Rear Window

Well, I can't even call this morning. It's lunchtime, and I've been at my computer for almost three hours. I've reached stalemate with the story I'm writing, which always happens around about now. If I'm not careful, I'll be propelled into a round of meaningless www.nonsense, and then it'll be five o clock before I've blinked an eye.

     
And I need to be at least halfway through my story by the time it's dark tonight, and the man with the black hair in the posh flat across the road has closed his laptop lid on the day and left the room.

I'm somewhat annoyed with him right now. From time to time I waft about my flat, eat lunch, sift through papers and not once does he look up and acknowledge me. He's been working at that window for a year now, and nothing stirs him from his work. I figured I'd strip naked in front of my window to see what happens, but I've worked out he's probably gay (he lives with a man who irons a lot... flimsy evidence, I know).

     
I feel comforted when my man across the road is at his laptop working. Sometimes he talks on the phone, but mainly, he perches over it, the screen lighting up his glasses. I'd like to think that perhaps he's writing a novel or a screenplay (hey, we could swap stories!), or is on his way to becoming the next Danny Boyle (he looks a bit like him).

     
But I strongly suspect it's work of a rather more mundane nature he's doing. After all, he doesn't strut and fret his living room, hand to forehead, looking like inspiration's just about to strike. He doesn't toss page after page to the floor, lips quivering with rage. No, he sits and he types and he stares at his screen. He doesn't even drink tea or coffee (I never see a mug beside him).

     
Actually, he probably IS a writer. Because that's what proper writers do nowadays. In olden times, it was okay to spend your life speeded up to the eyeballs, reeling about your flat (if you had a flat), trying to find your way to your cup of coffee through the heaps of papers mounting up on the threadbare carpet, waiting for mystical vision (or the drugs) to kick in. Nowadays, it's work, work, work; tap tap tapping into your Imac, sticking to routines, deadlines, structuring your sentences. No one roll of paper and a line of charlie for my man across the road. He's got it sussed. Hard work and a clear head gets you there.

     
I'm going to make another cuppa. Wait for the hot water to turn to brown syrup in my teapot. That's how I'll get through today. Mine isn't always a healthy life, I have to admit, and I don't think I can even excuse it by calling myself a writer yet without sounding hopelessly pompous.

    
 But are we so different: him with his Habitat lampshade, me in my stupid furry slippers? I bet he's too posh even for Waitrose, and that he never cries at Eastenders. But if my man over the road can do it, then so can I, even if he never lifts his head and look at me. What would I do if he did? Would I really wave? Hold up a piece of A4 with a crayoned thumb upturned on it? Show him my new hula-hooping trick? Maybe. Or perhaps I'd scuttle off to the kitchen, caught out, and throw peas at my bin for a while.

     
It's a funny thing, this writing business, and we all need allies, don't we? Even if they are too preoccupied or shortsighted to acknowledge our genius, or just our fantastic leopard skin dressing gown.

...

I post this brilliant video in recollection of what was one of the only notable thing to ever happen at The Brit Awards (perhaps apart from the KLF machine-gunning the audience)... Thankyou Jarvis Cocker. Click the side bar, top video if this one doesn't work

Play from your Fucking Heart

Why Won't You Release Me?

I'll say one word. Duffy. Now some of you will have heard of her, and some of you won't. If you listen to the charts, watch TV, I'm sure you will have. She's been a scourge in my brain now for some time, and I'd hoped I could make her go away like a bad dream, but I see she's up for nomination at the Brits and no doubt she'll sweep the board there.

     
Duffy. She's Amy Winehouse with the crack sucked out of her. She's Otis Redding with a razor blade taken to his vocal cords. I hate her with a vengeance and yet, whenever she releases another godawful single, feel compelled to listen. It's like picking a scab.

I've nothing against her personally. I reckon she's quite a decent person. And she's talented in her own way. But what I do have something against is the 'creation' of her into some kind of banal icon; and I have a lot against those bloated media suits who made her the latest 'big thing", dragging her caterwauling onto Later With Jools Holland to infect my ears.

     
It's soul music at its lowest - all soul drained from its core. People love her songs because they're catchy, like a bumblebee in the brain. If you've never listened to many of the soul greats, you might even think they're the real thing. But they aren't.

