this too

ON RETREAT

Happy Christmas!  back soon

CONNECTIONS

Very belatedly, I've updated my links to include a number of blogs I've been visiting regularly for a while:

Modal Minority - latest incarnation of a old blogger friend. Unexpected takes on a rich panorama of arts from the Global South. Also fiction. And you never know what new delight...

Verbal Privilege - a clever, caring voice on critical issues of arts, life and politics, especially in the Middle East and Turkey, where she's lived.

Jumping into Life - beautiful writing by a Zen practitioner currently at San Francisco Zen Center, where I wanna go one day...

Bitterroot and Bergamot - outstandingly lovely photographs and poetry from Wisconsin and Montana.

Crackskull Bob - delicious drawing and life-enhancing wit.

Real-e-Fun  - back after a break: non-religious funeral celebrant and on-line novelist. A huge inspiration, Zinnia blogged the riveting first draft of the novel she's now revising.

Never Neutral - Ernesto: no more new to me than neutral, but moved to a new and beautiful site on Wordpress.

Conscientious - Joerg Colberg's knowledgeable and discriminating blog about mostly contemporary photography.

A la recherche de l'absolu - Jean's gorgeous photos of the French countryside.  I hope to add more photography links in the new year.

ON WHITE

For the first time this Winter, after months of strangely, scarily continuing mild weather, it's cold. Last night, when I went home after midnight, clouds of freezing fog hovered on the street corners in my high, hilly suburb, and today it's just cold enough to see your breath in front of your face. Odd how I feel paradoxically warmed, hugged by the cold. A necessary relief. Permission to externalise the cold within.

I BEG HER PARDON

I beg this woman's pardon for photographing her with my zoom lens and without permission, and for sharing the photos. I hope she'd like them.

Girl with a (not pearl) earring.

THE THIRD MONK VII

A story in instalments. The rest is here.

The five-thirty bell and I grope my way out of the nest of blankets - never got into bed last night, but at some point my memories lulled me to sleep. Seated on my cushion, I'm not meditating. Too much in my head, thoughts from long ago, thoughts about now, the parallels. I fled then. I've fled now. How much of my life have I spent, to all intents and purposes, fleeing - fleeing in my mind from everything around me, even if not fleeing in body? This has been my refrain. Did I do wrong to flee from London to this retreat? Or did I do right, and all those times I fled only in my mind, those were wrong? There, I'm doing it again: judging, standing outside myself instead of just being. Be... here... now. Why is it so hard?

Breathe. This is not fleeing. This is to practise being here. Yes, I will slip. I will wander away, to the past, to the future, to thoughts, imaginings and longings. I will wander and return, and wander and return, and eventually wander less and be here more. By the time I leave, I hope to feel more solid and take some of that solidity with me to whatever comes next. That's why I came. But it may not be like that, of course. However it is will be how it is. I want to accept, to be more open. I may turn determinedly in one direction and find myself facing in quite the opposite. Whichever way I end up facing, there I'll be.

Spinning, spinning images and thoughts. Breathe. Here. Now. Tired. Cold. Confused. Here. Now. Here. Now.

So, yes, for the rest of the day, here, now is where I am. I sit and walk and work and eat and sit and breathe and breathe and simplify. But the lure of memory, combined with having the space for it, is too great. Back in my room at night, I'm gone again into the past.

That very first evening I found myself doing what I'm doing now - spinning my own experience into a story. Sitting cross-legged on the floor between Laura's and Marielle's beds, inventing a yarn about a little girl their age who travelled from the North of England to the South of France, and what she saw and what surprised her. The kind of story where they could join in. You know what else she saw? Did she see a goat? Did she see a 2CV? And did she see those at home? She didn't? Oh, how funny! And so we began to talk to each other. And so I found I could tell stories.

At two and three, they were so dear and so maddening - just finding themselves as people, defining their edges by pushing hard against everything. I knew nothing, nothing about child development. But I saw how astonishingly just like me they were, though how astonishingly without my inhibitions. I knew nothing and took them on as small equals, and so, mostly, we got along.

My French vocabulary was somewhat larger than Laura's and somewhat smaller than Marielle's. We all made mistakes, but different ones. My mispronunciation of certain vowel sounds made Laura wince and shake her fist - she'd just learned herself to get them all correct, so how could I, a big person... it was inexcusable! Once, when she raucously derided me for this, I slapped her, and saw the anger and humiliation on her face and never slapped a child again. But that was later. That first evening, we span a story together and thought we might like each other. And their parents must have thought, I think, that, yes, I would be kind.

