Water and Stars

I like poetry. Ever since coming across those lines from A Child's Garden of Verses by R.L. Stevenson (about the pail by the wall being half full of water and stars) it has had a place in my life - been important to me. But I hardly get to any poetry readings these days. Mostly, this is because of restrictions imposed my neurologically-challenged brain that isn't easily able to give the kind of sustained concentrated focus needed. But I have to admit that my preference is also to have a particular kind of one-on-one relationship with a poem that you get when it is just you and the words on a page. I often hear it said that a poem only really comes alive when it is spoken aloud, and it is quite true that to speak it aloud often tests where a poem is or isn't working; and it is true that when a poet has the gift of being able to deliver their words well, then it is a fine thing to hear them. I know one of whom it is said that he could read from a telephone directory or a Tesco's till receipt and make it sound like poetry (and perhaps, for the duration of his performance of such, it might become so). But there are good, even famous poets who don't do this well, and then I would prefer to meet their work on the page.

Perhaps I am making a virtue of a necessity. However good the poem on the page, one doesn't have the buzz of conviviality that comes from a room full of people sharing the experience. I have recently been in rooms full of people because they were occasions which I couldn't bear to miss: the book launch of a dear friend was one and the wedding of my youngest brother was another. The commonplace business of engaging in conversation in a crowded room, especially where there is ambient noise, has become something I can - almost - no longer do. It does something to the wiring in my brain that is hard to describe, but many PeopleWithME will know and recognise. Clearly there was a time when I managed better than I do now. But for now I will (have to) carry on treading the path of acceptance. Does this sound boring?

I am not bored. I have almost never been bored, even as a temp when typing figures all day on a manual typewriter or sitting in a classroom listening to the depressed geography supply teacher drone about where we got our wheat, cocoa and meat from. I took in none of the facts (I seldom did) but I remember everything about the teacher: how carefully he combed the few oily strands across his bald head, the texture of his tweed-like suit that picked up on the colour of his ginger sideburns, the earnest expression, as though there might have been something hidden in the dreary litany of facts that he would have liked to reveal to us. I remember how dust gathered in the corners of the large classroom windows that you could only open by using a long pole with a metal hook at the end, and the blackboard where there was always the ghost of something written in chalk, even once it had been rubbed out. I must have been paying attention - to something or someone. I still do. And the other day I read Billy Collins who said, while the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly on the windowpane. I don't think the one activity necessarily excludes the other, and however many flies you watch there is no substitute for writing words on paper (or screen). But it did give me the sense, or remind me, that the act of witnessing and paying attention means something and gives power and substance. The pail is still full of water and stars.

***

Practice

I am recovering from another spring virus, it is late and this is no time to be putting up a blog post. But I'm going to do it anyway because I'm going away in a couple of days and on 12th May it is M.E. Awareness Day, and I am mindful of it.

Either the number of PWME casualties has increased or I am just more attuned. Barely a week goes by that I don't hear about a death or about some outrage perpetrated by the medical profession. A woman with severe M.E. is about to be forcibly removed from her home on the advice of a psychiatrist who has never met her. Someone I have come to know through a Facebook group is denied the essential care she needs in order to live. Another has been told she must submit to an exercise regime that is not only unrealistic but dangerous, or risk losing essential benefits.

Being able to get about a bit, I remain one of the more fortunate ones, though twenty-five years along the road does not do me any favours and I am still sometimes asked if I am "better now."  I reply by giving a short lecture about the nature of M.E., not so much for my sake (if people have some understanding it's nice, but unless they or someone close has it then they probably won't and one must be realistic) but in order to spread the word a little - help raise awareness.

