You are a man-animal when you sleep. Your breath rustles past airways I would leap through; want to lie beside. You are heavy. Barely awake, but an instinctive arm over and around the shape of me, nustling me in. I can do all the things I always do, forget nothing, explore every side of myself, onward, onward, and something lets me breathe more deeply than ever I have; lets me submit; lets me choose to, only because of you. You ache inside with all the things you understand, and I have seen the same things, and made light of them; I widen a single eye and you release, curling up your mouth, finally understood. Didn’t you build your empire, row by row? Didn’t you burn paper money to find something more real? I was waiting, all that time, and lighting matches, too. Continue reading
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All’s well
Whenever an individual, company or organisation sends me an email which starts with ‘I hope your well’, I can’t help but have a pleasing flash of a particular image in my mind before continuing with the missive.
How kind (I think, picturing my well – a deep, narrow drop I imagine in my back garden, quietly existing on its own, darkly and damply) of them to express their concern and interest. It’s lovely to think that complete strangers have high hopes (or hopes of any kind at all) for my well. It’s sweet of them to enquire about it so urgently as to put it at the very top of the email (‘How’s your family? How’s work? Hope your well’)… But I am always left imagining what was meant to come next – what exactly is the nature/content of these hopes – since no one ever finishes the sentence. ‘I hope your well…. isn’t too cold and lonely’? ‘… isn’t too full of stones or sticks or scared of its own darkness’? ‘I hope your well is a source of nutritious, clean water that brings pride and good health to you and all who know you’?
I don’t mind that they get distracted halfway through the sentence and cut straight to a new one; I know the thought is there, of whatever type, and I appreciate it. Thanks.
Well’s well.
Cinderelly
My windowsill has been quite educational recently; every autumn and winter, colonies of ladybirds gather (I would be a very niche Cinderella, and sadly they don’t chirup at me like the birds, who echo her every intonation before riffing off her suggestions) and huddle. I hadn’t realised ladybirds hibernate, but for the last few years they’ve obviously been sending each other memos – maybe in morse code via the vibrations of their tiny feet – spreading the word that the corners of the windowframe in particular are where the party is happening. Continue reading
Sir Fluffalot; forget me not
My darling, beautiful cat king – king of the beasts and of my heart – took his last breath this afternoon, with no warning other than his gathered heap of gorgeous years. I got home yesterday evening from a few days away and he greeted me with a lazy squawk from his bed by the radiator, then relaxed in my arms as I grabbed him, plucking him from the floor as I do hundreds of times per day, him lolling and heavy breathing (the lazy way to purr), waiting for gravity to take its toll and for his stunning lump of a body to be too much; content with the up-down ride of daily love – my ears only popped this morning after yesterday’s flight; I wonder if his ever did, being so repeatedly picked up and put down.
Some say it’s silly to feel so heartbroken over the loss of a pet, but I will never say it is. Some say love for animals is not as real as love for people, but they don’t know how many memories and thoughts and moments he had buried deep into his fur, since my teenage years; how much he has been a store for everything. Continue reading
Ways to write a world
I wrote a whole world, once. Then I wrote another. Then another.
What is there to do with these worlds, afterwards? They sort of linger, lolling about in your head.
It’s a funny thing to finish a world; it’s a sudden decision to stop; simply to stop putting down the lifeline of its words or thought pattern. You walk along and hear a character’s voice, remarking on something which has amused him; speaking words which he is certain, by the way, is the kind of thing he’d say; he’s become quite witty – quite worldly, even stuck in that fertile ring of performance you formed with your sentences, that belt you put around him, that supposed perimeter defining him, a sort of spritz put about the sense of him. Continue reading
How to break up with a book (and other stories)
Finding a book you can be happy with is exactly the same as finding a lover.
First, you assume there will be serendipity. You go to all the right places; you see what covers take your fancy. The lighting is all wrong in a supermarket (and you are not swayed by ‘3 for 2’) and it’s hard to read in a club; you hope, then, for recommendation by a mutual friend. Your friends think very hard for you (they are happily committed to their books; they can’t wait to meet the book you eventually decide upon), perhaps even suggest a name or two, but the hope is short lived and your friends find your taste unpredictable.
You sift through memories, then, of all the books you’ve read in the past (some will multiply this number by seven, some will divide; there is a certain pride reserved for those who have taken years to read one single book), and think about what exactly you would like to be different (or the same), this time. Some people slip up here, and re-read previous tomes; this never ends well and if you once were together and then decided to part, each shrinking backward, then warning horns should be blaring; the readerly experience cannot un-yellow in absence alone. That is basic fact. Continue reading
I think I will fall in love with a chest of drawers.
It is all I want; drawers of varying sizes
which slide out and in again; a place to put
my little notes (my fears, my dreams, the things
which amuse me throughout a day).
A sort of posting device; quiet acceptance.
This is not a euphemism.
On showering; or how I hold the world together
Climbing the grand steps of self-labelling, there are many levels to nudge oneself through (one is both a person leading the horse on a piece of rope, and the horse being urged to proceed through each narrow gate) before one can truly feel comfortable calling oneself ‘a writer’. There is the ‘I’m not really a writer unless I have published my fourth novel and won another prize‘ brigade, and on the other side of the scale there is the horse-before-cart, self-actualising, The Secret-loving, manifestation-willing, glory-expecting camp of those who enthusiastically consider ‘being a writer’ merely to mean ‘sometimes I think about stuff and definitely will write some of it down one day; it’s gonna be good.’ Somewhere in between, there is this trusty landmark: you can’t call yourself any kind of writer until at least one person has asked you where you get your ideas from.
When some people shower in the morning, I imagine they think about the way the water feels, how they need to replace the shampoo soon, or what they’ll have for breakfast. On one level, I’m doing all this too (luxuriating in bergamot and orange homemade body scrubs, etc.; though I definitely have already had breakfast; I wake up starving each morning and have to eat immediately) but on another level, while the water runs over my body, I’m merrily and involuntarily living several other lives in my head like an absolute weirdo. Continue reading
‘So you can see me, I put make up on my face’ – Modelling Zen, or ‘Am I thick enough yet?’
Sometimes people ask me what, in my opinion, makes a good art model. I have roughly a zillion different answers to this question, depending on my mood, but one thing remains (and I think would apply to more ‘mainstream’ modelling, as well): you’ve got to be thick skinned.
This isn’t as simple as it sounds.
The obvious things are these: you have to be prepared to see yourself as an object. I go through a flurry of indecision about my beliefs on this; are you objectifying yourself by modelling? Are other people objectifying you? If so, is that OK? Continue reading
Where is my body? (Soul stations of performance)
If we’re all just here because we think we are (an opening sentence which I am efficiently assuming to sweep together in a vague, potent soup all current notions of reality as mere [/grand] manifestation of thought, quantum theory, and quarks which really only bother to flit about in well-behaved places because we watch them doing so [double-slit experiment ‘n’ stuff; outers being reflections of inners]). There’s a lot to be said for the quote which adorned various noticeboards throughout my teenage years, sometimes reincarnated and rebirthed through penned scrawls on scraps of paper, and pinned or bluetacked to my various local spaces, and still reigning high on one of the galleries of my modelling website:
‘We make ourselves up as we go’.
It’s an interesting experiment to treat life as an experiment. Continue reading
Tea & Epiphany 