Beside the lake.

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Beside the Lake

I walk beside a lake. You're over there, standing on the sand quite far but close enough to see the grim look in your face.

I think how pretty is your reflection, how your dress falls, a perfect curve from your shoulders. It's an ivory white dress and your dark brown hair flows down to your shoulders too, so from here your silhouette against the water is a series of arcs, each echoing the other. Your hem folds over the edges of your tiny shoes. I remember how delicate and soft your feet are, with no calluses. 

You are wearing a champagne coloured Hermès scarf round your neck, French style. I gave it to you when I came back from Paris last year and we had just started seeing each other. You let me tie it round your neck: I recall that moment, the smell of you so close: you, your perfumes and shampoos: nature and art in union; intoxicating...

Mirrored in the water, every now and again a ripple breaks your reflection, but only for so long as to remind you how serene and magnificent is your image, a medieval queen of sorrow.

I stand there, weighed down by irritation and despair. I also have an itching in my scalp, partly a psychosomatic response to our recent row about the missing train tickets which I accused you of losing, and partly because the shampoo seems to have run out. To my credit, I did not mention this in the argument, though admittedly I am not a big fan of hair washing as it seems to make my thin hair go flat and the size of my face then seems abnormally pronounced.

But we have argued too recently for a conversation. All we can do is scowl at each other.

It hasn't been a great vacation but you do dress well. I feared you'd take off the scarf during the arguments and fling it at me in a gesture of disgust: I am glad you didn't, though I don't know if this was for sartorial reasons, because of the chill in the air, or because you simply didn't realise how much this would have hurt me.

Anyway, I'm sorry: I should have taken more photos of you with the new Samsung cell phone. I'm truly sorry about that because I'm sure our friends- especially Angela and Floyd- would have liked to see them. I'm sure they would have admired each image and added appropriately witty sweet comments on Instagram.

Now, I think I will go back to the cottage and make some gin and tonics before we catch the train back. The train tickets were in my overcoat pocket all along, but I'll say they were on the mantelpiece under The Observer's Guide to Pond Life.

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Image: Across the Lake, Monotype http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/3208933837/in/set-72157612697830853/

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Read to The Vicious Circle Writers' Group, April 12, 2021

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Ardbeg- the fourth of the Billy stories

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"Weeping, death, a lonely and desperate place. Goblins everywhere"

Ardbeg

Here’s a memory, true of course...

  I was walking down Wentworth Street when I saw Billy. It was one of those overcast days, when you just wander about expecting it to rain. I’d been to the train station just for somewhere to stand. I looked at the huge sign with all the destinations which I had never been to and maybe never would.

 I wore my light buff raincoat and felt like a detective. My shoelace had become untied so I bent down to tie it and as I was bending down I saw him, blue t shirt and jeans, that pink English face skin so pink it always seemed weird to me (I am quite dark, you see). He was standing outside the station talking to some fellow and, I saw his face in profile, the sharp nose and too small mouth. From my crouching tie position I yelled “Billy” loudly, and then the pink face that was Billy turned. I wondered if he saw me: he turned and started to run, so I went after him. I caught him at the corner, grabbed his arm.

 But it wasn’t Billy. It was some other guy. Indeed, he didn’t really look like Billy at all, except for that English pinkness. “Fuck off,” the stranger said.

In those days I’d avoid going home. "Home" meant a two room garret, a place seemingingly perfect for solitude, with a neat kitchen and living area, ample bookshelves and a sweet bedroom, all cosied by the sloping roof.

 

 But the place had been taken over by goblins. They’d sit on my bed and mock me with cackling sounds, or messed with my stuff, taking the CDs out of their cases and putting them in the wrong ones so I couldn’t find the stuff I wanted to listen to. Or they reversed the books on the shelves so you took ages to find the thing you wanted. And the fruit smeared on the kitchen cabinet handles. Why? 

They had black skin and screeching voices and wore almost nothing except woolen caps and their hair was crazily unkempt. They stank of coal and urine and I didn’t like them much. So I was always looking for someone to hang out with or else working late in the little office near the harbour, with a desk, a phone and a computer and where I would sit trying to figure out a way to make some money. 

I reckoned that if I didn’t show up at home they’d just move on to bug someone else. They' been there for two months already. I got to the office and stood there looking out at the forlorn sky and how the boats weren’t moving and everything was too grey even for someone who likes overcast days. And even the gulls flew slowly.

 I had some whiskey on the table, a good bottle still half full with the solemn words ARDBEG proud on the front and I poured a good slug into my dirty cup and it softened it all.

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Read to Alburquerque Cyberscribes 26 April, 2021 

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Memory of a Lady

You live in an apartment, one that is full of beautiful objects such as flowers in vases or nail scissors with golden handles, or a string of pearls draped round a porcelain hand designed specifically for that purpose.

That is one of the things I like about you, your jewelry and your many many things and the way they sit on your Regency dressing table which your grandmother once owned. They reflect in the oval mirror and they reflect on the deep polish of the table too in way that is sad and true like a poem should be.

When I am standing in your room and I watch you apply cream to your hands I think of how, when we are separated (as seems inevitable) and whatever anguish I feel over this has dissipated, I shall feel a tremendous sense of missing that sight- you applying cream.

I shall sometimes see myself standing there while you are so engaged. How must I have seemed to you: dense, ponderous? Did you consider me as a lost soul, beyond hope? I believe that yours was a more practical turn of mind. You were efficient, not necessarily at ease, but capable, seemingly without perversity.

My life, by contrast, was weighed down, opaque. When you asked me how I felt I could not say; I stammered. I was pent up, so full of emotions. I could never understand why you liked me.

I felt inferior to you but that wasn't why I didn’t ask you what you thought of me. I didnt ask you what you thought of me because you did not seem truly to have the need to discover anything about me at all and because I could not in a few words tell you my secrets.

Trying to write online and not succeeding...

I want to write very short strange pieces again, and I'm not sure if the internet is helping

It seems to me that trying to write things online isn't as easy as writing things when you don’t have the online distractions, although it can be useful to have various references (although, funnily, access to these references might be unhelpful too, because they so severely constrict the imagination when consulted. I mean, I look something up and I see immediately that my idea of what it is doesn't match my imagination and I can no longer use it as an element in what I'm writing. For instance, I might imagine the pyramids surrounded by desert, and then look them up online to see they are located in a suburb and thereby lose touch with the atmosphere I am trying to describe).

Some observations about working online:

1. The Internet is more like a magazine than book. This goes for the content- contemporaneous, with adverts and short, often trivial opinion pieces- as well as the presentation (colourful, visually disrupted and heavily reliant on images).

2. It is highly sexualized. Sex is fairly distracting at the best of times: the Internet makes it more accessible and invasive. I am not against pornography or sex but I think it isn't necessarily a good thing to have around all the time because sometimes I want to be free to think about other things.

3. It seems poor for concentrated reading. I cannot settle into long pieces easily. An essay of four paragraphs is a long online piece. I think this is partly to do with the glare of the screen which can become tiresome, and also to do with how moving from one screen to another to follow a narrative is tiresome. Books allow a certain pacing: you know more readily where the middle and end of a book is from the thickness of the pages, so you can pace your reading more easily.

Also, you can move a book about: it’s a physical thing, you can lie down, stand up with it, take it to the park, annotate it, lend it and earmark it's pages: things that are unavailable to the computer user (though the Kimble attempts a compromise). I think that physical movement is very necessary for thinking: the obligatorily sedentary nature of the computer encourages passivity.

4. There isn't a lot of advertising on the sites I look at but it does affect my ability to read pages easily.

5. I "flick" a lot, I don't settle. I "flick" with the mouse because I can, not because I need to. Of course this might be a tendency which is specific to my nature, and others don't , but I doubt it somehow.

6. The speed of the Internet is such that when one puts something online, say a comment on a column, or sends an email you know that you could conceivably receive a reply almost immediately, and it invites the tendency to repeatedly check inboxes and postings. This makes me "jumpy".

7. Fact checking is very easy. This is great for research, but perhaps not for fiction. What’s the proportion of creative writing online to factual commentary? How does that compare to the world of books? I’d bet the proportion of fiction writing on paper is greater than that online.

8. Trying to write things online isn't as easy as writing things when you don’t have the distractions, although it can be useful to have various references. It is difficult writing here, on Blogger, partly because you are only given a little space to write in, so you can't see everything you've written. I have started copying and pasting from word to write on Blogger to overcome this.

9. Imaginative reading seems hard for me online- indeed, I almost never do it. I think it is very hard to read imaginatively because the web is largely image led and it is hard for mental images to compete with the images on the computer and to maintain the sustained imaginative effort required to "get into" a novel.

10. While it is excellent for discovering new music through short samples, listening to things online is not for me as good as putting stuff on the stereo and lying on the sofa because there are too many things online to distract me (this is really an aural version of points 1, 3 and 8).

