"(ll. 452-461) `Strangers, who are you? Whence come you sailing
along the paths of the sea? Are you for traffic, or do you
wander at random over the sea as pirates do who put their own
lives to hazard and bring mischief to men of foreign parts as
they roam? Why rest you so and are afraid, and do not go ashore
nor stow the gear of your black ship? For that is the custom of
men who live by bread, whenever they come to land in their dark
ships from the main, spent with toil; at once desire for sweet
food catches them about the heart.'"
...

"(ll. 526-530) `Lord, since you have brought us here far from our
dear ones and our fatherland, -- for so it seemed good to your
heart, -- tell us now how we shall live. That we would know of
you. This land is not to be desired either for vineyards or for
pastures so that we can live well thereon and also minister to
men.'

(ll. 531-544) Then Apollo, the son of Zeus, smiled upon them and
said: `Foolish mortals and poor drudges are you, that you seek
cares and hard toils and straits! Easily will I tell you a word
and set it in your hearts. Though each one of you with knife in
hand should slaughter sheep continually, yet would you always
have abundant store, even all that the glorious tribes of men
bring here for me. But guard you my temple and receive the
tribes of men that gather to this place, and especially show
mortal men my will, and do you keep righteousness in your heart.
But if any shall be disobedient and pay no heed to my warning, of
if there shall be any idle word or deed and outrage as is common
among mortal men, then other men shall be your masters and with a
strong hand shall make you subject for ever. All has been told
you: do you keep it in your heart.'"

Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo tr Evelyn-White

I think of the days of our cat Bella's death as hot and fuzzy, black with her fur, prickly, salty. Can I write about this? When the nurses took her into the other room to put a catheter in her leg she was already very weak, but she turned to look right back over the vet nurse's arms and straight into my eyes. Why would I write about this? It was the middle of winter. N stood beside me. They returned her, still wrapped in the green crocheted blanket, to my arms. She relaxed into the cuddle as soon as she was back there, as though we were at home. She was so weak by then. The nurses had already told us what to expect, and gave us time like that until we were ready.

What I regret is that as they moved towards us with the injection they were making noises, as though to calm her down, but it was the noises that were disturbing. They were tense, tutting and cooing. They said 'talk to her, tell her you're there', so I did, but that was not what I wanted. I wanted to be silent with her. She knew I was there, we were together. She knew N was standing beside us and we were safe. But they made noises, and it was disturbing. She didn't wriggle or startle but she was aware, wary of the sounds. Those moments should have been peaceful, they could have come quietly and she would have felt more safe.

Once they put the injection in through the catheter it was instant, her heart just stopped and she was limp. Her bladder released through the blanket and I lifted her up to the vet's table so that we wouldn't be totally covered in wee.

Then my memory is a little bit fuzzy. I had another blanket with me, really a large piece of soft velveteen fabric, and I'm not sure if we wrapped her in it there or kept her in the crocheted blanket until we got to Mum's. I remember how her body kept its warmth as I held it against me, and how naturally it moved into the various positions of her life - snuggled against me as we drove, or curled in a circle, which is how we wrapped and buried her.

I unwrapped her so that Mum could kiss her goodbye.

That morning I had sat with her on the front steps and we watched the birds on the front lawn. It was drizzly and she was so happy to be out there, watching, alert, from the blanket in my arms. I let her stand for a little while on the footpath but she didn't move, just swayed, seemed unsure what to do, so I took her back in my arms and we watched. For those last couple of days all she really seemed to want was to be held. I sat for hours on end, just sat with her in the armchair, moving as little as possible, and then laid her between us in bed at bedtime. N brought whatever I needed. I tried a couple of times to take her to the toilet or to water or food when I thought she'd be ready, but actually she complained when I did this. She was, despite her great stillness, still capable of standing and taking steps when she wanted. I wasn't sure until she showed us, but she could still initiate movement, and so I learned to just wait for that and help her to her bowl or litter then. Otherwise we just sat together, sharing warmth through hours with no greater need. I felt I was storing something for the years ahead. The room grew dark, the room grew light. We were together.

things haven't been quite the same since my dream of being tortured. some time in the few days after that I meditated and it came back, the feeling of the forearm shoved up into my torso and squeezing. It was unbearable. In my head, as it began, panicked shouting - 'not again not again not again'. but it continued, and afterwards left me with the sensation of something being over. maybe of something having been killed. something specific, which used to reside on the left side of my face, below my eye, close to my nose.

