Two things happened this week; one looking back, one looking forward. I watched a documentary on Michael Stipes and I discovered Therapeutic Writing. If you have never listened to REM or if you were a huge fan but have neglected your dotage, stop reading for a moment and put 'Nightswimming' on Spotify. Seriously, it's like floating face and palm upwards in a lake of pillows with the soul of your fourteen year old self navigating.
Stipes' advice to anyone involved in writing or creating anything was, 'Don't listen to anybody'. Once you get past the irony of him actually giving that as advice, you realise where his lyrics come from. They fall, unfiltered, from the clearest part of his experience of feeling. They seem to make no sense yet they perfectly described feelings I didn't realise I was having until he sang about them.
Whoever you are, no matter how wealthy, bitter, frightened, intelligent or self assured, you will have a heard a lyric or read a sentence once that stopped you in your tracks. Someone else, an entirely other human being, will have achieved the beautiful experience of putting their feelings into words. You encountered them and suddenly felt a little more known. I am so darn thankful to Mr. Stipes for not normalising his head; for allowing the words to somersault out as they did. C S Lewis always maintained, 'We read to know we're not alone'. Some of us read, some of us listen.
The documentary didn't say much about why Michael Stipes wrote. I don't know anything about his mental health or his personal life but I am willing to bet both were made more enjoyable because he wrote. There is something 'other' about the process of writing. Similar to listening to Stipes' lyrics, I discover what I feel once I've written it down. Until then, it is roaming my mind unidentified and sinister. My mental health and personal life would be in a much sorrier state without the therapy of writing.
This week I discovered this was actually a 'thing'. There is an Institute in America not to mention an entire body of psychologists devoted to the power of creative writing for therapeutic purposes. One task that caught my eye repeatedly through my reading was the simple exercise of writing a letter to someone who has wronged you in the past. You don't need to send it, you just need to allow yourself to say all the things you have been keeping fenced in. There is now 'scientific proof' (more on this as I research it!) to show that people are able to move forward emotionally once an exercise like this is completed. So simple and not rocket science but, sadly, this is the sort of thing we all know about but don't devote the time to actually doing. I am going to try it this week and I urge you to do the same - I really hope you feel a little lighter afterwards.
In the meantime, get back on Spotify and give yourself ten minutes to revisit a long-lost but long-loved lyric that gave your experience of this crazy life a name.
Tuesday, 23 February 2016
Tuesday, 2 February 2016
Room to stand still
When I was younger, I collected images of people I wanted to be - in scenes I wanted to live in - and stuck them to my bedroom wall. The most memorable was an older teenage girl on a train platform in a French beret, with a sweet little wooden-trim suitcase and a carefree scarf. I pinned her to my wall and longed to be her; a few months later I made it happen. Sitting on the train heading to North London to stay with my aunt, I lay my beret on the suitcase at my feet and realised I didn't want that girl's outfit. I wanted her freedom.
It didn't matter that I had wasted months saving my Saturday job money and scouring Brighton's charity shops to perfect the look. That was a crucial part of the process. Sitting on that train by myself, I couldn't stop smiling because another piece of my jigsaw had arrived - I realised I craved independence and the romance of train journeys. Something in that image had drawn me in and taken over my thinking for months until I stepped right into it and woke another part of me up. In those young years, there were no worries about what I should be doing - I just remember doing a lot of following my heart and answering to noone about it. I was busy getting to know myself.
Somewhere between then and now, I lost that confidence. My twenties seemed to involve an awful lot of people telling me who I should be, what I should think and I lost that growing clear vision of who I wanted to be. At the time, it felt like growing up of course. You don't have time to spend months recreating a photograph from a magazine for crying out loud, you have to earn some money, find a flat, have some relationships, paint the town red. Maybe seeing so many others doing life in such different ways to me made me question myself and trust them. An incredible amount of inhibitions crept in and set up camp in my head to the point that I willingly lost my young self in order to fit in.
This, without doubt, is not just my story. There are versions of this lament in many journals out there - I lost my way! I can't remember who I'm meant to be! I always feel I should be doing something else! So I have a small theory of how to navigate our way back to the freedom and possibility of living as our younger selves. We need a room to call our own. Think about it, when we were children and students, we had a whole room (or sometimes half a shared room..) that was all ours. We picked the floor, the walls, the bedspread, the lamp. More importantly, we picked the pictures on the wall and where we put them, we picked the music on the stereo, we picked the layout and changed it whenever we changed. When anyone walked into that room, people got to know us. When we walked into that room, we stood still, we became ourselves and we spread that around us like extensions of our inner world.
I am not suggested for a minute that we should all build an extra room onto the back of our houses in order to refocus our thoughts. What I am saying is that we need to recapture the spirit of our own room. Whether it is a corner of a wall in the study, a shelf in the bedroom, a cupboard in the dining room or even a book big enough to stick all our bits in; we need a space to collect what inspires us. An image, a quote, a thought, the melody of a song, a small piece of our own art or writing. It is not there for display purposes, it is there to remind us what we like, who we want to be able to say we were when we're old. It is not necessarily to be shared, it is a chance to forget trends and expectations and to be honest. Obviously there are on-line versions of this very process, Pinterest being the most popular. I think these are fabulous and definitely have their place. However, you are still moving around images chosen by other people and the pressure to 'follow' others creeps in again.