     
I perhaps should have some loyalty because she's Welsh. But I'm afraid it doesn't stretch as far as this tiny singing puppet with a voice like a cheese grater. Am I cruel? Listen to Mercy, her greatest hit, and you'll be begging for it by the end.

     
I've posted a video of hers at the end of this post (click twice). You could easily mistake it for that Halifax advert. She cavorts about without any sexiness whatsoever as suited men hurl themselves about an airless studio. God save us all. What was that bloke out of Suede thinking when he announced her his protege?

     
Maybe none of this makes sense to you. After all, her songs are catchy, they have a habit of making you tap your foot, even if you don't want to, and she is kinda cute, isn't she, in a harmless kind of way, even if her face looks about fifty when she's actually only twenty-two.

     
But it's all that makes me weep about the music business; all that makes me lose faith in people's ability to detect a naff line when they're being fed one. When they decided to make her a star, the whole of the music business shifted in line behind her and opened their wallets. She's perfect fodder - a little hint of depth in her lyrics, a little harking back to the Sixties, all put together in a nice sanitised package. This funny little Welsh girl became a star. And now she's inflicted on me every time I turn on the radio. Once again, banality reigns supreme.

Modern Life Is Rubbish

Two things recently have made me realise I am getting older. When watching the corny What Women Want with Mel Gibson in it (the fact that I was watching it in the first place is somewhat unusual), I saw him and actually thought mmm, you're quite fit.

     
I have also started listening to Annie Lennox. Now she is someone who's always bored me shitless with her 'meaningful' lyrics, her strutting 'strong woman' performances, her stupid bald head. Worse than Sinead O Connor, worse than Skunk Anansie, she led the troops of the skin-headed, mouthy, empowered yet surprisingly bland female, with no trace of irony in her lyrics or persona. She stood for everything I hated about pop music.

     
So it seems, despite my best intentions, I am descending into middle age. Mel Gibson always turned my stomach with his hairy chest, and in the Eighties, his horrible mullet hairdo. Only housewives ever fancied Mel.

     
However in the wake of Iggy Pop gyrating about our billboards and TV screens selling insurance (how could he do that, why would he do that?), I realise that even I must embrace the middle road from time to time. I hit rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I found myself crying to No More I Love Yous and had to admit - Annie Lennox is a fine songwriter.

     
So if John Lydon sells butter, and Iggy Pop sells insurance, and most other pop stars who haven't had to perch upon the pedestal of 'anarchy' 'rebellion' 'integrity' or 'debauchery' are busy selling their small souls, and further, I am listening to Annie Lennox, what is left of the rock n roll dream? Of poetic excess? Can you imagine Bukowski selling tinned pheasant in Harrods, or Rimbaud down at The Groucho Club spouting off about his latest line in aftershave?

     
I have little hope left for our culture, for myself. But when finally I see Patti Smith endorsing Macdonalds, or Morrissey advertising the latest IPod, then I truly will give up the ghost, and write modern culture off as the mediocre rubbish it so dangerously comes close to being.

ps Someone just pointed out to me that the only reason I fancy Mel Gibson in What Women Want is because he is cross-dressing. Hurray! My old identity is intact. I feel better.

Woodvale Cemetery

There are still some secrets about Brighton I'm only just being let into. After ten years since my arrival into this strange and eccentric city by the sea, this greatly excites me.

     
Today, I learned about Count Eric Von Stenbock, "Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men," as WB Yeats called him. He was also remembered with affection by Aubrey Beardsley, Symons and Lionel Johnson (although they thought his poetry was drivel). Many of his verses concerned his doomed love for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16.

     
He was alcoholic, Catholic, Buddhist, homosexual and overall degenerate, and most interestingly of all, he lived in Withdean. Mental illness dogged him throughout his Thirties, but, since he was a Count, when escorted (as he was at all times) by a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll, everybody had to greet them with according courtesy.

In Eric's mind, the doll was his son, and he referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it was brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health.

On April 26th 1895, on the same day that Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his trial, Eric died. Drunk and furious, he'd tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate. He was buried in Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged), his heart removed and sent to Estonia, where it resides in a church at Kusal.

     
At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.

     
Oh Eric, I applaud you. There's nothing quite like being a rotten poet with a taste for life-size dolls and the Divine.

