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: