Dear July, nine: immersion.

Yesterday, I started the day writing in a coffee shop. While I was working, a table of three sat beside me – a grandmother, a mother and a daughter – and started a conversation amongst themselves about ‘what it would be like to swim in a swimming-pool of hot chocolate’. The grandmother was miming – doing the breaststroke mid-air – saying how she would swim with her mouth open, swimming and swallowing and swimming and swallowing, drinking it all up. ‘Just imagine,’ she said. ‘Imagine swimming in a pool of chocolate...’

Later in the day, after my friend (also a writer) came to meet me, we relocated to the library to work and ended up sitting at a table upstairs that hangs over the librarians’ desk on the ground floor. After an hour or two of ‘pulling teeth’ ideas-wise, I decided to listen to a bit of music to make myself focus and finally (finally) managed to get into a flow with the chapter I was working on. Ideas and words started coming relatively quickly. And then I heard a man’s voice below saying: ‘a lentil soup bath’. I stopped typing and took one earphone out. ‘Would it be lentil? Or tomato and basil?’ The librarians downstairs – three of them – seemed to be involved in one of those bizarre ‘it’s quiet and we’re really bored’ kind of conversations that only seem to happen at work. They were laughing and talking about what it might be like to take a bath in a bowl of soup. ‘Just imagine it...'

Weird.

I don’t know the significance of this. Might be the weather (last week’s no-tights-needed heat has been replaced by probably-a-good-idea-to-wear-tights-and-a-few-vests-and-some-jumpers drizzle. Right now, the idea of swimming in a pool of hot chocolate doesn’t sound like such a bad idea).

♥

Notes.

The music I was listening to included: this and: this. (Current chapter isn't a particularly happy one, thus the wistfulness...)

Today’s poem: Love after Love by Derek Walcott 

Picture by: Hazuki Koike (I found it: here. The artist's website is in Japanese, so I'm not sure whether to link to it because I don't know what it says!)

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.)

Dear July, five & six: on turning 24.

A note: so, this post is a little introspective. The beginning of July always feels like a second New Year to me because of my birthday - meaning: a time for looking again and refocusing. (I shall widen my gaze tomorrow). But the ‘something I noticed’ comes in the form of these pictures. Yesterday my Mum and I left the house without realising we’d dressed up as opposites of each other. We often match unintentionally. Whether in clothes, ideas or our reactions to things my Dad says. Poor man. (‘What do you think of that car?’ ‘Hideous. It looks like a wasp.’ ‘Mm. That’s what your Mum said.’) 

Anyway – it reminded me a little of this illustration by Sara Soderholm. So when we got home, we tried to recreate the picture. 

♥

Dear July,

I turned twenty-four yesterday. It was the first of my 20-something years that I’ve been able to greet with a tip of the hat – ‘Well hello there, two four. How’d you do?’ – rather than with panic. My last evening as a nineteen year old (back in the day) was spent tucked behind cream coloured curtains on a window-sill, sort of (slightly pathetically) crying into the knees of my pyjamas because I couldn’t believe I’d let myself get to twenty without having Everything figured out yet. (Whatever that means. Still not sure.)

The person I’d like to be at twenty four is still more interesting than I am. She’s wiser. She’s written more. She isn’t so awkward. She’s less of a klutz. Her bedroom is tidier. Her hair’s not so frizzy. She doesn’t dance round the edges so much – she just says what she thinks: bam. She’s kinder. And wittier. And she probably doesn’t fall asleep at least one night a week on the sofa fully-dressed (a habit I seem to have picked up only this last year. Send help). She’s a lot less hesitant. She takes more risks.

But, hey.

I’m trying to treat these ‘could be betters’ with good grace. I might not speak fluent French. But, among other things... I did travel halfway across the world by myself this year to visit good friends. I built a website. I learned how to carve a pumpkin. I navigated the Paris Metro singlehandedly. I taught a class. I house-sat for my sister and her fiancé for a week and managed not to kill their cats. (That’s something, right?)

So welcome, twenty four. I’ll try and grow into you. May you be filled with light and love and may I write so much in the space of your 365 days that this novel I'm working on will be so close to completion that the words will sing.

♥

Today's poem: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. (Quite a lot of these poems seem to be about losing. Any suggestions for ones about being allowed to keep things?)

Dear July, three & four: snapshots.

Dear July,

Yesterday was: waking up to sun, eating apples in the garden, painted toenails, driving in the heat with the air con up and the windows down justacrack (because, as I still haven’t shaken my insect phobia, I've pledged an oath to myself ‘to never – not even on the three sweltering days Scotland has in the year – open the car windows wider than a pinkie’s width while driving’ – because if a wasp flew in, I would surely die). It was sun on my shoulders, and buskers by the library, and sunglasses reflecting steeples. A conversation that wound up and down and around a hill and in and out of city streets. It was promenading Shakespeare in the park, bumping shoulders with close-packed play-watchers, laughter and ridiculous disguises and then holding-our-breath silence (the city beyond the park gates humming) as the play took a turn from the comic to tragic – ‘Worthies, away! the scene begins to cloud’.

Today was: waking up to rain smattering in the gutter outside my window and then gushing through the roof onto the floor of our sitting room, my dad running down the stairs to grab the recycling bin in lieu of a bucket to catch the water (the perils of having an old house). It was a leaf stuck to the kitchen window, and the opening lines from Don Paterson’s 'Rain' in my head:

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face...

It was frying sausages, and looking through Pinterest recipes, and smashing digestive biscuits with a rolling pin to make a cheesecake crust. Taco salad, and talking with my Mum on the sofa, and folding laundry (‘Life is really just a series of washing the dishes and folding pants, isn’t it?’ ‘Mmm. Daily rituals...’). Hearing fireworks outside and thinking of my American friends dotted about the globe. Reading some literary theory and realising that, after avoiding him for years, I may need to take a look at Derrida. Listening to Bon Iver with the slow cooker bubbling in the next room.

♥

Yesterday’s poem: Lamium by Louise Gluck. Today’s: Margaret Atwood’s The Moment.

Pictures by: Me Suk Lee.