taliesin's log (voices of women)
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dimanche 29 août 2004
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In the house, tidy now apart from my working corner, the fog's cleared.
The damned accounts remain undone, but can wait until tomorrow.
The e-mail brings the usual dose of shabby porn offers, mortgages, lotteries, and a couple of unpaid bills, which couldn't wait.
Not a word from Ursula, but then I wrote to her only a week ago, she's 75, as fertile as ever, and knows she doesn't have to say anything to me unless she wants to reply.
From you, not a peep either. I'm not surprised.
Do you have company this weekend after all? I ask because today, Whitetail brought a friend along, waiting on the window rail for me to haul myself out of sleep...
 Well, I did consult the book. Last night was indeed the right time and I felt ready to be told things I might not want to "hear".
It was tough though, the consultation, as hard as one I needed once in the Factory, the evening before having to address a pre-strike assemblée générale by microphone in the Engine Room and 'phone link to the gals and guys out in the bureaus round the world.
I asked the 'I Ching' about that because I knew that what I had to say was a minority view, at odds with all the other "union leaders" due to speak about what should be done. So it was scary and hairy, but the book told me how to set about it. For what it was worth, I "won" and so did the workers. Another cowboy PDG bit the dust.
I'm glad those nervewire-wracking days are over.
But all that is boring "log house" business.
Ω Ω Ω
Later, I'll tell you what the I Ching said. Meantime, I guess you've grabbed that metaphor: the "log house" isn't just the other side, or my den or your own unvisited nest; it's what people call the real world, outside the gardens we have, each and every one of us.
My Grandpa spent as much time as he could in gardens. When I was eight or nine, we were at the bottom of the long one behind the house where I was born, our knees on newspaper as we did the rockery and chucked the weeds on to the compost heap and the bad stuff into the barrow for the bonfire.
 It was getting dark when my mum's mother, not a bright woman but a firm and practical little one, came down and planted herself under a huge acacia, hands on hips.
"Nicholas," she said. "Your mum says supper's ready. So is yours, Teddy. Didn't you hear me calling?"
"I'm sorry pet, I didn't."
"Didn't you hear your telephone either? It rang three times." She never answered the 'phone in his study, that was his work. We'd heard it, the window was wide open, but he'd just winked at me.
"Yes, I heard that, but it could wait."
"It might have been important, Ted."
"Tomorrow it'll be important, Winnie," he replied. "Not today."
"I wish you wouldn't say that."
"I know, pet, but I know who it was. I'll know what to tell them tomorrow."
I knew little then about his journalist's job, but I understood the irritation in the way his wife looked at him, only too well.
"Hey Gran, do you know what we saw? We saw a Red Admiral!"
"That's right, lad. So we did, over by the peas."
She sighed. "Your supper will be getting cold."
Such episodes were frequent. Wouldn't you treasure an old photograph of a man like him? That picture's in the log house too, but I can't send you directly there, because if I did, it would turn on a "trackback" and that's a bad idea.
His books about the genesis of the frozen food industry were dull, but the job took him and my grandmother round the world, including America, at other people's expense.
When they retired to an estate built for hacks put out to pasture, in a town called Dorking, he spent many days walking the old straight paths on which the Romans later built their roads and filling his notebooks with archaeological scribblings.
Never financially wealthy, he left almost nothing in his will, but I, who often went on those walks with him in the hills, got some of the notepads. Ribblesdale, the Newspaper Press Fund's estate (where I could also retire one day if ever I was mad enough to live in England again), got one of the finest gardens in Dorking.
When he and my gran arrived, it was a huge, very ordinary garden tended once a week, if that, by outside contractors who worked around the pretty bungalows and the two big apartment buildings for those too old for homes of their own.
Grandpa took one look.
"There's no love here," he told himself. Single-handed, until others realised what he was doing, he dug up the whole place! He replanted it, built rockeries, fabulous flowerbeds, turned a pool into a proper pond, brought in the birds and the other wildlife.
They never paid him for the work, he would have been as cross as a gentle man can be if they'd offered, but everybody loved him for it. Over the years, he acquired a handful of willing helpers.
When he was dead and a while later my gran moved from bungalow to apartment, she always kept it full of flowers.
"That garden was his life," she said.
Ω Ω Ω
I know, Ellie. I know what you're going to say.