     
I love Brighton cemetery. It's been far too long since I was last amongst the tangled ivy, my trainers squishing in the mud. Angels rear up at every turn, the lettering on headstones turning to rust in the dew.

Today, I peered into the small, simple plot where the Sisters of Mercy (nuns, not goth band) lay crammed in, heads to tiny feet. I also saw (thanks again to my knowledgeable friend) the resting place of the first man ever to spot Antarctica.

      
Tonight, I am very happy in my polka dot dressing gown and leopard skin slippers, listening to Debussy and generally avoiding starting my new story about a man who is perpetually late for everything. Mmm.

     
There's nothing like the dead to raise the spirits!

Boogie Woogie

So I’ve just looked here and noticed that my last post was the end of September. Oops.

     
I'm hungover today and haven't managed to do anything constructive yet apart from a few hundred words of writing homework. Mainly, I've been tidying up my recently returned computer, hula-hooping and watching repeats of Project Runway on TV Shack. 

     
I'm surprised how rubbish I feel today, when I wasn’t even particularly drunk by the end of last night. It seems to be that the less often I drink, the worse I feel the next day when I do.

     
Last night was partly a lot of fun, and partly a bit underwhelming. One highlight was the talented stripper, Leanna. She looked fantastic and did remarkable things with a bottle of vodka and some red stack heels. The low point, however, was definitely the Rick Astley impersonator. Never Gonna Give You Up. Oh, I wish he had, drag king or no. I felt like I'd regressed twenty years, and was now standing in a real, live, gay cliche.

     
Another highlight was a good bit of disco dancing. I get tired of anti-disco snobs – you know the sort – if it’s not The Pixies or an ‘upbeat’ Smog number, they think it’s tacky. If anything progresses to Chic or, god forbid, Sister Sledge, they’re out the door. To me, disco, even some tacky disco, is such a pure expression of emotion in music – hands in the air, strut your stuff kind of joy.

     
They played one of my favorite disco numbers, Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara. I still remember dancing to it in a hotel disco in Mombassa, aged five, thinking I looked like one of the glamorous, raven-haired women from the band (despite the cropped hair, Clarks sandals).

     
College is good – very good. It's all the things I thought it'd be - challenging, intimidating, stressful, tiring, annoying and overwhelming, and I have to say, I'm greatly relieved.

     
Before I go, I have to say last night's dancing was nothing in comparison to what these cool cats are doing. Kids today could learn a thing or two. Yes, sir.

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday morning: back home

I sit up in bed on a cold autumn morning, and I can see that the sun is shining, the clouds are moving. This is the first morning in a couple of weeks that I've woken up feeling even vaguely like a human being, with a still beating heart, and perhaps even a future and a purpose. It's a feeble flicker of it, but it's there.

Mum has stabilised, at least for now. The doctors still aren't sure that it was definitely another stroke or whether it was a fit that made her lose consciousness like that and her breathing so laboured. As usual, it's a deathly mystery. And I guess that means, after preparing for the end, once again, after going through all that trauma, we're back to where we've been for the last two years. Waiting.

So when next week comes, I'll be winging my way back to Brighton. Sunny, happy Brighton. Home of the creative and free-spirited. It sticks in my throat like too-sweet candy.

I'd like to run away from Brighton, up sticks and sod off to London, where my course begins next week. But I know that won't happen, and that instead, it's the swallowing of reality of life in Brighton for now, of waiting for things to change.

I stare into my crystal ball and don't like what stares back. I remember the forces around me that are good, the ones who care. I see the tree outside my window is still standing, waving its branches at me. It is solid and still growing.

Speechless

This morning, as I inhaled a cloud of pain and breathed it out again and said No, I will change my life, I will not let the cloaks of recent events take me down, and I rang the electricity board, and I unpacked my new mini laptop and prepared for the launderette, I got a phone call. It was the phone call. The one I’ve waited for two years. Perhaps.

     
Mum has been rushed into hospital again today, this time with breathing difficulties. But she went to sleep and didn’t come out of that, and now we’re all playing the waiting game again to see if it’s another stroke, the one that’ll finally take her, if she’s finally able to swim to freedom, away from tubes and machines and the same view of squirrels and daffodils from her bedroom window.

