He was with me then As I searched for a new place In which I could live But he does not speak He is my companion He wants to help me I don’t believe yet That he won’t come home ever. But I just pretend When I am with folk They tell me I am stronger. Oh,comparisons! Yeah,I need no-one No words of comfort or love I must be a stone. My stoicism A wonder to the heavens My dead face fakes peace.
Day: June 19, 2016
Subtle is a word I love
subtle
ˈsʌt(ə)l/
adjective
adjective: subtle; comparative adjective: subtler; superlative adjective: subtlest
-
1.(especially of a change or distinction) so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyse or describe.“his language expresses rich and subtle meanings”
synonyms: fine, fine-drawn, ultra-fine, nice, overnice, minute, precise, narrow, tenuous; More antonyms: crude -
capable of making fine distinctions.“a subtle mind”
synonyms: astute, keen, quick, fine, acute, sharp, razor-like, razor-sharp, rapier-like, canny, shrewd,aware, perceptive, discerning, sensitive, discriminating, penetrating, sagacious, wise,clever, intelligent, skilful, artful; More antonyms: slow-witted -
arranged in an ingenious and elaborate way.“the German plan was simple yet subtle”
-
2.making use of clever and indirect methods to achieve something.“he tried a more subtle approach”
Origin
Middle English (also in the sense ‘not easily understood’): from Old French sotil, from Latin subtilis .
Share this:
What I really like
I like the word ” subtle” I don’t know why
I like Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata as each time I hear it it affects me just as much
I like the fact that 0 is a symbol for nothing.
Share this:
Look before you weep
Brittle wings tease subtle angels
Give in turn
Look before you weep
Love of honey is the fruit of swarms
Love is undefined
Love makes my life swirl around
Love thy neighbour as herself
Love will find a play
Fake love makes war
Man does not live by bread and bones
Many a true word is spoken by pests
Many are called but few are rising
Many hands make lights work
Marriages are made in Devon [ or maybe Cornwall]
Marry chaste, repent with pleasure
Might is trite
Misery loves to dump on you
Moderation in all flings
Money doesn’t flow with ease
Money isn’t ever bling
Money makes the world unsound
Money balks
More beer, less cocaine
Music has charms to soothe the ravaged beast
Nature adores a vacuum
Necessity is the mother of intention
Needs must when the devil arrives
Ne’er cast a clout till May is about
Never go to bed on an argument unless it has springs
Never judge a book by its lover
Never book a gift horse with the truth
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today
Never speak if unwell or dead
Never sell whales out of school
Nine tailors take a scan
No man can serve two mistresses,a wife and a concubine
No woman is an island
The news is wood mews
No one can make you other
No pain, no explain
No pests in the knickers
Nothing flew under the sun
Nothing is certain but death and waxes
Nothing succeeds like access
Oil and water don’t make pics
Once a brief, always a brief
Once bitten, twice awry
One good burn deserves some butter
One half of the world is unbalanced
Share this:
Other people actually exist
“There is nothing we could know about ourselves or another that can solve the problem that other people actually exist, and we are utterly dependent on them. . . . There is nothing to know apart from this, and everything else we know, or claim to know, or are supposed to know, or not know, follows on from this.”
Adam Phillips
Share this:
This partly describes how I am feeling today
Share this:
Gosh,not far from London
Share this:
In the Peak District
Land of cruel rock and harsh descents
Into river valleys with stone houses.
On the West side struck by chilly rain
Blown by the West wind.
Land of wildness and birds,eagles even;
How it calls to me.
The vast space and the peaceful green
The heather and the sheep.
The lark in the morning
And the joy of vision
Up high and higher into the void of the sky
We climbed with strange lack of fear
Share this:
My grandparents
Grandad looks mixed European possibly a little Jewish with that nose, while poor granny who died after her son was born was 100 % Irish [ with a bit of Spanish perhaps from the Armada.
Grandad worked for 50 years in a coal mine and raised 6 children alone.He took part in the Miner’s Strike and they had to go to soup kitchens for food.I suspect we were all very thin because my mother probably was not given very much to eat and she thought that was normal.When I was 22,I weighed 7.5 stone and I am quite tall.When I lay down my hip bones were sticking out.]
I can see my sister and one of her sons in granny’s face but noone looks like grandad…
Share this:
War in my genes [ not jeans]
My therapist says I’m neurotic because the Viking genes in me are warring with the Celts.But what about the Anglo-Saxons,Ancient Britons,Romans,Jews,Huguenots?
When you recall I was created from just an ovum and a sperm it is pretty amazing that all these genes have replicated themselves and enjoying more struggle and strife.
I have Celtic feet which is very bad because they are very bony and the toes are too long so they get bent.Meanwhile my skull is Scandinavian. Now that’s two different races in my skeleton already.I am pretty sure if I should vote Remain as I am already European. like most “English” people here.
What is odd is 2 people I know, who are from countries outside of Europe,are against “foreigners” but their husbands were British and now they have British passports.But strictly speaking,to Nigel Farage and his supporters they are not British.So their position is odd.I must tell the therapist unless she’s been sent to Yarl’s Wood.
Share this:
My picnic is ruined
From twitter
Share this:
Ben Tallon, the artist who learned to use mistakes
I wrote a post last week about how when he spilled a bottle of ink he used the result to make an image.
https://wordscat.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/made-by-accident/
Here is a fuller account of his art.
http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/ben-tallon-freelancing-champagne-wax-crayons
Share this:
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/adrienne-rich
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Share this:
A tale of married life
By Katherine
Stan and Mary went in town
Share this:
The unfamiliar
We’ve already seen that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, and that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. John Keats wrote of this art of remaining in doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” and famously termed it “negative capability.” But count on Anaïs Nin to articulate familiar truths in the most exquisitely poetic way possible, peeling away at the most profound and aspirational aspects of what it means to be human.
How my heart sings 