11. Likewise, while the Internet gives and excellent impression of art works, it is not like seeing the real thing. Such an obvious point needs to be made, amazingly, because I see that people make judgments about art from the images they get on their small computer screens, losing so many essential aspects of the artworks.

12. The Internet can be very addictive. I can go online and stay online for hours- I feel very aware that I'm not online when I am not, much as an alchoholic is aware he is not drinking when he isn't.

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I see, reading the above, that much of my concern is about my inability to settle and relax on Internet communications. I accept that my fidgetiness is my own responsibility, but I do not think I am alone with these difficulties, and I wonder what solutions we can, collectively, propose to allow us to do things which the seductive Internet makes harder, and which are so worthwhile?

Instinctively, I dislike paternalistic solutions but they may offer the best way to tackle the issue of internet distractions- recognizing the social value of having locations which are specifically designed for single activities – listening to music, reading, writing, talking or looking at artworks or simply sitting.

So, one answer, I think is not to make computers available in certain libraries, and not to have access in cafes, aeroplanes or trains.

Kim's Game - Work in Progress

A few changes were made to the painting, removing fussier details, making the dhapes simpler, often more egg-like. See previous version - http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

Kim's Game is played at children's parties. A series of objects are displayed to the children on a tray for a limited time period and they have to record what these objects were. The winner is he who recalls the objects most accurately.

According to Wikipedia, "The name is derived from Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel Kim, in which the hero, Kim, plays the game during his training as a spy."

I played the game at Malcolm Smith's birthday party in 1975 or 1976. I remember the objects being brought to us on a tray, then being removied exactly two minutes later, after which we each wrote down the names of the objects we could remember on pieces of paper.

I remember how poorly I recalled the objects despite forcing my concentration. I had a feeling of frustration when writing down the names of the objects, fearing that the process of writing them down was so laborious that in the time it took the other objects would fade from my memory.

My host's mother returned the tray to us for comparasion with the lists- I do not recall who won- it was not me! How mysterious it was that I had simply forgotten some objects so prominent they were: they had indeed disappeared from my consciousness, as if their presence had been a mirage. But they had surely been there as much as those whose names I had recorded.

Dear Shadow Alive and Well, How can the Body Die?

How can the body die?

But I have never felt any comfort in the idea of eternity. Perhaps this is a reflection of the melancholic personality, the personality that experiences life as the experience predominantly of suffering.

I cannot imagine the soul. I cannot sense that there might be a quality of me that is essential. I feel myself to be too mutable for the concept of the soul with its essentiality. And it seems to me that physical pain is too close to mental anguish for the notion of a pure, unsuffering "core" to be credible.

I cannot, like Fleet Foxes, the author of these lyrics, find my own mortality strange:

Through the forest
Down to your grave
Where the birds wait
And the tall grasses wave
They do not
know you anymore

Dear shadow alive and well
How can the body die
You tell me everything
Anything true

In the town one morning I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death

Indeed, the thought of eternal death comes as a relief even if, paradoxically, I doubt my ability to experience it. And I confess that I have thought also of the deaths of others with a definate relief at times.

Sometimes I think about what will happen to the things I own after my death. My body happily burnt, my ashes dispersed, no-where too undignified I hope.

I see men in overalls, taking the paintings I've painted down to a skip and flinging them in recklessly: they've served their function as repository for my ego needs and as an aesthetic passtime. The books go to dealers; the are clothes burnt.

The clothes burnt, I hope, for the thought of another man in my coat or shoes is appalling to me. I think of that and imagine a sort of identity theft taking place, my userper's skin close where mine was, adopting my mannerisms, my motions, going where I used to go, consuming what I consumed, watching the same films, laughing at the same jokes- like the oft-despised presence of an unwanted younger brother, copying me: a doppelganger.

The clothes bear witness to my life, they went where I did. They show stains or wear marks which correspond to how I live. what I eat and how my body moves. Please burn them so my presence can't be stolen and I am truly no more.

I used to have these fantasies of invisibility, I no longer do, but perhaps those fantasies compressed and trasnmogrified into my dominant social modus operandi, manifesting themselves as a sort of non-presence, like a tipex-ed blank on a typed page, so I am aware of myself as hiding - withdrawn or masked - among others.

I'll finish by saying that I always felt myself exposed in the UK, but here in Brazil I feel myself invisible, because I can hide behind a series of popular assumptions about Britishness, a quality that any true Britons knows to be so amorphous as to be no guide to personality at all.

Spiky plant

I do not know the name of this plant.