a negative capability scrapbook
Word pouches clutched the heart of earth as the lead-lark plummeted. Schrödinger’s quantum addressivity exploded in its firework multiplicity. Ambiguously undulating pigeons frighted chaos and old night.
There was also liquid quintessence of christmas pudding with emperor’s ice cream.
And mushrooms.
But not necessarily in that order.
A damn fine, unboxed, cat.
And I knat.
UPDATE: And if you want some depth and sense and beauty on the matter, go here.
On the way home white paper birds flutter in the breeze near the Interplanetary Society. I turn and snap them quickly with my phone.
On the train a discarded newspaper tells me a paper plane is to be launched from space.
This morning I popped in to F’s for a quick cup of coffee after dropping Secondspawn at school. Didn’t leave til three. Oh the delicious companionable delight of a kitchen table, gourmet food rustled out of the air, T joining the coven, the dogs trying to out-fart each other beneath our feet. The talk, the laughter. The knitting. Oh yes. The knitting.
Home to deposit the out-farted dog and then down to my first ever I Knit London weekly knitting club. A panicked mail to knittingdiva Pixeldiva expressing social inadequacy and fear of strangers had elicited sympathy and a companion experienced at these events.
Oh joy. Oh happiness. The tiny shop has hanks of multicoloured yarn hanging from rails on the ceiling so full is it of juicy multi-coloured fibre joy. The smell is a faint, subtle but unmistakable perfume. Of wool. And dye. And spun delight. The shop concentrates on hand-dyed yarns from small British producers as well as some of the standard brands. Everything is edible.
First I have to undertake my urgent and important mission – buy sock needles for F. Then the far more difficult task of not buying vast quantities of yarn. I succeed, mostly. I get (as I had planned and allowed myself to) a hank of the most divine alpaca/wool mix aran in a colour called “twilight” for a planned present for a friend and the needles to go with it. But then weakness crept in and so did a completely unnecessary skein of sock yarn. Hardly any time remained, after the transports of delight, for actual knitting before I had to rush to transport of a more prosaic variety in order to get back home before the children returned from their father’s. Which I very nearly succeeded in doing.
On the way back I gazed at the unbelievable colours, stroked the incredible texture and marvelled at the priceless pleasure something as simple as three friends and two skeins of wool can provide.
So. To sum up. Today I went round to a friend’s house and met another at a wool shop. Then I went home.
The other night I dreamt that the second and third toes of my right foot fused together into one toe. The same was happening to the corresponding toes on my left foot but I managed, painlessly I think, to peel them apart before they fused as seamlessly and irrevocably as the others had done.
Also in the same phantasmagorical interlude Maizy had open heart surgery and I disturbed her as she was coming round from the anaesthetic, her entire body a mass of huge stitches, she was in pain and I was told to leave because it was my fault. It was also revealed that a dear friend from university was best friend to a former colleague whom I disliked intensely; from this latter I learnt, in the dream, much about my own lack of humility, overabundance of judgementalness and the importance of right livelihood.
The foot thing is highly likely to be related to the current sock-knitting and the acquisition of a pattern for a knitted tabi, the Japanese foot-covering with a separate big toe designed to be worn with thonged shoes and traditionally sewn from cloth. Could the multi-pierced Maizy be traced back in some way to the weekend’s re-encounter with the nightmares in stitches of Louise Bourgeoise?
Or perhaps the whole technicolour experience was due to the consumption of an entire family-sized packet of jelly babies shortly before going to bed. They, after all, have fused toes and are no doubt full of enough noxious chemicals in sufficient quantities to disturb the brain chemistry of even the unsusceptible let alone the susceptible to such imbalances.
It is only recently that I have been able to look a jelly baby in the face, much less insert one into my own. As a very small child (probably between the ages of three and six) my father used to drive my brother and I for what seemed like several days across the country to pay dutiful visits to his aunt. My mother, needless to say, refused to go. I hated it. Hours of excruciating boredom on the way there, hours of excruciating boredom once we arrived (apart from the very few minutes of entertainment provided by Billy the budgie who didn’t talk and bit).