"Hey Nick, it's not for me you're writing this! It's getting kind of like the blog."
Is it?
"Hey Nick," you'll tell me again. "I think you should write a book."
 Wrong, darling. 101% wrong.
If white-tailed eagles could bark, you'd be barking up the wrong tree.
As for me, I'm prowling, sometimes howling, round the right one, that's for sure.
This is for you.
You know so much about life and love in the world out there, probably more than me, but my Grandpa knew more about gardens than any man I've met.
He knew something else too. As Ursula does, he knew about really important open secrets like the Grove.
That, and the I Ching, can wait. I have a lunch date with a zany musician and friend, possibly an interview.
And I have a "literary lion" to tease, more mercilessly than ever.
Ω Ω Ω
Later.
I was kind. Only for about seven minutes into doing the above did I torment Baudier, before revealing that I'd already heard a radio interview he was so proud of giving on Monday.
 "L'art brut et l'art raffiné" indeed! Honestly. It was once I compared his literary "matière première" and his "oeuvre travaillée" to the working of an oil refinery that he began to catch on.
Now that I can do it, I derive a perverse pleasure from churning out the kind of bullshit they talk at 8:30 am on France Culture...
We only managed to agree on one thing related to his latest book, that nobody knows where pornography stops and eroticism begins. Sam had his own view on this, but once he looked set to do a poll of the Canteen's clients on the subject, I hit him over the head with a magazine.
My own interview went well enough.
But yours, Ellie, are much better, lass.
I mean, wow. The "resourceful son of a Hungarian immigrant" in a Shakespearean power struggle? Great stuff.
Sarkozy is "committing regicide"?
I love it. All things considered, I have but one quibble. You might have let De Gaulle get the key word in before starting the voice-over.
As for the rest,
well,
let's just say,
do I have a surprise for you!
Baby, I've got you ... taped.
Ω Ω Ω
Much, much later.
And soaked. I wasn't expecting that.
Nor did I expect the I Ching to be so direct.
I messed it up twice, let ideas get in the way first time round after I'd only thrown the lower trigram. Second time, I didn't get beyond the bottom line. It didn't matter because the third time it flowed as it should after a breathing exercise.
Then I got the very same results for the lower trigram, with every line on the point of change.
It was the same all the way up for the first time I can recall. Not one of the six lines was stable, yin or yang, each was about to "turn".
The next surprise came with the clarity of the first hexagram.
My question, remember, was "What does the wise man do when his dream (i.e. Ellie) catches up with his life?"
I used three books to make my notes; not Legge, whose version remains the most famous -- and among the most erratic.
First, Mêng (or Mong) told me that you, love, are my "youthful folly".
Quite so.
That much you knew already.
Where the interest lay was in the mistakes I've made and the ones I didn't, which got better still with the "commentaries".
 If you want to see this "young fool's" notes, you may.
"To know how to take women
Brings good fortune.
The son is capable of taking charge of the household."
It's a pity I never knew "how to take women" until you walked into my life, but then I never had my "childlike folly" back before!
"Take not a maiden who, when she sees a man of bronze,
Loses possession of herself.
Nothing furthers,"
is better rendered in the French version.
It's first a warning to stay clear of women who are too young.
Secondly, it says that women after your money ("bronze") are like the light at the end of the tunnel that means an oncoming train.
As for the "humiliation" and the "punishment", I've had my share of that, like the rest of us. Good teachers too, especially in the past year.
Of the "commentaries", the parts that worked on my mind the most during the night were bits relevant to the two trigrams, speaking of a "double life", "secret loves", "the stone collector" (I'm an inveterate hoarder), "coyotes" and the "monk" I've been.
Which bits are about me and which parts speak of you I'm not yet sure, but won't ask, since lines two and five work together, suggesting I not only be "chivalrous" but keep my questions to myself.
So much for that idea!
No more questions.
Maybe that's what "love learning" is all about.
Yes. But the 'I Ching' or 'Yi King' is the 'Book of Changes'.
So where does all that leave the "young rebel" and his moving lines?
Here, Ellie:
"Fire in the lake: the image of 'Revolution' ('Ko').
Thus the superior man
Sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear."
With the second hexagram, you ignore the lines. You focus only on the "image" and its meanings.
To find myself at the "turning point" is unsurprising.
