Illness is a plot to slow us down

Illness is a plot to slow us down
when God sees we are about to catch him up.
His face is covered by a thoughtful frown…
till he bestows with love the poisoned cup.

For speed is alien to the human soul
we have to live as slowly as hearts beat.
If rushing on we may miss our life’s goal..
Running down some long and rain filled street.

Step by step across the dangerous flood
On stones placed there by patient long gone men.
With care,perception guides us to the good
but haste leads often to a tiger’s den.

Beware impulsive speeding in your mind
For out of this come many acts unkind

Viewpoints, a musing

 

 

What is the point of my view?
what is my point of view?

If you are in a different place from me then we need to take account of that.

 

P1000074
A point of view depends on where you point,I suppose… you could rotate and see a different view from the same spot…
Now pointed questions ar a different thing altogether.. like arrows,perhaps.
A loaded question is like a gun.. dangerous or tormenting or showing power..
He has the appointed viewer here now…. a civil servant perhaps?A government official?
So many of our phrases come from art and poetry.. language was once entirely poetry until the metaphors set like hard jelly and we find it hard to burst out of it…as it were…
We live off the poetry of men and women long gone from this earth,though many no doubt became soil and so are still here spread about… all over the world.. just think a woem could be digesting Oliver Cromwell!

 

WORMS

A worm has just a simple life
No sister, children nor a wife
And yet we never hear complaints…
Thus language gives and language taints

Follow me on Facebeak

No,I’ll never love a hen again..
Her nose runs all day and she follows it on Facebowl
I bought a witch a broom   and now she gives me static
At least tantalize me till it’s light and I can go out and get my hair trimmed.
He gave me a laugh and many   more sinful emotions than I’ve ever had before
He kept me mating far too long.. you know what it’s like;one thing leads to a mother.
He laughed all the way to the bonk
I played a bar and then found many more in a music book
I pray for more catarrh in winter
I generally lay my bards on the table
l left my mark on his back.. nailed my man !
I leave no organ in tune but your double bass  gave me the willies
I’m just a reveller in my own lifetime
I was left by his faltering at the altar
He’s at my wits end
It was the fleeter of my two feet which ran faster than I did
I let the flat out  and hired a wheelie bin just to sleep in,you know what it’s like now in London
Let’s never pall again.
I’ll never wear a glove again.
No,I’ll never write a double negative for you.No. not ever
She said,let’s split now then she turned a  perfect cartwheel
My identity never achieved revolution
He preys all night and an owl is photographing his movements for the Daily Beast
Ariel is no longer a spirit… what would Shakespeare say

Blogging is a sin now!

Hey Father give me some blessings.It’s two bleeps since my last transmission.

What is wrong with that?

I have no idea,Father.

This place is for confessing your  sins if you repent

I know,it must be fascinating.Can you tell me a few general categories of the most popular sins?

But the confessional is sacred…can’t you read the newspapers?They are replete with sin,positively brimming over

Well,I come here a lot and I’m running out of ideas for my blog.

Blogging is sinful.We have been thinking and we have just decided

Really?It’s not mentioned in my Missal.

No doubt it will be in the next edition!

Why is it sinful?

I believe it takes your mind off the people around you.

Exactly!

Can’t you do anything about these people?

I’ve tried praying for them,seducing them,ignoring them,emailing them.

And what happened.

Nothing at all.They just ignore me.

Why don’t you ignore them?

That’s a wonderful idea.

Now,to cut back your blogging you need to learn the oboe…

Why,Father?

You can’t type when playing the oboe and it’s cheaper than a piano..

Gosh,you are so clever.Theology is good for the mind

And your playing will be so awful that it will make your housemates speak to you..

That’s unlikely,they are all cats!

Oh,you nincompoop.Be off or I’ll kick you out myself..

That’s not wholly holy or even holey.

Be off or I’ll send you a rhyme.

About time!

How about the design?

I am thinking,sublime?

I’ll take nine plus some twine..

What is my penance?

Being who you are!

By a large shop’s mirror I sat down and wept

P1000067

The school tell me the children are totally nitless now
They are tested daily by flea circuses.. what a performance
And they even know how to read faces and use body language since most cannot talk….
So how can they read? Silently,no doubt
Some children wear nappies in school to save time going to the lav.. whatever next… taking a baby’s bottle to save paying for school dinners..?
Some folk think,why grow up when we die later…. why not stay as children.. but in the end most of us give in and give up the breast for a few short years.. then those with them are hunted by those without.I think it was very unfair not to give men a bosom of their own though perhaps it would lead to total narcissism and we don’t want that do we?Ahaa.

As for their organs?How about becoming a hermaphrodite on the NHS..Two fo’ one.Marry yourself and save money on beds..and sheets and so on.. I suppose it’s boring marrying someone you can’t see except through a mirror
Think about it.. you can see anyone at all except yourself… very intriguing..so save up or make a mirror from mercury.Just don’t eat it.

For lonely harts

They say I have a great sense of rumour.
And I am extremely dutiful.
My hair is like spun mould.
My eyes are like two bars.
My nose is ironic like the poet’s.
All in all I am a site to be ribald.
My cooking is extra-ordinary ,indeed it is plain.
My figure is probably zero writ on a barge.
I am a very rude housekeeper and all the furniture is witless.
My husband buys me furniture polish for Xmas made from bees wax.This is true.
Do bees ever wane?I know they can buzz.
My doctor said I was the second cleverest person she ever met and she should know as there were ten patients signed on there…I still don’t know which one was the cleverest but I don’t believe in IQ anymore.You see mine is 200… and look t my life… then you will wonder whether I have no EQ..none at all..you don’t need it to do theoretical physics.
My therapist admired my dreams as she was in most of then rowing me out to sea.
She wanted to show me a new perspective on life but we had to call the lifeboat out… should i stop the therapy and have swimming lessons instead ? I think if one has to keep calling out the elifeboat it is not a good omen and I could save the money and buy more wool…
What does pellucid nean?I just love the word… is it related to lucid?

I need a bath and the birds have gone so for economy I shall use theirs;

Outside the circle of your arms

Image

The hole sucks me in,
with its deep darkness
The Fall was never healed.
Can I resist the call of the killers?
Will they kill me with kindness or with hatred?
I try to hide but no place feels safe anymore
I negate my writing and hide my pens.
Pain degrades me.
Writing deleted returns in imagination
I can do little but I try
Black gravity is the monster in my soul…
Sway not the tree
On whose strong branch the leopard drapes himself
But let the moon speak in silver tongue
as the leaves rustle
I am invisible
except as a home for ants
Who steals my words.
I am no more than a punctuation mark or a short title
I am near the end of my sentence.
I’ll be hanged by some inverted commas
From the oak tree.. burning in the sun’s borrowed fires
I can’t see your face now.
Just shapes in grey fog
Like the doctor without feeling for my child.
A child,that was..
that would have been…
that has gone.
I am uncertain

outside the circle,

outside the circle.

the circle

the circle

of your arms

I knit with love my life and my own tale

I knit the rhythmic pattern of my day.
the complex stitches make me sure to err
and yet i have no fear for on this way
I knit or unknit with my calm and care.

With warp and weft both in their rightful place
with right and wrong accepted and allowed
I knit so slowly,saying no to haste.
I worship with my truth and am not cowed.

As I go back to fix a stitch which is not right
No longer do I castigate myself..
For in a flash I saw as if in light
That to and fro are both a part of health.

For now I know we all at times shall fail
And that is part of our life’s measured tale

Women, Art and Authority: The Language of Exclusion

A good post

Jeanne de Montbaston's avatarJeanne de Montbaston

Fede Galizia, 'Judith with the Head of Holofernes' (possible self-portrait). 1596. Fede Galizia, ‘Judith with the Head of Holofernes’ (possible self-portrait). 1596.

I recently watched Amanda Vickery’s series, ‘The Story of Women and Art,’ which you can catch on Iplayer (and catch it soon, before it goes).

I am a pretty obvious target for this series. The name I blog under, Jeanne de Montbaston, is the name of one of the few medieval women artists about whom we know a fair amount. I’m not an Art Historian, but I’m very interested in women artists, because in medieval England (and France, and Italy …), you often find that the people illuminating books –  or making tapestries and other works of art we’ve now lost – were women. I suspect that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were actually a reasonably good time to be a woman artist. Yet, ironically, I suspect that’s true for women like Jeanne de Montbaston simply because…

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Rocks bestrew my path

When true love’s gone

              and doom hangs over head,

When life runs like a river to the sea,

Then, shall I take new lovers to my bed,

And with their carnal touch consoled be?

 

When true loves lie and break my woman’s heart,

When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path,

Then, shall I my life of evil start,

And, on the world, shall I bestow my wrath?

 

When true loves lie and wreck all loyalty;

When puzzlement makes all the world seem mad;

Then I shall upend causality

And let myself do deeds which make all glad.

 

For I have love’s own child inside my soul

And I shall tend her till at last  she’s  grown

How to books just out of reach

How to tackle your fancy

How to lay your own eggs to save money….

How to be trying to doctors.

How to test your patience or patients.

How to be brisk but not brusque for men and women alike.

How to prey daily en masse

How to spot wolves in the city.

How to play wolf and love it

How to wail profoundly.

How to talk in precis.

How to be feminine and masculine simultaneously.

How to bare a child in the sunshine and get a tan

How to play willy nilly.

How do you see the future?

How to predict yourself easily

How to love bitter.

How to laugh longer…

How to love longer.

How to sleep longer and longer

Love,the word

Now love is not an easy word to use,
for excess talk has torn away its soul;
In cards and letters,we must stand accused
so where love dwelt,there’s now a widening hole.

And if our language changes, what’s the cost,
when life departs from words that meant so much
or is there something permanently lost
when hands and pens have lost the way to touch?

We soon forget what loving used to mean
We change to fit our fractured complex realms
Till we are now as fractured in our schemes
and what once was,seems never to have been.

Yet there’s a remnant found in art and song
Which we can capture while our spirits long.

Yet another lover leaves my bed

When another lover flees my cat sized bed

and leaves me wild and lonely in the night

I wonder if it’s unknown words I’ve read

Or isit that my eyes have known their spite?

I tempt this sin with all my female parts.
They feel I’m like a spider with a bat,
to cure ,devour,digest my ghoulish pests,
They think they should be learning on the sat.

But some who mind me feel they have been robbed.
I give them all detention,I’m a liar.
I give them generous fare and sing sheeps’ songs.
I give them comfort like a hellish fire

Oh,come back ,bad boy ,don’t desert me yet,
The clothes I thrashed for you are not quite set

Books I have red

At my interview for Uni I said my favourite books were:

To thrill a mocking bird
War and Lease.
A Xmas Carrot..
Picnic capers

Doctor give over..

Sins and incivility
Far from the mad and crowds.
The green and wooden flea.
Oliver missed.
David’s copper failed.
Hard Rhymes.
A book of humour for life buoys.
Cookery snooks..
How to learn anything in five minutes a day.

How to  be your own best fiend.

What was it called?

They offered me a job in the library

My doctor is blue

My doctor had a black face today

I scarcely knew what to say.

For if sysmpathy’s lacking

There’s no use unpacking

one’s delicate fears and dismay.

 

 

Fear gives me pain in my butt

As it loosens control of my gut

I  hate all the pain

from which there’s no gain..

and hope soon my  butt will be shut.

 

He tried hard to reassure me

but his motive was easy to see.

he was feeling quite blue

and didn’t know what to do….

Maybe all he can do is to be,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The memory lasts

 

midsummer days evoke entrancings past
where children played in joyous, daisied fields
with buttercups so bright the memory lasts
a freedom that our conscious growth will steal.

those stones and leaves and many coloured flowers
were gathered into images that glow
yet later we forget those treasured hours
when for a while we lived in life’s deep flow

we did not look and see,but felt at one
we lived as did the birds high in the trees
now we see and write yet experiencing has gone
we no longer live like flowers filled with bees

to lose ourselves in nature is a joy
which to our adult selves we must restore

When he went away

When he went away
He said,”Lehitraot,mama.”
Do vstrechi.
He died, but I’m still here
Yes,in my heart I feel his love.
But why did I live,
And he did not?
Auf wiedersehen
Lehitraot.
Yes,darling,I’ll see you later,LC3_3932
When the sky turns black and all the stars blaze bright
I’ll see you shining in the night.
I’ll see you in my dreams alas.
Do vstrechi.
But why you and not me too?
Araka
I can’t understand.
Lehitraot,beloved.
A plus tard
Some where in this world,you fell
But no-one,not even God, can tell.
God was absent then or in some other place
He’s gone again.
They said He’s died too,
But He didn’t have a mother like you.
Do vstrechi.
My breasts ache and my heart and soul,
My breasts were made to make you whole.
To feed, give love and to console.
A plus tard
And now they ache with grief as my tears fall.
A bientot
My body trembles in the night
As dreams may bring my lost ones to my sight.
A plus
I’d walk across the roughest bleak terrain
If l I could find my loves and hold your hands again.
Do vstrechi.
The bell rings on the ancient clock
As time goes on as normal,  never stops.
Araka
I wish the hands of time could be reversed,
And I was not living with this curse.
People forget that I once had a son.
They think my grieving has been done.
Araka.
But grief and loss and pain will never end
Until the curtain of my death descends
Auf wiedersehen.
Meantime I look at flowers and birds and trees,
But it’s really you my deepening insight sees.
Lehitraot.
Th inscape of my heart is shown to few,
An artist of the lost would know this view.
I know I want to see just you.
Do vstrechi.
But for me there is no
Auf wiedersehen
Never again will you say
What you said that day
Lehitraot,
Mama.
Papa
A plus tard
Tot ziens.
See you later
See you soon.
See you.
You
 my beloved son

How writing poetry was compared to Perseus killing the Medusa Gorgon

Image

 

When thy song is shield and mirror

To the fair snake-curlèd Pain,

Where thou dar’st affront her terror

That on her thou may’st attain Perséan conquest

Francis Thompson wrote those lines.. se below

I am interested in these lines from the poem below…. When thy song is shield and mirror To the fair snake-curlèd Pain, Where thou dar’st affront her terror That on her thou may’st attain Perséan conquest; I think the meaning is that by expressing what is in us creatively in poetry or other forms we can overcome what we are afraid of not by attacking and killing it but indirectly in the manner of Perseus who killed the Medusa Gorgon by locating her and seeing her reflected in the mirror of his shield.Others had been turned to stone by her gaze. Expression is the mirror/shield Read about Perseus below http://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Heroes/Perseus/perseus.html This is where I got the poem………Bartleby.com a good website re which I say go visit. Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917. 240. From ‘The Mistress of Vision’ By Francis Thompson (1859–1907) WHERE is the land of Luthany, Where is the tract of Elenore? I am bound therefor. ‘Pierce thy heart to find the key; With thee take 5 Only what none else would keep; Learn to dream when thou dost wake, Learn to wake when thou dost sleep. Learn to water joy with tears, Learn from fears to vanquish fears; 10 To hope, for thou dar’st not despair, Exult, for that thou dar’st not grieve; Plough thou the rock until it bear; Know, for thou else couldst not believe; Lose, that the lost thou may’st receive; 15 Die, for none other way canst live. When earth and heaven lay down their veil, And that apocalypse turns thee pale; When thy seeing blindeth thee To what thy fellow-mortals see; 20 When their sight to thee is sightless; Their living, death; their light, most lightless; Search no more— Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’ Where is the land of Luthany, 25 And where the region Elenore? I do faint therefor. ‘When to the new eyes of thee All things by immortal power, Near or far, 30 Hiddenly To each other linkèd are, That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star; When thy song is shield and mirror 35 To the fair snake-curlèd Pain, Where thou dar’st affront her terror That on her thou may’st attain Perséan conquest; seek no more, O seek no more! 40 Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.

Y not writhe a book 2nite

Image

How to write gooder than your pest….
How to re-use male.
How to exceed in business and be very trying
How to bin friends and influence weasels.
How to get self esteem without really prying
How to love yourself on the moors.
How to march well with a strumpet or axe
how to love hard labour.
How to spell correctily forevere
How to earn some knew grammar
how to consummate with numbers and figures.
How to be less intimate with strangers
How to transmute your marriage.
Hpw to be an alchemist for non-readers
how to make love a menace..
How to make love on infinitely long lines.
How to be lesser than trivial
How to fax males and fix emails.
How to dissolve quarrelling forms in algebra
How to phone the dead
How to make money past longer
How to cook fakes at home without really defying
How to write books without sighing.
How to publish and write a knee book
how to get a contract for your writhing
how to use cutlery for creative activities.
How to amuse yourself and authors with really trying.
How to sound foreign everywhere in the world.
how to dissemble and act outrage.
how to live with rage and l ike it
How to stun hearts once and for all.

For the worms

I feel my soul is trembling like a leaf
that clings on in the worst of a fierce gale
It will fall into the mud so far beneath,
though briefly through bright sunshine it may fall.

 
I am as nothing, trodden into earth.
And lower than the lowest living beast,
I make no estimation of my worth
and for the worms I shall provide a feast.

 

At first I thought that I could ride the storm
That I could live without your circling arm
But truth has taken hold of me entire.
The choice is death by mud or death by fire.

 
I know well I’ll be trampled with earth’s dust
No more to be an object of mere lust

Embodied love

Let your lips meet gently,

the top one resting against the lower,

touching with tenderness

your own skin to skin.

Forefinger propped on chin,

I let the others dangle,

like leaves on a branch;

how softly gravity tugs them downwards.

Let heart beat quietly,slowly

as the blood circulates

carrying its music,

a river,

following the path of least resistance.

How the blood vessels receive willingly this flow,

touching it kindly as with tiny open fingers,

helping and being helped.

How the hair on the head

floats

on the breeze,

like tentacles of an octopus

waving goodbye.

Top eyelid loves the lower one;

as we blink they touch

like lovers kissing swiftly

behind a tree.

and how the light comes in

we see a world.

[mine may not be yours,]

but the blink of my eyelid

sends waves through the air,

so we’re all touching and being touched,

lips kissing each other,

kiss all living creatures.

skin to skin.

air to air.

And inside us,the rich darkness

of creative night

transforms,in turn,

these touches

into dreams.

Blindness and Insight

This sounds like a novel we all should read.

litlove's avatarTales from the Reading Room

raymond carver_cathedral_coverWhen I worked in Waterstone’s back in 1993, Raymond Carver was the man. I hadn’t even heard of him, but it wasn’t long before I realised he represented some pinnacle of writing to the people I worked with. A collected edition of his stories had recently been published and I bought a copy of it, though it was in fact many years before I actually started reading him. Short stories aren’t something I read very often. I did appreciate him, and all those blue-collar depressives he wrote about, self-consciously ordinary people on the run from their better natures. But I didn’t love him, not in the way I felt I ought to. One story, though, stuck out in my mind, awkward and yet fascinating. This was ‘Cathedral’, the story in which a man overcomes prejudice and experiences a moment of pure revelation.

Our unnamed narrator is waiting at home, anticipating…

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Blind sight

Image

 

Blind sight scattered my wits
Like whitened bones
Across the deserts of my mind.

I descended into blackness.
Love shrank into the tame cat
By the fire,unacknowledged hate
Grew to fill the room.
I stared too much,
A full stop grew gigantic
Crowded out
All the words in the sentence
I saw nothing but this dot
Now a gigantic black hole
Into which I was dragged.
An energy coming from within my own head
Sucked me into the black hole.
That place was the wrong sort of dearkness.
Within that full stop,
Love Fundamental became invisible.
Disappered into the dark.
I dragged my eyes away
And saw the moon appear , so eerie,
It shone,grey silver.
If I had opened my eyees wider
I would not now lament
What I destroyed in the wormhole
Of the black dot that drew my eye
Into a tunnel of darkness
It blinded me to the light
Did not let me read the sentences
Beside the full stop.
An error of focus left hate
Unacknowledged,unmitigated unredeemed,
Kept from love or goodness
Afraid to spoil my love with hate,
The fear of hate became
That which spoiled all else else,
By freezing Love itself

Knotted

Image[Art by author]

Suddenly, blindly
She punched my solar plexus,
Never saw my fall.

How a deathly hush
Hung over the small room
Like a cloud of ash.

I saw his face scream.
His eyes shrank and shivered.
His sweet tongue knotted.

The notes in the margins

Munch-studio-Getty95002154

I’m finding Derrida de-structured
And Wittgenstein’s‘ mind makes me smile
Who would have conjectured
That one day I’d lecture
On thoughtfullness and all its trials?

I prefer Kierkegaard to Sartre
Who sometimes makes me feel  mere.
Who would have expected
That words would be texted
As men smoked cigarettes and drank beer?

Some people like reading Jane Austen
While others fight with Wittgenstein.
Who would have discarded
The notes in the margins?
So  strangely these words recombine.

Munch  had to paint people screaming,
his premonitions were strong
Who else would have expected
The human destruction
Europe brought to the world before long?

 

 

Munch was not only an artist
He was a philosopher too…
who else would have dreamed up
an image that screamed up;
a warning struck, out of the view.