Worst of all was the appalling sickness on the way home. I was always sick. I was always sick for the same reason. Because my thoughtless and horrible great aunt always, without fail, gave me a humungous box of jelly babies and I always, without fail, ate them all in the car on the way home. And it was clearly her fault. It was also her fault that my brother didn’t open his box for days, ate them in small but regular quantities and taunted me with his sweetfulness and my lack thereof for weeks afterwards, which made me very sour indeed towards both of them.
Thinking about this childish shift of responsibility and how prevalent it is in various forms in people of all ages as well as organisations, governments and entire cultures led me to the wikipedia article on locus of control personality orientations which has made interesting reading.
Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. For example, college students with a strong internal locus of control may believe that their grades were achieved through their own abilities and efforts, whereas those with a strong external locus of control may believe that their grades are the result of good or bad luck, or to a professor who designs bad tests or grades capriciously; hence, they are less likely to expect that their own efforts will result in success and are therefore less likely to work hard for high grades… Due to their locating control outside themselves, externals tend to feel they have less control over their fate. People with an external locus of control tend to be more stressed and prone to clinical depression.
Indeed. It’s something else I feel shifting.
So what else? I’ve been doing a great deal of knitting at home, on the bus, in cafés, round at friends’, whilst listening to an unabridged reading of Emma etc. I’ve added a widgety bit of javascript to the sidebar showing recent projects and their progress. Down on the right, below the twittering. A piece of gorgeous goodness from Casey the code monkey at Ravelry.
My father seemed highly gratified with his birthday socks; I started a pair for myself, one of which posed with some art at the weekend; started and finished a very pleasing beret and finally, finally, just a few minutes ago, sewed in the last end of the Austenesque. I’m thinking of modelling it and asking Neha to take a celebratory picture of it when we meet up what is now later today. But I think I need to get hold of a corset first, somehow.
So in the absence of a picture of the charming garment here is a picture of my charming creatures being aaawsome. Taken by the charming and aaawsome Alistair. On his iPhone. Jealous? moi? overcome with uncontrollable capitalistic acquisitive gadget lust? No, no. Of course not.
This is also, incidentally, a wonderful example of how not, according to all the best advice, to write a blog post. But what do I care? I am half-woman, half-vegetable. Curly kale to be precise. And I’m very happy this way.
I went again to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern yesterday. The moment I saw this sculpture I thought of the Buddhist concept of attachment and non-attachment.
Please read Beth‘s post of the same name, including the comments.
I have long been wondering how best to illustrate the idea of non-attachment visually since Alistair first told me Joseph Goldstein’s explanation which completely revolutionised the way I conceived of the notion.
Now I’ve found the perfect pictorial co-relative, and don’t have to write an exegesis since by the serenwebity of the internetting Beth and her commenters have done it already!
The socks I was planning to make for my father for Christmas have now become the sock I have completed and the sock I am still making – for his birthday. Which was yesterday. Luckily we’re meeting mid-month so I’ve got plenty of time to finish.
Quite why I started this project I don’t know. I didn’t like working on double pointed needles and I’d never used five before, only four. I didn’t like working with such fine yarn. I’d never made a sock before. Babies booties – check. Gloves – check. But only on two needles. Socks? never. But I’m really enjoying it.
Just one thing. I have the invariable habit of starting with the end of the yarn which is at the centre of the ball. This has the huge advantage of preventing the ball bouncing around, disappearing under the furniture, collecting dust and fluff and appearing to the cat as an exciting toy every time you pull the yarn, which is what happens if it’s peeling off the outside of the ball. Pulling from the inside the ball just sits there quietly and gives up of itself from its guts without any fuss at all.
With the first sock I dug around in the middle of the ball trying to find the end and eventually, like a clumsy surgeon delving in an abdominal cavity, fished out a large dollop of tangled mess. This had to be painstakingly unravelled and rewound into a quite sizeable sub-ball. Then when nearing the end of the ball (and the first sock) the yarn collapsed in on itself, squirmed around and became another dollop of tangled mess which again had to be unravelled and rewound. It seems that Regia isn’t balled for centre-pulling.
When starting the second sock I cast on with the outside end of the new ball. What I hadn’t realised is that, since the yarn is dyed to produce repeating stripes of varying widths, this outside-in approach means the second sock is going to be upside down in comparison to the first sock.
This of course doesn’t matter very much because my father probably won’t notice, if he does he won’t mind and if he actually wears them they’ll be invisible beneath his shoes and trousers anyway. It might in fact be viewed as a positive thing since variety is the spice of life and, as I have just been told, “to be on the one way is to be without anxiety about non-perfection”.
Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before our eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and non-Being. Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this. One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.
Words!
The Way is beyond language, for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today.Hsin Hsin Ming – verses on the faith mind of Sengstan (Sosan) 3rd Zen Patriarch
Frost and the long low light of the winter solstice. The tree tells of the old stretching out into the new, entwined together as they must be, neither one nor other but both.
The lips of the bark speak of beauty and pain. Neither one nor other but both, as they must be.
And the lichen on the bark says whoa, look at us! bright gold crinkled and crunkled like a landscape, like mud, like the moon! We too are not one, not other but both. Beautiful, omnipresent. There for the delighting in if you but see. And those craters that you’re staring at? they’re our genitals so stop being such a voyeur if you please.
Er, thanks, lichen! All very intercomingly.
At this crux, hinge or whatever one cares to call it, this moment when one traditionally looks back to the source, forward to the mouth, I found myself writing to a friend about the midstream, about that place called “the present” in which I have increasingly found refuge:
“A place where things matter as much as they matter and don’t spiral out of control, don’t tangle up the past and wrap their tentacles around the future. “Resignation” and “acceptance” give the wrong impression. It’s a far more active and joyful thing, I find. I appear to have become rather Pollyannaish. Although having just looked up the definition on Wikipedia expecting it to be slightly other than it was I find that it’s not a bad thing to be at all… it’s not optimism (which implies looking forward) such as gratitude in the here and now which is important.
“Which is not to say that it hasn’t been a challenging year if I look back, which one invariably does at this time. However so much has changed and there is so much to be thankful for. Chief of which is the love of friends.”
To all friends, both near and far, who read here and who don’t, serenity-love-gratitude-joy.
(The next Festival of the Trees will be hosted at yearendbeginning by Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries – still time to submit!)
“Are you”, the hypno-questionnaire asked, if memory serves me correctly, “the sort of person who enjoys looking at sunsets?”
I’m sooo glad I whizzed back into the house and picked up my camera this afternoon having set off on towards the school without it. There was something about the quality of light just outside the front door that boded well.
It appears that I’m the sort of person who’s perhaps over-enthusiastic about sunsets. Here are the pictures I took, all of them, in order, as the sun descended in the sky and we walked in a north-westerly direction from school to home.
Even the large bins in the park are gilded and beautiful.
A vapour trail gleams silver against the slightly purpled sky, offsetting the gold below.
The gap in the row of houses lets us see another layer of gold.
This buddleia is just next to the railway line and Tuesday’s trees.
Allowing Maizy off the lead in the open space we (inaccurately) call “the field” gives us even bigger skies to admire as the clouds and light change, minute by minute.
This structure used to be a church. It’s being transformed or perhaps “repurposed”. Its silhouette is if anything improved by the scaffolding.
Very nearly home now.
I’ve been thinking about a sense of place since reading Jean and Dave and Whiskey River.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anywhere to be home in a positive way. Home was, in my childhood, not a place of safety. Since then it’s generally been somewhere less bad than other places. How can one, though, feel present anywhere if one is not present to oneself? As I become more able to be with myself rather than finding ways to “not be”, it seems I’m more able to be in the world too.
The square in which most of my life takes place – nodes formed by home, school, shops, shrink – has become more like a space that is mine as I more belong to me.
I was out and about today, and took the camera.
First to St Martin-in-the-Fields for a short (very short) period of quiet for Just This Day. It seemed particularly appropriate to think about the peace talks in Annapolis. I had read Rachel’s post about hope before I left in the morning, and rather unexpectedly, it was hope that I found.
Then to the Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I managed not to be utterly depressed and demotivated by exposure to wonderful photographs. My favourite was taken by a 24-year-old who sounded, from the blurb beneath the picture, to be a complete hero. I also liked this one and this one. You can scroll through all the pictures in the exhibition from any of the previous three links.
A spot of spawn-stocking-present-shopping left me exhausted and with a very heavy bag so I retired to an excellent cheap Spanish greasy spoon and took pictures through the window while consuming hearty paella.I’m breaking all my self-imposed rules about taking pictures of people. I only asked one of the subjects shown above if I could photograph them.
