of legacy and immortality. Is man in constant struggle to compete with nature to achieve a timeless existence? I think I am quite happy in the knowledge that I am a mere drop along the way for our planet's rivers and seas. I take comfort from the knowledge that these waters will outlive me by centuries. I quite like the idea of them watching over my children when I am gone. I can only hope that my boys will take some time away from machine worshipping to contemplate the wisdom of the sea.
Eliot's third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, said to be named after some rocks off the north east coast of Massachusetts, was written during the Second World War. In it he asks such interesting questions about nature and science, about the point of progress and whether something timeless is watching us all stumble away from the point of life.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
How interesting that the river starts this sentence as a strong and untamed god and ends as a mere problem to be overcome. I think Eliot was exploring a Christian faith when he wrote this so he is perhaps playing with the convenient ebb and flow of faith in a God that is struggling to find a place in a modern world. Not only is he personifying the river here, but he seems to be enabling it to grow through human stages - starting as a sullen and difficult child and maturing as it finds its uses.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
It's so easy to forget that the planet was here long before we were. I'm sure that watching the war unfold around him, Eliot was particularly conscious of man's poorer decisions and the planet paying the price. How quick we are to dismiss the natural world in favour of worshipping the machine - whether that machine is a gun or a mobile phone. Quite right to characterise the river as periodically reminding us that although we can ignore, pollute or attempt to control it, it could wipe us all out in one wild rage. What I find most unsettling in this extract though is the notion that nature is our spectator - a knowledgeable spectator - witnessing us all charging in the wrong direction. What is he waiting for?
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
Here Eliot weaves time into his exploration again. He takes the presence of the river from the nursery, through April and autumn to the evening - a lifetime. The river is ever present. Like a god. This introduces notions of legacy and immortality. Is man in constant struggle to compete with nature to achieve a timeless existence? I think I am quite happy in the knowledge that I am a mere drop along the way for our planet's rivers and seas. I take comfort from the knowledge that these waters will outlive me by centuries. I quite like the idea of them watching over my children when I am gone. I can only hope that my boys will take some time away from machine worshipping to contemplate the wisdom of the sea.
Monday 4 May 2015
The Girl From Eponymous
Today I will invite you over and give you the best I have to offer. Imagine arriving to a kitchen spread of all my favourite foods, my all-time momentous tunes on the playlist, the house cleaned to perfection and Long Island iced teas served by an intriguingly handsome yet shy bartender. Today's written offering will be the poetic equivalent of all the above. I am going to invite you to sit on my virtual picnic blanket, lay back and breathe in these words and images. Taken from T.S Eliot's fourth Quartet, "Little Gidding", I am not exaggerating when I say these words have stopped me in my life tracks on numerous occasions and changed everything.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Just take a moment and reread that. So much to wrap ourselves up in. Firstly, I love that Eliot says 'We'. This isn't a solo journey; it shows an awareness that souls belong in jigsaw groups. How would Eliot have felt knowing that blogs would exist one day to bring remote jigsaw pieces to their table? This first line is one I would happily have painted over our front door, or tattooed on my children's foreheads I believe in it so deliciously. Exploration doesn't have to mean strapping on your backpack and packing a lunch, it can be sitting in the same armchair but delving into every feeling, chasing every thread of a thought to uncover new ideas. It can mean exploring other people, really trying to understand that even the people we live with experience this life in a completely different way to us.
