From the House of the Dead - Part one; taken from Richard Bradley's book The Significance of Monuments. The actual poem is from Ivan Lalic, 1996 'Of the Builders'
When you have nothing to say, it is perhaps better to say nothing! But I shall proceed down this chain of nothingness. Also I shall play Leonard' Cohen's 'Hallelujah' to highlight the mood. He has such a sexy voice.....
I am reading Horatio Clare's Heavy Light on madness. Horatio Clare lives in Hebden Bridge Just one incident amongst the many. He believes there is a whole spy network out there, with people spying on him, FBI or M15, the foolishness would be funny but of course it is very, very sad.
He got it into his head that he had to drive into the reservoir, I don't know if it was the Gadding one up on the moors. But he sits in a layby plotting this, then strips naked and drives the car towards the edge. He jumps out of the car, it goes over a shallow dip and lands on a drainage outlet, straddling the concrete. And there he leaves it. He frightens some people in a camper van and someone who lives on the lane. Eventually the police arrive, and very gently look after him.
This happens many times the police having to attend these moments of madness, whilst family and friends worry about him. I have just come to the moment he is sectioned to Wakefield Hospital. People gather in his flat, so many. Ambulance men, social worker, doctor, police and family and friends. I know there is going to be a reasonable ending for he has written this book on this period and now at least is in our world.
Chopin is playing at the moment, gentle drowsy music.
I have also listened to the music on 'As it Happens'. Modern music, jarring against the nerve ends but in truth saying something. It captures the moody landscapes round here. The strangely shaped rock formations, reminding me occasionally of the tors of Cornwall. Giant pebbles thrown around by the gods, is that what prehistoric people thought about them?
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Patchwork: I have learnt that a left handed person cannot use a right handed cutter, hopefully easily remedied. Must learn to make lists and include everything I need on that list - have no backing material!
Also have received two identical books when I asked for two different books, who is the idiot that thought that one out?
So what was I writing in 2007? did I understand it?
For your cutter, remove the blade and reattach it to the other side, that should work perfectly. I am assuming you have an Olfa cutter.
ReplyDeleteThank you whoever you are. I transferred the blade to the other side after I had worked out the sequence of putting everything together, and I now have a l/h rotary cutter.
DeleteI like the style of this fluent blogpost - just opening the window and letting us look in. With you there is always the old history and a wistful sense of something more fundamental than what we have. It is clear that our Phoebe is left-handed for life now - in a right-handed world.
ReplyDeleteWell at least Phoebe's left handiness is recognised now, when at school they tried to make me use the other hand. She will manage easily, it is just when it comes to scissors and implements that have a right hand bias. And yes there was a certain 'write as you think there'. I leave crafted writing to others.
DeleteGlad you listened to the music my son put on his blog. He used to write a lot of modern music (his subect ar Uni) and I am reminded of a concert we went to together when he was much younger (he approaches retiring age now it was all modern music and Stockhausen was himself conducting. One piece of his was played from various parts of the concert hall and Stockhausen himself came and sat close by where we were sitting - it was quite athrill for the teenage Stockhausen fan my son was then. He writes now but is still a modern music fan.
ReplyDeleteHi Pat, yes I read his written work which is excellent. The last essay on Jumble Hole Clough which is somewhere down the road from here struck me as very true, there is a dismalness about the landscape round here, though some would argue otherwise. Such music is an acquired taste but like a painting reflects a feeling.
ReplyDeleteYou have a wonderful variety of topics, Thelma! Sometimes I can follow along and sometimes I don't quite know what you are talking about but I always read what you have to say. I enjoy "As it happens" also.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading the book "Black AF History" by Michael Harriot and it is an eye opening (for me) look at the history that was left out of the "whitewashed" US history that was taught to me. It angers and saddens me that these hateful things are still going on here.
That made me giggle Ellen, thought I was very simplistic in my thinking. Thank you for reading me anyway. The 'whitewashing' of history is fair game by those who do not want us to learn.
DeleteA line jumped out at me: Does a hand thrown pot painted with natural clay dyes have any more resonance with our souls than a beautiful highly decorated glazed pot? I think that it does. Holding something ancient gives me a sense of something lacking in today's world: Permanence. Everything seems to be in a state of flux now, subject to change without warning. Paradigm shifts are the norm. How did this happen? I could not tell you, but there is a huge comfort to me when I hold something old in my hands. Their lives were hard, but there they were, putting time and mindfulness into creating something not only functional, but adding a touch of beauty. There is a lesson there, I think. Mindfulness, adding beauty where we can...
ReplyDeleteAnd I can tell you that when I was picked up at the airport in Birmingham, my son-in-law stopped to show me the ruins of an old church on the way home. I touched those walls and thought of the hands that had touched them hundreds and hundreds of years before me, and I felt something. I cannot even tell you what it was, but there was a sense that my hands were joined in with their own, that I belonged to that time just as surely as I belonged to my own.
A wonderfully evocative post. I love the vision of pebbles thrown by the old gods. It's not wrong, you know. It is said that we are meant to be the hands of God working to do good in our world. I imagine the people laboring away were the hands of their gods just as the people claim this visual today.
I think we create the gods Debby, otherwise why are they in our image? I do believe that histories are somehow entwinned through time. Time is not linear, there is more to this than we have so far learnt. So, with the added qualifier that we think ourselves into belief systems, there is somewhere outside of them something spinning unfathomably.
ReplyDeleteI believe that you are right. What I was trying to say is something akin to 'I believe that they believed in those gods, and that they saw themselves as employed by him, whether they be moving stones two thousand years ago, or helping in a soup kitchen today.
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