Timely and appropriate fortune cookie
Eyeshadow
Look! look! the sun is out!!
Well, ok, that’s a shadow. But it is proof of the existence of the sun, no?
We were fantastically lucky. I booked our trip to the London Eye more than a week ago because lovely Z from Hungary is staying and it turned out to be the only sunny day in living memory.
There are more in this set of pictures on flickr.
Another lovely summer's day in London
Another lovely summer’s day in London
Weekend
I went to stay with Tall Girl at the weekend. She is indeed very tall.
It was lovely. We made the most both of an unusual state of not-rain and the delights of Hebden Bridge. Women appear to learn their role in life particularly early in Yorkshire.
The absence of rain continued in the afternoon allowing a longer and less sploshy walk than had been possible in the sluicing downpour of Friday.
We came across this family shearing operation – father with hand clippers, daughter in charge of the shorn fleeces, son bringing refreshments, dog peering fixedly through the bars of the make-shift fold, mother directing operations. “Don’t get his bum in” she said when I asked if I could take a picture. Ooops. Too late.
The circuit closed again back by the water, one of the many streams which cut through steep-sided valleys down to join Hebden Water which in turn joins the River Calder and on to the River Aire, the River Humber and on to the sea. Brown and frothy it rushed over the stones but caught in the circle of an abandoned mill pond its stillness reflected the gold of the late sun and the extraordinary, almost oppressive, green of tree and moss and fern.
That evening we went to see Gambian kora player Seikou Susso with his band at the Trades Club in town.
Check out the drummer in the middle there who seemed to spend the whole time peering anxiously at the kora and bass players in turn. The first half was good, but after the break they appeared to play the same songs all over again and Susso’s strange smile and habit of using the phrase “tickety boo” made the experience disturbingly surreal. However I’d become fascinated with the face of the fourth member of the band who played the djembe drum and spent most of my time trying to get a decent shot of him.
It’s lovely seeing an old friend. Like a home-from-home. And Maizy had a great time too.
The canal
A feral lily. Going away for the weekend tomorrow today (goodness it’s late), may be off line.
After the storm
The crap gets washed into the dips depressions.
(The camera on my phone is a higher quality and has far more options than my first digital camera.)
Waiting…
…secondborn (right) and his best friend in the whole world… karate grading…
they made it! red belts both!
Pearl River pigeon
My very dear friend feng37 is translating poetry again as he watches the bodies floating down the river.
So he translates poems from Chinese, an act of love and an act of homage to the writers, I’m guessing, and makes art. There’s so much happening in this one, between the characters and the paper and the river. I’ve put it all down here but go there to see it alongside the Chinese. And read here about the young migrant worker, Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poem this is.
Paper Tiger
She’s a tiger on paper, or a rhetorical figure of speech
From the air, she sucks bodies dry, an illusionist’s symbol
Her shelter is a scream from the ashes, as eye-piercing as the setting sun
She’s concealed in the shade from a narcissus, sunset’s gentle sigh
She opens her mouth to speak the darkest sonant in a hush, the flesh of speech
A monstrosity among tigers, from its open mouth on the paper, between its teeth passes
The bright dusk of things past, the pumping sound of recollection
But it’s too slight, the sound as faint as the bug on the tree leaf
She’s too little, the rain’s too much, her fate like the humid thunder
Bringing in from afar a barenaked dusk or dawn
Whose sheens come from the tiger’s hard, pointy bones on paper
The sound of rain falls, we drink our liquor, the rain like the liquor pours over us
The rhetoric we so adore knocks us unconscious, leaves us among the beasts on the paper
The rain left to fall outside, how much does it wash away
The shyness of my youth, sigh, a tiger that’s ceased to exist
Rinsed away by the rain, it slowly left, towards the twilightThe beast on paper, a limpid planet, I will pass through the wall and leave
The wall in the air, it comes from a rusty place
The stooped tiger, slowly and silently rises up from the paper, its iridescence
Is the shadow in a word, a phrase, a poem, where there appears another
Tiger, its masculine muscularity, lush like a treetop, gives the paper
Vigor and cool shade, from up on the paper it looks down, then rushes toward the monsoon
It wants to look you in the eyes, its iridescence, like dense rain, weaves together
The nearby night flies off in fright, its eyes a bundle of remote blue light
Its hair points toward autumn’s escape, turning ashen and white
The tiger on paper, it makes no sound, just leaves tracks worth pursuing
It is a symbol or an allegory, the trees on paper begin to whither
It holds its head way up high, standing in a dry and scraggly patch of meadow, a colorful and vivid oil painting
But you cannot see its bones and its sprint, those tiger bones more solid than steel
Crouched in the dark, on the paper, bending, stretching, gathering strength
Like an exclamation, the blade of a knife piercing flesh or thought
This near nothingness of a beast, its tyranny, fills me with a feeling of being oppressed
From the paper I breathe in the inner panic it brings, still it grows
A tail much more distinct than the trees, its eyes and forehead hidden deep in the monsoonImagine a tiger on paper suddenly jumps up, bringing with it the sound of wind
In clarity, it presses close to my skin, the rain of a shadowy autumn day drifts down
Its senses are like a woman’s intuition, stubborn and sharp
The woman in the dark, on whatever page the tiger happens to be haunting, is calculating the moonlight
More vast than the night, in the bending of some sentence, the tiger leaves
Leaves almost imperceptible signs, the woman predicts the falling and flowing of light and flesh
The tiger on paper runs, through its deep-rooted misery
Its sharp teeth are polished smooth on mutiple lusts, one tiger and one woman
Bow to each other, like two boxers sizing each other up in the ring
The lights go bright, then go out, leaving the black ink to narrate
A tiger, it shifts, in the hidden woods, the tiger on paper drifts down
The dark red blood, red like truths are, a rain of thin wires
Rusting on the paper, creeps up like a drop of ink
In the green silence, a tiger is laid to rest in the whiteness of the paper
I’ve signed up for a short course on photo-etching at the end of the year and a slightly longer course on digital image making at the beginning of next year. I want to play with pictures and get them off the screen and onto paper. And plastic. And metal. And, oh, almost anything really. It’s scratching the itch to make things. The pigeon above is a first thought.
Depilling – week two-and-a-half
There is a very annoying side effect. It’s as though, whenever I move, my brain moves rather more slowly than everything else. Think stomach-in-lift experience. But permanently, prompted by anything more than the most gentle and regal turning of the head. A cross between slightly-pissed-while-very-tired and the up and down motion you get walking on dry land after a long boat trip in rough weather.
At first I thought hey, this isn’t so bad. Not nearly as bad as the drooling catatonia of starting to take SSRIs. It’ll pass, I thought. It’s nothing, I thought.
Well it hasn’t and it isn’t and I’m getting pretty pissed off with it. Even, on occasion, sick of it. As in nauseous.
Otherwise life seems… hmm. To have a bit of a sting to it. To be complex. Annoying. Exciting. Tiring. And zesty. None of which is necessarily bad, in small amounts.
frizzyLogic 