this too

WRITE IN WATER

However hard wrought,
let the words float away free.
There are always more.

KEW GARDENS IN BLACK AND WHITE

Much to say, but too tired and too busy.  So here are some more photos.

If I knew how to post a slide-show with music, it would be something baroque - simple, repetitive, but with endlessly varying twiddly bits.

ILLUMINATING

I keep thinking I should try and express the many thoughts in my mind as I've listened to the extensive BBC radio coverage of the 200th anniversary of the Act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade on British ships. Something about how the many considered, knowledgeable, heartfelt talks and conversations, poems and plays inspired by the anniversary have made me think widely about the meaning of freedom, choice, equality, about the many ways in which we enslave ourselves and each other, at the very same time as making me think that any comparisons and musings touching on my own experience are impudent and inappropriate in the face of something so horrific, so ungraspable, so terrifyingly institutionalised. I think the main thing to note, and welcome, really is the mere fact that they have made me, and apparently a lot of other people, think - at length and uncomfortably.

Particularly worthy of note was Jackie Kay's lyric play, The Lamplighters, on Radio 3 last night, and the following hour of prose, poetry and music about slavery and freedom which she curated (listen again at the links until 31 March).

I saw Jackie Kay read some of her poetry recently at the London Review Bookshop (just noticed that they are highlighting a great list of books for the anniversary). She's half-Scots and half-Nigerian, a warm, solid woman with a lilting lowland-Scots voice that is surprisingly small and sweet. She read a funny, troubling poem about meeting a Nigerian man on a train from Glasgow to London. Uninvited, he waved a finger in her face and declared that he could tell she was, like him, an Ibo; she had an 'Ibo nose'. Ibo, in her Scots accent, sounded like the French word, hibou - ' you're an hibou, that's an hibou nooze'. Her accent wasn't just an incidental, charming addition - it underlined powerfully how she's not just Ibo, not just Scots, how none of us is reducible to one identity, how identity is both a comfort and an imposition. Her voice and the poem, its wonderful mingling of humour and indignation, communication and isolation, confusion and laughter, lingered in my mind and linger still, as will The Lamplighters.  Work that hits you on every level.

ORCHIDS: CODA

as ever, click on photo to enlarge

ORCHIDS AND ORCHIDS

Come into the hot-house on this chill morning of desultory snow.

The orchids were not quite as wonderful as two years ago, but nice. Maybe nothing's ever as good as the first time. No, think of all the music I play over and over, the paintings I never tire of, the landscapes I love to revisit. 

I looked through the lens of a better camera, and saw not only sharper colours but drooping petals and marks on dusty greenhouse windows - that was part of it. And I was tired, almost numb with tiredness - that was part of it too. And I went with precise expectations, which is rarely a good idea.

But why compare? They were gorgeous.

click on photos to enlarge

HEARTFELT

I’ve just started reading Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. How wonderfully, magically well-written it is. A tear on my cheek, as I sit reading on the bus. Not because it’s sad, though I know it will be sad and shocking – it’s about the Biafran war. Just because it’s so perfectly evocative: “He found himself talking in a way he usually didn’t, and when their time ended and she got up, he felt his feet thicken with curdled blood. He did not want to leave.“

She’s a brilliant writer. It’s me too, though, I think. It started when I saw the deeply beautiful paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil. Then it happened again a few days later, when I went with Natalie to a recital by a pianist friend of hers. He played Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31. My heart trembled at the beauty. Physically, it moved. I felt the tremors of a soft, gelatinous creature deep inside me. Could it be that my heart, finally, is hatching, after so many years inside the shell it grew around itself? Is this possible, so late in life?

GOUNOD'S ROOM

A romantic vignette for the start of Spring.

Feeling rather tired and ill, I spent several hours on Saturday lying on the sofa, half-listening to a radio broadcast of Gounod's Faust, live from the New York Met. Not really my kind of thing, but a pleasant background for wandering in and out of sleep.

In or out of sleep, I'm not sure which, my mind found its way to the hotel where I stayed some years ago in Saint-Rémy.  Then old-fashioned and not very up-market, it was pleasant enough, but noisily sited on the main square. We soon moved on to a nicer place outside the town centre, on the road to the  Hospice Saint-Paul where Van Gogh famously lived and painted for a while.

I recall the first place only because a framed notice by the reception desk noted that Charles Gounod stayed there in 1863 while writing not Faust, but his later opera, Mireille. On the way upstairs we saw a further notice on the door of the composer's very room. As we left the hotel, while my friend was paying the bill, I flicked through the visitors' book and saw written, just the day before, in a round, school-girl hand:

"Last night I made love for the first time, in the room where the composer Gounod wrote his romantic opera, Mireille. I shall always remember this."

I lingered, reading and re-rereading, wondering if we'd seen the happy couple, thinking how remarkably, sweetly romantic in these unromantic times.

I see the hotel has been entièrement rénové since we were there, and renamed itself Hotel Gounod.

YESTERDAY...

... was Mothers' Day in England.

So I expect this scene was repeated at many bus-stops.

MILLENIUM BRIDGE: WHAT'S SHE DESCRIBING?

click on photo to enlarge, and perhaps, if you concentrate hard, you can hear her...

AMRITA

Self-portrait as Tahitian, Amrita Sher-Gil, 1934

What Gauguin painted
from without,
you, from within,
not only painted - lived.

Rebellious artist,
one who stepped
outside the frame,
yet still objectified
twice over: woman, odalisque.

You speak to all of us
who, generations on,
reach for the East
from Europe, wanting both.

A life we might,
in modern idiom,
call 'colourful' -
deep colours, deep divides
and ended young.