So the lighting was shit, the sound was disgracefully ropey for an allegedly “quality” venue – particularly since this was the third of three nights – and the floor was crowded with people of record-breaking height who all felt a desperate need to stand right in front of the stage thus blocking the view of your illicit-photo-taking correspondent. And the boys (most of whom are undoubtedly grandfathers) were taking it easy.
I had the most fantastic time. (Fan-tastic. Fan-tastic.)
It is difficult to overstate how much I love this band. The wonderful, sexy, mellow, sinuous, smouldering, life-affirming sound. Even the song Coumba, the lyrics of which are in French and I can therefore understand and are about the end of a relationship (written, apparently, on the day band member Rudi Gomis went to court to get a divorce from his first wife, Coumba) sounds jaunty.
Here’s my first blog reference to them back in February 2003:
Top of the spike is every track I have by Orchestra Baobab. They provide quite simply music to stay sane to. I don’t know, and don’t care what their tracks are about (my Wolof is limited to “hello how are you” and “yes”). They could be about Armageddon. But they help keep me from meltdown… Stunning. Sexy. Soulful. Syncopated. Smoochy. Sanity.
And here they are again in March 2005 when I saw them play in Dakar:
And my love for Orchestra Baobab knows no bounds. They, on my iPod, brought me through the deepest of darkness and I shall never forget how much I owe their music. I wept while they were on stage. Tears of relief and joy.
I didn’t cry this time, but I closed my eyes and went back to that time, of being unable to get out of bed even to take my pills only a few feet away on the mantelpiece. A time of utter desolation. Curled into a tight foetus, clutching my iPod under the pillow with this music in my ears the only sign I might still be alive.
I could see again my trainers as I walked doggedly, eyes on the ground, through the rain and mud of the winter of 2002/3 to the therapist two, three times a week, iPod clutched in a pocket, with the rhythm propelling me forward one step at a time.
And I felt profoundly grateful and happy to be there, at that moment, in that crowd, with my friends, listening to this same music and to be in such a different place. My life may be somewhat financially diminished but it is so much richer in so many fundamental respects and I feel more authentic (I can’t think of an adequate word so that will have to do) than at any other time.
I’m such a fan I can actually sing along to many of the tracks even though I speak none of the various languages (apart from a little French) in which they are sung. And I did so without the slightest hint of embarrassment. After all, nobody in the overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, middle class audience was likely to pick me up on my pronunciation. But there were a few numbers I didn’t recognise and that’s because they have a new album out – Made in Dakar.
I reread the extraordinary biography of the band before writing this, and it struck me that it’s possible that one of the reasons it fell from favour was its ethnic diversity and, more particularly, the high proportion of members from Casamance, the would-be breakaway region in the south of Senegal.
I hope that their new residence in a Dakar club means such divisions are less bitter than formerly.
So the performance. Well, one of my friends thought their approach was somewhat lackadaisical. I prefer the term “laid back”. These guys are not young. They are not hungry. In fact most are rather cherubically rotund and of a placid appearance, particularly bassist Charlie Ndiaye (above) who stayed at the back of the stage with his eyes barely open throughout, bass resting on the swell of his belly. The notable exception is ectomorphic tenor sax player, Issa Cissoko (pictured above the bassist), who is tall, whippet-skinny, deeply lined and a vigourous seeker of attention. Lead guitarist Barthélemy Attisso (above the sax player) leant over his instrument like a rather dour accountant (he was in fact a lawyer) but he’s still one hell of a player. Perhaps his demeanour is due to the heavy responsibility of the title “chef d’orchestre”.
It seemed to me that there was much good-natured camaraderie and a fair amount of clowning around poking fun at their own age and inability to dance like teenagers. It was fascinating how versatile many of them are, slipping seamlessly between various instruments and vocalist duties. And they are, of course, professional musical performers. It’s what they do, night after night, year after year, mostly in the same place, occasionally on tour. It’s a different life to the recording artists of Europe whose money comes from royalties rather than bums on seats or bellies at the bar. So there’s nothing dangerous or edgy about their performance. But the reverse has its merits – deep familiarity, confidence, relaxation, polish. Little urgency, much joy. All this and some new material too!
The rest of my pictures are here and their record label has a gorgeous gallery including wonderful pictures of them playing in Dakar in very smart suits.
frizzyLogic 