'Li' (fire), wit and affection, the sun's warmth penetrating 'Touei' (the lake), which is also mystery, sorcery and lightness of heart, is a very "fortunate" hexagram.
But in this one, I also see a warning.
The wise man, it says, notices the change of seasons, the "shedding of skin and scale". And leaves?
And lives with it.
I think 'Ko' is telling me that now that the heart-springs are flowing free again, the "moon" inside the "mountain" of the first hexagram, I've yet to learn to love the winter.
That will not be easy.
If you've got this far, you might want to know which colours are related to these four trigrams. In order: dark blue, warm violet, orange and golden yellow.
Can I do the 'I Ching' for you?
No, I can't.
That never works.
Neither, in my view, can doing it on the Internet, though lots of people try, because fiddling with the computer must get in the way. On the other hand, the Web does provide some great links.
But if you want to try the 'I Ching' yourself, I can endeavour to tell you what it says. You don't even have to tell me what the question is.
Ω Ω Ω
That book lives in the sacred grove.
 What I like about the sacred grove is that everybody who has heard of it, as the four pictures here show you, has their own idea of what it's like. Just as they make their gods.
For me, it's like the 'I Ching', eternally the same and always changing: the "perfect contradiction".
Better still, Ellie.
You never know quite where you're going to find it.
Ω Ω Ω
One of the photos I stole from Line Chatelain, who has plenty to say about gardens. And there's a painting by Charles Frizell, whose is as interested in the Native American as me.
I'm particularly interested in one native American.
She may not be old, far from it, but she sure is wise and destined to become more and more beautiful the older she gets.
10:45:20 PM 
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samedi 28 août 2004
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Birds, some people believe, are messengers.
Take the raven, older than the Christian myth.
Take the urban legend of the wild bird's omen when it flies into a room.
The miner's canary.
The carrier pigeon of the trenches...
Of the birds that breakfast outside my window, one sometimes lingers. Different from the rest, he has white wings, and like the pygargue à tête blanche, this one has white tail feathers.
How did he come to know that of the 14 or more who wait for me to get out of bed, he's my favourite?
I've never told him, reluctant to offend his friends. This morning, he settled down again on his railing outside the bathroom window.
It's not more bread he wants.
He just keeps an eye on me through the frosted window and watches over the garden below.
I cannot help this: when an African or "dark age" humour takes me, when you are silent, I like to fancy that this quiet bird, black and white and richly shaded from neck to beak, brings me a sign from you...
But he's no dragon, mercurial this month -- he's just a Paris pigeon.
Speaking of you with Sam this lunchtime brought the sun out.
Or so, again, I like to think.
But without a word of you, this evening brings the mist.
Four months ago, the teasing questions I borrowed for you from 'Les Inrocks' went unanswered.
Still I don't even know your favourite colour...
In October 1987, 19 months before a child was born, her parents came home from a few days in Britain. We flew the very night 'Dandan the weatherman' later told us had brought "south-eastern England's worst storm since the Great Storm of 1703".
Millions of trees were felled. The tempest tore through Brittany's forests and beyond.
With no chance of turning back, we had a fine pilot. Our plane was hurled across the sky like a plastic kit, but he stayed the course.
Passengers too proud or stupid to fasten their seat belts smashed their heads on the luggage racks. Two were badly hurt.
I'll never understand exactly why I wasn't afraid while Catherine, trembling, kept her head buried in my chest.
Nobody had told me then why the cabin crew had eyes only for the wings; weeks afterwards a steward explained that flight attendants know just how far up and down the tips can bounce before the strained metal snaps free of the long tube it keeps aloft.
Only one stewardess panicked. As we steadied into a dive, she grabbed the intercom and announced: "By the grace of God, we're going to land at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle."
Furiously, the captain went public then. We all heard him order the girl to shut up and come to the cockpit at once.
Catherine vowed that she would never fly again.
And for years, Ellie, she never did.
Whether that storm was a harbinger of things to come, I don't know.
That chunk of Antarctica the size of Belgium that broke off the ice shelf. The autumn storms of 1990. The diminishing glacier front, creeping back up mountainsides I've seen in the southern Alps.
The tempest of Christmas 1999 that brought down Marie Antoinette's Virginia tulip tree and Napoleon's Corsican pine, had Catherine weep when she saw what it had done to her local park, the gardens of Versailles.
 The shifting sands of Africa, inching south.