The spirit is still strong (I have yet to meet a PWME for whom this is not true - practice makes perfect) but the disease takes its toll. It is time to take stock again, find new ways of doing things, especially those things I love, that give my life meaning. I carry on doing The Writing, but am having to embrace the idea I may never have the strength for a big project, and that - crucially - this will be ok. Good enough. I have rehabilitated the reading, for which hurrah, because I am as much a reader as a writer and I feared I might be losing the ability to properly focus - M.E. brain can lend one a kind of dyslexia whereby one takes nothing in. I have to be careful not to risk overloading the brain because this can easily cause relapse, and have come to recognise that I can take in much more if brain does not feel it is having to absorb Information.  Kindle has helped to some extent.  I don't know why it should be easier on the eye than a book, but it sometimes is, and you can adjust the font. I continue to meet with writing people, when I can, either to workshop poems or to sit in a kitchen (mine or theirs) with a notebook, to write and then share what we have made. When this kind of activity works, when people are focussed on the work and the process, there is a sense of community and it feels as though one has a hearth. Whether my words find their way into the wider world or not, I am still this writing person, as green as when I first began to do it, when I knew (a late developer) that this is what I was for. I need to put my ear to the ground and listen for what is coming, for what I really want to be speaking about, because unless I am true to that I won't have the strength to do it. Unless I can bring this kindness to bear on my practice, then I won't have the heart for it.

Today I went into the village for bread, yoghurt and a newspaper. I nearly didn't because it was cold and wet and I haven't been outside for a few days. There was a boot sale going on in the community centre car park and all the usual spaces in the village centre were full. I parked my car at a distance from the minimarket where I got my paper. Coming out of the shop, I saw a Big Issue man under an umbrella. As I shook my head at him, he held out his hand and said, "Please." He was ruddy, thick-set with dark wavy hair, and from somewhere else - foreign. I ignored him.  Perhaps it was just the easy habit of common and garden mean-spiritedness - I give now and then, but not often, not much - and also, I didn't want to stand in the wet, rummaging for my purse. But back inside my car, the look of him lit up like after-image and I felt him in me, familiar, there was something in his gesture I knew or recognised, as though he might once have been someone who mattered to me. He wasn't, I had never seen him before. I drove past the shop, left the car hazard lights on and dropped some coins into his hand. He nodded, as though he had been waiting for me. He looked tired.

There is something I need to put together again, something I would like to re-member. This too is work-in-progress.

**

If not, August*

There is nothing to discuss because, basically: the interesting things are not up for discussion, the things that might be up for discussion are not interesting and the rain it raineth every day, which we apparently need and you surely don't want to listen to me talking about the weather, so the rain is not up for discussion.  When I am writing, it is either going well or badly and if well then one doesn't want to jinx it saying so (this does happen, believe me), and if going badly one doesn't want to lend weight to the fact.  So the Writing is not up for discussion.  My aches and pains really should be up for discussion but not, dear reader, with you.

But this: I ordered a book from Amazon recently - a book of poems by an author I came across years ago in the first of Neil Astley's marvellous anthologies, Staying Alive.  I kept going back to the poem, really a whole sequence, and promising myself that I would get something of hers.  So finally I did, even though her collection is no longer in print.  But on Amazon everything is possible, especially if you are prepared to fork out £17.99 for a battered ex-libris copy.  It was spoiled with unsightly stickers, one revealing that it had been bought in one of those sales that libraries sometimes have when they want to sell off old stock, and the spine was all stiff with sticky tape.  The Amazon dealer kept asking me for feedback so finally I emailed expressing my disappointment in its condition.  Didn't expect much of a response, but they have given me a bit of a refund.  And I have scraped away and got all the crap off the book and am still pleased to have it.  The book is Lost August by Esta Spalding, and the sequence is there and is, I think, the best thing in it - though I perhaps need to spend more time with the rest.

Here it is.

August

Skin-tight with longing, like dangerous girls,
the tomatoes reel, drunk
from the vine.

The corn, its secret ears
studded like microphones, transmit August
across the field: paranoid crickets, the noise of snakes
between stalks, peeling themselves from
themselves.