     
Today, for the first time in my life, I lost the power of speech. I'm a good communicator. But today, my brain shut itself down, and the world span backwards, and my mouth no longer said the words I wanted to say. I slurred my way through this afternoon, this evening, a personality I no longer recognised, in a world all too familiar. That blurry world. Where walking forward feels like going backwards, where I blink an eye and am filled with terror. Where I suddenly notice the moonlit sky or the glassy sea-water and I feel like heaven is exploding right inside of me.

     
I am used to being split open. I even get accustomed to it even, and find joy in what I discover inside - the hidden jewels, the rapture of knowing what really matters in this life, behind the masks and the craving, the need and the games. I can hold it in my hands for an instant and know it’s worth everything.

     
As I cycled slow as a snail towards the Meeting Place today, I saw a little girl with her dad on Hove lawns, just learning to walk. She turned as she marched with wobbling legs away from her father, her face lit with an incredible radiance - sheer exhilaration, unadulterated joy coming into being. It's hard to accept, but true nevertheless, that what lies behind that little girl’s smile is the same as what lies behind my Mum’s closed eyelids, and what will take her, if not now, sometime soon, away from me forever.

     
What a magnificent beauty of a terror for us all to live with. It makes me want to love all the harder, dance all the more fiercely, hold what’s precious in the palm of my hand and never malign it. Then it makes me want to crawl under a bush and stay there forever. We are idiots, and that makes us all the more human. We throw away the best things in life and usually we learn the hard way.

     
I hope I'm learning. One day I will finally no longer call myself a victim. One day, maybe tomorrow, I will reach out and see all this is my making, not my breaking. And that forgiveness is always, always, already there, at every turn.

An Autumn Morning

I woke up too early, after little sleep, to the smell of sea salt coming through my open window. I stirred, felt my skin against the sheet and a small stab of wonder in my belly. It surprised me to find some joy on this too early a morning, when life hasn’t been too kind and I really should still be fast asleep.

     Maybe it was something to do with the weather, or feeling the sea so close at hand. This relentless shitty weather doesn’t bother me much. In fact, it is a relief to see summer slip away without any final words to say to light up these September days.

     Summer is so obvious. It wears its plumes like a peacock. It is without subtlety, without irony. I end up feeling so much pressure to live in summer – to squeeze its juice out to the last drop, to run in its sunshine, to muck about under its blue skies. These last months have largely been such a washout, that’s rarely been possible. It’s been cloud and relentless wind, with the odd peep of sunshine in between. So I’ve been let off the hook, and I felt this morning, as I have on many mornings these last few months, happy that I no longer have to try and be happy.

     I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t like grey skies, or damp cold, or that wind off the sea that bites into my neck and makes my face scrunch up. But I often welcome the streaks of wet coming down the windows of my flat, the sound of car wheels rolling through puddles, and the calm dripping from the gutters after the rain has died down.

     One thing I do feel a little cheated of, however, is autumn. Summer being a washout is one thing, but autumn? Autumn is for shifting colour, for the last flood of warmth on skin, for picking berries and getting muddy trainers before curling up to watch the sky turn first amber, then red, then pink from my living-room window. It’s not meant to be just a continuation of drizzle - non-descript and apathetic, each day the same as the last, uniformly wading into winter. That’s simply underhand.

     I'm not looking forward to this winter. I really don't know how it'll be. Although there is at least one major new beginning for me, I feel people I love dissolving around me like water into mud. Consequently, I feel very alone, only myself to rely on. Someone told me recently that life is giving me a chance to dig out the weeds, the old dead stuff, so that new plants and flowers can bloom in the spring. To let go in order to bring in the new.

     But if I look out at my garden, it seems pretty empty and forlorn, and spring feels a long way away. Maybe that’s what all this rain is good for. To make it all grow again. I hope so. Bring it on. I don't want to make anymore mistakes.

White Flowers

I went out and bought white flowers. Brought them back. Sat them on my table. I resolved: I no longer want to live in somewhere with an air of mild depression, where the carpet crinkles under my foot, constantly shedding anxiety. I said: I have built a pretty fortress, a sanctuary of steel and concrete, where I can rest away from harm, but where I am always alone.

     
These flowers make me happy. They honour the whiteness lighting up parts of my mind. They cherish the rain pounding inside me, and open like my springtime would, if only I’d let it.

