brittle thinking

Some might say television is the opiate of the masses. I believe that used selectively and critically it can be educational, valid, and inspiring.

On Monday I watched people frozen to save their lives. Particularly striking was the woman trapped under ice - feet up through a hole, held tight as her last link to the surface world. Head half submerged in freezing water. Slowly slowing down. Thoughts, blood, heartbeats. Losing heat, losing life. Till nothing - silence, stillness, stasis. Hours while she is dug out, held, handled, carried and flown to the most northerly hospital in the world. Then peered at, poked and monitored. Slowly warmed - welcomed back into softness and movement. Breath revisits - movement remembered - life returned.


I watch and then I turn from the screen and I think.

Only the cold saved her. We mammals need warmth to survive, but she needed cold. A step outside of the rules of nature. An inversion of how things should be. I think of the relationship between heat and cold. How one can feel like the other. How ice can burn. They are opposites. Like life to death. In one always the other.

I think of all those mottos - what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, kill or be killed, no pain no gain. I think about what is being killed. Kill the senses, kill the desires, kill the instinct to cling to the thinning thread.

And then I think about myself, and how sometimes I know how she feels. I call them my everyday winters. I have to invert myself to a reversed 45 degrees. I have to freeze out consciousness, freeze myself in. Hibernation of the mind. I have to hold my breath and close my eyes. I have to play dead. You might not notice - the signs are subtle but there. A crispness to my tone and occasional visible breath. Suspended - just till the tides of time carry me beyond today. To a place more welcoming, a place with smoother edges. A place where I begin to thaw.

writing to reach you

This is the plant that stands to my left. My witness when I come here to write. She always cries exactly one day after I water her. And I always wonder why.

Perhaps she cries in gratitude - that I have now remembered her, when for weeks I have passed by without a glance in her direction. Perhaps she cries for being nameless - all because I carelessly lost her label soon after we met. Her closest neighbour is a lemon tree - so perhaps she cries tears of inferiority because she lacks a vivid scent.

Maybe she cries because she is looking in when she should be looking out. Longing to break the glass that keeps the sky at bay. Maybe she misses for the smell of the damp soil in the evening or the midnight whispers of a passing snail.

I think she cries at the memory of the sounds of standing in the rain, the sensation of the sky as it falls and collects on her leaves.

memories form a disorderly queue

You’ve left the towels on the line again. One grey one. One blue one. Two hand towels. You’ve only got two hand towels. You’ve only got two hands. Our line - a green metal contraption strung with yellow plastic string. Also sporting a plastic peg basket full of plastic pegs.

I remember when we had wooden ones that darkened when wet. That squeaked when I snapped them open and closed. Making crocodile smiles. Despite warnings I couldn’t resist clipping them to my lips or the tip of my tongue. Speechless. The surprise greeting of pain. Always sharper and more lingering than you think.

I remember fetes with stalls where people broke those wooden pegs apart and reassembled them into new things. I had a rocking chair made of pegs - a miniature one, of course. Something used to sit in it. A doll, or more likely a bear, or more likely a duck. I forget the inhabitant but I remember the chair. So often the way.

You’ve left the towels on the line again. Drenched each night by summer storms, they begin each day a little heavier than the last. Don’t we all. Through the day they doze a dream of evaporation, casting off a haze of concern. Their only lingering worry - that they may be left there till winter to freeze stiff and snap. Don’t we all. Eventually.

reflect what you are

Last Monday I found a place that never took the time to find me. I saw seas of green and leaves that choose to linger. And I saw these shining fragments of infinity, raised a quarter way to the sky.


Ever intrigued, I pulled on my disguise to mingle with the locals as they perched on their branches and their backs of benches. And they explained this monument - this tribute to their abandonment of vanity.

For birds have no need for reflection - enough that they appear in each others eyes. They have no desire to admire their images. Why would you if you could fly?

soft

silent

steep

sharp

impossible paleontology

Like city streets I’m a one way system. I can read or I can write. Things come in and things go out. Never both at the same time.

If I splay myself wide and walk with one foot on each side of the street - one in the sun and one in the shade I can waddle along for a while. But its tough and progress is slow, and neither side gets full attention.

At the moment the reading side of the street has caught my eye. I am looking in all the windows and buying the wares (all in the name of my Booker 2006 experience).

But the shady side suffers. Largely unwalked, my pages curl from sunlight rather than heavily laid words. Poised, my pen gathers frustrated ink at its tip.

Thoughts arrive and depart un-netted. I look up from a book at an unfamiliar howl or hoot. A funny looking face beckons me closer. I write a hasty note-to-self. A reminder to come back later and catch this crazy beast - to pin and mount him and lay him on display in this maudlin museum of freakery.

But when I return, a few days later - follow the scanty signpost I left myself - I find nothing but dust and bones of the rarest kind.

all the streets are crammed with things eager to be held

This is yesterday. I am being chased away from a place I don’t belong. Raced home from a quick trip to collect some books from the library. Dodging occasional raindrops that threaten to re-punctuate my sentences. Evading normalitys glance as it threatens to dull my senses.

This town is not mine. It is too full of people cleaning their cars. Husbands with sponges and a shine on their mind. Wives feet sticking out of back doors as they Hoover up conjugal crumbs. Too many people carry shopping bags bulging with Saturday routine. Too many people are holding hands, clinging together for safety, like children crossing a road.



