Dear July, seven & eight: yes or no, or maybe

Dear July,

Another poem for you. Tuesday’s poem was William Stafford’s ‘A Ritual to Read to Each Another’ (see below). All the poems I’ve been reading so far have been by women, so I thought I’d try and balance things out a little by reading a male poet.

There are so many lines in this poem that echo... even if I feel like I need to sit with it for a while longer to fully ‘get it’ – if that’s even something worth trying to do. I’m reminded of John Keats words on understanding poetry:

‘A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.’

(I think this exact quote actually comes from the film Bright Star – really beautiful, albeit devastating film, if you can get over the silly hats. But it sounds like something – or the whisper of something – Keats would have said somewhere in his letters.)

So: luxuriate in this poem (sidenote: sometimes when other people post poems, I skip them out because they take too much effort to read. But really: don't do that. Read this ones a few times. Carry it about in your pocket. It's worth it). What stands out to you?

A Ritual to Read to Each Another

William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give --yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

♥

Pictures from yesterday: the light in our kitchen, sun on a walk around the village, light in the lounge (reflecting twinkle lights around the windows and illuminating a slither of the bookcase in my brother's room). It wasn’t #hottestdayoftheyear kind of heat – like last Wednesday – but it was warm enough to hang my bed-sheets outside and have the window open most of the day (promptly shut, of course, when a bee tried to get in. I'm imagining bugs will be mentioned a number of times this month. It’s an issue, July. You’re a nice month, but if you could do something about all the bugs that come with you that’d be great.)

(p.s. By the by... I’ve made a writer’s page on Facebook. If you’d like to like it I’d like that. You can find it: here.)

a gold dust glow (on possibility).

So, you might've noticed that I’ve changed things about a little (design-wise) on the blog. A small tour: look up! I now have links at the top of the page. Look to your right: there are little social media buttons which you can click on. Scroll back to the top: the messy looking fake-shadow header is gone! I think it looks a bit more like a proper blog now. (What do you think?)

On the subject of change, here’s something I’ve noticed recently: it is possible. Change, I mean. Change is possible. Here’s how I know it: 

I used to hate ginger* and now I don’t.

After years of feeling queasy at the thought, I’ve started enjoying ginger beer... and Three Ginger Tea has risen up the ranks to become my favourite herbal tea (as I described it recently in a letter: ‘it’s very warming and leaves a tingle like gold dust at the back of your throat’).

Other things I used to hate and now don’t include: mushrooms, uncooked tomatoes, coriander, and red onions**. I now love all of these things (deeply. In a moment of unchecked sincerity, I recently told my brother: ‘I’m really passionate about mushrooms’. He laughed quite a lot. I suppose it was sort of an odd thing to say in retrospect). These changes are encouraging. They give me hope.

If my taste-buds can change their opinions on coriander – moving from a place of disgust (‘it tastes like sick’) to one of near-fervour (‘we must have it with EVERYTHING’***) – then maybe other parts of me can change. 

Like: my inability to hear alarms in the morning or the way my first instinct is usually to hide from/pretend not to notice people I’ve been hoping to speak to when I see them on the street (o! shyness, you wily fiend). Things like: my phobia of insects, or the issues I have finding shoes that fit, or the way I fall in love with impossible notions, or my habit of leaving things to the last minute. Maybe. We’ll see...

(NB. My feelings towards marmite will never change. Gross black salty concoction.)

(Pictures snapped on my iPhone. Notes:

*I’m talking about ginger, as in ginger-the-foodstuff, not ‘carbonated drinks’ or ‘individuals with red hair and freckles’.

**I still don’t really like raw red onions, but this has more to do with the way they linger powerfully on the breath post-eating than their actual flavour.

***Everything especially includes: chilli con carne, fajitas, and chicken and mushroom curry.)

four noticings.

 

(One.) Light is coming back to the world, winter is nearly over. Most of the pictures scattered about this post were taken on different days, all around one o’clock in the afternoon.

At that time, on clear days, this incandescent light makes the streets glow and turns people into silhouettes.

(Two.) I’ve been coming across a whole host of magnificent words recently. Some of them are new; some of them I’ve already heard of before but something about them has just, all of a sudden, struck me. I love the sounds, the textures, the meanings of words.

Here are a few I’m liking just now: polyphony, solemnity, soliloquy, indicative, visceral, sibilance, dialectic, irrevocable, eschews, omnivorous, lipogram, plosive, expunge and plunge.

