Only just.

I was eavesdropping. A poem happened.

Only Just.

"It was just a kiss."

The world is a smaller, sadder place
When a kiss is qualified as
Only 'just'.

Beautiful ghosts

I had a kaleidoscope when I was a child. I think most people did. Mine was as basic as they came: cardboard tube, a couple of mirrors wedged in the base, and a handful of cheap plastic beads thrown in. I loved it though. A gentle tilt and the beads would shift and form a subtly different pattern. A more vigorous shake, and the composition would change entirely. Simple materials that produced an infinity of pretty glowing patterns, the first kaleidoscopes were made in the early 19th century and they are still made today.

Being a language nerd, I find the etymology of kaleidoscope as appealing as the instrument itself. As with ‘periscope’, ‘telescope’, and ‘microscope’, it is based on the Greek ‘skopos’  -  a watcher or observer. However the other two components in the word are what give it charm: ‘kalos’ = ‘beautiful’ and “eidos” = shape or form. A kaleidoscope is ‘an observer of beautiful patterns’ though personally I think of it as the “Look at the pretty things!” toy. And if you think that last translation is overthinking things, I can go one better. That middle component, ‘eidos’, is where we get our word ‘idea’ from. Even better, it is also connected to concept of the ‘ghost’ (or eidolon).

An observer of lovely ideas. A watcher of beautiful ghosts.

I told you I was overthinking.

On a more philosophical level, I find the kaleidoscope a great metaphor for life. It’s pop philosophy, but I like it. People are all kaleidoscopes. The plastic beads are knowledge, experience, and emotions. Everyday life will give you a gentle tilt or a vigorous shake and the pattern of each day will always be slightly different to the pattern of the days before it. Sometimes it’s the better parts of your life that are in view – those are the good days. Sometimes, the mirrors show a replicating pattern of the darker things and the day is filled with endless beautiful ghosts. However, even on the bad days a little ‘plastic bead’ of happy can mix with the gloomier array, just as on some of the best days, a dark ‘bead’ can give a sense of the bitter-sweet. The marvellous is mixed with the mundane, and we continue to add ‘beads’ to the mix.

Right now, my quotidian is rather more

Than

I’m pretty sure that my life needs a vigorous shaking to bring a more pleasing arrangement into view. I’ve organised a few days’ personal leave next week to seek if I can shake away the ghosts (I say away, not off, for if you have such forms in your personal kaleidoscope, they are never really gone – just out of sight for a time).

As they say, “there’s always light at the end of the tunnel”,  or perhaps they meant to say “there are always beads at the end of the tube”?

Transits

Transits

As you passed you threw

Your shadow on my surface

Obscured every image save your own,

Occulted both my reason and my purpose.

As you moved on I felt

Reality returning.

I closed my eyes against the light

Which discovered me alone and burning.

The stuff of nightmares

The problem with insomnia is that by the time I actually manage to get to sleep (or get back to sleep as the case may be) my mind is determined to punish me for the 20 hours that it has been awake by presenting the most lysergic dreams that it can produce. The result is a groggy morning self strung out by the memory of fevered images.

It’s a good thing I’m not operating heavy machinery.

Just so you know, I don’t think dreams are prophetic. I think dreams are the result of shaking the brain’s kaleidoscope, and that various unrelated bits and pieces fall into focus. I don’t think dreaming of a tree means that I’m going to experience growth in the future. Neither do I imagine that repeatedly dreaming of a brimming wine goblet means that I will be repeatedly drinking red wine in the future (although now I come to think of it…)

There is red wine in store for me.

Dreams and nightmares are, however, excellent fodder for art and stories. If I can hold onto an image long enough to get something down on paper or into type, then I usually find the result oddly pleasing.

The ‘cosmic tree’ was one such image.

It wasn’t mean to look quite so mystical. That result was due to my limitations as an artist. In my mind’s eye, I saw a tree, quite bare of any leaves, with a very clearly defined root system and the night sky in its background. What I managed to draw was something like a branched glowstick, but it looked pretty enough so I left it as it was.

Then later in the week, I was at work and the conversation turned to Google Deep Dream. Deep nightmare would have been a better name for it judging by some of the images that I was shown. It’s a piece of ‘machine dreaming software’ that looks for similarities between an image you upload and images which it has stored in its database. It then morphs the former into the latter in a process called 'inceptionism'. There are shapes and animals and buildings.

And eyes. So many eyes.

So I put my cosmic tree into the dream and waited to see what would happen.

The results was beautifully weird.  More dream than nightmare. It was the fluid dynamics of Van Gogh meeting the surrealism of William Blake’s religious art meeting a Shaun Tan mural meeting Arthur Bocklin’s sacred groves. It’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The White Goddess rolled into one. It’s a vanitas, a memento mori, and a near-death experience.

I saw my tree had morphed into an arboreal/peacock hybrid. The stars had turned into eyes, like the feathers on a peacock’s tail, and, as if the reinforce that image, the tree roots had now sprouted peacock feathers that glowed like iridescent tubers in the dark earth.  It was the myth of Argus Panoptes – slain in a grove, his 100 eyes transposed post-mortem into the tail of a shrieking bird by the goddess, Hera.

And yes, yes, I *know* it’s just an algorithm and probably Google’s way of scoring a lot of free images for their database, but I needed a little weirdness this week (well, good weirdness over bad or weird weirdness), and this delivered magnificently. It wasn’t nightmarish at all.

The only scary thing about it was that the artificial intelligence had dreamed something that I could well have dreamed myself. Now, that's the stuff of nightmares.

