Random thoughts in August

Can you believe it? Nine weeks of study have passed, and I am still more or less on course. Never mind that I have taken little side excursions and veered off down side streets where poetry hides in and under bus stops. And I’ve wandered into online museums and seen stuff that stops me in my tracks. Just when I get all depressed about the politics and stupidity of the world, I blunder across the ingenuity of the Guggenheim YouTube Plays collection – twenty five original video clips from around the world – and the sun comes out. I realise there is definitely a different way of looking at things. Hooray for human difference, and that we are not all fashioned out of the same test tube.

And here’s a fragment I found in one of those alleyways, by dear Emily.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”  (from Emily Dickinson’s letters)

Definitely visceral, not virtual.

Live in the sunshine

‘Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m certainly living in the sunshine, off to swim in the chlorine and I’ll drink the wild air when the storm hits this afternoon.

It’s knowing

How do you get to know a place. I am overwhelmed, awe-struck all the time. The landscape in the top end  is all about moments, moments of intense pleasure that blow you away –  the moon hiding in the drifting clouds at night, watching through the she-oaks; the waves plopping onto the foot-cutting sand at Casuarina, unmindful of you; the rising sun picking out, bit by bit, glittering specks of light on the dull, flat grey water; the smooth ochre and cream layered rocks of Dripstone cliffs; the headache heat that shocks you to exhalation when you step out the door. Pleasure and pain, bang! all in one. Fight it, you collapse, exhausted. It’s all about flow.  Go and rest under a tree and think about it. Forget that you thought you could control it.

Then –  go and watch this video, which is perhaps not so unrelated as you might think –  Kim Scott talking about his book ‘That Dead Man Dance‘. The place is Western Australia. The contrast is a very old culture versus a visitor to the shore, and how that might sound if you wrote it up in a novel.

Dreaming – again

‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.’

Henry David Thoreau

Cultivating the garden in the best of all possible worlds

Okay, so we are on a bit of a Voltairean theme here today, again thanks to the wonderful navigational direction of Esther, who is in the pilot boat keeping us off the rocks. How many metaphors can I mix and mash up together today? Into the blender we go.

So, we (the royal plural) are in the lifeboat, singing in the rain, happy because we are in the best of all possible worlds, and thinking about cultivating a lovely green garden (thanks Candide) when we get to shore, growing new things and creating and generating life, even though catastrophe and mayhem rain (ha ha) around us.

Confused? Well don’t worry, I have not lost all my senses, its the hot weather. They call it going troppo. Happens to us all eventually. But truly, don’t send around the men in white coats just yet, I am off to the library today to find more books to supplement my reading list (haven’t I got enough books stacked up beside my bed, unread but in waiting?), and I will practice my flute (oh the sound is sooooo much better than this time last year – some things do improve), and hop on my bike and cruise around Casuarina.

Have a good day yourself and remember ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ (ha!), according to Dr Pangloss (Voltaire).

Time past present and future

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetal possibility . . .

(from TS Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, 1944)

Horace – 65 bce

‘Scale back your long hopes to a short period.
While we speak, time is envious and is running away from us.
Seize the day, trusting little in the future.’

More random thoughts

Lawrence Durrell had a few interesting things to say about writing and travel:

‘Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will – whatever we may think.’

. . . He’s right. Thank goodness for the random in life – how exciting it makes things.

‘I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time – those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.’

. . . The angst grows as darkness falls.

‘It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else.’

. . . Only crazy people write – who else would spend so much time with themselves.

Random thoughts

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

AA Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Jane’s wisdom 1

‘What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.’
Jane Austen