Icarus skywriting # 14.5

Pondering or forgetting...

Oh - I sang this song (below) in a  country club in London and I just have to post it because I forgot I even knew it. How does that work? I heard it come over from someone else's garden and found I could sing all the words. How does that work - subconscious burying of the text, unconscious burying of the text, text buried in the unconscious subconscious. This has made me ponder - see picture. How does that work, how does that work, how did I forget, is there something I am not telling myself, am I forgetful, I forget to remember to forget sometimes but that is not the same as forgetting, nope, not the same at all - but she never spoke Spanish to me, and I didn't forget that!

Icarus skywriting # 14

I have been thinking and writing and reading and thinking and writing all morning, just trying to get a handle on a conundrum and isn't that just it. Working out what I know I know while trying to figure out that which I do not. I have a new word, which is paravihara. I just made it up - well not really, its a composite but its my composite so hands off. But its a parabiotic meeting space, the point of 'in-between' which Benjamin would call, 'a terra incognita in the hollows between the lands we know...' and I like that idea very much indeed. And I was thinking that travelling to such a place is also the art of writing because you are afloat on half a boat which you are still building as you sail. But I can't dawdle here, I am shipping water and listing wayward... that was the river, this is the sea:

Icarus skydancing

Cowgirl in the kitchen getting ready to line dance, yee hah! Hit it, Earl:

Icarus skywriting # 13

Books and bookish thoughts lead me down so many dusty tracks of thought that sometimes I feel the need to kick out the light and say, that's it. I'm off! But still we continue to look for new projects to occupy the hours we don't have to finish the ones we are doing now. Time and ideas are a problem because we have to make choices. I have chosen my June/ July/ August project and only time will tell if it can be achieved. But there is always other quests going on. Like who painted this? 

I took this picture (I think) but can't figure out where or who painted it (note to self - keep notes). But I do like it very much indeed. All answers on a postcard to the usual address. I was reading Douglas Dunn last night and came across the line, 'Her pleasure whispered through a much kissed smile...' and I rather like that expression. So I steal it, and the unknown painting, for here, in the hope that no one minds. These days in an open book... missing pages I cannot seem to find..

Icarus skywriting # 12

Well I will never win the Orange Prize now! But of course I couldn't have won it anyway. Isn't it a strange thing in this wide world of ours that there are still things we cannot do. Well of course some of those things are necessary in the world of gender divisions, but book prizes? Summer has arrived at long last - and long may it continue. Old Brighton always looks its best in the sunshine. It always polishes itself up and then says, 'take me, take me' - old tart that it is. And how would Rilke describe it?

Wait..., that tastes good... But already its gone.

... A few notes of music, a tapping, faint

hum - : you girls, so warm and so silent,

dance the taste of the fruit you have known!

The world is NOT orange! How can a poor man stand such times and live, I ask you! I remember a time when everything was cheap - including me.

Icarus skywriting # 11

Flowers for my baby...

A celebratory blog for my baby who came home yesterday and made lots and lots of lovely noise and talked about tennis and America and boys and the whole day like this note went without punctuation as we ate fish and chips in front of the football because nothing had changed at all except we were just a year older though no wiser for all that ooh its so good to have her here in her bed upstairs sleeping. Jet lag has been described to me as the body arrived and waiting for the soul to catch up. If she has more soul to catch up goodness knows what she will be like, for she is already blessed with rude health and happiness - yay! I saw the crescent, but she saw the whole of the moon:

Icarus skywriting # 10

Anticipation

Tomorrow I drive to the airport to collect my baby girl. Oh yay, I say, for I cannot wait. And I have discovered that absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder it just means you get to see less of those you are fondest of - and she is very high on my list. This week I have been reading The Essential Poems by Pablo Neruda, and random lines pull at my memory tags, 'The night wind spins in the sky and sings.' or 'Little by little, and also in great leaps, life happened to me,' or 'Perhaps it was my punishment/ Perhaps I was condemned to be happy...' (that line tickles me greatly). And also this week I have been pulling the bones of a new project together, new writing, new ideas, new things to say (and I wonder if they will ever be said or if they will stay put, haunting my inner self, taunting my well being. Perhaps I am condemned to be happy and its hard to write when contentment lurks in your guilty conscience.). Here's another story song from the fine Karine P. again. I find myself drawn to the pathos but also the lines: 

Caught between the air and the windless deep 

You float like a lily flower
And you look just like you fell to earth to sleep
And you’re waiting for your waking hour 
Followed by
And I swear to God I saw an angel hand attend you.

But that was just the dancing of the light...' 

because it resonates with the writing I am doing. And I am now looking for a copy of Cold Night Lullaby.

Icarus skywriting # 9

Walter Benjamin wrote, 'To thinking belongs not only the movement of thoughts, but likewise their standstill. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives the constellation a shock, through which thinking crystallises itself as a monad.' Oh! That moment of seeing and meaning, but can it ever be monadic? This makes me think of poetry, not reading and trying to understand what the poet has written, but understanding that the poet has written something he or she meant to write but which will never be read in the way he or she intended because the slippage between the writer and the reader always renders meaning slippery. 'Every angel is terrifying...' as Rilke says. And now I am wondering to myself why I wrote this. Does it make sense, what sense am I trying to reach? Reading Judy Horacek http://horacek.com.au/makes me feel like this  because she has so many answers and I hope she wont mind me borrowing this pictures (but oh so many to choose from) - I'll buy her a drink next time I am in Melbourne. Here's a Steve Earle song sung by Joan B. 'We can all learn to sing the songs the angels sing.'