I am burdened as the sky,
clouds, upset buckets pour
their varnish onto earth.

Last year you asked if I was
faint because of the blood. The tomatoes
bristled in their improbable skins,
eavesdropping.

·

This is one way to say it.
The girl gone, you left.

& this another.
Last year in August I hung
my head between my knees, looked up
flirting with atmosphere
but you were here
& the sky had no gravity.

Now love falls from me,
walls from a besieged city.
When I move the mountains shrug off
skin, horizon shudders, I wear the moon
a cowbell.

My symptom:
the earth’s
constant rotation.

·

On the surface the sea argues.
The tide pulls water like a cloth
from the table, beached boats, dishes
left standing. Without apology
nature abandons us.
Returns, promiscuous, & slides between
sheets, unspooling the length
of our bodies.

Black wild rabbits beside the lighthouse
at Letite. They disappear before
I am certain I’ve seen them.
Have they learned this from you?

·

I read the journal of the boy who starved
to death on the other side of a river
under trees grown so old he would not feed them
to a signal fire. His last entry:
August 12 Beautiful Blueberries!

Everything I say about desire or
hunger is only lip service
in the face of it.

Still there are days I know
your mouth gave that last taste of blue.

·

When you said you were
leaving
I pictured a tree;
spring, the green nippled buds

not the fall
when we are banished
from the garden.

·

Another woman fell
in love with the sea,
land kissed by salt, the skin
at the neck a tidal zone, she rowed
against the escaping tide
fighting to stay afloat.

To find the sea she had to turn her back to it,
stroke.

The sea is a wound
& in loving it
she learned to love what goes missing.

·

Once the raspberries grew
into our room, swollen as the
brains of insects, I dreamt a
wedding. We could not find our
way up the twisted ramp, out from under
ground, my hair earth-damp.

I woke. A raspberry bush clung to us
sticky as the toes of frogs.
A warning: you carried betrayal
like a mantis
folded to your chest - legs, wings, tongue
would open, knife
the leaves above us.

·

If I could step into
your skin, my fingers
into your fingers putting on
gloves, my legs, your legs,
a snake zipping
up. If I could look
out of your tired eyeholes
brain of my brain,
I might know
why we failed.
(Once we thought the same
thoughts, felt the same things.)

A heavy cloak, I wear
you, an old black wing
I can’t shrug off.

O heart of my heart,
come home. O flesh,
come to me before
the worm, before earth
ate the girl,
before you left without
belongings.

·

You said, there are women
I know whose presence
changes the quality of air.

I am not one of those. The leaves
lift & sigh, the river
keeps saying the unsayable things.
I hesitate to prod the corn from the coals
though I have soaked it in Arctic water.
I stop the knife near the tomato
skin, all summer coiled there.
You are not coming back.

One step closer
to the fire.

September will fall
with twilight’s metal,
loose change
from a pocket. Quicker than
an oar can fight water,
I will look up from my feet
catch the leaves red-handed
embracing smoke.

Around me, lost things gather
from an instant
in earth-dark air.

Esta Spalding

* if not, winter - one of Sappho's fragments and the title of Anne Carson's translation.

tweet

This morning being fine and full of birdsong, I stumbled out into the forest (because I can, being on the edge of it). I didn't get lost, but I did stray from the path, and I did wander further than I meant to. I always do this - go on until I suddenly know that I have gone too far, walking back will be difficult, the days that follow also. But the birds did lead me on, so many of them in full voice, particularly the small ones, those you don't often see nowadays, unless you live near a forest or a protected place. My neighbour has made a study of bird language. There are many, as you might imagine. The song of a linnet is nothing like the low, persistent call of a dove. Chaffinch tweets melodiously and the Blue Tit is more conversational. Each year they come and nest in the bird box that Son made when he was at school. One feels privileged.

