Synchronicity

When Seamus announced this Lion thing a few weeks back I didn’t hesitate about whether I was going to join or not. Work was dragging me under but I held a certain fondness for those lions and having seen some of them in the flesh (so to speak) I felt certain connection to them. The Shameless Lions Writing Circle has really taken off and I don’t know what it will become, but there is a really good feel about it. Some of the Lions have even branched off and created their own blogs or are off on travels who knows where. The original posts back at the circle have become a little more in-depth including the inspiration behind the names and Seamus has found the creator of each lion.

As I browsed Ahtzic Silis’s website on Monday there seemed a certain synchronicity in having chosen Endelyn, or maybe Endelyn chose me. Silis is an El Salvadorian artist and designer whose work is influenced by Mayan mythology. Although my trip into Mayan territory was at the end of my stay in Mexico, it was Latin American culture that awoke my senses after what felt like a period of being asleep. It seems so right that Endelyn’s inspiration comes from that land.

And then Endelyn’s name. Without a doubt if I ever went back to England it would be somewhere in the South West. I spent four years there and I remember that every time the coach joined the A38 it would be like I was coming home, whereas going over the Hammersmith overpass filled me with dread. So again it just seems so right that her name is Cornish.

So now a little word from my muse.

From Hurucan

When Hurucan sparked into existence
did you know that one day I would be with you?
When you first looked into my golden eyes
did you question how I came to be?
As your hands caressed my very force,
did you feel the crackle of unity
skip along your every fibre?

We are connected now, you and I.
We were connected then, you and I
though we did not know it.
A filament so fine joined us
through time and history
drawing us closer together,
though embroiled in other tragic stories.

Travelling closer than further apart,
until the cord between us uncoiled.
Lost in a swirl of confusion
we reached out, caught hold, drew in.
You explore me with your eyes
boring into what is beneath the skin,
the landscape of my very existence.

What did you feel standing before me?
Your soul engulfed in emptiness.
Regret that you were not aware
of my closeness.
Indifferent coincidence brought us together,
the union of senses and being
now holds us in our place.

©Copyright, 2007. Verilion

Books wot I read

Claire often pushes books my way and on the whole I tend to trust her judgement, apart from when she tries to push huge Robert Fisk tomes my way. Sometimes she pushes so many my way I have to tell her to “STOP!” But these are the trials of having a librarian as a friend.

A few weeks ago I wandered into Breakfast Club and lurched about looking for a spoon (you’d be surprised how difficult that can be) and tried to make a cup of tea and found Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes pushed my way. I’m not my best in the morning so I was a bit grumpy about having a book with a white mouse on the cover next to my breakfast, but the general opinion of the Breakfast Club was that it was very good, so I shoved it into my bag with the rest of my breakfast, grabbed my tea and staggered up the stairs and deposited it on my desk before going to get on with my job. Later that same day I collapsed onto my sofa and pulled out the book. When I heard my electricity metre click onto heures creuse I knew it was time to go to bed but I couldn’t put the book down. Just one more journal entry, I thought.

You see the book is about Charlie Gordon. He is a thirty something retardate (as the book calls him) who has been selected to take part in a new experiment. So far the experiment has only been tried on animals and Algernon is their star patient. By the time I went to bed Charlie had already been operated on, could finally beat Algernon at the ‘amazed’ test and was achieving levels of intelligence that you and I can only dream of.

I was two thirds of the way through the book when I read the journal entries that made me gasp and swallow back tears. I was on the metro at the time.

Claire later told me that the book was recommended to her by someone who said it changed them; I can see why. At first you read the book and like the other characters you laugh at Charlie’s misspellings and his way of viewing the world. As he changes you begin to question your view of the world just as Charlie does.

I won’t tell you more, just read it, if you haven’t already. The book has been kicking around since 1966 and even today it has resonance.

The next book I’ve read recently is ‘How to be Good’ by Nick Hornby. I wasn’t expecting to get through much of it, but I had forgotten that my fellow colleagues were all pukers so they needed to sit at the front of the bus and the law says that responsible adults have to sit by the emergency exits, so there I sat. I looked across and told my fellow travellers that I was going to read. They pointed out to me that we were stopping for lunch soon, so I flicked through my Private Eye first and after lunch got started on the book and was only distracted by their gasps of how gorgeous the scenery outside the window was.

