http://counterpathpress.org/videoed-readings-of-154-fortiesjackson-mac-low

http://counterpathpress.org/anne-tardos-reading-jackson-mac-lows-forties-42


when I come back to Jackson Mac Low's poems after a while away, I think first - it's nonsense! It's nonsense! And then I settle in and the language seems like clear water travelling, pooling, settling, shining brilliant on the surface then limpid to its depth, then jumbling and rushing on again. 

A beautiful day, a day of small completions. We moved in September but we've never quite finished moving. Bare walls, the odd box here and there. Today I put away the pictures I don't want to hang, got the others ready to hang, sorted through junk and knick-knacks, reordered my bookshelves to get stacks of books off the floor. Now I have a collection of photos and beloved things on top of the shelves - the reading light my poppa gave me, the small dragon from Nan with the coin in its mouth, the silver pocket warmer from N, the opera glasses from L. Photos of dear ones, the old pack of miniature tarot cards, the cup-cake pin-cushion sewn by A. The canasta cards from Auntie M, etc, etc. J & J gave us a photo they took in Malaysia before they left here - it's a table and chair in a bright verandah looking out to trees, a cat watching the trees - so that is on the wall now. One casualty of my orderings was the small photo R gave me last Christmas, of hands laid peacefully in a lap. I had found the right place for it - propped against the window in front of my desk, where it is just within my field of vision as I work - but I hadn't realised the window was leaking from the day of hard rain. Fifteen minutes later I noticed the (unframed) matt board was soaking up water. Only a little water had crept onto the photo. I have weighted it between paper towels. Maybe this will be enough to save even the matt.

I didn't repot any of the plants I bought yesterday - I want to give them a chance to adjust to the new light conditions first. But I cleaned out all the old pots and ordered things on the patio, and even threw out one of the money plants that had got rootbound. Perhaps I'll give away more of the money plants once I've done the repotting - they grow so easily and self-propogate, so they tend to take over. I hope I can keep the new plants alive. I chose a great variety of foliage, and I'm so happy to have them. The oxalis with its great purple false-clover leaves looks a little fragile, but we'll see.

I think this was the perfect new year's eve day. Ready for a new year.

I thought - I need to read a poem, because  I can't remember how they are written. What do people write them about? How do they begin? I resolved to write a poem like the first one I found on my bedside table, and it was this:

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1996/spring/catullus-alberto-caeiro-fernando/

- or at least, the 'dirty unknown child' section. That is difficult, because it is close to what I saw today.

Bought no orchid, but a bromeliad, a couple of hanging succulents, and something spiky, drapy and flowering that I suspect is two or three plants in the same pot. There were wonderful strawberries in hanging baskets, and although they were hung in the shade, I was too suspicious to bring one home - probably would have carked it on our shady patio, and that would have been too sad. Oh and an oxalis with large purple leaves and little white flowers. I wish I had at least asked about the care of the strawberries.

As I was paying the cabdriver when I got home a Chinese boy of about 8 years old, with no front teeth, jumped in the taxi beside me and closed the door. The driver smiled, thinking I knew him, but I didn't. The boy didn't answer any questions or talk at all, just wriggled and laughed, leaned forward and tried to press buttons on the driver's console, to grab my money, and so on. He wriggled out of the driver's reach and into me, like he knew me very well. While I was putting away my change the driver came around and pulled him, gently enough, out of the car, chiding him that the police would get him. When I got out the boy grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the stairs to the apartment service area, but I didn't go, because my hands were full of bagged pot plants with many dangling fronds, which made them hard to set down. But I'm not sure I would have gone anyway. 

YL wants to translate some of my poems; I have to get a set together for him. Or, I've done this but I am stalling on sending it. It's hard, painful, to go through EVERYTHING and find so little.

SC asked for a 'crime' story ages ago for her journal, so I gave her the garden story, The Trappers, it's called at the moment. But she wants the story changed. The protagonist changes gender and then nothing is 'done' with that. I don't want to change it. I told her I couldn't, and I can't, so maybe she won't publish it now. She wants the officers to notice the gender change, to confirm that it is real. Why would I want to confirm that it is real? It is important but only important in exactly what it does. It gives the protagonist a particular proximity to the 'child'. Gender there is a function, not a condition. Or it's just one of the things that happens. It's not the meaning of the story, and I don't want the story to explain it or be explained by it.

There's the long, dead essay from a couple of years ago, rejected after months of work and now too outdated to use anywhere. A couple of dead conference papers. I said I'd turn one into an article, and as soon as I said that I locked up on everything. Soft Shroud too, which I loved, and now feels like a tangled, unsolvable problem, a mess. I can't speak, I can't be understood because I have some kind of speech impediment, whatever I say. This feels like what they call circling the drain. Self-pity in the ranks (there will be no self-pity in the ranks)

Woke in the night up against that wall and I decided that I had to jettison that agreement for the article just to get my spirit back. Yes, I can do that. Permission granted. It's me, my life, my own. And then the key turned in the lock - if you were to keep going with the article, here's what you should read, do, say... it needn't be a big deal, it is something you do, just what you do normally alongside everything else you do, not what is done to you, not a prison....

So I'm walking to the garden shop now, to think and to buy an orchid. 

boat notes 24/12 -

Morning. It's day but not yet 'sunrise' because of the cliffs. There's this one boat and I want it to go away, its engine pointing on my morning. A sea hawk is whistling and circling over my head, steering in tight circles with its tail and its wing tips. At the kayak station, flat yellow and green house on a barge, kids or tourists playing hackey-sack in silhouette. I woke in the night with relationship panic...
c'mon, c'mon, calls a raven in a cliff echo. Reveal your nest - reveal your nest -

We're moving, we're out of the cove now, sun's warming things up. A couple bail their fishing boat, and N gets his flash out. It's a tour, we're on a tour. Oil emulsifies near the rocks. Scrub on the cliff-sides. Dark grey planes with cream streaming and planing through it. Sun's gone, suddenly freezing. Children swimming to school because their family can afford no boat. How do you survive in a floating fishing village with no boat? Sudden cold winds. Boat hands without boats. Sometimes teachers pick up the kids in their boats and take them to school.

On the piers ladies sell pearls, fake pearls? Smartly dressed, urgent. I lie back in the sun above a city of boats, hat on, wrap pulled around me. A boat above a city of boats.

-
Tiny one-room concrete house, beside a busy freeway on the way to a wonder of the world. Aqua like houses in Patea. In the front garden a large grove of cake-tiered topiaries.

Wedding couple both in white on a blanket in a pine forest, wedding photos by the freeway.

In a town a mamma sits on a broken pavement next to her scooter, helmet on, large sleeping boy of 8 or 9 laid out on her lap, cuddled in.

Mamma in an ornate hat, standing behind daughter on daughter's bicycle, holding on, daughter is smiling.

Sister behind sister on a scooter, wrapping facemask around front-sister's ears.

And hand-ploughs. 

boat notes 23/12 -

Top deck of the boat, Ha Long Bay. Two lemon trees, the furled mast, red flag with yellow star and yellow flag. All the boats repainted white five months ago so they look 'international standard'. This silence is two or three low, even boat motors, and the water carrying on its whispered conversation with the narrowed base of every rock, each one cedes - 'do not cede upon your desire' wrote Lacan I think but where, why? we curl around the corner of an island, there's the sound of an anchor chain, it's just me up here, the shadow cuts away from the narrowed base to leave the island in relief against bright water. But everything here is dimly green, the smoggy, softly smoggy sky is yielding to the evening. Fisherman shouts a song, whistles across from his yellow house-station, our boat sounds a short, bright horn and it echoes around the rocks. Maybe it's not the fisherman who shouts but the Greeks in their bright yellow kayaks, spooning through the last of the light - not last, yet, but lowering. Lights are up on the mast of the Halong Dragon Cruise beside us and here on our deck by our lemon trees, which I know are not lemon trees - leaves are a little like verbena but in a seven-fingered hand. Maybe chilis. Not chilis. Wicker chairs, concrete slab table top.

A bat complains against the cliff and we're still moving. Kayaks go through a low hole in the rock, life jackets still just picking up light as they move out of the rock's shadows and off into imperceptibility, paddles catching just a little more, a final pinch... It's hard to believe no one else is up here, seeing this. G wrote 'H L B is beautiful, would give you time for quiet reflection.'

Now N is here, reclined on a wicker sun bed, pointing his camera at the sky, now Belle and Andy, friendly and independent at the far end of the deck. N's brought me an amaretto sour, the water's heavy and peaceful, soup, glossy molten iron picking up the boat lights, reflecting them in long smudged beams.

I love people here, I love the way we all want to see this wonder. In the cave - 'Surprising Cave' - the surprise is a stalacmite that looks like a cock, and it jumps out at you as you round a corner into this huge cavern, 200 metres across, with 800 metres of walkway snaking up one end and down the other. Looking down on the streams of people trooping along the walk - it's like the Inferno. But everyone's  exciteable, peaceful, capacious and grasping. Graffitti on the cave walls from 1956, 1938, 1905 - crass happy people, taking big bites of wonder and chewing it up, chewing themselves into it. A young fit Greek guy does a handstand at the peak of the walkway - a couple of hundred spectators to see him and laugh! Then our Vietnamese guide does one too, it's better, it's hilarious... I'm complaining in my head about the one boat generator I can hear near us but really I'm happy, happy to be an ugly human ape. N said to the guide, about monkeys  - 'really I think they are just bad people'. and H the guide said 'yes, and if you have a beautiful girlfriend, a monkey will like her too.'

Roof of the cave like the mud of a riverbed with the stones picked out, like paint rolled over a lino cut and sucked into soft peaks. The motor sound suddenly fading - they are moving away. Exciting promise of a different silence. The smell of deisely saline comes up, smell of Tryphena Harbour. Cone light on a cliff side. Another boat moves off. The cavern so huge that the stream of humans seemed in scale. Stalactite legs poking through the cave roof, dragon claws dangling down, the spine of a dragon pressing, dripping wax pillars, mysterious drapes.

So much detail, what for? Words for what I see and love? Can I describe it, and then what? 

I wake up into a panic.
the walls are a wall.
flowers, plants and air have a bright steel substrate,
visible now. I'm at the future,
becoming it, about to lose my organs.

we are home. this country seems astonishingly green, clear-aired, quiet and orderly. my sinuses are throbbing from the pollution and my neck hurts from nodding off on the plane. as we drove through the yellow soup out of hanoi I saw how many flowers there were - in every shop, in hawker baskets on every corner. 

for one night I was burningly excited by the new scaffolding I have been building around soft shroud. I stayed up late, I wrote lines, I went to bed in a surge of its reasoning. it would be the gentle beauty of intimate conversation. gap crossing, bridging. an encomium for this, a lullaby of harmonising dialogue.

I lost that in the days after; interruptions, and... just failure to realise in words what I felt... the voices took on the tones of interrogation and isolation instead. I don't know how to make it otherwise... and - I still very much fear explaining and the loss of energy, immediacy, that might come with that. but isn't explanation precisely the beauty I was after? when a person explains something important, and then it is felt and understood.

Maybe it is not the information that is important, but the relationship?

I don't know what to say; this city's a grind. everyone is constantly on the verge of critical injury. everyone's a toddler playing catch in the traffic. everyone's squatting in a puddle to rewire a live powerbox. everyone's butchering meat on the footpath, and cutting fresh herbs through the dirt and blood. if you have a nerve the city's got an angle-grinder. if your shoes give up the ghost it will glue the soles back on. it wants to back a motorbike over you, and then drive a motorbike over you, then drive another sixty or seventy motorbikes over you. that's the city; the vendor just wants to you take a photo of you in her coolie hat so she can sell you a bag of chopped pineapple.

in the war museum are the wooden stakes the vietnamese used to spike the red river. they tipped them with iron and hid them below the high tide. and the bamboo stakes used to spiked the booby-trapped latrines; and the swinging balls with iron spikes, and, and, and clothing of children killed forty years ago in the christmas bombings, the photos of Heroic Mothers who lost their husband and only child to the war effort, or all their children - two, five, seven, nine....

.

last night we ate in a quiet room in the back of a restaurant, next to the maitre d's family as they ate their own dinner. he was african-french, she was vietnamese, both tall and elegant, their maid shy, their little girl restrained in her squeals and their boy completely elusive, slipping out of the room repeatedly without ever showing his face or seeming to return. in between service the father checks their meals, and teaches their maid to hold both the toddler's hands up high so the toddler can keep her balance as she learns to walk.

at the table in front of us is a chinese couple in their mid-twenties. she's ultimately groomed, with luscious extension curls and doll eyes, wearing a black silk jumpsuit and tan platform heels. she spends their degustation meal examining a series of self-portraits on her i-phone, taking photos of each course, texting with a friend, and checking her face in her compact. two or three times she looks up at her partner, and shows him her phone, then takes it back. he spends the meal just watching her with a half-smile that seems a little bit adoring, a little bit embarrassed. not once does he check his own phone.

at the other table is an older french mother and her 11 year old daughter, both petite and with long, windswept black hair. they look worn out with each other. they both order steak tartare and french fries. the daughter slumps into her silence and the mother glazes into hers.


our meal -

Amuse-bouche

Bisque de gambas, bruschetta d’avocats au wasabi & sa gambas grillée
Prawn bisque, avocado bruschetta & wasabi, grilled prawn

Entrée - Starter

Saumon fumé, crumble d’aubergines au gorgonzola
Smoked salmon, eggplant crumble in Gorgonzola, pesto & balsamic sauce



Foie gras

Terrine de foie gras au sel de Guérande, mangues rôties aux épices
“Foie gras” terrine in Guérande salt, roasted mango in spices



Plat au choix - Choice of main course

Cannelloni de crabe & d’asperges au safran, émulsion de caviar de saumon au vin blanc
Crab & asparagus cannelloni in saffron, white wine emulsion & salmon eggs

ou/or

Filet de bœuf australien Rossini, petits légumes de saison à la Provençale
Australian grilled beef Rossini, Provencal seasonal vegetables


Tangerine delicacy

Sorbet tangerine & vin liquoreux
Tangerine sorbet & sweet wine


Dessert

Variation de gourmandises du Chef
Chef’s delicacy variation

everything was wonderful - perfect, even - except the cannelloni, which was a little too salty and rich, and lacking in integration, because the more subtle flavours were lost, and because it was hard to get firm asparagus spears, soft gooey cannelloni and the delicate salmon eggs on one fork. the dessert was threefold - a chocolate truffle, a vanilla cream and a pineapple 'basket'. Coming after the sorbet this seemed too much. but the bisque and eggplant crumble were incredibly comforting, and the foie gras was - unfortunately - incredibly delicious, memorable, more-ish....

roadside bits:

under a tree by an open front gate
a wooden bed
spread with hay



a man in a string bikini
and a fur hat
follows a divining rod
through the main street




dogs off to market
on the backs of two bikes
six in this cage, ten in that one




a man squats barefoot
on the metal guardrail
of the overpass




under a giant bouquet of blooming silk
a motor scooter
and clouds of dust

BOAT SWAMPED. Occupants Saved by Sapling.

Spent most of yesterday in a wonderful cafe, big, empty, slow, perched over the city. Had the feeling of low-rent real estate in places like Port Kembla, where square footage is not under pressure. Uncomfortable couches, 80's brown, orange and pink decor. I am gaining a very little very tentative confidence that the direction of the Soft Shroud revision may be okay, that I may be able to work with this throughout. I fell asleep thinking of the Earth spinning pieces of broken, buried, brightly coloured ceramic to its surface. 

Dreamed last night that Allen Ginsberg came for a brief residency. I was supposed to work with him on a play. But I really hadn't done anything towards it. I was saying, oh, after I've finished teaching...after I've finished this, and that.... but I assumed he was doing it on his own anyway because he hadn't noticed or interacted with me at all. The environment was more like a high school, we were standing around in formations outside. School colleagues were asking me about it, saying what a great opportunity this was for my career. I thought perhaps I'd better get on with it, try to catch his attention. Ginsberg was old, fat, crusty but also quite deep-voiced and heterosexual. Eventually he looked at me and I thought maybe I had a reason to start writing but at that point I realised that my dream was wrong, that the real Ginsberg was gay and had a fairly high-pitched voice.

I saw a little girl of about four years old get bowled by a motorbike tonight, right in front of me as I was crossing the road. She was not at all hurt. She and her mother and sibling had waded out into the roaring river of traffic at the same time we did. At that point I thought - jesus h, that woman isn't even hanging on to her kids' hands. I wanted to grab the little girl then but I thought no - they know these roads better than you do - if you move in an unexpected way you will cause a problem, surprising the traffic or the kid or both. just then the little girl made a break and ran, right into a moving motorcycle. she was knocked flat onto the road and the motorbike slammed on its brakes. There is so much traffic, with no discernable lanes or other order, so it seems like things are moving very fast. But generally no one is moving at more than 30k, and everyone is super alert. she was not run over and there was no further accident. I helped to pick her up and she brushed herself down, no tears, while her mother told her off. 

that feeling is like cold ground around a transplanted root, bruised root. dumb about whether to breathe or grow. and sending out one long, blind, constantly seeking feeler, looking for the old bearing - are you there are you there are you there? hunting, fossicking. disturbing the earth. interrupting every train of thought. unsettling every environment and every routine. I've only just come to not feel it for a little while, it seems, although maybe there were other times. right now it's back in force.

N says there is a cafe with a second story and a view over the lake. If I set up there tomorrow morning I  may find an orientation. if that isn't suitable I'll just go back to the cafe at the women's museum. comfy chairs. busy, but in a nice way, just non-English chatter. people in their thirties, forties, fifties, with books and business papers, newspapers. one skinny older man walked through in aviator glasses and leather gloves, smoking a cigarillo as he went. young waitress smiling and quick to help us at every turn.

Writing orients me; a plan to write begins it. this is the most important thing, more important than whether or not to go to Ha Long Bay, a question which has worried me all day, because I could not resolve whether it would bring me closer to writing or further away. the contradictory answers perfectly balanced, the feeler-root confused, unable to go further this way or that. confused between the true thing which is a substitute for the long-loved false thing, and the false thing which was sat in the place of the true and was a nurse to the true, and might still....

oh - I mean - amour-de-soi, I think, vs amour-propre. because the recommendation for Ha Long Bay came from "the subject supposed to know". and oh but DID know, DID know! besides which it's a world heritage site. and maybe the healing effect of nature would outbalance self-disgust at participating in the desecration of nature? or stay in the city with horns. 

We went for a walk this morning around Hoan Kiem Lake - got about half-way and diverted into the Women's Museum, where I was unsettled by how much I have forgotten about the Vietnam War, and how much I never knew. Along the way there was a group of friends in their late thirties or early forties, relaxing by the lake - they included a couple, and the others persuaded N to take a photo of the couple, who were draped over each other on a park bench, cuddling, peacefully in love, her in thick pink socks with high heels kicked off....

40% of the armed forces in the South were women....