(Three.) I came across this the other week and thought it was an interesting idea:

‘You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope is strong as long as you are merely using it to cord up a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? ... Only real risk tests the reality of a belief.’

~ C.S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed, 1966 (not exactly light reading, but a very honest book).

(Four.) I also noticed this dog with shoes on in Central Station.

♥

to tremble.

‘...to sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion it stirs in us rather than the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise is to savour rather than suffer the sadness of it, it is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.’

~ 'Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale' by Fredrick Buchner (1977)

I thought this was an interesting idea, and I want to be careful of sentimentalising things and missing their meaning. This book is absolutely beautiful. I’ve been reading it slowly, in between Dickens, Bronte, Tennyson and all the other Victorian writers that we’re looking at this semester. It is worth reading, whatever your philosophy on life, purely because he writes such wonderful sentences (about silence, about loneliness, about laughing). And he quotes Shakespeare, and he is insightful and intelligent, and he writes about ideas through stories, and... and... ah, it’s brilliant.

(Picture from: here).

♥  

go do.

♥

When I was twelve, I read a book on juggling. I read it in the summer, lying on my stomach in a rectangle of sun. I went over passages of the book again and again, trying to make them stick in my brain. I eventually put the book down and felt ready to begin. I picked up the oranges (stand-in balls). I started playing circus music inside my head. And then... thump, thump, ‘owch’.

...that was not supposed to happen.

I took a moment and then started again. I fetched the oranges. I hummed the circus tune (a little louder this time). And then... ‘owch’, thump, ‘owch’. Juggling, it turned out, was trickier than it looked on the page. I decided to give up and eat the oranges instead.

Thus ended my brief career as a clown.

♥

I was reminded of this recently, and I think that I probably went about it the wrong way. The way to learn juggling is probably just to juggle. To practice. To physically move your arms: throwing, catching, dropping, picking up, trying again. Learning the theory is part of it, but the real learning is in the doing. It is easy to read the book, but that is not juggling. You can’t call yourself a Juggler if you don’t actually juggle.

♥

I read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at the start of the summer. There was a description in it of someone who was ‘so brave in thought’ but ‘so timid in life’. And it struck me. I am someone who would prefer to wait until I really fully absolutely understand the ins and outs of things before I act on them. But I wonder if there is a degree of fearfulness in this. Most things that are worth having require a level of risk – the risk of being embarrassed, hurt, wrong – and risk means dancing with the unknown.  

I've been thinking about this a lot this summer. I've been thinking about  how I can (and do) wax lyrical about "the beauty of love, friendship, faith, [insert other ideal here]" to my heart's content; I can discuss the theories and philosophies behind them; but if I get stuck there, if I do nothing beyond that ...my words are empty. Life will be empty. Life is something that is learned by doing it, by taking risks. I want to live a life that matters, not one that could have.

♥

Listen to this (Go Do by Jónsi) ...if you want to.

(Pictures from: Leanne Ellis).

How about a friar egg on toast?

We rediscovered this egg holder a few weeks ago at the back of a cupboard.

Most of the monks are a bit dopey or creepy looking...

...but this one at the back is my favourite:

He looks rather wise and knowing, in a gentle ‘I want to share my knowledge with you’ kind of way. Not like the one on the left (middle picture) who looks a bit arrogant and disapproving... or the one down at the front who looks like he could do with eating a few more vegetables.

an interesting sentence.

Picture from: here.

'If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. ‘Dark’ would be a word without meaning.’

~ C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, 1952).

I read this on the way to buy Christmas presents last week. An interesting idea. I probably think along the same lines. It seems strange to think there is no meaning when humans are so preoccupied with finding meaning in everything they do. Health professionals, philosophers, psychologists, artists: they all recognise this. Human instincts seem to be there for a reason. Hunger signals that we need food. Loneliness reminds us that it is not good for us to be alone, that we are better, stronger, when we're together. Emptiness, the longing for something more, for answers... surely this desire, this niggling feeling that something is missing whispers that there is something more to be found... that life is a quest.

'I know that I know nothing.'

Today, this caught my attention. I found it in the middle of a chapter about Shakespeare and Renaissance print culture:

‘Much of the recent resistance to editing has been a result of the rhetoric of certainty that many editors adopt. For most of them ... “certainly” is good, “probably” is bad, and “possibly” is worst of all. If everyone accepted that most of what they do is grounded on a measure of probability about which rational agents could reasonably disagree, most arguments in editing (and in the world) would end.’

~ Colin Burrow in ‘Editing the Sonnets’ from A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets

(Interesting.)