The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.
Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron.
Oh bring back purple prose please – I totally adore this short story by Lawrence – there is something so heavy with the drudgery of the coal pits about it – and it is so attentive to noises and smells ………. the kind that have lingered with me after reading this first time 25 years ago ….. those flowers say it all. Haven’t read Lawrence for a while but I think I am about to enjoy his purple-ness once more. !
SOME FAVOURITE SAYINGS THAT PROFOUNDLY TOUCH MY LIFE:
How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves – even if we are unsure of who we are? — Paulo Coelho
Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. — Voltaire
All my life has been governed by feminine energy, by women. — Paulo Coelho
Before coming to know the feminine I didn’t know the meaning of compassion. — Paulo Coelho
WONDERFULLY ENLIGHTENING
OUTLANDISH QUOTES THAT MAKE ME QUESTION WHO DECIDES WHAT IN THE WORLD :
Music isn’t just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that – it’s an ideology. You can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.
IS THIS REALLY TRUE?
Paul Simon; Diamonds on The Soles of Her ShoPeople say she’s crazy
She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes
Well that’s one way to lose these
Walking blues
Diamonds on the soles of your shoes
She was physically forgotten
And then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys
She said you’ve taken me for granted
Because I please you
Wearing these diamonds
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/paul+simon/diamonds+on+the+soles+of+her+shoes_20105874.html ]
And I could say oo oo oo
As if everybody knows
What I’m talking about
As if everybody here would know
Exactly what I was talking about
Talking about diamonds on the soles of her shoes
She makes the sign of a teaspoon
He makes the sign of a wave
The poor boy changes clothes
And he puts on after-shave
To compensate for his ordinary shoes
And she said honey take me dancing
But they ended up by sleeping
In a doorway
By the bodegas and the lights on
Upper Broadway
Wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes
Lyrics to a wonderful song – poetic and inspiring.
Cath
In our Park.
I gaze at Rastafarian bushes combed abundantly
With red berries; Bow-tied coifferings filled
with black-birds singing in this pie.
Above me there is a vast swimming pool
of Mediterranean blue
Dashed with strung-out pale bodies
like clouds bathing in a
tangerine-peeled warmth.
Across the grass, there is the place –
Where hurt and harm
are real
though The Cenataph’s body is in a different place!
Cenezoic freedom; the flora and fauna Of time
are all contained here in one Huge erection to lost youth.
And me?
I am the dome of the band-stand
Bouncing Back
rhythyms and sounds
touch-tasting Lives
that are not mine and never were.
My rails surround and support this
Heteromorphic journey outwards for
All joy is life
is all my forgetfulness.
I look to the gateway ….
Redress moments where green
To blue I unwrap this Huddled little house-wife
as I gorge my Senses
with natures delights.
Beauty is all joy in life
where streets Have peoples on peoples
on peoples Shelling art with words
Bombarding imitation living with more than Fantasy …
arcading life’s pleasures
Celebrating what?
Cath
Indifferacide?
in my beginning is my end – with tall walls don’t rail me, or harsh words impale me, but with your smile see me – give me water to dangle in – food to nourish me, always encourage me – otherwise leave me. Send your smile to the edges of my mountains, To my hills and my lakes of endurance – preserve my humanity –
Let your smile be the disparate drippings of on-going melted grasses, fume of poppies, tulip tips, pumpkin pips – wild geese flapping wings of flight – let me not fall from grace but find a Venice gateway and gondola dreams resting in your hands.
For Time is swelling in this sodden earth though stars are shining in a filament sky like white shadows shimmering on a Chimerian night – knotted, twisted webs of silent sounds as if baby breath has awoke silently rocking in this crib.
(variation)
Louis MacNeice – Prayer before Birth
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
This is a beautiful poem although surface appearance is harsh! It has a universal quality – genderless and a voice of innocence – almost as if the story of a life untold.. The use of repetition is astoundingly resonant of personal and global histories that are destined to repeat themselves. It also speaks of the ties that bind and the way lives collide in unfortunate ways – family fragmentation, poverty and betrayal – spiritual freedom and spiritual enclosure.
Cath
Kamala Das.
ISBN: 0 86125 169 5
‘The old playhouse and other poems.’
If ‘things’ can become “me”, how does ‘the old playhouse and other poems’ become a corporeal and intellectual representation of the human body in its male and female form? How do men and women become inextricably entwined in times and places that say who they are? Deeply interrogating the surface and depths of physical and spiritual love there is a claustrophobic and self-absorbed feel to the way in which love is thought about in this collection of poems:
For, love is Narcissus at the water’s edge, haunted
By its own lonely face ………..
Look closer though, for if “I” am the loved and the lover, who is the image through which I see myself, and why must my Being be submerged in the waters of a well that calls me in and want to resist? Surely I have a choice to be someone that I am not?
Feelings of intellectual imprisonment and an unusual sense of corporeal sovereignty (as well as entrapment), are celebrated motifs in this collection of writings in which themes of duplicity, familial loyalty, fluidity, life, lost tradition, tradition and creative endeavour are raised to the surface by a naive, yet profoundly ‘knowing voice’ ….. a voice whose bludgeoning “narrative force” and “words” come alive in acts of sheer madness, loss of control and, most bizarrely, in control itself!
Set to “perform” an assault on the senses (and the sensibility of the poor little “colonial reader”, (who might, by chance, think they know it all), Kamala Das dares her words to create a fallacious yet obviously sincere approach to the idea of “ownership”, sexual as well as cultural! Her work dares the reader to take another look and proudly exclaims in a most spiritual and liberating way that ….. ‘bereft of my body my soul shall be free’ (The Suicide)
This collection is a work of “art” in which “memory” is embedded in historical recall, cross-cultural experience, and the idea of what is ‘natural’ in the natural world, as well as in the world of sex and lust, her images are often disturbing and frightfully self-destructive. But, is this use of self-destruction (a collective idea of self that needs some sense of deconstructive power to survive) all that her words evoke? Powerfully evocative of a demand for love that is of the self ………. me, my self and ‘I’, physical love in its rawest detached form, is set against questions of sexuality and “choice” that determine its cultural import and a politics of the person that is in fact a collective appeal to see rather than just look!
Adult love is a theme that carries Das’ work to the edge of a very precarious precipice and is described with some contempt as a thing that frolics in ‘puddles of desire’ (The Freaks). Love remembered in childhood is quite a different matter, filled with philosophical snatches of ‘nostalgia’ in a brutally frank and incisive way, yet bereft of a sentiment that exonerates love as a universal concept. Love is, therefore, replaced by the death of love, in its most subtle and tentative forms. Death, life and love are thrown into one huge and generous melting-pot where the language of the body and its corporeality points its finger at governance.
Held captive by the giving away of the body to lust and usage, this collection of poems is determined to say things out loud and clear! The poems are incisive, bloody and hold the stench of the earthliness of the body with the magic and serenity of thinking of love out-loud, for love has its malcontents and they are firmly held within the gaze of a female voyeur who knows how to play a tragic scene! Is it the lover or the loved, the place or thing that makes Das’ poetry magical? The answer is embedded in words that cross global and historical contexts:
‘ask me why life is short
and love is shorter still,’
(The Stone Age)
Cath: Toni Morrison – Beloved – Rocking the House.
When slavery has torn apart one’s heritage, when the past is more real than the present, when the rage of a dead baby can literally rock a house and fill it full of venom then the “traditional” idea of what a novel is no longer an adequate instrument when cultural boundaries are explored. Pulitzer Prize-winner Beloved is written in fragments and images of slavery which smash history like a mirror on the floor leaving its reader to put together a new history. It’s narrative voice(s) becomes a choral event and a vehicle towards self-love and the love of others. In a novel that is hypnotic, beautiful, and elusive, Toni Morrison portrays the lives of Sethe, an escaped slave and mother, and those around her. There is Sixo, who “stopped speaking English because there was no future in it,” and …. Baby Suggs, who makes her living with her heart because slavery “had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue;” and Paul D, a man with a rusted metal box for a heart and a presence that allows women to cry. At the center is Sethe, whose story makes us think and think again about what we mean when we say we love our children or freedom. The stories circle, swim dreamily to the surface, and are suddenly clear and horrifying. Because of the extraordinary, experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter, what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding, raising a consciousness in the reader of exactly what human beings are capable of as well has highlighting those ‘dis-credited’ knowledes/experiences and stories that are meant to constantly be re-written for the sake of global understanding and peace.
BLACK SWAN OR WOMEN IN THE LAKE?
DISCUSSION:
Wendy
I would highly recommend the film ‘Black Swan’ directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman. The film follows the life of ballerina (Portman) as she moves from chorus to leading lady. As this transition begins we see how her own self doubt and the rather creepy life she leads living alone with her mother leads to the unravelling of a promising career. Spooky in parts, bizzarre in others, intriguing, baffling and yet beautiful. I won’t spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but it is a classic example of how life can immitate art.
Alana
That movie was really cool and different, strongly disturbed me though!
Wendy
my son said that too. I really liked the spooky / wierd bits, really made it different for me. Glad you liked it too Alana!
Alison
I really appreciated alot of aspects of the film, the cinematography,the beauty, Portman’s performance. However, I also became increasingly rattled by the misogynist tone of the film. I don’t know if anybody else felt it’s misogynistic tones or if others were too busy to notice that the idea of a woman becoming a black swan far out-weighed the fact that other women were drowning in the lake.