How to be Good starts off as a laugh a minute ride, seriously I was laughing out loud, even though it starts off with Katie (the narrator) telling her husband that she wants out of their marriage. About halfway through it stopped being funny. Hornby’s books are anything but easy really, when I think back to the other ones I’ve read: attempted suicide, bullying, relationship breakdowns, being a sad bastard, it’s just this one seemed harder and bleaker. And then again maybe it was the subject matter, the utter breakdown of a marriage, being together but hating each other. Being so miserable, but not knowing what else to do. If anything this book is so excruciatingly accurate that it ends up being painful to read. I’d recommend it, but only if you are in a stable, happy relationship!

This post was inspired by this. He he.

Wash it Away

When you go away on a trip there is always a certain level of expectation. On this trip the only thing I expected was to hate camping and when we arrived and it was raining nothing changed there. When I woke up freezing in the middle of the night I continued to hate camping and when breakfast was crap I still hated camping.

But something changed in the middle of the week and even though my face is excruciatingly sunburnt, I lost count at fifteen bruises and one of my finger joints looks gross, I have had a great time. I feel like this year more than any other year I have achieved something.

Without fully being aware of this I travelled into the heart of the ‘montagne’ region of the Tour de France. It’s my favourite bit of the Tour de France, where there is the most spectacular scenery and the crashes and I was there. It’s as fabulous as it looks on the telly and I would recommend that everyone go there.

I finally dealt with capsizing which I have managed to avoid every year for the last five years. Although after the third time, my idea of dealing with this was finally to swim away very fast (in my ever so slow way) and get out the lake and vow never to capsize again.

My legs were not shaking uncontrollably when I went to abseil off the edge of the cliff. Maybe it was because we soaked up the mountains and watched the gliders taking off and riding the currents. Maybe it was because the tiniest thing on earth who had sobbed her homesick heart out on the first night advised me to not look down and not be scared.

I was right at the front of the raft when we went into the rapids. After my fabulous show of ‘scardey catness’ the day before I was challenged: “You won’t go to the front when the instructor tells you Miss V.” I was there before anyone else!

I explained very laboriously why a protest is not something you do for the benefit of someone else; you do it because you believe in it.

I didn’t have very many showers and someone told me that my hair was curly. I had never considered that this was something that I hid until Siobhan asked me if I had actually seen my hair. The mirror in the tent was tiny and one second you could see something and the next the wind blew and you could no longer see the bruises on your bum to put the arnica on, so no I hadn’t seen the fact that my hair was growing outwards with each minute of the day. But what it symbolised was that for five days I got Paris out of my system.

Sometimes it’s good to do something completely different, to let that sail fall on top of you again and again and again and not care; to laugh out loud. To let that icy snow flow wash over you, breathe in the pine air. Swing back on your plastic chair and look at the stars. Watch the mountains appear from the mountain mist in the morning as you stagger down for your morning pee. Let that rain wash it all away.

And now it’s time for a bath, a take out and a nice glass of wine.

Building

The other day I received an e mail from the folks from Brittany with some photos that depicted the progress on the house they are building. They have added an extension to the back but have kept all the stone and are slowly rebuilding the outer stone casing of the house. They seem to have moved along so much since I saw it over three weeks ago. Or was it a month? Never mind, the point is that as I closed the photos I wished that writing a book was like that house, so that I would know when it was finished. It was one of those analogies that I instantly began to see lots of faults in. A book is not like a house, you don’t lay the last word and say: “Right, now it’s finished.”

But today as I came back laden with Private Eye and The Word for the train and when I’m too tired to read ‘How to be Good’, and a dress and t-shirt that somehow asked me to buy them (when I was actually on my way to the tabac), I looked into a flat that was being remodelled and I wondered if the analogy didn’t work after all.

See maybe the foundations are the ideas and whispers in your ear that draw you to pick up your pen or your keyboard. Then the walls and the rooms and windows are the storyline, the characters, what makes the story flow. And then decorating is like an edit to make things just so. Adding your furniture and things is like the final tweaking. But every now and again, maybe you just have to redecorate because it just wasn’t right in the first place.

And then the wreck of the house that that couple have rebuilt. Well, maybe that’s something that has lain dormant for a long time, and the bones and some of the words are there, but it’s refusing to die. It’s just waiting for the right words to come along to build it whole again.

I’ll go and ponder on this some more next week, but meanwhile if you have reached this bit, I’m off (deep sigh of discontent) camping. Apparently it’s going to rain most of the week (bliss, cos I do so love camping). There are some other aspects that make this trip less than ideal, but the up side is the sailing, white water rafting, kayaking, climbing (maybe I’ll skip the wind surfing). So please could you feed Tibo if you get here. He’s at the bottom of the side bar. He doesn’t do much apart from purr and hop about a bit and he’s very partial to raw steak. He’s here to keep Endelyn company, but ...uh hum, it seems that Endelyn prefers the calm of the words that surround her up here, she likes to let it all soak in so that she can growl it back to me later on. So until Tibo is a bit better trained he’s staying down there with the music and flowers.