As I speed away from today I see that I am feather racing. A small whiteness is dragged along in my slipstream - pulled on by the weight, speed and intensity of me. Or is it the other way round? Does it draw me on, forever tied by forgotten ancestry. Shared avian pasts - forgotten by everyone but the leaves.

one shade more, one ray less

She walks in blue. Barefoot and true. Her clothes nothing more than fibres laid between herself and her sky. Toes that could turn the tide if they chose to.

All the seagulls move aside - only to watch her. To watch her continue on her way. White and grey. Skin tanned to breakwater brown. Soundlessly, endlessly on.

Around the edges of this island. Never questioning why. Her commitment keeps us safe. It breaks a space for us to sit high and dry - observing her progress.

She walks because she knows. Knowing enough to know. That sometimes the tide is high, sometimes low.

[I see her but she is not mine to watch. My walker walks at night - when my eyes are closed and I cant see her. My walker walks on rainy days - when I am buried indoors under papers and dirty looks.]

I aint got time for the game

From either side of the screen people smile or scream and demand we consider the meaning of life. But don’t they realise I have spent my time doing little else? And I am getting closer to an answer.

And the answer is looking a lot like the puzzle known as the Towers of Hanoi.

When I was little, my Dad and I subscribed to a computer magazine. Each issue had lines and lines of BASIC code. We would type it in, letter by number, line by line and then hit ‘RUN’. We programmed this puzzle. Ever since it has fascinated me. You can play it here.

Did you enjoy it? did it drive you crazy?

It’s a lot like life. Its all about making little moves, one step at a time to get closer to where you want to be. Even though that place is only a few steps from where you started. You have to learn early on never to put a heavy load onto a foundation that cant hold it up. You have to keep a tight hold on your patience. You always have to think one or more steps ahead. You have to be prepared to accept that sometimes you will feel like you are moving backwards.

And just like life - its best played calmly, with all the time in the world, a cup of tea, and a quiet room all to yourself.

the road to nowhere

I am on a path of ideas. I have to keep walking. There is further to travel to reach my destination. Continue with me if you will.

Do we use methods of capture to keep a safe distance between ourselves and our reality, ourselves and our experiences, ourselves and our former selves? Do we seek to put a frame around moments so they are contained and cannot leak beyond the boundaries we allow them. Does this extend beyond the stasis of photography. Is it at play in films trapped on celluloid and wound onto concealed reels? words inked into bottom-drawer diaries? conversations ended with knowing silence?

‘maybe I shot the video tape so I wouldn’t have to remember it myself’ David Freidman

I wonder if all things look better from a distance? Up close we are microscopes to every imperfection. With time and distance the serrated edges of emotion grow blunt - so we can press against them with little fear to our paper thin skin. In their time smoothed surfaces we see a little of ourselves, but mostly just them.

‘you pass through boredom into fascination’ Adam Phillips

Writing becomes universal and somehow more profound when read at a time when the acute meaning has dimmed. Like large works of impressionist art. Up close we see blocks and dots of colour and paint - take a few steps back and a masterpiece greets us.

As I retreat from this room I look at the far wall, and ask… is it leaving me - am I leaving it - or is the parting mutual?

paper poses

This island melts to soft focus - my eyes threaten to drip from their sockets to the page. Thought shifts to photographs. To faces frozen in time - expressions locked for lifetimes to come. People inkpinned to paper.

Some of my favourite photos of my favoured friends are those they probably like the least. Images where their mind has left the building that is the body. Vacant possession. They are sham castles - all flashy front but nothing to inhabit.

Their eyes are empty of meaning, thought, life. They have been bled dry by madness, misery, or distracting thought. They hold two dimensional poses - as if they painted themselves that way that day because they knew the only thing they would be fit for is a quick dip in a chemical bath and an early burial between the pages of an unread book.

right

left

down

up

angels with silver wings

Its not for me to mourn something I never knew, to cry over someone I never lost. I don’t want to pick over the ashes of the remains of the day. Its not right for me to keep my silence for two minutes just because the papers tell me to. Silence cant stitch together the holes we tear in time.

I don’t want to be told when to remember any more than when to forget. Within my mind all knowledge is mine - to play, rewind and erase as I see fit. I don’t want mourning marked on my calendar like the chalk lines around cartoon murder victims.

I want to be surprised. I want to be scared. I want to be caught unawares and grabbed by the throat by a memory best left forgotten. I want to be made to remember something that didn’t happen rather than something that did.

On Sunday 4th June memory paid an unexpected visit. A chance call to remind me that she guides my hand more than I care to admit. A year to the day and she called my name - turned my head from rain to flame. She is the messenger - the bright burning angel who speaks for the silenced. Singing songs of echoes of echoes of echoes.

And to take myself back to where I began, I tell you that what she told me is not yours to know. But I’ll give you a precious fragment of what she gave me, that -

The truest promises are those that never come to pass.

On Sunday 4th June, in a place not made for your eyes I wrote -

‘This is a blank space. A series of backspaces to erase what was previously laid. To pick it up in its delicate entirety - and carry it to another place, another day.’

This is that place. And today is that day.

I pad through the dark

You are the bonfire burning four or more gardens away. I never left the house but I’m sure I lit the fire. Sleepwalking with nothing on my feet but a spark between my teeth. Sleepwalking sweet pyromaniac dreams. I whispered you into ignition.

Embers flutter through the air. Black moths of memories lost. Twisting like discarded letters - spelling out the secrets we tried to burn. I wait and watch as they fall to where I lay. To where I came to rest at last. Ever grey on white skin. Fading into my pores - they spell your name.