It's a warming idea that the end of our exploration will bring us to where we began, a circle. Some would say frustrating, but there is a comfort, almost an excitement to thinking that we may already have come very close to where we will end up. Imagine asking searching questions as a teenager whilst sat on a windswept beach; questions that we ache to understand but feel too small to even begin. Returning to that beach on a deckchair with our grandchildren, years later, we may feel those questions in the salty air or wedged between the pebbles and smile as we realise they were the wrong ones to ask but they led us down the path we took. Knowing the place for the first time suggests that either we didn't really know it as a teenager or that we don't recognise it as a grandparent. Or it suggests that with our memories and experiences in our exploration albums, everything makes a new sense.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
So gorgeous to think of something being 'unknown' but 'remembered'. Again, Eliot touches on the idea of the parallel self. Is that what feelings of deja vu really are? A prosaic but nonetheless important question. In those quiet moments when we feel something that is both foreign but comfortable, are we not brushing close to what we might have been? Or what actually is being elsewhere? There are lovely notions of time, as well as place woven in here too: the start of the river being present in the waterfall at the end - speaking to us, just like the children in the apple tree. The obvious reference to Eden blossoms the thought out to notions of wisdom in our choices. Are we making the right decisions? Are we being the right person? I have no idea how to answer these fabulous questions but I do always remember to listen for wisdom in the stillness between the waves.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Just take a moment and reread that. So much to wrap ourselves up in. Firstly, I love that Eliot says 'We'. This isn't a solo journey; it shows an awareness that souls belong in jigsaw groups. How would Eliot have felt knowing that blogs would exist one day to bring remote jigsaw pieces to their table? This first line is one I would happily have painted over our front door, or tattooed on my children's foreheads I believe in it so deliciously. Exploration doesn't have to mean strapping on your backpack and packing a lunch, it can be sitting in the same armchair but delving into every feeling, chasing every thread of a thought to uncover new ideas. It can mean exploring other people, really trying to understand that even the people we live with experience this life in a completely different way to us.
It's a warming idea that the end of our exploration will bring us to where we began, a circle. Some would say frustrating, but there is a comfort, almost an excitement to thinking that we may already have come very close to where we will end up. Imagine asking searching questions as a teenager whilst sat on a windswept beach; questions that we ache to understand but feel too small to even begin. Returning to that beach on a deckchair with our grandchildren, years later, we may feel those questions in the salty air or wedged between the pebbles and smile as we realise they were the wrong ones to ask but they led us down the path we took. Knowing the place for the first time suggests that either we didn't really know it as a teenager or that we don't recognise it as a grandparent. Or it suggests that with our memories and experiences in our exploration albums, everything makes a new sense.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
So gorgeous to think of something being 'unknown' but 'remembered'. Again, Eliot touches on the idea of the parallel self. Is that what feelings of deja vu really are? A prosaic but nonetheless important question. In those quiet moments when we feel something that is both foreign but comfortable, are we not brushing close to what we might have been? Or what actually is being elsewhere? There are lovely notions of time, as well as place woven in here too: the start of the river being present in the waterfall at the end - speaking to us, just like the children in the apple tree. The obvious reference to Eden blossoms the thought out to notions of wisdom in our choices. Are we making the right decisions? Are we being the right person? I have no idea how to answer these fabulous questions but I do always remember to listen for wisdom in the stillness between the waves.
Monday 27 April 2015
Approaching Burnt Norton
I have decided on a frame for this blog. I am going to read some fabulous parts of some fabulous poems and wander through them with you. It will help me to expand my appreciation of the greats and will hopefully inject a little poetry into your life. It's important to be open to poetry because I think it has an unfair rep. We are a generation asking for fulfilment, for experiences that will blow our minds, for untrodden paths. All of these you will find walking the lines of poetry. Trust me on this.
Where else could I possibly start than my first poetic hero - T.S. Eliot. I read a small section of his fourth Quartet as a child and it reached inside my chest and took residence there like a friend I knew immediately would be for life. Thomas Stearns Eliot was a Yankee. The highlights of his life for me were that his mum was a social worker and a poet herself. Thomas was a poorly child and so spent a lot of time alone and with books, particularly loving Tom Sawyer. He grew up by a river in St Louis and always said that this location influenced perhaps more than any other. He attended Harvard, moved the England when he was 25. As an academic, he jumped between Paris and Harvard only to return to London where Ezra Pound met him and deemed him "worth watching". These parts of his story, more so than his writing catalogue, make a poet 'meetable'. You can imagine him on the street, at a lecture, in a bar. His thoughts were made of the same particles as ours.
I will work my way up to The Wasteland but I need to warm up a little first so I am starting with the first of the Four Quartets - Burnt Norton.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
I like the idea of time existing as an entity. That the past and present are lined up on a shelf in the future - tangible and observable. More unsettling is the idea of the future already being a known substance in the past. It's as though time is actually like a museum exhibition that we are walking through. It all already exists, we are just restricted to moving though it at Greenwich Meantime pace. This does make time 'unredeemable' in that we can't change any of it but, in Christian terms, it means we can't be forgiven for it either. It seems quite a cruel interpretation of life and brings Catholic notions of Hell into this life.
However, what follows makes me feel like Eliot didn't really believe this.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
I love the 'Sliding Doors' conversations where you consider how completely different your life would be had you made just one small decision differently. These 'What might have been' narratives are as real, often, as the life we are living. Eliot is making me wonder if these narratives are only fabricated - never a real possibility in reality. This is something we will never know the answer to. We will never know whether we are able to make any choices other than the ones we make. Every choice is pinned onto the wall of time so even if we go back and change that choice, the change is further down the wall. The original choice is 'unredeemed'. Would it make life easier or harder knowing that our scripts have been turned into our life story already?
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Beautiful. Is an echo not the shadow of something real? If we have memories of the echo then either our memories are unreliable narrators or our parallel selves have followed another path. I will never pretend to be any kind of authority on what poets meant when they wrote. I will, however, ask permission to bring their beautiful words into my own life and weave them into my understanding of the world. I love this image - a parallel version of myself taking footsteps down a passage that I walked past. On her way to a rose-garden.
Until next time.
Where else could I possibly start than my first poetic hero - T.S. Eliot. I read a small section of his fourth Quartet as a child and it reached inside my chest and took residence there like a friend I knew immediately would be for life. Thomas Stearns Eliot was a Yankee. The highlights of his life for me were that his mum was a social worker and a poet herself. Thomas was a poorly child and so spent a lot of time alone and with books, particularly loving Tom Sawyer. He grew up by a river in St Louis and always said that this location influenced perhaps more than any other. He attended Harvard, moved the England when he was 25. As an academic, he jumped between Paris and Harvard only to return to London where Ezra Pound met him and deemed him "worth watching". These parts of his story, more so than his writing catalogue, make a poet 'meetable'. You can imagine him on the street, at a lecture, in a bar. His thoughts were made of the same particles as ours.
I will work my way up to The Wasteland but I need to warm up a little first so I am starting with the first of the Four Quartets - Burnt Norton.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
I like the idea of time existing as an entity. That the past and present are lined up on a shelf in the future - tangible and observable. More unsettling is the idea of the future already being a known substance in the past. It's as though time is actually like a museum exhibition that we are walking through. It all already exists, we are just restricted to moving though it at Greenwich Meantime pace. This does make time 'unredeemable' in that we can't change any of it but, in Christian terms, it means we can't be forgiven for it either. It seems quite a cruel interpretation of life and brings Catholic notions of Hell into this life.
However, what follows makes me feel like Eliot didn't really believe this.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
I love the 'Sliding Doors' conversations where you consider how completely different your life would be had you made just one small decision differently. These 'What might have been' narratives are as real, often, as the life we are living. Eliot is making me wonder if these narratives are only fabricated - never a real possibility in reality. This is something we will never know the answer to. We will never know whether we are able to make any choices other than the ones we make. Every choice is pinned onto the wall of time so even if we go back and change that choice, the change is further down the wall. The original choice is 'unredeemed'. Would it make life easier or harder knowing that our scripts have been turned into our life story already?
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Beautiful. Is an echo not the shadow of something real? If we have memories of the echo then either our memories are unreliable narrators or our parallel selves have followed another path. I will never pretend to be any kind of authority on what poets meant when they wrote. I will, however, ask permission to bring their beautiful words into my own life and weave them into my understanding of the world. I love this image - a parallel version of myself taking footsteps down a passage that I walked past. On her way to a rose-garden.
Until next time.
Tuesday 24 March 2015
Blurred lines
I read this week that leading educators in Finland are scrapping traditional school subjects in favour of 'Phenomenon' teaching which basically means teaching by topic as in primary schools. It made me think of my dear university friend who could not, would not let her peas touch her mashed potato on a plate of food. Some people like to keep boundaries clear, keep substances and ideas pure, keep each mouthful tasting mono-flavoured. Others like to blend and mix it up, see what happens when substances and ideas mesh.
The experts in Finland would argue that separating out your English from your Maths from your History, etc was very suitable in the early 1900s - it matched the state the world was in and amply prepared students 100 years ago for the nature of employment beyond school. Nowadays, these experts claim, that model is outdated and a poor fit for modern society. Such an interesting thought.
By nature, I am a purist. And I have my own definition for that. It means I like to eat whole nut chocolate when I am alone so no one distracts me from the taste. I like to open letters from my friends only when I have tidied the downstairs and made a cup of tea so nothing will distract me from the pleasure of reading. I've been known to leave a room uncleaned for months because it is due to be repainted and if it's not going to be perfect until it's painted, then why waste energy on it in the meantime? To readers, slightly ocd. To myself, a purist.
However, I am warming to Finland's idea of pulling down the boundaries, forgetting where one thing ends and the next begins. For the next generation, it hails all kinds of precedent for multi-cultural acceptance, for young business owners playing every role in their staff, for pigeon holes of all kinds to be blown apart and rebuilt as open plan pigeon complexes. Classrooms would be full of exploratory projects, with confident independent groups working out the economic viabilities of a ecologically sustainable tree house village for the next Olympic Games.
Then again, if I am a child reading Pride and Prejudice in my traditional English classroom, I want to revel in the language, its rhythms and tricks and beauty. I don't want to be working out the ph levels in the water in Jane Austen's lifetime and working out why those who lived at the top of the hill didn't catch typhoid but the ones at the bottom of the hill did. I know what I'm getting with English and it's pure and it's indulgent and it escapes the need to think logically for a short time. Hmm to blend or not to blend.
Discuss, Finland.
The experts in Finland would argue that separating out your English from your Maths from your History, etc was very suitable in the early 1900s - it matched the state the world was in and amply prepared students 100 years ago for the nature of employment beyond school. Nowadays, these experts claim, that model is outdated and a poor fit for modern society. Such an interesting thought.
By nature, I am a purist. And I have my own definition for that. It means I like to eat whole nut chocolate when I am alone so no one distracts me from the taste. I like to open letters from my friends only when I have tidied the downstairs and made a cup of tea so nothing will distract me from the pleasure of reading. I've been known to leave a room uncleaned for months because it is due to be repainted and if it's not going to be perfect until it's painted, then why waste energy on it in the meantime? To readers, slightly ocd. To myself, a purist.
However, I am warming to Finland's idea of pulling down the boundaries, forgetting where one thing ends and the next begins. For the next generation, it hails all kinds of precedent for multi-cultural acceptance, for young business owners playing every role in their staff, for pigeon holes of all kinds to be blown apart and rebuilt as open plan pigeon complexes. Classrooms would be full of exploratory projects, with confident independent groups working out the economic viabilities of a ecologically sustainable tree house village for the next Olympic Games.
Then again, if I am a child reading Pride and Prejudice in my traditional English classroom, I want to revel in the language, its rhythms and tricks and beauty. I don't want to be working out the ph levels in the water in Jane Austen's lifetime and working out why those who lived at the top of the hill didn't catch typhoid but the ones at the bottom of the hill did. I know what I'm getting with English and it's pure and it's indulgent and it escapes the need to think logically for a short time. Hmm to blend or not to blend.
Discuss, Finland.
Friday 20 March 2015
The birds.. are the keepers of our secrets
Sitting listening to the birds just moments after the solar eclipse, I realise how they have been my theme for this week. Do you ever have weeks where an object, a word or an idea keeps coming to you, asking to be considered? Well birds have approached me this week.
Just to be clear, I am no ornithologist. I can just about identify a pigeon, a magpie and an owl. I am intrigued by the idea of birds though - the freedom, the notion of caging, the ability to fly anywhere but staying local. I have just finished a fabulous book called The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman. It carries themes of loneliness, chosen isolation, redemption, it's pretty intense! But it also tells the story of an artist who had a very poignant experience in his formative years involving a caged bird and a woman he loved. Throughout his entire career as an artist, this bird featured somewhere in every painting. It made me wonder, if I were an artist, what would appear in every painting of mine?
Walking through the woods earlier this week, I was listening to the different calls passing back and forth like an elaborate game that only the birds knew the rules of. I may of course be mistaken but, give one or two pitch variations, each bird seemed to be making the same sound pattern repeatedly. They sounded to my untrained ear as though they were only able to 'say' one thing over and over. Despite what seemed to be an overwhelming limitation, they were incredibly enthusiastic in producing their given phrase over and over. Now, don't take me for a fool, I know there are probably readers out there screaming at me that these calls are a multi-coloured canvas of mating, filial and location signals. But at the end of the day, the sound is pretty much the same. It made me think, if I were a bird, what would my given phrase be? And would I be able to give that phrase renewed excitement every day?
What on earth would I be happy to paint and say for the rest of my days?
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