Accentuate the positives

I want to write about what is making me feeling good right now. But this is not a “Pollyanna post”.

I don’t like Pollyanna posts or blogs– you know the ones I mean. Pages and pages of unmitigated, manicured cheer and affirmations. Those blogs with posts which are light and bright and white and all the food has been styled, or there are pictures of bedrooms with pristine bedspreads (organic cotton, of course), with votive candles on the bedside table just next to a carefully-constructed stack of books about positivity and wellness. If your blog is a constant stream of in-your-face-Pollyanna-I’m-just-glad-glad-glad-to-be-alive images and text, well, I don’t believe you. You’re not living - you’re constructing life and you’re putting your constructed life out there to show others how superior your way of (constructed) life is. As the hashtag says I’m #notbuyingit.

My bedroom is not a restful sanctuary. Even at its tidiest, there are mismatched sheets and covers; books on/beside/under the bed; shoes lie where I kicked them off when I came in; cables all over the place where I charge my phone and lap-top; cosmetics, creams, lotions and potions on all available surfaces; dust on top of everything, because dusting? Really? who can be bothered? I bet your bedroom looks more like my bedroom. There isn’t a single tulip flung artlessly on a boho comforter and nary a self-help book in among the book clutter.

Now, the Pollyannas among you will clutch your hand-knotted pearls and gasp “How shocking! She must be desperately depressed. A bedroom should be a sanctuary of BEAUTY and REPOSE. Let’s crowdfund her a subscription to Home & Garden, forthwith!"

But here’s the thing: sometimes the bedroom looks like a bedroom. Sometimes it looks like a war between books and bedding with casualties on both sides. Sometimes I’m in an upbeat mood and all is good (and I’m a bit glad, but never quite to Pollyanna extremes) and sometimes life sucks/blows/bites/your oral metaphor of choice.

I like to write about both. Because real life. Not constructed. 

No edited highlights. More the positives accentuated to distinguish them from...everything else.

So here are the my positives:

Sunrise/Sunset

Not the song from Fiddler on the Roof (although I do have a rather good story about that – remind me to tell it sometime), but the actual diurnal events. As it’s winter here, the sun is rising as I am heading to work and then setting as I am coming home. So I’m outside, with my iPhone camera, enjoying the colours, and the cloud patterns, and the messing around with Instagram filters to up the drama a bit. I like the contrast of the natural and the manmade. You will see lamp-posts, powerlines, roads, and other structures in my photos.

Planets

Once the sun has set, and I have put my camera away, I go star-gazing and planet-gazing. There’s a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter this evening. They are less the 3 degrees apart in the Western sky so they will look like one big star. Venus is about 260 million kms away from Earth and Jupiter almost double that, so the fact that I can see them so clearly when I, say…go to put my rubbish in the bins at the end of the day, is incredible to me.I feel a poem coming on. (No, seriously, I do. Watch this space.). Venus is my favourite planet because it looks so glorious in the sky; yellow-white and diamond-sparkly; named after the goddess of wuv, twuw wuv. In reality, it has a surface temperature of over 400C, sulphuric acid clouds, and an atmosphere so dense that if a human were to land there, they’d be crushed to death before they had time to be incinerated or poisoned. There is nothing Pollyanna about Venus. 

Cocktails

Down-to-earth, definitely not celestial, cocktails are good at any time of year, but in the winter they take on a new quality that has to do with coziness, that lovely heaty sensation you get when drinking spirits, and glamour. More often than not, they are  delightful to look at. The Negroni will always be my favourite - it is a song of ice (occasionally hand-cut) and fire (all the red and orange) in a glass. That said, my recent experience with a Honeycomb Old Fashioned has nudged Old Fashioneds into my personal cocktail second place.  For what it’s worth, I don’t food-style – I don’t have props or a light-box or any of the bells and whistles. I usually push any clutter out of the way, but you may sometimes see the corner of a menu or a beer-mat in shot and that’s fine by me. It’s the  real deal, the drink I actually drank – moments after the photograph was taken, that drink was probably gone.

So that’s me at the moment – head in the stars, glass in my hand, mess in the bedroom.

Gladdens the heart. :D

The Turquoise Gate - a dream set down

I can't remember the last time I woke up because I was crying out in a dream. Mostly with dreams I forget. This one is clinging insistently. I decided to draw it & to write it. It's not horror exactly, but there was a sense of menace that was not easily shaken off. It was one of the few times when wished there was someone else in the house with me.

The Turquoise Gate

The gate at the top of the stairs is old.
Turquoise paint peels off the metal.
It's wet from the rain.
I fiddle with the latch & I think I have it closed.
I push to test it but it swings open.
I pull it closed & try again because I know what's coming.
The rain obscures everything in my field of vision. 
The rain bounces off the white marble steps that lead up to the house. 

The rain is a dense white veil. 

I can see nothing.

Then I can. 

The image is blurred but it is there.

A small dark form. 

It's closer than I thought because I didn't see it coming. 

And it's closer now. 

And the latch will not fasten. 

Narrenschiff

Otherwise known as "The Ship of Fools".

This has been a favourite image/conceit of mine for a long time ever since my first encounter with  it in W.H.Auden's Atlantis.

"Only The Ship of Fools is making the journey this year."

I come back to it every time I feel adrift. Now is one of those times.

This is my verse. Not as long as Auden's and, of course, not nearly as elegant.

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

They chip the barnacles off the hull.

They tar the wood, replace the nails,

And stitch the rents in all the sails.

 

The Ship of Fools is in dry dock.

When all is done, they let me board.

They float the craft, and hoist the main,

And then we put to sea again.