SLOW PHOTOGRAPHY

 

The first room at the current London exhibition, In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century, is devoted to Eugène Atget. My first opportunity for an in-the-flesh - in the soft, clear, brownish print twinkling at me from behind glass - encounter since a blogger friend set me on his trail months ago.

The exhibition is too big: Atget, Kertesz, Brassai, Doisneau and on and on through known and unknown masters and mistresses: 'photography from an entire continent that spans across a complete century', a reviewer trumpets enthusiastically. We don't have exhibitions in London; we have blockbusters. The audience's attention span is supposedly so short, the need to turn a profit so great, we have to have all the twentieth century's greatest photographers together in one go in one gallery. Here you are - photography. Done that. Next week, something else.

Try to turn off overwhelm. Don't think menu gastronomique, think wine tasting. Sip a little here and there, retaining information and impressions for another time. Don't swallow. Take a break. Return to Atget. Slow down. Photos that took minutes to expose, hours to haul the camera into place, can't be viewed quickly. Take just one. Follow the outline of the doorstep, the door, the window-panes, the arch. Then the carved curlicues above: trace them carefully. Smell them. Old stone. Slow and quiet, like the slow, quiet man with his heavy camera.

Pause. Digest. Take another. Savour it. Take your time. Ah.

THE EDGE

In an otherwise relentlessly demanding workplace, much more in line, as is increasingly the norm these days, with globalised US- and Far East-influenced workaholic lifestyle expectations, we retain a traditionally generous British public sector annual leave allocation. So I hadn't taken all mine. So I decided to take Fridays off in December. Yay, hay - four-day weeks! Time to write! Time to play! Yay, nay. So far, it's been time to sleep. Time off makes me shatteringly aware of my rest and sleep deficit. Quite depressing. Actually, more than depressing, frightening. Stopping briefly and finding that my body falls at once into numb sleep and my mind into numb depression, that I quickly start to slide towards an edge much closer than I thought it was. I start and scramble up and GO somewhere, anywhere, as quickly as possible. Get away from the edge. Having been there, though, and looked over, the image won't leave. Running on the spot with my back to a precipice - and not just me; a long line of us, all along the cliff, and every now and then a body going over.

FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING

Goodness, a poem. I don't really do those.

Do read the rest of the current batch on Qarrtsiluni, which are on the theme of 'First Time'.

THE THIRD MONK VI

A story in instalments. The rest is here.

All this. As we sat through the afternoon, talking of housework and cooking and how Marielle walked in her sleep and Laura, at two-and-a-half, was just getting used to nursery school, and exchanging glances and speculation, and weighing one another up, all this - the light, the air, the sun on dust and stone, warm enough to sit out in February without our coats - seeped into me.

Two sides of the square were tall, old, shuttered, flat-fronted stone houses with steep steps up to high front doors and pots that would soon sprout geraniums. One side was the cafe, with chairs and tables scattered across the dusty gravel, and a faded boulangerie, empty by afternoon of all but a few skinny loaves. On the fourth side modernity encroached, with new, square, concrete houses, garage below and stairway to living quarters above - the standard box then just beginning to colonise the South.

When Marianne left at three o'clock to collect the children again, she directed me along one of the narrow, older streets which soon became a path into the hills. I walked slowly, smelling and touching and lifting my face to the sun, and wishing I had worn a lighter sweater. The landscape, crossed by the autoroute, rolled towards distant peaks. Bland villas had only just begun, then, to creep outwards from the edges of the old grey villages that clung to and blended with the rocky slopes. Sand and stones and prickly bushes that, even at that season, breathed out a residue of aromatic oils, birds rising from the scrub, and everywhere great fluffy clouds as golden as the sun - mimosa. The light was brighter and softer than I had ever seen before.

I felt warm, tired and above all astonished that confusion and failure had somehow brought me this reward. It challenged the premise of my whole young life, which had pursued me even to the privilege of Oxford: that life was hard, that I and mine were have-nots, and that we deserved it. We were bitter, we blamed one another, but we deserved and expected no different. I'd fled on instinct, with no thought of finding sanctuary. But perhaps I had. Perhaps the world was much more varied and random, and therefore held more place for hope than I had ever thought.

I remember sitting for a long time on a flat rock, hands clasped around my knees, hugging the landscape to me and thinking: the nightmare is over. For months I'd been seeing myself in a deep hole, my options fast trickling away. The friends who'd quickly become my surrogate family had been the happy side of student life in Oxford, their cheerful sympathy my shelter from an academic stringency I was too immature and unschooled to benefit from. Without them, I'd sunk further and further behind with assignments I either failed to gasp or took too much to heart (it occurred to no one, seemingly, that Existentialists were not the thing for unformed youngsters not yet sure why, or how, or even whether we existed), drifted into drowning my confusion in cheap wine and cider and burying it briefly in the embraces of too many interchangeably crass young men. It was a grim picture, but suddenly, propelled by desperation, here I was out of the hole and standing up in a wide, open place.

I don't remember thinking all this, but seeing it in shapes and light, a new pattern forming around me as I looked out across the sunny hillside. And this, I think as I look back, was why I entered that time so open-hearted, why it proved so formative.

Cradling this incoherent sense of wonder and renewal, I headed nervously back towards the village. 

MACHINE GUNS AND RUDE POTTERY

World-travelling British blogger Sarsparilla is in Peru and seems set to stay there, stirring memories for me of my single, strange, long-ago visit to that country.

Every year I receive a birthday card from a long-time ex colleague. We spent a birthday of mine together in Lima and she never forgets.  At midnight, as the clock ticked over into my birthday with the conference office still buzzing, a crocodile of waiters entered, on M's secret instructions, carolling '¡Feliz Cumpleaños!' and carrying trays of pisco sours. Last June on my birthday I phoned M in Vienna to say thankyou, and do you realise it was twenty years ago? She did. She, who was middle-aged and is getting old now, and I, who was young and am now middle-aged, have undimmed memories of that visit.

There was a new, nominally social-democratic, government under President Alan García, and the international organisation we worked for was their guest. Lima in June - cool and misty. Hordes of us, from all over the world, stuffed into a city-centre hotel which had sprouted marquees to hold the overflow. All of it ringed by a solid rank of soldiers with machine guns. The words on everyone's lips, 'Sendero Luminoso'.

The new government held out hopes of peace, or at least de-escalation of the civil war. It was not to be. Perhaps our presence, offering international endorsement to García, was even a small spur to the new outbeak of bombings. The tourist railway line to Macchu Picchu was blown up and attacks proliferated in city and countryside. The news spread around our delegates that a guerrillera had been seized in a room across the road from our hotel, about to launch a mortar.

We knew all this, and yet the deadlines for paperwork, the difficult delegates, remained a greater source of stress. Peru seemed about to burn, and yet the burning in our feet from standing up around the clock remained a greater pain. When we finally got to bed, M and I put our suitcases under the end of our mattresses to raise our feet and ease the throbbing so that we could sleep.

We were hearing the official version from uniformly rather white politicians, a rather different story from the rather less white Peruvian conference staff, and starting to feel, all around us, the other story, grinding deprivation and despair, of the indigenous majority - not too surprising that many supported the Maoist insurgency. We were learning something of the country, yet were in our own little bubble, protected by a private army.

The staff team ventured out one evening to a restaurant across town, 'lost' our taxi drivers and missed the curfew. After half an hour of frantic phonecalls we located our boss back at the hotel, and he came with an armed minibus, flashing lights, sirens and outriders. We were grateful and ashamed.

Our cherished plans to visit Cuzco and Macchu Picchu before going home were off, but we did spend a day or two in Lima. I particularly remember - who could forget? - the museum of 'erotic ceramics' - precolumbian pottery depicting, kind of sweetly, every imaginable permutation of sexual activity (surprisingly, I found no good pictures of these on the Web). And the museum of Inca gold. Everything exaggerated, surreal, like the soldiers with machine guns and reports from the war.

You'd think the memories would be awful, but truly the strongest are of kind people, weird and joyous art and music, and a certain intense aliveness that comes, I suppose, from being on the edge.

I always meant to go back, especially after the Sendero leaders were captured and the war wound down. I still mean to. And now Alan García has been elected President again. Have we come full circle? Time to go back to Peru?