And Paris in August last year.
But of one thing I'm sure: even this garden needs the protection of strong, sturdy trees.
What trees you might bring from the United States and your travels I cannot guess.
I must, of course, suggest oaks.
Silver birches too, pliant in the wind.
From Africa, it has to be the grand baobab, what else? Of the two pictures here, the Kid took one and me the other seven years ago.
One tale puts the baobab among the first trees on the land. But when it saw the palm tree, the baobab grew jealous, wanting to be taller. It told the gods.
When the red-flowered flame tree arose, the baobab was envious of its blossoms. On spotting the fig tree, it asked for fruit as well.
Finally, the baobab's demands exasperated the gods. They ripped up the tree by its roots and replanted it. Upside-down.
Since that day, the baobab has never asked for anything.
Botswana's Basarwa (bushmen) believe the baobab began life old.
In many cultures, it is sacred, a place to bury ancestors. Its hollow trunk is good for storing water, birds and monkeys adore it, its monkey bread fruit is edible. Makes medicine too.
 The baobab is Africa's Yggdrasil, the world tree of the Norse people in my own ancestry.
Being no baobab but part Viking, part Mediterranean and part Saxon, with a salt sprinkling of Celt in the paternal blood, it's been too hard for me to keep stories and queries to myself, even since the month the fates turned me head over heels!
But what of you?
Certainly you're no belle dame sans merci; I'm through with her kind.
Yet you're becoming the beauty who vanishes for any reckless man who dares ask her to identify herself.
Am I a wolf fit now only for the ostrich farm?
Trying to tend a garden when my head is deep in sand?
How long must my harder questions, Ellie, meet with no answer but the winds you're flying now?
A cold draft too, where reason chills the passions.
 Well, I don't want you to be sad.
It feels like time.
Tonight.
If you're to leave it none the wiser and the only whispers it can hear come from my heart, I must clear my head of thought and turn, at last, straight to source.
It's time to tap the roots.
The I Ching, perhaps, will tell me what the "wise man" would do once his dream has caught up with his life.
9:36:33 PM
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vendredi 27 août 2004
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Asuka lives in Japan.
Handicapped, he joins with others to make
an exhibition of his soul.
In his own translation, Asuka says:
" When I'm feeling down I always go and buy
seeds of courage from the sky
When I plant them in the flowerbed of my heart
I gain courage
Courage, sometimes it pushes me from behind
Please buy the seeds for the flower of courage
at a flower shop in the sky
Once you buy the seeds for the flower of courage
Why not plant them in the flowerbed of your heart?"
 On those same islands, Kusudama,
artist,
works on patience.
Should I plant the flower of patience?
(Outside the garden,
something whispers
something's awry...)
 Inspired by Chinese neighbours,
the Japanese wrote Kanji.
We don't speak it, you and me,
but we can look.
It speaks to us.
Almost half a world away, once a decade,
when the rains are done,
a cactus too flowers into courage.
Silent the eagle
daze on wind, salt-stung gaze;
white flight, jet black rock.
How many distant lands have you visited, my friend, to which you would return?
Places you loved that dearly?
So far, I've been to one.
 Far above Funchal, Madeira looks after a secret.
There's another garden, Ellie, the labour of love of a man called José Manuel Rodriguez Berardo.
Now anybody can go there,
anybody with a sturdy pair of legs and a good head for heights.
How I'd like to take you there one day!
(I don't know what's amiss;
miss,
perhaps the compass of my intuition has lost its bearings,
all I can do is wait ... and tend the plants.)
Berardo's work is done.
He also kept koi fish, laughing Buddhas.
My work here has just begun.
6:43:10 PM
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dimanche 22 août 2004
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Go on.
Be cross.
But what else, darling,
d'you want me to do with all the inspiration?
Weed the garden?
I did.
Go out for a good long walk while the sun shines?
Did that too.
Have a long lunch with Baudier?
Ditto.
In short, when you go away
you have only yourself to blame for what happens here.
Curiosity kills cats.
Not eagles, not wolves.
This morning I took the sextant out again, for the first time since we met.
Surprise, surprise!
For now, the Moon has sent me back to basic instinct, Venus has given me "tenderness" (I knew that anyway and told you so) but "complicity" too, while naughty Saturn makes me "inflexible".
Pluto's message is odd: there's an "explosion" coming, but I don't know where.
Orgasmic it can't be.
My birthday's not until October.
Venus, of course, is currently my "ruling planet", well ahead of the others now, and tells me, pointlessly, that I'm in "love relationship with friends".
Neptune warns that somebody will "abuse my confidence", while there may be "trouble 't mill". That's Yorkshire-speak for conflict in the Factory.
For the rest, Jupiter and the Moon are set to bring "luck" to a "good heart and soul". I wonder whose?
There's a "nodal" warning: don't try too hard to please. I'm to be "self governing".
The rest tells me nothing I -- and you -- didn't know.
Now what of the Lady Hawk?
Your Moon in Libra (my sign) grants you "harmony".
Venus and Pluto place the emphasis on your feelings and "transformation", but the Sun in Virgo, along with Mercury, also empower you with strength of "reason" and "analysis".
You've four planets in Virgo! Jupiter is making a "conformist" of you, but Mars is helping you with some "strategy".
From Uranus in Pisces, you're supposed to have a "premonition" soon.
In the Houses, you too have a "love relationship with friends".
The rest are worth a "photograph", I'm unsettled to see so many "tribulations":
As to the "aspects" (the relationship among your planets), the Sun and Saturn have given you "self-mastery", but the Sun and Mars are making you "quarrelsome, (with a) cold control of emotions". Can that be?
Consolation: the Sun and Jupiter are granting you "healthy vitality and stable energy", while Jupiter and Mars render you courageous.
If Venus and Pluto mean that "events in (your) love life" have brought a "deep and troubled passion", then why are Saturn and the Moon filling you with "organic inhibitions, affective frustration and (a) refusal to live"?
Is this the Ellie I know?
The "timing" for this "forecast", darling, covers between now and your own next "lunar return" on September 17.
As for your ruling planet, Venus is nowhere at all, but I've never seen any planet as strong in somebody's chart as Mercury is becoming.
He'll sharpen your mind even more and make you curious, keep you on the move, but could disperse your social life. Mercury, the messenger, is about as close to the trickster god as the "mythology" of astrology allows.
I believe the "lunar nodes" also merit showing you in full:
At least you're going to able to trust and rely on me for a coming while and vice versa.
Our "compatibility factor" has moved since my last look many moons ago (when it was hovering the closer end of "good" to "excellent"):
I daren't "do" the Wildcat's!
Marianne can do her own, if she wants.
What escapes me is why both your current ruling sign and ascendant are Virgo.
I thought I was the "virgin" around these parts.
I got this done before lunch.
A new special dessert Sam promised me.
If you like caramel as well as chockies, you'll like it.
Before that, though, I had the fellow pass the salt.
By the bucketload,
even if they say just a pinch will suffice.
1:11:30 PM
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My haiku told you more of where the garden lies.
Even here, this day of rest, I can feel it, just as we can feel it beyond the fence, the nip in the morning air.
Take a glance, love: one prospect ... and a kinder outlook (often, as in other matters, the "truth" lies in between).
As the world turns, like every year, my blood drives thoughts too far ahead, I want to be brave;
like every year, I pray:
"Spare me a winter like the last, like all the winters before the last, always longer than the last.
Grant me somebody warm again, let me warm her."
It never worked before since I wasn't sure where to address the prayers and they piled up in the poste restante.
Do I know better now?
I think so.
Last night, I felt cold but then wasn't in bed till almost 2:00 am, now the neighbour's assured me that late movies bother him not a jot.
'Doctor Zhivago' is very long, I'd forgotten most of it, but afterwards, it's absurd to complain of the cold.
Ellie, today I planned to make a 'phone call that's waited for too many years now: from my oldest friend and his Californian wife, I want news of the Estuary.
This can wait one more week, that last summer week of "freedom".
Instead, this afternoon, I'm going to break the ice -- briefly -- and write to Ursula.
I want even more to tell her how important she has always been to me, without sycophancy, one writer to another, a friend.
I'm going to say "Hallo".
12:42:43 PM
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samedi 21 août 2004
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Far from towns and sodium haze our garden lies.
Maurice Ravel, always welcome, is composing 'L'Enfant et les sortilèges' (Hockney).
Quiet as other night visitors...
What matters most often occurs in our absence.
It's like daylight life, Ellie.
Doesn't most of what we know happen 'in the dark?'
In times set apart, when we're not looking?
 Where infra-red would only fox you, with true night eyes you'll see the beast who's but a friend...
Warm lee of quiet hills;
grumbling waves, flecks of spit at
chattering pebbles.
If so lightly you close those eyes,
it's a flutterby, the turning moon (Cloud Hands).
7:26:43 PM
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jeudi 19 août 2004
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I'd just settled back with a long cool glass of "mélange infame" and a plan to pretend to read and doze while watching you with the hose, when there came that ear-splitting crack in the sky.
Soon it was pouring.
Honestly, love, you might have warned me.
That was a smart move.
Of course you've kept quiet.
You weren't going to steal your own thunder now, were you?
 Now, do I give you advance warning news of what may come of the wild crane's bill still doing so nicely, thank you, by one of the ponds?
In other people's gardens, they're tired by the end of June, but these flowers of ours obviously like the moisture.
Or maybe it's something special in the soil...
Nothing here is quite normal.
Perhaps I shouldn't tell you, since their secret won't blossom until the last week of August.
After all, so far this summer the Norns have made a vocation of ensuring our spells of vacation give you the best of reasons to be the far side of the fence.
Hmm.
Teasing fate has never been a safe practice.
Did your ears burn on Sunday, my love?
Wasn't me, you know.
It was that Sam.
Oh, it must have been what ... around half past three in the afternoon.
Curiosity. Insatiable curiosity!
As we left the Canteen,
the Wildcat paused in the doorway, friends with Sam now,
asked him, Had he met you?
And what, then, did he make of you?
Oh Wildcat!
How many lives has she got left now?
Instead, I'll tell you about Excalibur.
I so nearly had to wake up Arthur to borrow the sword for a night.
The king wouldn't have minded, I'm sure, but disturbing him would have upset the Glastonbury crowd quite dreadfully.
No.
I daren't even tell you about Excalibur until we've got a moment together outside the garden.
Besides, I so much want to see you smile again.
For real.
10:53:09 AM
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mercredi 18 août 2004
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Hmm.
You're very quiet if you're going about the garden!
But I hope it pleases you.
Your silence has failed to set off any alarms. The gate won't let in paranoia and fear.
The Hotel Losserand, briefly mentioned on the other side, is now empty, apart from me.
Still was when I last checked this morning.
No visitors' suitcases or forgotten belongings were visible when I got home last night.
The Wildcat had said she was likely to roam on northwards.
Amsterdam and a long unseen former lover.
I'd left her a friendly good luck note (I also meant it for said former lover, but didn't add that bit).
 Got the 'phone call from Amsterdam later.
She did say thanks and was about to launch into the usual round of "Sorry this and sorry that" when I reminded her that it would be good for her to say sorry less often.
That was followed by the things I hadn't noticed. Marianne's 'phone charger had gone! And she'd forgotten a well-hidden box containing two pairs of brand new fashion shoes.
"I'll post them."
"Oh, would you? I'm really going to need them."
"You knew I'd say that."
She didn't deny it.
I'll say one thing for the Wildcat. She's very expensive, but makes no bones about it.
Is this where I say "Oouuufff"?
Do you think I'm an idiot? I often wander wonder myself.
Anyway, it's coming up to your turn to wheel the barrow around with the compost.
Go down the pathways and find your way round the copses.
The longer you leave it, my love, the bigger the garden will grow.
Soon I might have to draw you a map.
For now, I've borrowed one of Ursula's. Unlike the Wildcat, my mentor in Oregon is 'Always Coming Home'.
I don't mind if you drench me to the skin while you're going around with the hose.
Do your worst.
It's good for the plants.
10:12:40 AM
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mardi 17 août 2004
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When my friend in his seventies sends me a comment he doesn't want broadcast to the five continents, he heads it 'For your eyes only'.
I received such an e-mail last night.
"Even before I saw your Sunday blog, I must have been thinking of Julie C. too," my self-proclaimed chum wrote, adding:
"Dunno Y[ork], altho I've a vague idea somebody recalled her chicken-eating scene in 'Tom Jones' as an example of real acting. Of course I thought her gorgeous but I didn't fancy her - I don't fancy the unattainable.
Anyway, there she was in my subconscious & she popped up in my dream last night. Erotically. We were making squishy love but stopped when she burst into the very wet women's tears that make anything but TLC impossible."