Icarus skywriting # 8

Spring

I was sitting in the kitchen, wearing my new haircut, thinking about dinner (baked cod with a pesto crust, served with sweet potato and salad) while listening to some music on 'shuffle' and this song came on and I just had to blog it because it is just the bees knees. I used to sing this live in an Edinburgh pub and since I am interested in Icarian things, I forgot these lines - But the sea is wide and I can't swim over and neither have I wings to fly - and then we find we are back to this idea of escape and return to and from an island, and sea and boats and flying:

Icarus skywriting # 7

terminal star...

Being told you are going to die comes as a bit of a shock. I know this because today I was told exactly that. I smiled, what else can any of us do, especially since the news was predicted by a Brighton gypsy who asked for nothing but gave it as a gift. And I wonder, is it a gift we desire? Is a premonition, a prediction of death, really a desirable gift. I ponder this because I also wonder if I should write a bucket list of things to do, or should I be doing them anyway? But didn't I say, yes I am going to die, predicted age 92, oh! It makes me feel like I should be preparing for it; strengthening my (slowly becoming) arthritic fingers, strengthening my breathy lungs, my signs of calcium deficiency, my aching heart (ever the dramatist). But of course my body is not a prison for my ailments but simply the coop that holds my clucking thoughts and dreams and ideas until they can be developed further (which may be no further than chicken and miso soup) '...does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance.'  I feel my spirits expand and I was thinking, terminal star is a phrase used to describe a star which has died but we can still see its light; because it takes light years for light to travel and by the time it reaches us the source is already dead. I haven't died yet, and I am still transmitting, but surely memories are like terminal stars and so as Karine Polwart sings these lines (below) the metaphor extends beyond the physics into the metaphysics of being and memory:

You're a beautiful trace
Of time and space
You're a thing that once shone
And you still shine bright
In the darkest night
Though you're already gone...

All the stories in stones
And in beakers and bones
All the salt in the sea
Are eclipsed by the might
Of your fading light
You're dying so beautifully
So beautifully...

Icarus skywriting # 6

Nostalgis # 2

I was sent this today and just love the conceit of it - and I have just ordered the book so I can ruminate in the sun when July brings it on: 

I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created an interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that’s it, an always within never. Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

And I have been thinking about strains of music creating an interlude in time... and an always within never - we just need to be ready to listen.

Icarus skywriting # 5

Nostalgis

I was writing a blues song for my next door neighbour who used to be a journalist until he retired. And this is what I came up with...
Aye lookin' for trouble
aye lookin' for news
aye lookin' for opinions
aye looking for views
but no one would choose
to have the (fuckin' Alasdair) Buchan blues 
I have already posted today but then sometimes you come across something you just have to share and this wee film is one of those - I grew up here, I know this road, I have cycled down it and now one of my favourite songwriters lives there and sings there and is there and its 10pm in my evening and I feel nostalgis for Salters Road... is this a word 'nostalgis'? I claim it as mine!

Icarus skywriting # 4

The professorial picture is inserted here to celebrate the publication of yet another paper, yay, the link is at the bottom if you really want to see it.But as with all published work, the pleasure is fleeting, empty as a promise, because its gone and you have already moved on. So contemplation is back on the agenda and with it comes the bliss of knowing that thought will be followed by words and tones, twisted into forms hitherto unknown for they exist only as ellipses in their primordial state, as ideas take shape. A metaphor here, a simile there, a joined up enjambment as the story unfurls... and still I stand on the rocks looking out to sea and listening to Armand and Levon again. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april12/melrose.htm 

Icarus skywriting # 3

I am in a new state of enlightenment, a self-imposed new way of seeing and being and it washes over me like a tsunami of hope and good cheer, and sounds like the hush of the sea on a pebble beach in Brighton - hush... sh... sh... sh... shushering in breathy, salty air sh...sssss.... it feels good... and this is my desk at the moment as I begin to gather writing tools around me... and I have been thinking that sometimes I forget to remember to forget... and yesterday I wrote down a snatch of a song line... empty as a promise in a pocket full of holes... and another... I only have first world troubles... I only have first world blues... my news channel talks of hope and good cheer because I know what its like to be free... and I read the beginning of The Song of Achilles and said yay... and I find Armand Amar and Levon Minassien's music other and strange and hauntingly beautiful... which helps me to write with a different internal view of the world...

Icarus skywriting # 2

Writing Again

This blog began with me writing and I am back doing it again. This time fiction - yay! The year has seen:

2 books

4 articles

1 keynote address

So its now time for a wee change of tack and from now, through the summer, I will be doing something else. Although, that said I have 2 Icarus projects bubbling with Australians too so having exhausted my self 2011/12 I am back on the treadmill, word-chomping and listening to appropriate music as I tip tap my way through the metaphors and similes of fiction. Here's the music, the incomparable Karen Matheson who makes me nostalgic: