This morning I slept late. Usually the creep of pink across the wall as dawn unfurls her banners will rouse me. Not today. The clouds hang low and sullen, gunmetal shutters closed across the bowl of sky. Space is only about 12 miles above us, straight up. No weather, no air just a deep cold dark studded with the fires, the signposts of the Universe. How do the fires of the sun burn without air? If someone really big put a saucepan lid over it, would it go out? No global warming then, nor yet nuclear winter just an icy blanket of black velvet dark encrusted with distant suns too far to light our brief candles.
There was a science fiction tale I never understood. Heinlein I think, although the years have carved lacunae in my memory leaving brain lint where knowledge once nestled, his people were preparing for the coming of the stars, a sunset that led them to destroy their civilisation whenever it came. They were crushed, driven mad by the sight of the stars. Was it the awful splendour that defeated them or were they just scared of the dark? I have felt awe. Been speechless in the presence of some beauty inaccessible to Man's creative talents. Something that just exists and is so near perfection that my eyes burn with tears to gaze upon it...but it has never diminished me because a grain of sand, a pearl, a Universe can sit side by side with one cell discarded from my skin and claim kinship with its heart rending beauty.
I recently saw photographs of waterdrops on line, the strange crystalline shapes it took responding to sound, the spoken words of love, of hate, of prayer, of anger. Before and after prayer the lineaments changed from disjoint into harmony. I know my liquid spirit shifts and shapes when I take it into company. It moves and dances to the pulls of joy and jabs of anger I encounter, opening like a flower to the gentle touch of love. What is love? For me it is the care I take not to cut myself even with the painless slice of a very sharp knife or to avoid the blundering crushing pain of a thumb beneath a hammer and applyiing that same care to others.
Love thy neighbour as thyself. I embrace the spirit, not religion, but these words ring true. The same survival instinct that pulls me back from touching heat, from poison, needs to be applied like a poultice to the world of people I encounter. Side by side we share the beauty of the stars, the flowers that never worry if their petals are too gaudy, sexy enough, expensive enough. The trees that never fret if they have not as many leaves as their neighbour in the forest. The soil that feeds all equally without question, yielding more to those who give back and nurture it.
When did we learn to believe in poverty when abundance is the rule? Perhaps it is when we came to think that the toys that decorate the trash heaps of the world and travel back and forth unwanted on stinking barges without a port equal riches. A smile, the hand of friendship, the kindness done unnoticed, unremarked, the care we give ourselves and others, this is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And here you can find love.
Tonight I am a little one.
I have cried tears
right from my broken heart,
they scald and scar my face with red,
with swollen eyes,
snail tracks of salt
across my cheeks.
Not the gentle tears of feeling
these rise from some
deep shuttered well
to carry off
my poisoned dreams
my shattered hope
my unrequited love.
Their passage mars me
so I can see the ugly
stored inside me
leaving.
Something I can wash away,
can say goodbye to.
I wonder if the well
is very deep...
Just goes to show that if you wait around everything passes. He got old and shrunken and lost all his teeth. I'm so glad he left me!
When I was about nine years old I loved to go to church. I went to school at St. Gabriel's, staffed by Anglican nuns in full habit, mostly black with white like magpies chasing our shiny childish souls; although there was Sister Christine who rapped knuckles with a ruler and had perpetual hiccoughs who wore brown. I didn't like her much. I loved to pray. The words would pour from my throat in sweet measured cadences and sometimes I'd see the nuns whispering and nodding towards me, I think they suspected vocation in me and they may have been right because once I prayed and saw an angel who came to answer my prayer; but my path from the Church was brutally and abruptly sundered one Sunday afternoon.
I went to church as usual,Sunday School, we sang the hymns and then it was time to pray. The stained glass windows were right above me and a shaft of sunlight trickled down and wrapped around me, bathing me in colour and in warmth. I was exalted, taken by the Rapture. I could feel the power reaching out to me and calling me up the ladder of light barred with rungs of sapphire, ruby and gold. I prayed. The words an anthem of my spirit. My soul pushing up from my diaphragm, through my throat and climbing up the light with passion and commitment. I saw and was Seen, a deep connection made to somewhere, something, and the current ran from me to all the others, I felt the meld take hold and stretched my arms above my head, reaching up the light.
A crash on the lectern stopped me, stopped us all, The priest came over, grabbed my arm and threw me literally out of "his" church and told me never to come back. I stood in tears, wringing nine year old hands, asking why? What did I do? He said "You prayed too loud." and whirled his fusty robes back inside. I trembled as I waited for my mother because I had transgressed. I had been expelled from Church. And she would not be pleased. Strangely there was no punishment forthcoming, and when all the grown ups came and others told the tale there was a hue and cry...against the priest who then proceeded to expel everyone from the Church. He shouted and pushed the grown ups too. They pushed him back. I remember my eyes stretched in my face, unblinking till they felt dry. The world was unfamiliar and unsafe.
I never went back to church with any earnestness. I went to many churches, seeking what I had felt and lost. Once, at fourteen, sitting on a hill with a stone pressing painfully into my behind I knew with utter certainty that the world and I and you and all that was around us, this was immortal. This was spirit forever.
I have followed many paths; opened my heart and mind so often that I broke the doors. Now tears stream down my cheeks uninvited, without a sob when I am engaged. I have no shields against the Rapture and I pour my soul into my words, onto paper on the net and let it wander where it will. What of the priest? The man who disposed of a young girl's burgeoning vocation? He drank, and on that day, demon alcohol was the spirit that moved him. No doubt my nine year old voice, suffused with Rapture was shrill and hurt his head...although I felt it echo in my chest. Today I thank him, because the cold of stone beneath my knees, the shock of flagellation is a poor way to celebrate the flesh. I might have made an admirable nun but I am one hell of a woman.
My life is just memories. Where I was, what I did, who I did it with.
Just memories, no substance at all.
I remember an apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone; two floors, with the kitchen on the very top floor, and a cat called Pyewackett. Pye had beautiful turquoise eyes and perfect tabby markings and was the silliest cat who ever owned me. I would sit at the table and Pye would shoot up vertically looking over at the table top and plop back to the floor. If she tried to jump onto the washing machine there was a hollow boom as her head drove into the side.
So there we are, one sweet summer day, walking into the kitchen when suddenly Pyewackett took off at a run, covering the whole length of the kitchen in three bounds then she went up and out of the window at the bird flying by. For me time slowed to a molasses crawl, the o in no elongated and oozing past my lips in rondures of anguish. The room stretched, an impossible space to cover with leaden limbs. And in this endless beat of agony my silly Pye looked down, spun in midair and stretched, front legs and claws extended towards my own outstretched digits and then a howl and she was gone.
I fell and skidded on the tiles, a slide baseballers would have envied, and reached the window just in time to see silver scythes of claws embedded in the window sill, the old wood bending, shredding, pulling free. I reached, and terror clambered up my arms, over my head and down my back ripping cloth and flesh in its headlong rush to safety.
Many years later I stood with my Pyewackett and held her as the vet gave her the first injection that would ease her gently into eternal night. She purred and I stroked her and the vet left us alone. I wept for my silly cat who I loved dearly; there was a stumble in the heart beneath my fingers and then it stopped. In that moment the world flexed and her fur gleamed as if freshly brushed, and at 17 looked just as she had at one year old. Part of my life, but just a memory and ashes scattered on the wind.
Words slipped like perfumed oil between my lips and music triggered connections that led to informed exposition that went far beyond my usual research. Finding the 'zone' in anything is so totally satisfying an experience that all else falls away. I strove to find it in running and jogging once. Everyone extolled the joys of the "runners' high" and as I lived by the Garrison Savannah - the race track & parade ground - at the time I was perfectly positioned to take early morning advantage of the sport. I ran every day for two weeks. My times improved, my stamina increased and I became more and more unhappy. I did not like running. My endorphins stayed stubbornly unreleased and I looked at the misery etching indelible lines into other faces and decided that was not what I wanted in my future.
I have sat hand coding HTML and fallen into the Zone. I have picked up a paint brush and become instantly lost in total focus. I have danced, living so completely in my muscles and their movement that I felt each joint, each subtle articulation rotate in its lubricated casings, each fibre snapping and stretching creating through infinitessimal destructions of self.
And then I discovered weight lifting. Endorphin floodgates opened drowning me in mindless repetition of pleasure. My body was remade in six weeks from languid elegance to bounce and subtle ripples in each movement; skin thinned and the faintest hint of vascularity announced itself in tones of blue and violet under gold integument and I was ravenously hungry eating massive, frequent, meals to fuel the system and maintain flesh, going to the gym six days a week, four hours a day; working a split program, each muscle group pushed for maximum excretion of inner joy juice . It ended, of course. Intense pleasure led to recklessness, seeking more, convinced of invulnerability.Going for the pump, the stunning surge of blood filling the muscles stressed to capacity. One more set. Bench pressing without my spotter, lifting almost my own body weight just three more reps...a torn rotator cuff is not fun, neither is a barbell falling unchecked across the chest. Brought me right out of the Zone.