"More grateful 'tis at times (for Nature craves
No artifice nor luxury), if forsooth
There be no golden images of boys
Along the halls, with right hands holding out
The laps ablaze, the lights for evening feasts,
And if the house doth glitter not with gold
Nor gleam with silver, and to the lyre resound
No fretted and gilded ceilings overhead,
Yet still to lounge with friends in the soft grass
Beside a river of water, underneath
A big tree's boughs, and merrily to refresh
Our frames, with no vast outlay- most of all
If the weather is laughing and the times of the year
Besprinkle the green of the grass around with flowers."

Lucretius, from On the Nature of Things, tr William Ellery Leonard

classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.2.ii.html

"Mild is the slow necessity of death:
The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp,
Without a groan, almost without a fear,
Resigned in peace to the necessity,
Calm as a voyager to some distant land,
And full of wonder, full of hope as he.
The deadly germs of languor and disease
Waste in the human frame, and Nature gifts
With choicest boons her human worshippers.
How vigorous now the athletic form of age!
How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!
Where neither avarice, cunning, pride or care,
Had stamped the seal of grey deformity
On all the mingling lineaments of time.
How lovely the intrepid front of youth!
How sweet the smiles of taintless infancy.

Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,
Fearless and free the ruddy children play,
Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows
With the green ivy and the red wall-flower,
That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;
The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,
There rust amid the accumulated ruins
Now mingling slowly with their native earth:
There the broad beam of day, which feebly once
Lighted the cheek of lean captivity
With a pale and sickly glare, now freely shines
On the pure smiles of infant playfulness:
No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair
Peals through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes
Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds
And merriment are resonant around.

The fanes of Fear and Falsehood hear no more
The voice that once waked multitudes to war
Thundering thro' all their aisles: but now respond
To the death dirge of the melancholy wind:
It were a sight of awfulness to see
The works of faith and slavery, so vast,
So sumptuous, yet withal so perishing!
Even as a corpse that rests beneath their wall.
A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death
To-day, the breathing marble glows above
To decorate its memory, and tongues
Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms
In silence and in darkness seize their prey.
These ruins soon leave not a wreck behind:
Their elements, wide-scattered o'er the globe,
To happier shapes are moulded, and become
Ministrant to all blissful impulses:
Thus human things are perfected, and earth,
Even as a child beneath its mother's love,
Is strengthened in all excellence, and grows
Fairer and nobler with each passing year."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from The Daemon of the World: A Fragment 

an "iBook" edition - no details. 

What is the authority of a draft?

It has been suggested to me that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", and as I work (so very very slowly) on revising "Soft Shroud" (working title, working body...) I have that thought in mind. Not as something I accept, but as a kind of irritant. Sand for the oyster, or maybe just sand for the sandwich. I am asking myself - what is the authority of the draft?

And of this draft, which I dug out of sustained physical attention to felt sense within particular musical environments (especially the Animal Collective's Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (also Fall Be Kind)) that I chose to hold particular emotion & event environments (Charlie's death, bankruptcy, Grafton) that were for me totally experientially bound together.

None of that is nothing to me. It took me quite a long time to see how much was NOT carried in what I had written - I had to wait until my immersion fell away again, but still the territory and its signs are so personally infused that it is hard for me to step outside it.

When I think that I am too attached to my "compositional experience", I think the alternative is to be present (outside of myself) to what the words are on the page now, to let go of their personal histories and be fully conscious of them, independent but intact. But I can't. I can't be somewhere other than my body and its memories, which have emptied into words. And I can't eradicate my own purpose without losing too much. The purpose is not to convey experience as it happened. The purpose is to make an immersion (not just be in an immersion) that vibrates at the same frequency as the frequency I was in (physically, compositionally) in relation to those experiences.

It sounds easy to come to this but it has not been obvious to me at all.

What if the draft knows more than me now, rather than less than me now? And what if my role is not to cut it away from its moorings,  but to move into those, to know that I don't understand them but they are 'mine', as in, the experience's? This would not be 'the mooring of starting out', but of a kind of backwards-forwards, which is very much the direction of the poem. A ship moving backwards, prow pointing back, into a night that's just like water.