I can't scan it so I'll say it. Maybe you'll see it for real one day. Maybe it'll just be here.
The photo is from a day on the French side of Lake Geneva this summer. On the boat on the way over a sliding door closed onto the side of my head and I had to spend a lot of time looking across the lake and biting my lip because it hurt so much I thought I would cry in front of the whole crew.
The photo was taken some time after this and the pain had died away. This is important background since I was waiting for that time when 'after pain, a formal feeling comes' as E.D. says. This photo inspires a calm and a formal feeling like nothing else but the cessation of pain or nausea.
It is blue. The lake's edge seems to curve as if it is the whole horizon. The sky is a creamy blue. S and C are standing on a promontary of the wharf containing the small crisp white boats. You cannot see the boats in the frame but you can sense them. The lakewater is so clear that for as far out as you can swim you can see the bottom. You cannot see the clearness of the lakewater in the frame but you can sense it.
S and C stand on the promontary. It curves up from the bottom centre of the frame to the middle left. C stands in shadow, arm upstretched with unconscious grace to shade her eyes. You cannot see the detail of her face. S stands, hands on hips, turning to the camera with a smile. She wears a blue dress and sandals and a yellow headscarf that punctuates the scene, like a top note in perfume. The blue is the wood note and this the floral. The whole thing would smell like warm milk and salt if it smelled of anything.
Out of scene, I stood in the shade of a sail, balancing badly in my shoes. I was wearing a blue and white striped dress and had just discovered the taste of caramel and fleur-du-sel icecream. The air was the temperature of blood and the water was very cold. Soon we would cross back on the boat and picnic on French sausages and watermelons in the park near the centre for refugee studies. But for that little while they stood cupped in curves, C's arm, S's left breast, my spine as I bent to frame the shot.
I keep all three, C, S, and invisible I propped on my desk as a talisman against these grey winter walls. Against dark at four. Against rain. Against the hiss and rumble of the gas fire. The photo tells me summer is somewhere in the world, and it is good.
Monday 15 December 2008
Sunday 26 October 2008
stories, 1
I'm filling up a small sheet of paper with 5 stories. Each of them can only be as long as the A5 sized section allotted to it. It's just a little exercise to try and get started on writing again. When they're all finished I will scan the paper but until then I'll just transcribe the first one. It doesn't have a title and is inspired by a man I saw walking down the road.
The beginning. Once upon a time there lived a man a very very hairy man who was called the wolf-man for the very pure and extremely simple reason that his father had been a wolf a grey brindled old thingwith one scarred ear. The wolf man was as I said already very hairy. His hair was luscious and silken over it grew from his hair in whorls down his neck in ripples then and eddies over the knotted constraints of his back near the shoulders where he had to work hard to keep the wolf part of himself inside here it became more of a full flow into the small of his back as if in relief at its release. From the small of his back his hair stretched and curled itself around his sides to curlicue its satin self around to his stomach from whence it tumbled up in alphabetic forms to the crunching indent of his navel and up up up up to greet his beard. I don't know what happened below the waist because he always ore trousers of course to protect his modesty. Even when it was winter he would take off his shirt and parade the streets and people would stare at the signs and wonders that may be hidden in the patterns shifting through that hair but he just bared his teeth at them all and strode on by. THE TRUTH. The end.
Right, back to what I was doing before which was singing along to Johnny Cash and eating apples.
The beginning. Once upon a time there lived a man a very very hairy man who was called the wolf-man for the very pure and extremely simple reason that his father had been a wolf a grey brindled old thingwith one scarred ear. The wolf man was as I said already very hairy. His hair was luscious and silken over it grew from his hair in whorls down his neck in ripples then and eddies over the knotted constraints of his back near the shoulders where he had to work hard to keep the wolf part of himself inside here it became more of a full flow into the small of his back as if in relief at its release. From the small of his back his hair stretched and curled itself around his sides to curlicue its satin self around to his stomach from whence it tumbled up in alphabetic forms to the crunching indent of his navel and up up up up to greet his beard. I don't know what happened below the waist because he always ore trousers of course to protect his modesty. Even when it was winter he would take off his shirt and parade the streets and people would stare at the signs and wonders that may be hidden in the patterns shifting through that hair but he just bared his teeth at them all and strode on by. THE TRUTH. The end.
Right, back to what I was doing before which was singing along to Johnny Cash and eating apples.
Wednesday 1 October 2008
the Wharf
Canary Wharf is somewhere I love and hate and cannot stay away from. I go there to the cinema because it's close to my house and - less prosaically - while I'm there I like to stoke the fires of scorn and self-regard. Yesterday I skipped around in my jeans and navy aran jumper and my dad's tartan scarf that's older than I am and my red lipstick that smells like lily of the valley, carrying a bunch of outofseason sunflowers and I watched all those grey faced sleep deprived men and women glance at me like I was an alien creature. A medieval peasant. A martian. A woman wearing trousers in a time of corsets and hooped skirts. It makes me giddy, all those buildings that are hundreds of times taller than me, all hard edges and glinting chips of steel and glass.
The inside of no.1 Canada Square is the colour of hastily masticated steak mixed with a glass of milk taken before bed in the hope that it will cool all that meat lying on the stomach.
It is all so much of its own expanding self, existing only for itself and for the great grey gobbets of imagined coffee gold and oil that stream into it and out of it in algorithmic waves. I can't help but believe that its time will be brief and that when we are back to tilling the earth and these words are locked inside this machine and forever lost that I will survive longer than the grey faces will.
The inside of no.1 Canada Square is the colour of hastily masticated steak mixed with a glass of milk taken before bed in the hope that it will cool all that meat lying on the stomach.
It is all so much of its own expanding self, existing only for itself and for the great grey gobbets of imagined coffee gold and oil that stream into it and out of it in algorithmic waves. I can't help but believe that its time will be brief and that when we are back to tilling the earth and these words are locked inside this machine and forever lost that I will survive longer than the grey faces will.
Monday 22 September 2008
Hiraeth
the harbour slip, the
wrack and slick of seaweed
ends jointed like bone
I just got back from Wales, land of some of my forefathers. I wrote the above after a trip to Tyddewi harbour, with its happy familiar stink of rot and ozone. The smell that was here before us, the smell that will be here after we are all gone.
wrack and slick of seaweed
ends jointed like bone
I just got back from Wales, land of some of my forefathers. I wrote the above after a trip to Tyddewi harbour, with its happy familiar stink of rot and ozone. The smell that was here before us, the smell that will be here after we are all gone.
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