Yesterday I was on the road early, driving east into the dawn and the sun was huge filling the whole windscreen with molten gold and blinding me until the road turned away. There are roads that do the same at sunset when the sun becomes a sullen red-white disc flinging tints of lavender and scarlet across blue and white in the evening sky.
Do the builders look before they carve the roadways? Do they stop to think that vision is essential, that blindness, even momentary can lead to blood and other things trailing from the shattered carapace of metal,glass and plastic? Builders build, designers design and would-be poets write dark thoughts about forever and infinity and DJ's ask the questions into a silent ether that may or may not have ears to hear the words. May or may not care to raise the question at the next town hall meeting. May or may not want to make the effort to amend and change the quality of life and ensure that it remains available for living.
Ah me. Army of one. Lone voice that drips like silky water wearing down the stone of certainty. Once I, a smoker wanting to give up, ran a campaign on my program years ago encouraging all smokers to join me in quitting. The tobacco company complained, the GM called me in, stymied when I offered to give them equal time on every show to counter my suggestions. Three people became non smokers as a result of my campaign; I smoked for another twelve years, until I was ready to quit for me. Someone was listening.
So I will keep on speaking the truths I perceive and leave them, like fruit, ripe for the picking and devouring. Someone might be listening. Some ear may hear. Then another voice can join and yet another until our song becomes an anthem that can change the world.
You should do this, you should be thinking, you should...how does anybody know what I or anybody else SHOULD do? This is the thinking that creates rebellion and conflict. The language of control and restriction. Yes, fine, society needs laws, boundaries and guidelines; parents need occasionally to insist that they know better for the safety and well being of the child but for the most part we have no right to "should" another person especially a stranger who has not asked for our judgment, only for information and perhaps, unconsciously, reassurance that what he or she is questioning is normal, that they are human.
And here am I, shooting from the hip in outrage,climbing my little soap box, wringing my hands in despair because as long as we keep trying to suppress we are not free! By all means tell me you don't like what I write...not that I should not write it. Tell me my question unsettles you, you do not want to answer, that it shocks you, lifts rocks you don't want to look under, but do not tell me I should not ask. Not if you want me to take you seriously. The minute we say to another 'you should' we are denying them their right to selfhood, denying them the basic respect of listening to what they say and admitting they have a right to say it, whether we like it or not.
I have always loved the 'just say no' campaign. Tell beings whose whole existence and growth depend on saying yes to new experience and experiment to just say no? We need to question and examine. Jim Jones told a lot of people they should drink Kool Aid. One word could have changed the path of history: Why? Ask it next time someone says "you should...."
A new adventure starts next week. I have signed up for a class in portraiture. In my life I have drawn two portraits, quickly, off the cuff, and garnered congratulations and praise; better yet any observer seeing the sketch and seeing the original would know that one of these things looks just like the other.And yet I cannot draw faces...or people. Draw the heck out of boats and plants and landscapes, paint sweeping vistas in water colour with the same ease that I burn sausages to charcoal instead of dinner. Apart from those two flukes where aliens took over my hand(there is no other explanation)I cannot make a simulacrum of a face. And so the class. Piano and guitar lessons left me tuneless without an instrument to play and this maybe the same but I have learned to do so many things throughout the days that make up my years that this too may be possible. I learned to make pots and and grew clay to smooth round cylinders spinning on the wheel, pinched and coiled and slabbed designs that sit jumbled in a box, all fired and shiny, just five feet from me. So perhaps I can learn to capture curves and angles of a gleaming eye, a jaw, a lip, even a whole mouth. The knowledge is within. I shall do my best to let it emerge without resisting, holding back. Why can I play no instrument? Because I let casual words said too close to too young ears close my understanding. "oh her, she always has to do everything" and it sounded to me as though that made me what I tried so hard not to be...bad. For a year I walked a tightly circumscribed path, not reaching out to grasp but touching very gently just those things pressed against my mind by others. Now, older, I am proudly capable of many things and say what you will, if it catches my fancy, I will learn to do it. I will succeed and do it well. All I have to do is listen.
with a squall of rain and wind that tosses the mango tree out back enough to shake loose blossom, filling the air with fragments that were meant to be succulent, fragrant fruit.Some of which would have ended up on my breakfast menu eventually. Rain is different here in the Caribbean. Yesterday I drove around the corner from one patch of sunshine to another, but the second patch was filled with a driving rain impervious to the highest thrust of windscreen wipers. Another 100 yards and it was done, road dry as bone. We say 'the devil is beating his wife with a cou cou stick' when rain and sunshine come together. Cou cou being made of cornmeal and okras and churned with a flat paddle like a tiny cricket bat. Delicious with steamed flying fish or salt fish in a butter sauce with onions. For some reason my cou cou turns out green which is not standard issue. Maybe too many okras.
Another week. My tape recorder ordered six weeks ago has not arrived and I am shackled to the studio not truly designed for production work. Am currently doing a Heath Robinson with extra cables, pulling the mic out from the console and creating an area where I can sit face to face with a guest but with the current configuration there is no way to make it look natural which further stresses those already nervous; and it is hard to make things look and feel effortless with one's back to the controls that need monitoring. I tried a mirror in an experiment and it is just not on as an option. I tell myself to breathe, pull my shoulders down from around my ears and ply myself with platitudes about Rome and ancient and modern building practises. Sometimes it helps but I need content and I have all these people eager to give it to me and nowhere to gather it effectively. Of course there is the loose cannon option...rent studio time from my competitors. Maybe I can suggest that and see what outrage can achieve...
Friday last week I got a phone call at about 8:30 a.m. and when the caller was surprised that I was still asleep (forgot to turn the phone off) I explained that as I work until dawn on Saturday morning I sleep in late on Friday. So she called this morning at 8:45. How is that supposed to be better? At least this week I am already awake despite staying up until three last night...man am I going to be dragging later!
This week has rushed by and I keep getting the feeling I haven't done very much. Not true, because I have files full of new promos, bridges and stingers; I've finally got a chance of getting a crossfade right in audition (if you are reading and don't know, adobe audition, audio editing software) once in five attempts and I actually used eight tracks yesterday, chequerboarded them and got the effect I wanted in the mixdown! I suppose that's why the week is missing...like coding web pages, life just slides down into a black hole and when you come out the light has changed, sometimes the whole day has moved on, and editing/mixing pulls the same level of attention I guess. At least I have product to show for it...not like spending hours writing a script and then trying to run it and nothing!
Strangely enough this daily striptease helps my show. I believe good radio is like a conversation between the DJ and the "Listener" and doing the psychic naked 360 in front of the world helps me let myself be seen as well as heard once the mic is on. I was painfully shy until I read in Reader's Digest that shyness is a form of vanity so I dived into things that make me a privately public creature, behind words, behind a lens, on a stage,behind a mic. Seen and heard but at a distance so I can run if the big bad world gets too close. Self-knowledge is such a freakin' bore at times! I am still shy, I just suppress it ruthlessly and dance in public with my soul on the outside.
This morning I ache, each joint a song of how much it has done for me, how lithe, how limber I have been. Each tree I climbed and fell from, each dream reached for, way above my head just out of reach to make me leave the womb. In some places I burn, the lactic acid from this morning's dance drowning each muscle almost to the skin , a brushfire of exertion not eased by sweat. For so long, I would have lived forever, invincible, invulnerable a young immortal with feet that did not touch the ground and laughter that cascaded over admonitions that told me to slow down. I danced and swung from cup to cup, drinking Life with all its joy and pain embracing broken glass with the same passion I brought to velvet and to skin. I have wept tears drawn from me in floods by recognition of shared pain, and sometimes tears so salt they scored and burned my cheeks like acid in the wake of some momentary betrayal that for that moment was the end of Life for me. And yet, I breathed again, heart beat again and other moments came to set me dancing on my path. I have been a dream, a curse, a joy, a burden, an unmitigated bore depending on whose mirror I have stood before. And I have seen my inner self reflected in anger, tenderness and mindless passion; all those faces that are mine to claim and work with, seeking the face I had before I was born in every pool of water from the corner of my eye. So I ache and stretch and finger acupressure points, some soft, some hard, wincing at the tale the gentle agonies are telling, noting where I must find balance and direction and where the energy lies so thin I am a battery on empty. I stretch and ache and rejoice because each twinge announces that though, at last, I am mortal, I still endure.
and do you enjoy
your solitude?
I retreat into my
quietness sometimes
ears burning from the
sounds of the world
the people who imagine
that they own my time
I wonder if they ever
stop to think
to see
that I am so much
my own
that I am unattainable
cannot be achieved
or grasped
can only be given
I smile because I open doors
and put out welcome mats
then watch them batter at the windows
perhaps I am unkind
to expect them to pay
attention
the only coin they
will not spend.
This is a list of bajanblue's Blogs. Click here for bajanblue's Blog List
bajanblue Blog (295)