I think this may be all I can say for now. More of a tweet than a post :)

License to Jump Queues

Oh for goodness sake, where have I been! Drawing out Lent, I should think not, as though privation were good for the soul, for this soul I mean (because no it isn't) or as though I am Greta Garbo, gawdssake, with a big loud megaphone blaring that I Vant To Be Alooooone! When actually, I don't, not really. I like the community of disparate souls that gather around the flames of blogfire and it wasn't my intention to banish myself forever to wander in the dark forest toute seule. At least not yet. At least I don't think so. And I say this with whatever shreds of strength are left to me by this wretched chronic Condition of mine, which I will neither go on about at great length nor seek in any way to deny, and this is quite a trick to pull off, so give me a few gold stars for this. I am not sure that I have been earning gold stars for much else. I have written some poems and taken them to workshops, I have given attention to workshopping other people's poems also and this continues to feel meaningful to me - in other words, like real work. And I am honing a skill that I have yet to find a title for, but let us call it Giving Myself License - GML for short. As things stand, this basically means that I park in places that strictly speaking I shouldn't, but I hope to find creative ways of extending this and will welcome all suggestions.

Went to see my GP the other day. Come back - what do expect me to blog about on my first post, post-Lent, and I can file it quite reasonably under the label Life and Stuff. Ahem. GP has been away from the practice for a while as he became the father of twins. A photograph showed from behind a box of index cards and I saw the crowns of two smooth baby heads. He looked tired but did not mind that I had come with a list of ten or so things. He is by no means the brightest button in the box but he is unfailingly courteous and does what he can with the limited resources allowed by the NHS. There needs to be dialogue between him and the specialist I see from time to time, and in order for this to happen I have to be on the case or things get stuck. So yes, much time is given over to health matters. I don't mind. I am still hopeful that if some of the issues underlying my symptoms can be addressed then a measure of wellness may be given back to me and will never believe that it was part of Anyone's masterplan that I should come into the world and be so ill for so long. When things go wrong, when something vital is lacking or malfunctioning you try and put it right and you go on trying while there is hope and while you can. That is all.

Meanwhile, you carry on and develop strategies. One of mine is to give myself license to break minor rules. Call it covert bad behaviour of the mostly uncriminal kind. If there is a queue anywhere I will, if possible, try to jump it. I park my car beside petrol pumps at Tesco Express when I just need some shopping but no petrol. I park in the bays at the back of the doctor's surgery, which are only supposed to be used by staff, when there are no spaces at the front. I do these things to save my strength and because there are times when walking up an incline can make me much worse, and standing in queues will always do that (if interested, see Orthostatic Intolerance). So yes, the other day I parked at the back of the surgery. Plenty of space there, no-one spotted me, no harm done. And you see that photograph at the top? That was taken by Mr. Signs on a lovely day in Brighton when we were having a walk and fancied a cone of Mr. Marrocco's ice cream (length of queue is testimony to how good it is). We went to the back of the queue, as one does. Then I asked Mr. S to wait while I went to investigate. Are you going to try and jump the queue? he asked. He knows me, doesn't really approve but is also realistic. Make mine a raspberry sorbet, he said. I hovered around the glass counter looking as though I was studying the various different flavours on offer. There was a kerfuffle of people choosing things and a bevy of scoop-wielding shop assistants. One of them spotted me and asked what I wanted. I walked out with two cones - simples. On our walk back we spotted the same person that had stood in front, still waiting and reckoned I must have saved us about half an hour.

Am I a bad person? This is rhetorical and not really up for discussion, at least not in my hearing. And, like I said, suggestions welcome.

***

Lent

It is that time of year: Lent, and the almost beginning of Spring. The birds are singing more but from my perch in the Signs Cottage study, I don't see very much happening and something seems to be not quite right in the garden. It is the absence of apple tree, which fell down last year, having covered itself in a swansong of blossom and final burst of fruit before giving up the ghost. My eye still looks for it and comes up against the hollow-eyed falling-down shed at the bottom of the garden, and the tall fir tree in the garden opposite. Everything changes. This blog changes: first white, then black, now grey; and my posts are becoming less frequent. No apologies. It is very cringe-making when people apologise for not having blogged - as though one has been sitting up twiddling thumbs waiting for them to come back while they were away having a life. The blog itself, though, begins to feel like a friend that one has not been in touch with for a while. The longer one leaves it, the more difficult it becomes to re-establish contact until finally, I imagine, the relationship begins to pale and then becomes an erstwhile rather than a current one.

On Shrove Tuesday I decided to give up the internet for Lent. Then on Ash Wednesday I decided not to because a) it isn't as though I have a terrible internet habit that is interfering with the rest of my life and b) giving things up suddenly felt like a bad idea as health issues mean that I have enough restrictions in my life. My best Lent resolutions have in any case been to do with taking things on. One year I resolved to write a poem each day. I didn't keep the resolution, but many more poems were written during the period than if I hadn't made it. This year I will be writing in the notebook every day.

March will be full of good things in the way of daughter's plays being put on at various places in London (she is one of this year's Royal Court young writers), and also a musical directed by son. So there will be trips back and forth to the Smoke. If health and strength are gold coins, I will need to get a stash of them.

**

Stories and Lies

I have been reading John Burnside, who recently won the T.S.Eliot for his extraordinary Black Cat Bone. This and Hunt in the Forest have taken up residence by my bedside and I have also been reading his memoirs. I am interested in the narrative he constructs from his life. In a sense, all narratives about ourselves are stories. John Burnside's father was, he discovered after the father's death, a foundling - left on someone's doorstep and passed from place to place, an unwanted burden in hard times. So his father told lies, told this story and that, about who he was, where he came from and the identity of his parents. Any story was better than the fact of having been abandoned on a doorstep without even a label around his neck.

The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are, where we come from, are perhaps a kind of lie, even for those of us who were not left cold on a doorstep. They have to be lies, partly because all stories are lies, and most of us need to place ourselves within the context of a narrative that makes sense. But there is something else: Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was, in a sense, a lie about her childhood and her mother. The story she wrote was not as bleak and dark as what really happened. She wrote a story she could live with. But even in her recent memoir, which tells her story as it really was, I find myself asking questions about her father and why he failed to protect her. He comes across as an essentially good person and probably was - but my guess is that the narrative JW has constructed requires this because at the very end of his life she was close to him and there was reparation - a kind of healing. She is still telling the only story she is prepared to live with.

The narrator of her novel The Passion says: "Trust me, I'm telling you stories."

I tell (myself) many stories about where I come from, pinpoint landmarks on the road that led me to where I am now. In terms of location, there were many as we were so often on the move, from England to Germany and back again, from one place to another, frequent change of schools. What strikes me now is that there is nowhere I look back on to say: this is where I come from; these are my people and this my language. There is no 'we' because I did not belong to a group, and family life was fragmented. In my working-class primary school my accent and manners were strange. I did not realise I had a German accent. In schools where middle-class children went, my accent and manners were strange. I had picked up a cockney accent and still carried a trace of the German. I met the boy who would be my first husband when I was sixteen. He came from somewhere - a tenement in Glasgow and a community. Where he came from was written into everything he did and said. I married him and picked up a trace of his accent.

This is the story I would have to lie about - what the narrative would need to cover: that I spent my childhood among strangers and came from no particular place. I lived in books and other people's stories. This is not so unusual, especially for an introverty child who is an early reader. I can draw a map of my childhood, say where I have been, in this book or that story, from Peter Rabbit through Narnia, Wind on the Moon and Mallory Towers to the diaries of Anne Frank. But this is the only map I can make and it is not enough for a satisfying narrative. I construct others, therefore - put together versions that feel coherent and reveal an aspect of what I feel to be true; of lived experience. If a story no longer serves its purpose, I make another one.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

***