Bun cha for lunch - broth with add-your-own noodles, beef rissoles and wonderful mixed fresh herbs and lettuce - then back through the traffic for a nap. Reading Joseph Massey. Wondering how to pull myself together to get anything done.

We're in Hanoi. Every time we go somewhere else it becomes clear again that we live in the least cool city in Asia. In bed in the hotel now with our balcony door open - it's rowdy with traffic out there and there's a guy at some night spot nearby playing guitar and singing in Vietnamese, amplified, with the gentle inflections of Elvis's upper range and a loose melodic structure that, pleasantly, I can't quite arrange into a tune. I'm tempted to close the door to quieten things down but the fresh air is so good - it's 17 degrees out there. At home you wilt if you have the windows open for any time at all.

 We just ate dinner at a bright, bustly multi-storey restaurant down the road, and then took a little walk by the lake nearby. There was a crowd of carollers in white boiler-suits with JESUS stamped across the front. They seemed a bit timid in their singing and dispersed pretty quickly, while another crowd, of mature ladies dancing in formation to house music, went hard for track after track. There were Ceroc dancers too, and every other person seemed to have a red cocker spaniel. Cars and motorbikes talk to each other with their horns, and to walk across the road you just walk slowly with intent into the flow of the traffic. It doesn't feel scary. One block over from the hotel is an intersection lined with street bars. Many dozens of young Vietnamese in their 20s sit on the road and footpaths on short plastic stools, drinking beers for about 30c each and huddling together in their black puffer jackets against the cold. It's winter here.

The concierge gave us detailed advice on what to do tomorrow but I am so tired, and we have plenty of time here. Grandma's funeral is at 1.30 tomorrow, so I want to be careful and thoughtful with what I do. I keep feeling some kind of - like, inflammation in my old attachment wound, is the only way I can describe it. Mind going back to the same old sore spots, wants to worry over them, fruitlessly, then to pursue something to try to ease it.

I read Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman on the plane. Mostly I think it's about time, proposing fiction as a kind of navigation tool for the future. But I don't think I like it, because every scenario Katurian proposes has only two options, bad and worse. Even his pig story has just two options - bad for me or bad for them. Tupolski's story is the alternative that turns the ending - bad vs miraculous craft, but that doesn't work for me. Caryl Churchill's  Far Away begins on similar territory - the working out of the individual's complicity or responsibility (ability to respond) to brutal power - but it ends up in much more interesting places to me. Weirdly it seems more socially mimetic as it continues and becomes more fantastic - while McDonagh seems to end up expressing something about a personal limitation? Neither of those thoughts is right, precisely. Churchill with the war incorporating animals, weather etc seems to go into some substrate of the social, into a base increment of defensive collectivity. McDonagh... what is he saying, that to save a child from the horrors of the imagination requires care plus prodigious mathematical foresight in artistry, to the point where it's inconceivable fantasy? That just seems like bullshit. And it's this elaboration - the sense that he is through all this *saying something which must be fathomed* that makes it seem weaker than Churchill's transparency.

today was a lot of slipping in and out of the rain - you can take two steps from shelter to a taxi and you are soaked through to the skin, exhausted, not wanting to wear a seatbelt because it presses wet clothes against you, worrying about the box of books in the boot and whether you can get them safely into the apartment building. the night is very blue and books want to be read. but tomorrow to hanoi, whether some quiet and restoration and stillness can be found there. in all the traffic there could be, like in bangkok, places for budding waterlilies in soft pinks and greens. I'm getting dogged by despair and need something written, something accepted. and need hours and days of quietness. need to write something for the funeral. they are writing on her coffin so I wrote some words but it is cruel because if I feel where we are together most it is three years old, holding hands and crossing the road. holding hands in the big wind and stopping and holding the lamp-post to not get blown away. on the way to granddad's shop. or cuddling up in the morning listening to the radio. hanging out the washing together. and there was a mangler. and there was a candy floss machine. so what to say? my tummy hurts, I want to go to sleep, like that....

medical insurance today. running through policies, took hours. she had a funny little laughing wheeze when she said most anything. and very bright white diamond rings. quick to notice N's changes in mood. stacking up the possibilities. Ectopic pregnancies, twins, hydatidiform moles, neo-nate care, cancer, psychologists, acupuncture, evacuation, repatriation, contact lenses..............................

My grandma, today at around 6.20 pm NZ time; peacefully, with family around her. 

Last night I dreamed that I had taken up an academic position in Hamilton. I seemed to have inherited it, and a large house on campus, that had been owned by my stepdad's uncle. The house was in a poor state inside from long disuse - dusty, dirty, things scattered everywhere. I was going through the books, trying to put them in order and decide what to take to my office. Most were philosophy. There was a huge old hard-cover copy of the works of a particular philosopher - it was the size of about ten bibles but all bound as a single book with one ridiculously long spine. It was unwieldy and and I was excited about owning it, telling myself I'd read it and feeling like this would legitimise my position but at the same time - deep down I knew I wouldn't. I didn't know what the philosopher was about, I didn't know where to start, and I couldn't even figure out if it was his works or - it seemed almost to be a compendium of works by others on him.

The great-uncle's son was there working on the garden - he was also an academic at the same university but he didn't look like one - he was too rough and physical. I asked him about his teaching and he deflected the question. I could see he was deeply uncomfortable and disillusioned as an academic, knew it was not the job he was good at, that in fact he was a gardener at heart and that was all he wanted to do. 

I can't think what I saw today, so I must have seen things I don't recognise. the secretary leaning her hips back against the wall, relaxed and smiling in her brown bob, giving good holiday wishes. N's face a little the wrong colour and with slick hairline when he brought out the dinner, as though he is getting sick too. a photo of patea beach, close to where my sister and mother and aunt are now, ready for when my grandma leaves us. the beach is silvery brown and held together with cutty grass. cliffs layer into the distance and in the foreground there are low silver log fences, to stop people driving through. but it looks deserted.

at the home my grandma is asleep in a fold-out chair. my mother is asleep in my grandma's bed. my aunt is watching them both. time is liquid.

He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity - that is what he is like, what the whole therapy was like, wide-eyed blunders and pratfalls, like therapy with Steve Martin as The Jerk. And every time he hurt me, he heard all of it and showed he was sorry.

in my meditation tonight I saw a contemporary cathedral out there in the dark, shaped a little like the holy trinity in parnell, but without the eaves, more closed, blank, and seagulls flocking around it, calling together. and then alone, a large ruby cross, foregrounded - very severe, raw crystal bound in metal.

you were a flower, fallen out the door of your church
and I was a bee used your petals for my nests


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126556246

i

part of what sucked me down is the question of what to work on over the 'break'. and having too many urgent projects, and knowing split energies in this way is the least effective for me. 

"But Fionn, contrary to what was being said of him, discovered that his journey, in fact, was an attempt to find the size and the range of his consciousness.
   Then came the day that he understood what language was - a bridge between the flesh and the spirit.
   At the beginning, he'd thought the range of meaning extended to the supple body of the woman he'd been given to escape Aengus' wrath. Then in turn, he found it only covered the little black-nosed shape of the bird he'd taken to escape Aengus' fumbling in the dark and the burden of his love. Now, having on successive days become a doe, a fir and a blackguardly dog, he found that the memory of others contributed to what he now was, a horse quietly steeped in a manmade field on Aran. Around him goats were singing. Each mouthful of grass he knew meant a day's work by someone in the past. The very earth his hooves stood on would have come here by boat from the mainland. The seeds of the grass he now ate would have been carefully fed into the new seaweed-nourished soil one at a time. This, the man he had once been knew. Not only that but all he looked on he considered first as Fionn would, then as the woman did, as the bird, the tree, the doe, the dog and lastly the horse. It was the horse ate the grass but it was Fionn himself had sown it. His consciousness now extended through all he had seen. But there was loneliness in this condition. And that was when Fionn considered Fionn."

A Goat's Song, Dermot Healy. 197-198

I have a cold, a sore neck, blocked sinuses, cold feet, can only find one sock. I know if I imagine that my feet are actually sweatingly hot this may confuse them and make them actually hot.

I watched a documentary interview with a cannibal today, his head the shape of an alien and he said he felt like an alien, catapulted from another planet. In the middle of it one of my colleagues came over with potplants for us to mind. he had been sick, feverish, said he thought this would be good for poetry. he introduced the potplants by name. I said I hadn't achieved that level of intimacy with my own plants and he said yes, but you and N have each other, I only have the plants.

then I went back to bed, the sky was a very milky blue, at some point N came and closed my computer for me and eased off the air conditioning just as I was falling asleep.

I have not been meditating much the last week and I find I am not remembering my dreams in the same way. I want to start again, but maybe just sticking to 10 minutes for a while instead of 20, while I am sick. I feel like too much crying and fighting made me sick. This is BD's theory,  that when one cries or shouts one irritates the mucous membranes and germs get in. I think it is right.

Well, I was doing so well before that. And then hormones and stress came and smashed me up, I dropped all my routines and went crazy and now can't remember where I was. Threw my glasses, broke them, had to get them repaired.

But I had seen it coming and went to see G on Wednesday to try to forestall it. Nearly did, but didn't. It was nice to see G. And I did meditate that night, and went to the cafe to write on Thursday and Friday mornings, just couldn't hold things together over the weekend. Tidal rage.

Began something interesting on soft shroud at the cafe. a frame around it. Back to the cafe tomorrow morning, if I feel well.

G said something so - he said 'I want to tell them to have faith, to keep going, nothing will end, don't sell your girls to sex traffickers, no one will die -'

I stared at him and said 'but people do die'.

He said 'yeah, I know - or, I don't know, I just don't know enough about those communities.'

'People die, kids without medicine...' and then we talked about micro-loans, strategic initiatives, like I was teaching him.

My feet are warm now - it worked, I tricked them. A miracle of faith. Does G get this attitude from church? How come he can be so dense, a child? Like a little kid excited about going to Sunday school and learning stories and praying to Jesus. Last time I saw him I said - 'I don't like happy, comfortable endings or messages in my poems, because it's like - like say as a therapist you were just trying to fix all the problems in people's lives so they could be happy. It's not going to work. So you have to find a way to help people be alive and just... (I couldn't find a word) LIVE and be engaged with what is there and not wait for anything.'

He said, 'Oh! I do? Really? I haven't got there yet, I am still trying to fix everybody's problems so they can be happy...'.

He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity. 

(written on Sunday, but I fell asleep before posting it)
today I painted a picture. my brush was cheap and pieces kept coming off in the paint. I mixed the palest green-white I could and layered it horizontally across the page.the colour veered into a bluer tinge in the middle and a yellower tinge at the bottom. I was going to leave it like that - once  I'd covered the page I wanted to do nothing to it.

-but I should paint an actual picture! I've got all this stuff out! 
     -but this is the picture I wanted to paint. I mixed the paint and felt it thick on the brush and covered the whole page. who am I painting for? who will see this? No one, just me, and that is the feeling I wanted.

So then I sat there for a while admiring my painting. I noticed if I lifted it up the light caught it differently and there were blank patches where the paint was thin, so ok, don't lift it up. I was almost out of white paint (memory flash - The White Horse Inn at Berrima).

Then I felt something I wanted to do. I thinned some blue paint into watercolour consistency and made a few patches of that on the page, afterwards wiping away some that looked too much like teardrops. Then one patch on the bottom far right ended up looking like a small blue tug boat churning through a golden-green sea. The tug boat's chimney coughed out paw prints into the sky, as well as a very, very tiny blue matrouschka who sailed through the air, catapulted. I adorned these just a tiny bitt - made them clearer with the very edge of a couple of hairs of my brush

dreamed of triangular root nodes and women tying half their hair back in clasps. and N and my father and I were at a Japanese university. It was orientation week, and the leaders in our orientation group were grabbing lockers for our group, reserving them. I asked (half-heartedly) for a locker near my classroom but didn't get one, it didn't matter.

N and I walked around the university - it was pretty and busy, built on a steep slope with lots of bamboo construction. Large clay pots were sat on the pillars of every set of stairs, and there were heavy beams fixed to the top of each banister. There was an orientation event which involved students picking up the pots and beams and putting them in different places, swapping them around. It seemed largely pointless but I pulled one of the beams off its nails to try it. It was far to heavy for me to lift. In the spirit of participation N held my arm and had me swing out past the stairs, bending and damaging a thin bamboo banister in the process. Why were we doing this? It was destructive and not part of the reason for being here. 

in the morning light her kayak's steadily gliding towards the island, towards him and towards her new self, on and on, seeming with each moment to get closer and the light reflecting off the water in petals, then in sheets, brighter  and brighter till she can hardly see the island at all. 

'until the relationship is a problem...', Freud said, he remembers, well, now he's come down from  the garden to the waterfront, the letters in his hands - they're unanswerable, all of them, and if he's honest he's had some of them for years without answering them. this isn't the problem. the problem is that someone is coming, reaching unfathomably forward and his eyes are now closing against the flashing light, getting smaller in his face to keep it out. the earth that the jetty's rooted in is something of a relief - he will rest his eyes there now, he'll use his paws and dig a shelter....

three dreams:

I was crossing a farm in a storm. I sheltered in a farm house with LA and W and their kids. N too. The storm was so fierce, disturbed weather patterns, perhaps it would never come right. But I felt it on my cheek and although it was harsh I was ok. Was not hurt or blown away. We were all safe.

-

I discovered that just up the road from where I was living one could cross over into Thailand. There was a quiet resort on a beautiful blue-green bay, with islands, boats to potter around in. I realised by following TYY, who was also staying there. It was just 20 minutes away from my home. When the guests arrived the management were in a bit of a flap. There was an interview with the manager, the dad of the guy who unexpectedly owned the place  - he was young and confessed that he had no business experience at all, so whether this place was going to work or not was touch and go. I hoped he had been researching business manuals but thought that probably wasn't enough. The first round of drinks for the guests went well, because he went to a shop and bought a good selection of appealing drinks, and the wait-staff presented them in such a way that the guests ordered what was there. But when he came back with the second round of drinks he had just paper for cups that needed to be fitted together - hopeless.

-

I found a fantastic garment in a second-hand clothes shop. It was a high, starched, pointed white collar, an ornate silver broach below that, a pleated white shirt front and a navy blue cape, all pressed and immaculate, despite being second hand. I loved it and took it excitedly to show PHF and LA. Don't you think it looks like a lawyer's costume? But they were both lawyers and weren't so impressed. P showed me her actual lawyer's costume, much more full and elaborate, and all the other costumes she'd made for repertory theatre etc.

I was travelling through a large cave system, with many underground pools and rivers. I needed to be in the water - to swim, to drink or to travel downstream - but many of the pools were too shallow. I dived into one, holding my limbs close to my body - it was just deep enough for me but I had to be very careful. I made it safely. The water was stagnant, though and I had to find a way to go on. Image of water spilling over the lip, and of fresh water pouring into the pool. 

Dreamed that I was pregnant, about 6 months or so, but my belly was too small, so I was getting worried. 

a night full of dreams.

In the last one I was trying to get to a catch-up appointment with Glenn which was scheduled for 7pm. But it was in Auckland, on Customs St, where the tango studio used to be.

I was walking down Ponsonby Rd to get there and for some reason stopped in this little granny store. The two old ladies in there kept trying to sell me this, that and the next thing - ornamental plates and spoons and so on. I admired a spoon and agreed to buy it, and then they showed me a plate which happened to have a wedding message for my name and N's name (misspelt) so I though I better get that too, and then they were throwing other things in for free, wrapping them up in newspaper. It was getting later and later.

When I got out of there it was already 7, and it was cold. One of the plates, which I'd paid $150 for, had chipped as I put it in my bag and was already worthless but I decided not to mind. I started to walk as quickly as I could to the appointment but once I got down to the end of the road I realised I wasn't where I thought I was. Everything was so familiar but I couldn't remember how to get to his office. I was walking quickly here and there, trying to get there but not knowing where I was going. I decided this was wasting time so I went to pull my phone out of my bag to check the map. (There was an additional wool cardigan in my bag that made this hard - given to me by the old ladies. It wasn't going to fit over my jacket but at least I could put it on under the jacket if I got cold). I realised I couldn't remember the street name, so couldn't look it up on the map. I saw he'd been ringing, because it was now well after quarter past, but there was a new interface on my phone (because I was visiting NZ) and I couldn't get to the calls or texts or find the map. In looking for his text I saw a whole history of warm text messages from therapists I'd forgotten ever seeing, including 'Elizabeth the dramatist' and 'Roslyn'.

A strange man seemed to be following me as I dithered - I stopped and looked at him and he said 'Why are you following me?!' He looked a bit like N. I decided to try to call N but I couldn't get his number punched into the phone. I knew I was missing my appointment. Finally, crying, I turned to the guy following me, which was N, to ask for his help. "I'm lost, I have no idea where I am...". We embraced and I was relieved.

-

The dream before that I was seeing an new therapist and it turned out to be Charles Bernstein. He'd been recommended by LA, who was also seeing him, and she came with me to the appointment, which was in a waiting room. I knew she had been excitedly showing him her poems but I didn't expect to do that. He asked me a question and she started answering about herself, and then carrying on the conversation with another woman in the waiting room (a second therapist). He said we'd better go onto the next room, where it was quieter, so we did. It was his wife's dressing room. It was mosyly empty except for a large chest of drawers and in front of it, a series of large polished stones in a formation on the cream carpet. Some kind of configuration for contemplation, maybe an Eye of Horus. He said 'she has 700 dressers'. 'Capacious', I said. I was adjusting my thinking - I realised this wasn't the hoarding of junk, but the assembly of space and materials essential to a full creative practice. 

little memory -
we're at Clareville it's night, we're talking about the bilby, it's been rustling down the side of the house, maybe L saw it come inside. we make sad jokes about the neighbour with the leafblower. late at night. sounds or the thought of sounds, neighbour's dog barking or it's ours, a doorbell, thought of a halloween party, a fake moustache. actually I recall we made a moustache out of fine black (chow-chow) dog-hair. I think we taped it by the door to wear in case of strange visitors.

sounds of the boat masts clinking in the inlet. you move at the wrong moment and a baby possum freaks out and falls out off the trunk of a gum tree onto the verandah, onto its head.

last night I dreamed that I was at the T's house - a new house, different to the one on our old street. Kind of bland but large. I was wandering around, commenting on how much room they had. Mrs T said oh but there's even more - indicated a couple of wings I hadn't even seen - or were they the ones I was already thinking of? I remember talking freely and feeling comfortable. I was going to spend the day with the girls making art, we had a clear plan.

At some point talking to S I noticed she had two dads living there. I'd never noticed before that that was unusual. They just had this accommodation, because Mrs T had left one for the other but no one wanted to move out. They were peaceful and friendly enough, though perhaps the men didn't talk to each other. I realised it was peaceful because none of them had sex anymore. So it didn't matter.

*

I forgot that the squirrel was in this dream too - running away from the tree  across the ground. it was a squirrel and then more stably a rat. 

Last night's dream was full and elaborate; I was able to stay asleep until its closing and it woke me up with a clear sense of a completed message. The movie was set in an old, sweet part of Dublin with small cottages. I was going to a movie with a workmate; N was staying home with our two kids. When we came out of the movie the workmate and I were happy and excited, talking freely and easily about it. It was so exciting and good that we started to run on our way home, and then my colleague was so happy and liberated that he tore his clothes off and we continued to run like that, laughing and talking as we did. As we came to the bottom of the hill I realised that we were outside the door of my brother and sister-in-law's, and that they had probably seen us. Indeed, my sister-in-law was peering out their cottage window, looking concerned and disapproving. I pulled my colleague down the side street, the shortcut to my place, where it was much darker and no one would see. There were a couple of fleeting celebratory closed-mouth kisses as we went - and we came out of the sidestreet tucking in our shirts - my colleague had got dressed again. To my shock N was there, waiting on the corner - he saw us tucking in and I felt sick at the look on his face. He had the kids with him. I picked them up, our one year old and three year old, boy and girl, tucked one under each arm, thinking to show my commitment. It was awkward to carry them both but they both fell instantly asleep as I followed Nic indoors. There was a hooded Irish soothsayer set up at the step of our house. As I walked past with the sleeping children he said, "It only takes a moment to get carried away."

I shimmer above and just below the waterline. there's an island that I've boated to. the water glows to its depth around it, and its trees reflect in the surface of the water and into its currents, and there reflected is the house that is - was - owned by my parents, empty now, and sold on, but still inviting. will I approach? a woman, a friend and keeper of the island, has spoken vaguely but warmly - maybe in welcome, maybe just in the pleasure of being an islander herself. maybe there's a key, or nothing's locked. I'm not sure I even need to go into the house,

I bring a pile of letters with me. some are still in their envelopes, some I've already read, weeks or even months ago, unfortunately without answering or knowing how to.

Few are from my clients or former clients. Most come to me because of the word of mouth;  it's become known in the city that I answer letters, and that i turn no one away.

red dogs in the shade and sun, red dog mother in the shade, sons wandering in the sun. near the young tembusu trees with their corrugated bark. word is the cat population is thinning out. 

Trying to go back through things here and find stuff that I can put together. A lot of it I prefer just as it is, fragments falling on one another, little squares layering, intensifying in colour and then fading off, drifting into something else. I like this better than whole separate things.

Dreamed that I was out by the back fence with N and a young woman who was standing in for my little sister, because she couldn't be there, and one or two others. It was night and for some reason we were watching the sky. There were thousands of stars visible. I saw a shooting star - I exclaimed and pointed but as I did I started to see dozens and then hundreds of others brightening and fizzing away into nothingness. I looked to the Southern Cross (in the dream I called it the Aurora Borealis) in time to see its stars do the same. They were gone. It was clear we were witnessing the end of our known existence, our galaxy coming to its end.

Before I could be terrified I knew I had to make sure my sister was okay. I hugged the girl as we looked at the sky and told her 'It's an incredible thing to be alive at this time, to see this.' I knew I had to find my actual sister and teach her this, wherever she was, in time for her to be okay.

And then I started repeating an exclamation of wonder - maybe 'Look at them! Just look at them!' I said it over and over until I woke up and then it echoed around keeping me awake.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Starlight Night LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!	5
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!	10
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

crying meditations:

- throat dilated and hardened into an open ring, tongue quivering free on its stalk like a baby bird tongue 

- intense sharp itch on the foot, on the neck, on the left side of the abdomen, itches layering and getting fiercer, pincers, whole body chained, hard jaw, teeth together

- hot sheets of back-ache, layer under layer, crumpling

- empty flask suddenly opening on the left hand side of the diaphragm, hard shell, filled with cold air 

- brief sharp stomach pain opening into deep jelly wobbles in a quick 2/4 rhythm

livid sun this evening, dropping below the clouds and into a last stretch of haze before the hills.

trying to write that and about the pink student halls snugged into the hills, pagoda style roofs, but distracted, that instead we were rolling back away from the sun, and the thin empty prism between the ground and clouds was now angled towards it. 

actually this afternoon there was soft sunshine for a long time through the window onto my face and the desk, where I was slowly grading, reading the poems several times, drifting away, coming back. I went to look at him in the bedroom - I knew he was asleep - curled over my pillow, holding it. 

may the early light shine upon you

His eyes were a little bit fervent tonight, saying 'I can do this too'. he offered his critique. "It's a little bit of a train of thought." Then we stepped out of the theatre onto the closed road, roadworks. the humidity so thick we were walking into a warm cloud, cotton grey on the night. no traffic anywhere. 

I dreamed that N and I moved into a large shared house, old and run-down. We took three rooms, and we were happy with how much space we had, even though the rooms were separated in the house. We moved into a different room in the middle of the night. I heard my parents shouting in the next room - turned out they were staying there on a kind of meditation retreat. The owners of the house were meditation friends of theirs. I was upset and concerned that they were disturbing the rest of the house. But the owners walked out with me to the kitchen, supportively touching my elbow, saying 'yes, it's a shame, isn't it, after all these years. They must be very attached to that pain.' They were calm and philosophical, and everything was okay. They had made rolled up bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast - there was a large, stacked tray of them, and although this didn't specifically appeal to me I was happy because I knew N would be excited by it. 

My mother has had a baby. I'm with her, we're taking the baby home from the hospital - we're together on a sort of trike, or bicycle with side-cart. I think the baby's name is Colleen. My stepdad has not attended the birth. He's away from home for a couple of days at a music festival. It's sinking in that this is strange and wrong, that he doesn't want to bond with her in the first couple of days, thinks he can catch up later. My mother is having a psychotic break and has got off the bicycle, is wandering all over the road, shouting and waving her arms, trying to go inside a cafe. People are cautiously surrounding her; she's perhaps going to be taken back to hospital. I am looking after the baby, who is brand new and wrapped up warmly.

I CAN SEE THROUGH MY EYEBALLS

(Pina Bausch)

a white cliff of hearing water

is hearing a cliff-nest boiled in milk.

whiter the sea-mews boil in the jaws,

swim up through the hearing,

see through.

yonder a yolk, a yellow mew

falls from the sun to the milk

and we meet, climb the cliff’s veins

dry off in the clothespines

as pins in shadow, thin but holding

warm stones in hands.

pina is a blue tree. shadow.

tall, with humorous feet

that is viscous feet transducing

the wrapping arms transducing

in fingers fine hairs

on the backs of warm stones

on the backs of the root

threaded dirt, animals threading

saccade saccade the city of trees

with cinderblock city with

warm stones in hands.

one of her animal bodies
folds to the lee as a city.
another of her bodies
folds to the lee.

I seek the world's veined teapot, buried....

Samuel Ace at The Drunken Boat

demotion ("A stressed syllable may realise an offbeat when it occurs between two stressed syllables" - Derek Attridge):

Martine Bellen, Hey Diddle Diddle

hen in the berries, juice on the feathers, hooves on the dancers, cup of night. milkstream. gentle ferns on the river, trailing fingers in the river, & roots push in the mud. rain on the stems banks and dribbles. rain patter and chill. 

cysts on my intestines!
cysts on my intestines, you make me want to sleep
you make me want to cancel all my classes and drift
over playgrounds on the hot hot breeze
make me go right down in my energy right down
to the television aisle in the large appliance store
float between the channels push around on the tides
of sound sleep moving
wake sleep cruising on the crowded escalators

got nasty drugs to kill the bugs
nasty drugs to kill the bugs
amoebas stop mobbing my innards
stop cramping me in the night
& washing out my will
on a wave of shit each day

got drugs to pop you like balloons
I want my energy back

if, in the dead of night, you have to seize chickens from the higher branches of a magnolia, muffle your baby's ears and grab the rooster first. 

small baby's tongue quivering on its root - free in the air like the clapper of a bell

a blind woman in the dole office queue - the case manager says 'follow me' and walks off

five children of different ages, up for adoption together: Quinta, Quinte, Quintara, Quintare, Quintea.
"Quintara and Quintea are making progress with processing their feelings about possible adoption and have chosen not to be photographed at this time."

it's all about the flight paths at the moment. seeing out, having a view. it helps so much here, where it's so hard to be outside. view skating along the buzzing green tips of the trees where they are respiring in the light. sea apples, angsanas, rain-trees, broad-leaf mahoganies.

and after dark the campus lights, quiet and peaceful. among these sorts of pleasures I feel guilty about having requested a bigger place, so I could work easier, so we didn't kill each other, so we could have more happiness. about having air-conditioning on so our things don't mould. it niggles and nags. I don't know how to make peace with the needs of the self that actively take something from others.

U PLAY IT LIKE MICKEY GILLEY THERE HONEY

exhausted! we moved house. the new place feels huge, and so much natural light. there was almost none before. now the bedrooms look out over the tops of trees to the grass-covered roof of the love-knot. we are at the level of the flightpaths of the birds. I have my own room to work in again, first time in three years. 

The Hour of the Soul - Marina Tsvetayeva

The Hour of the Soul

1

 At the deep hour of the soul and night,
Not figured yet on any clock,
Into a young boy's eyes I led my sight
Not figured yet as a double lock

On the flow of nights for anyone,
Pond filled to oblivion, to the rims,
And resting tranquilly.
                                    From now on
Your life gets underway, begins.

The greying Roman she-wolf's eye,
Espying in her nursling - Rome.
Dream-conjuring maternity
Of the rock... There is no name, no home

For my perplexities... I've shed
My every veil, have grown from loss.
Thus kneeling, bowing down her head
Over the wicker basket was

Egypt's daughter...

[14 July 1923]

2

At the deep hour of the soul,
Deep hour - nocturnal...
(Gigantic stride of the soul,
Soul in night's hold.)

At that hour, soul, rule all
The worlds you will
To govern - palaces of soul,
Soul, rule them all.

Make rusty your lips, with snow
Powder your lashes
(Atlantic sigh of soul,
Soul in night's hold...)

Soul, with darkness kohl
The eyes where like Vega
You arise... Of sweetest fruit
Make bitter gall.

Make bitter, dark as coal.
Grow great: and rule.

[8 August 1923]

3

For the soul there's an hour, as there is for the moon,
For the owl, the gloom, the dark.
For the soul there's an hour as there was for the tune,
In Saul's dream, of David's harp...

Vanity, tremble at that hour,
Wash away your rouge and your shine.
For the soul there's an hour like the thundershower,
My child, and this hour is mine.

The hour of the breast's most precious depths,
The breaking of a dam.
All things are torn from familiar berths,
All secrets from each mouth's clam,

All veils from eyes. All footprints led
To their source. All the notes unstuck
From their staves. The soul's hour is the hour of Dread,
My child, and that hour has struck.

'O Dread of mine.' That's what you'll coak.
Thus, tortured by the knife
The surgeon plies, children reproach
Their mother: 'Why are we alive?'

And she, with her hands' cool palms relieves
Their fever. 'It must be. Rest.'
'My child, the Soul's hour is like the knife's.
But the knife is blessed.'

[14 August 1923]

Marina Tsvetayeva. Selected Poems.Translated by David McDuff. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 1991.

land loss

someone I know posted an RIP message on facebook today, and the message began, "As a child I lived in a small no exit street surrounded by other kids my own age. Our mums were stay at home mums with open doors so we rocked from house to house, and which ever house we were in come 5pm was where we ate dinner. It was a childhood of playing stuck in the mud out on the road while practising blowing bubbles with our gum (we throught we were so cool), making tree huts and pelting i

nnocent pedestrians with acorns...."

I didn't know the person who died - one of the other kids - but the message startled me because I was also living in that street. I was late on the block, arriving aged ten - but the experience she described was almost completely unrecognisable to me. It's still a feeling of shock and actual pride and relief to see that so clearly. That my mum had never been a stay at home mum, that by the time I arrived there I had lived in 8 other houses and been to 5 other schools, that my parents were divorced and remarried and spent most of their time shouting at each other, that I'd been living next to an erupting volcano, had walked over a village smothered in ash-mud, had seen a dead body and the insides of several typhoons, had been tended by maids and endlessly touched by strangers in the street. And I was not allowed a tree-hut! Settling in in the little cul-de-sac, which every five years featured in a national magazine as the most 'normal' street in the whole country, was the pits. I used to watch those kids out the french doors until my parents would yell at me to go make friends with them and there was nothing I hated more than being forced to go and try to somehow start a conversation with my face burning. I had no idea why I didn't fit in. 

When I read the message I had a wave of anger and jealousy and then a wave of crowing - that's REAL, that difference was real. And now less of those and more... something else. later.