A Report on These Wholesome Times (However Long They Last)

I am sat at my broken-toothed laptop now, trying to tap my way through sticky keys for love of this blog, all while singing and swaying shakily along to Helplessness Blues. I am suddenly - though perhaps more gradually than I ever realised - a teenager again. Having trudged through torrents of obnoxious, youthful years that seemed to pour down so mercilessly, so endlessly, I find I am right back there again.

I shake both head and body, wondering with quiet mirth what God must see when He looks down at this young old fool. Is this the cycle of growth? Am I now squinting closely at the millimetres as they move up in slow motion to find light, where once my faraway eyes only saw nothing nothing nothing and then suddenly - it was always so suddenly - green springs from dead earth. Oh little me, was the earth ever dead. I'm glad at least now, grateful for being shaken awake to bear witness.

So, other than to bend my mind back and forth between my youth and my age - to revel in how I'm reliving morsels of it with a hopeful and hopefully wiser head - what did I slink into this neglected corner to do? I came to tell you that I am, in fact, doing. Besides this present spot of writing and editing some poems I've been working on in the dark, I am taking in and spitting back out all the pure old forms of creation (social media, I'm afraid, really is a cesspit of regurgitated anxiety whose upchuckers would probably do significantly better being wrung through therapy before coming onto the internet to 'journal'... speaking as one who has partaken in the sick farce, I don't count whatever bilious matter I myself have in past or preset projected - or will in future project - upon that stage. obvs).

IN THE MAKING

My pottery class is progressing well - at the halfway mark, I had already thrown three pretty little vessels at the wheel, two of whom may survive the fortifying fires of Max's kiln. Max is my brilliant teacher, by the way. I've also finally taken to the hand building kit Sam bought for me last Christmas and have pinched and prodded into existence a decorative tile for some unwitting relative to receive this festive period... my parents always love being tortured with the burden of my "art" so perhaps they can have it.

What else, dear digital diary. I've been drawing a little, lubricating my creaky creative hands some more ahead of our art collective's next exhibition (a proper one, at a stately-ish home in London, not just at the school again). The theme of my own submission is 'how does your garden grow'. Currently: dead for winter - and you know how much I adore depicting dead things.

I took a great leap on the art front recently and submitted some works to a local arts festival. Well, would you know it, they accepted my humble pieces! Pavements, Altars and Swans (not their legal names) will be dotted about amongst the Great Makers of Wycombe! I couldn't be more giddy at the idea of showing my 'stuff' as I affectionately call them. (O ghost of Pompey, begone!)

Speaking of exhibiting myself, I'm currently contemplating letting some of that aforementioned poetry out of the dark shadow of this blog's drafting pit and seeing if I can get published (under mine own name!) somewhere... we'll see how many years of rejection this one takes.

We drift along to the other arts - particularly music and literature - which I've been buoyed along by lately. On these, I am most content to report that I've swallowed whole some new and old favourites quite hungrily. I have also booked myself onto some exhibitions (there are always a few irresistible ones about town this time of year), an opera and a ballet (!) but we'll report back on those another time.

Book-wise, I finished The Sea, The Sea by Murdoch and want every young person on this Isle to read it so they know a bit of what's in store for them come retirement... jokes aside, it is of course so much more than that. Read more here, as they say. I'm almost done with Anna Karenina and I adore every page of it so far. I've started on a contemporary author that I borrowed from the library for the sole purpose of proving I'm not a white geriatric classist trapped in the body of a fun young black woman. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I think I'm warming to it but I can't tell for certain.

Musically speaking, I alluded earlier to the sweet sullen voices lulling me to rest. The folk giants of my romantic youth have returned to tramp the earth this autumn - my favourite season, so no better time for it. Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling, The Tallest Man on Earth, First Aid Kit, Hozier, even The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons... all the old stuff of course, I'm no heathen. Oh but their voices, so earnest so raw etc. Like that bit nearly two minutes into 'The Shrine', moments before it crosses over into 'The Argument', where he nearly screams 'sunlight passing over me / no matter what I do'. Oh oh oh, you've gotta listen to this.