     
I’ve been away from home a long time. This soup is thick and I am hungry. I'm craving sustenance, a liquid to keep me alive. My body is thinning, as my mother's thins, and will thin, one day, to nothing. That’s the day I give her back – my earth, my body, my shrine, my home. But I cannot wait until that time to start the letting go, for my own body to separate from hers, to find itself among the brambles, slightly cut, with the rain beating on it again. 

I came from her body, it is no surprise that hers became entangled in mine, or that it becomes me who is lying there in that nursing home bed, flaccid and paling into the vacuumed air. It is no surprise I don’t want to let her body go, or that I compare my own flesh to hers every day – see my arms fattening as hers do, lines appearing in my skin as hers wrinkle, my thighs plumper as hers slacken under sheets.

     
When her body transformed the first time, from healthy and normal to deadened and useless, I loved it even more. As the metal of the hoist came nearer, we let out nervous laughter, held the bar steady, trying to make sure she didn’t fall any more times than she already had. We all did things that broke us and made us bigger by the breaking.

     
But it isn’t me in a hospital bed, in a calm and shallow nursing home, waiting to die. I'm not yet 72 years old. I've not yet been a mother. I touched her body like it was a precious sculpture when I was little, when she was so beautiful. And I see no difference now - still beautiful, still wandering in her mind, inaccessible, all-giving. But the earth is taking her, and I won’t let it take me with it. My time isn’t done.

     
My body is abundant with grief. It yelps up my spine and faces me in the morning. It's a beautiful and peaceful thing, my body, when I accept it. At night, I dream I’m covered in mud, and that starlight is eating me – creeping up my toes, into my creases, nestling through my hair like sand over moon-stained beaches. Backed onto a cliff edge, I throw back my arms and laugh. I give my mother back to all that made her. My own child will survive if I learn how to look after her.

     
My friend said to me Go back to that place, back to where you felt safe. So I walked up the drive to the Poor Clare's Convent and knocked on the door. The windows streamed light through them, the benches were hard and I could hear the nuns singing for Jesus.

     
This is the place where saints surround me and I can, for once, look my mother in the face and say It’s okay, Mum, and mean it. Cause I saw another face in hers. Taking my coat back out into the world, I am not the same person as when I entered.

     
The white flowers live for all of us. They bloom, shrivel; they give off scent while they’re still living. We can make this life more beautiful. Let’s do that. Let’s make it better than it could be. Make it bloom.

Hi, How are you?": Daniel Johnston

I'm good, if not somewhat vulnerable this morning. I was in London last night to see one of my biggest musical heroes of recent times, Daniel Johnston. It was a bit of a dream line-up, with support from Jad Fair, Mark Linkhous (of Sparklehorse), Scout Niblett and James Mcnew (of Yo La Tengo).
   
After short sets of their own, and Daniel coming on briefly for two songs alone, they all all took to the stage together, like a bunch of escapees from the nearest psychiatric ward. Then we were blasted with pure fucked-up rock n roll bliss for the next hour.
   
To see Daniel Johnston still alive and standing in itself is quite an experience after all he's been through with his health/mental health. But the force of his songs was punched through a hundred times over by his live performance.
   
This man's beauty is palpable - it shook with his hands as they struggled to hold the microphone, rolling with his huge belly over his jogging bottoms. His set was sublime, twisted, anarchic, sensitive, tender and vitriolic, and his 'backing' band smiled at his lyrics as they played along.
   
I hope there are many years ahead of Daniel Johnston in which to write and play. I'd post this directly on here, but it's not working for some reason, so instead, here's a link to one of my favourite D.J. songs.

Buddhafield Festival

It's been sweltering all day today. Now, the sun's finally gone down, but a heat remains, sinking into the walls of my building, blowing warm through my open windows, caressing my back.
   
I'm home after almost a week away at Buddhafield Festival. I've returned to the computer several times today trying to begin to describe my time there, and each time I've gone away silent, empty-handed, a Zen stick pounding on my brain.
   
Perhaps there's just too much to say, or maybe it won't let itself be verbalised, this shift in myself that's turned me inside out. All I know is that my soul, my heart, has returned, and I see quite clearly things that before stood submerged in damp fog.
   