I once knew a very creative couple who were lucky enough to live in a two bedroom flat in South London. While they always slept in the same room, they each had a bedroom to themselves. It was an experiment they were trying to see what would come out of them as individuals and as a couple if they maintained their separate and joint identities. For the two years they lived there, each of them grew beyond recognition in their confidence and risk taking, not to mention creativity in their jobs and hobbies. Their rooms were amazing. This month, in amongst the unceasing tide of life, I have been trying to stop and refocus myself to my own channel. I have taken a few more romantic train journeys, I have cut out a few more images and given myself room to stand still.
It didn't matter that I had wasted months saving my Saturday job money and scouring Brighton's charity shops to perfect the look. That was a crucial part of the process. Sitting on that train by myself, I couldn't stop smiling because another piece of my jigsaw had arrived - I realised I craved independence and the romance of train journeys. Something in that image had drawn me in and taken over my thinking for months until I stepped right into it and woke another part of me up. In those young years, there were no worries about what I should be doing - I just remember doing a lot of following my heart and answering to noone about it. I was busy getting to know myself.
Somewhere between then and now, I lost that confidence. My twenties seemed to involve an awful lot of people telling me who I should be, what I should think and I lost that growing clear vision of who I wanted to be. At the time, it felt like growing up of course. You don't have time to spend months recreating a photograph from a magazine for crying out loud, you have to earn some money, find a flat, have some relationships, paint the town red. Maybe seeing so many others doing life in such different ways to me made me question myself and trust them. An incredible amount of inhibitions crept in and set up camp in my head to the point that I willingly lost my young self in order to fit in.
This, without doubt, is not just my story. There are versions of this lament in many journals out there - I lost my way! I can't remember who I'm meant to be! I always feel I should be doing something else! So I have a small theory of how to navigate our way back to the freedom and possibility of living as our younger selves. We need a room to call our own. Think about it, when we were children and students, we had a whole room (or sometimes half a shared room..) that was all ours. We picked the floor, the walls, the bedspread, the lamp. More importantly, we picked the pictures on the wall and where we put them, we picked the music on the stereo, we picked the layout and changed it whenever we changed. When anyone walked into that room, people got to know us. When we walked into that room, we stood still, we became ourselves and we spread that around us like extensions of our inner world.
I am not suggested for a minute that we should all build an extra room onto the back of our houses in order to refocus our thoughts. What I am saying is that we need to recapture the spirit of our own room. Whether it is a corner of a wall in the study, a shelf in the bedroom, a cupboard in the dining room or even a book big enough to stick all our bits in; we need a space to collect what inspires us. An image, a quote, a thought, the melody of a song, a small piece of our own art or writing. It is not there for display purposes, it is there to remind us what we like, who we want to be able to say we were when we're old. It is not necessarily to be shared, it is a chance to forget trends and expectations and to be honest. Obviously there are on-line versions of this very process, Pinterest being the most popular. I think these are fabulous and definitely have their place. However, you are still moving around images chosen by other people and the pressure to 'follow' others creeps in again.
I once knew a very creative couple who were lucky enough to live in a two bedroom flat in South London. While they always slept in the same room, they each had a bedroom to themselves. It was an experiment they were trying to see what would come out of them as individuals and as a couple if they maintained their separate and joint identities. For the two years they lived there, each of them grew beyond recognition in their confidence and risk taking, not to mention creativity in their jobs and hobbies. Their rooms were amazing. This month, in amongst the unceasing tide of life, I have been trying to stop and refocus myself to my own channel. I have taken a few more romantic train journeys, I have cut out a few more images and given myself room to stand still.
Sunday, 17 January 2016
Private Penance Patterns
A friend recently played me a song and said if there was ever a set of lyrics that he thought were written for me, it was these. I urge you to listen to 'Note to Self' by the gorgeous Jake Bugg. As I gratefully cried my way through the second listening, the line that struck me was, 'Don't cover your wounds with salt'. It blew me away. I spend a lot of time, and I mean a lot of time covering my wounds with salt but I hadn't really realised it until I heard that line. Now, don't get me wrong, this wasn't a complete revelation - I am a cradle Catholic so I have learnt and perfected the art of self recrimination and loathing all in the name of the greater good. It's as much a part of me as my right hand. Something about the sweetness of this song made me realise I had taken the 'payment for my sins' to a whole new level in recent years.
It got me thinking about how other people deal with the aftermath of doing something wrong; we all have a set of patterns depending on the nature of the wrong doing. One friend said he feels bad straight away so finds something kind to do for the person he has wronged and then he forgets it ever happened. Another friend talked about her penance in similar terms to carbon emissions - you take a flight, you plant a tree. She commits a wrong, she does a good deed - the latter doesn't have to relate to the former, she just restores the balance of one good for one bad. For me it's more like twenty thousand good deeds are needed to offset one bad and you aren't ever allowed to forget it. I'm starting to wonder whether I've got it a bit wrong..
I went to a talk recently where the speaker made reference to the way sins were dealt with by the whole community in the fourth and fifth centuries. If you committed a wrong, you were required to confess this wrong in front of the entire gathered community and then spend between seven and nine years excommunicated before you were deemed 'clean' and able to rejoin society. Heaven help you if you committed another wrong within that seven years. As time moved on, it was thought more appropriate for our confessions to be done in private to a priest who would listen to our list of misdemeanours and then decide on an appropriate a penance for us to set things straight. This could be a set of prayers or a good deed. In this way, my friends - not religious friends I hasten to add - are following a very similar pattern. Why have I decided to extend my penance back to the seven-nine year sentence I wonder?
This all becomes much more complicated when you are faced with teaching your own kids how to deal with wrongdoing. I merrily tell my two year old to say sorry and give a cuddle to his brother if he hits him/steals his toy. This seems to be working out fine. I get more confused with my nine year old as the last thing I want to do is promote my own brand of seven-year - self-beating yet I know this is what I'm modelling for him. Luckily, he reads. When he came home telling me how he had spoken during a minute's silence by mistake, he promptly cleared a section of his toy box and donated it to a charity shop and then apologised to his teacher. He then forgot about it. Apparently this is what Harry Potter would have done.
Of course, I know I am not alone in my penance pattern. There have been two moments of artistic clarity when I learned I was amongst friends. The first being Travis singing 'Why does it always rain on me? Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?' Classic Catholic thinking - ten years on but the punishments still come. The second was the gorgeous poet, Mary Oliver in her fabulous poem 'Wild Geese'. Read it - regardless of where you are on the penance spectrum this will give you a word hug. Her opening lines: 'You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.' blew me away. Still do.
I am really keen to hear about alternative steps to take post-screw-up in order to put things right with yourself and the world. Moving forward, I think the fog is clearing on the message that I need to adjust my penance patterns. I need to give myself a break. Tune in to my inner Harry Potter not my inner bible, reduce my sentence by about eight years, read my 'Note to Self' more often.
It got me thinking about how other people deal with the aftermath of doing something wrong; we all have a set of patterns depending on the nature of the wrong doing. One friend said he feels bad straight away so finds something kind to do for the person he has wronged and then he forgets it ever happened. Another friend talked about her penance in similar terms to carbon emissions - you take a flight, you plant a tree. She commits a wrong, she does a good deed - the latter doesn't have to relate to the former, she just restores the balance of one good for one bad. For me it's more like twenty thousand good deeds are needed to offset one bad and you aren't ever allowed to forget it. I'm starting to wonder whether I've got it a bit wrong..
I went to a talk recently where the speaker made reference to the way sins were dealt with by the whole community in the fourth and fifth centuries. If you committed a wrong, you were required to confess this wrong in front of the entire gathered community and then spend between seven and nine years excommunicated before you were deemed 'clean' and able to rejoin society. Heaven help you if you committed another wrong within that seven years. As time moved on, it was thought more appropriate for our confessions to be done in private to a priest who would listen to our list of misdemeanours and then decide on an appropriate a penance for us to set things straight. This could be a set of prayers or a good deed. In this way, my friends - not religious friends I hasten to add - are following a very similar pattern. Why have I decided to extend my penance back to the seven-nine year sentence I wonder?
This all becomes much more complicated when you are faced with teaching your own kids how to deal with wrongdoing. I merrily tell my two year old to say sorry and give a cuddle to his brother if he hits him/steals his toy. This seems to be working out fine. I get more confused with my nine year old as the last thing I want to do is promote my own brand of seven-year - self-beating yet I know this is what I'm modelling for him. Luckily, he reads. When he came home telling me how he had spoken during a minute's silence by mistake, he promptly cleared a section of his toy box and donated it to a charity shop and then apologised to his teacher. He then forgot about it. Apparently this is what Harry Potter would have done.
Of course, I know I am not alone in my penance pattern. There have been two moments of artistic clarity when I learned I was amongst friends. The first being Travis singing 'Why does it always rain on me? Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?' Classic Catholic thinking - ten years on but the punishments still come. The second was the gorgeous poet, Mary Oliver in her fabulous poem 'Wild Geese'. Read it - regardless of where you are on the penance spectrum this will give you a word hug. Her opening lines: 'You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.' blew me away. Still do.
I am really keen to hear about alternative steps to take post-screw-up in order to put things right with yourself and the world. Moving forward, I think the fog is clearing on the message that I need to adjust my penance patterns. I need to give myself a break. Tune in to my inner Harry Potter not my inner bible, reduce my sentence by about eight years, read my 'Note to Self' more often.
Monday, 28 December 2015
Sisterhood
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.
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.
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.
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