What else, what else. We've talked of art, of poetry, literature and music. Those are the main pillars that uphold my faithful life. But I've not been completely open with you. The one thing truly pinning my joyfully weary frame up is the heap of grace that's been lavished all over me. I'd be utterly, criminally deceitful if I did not say how much God has been working in and on and through me. It's almost ineffable - for once, I can't think of quite the right words to place around this shrine. Shall we just call it, then, with a simple 'Amen'? Amen.

Yes, I do believe that sometimes a good life, however long it lasts, is just as simple as choosing pure Love. No matter what. Every day you find yourself waking up, hold your heavy arms out for it, and hold on tight when it comes.

Goodnight.

 In the beginning woman made god, and god was a tyrant. Woman saw that this was… compelling. And so woman made the compelling argument for hypnotic tyranny, mirrored always on the unforgiving, unrepentant and indifferent surface of the sea, the sea.  

The act of creation, the object of creativity. Spontaneous recording of the past, present and future all colliding mercilessly in the cauldron of literature. Woman stirs, adds her spices and tinctures - such strange ingredients - and stirs and stirs again. Bubbling up from this black pot looms our stranger god: a director of the stage with a Shakespearean fixation. He is his own Prospero, conjuring monsters and ghosts and impish spirits to be bent over by his will, thoroughly used, and then left to the carrion of fate. He commands an entire playworld from the island of his peninsula, demanding ritual sacrifice from each worshipper who makes pilgrimage to this unholy place.

Driven by the most dogged, envious, paranoid obsession I’ve ever witnessed in a single figure, his passions are illumined by infrequent moonlit visions, only to be revealed as pure lunacy. Oh! god himself is overcome and eventually undone by hopeless figurings of his own heaven. A dream of a heaven, which can never be drawn to earth: "thy will shall never be done."

To return to the instruments of sacrifice and sanctification: Charles the father, harelipped Titus the son and cousin James the Holy Ghost. Of course, as the story goes, the son must be given up for someone’s sins. For an altar, perhaps Minn’s Cauldron; the church, Shruff End. Could the sea, throughout all this, be the relentless torment of Hades? Perhaps so for this ancient vengeful god of classicism. 

I delight in the dementedly dark threads with which this story has been woven. Far from moralising and chastising, it bellows its twisted hymns and seduces us into the ordinary depravity of man. Yes, it demands sacrifice and supplication, but it asks of us no repentance, offers us no penance. 

It is truly sacred, profoundly profane. 

An Empirical Examination of the Mystic Cycle of Creativity

... The magic, the feeling, the sense, the life - whatever it damned well is - I feel it filling up first in my head, for that is where all things must begin in this upturned and holy vessel. 

It fills me from the top and I am full of thoughts and so many words, so much ardent philosophising and theorising. I become a river of earnest young theories, a constantly babbling noise of poetry and free, unsung verse - it is, you see, monsoon season. The rains of life, of sense, of whatever, rain down: torrents of it rushing into my cold head and filling me toe to top. All this must surely spill out onto page and paper, into my husband’s halfturned ears. And so it does. And it is a glorious relief when those banks are finally breached, word flowing, unconstrained, as tipped ink. 

The feeling, the magic - whatever it bloody well is - dares not taper off and vanish once its limpid matter spills over those banks. It is, instead, absorbed down through my neck into the hollow grounds of my chest. The cavern is now breached, but the most extreme of my forces, pressures and temperatures are there to meet it; the waters immediately evaporate, turning into steam upon first contact. But, O! Where can this steam, this feeling, this life, whatever, escape to! There is only one way out and that is through my irate mouth. All of a sudden, the riverine abstraction has made of me a hot spring. Every emotion hits at the walls of my breast and I find that I have anger aplenty; my seduction, too, erupts; rampant joy flings upwards, scalding the air like a manic screech. All of these, my elemental furies, throwing their steaming fists against the world, against you, against me. 