The weeks from Hell

The week from hell turned into yet another exhausting week followed by the ULTIMATE week from hell. The crappy thing is that these weeks from hell are all caused by work. I know that there are a great deal of things that I can’t complain about when it comes to my job (16 weeks holiday a year for a start), but jeez the bags around my eyes are becoming a burden to carry. I’m not even going to waste more time moaning about it, I’m just going to look for the silver linings. The good things about hanging around in one place for this long is at the end of this year I am eligible for a sabbatical I realised. So when I have some energy I’m going to give that some good long thought. In the meantime I’m going to try and conserve what little I have left for next week, the week after that and the one after that. 21 days and counting folks. Meanwhile, here’s a poem:

A way of Being

Through waves of exhaustion
eyes are drawn to bright shiny things.
Tales of full moon aggressions wane.
Saints and sinners blend into one.
Passion requires an energy that cannot be sparked.
Put life on hold till the bags can fade away
and summer’s rich glow replenishes wasted stock.

Copyright, 2007. Verilion

Send Away the Tigers and Bring on the Manics

Every now and then I have the urge to get some new music, but today was different. I wasn’t content to buy yet another indie band’s catalogue of pop songs or rock folk ballads and after getting through the whole ‘Just for you’ selection I was still unsatisfied. I wanted something special, something that I could rave about and just because I knew I hadn’t done this for a while I typed in ‘Manic Street Preachers’.

I could have apologised then to my neighbours for the jumping up and down, but maybe I’ll save that for tomorrow when I’ve listened to Send Away the Tigers about ten times. I’m on my second play through now! And well, it sounds ... exactly like the Manic Street Preachers!

They are a band who have always been on my radar from the days that Richey James appeared on the front cover of the NME with the words ‘4 Real’ carved into his arm, but it was with the release of Everything must Go that I really began to pay attention. It was the first album without James and confirmed Nicky Wire as the real strength of this group. Design for life got to number 2 and the CD was rarely off my player.

A couple of years later I found myself in Madrid where the live music scene was dire (OK it was dire if you wanted anything other than Latino music) and then all of a sudden in the space of two weeks Massive Attack and the Manics were playing. I get this feeling that Massive played first. It was a great venue near Retiro Park where pretty much everywhere you stood you could see; always good for a bit of a short arse like me. I was well into Massive at the time. We had a shitty cassette of Mezzanine that we listened to in the car and then one day we finally splashed out and bought the CD and from then on you could regularly hear me waking up the neighbourhood on a Saturday morning blasting out the beginning of Angel. I had this whole image in my head of doing an installation that would have ‘Angel’ as a soundtrack with this massive mechanical Angel that would be gradually lowered and then all you would see were constellations and then as the lights went up the thing would unfold its wings and be blindingly bright. So what I’m getting at is that although I really liked the Manics I wasn’t as excited by This is my Truth Tell me Yours, I had no expectations for this gig other than I would enjoy it because live music is my drug of choice; that was until the lights went up and they started playing. Compared to the earlier albums, Everything must Go and This is my Truth were slick and well produced. But when they began playing all that was stripped away and what you were left with was an energetic guitar rock band. The crowd erupted and that tingle went up my spine to the tips of my toes that kept my head bopping and my shoulders grooving and my feet shuffling for the whole hour and a half. The crowd went nuts when they played Motorcycle Emptiness and La Tristessa Durera, but real ecstasy was achieved when the first chords of Motown Junk filled the club.

When Know Your Enemy was released in 2001, I was now in Paris. What the Manics achieved in that club in Madrid they achieved on this album. It was back to pure guitar rock and Wire’s ability to blend good tunes with politicized lyrics was extraordinary. I was sure they would play Paris, I looked all the time, I looked, I waited, they didn’t.

In 2002 Forever Delayed was released with that classic cover of Suicide is Painless, but it was a Greatest Hits album after all and there were no gigs.

So today I’ve already checked the ticket site and the official website. They are almost at the end of their UK tour and I don’t see a European one. And if they do come I think they should play the Bataclan, because it’s gritty and fairly small and they will bring the house down. And most definitely not La Cigale, because I don’t know what it is with that club, it’s jinxed, bands always cancel there. Well, actually they can play anywhere, just... please... come.