The heat from my body is rising like an aura. Outside, I hear male voices. There's a gentle breeze on my skin. I wonder where I'm heading with all this life inside me - rustling this way, snuffling that. I can only follow my nose.
   
 And right now, I find that I am glimmering with the waves, I'm out with the fishing-nets and seaweed. I'm lost, but this time, I don't mind. I welcome the tangles of my life that wrap like balls of wool inside Grandma's knitting bag. Summer finally has arrived.

...

Firday, I mean Friday

So I survived a somewhat crazy weekend in London. Loosely speaking, it involved London Pride, lots of dancing and sweating too much, Neil Young and a psychopath threatening to throw me out of a car. Nice. And I didn't even have a cup of tea all weekend to steady my nerves. Now I'm back in Brighton dossing about since work has hit a sudden drought.

can't really enjoy this time off as I'm panicking that I won't be able to save enough to pay for the MA in September. I'm also panicking that I have to move out of my flat in September. And that the elusive book I am meant to be writing will remain forever so. A nice trio of anxiety to keep me going on this warm summer's eve.

So, to take my mind off that, and to distract me from getting a real life, here's some of what's been interesting me this week.

If you haven't yet seen DiG! , the film by Ondi Timoner, do so. It's been out for quite a while now, and this is the second time I've seen it. The meteoric rise of impossibly cheek-boned Courtney Taylor and his Dandy Warhols, whilst the arguably more talented Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre fuck it up over and over again is addictive and moving to watch.

I also watched the Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa: Valley of The Wind, an epic and, at times, psychedelic tale of warfare between humans and insects, punctuated (somewhat distractingly) by the young heroine's tiny skirt blowing up about every 3 seconds. Is it wrong, I wonder, to ogle a cartoon character, especially one of dubious age?





Apparently it's a cult film now, and it's definitely worth a watch. The graphics are less slick than the later Ghibli films, which adds to the charm, and the story is just as far-out and eccentric as the best of them.

Music-wise, I've been back listening to The Seeds again. I used to be mad on them when I was about 14, but the obsession didn't endure the shift from vinyl to cd, and so they've been out of my life for some time now. They're pure magic.

Friday night

My street's ablaze with colour at the moment. The hydrangeas two doors up have sat, crisp and mottled for months, like old maids perched by the side of the road. Now, suddenly they've erupted into pink, purple and blue life, turning into something resembling a mild acid trip.

Seeing hydrangeas seems to short circuit something in my brain, sending me into a peculiar kind of rapture. They remind me of my Grandma more than any other flower. One glimpse of them takes me back to her garden again, and to her, brown skirt to her knees, hair firmly in place, picking a handful of peas or mint. There she appears, sturdy and loving, in her small, perfectly kept patch of green at Southview.

I'm not great at understanding the anatomy of things, at labels and the naming of parts, at decipherable wholes and the bits that make them up. I generally have a much more impressionistic experience of life. So it took me almost 34 years to learn that the flower I felt so ardently about was even called a hydrangea.

But I knew how those flowers made me feel; I knew the quality of the air in those summer days when I played on the wall. Every single day for the last two years I've touched the hydrangeas growing on my street, lightly, with my fingertips, as I've passed. And been immediately back there again.

Tonight, I walked home on the other side of the street, feeling like the wind was blowing me down towards the sea, pushing me out into a night where seagulls gather in a sky lit by boats and stars. And I wondered about all the flowers on my street; I wondered how come they are not made of blood, as we are, but of something different. Because our lives are not so dissimilar, and our beginning and our end all converge at the same place.

A rose feels the force of nature in its petals, trembles with the weight of the rain. It stretches its stalk away from the muddy earth, towards the sunlight. Tonight, I imagined every flower, every leaf trickling sap. I imagined salt water falling down from each one, red blood spotting the pavement, and a curious wet emerging from in between each petal. I imagined mucus-streaked stalks. The liquid of life washing across flowerbeds, over walls, out onto the empty grey pavement.

On a night like tonight, how I wished they would, how I wished the flowers would do their blood-letting and their weeping, their loving and mating, and I could walk through their rivers of their living and growth and disintegration.

Perhaps then I could finally see manifested the desire that's pumping through the veins of this world, through me, seeping out through my pores, winding through the channels of my mind, enveloping my tendons.

Otherwise, that which fuels everything that we do, the very axis on which this planet turns, remains as invisible as the air we suck on. We can almost pretend it doesn't exist, and that the world can be containable, reasonable somehow.

But I can feel it in the wind that's rattling my windows, in the heat of this evening, in the hum of night-time. It's everywhere I look. And it's in my heart, tinkling like that empty beer can rolling past my window. I am trembling with the force of what makes me, and will break me every time.

New petals generate, old ones die, and I proliferate. And if you think I'm being over the top, if you doubt it, look out of the corner of your eye and you'll spot it, always, sitting there in your living-room, drinking your coffee, planning your next move.

I don't know what to do with all this desire inside. It's as strong as that sea out there and as fragile as those petals. Me. Silly me. Messy, bloody, somehow growing. The world never did come to terms with itself, did it? And nor, yet, have I.

Homecoming

Monday is my new writing day, and naturally, I've spent the morning making pea soup, washing-up, re-vamping blogs, going to the doctors... anything but writing. Even writing here is a bit of a cheat, but I'm telling myself it's a way of easing myself into the avalanche of imagery that's waiting in the backseat of my mind, and that on some level, I do not want to face.

     
Often I feel caught somewhere in between childhood and here. There are days when a rose's scent or the dark green of a climbing ivy is enough to make me ten years old again. When  sunlight on glass makes time spin. As I grow older this seems to happen more and more. As I reach an age where there's no doubt that I'm clear of the boundary of youth, I increasingly feel  as I did before I even knew what puberty was.

     
I want to go home. Of course, I know that home doesn't exist any more - the home I remember is now occupied by strangers, a couple of kids, cars I don't recognise and pets I don't know about. It is re-vamped and re-constituted; lawns mown in straight lines, fences properly put up, the house walls now a yellowy white. Of course I hate it, this sanitisation of our rambling family home. The pruning of its madness. The killing of its dreams.

     
But more than this, I realise that where I want to return to exists mainly in those same parts of my brain that it always did, not simply out there, with the grass and the beetles, but in the home of my imagination. When I remember childhood, it isn't the real conversations I did or didn't have with my mother. It isn't how I felt when my father walked in a room. It's in how I hid under the cherry tree to feel protected. It's how I ran in a frail white nightie, rain on my reddening cheeks - around clumps of lavender, over wilting delphiniums. It's the crumbling grey brick of the convent wall as I crept unseen against it, chalk on my t-shirt, shielded by dark hedges. It's sunshine through poplar branches. The rooks lining up on a cold winter's evening. It's the crackle of crusty leaves around my ankles as I ran up our drive from school. It's the call of the wood pigeon, ever-etched in my synapses. When I awake to the memory of back then, it's a garden I always go back to.

     
And this garden is as alive for me today as it was back then. It's an Eden in my eyes. I feel its leaves against my skin, the grass between my fingers, the chill of evening air drawing in. Growing up took me out of the garden and into the world, it eroded the pathways leading back to the home of being. As an adult, I know I can't quite see what I saw in the veins of a dying leaf when I was nine years old. How that leaf glowed with it's own essence before me as I turned it over in my palm.

     
But writing takes me home. Perhaps that's why I do it. It takes me by the hand and leads me back through the shrubbery, up the winding tracks, over the wall to a vegetable patch and to toes peeping from under rough brown cloth; to next door at the Convent, where the nuns are singing, blue eyes to heaven. My hand is small, my fingers long; my shoes are wet and muddy. I rub my eyes and I can see again.

The U-Turn

I'm a little hyper tonight. It's taken two episodes of The L-Word to calm me down. Given things at the moment, that isn't perhaps the most obvious TV choice for calming down to. However, last night I watched Kes in an attempt to cheer myself up. Who watches Ken Loach films to cheer themselves up? Weirdly though, despite the squashed hawk and the coal-mines (or in fact, because of them), it worked.

     
I'm blabbering. I think it's because over these last few weeks, and particularly over these last days, my life seems to have done an unusual u-turn. Subsequently, the whole shape looks different.

     
The most recent of these is the unconditional offer I received from Kingston University to do an MA in writing. Suddenly, I have a direction and something to work for, as I hoped - and a structure to hold it all together.

     
In addition to that is the decision I've made to write a book, and finally, absolute clarity over what that book must be about. These two things alone have turned life a very different colour the last couple of days, and the wheel of myself is, yet again, turning.

     
These last weeks have been as hard as a fist to the stomach; I've lost half a stone in tears alone. I've been as confused as a dancing bear under bright lights. I'm sad and I'm lonely, the empty spaces stretching out where once someone filled them with love and with tenderness.

     
But, as is often the way in life, little chinks of light appear, unwittingly from the corners of the room. A spray of lilies breaks out into bloom without me noticing. Somewhere, a blackbird is always singing. What I mean to say is: the unexpectedly brilliant has occurred.

     
And so I catch small smiles turning up my mouth, and a new feeling in my chest, very different from the one that's been nestling there for a while.

God Seizures

I'm back from the doctors. I think I can trust him. He's taking my 'funny turns' seriously, which is more than the neurologist did, refusing to dismiss them as panic attacks. He is referring me back to both cardiologist and neurologist. He's not convinced it's heart related though, but that it's neurological-based, which is what I've always felt.

He tentatively said he thought it might be migraine. I'm not that convinced, but after having ten 'turns' in one day yesterday, I'm willing to consider anything. When I read up on various diagnoses, however, it is still simple partial epilepsy that fits my own symptoms most exactly.

Whilst I was looking into it on the Web, I came across this, The God Helmet.

This is so far out, and the implications so unsettling. As someone with a history of both strange or 'religious' experiences and also fit-type experiences (I think I came virtually convulsing out of the womb), there's something in it that doesn't entirely shock me. There's something very 1950's Sci-Fi about it, but the prospect of 'mystical' experiences (and hence a lot of the basis of religion) being neurologically locatable, is intriguing.

It's no surprise that when Richard Dawkins underwent one of these experiences, he felt nothing (I wonder what would make him feel something). As someone who describes spirituality as a 'virus of the mind' and faith as a maligning disease, I mistrust the obvious blind-spots of his scientific materialism.

One thing I do begrudgingly agree with Dawkins on, however, is how faith and 'spirit' can make religion impervious to criticism or rigorous analysis from either outside or within. Religion has such a massive vested interest.

When I think about Roman Catholicism (which contains much beauty in some of its ideals), it has such a huge investment in ideas of humanity, womanhood, manhood, family, birth and death and ultimately 'the soul', that anything challenging this investment is quickly pulled apart and conceived as heretic, aberrant, or 'other'. Or else it turns a blind-eye.

For as long as Catholicism has existed, homosexuality has been on its black-list. To validate it would be to throw all that the Church believes in as 'God's will' up in smoke (or so Church authority would have us believe). It demolishes the Church's position on marriage, conception and the family. Sexual union is meant to be between a man and a woman, married and in a state of grace and love, and for the purposes of conceiving a child. How can that underlying premise of Catholicism stand true if it in any way validates homosexuality?

So Catholicism makes its bitter choices, time and again. I often wonder what happens when someone is actually intersex, having both sets of female/male physical attributes/genitals?


There are two choices - preserve the authority of that religion and cast out those who don't fit in or embrace the differences and feel religious edict unravel.

I don't like the alternative - science-based, materialism-based, consumer-based, psychological-based hard conviction. It's not that different from a religious one.

I've been looking for a God for a very long time. One that's free from its own ideology, that is unmediated 'spirit' or reality, that doesn't need 'belief' in a whole set of proscribed values or rules. I either haven't found it yet, or if I have, I don't know it yet.

It's ridiculous to denounce God. We all have religion, even old Dawkins, whether its science, consumerism, politics, self-help, romance, drug-taking, music, poetry, activism, money, drink, solitude, chaos, death, family, work, self-harm... It's impossible to live in a God-less society.

But that is a God of surety, of belief. What about the more mysterious one, the one the saints talk of, and people like Dawkins despise? The one we can't capture? That defies description, is beyond conception? The one I'm always looking for, that always escapes, or isn't really 'there' to seek in the first place.

I touched it as a 'Buddhist'. I touch it reading both Derrida and St Francis.I touch it with poetry, music, and also sometimes when I look in my Mum's eyes. That's the only faith I know. And it's intermittent, inconclusive, and very scary.