This amount of energy can never last long. It is gone almost at the exact point of release. The rage is soon spent and the pressure that once rose so high now trickles coyly back down, forking into two directions: along both arms and towards my hands. 

My hands (these hands). The life, the sense - whatever the f ck it is - now buzzes at my fingertips and I am forced to wield whatever tool is compelled into its electromagnetic grasp. Graphite, chalk and charcoal are the ephemeral instruments that are so often found vibrating across one sheet or another, connecting the lines that ensnare some poor flower or shore or bird that is waving in the field of my vision. Yet more pages - page upon page, and sometimes canvas, too - are filled in a heightening frenzy as the sense, the feeling, the life, whatever, is channelled through these dread hands. And then, suddenly, they are exhausted. They cannot hold the force of it for too long - they are overcome with weakness, becoming limp at my sides. So off it slinks, down into my womb. 

We will not speak, here, of sacred things that happen down in the happy, tortured womb. 

Days pass, I emerge from a sanguine daze as the magic, the sense, the life - oh, whatever! - passes my hipbones to meet in my thighs. Now, it has taken on a viscous quality that trickles further still. Trickles slowly into my bones, sinew, flesh and all, reaching my bent knees, making my calves sticky and curiously sweetsmelling. At first, my lower limbs are so thick with the substance, the life, the magic, whatever, that I must move heavily to a rhythm - God, any thumping rhythm! - that will unstick me before it is too late and I'm consumed, hip down. As it reaches my ankles, as it coats each tiny bone within my feet, I find that I have been in fever, swaying and stomping and sweating all along. I have found a way to move through this and it has begun to feel more like resurrection than mere ritual. 

The magic, the feeling, the sense, the life - whatever it really is - has moved through my entire body, filled my whole upended vessel, brim to foot. 'What is this,' I have asked myself each time I feel the cycle beginning afresh - starting in my head, working its way through chest, throat, hands, womb, legs and all. 'What is this and why is this and how is this.' 

Note the absence of question mark, the plenitude of declarative. Something primordial in me knows that it need never ask what why and how. All I know is who I am, who it makes me, what it unmakes in me. I know it as the way seasons show up around the year; it is the earth that roves slowly around the sun, the way bulbs wilt and spring eternal, seas run shuttles of rock against sand, flocks murmur across the same incomprehensible migratory paths over thousands of years. It is the truth and it is perfected in its very nature; it is always creating, turning, and always turning out something new from this ancient string of prayers we may stoop to call a soul. 

It is, it is, it is...

Indefinite leave

Published ghost writer

abandons dreams to become

unmade, unreal. oh!

Starlings On Sunday

 The darkest cloud swells and subsides again and again. It has become a welcome speckled sight against these usually still skies. The flock is as punctual as only nature in her timelessness knows how to be, arriving in our patch of grey at around 5.20 every evening. I spend the next few minutes watching a grand and ancient waltz that I imagine must continue to swirl forever over other roofs in other towns long after my curtains have closed and the streetlights flicker on. 

 If my son is with me at this time, I point the flock out to him and he stands by the window in as much awe as me, asking the same two questions over and over again: "Mummy, what are they doing? Mummy, where are they going?" For those few minutes and beyond I do not know whether or how to answer him, because the lightness of some mysteries are so sacred that I'd rather not weigh them down with a simple search and a simpler answer. Some days I decide to tell him they are dancing, I tell him they are going wherever the wind takes them, and he tells me that sounds fun. I silently agree.

Today we watch the birds swell, subside and swirl. As I watch, I'm listening to an old playlist of sentimental songs I never intend on letting go, singing along heartily and missing all the top notes, swaying with my baby girl, watching my not-so-baby boy run from my side to reimmerse himself into his play, smelling the food my husband is preparing for our dinner, feeling my way ever so slowly through this home, this family, this expanded heart with all of its stretch marks. This rugged life of mine. And this? It is the writing and recording of moments of it all, it is the cherry atop my healing Sunday filled with starlings on grey skies. It is a necessary ritual for my body and blood to feel good in themselves again. Just for today, I feel good inside myself again. I hope that this is more than enough to see me through.