Smiling at an English gentleman's confession, I replied:
"If I'd been old enough and had had anything at all to do with it, Herr Brock, I wouldn't happily be where I am now.
I'd be happily elsewhere.
I met Ms York in the late 70s soon before coming to France.
She was as beautiful then as she was in the 1960s (and still is today -- I've seen a recent 'photo).
And I'd have made absolutely sure that the unattainable isn't and that instead of her getting embroiled in an unhappy marriage, the courses of our destinies would have been different.
She is not only gorgeous. She is bright and she's a nice woman."
No mere "real actress".
To see her "work" in slow motion, as our minds have always done with others' faces on a subconscious level in their own time frames, is to catch fleeting emotions so swift that you'd scarcely know they'd worked on you.
The moral of this you already know.
He doesn't know that after then raising my gaze to allegedly "unattainable" heights, my sights haven't lowered.
"You boys," a friendly ghost in the garden once told me and his son, "were born to reach for the sky. I do pray that you'll both catch your stars."
His own son achieved this after my uncle died.
Ah! To see the eagle at last, in 2004.
As for very wet tears, it's the cruelties that make women shed them that arouse my wrath.
To see you the far side of the Fence is to leave you with salt welling to a corner of my eye, a silly love song in my ears against the grumble of the Métro, and a smile caught with the breath in the chest.
There's a place for tears in the garden, Lady Hawk, for how else shall we bring full nourishment to the soil?
The desert crossing is done.
Would the "color purple" be one you'd like here (it already has its place on the Mac as the one that comes up as background to the titles when my mouse rolls over pictures)?
You were very astute.
As I wrote these words last night for the morning stroll, I'd no idea what the hours to come would bring and whether you'll meet my visitor.
Still I haven't. She called for two minutes, late, to say she was dining out and would say more in the morning.
I shan't detail the "strangeness".
 Until I've caught you big enough to play the "role" (should I ever go missing you again for long enough for that to help), Maggie Harvey may stand in most prettily as an occasional desktop photo.
While a Wildcat explored a marché de puces which proved to be only too true in name and kicked herself for turning down an invitation from a "delightful Italian", and as the Kid talked to her Boyfriend, I revisited July-September 1940 in both drama, made in 1969, and documentary on Sunday afternoon.
It would be unwise to use the women's auxiliary air force as even an occasional ornament on the Mac while a beautiful woman crazy for a film director but also in strange mood is here, so close to the garden.
When we do get to talk, I'd like to tell you -- I have her permission -- about the Kid's Great Adventure last week. It's more exciting than my news.
On seeing (for the fourth, fifth time?) 'La Leggenda del pianista sull'oceano' (iMDB; please ignore the spoilers should you go here), I realised that it may be my favourite movie.
The magical fable strikes every string in my soul and is richer in poetry and secret meaning with each viewing.
But my friend, who wanted to write fiction instead, only heard it. Indeed, sixth time round I could watch it myself with my eyes closed, so perfect is the soundtrack.
"Is it true?" you asked.
No, it's not.
Yes it is. True in every sound, every breath, every note, every word, every image.
The truest magic of all is that the music is real.
I don't know why my friend didn't close the door or -- even better -- ask me to take it off and put on 'A Bout de souffle' instead (which I did afterwards), since she didn't like 'The Legend of 1900' and isn't one to make polite concessions when she's suffering.
I don't think the film and the "suffocating" smallness of my flat, compared with a bare, big Viennese apartment, and the other given reasons for a mood, after she woke late, had anything to do with the truth.
I think Sam got it in one and you did too.
If you're both right, my love, then you were a little faster to catch on than I was, though I am once more accustomed to the surprises of fate.
Need more be said?
 I look forward to hearing your tidings.
Fly down this way soon.
Since Section Officer Harvey is only allowed in as a juvenile reminder and music for my eyes, rather than yours, I shall show you the latest sprig of almond blossom I found right up by a Tudor window of the house.
One thing I like about this tree is simply looking at it now, from the right side of the window.
Out in the garden.
10:51:55 AM
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lundi 16 août 2004
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The day's grey skies in a world outside the garden, part of a planet down to 19°C, set to warm once more in the week to come, are in the pattern.
It comes as no surprise to confirm the truth of feeling in the bones.
The new moon is upon us.
This will keep me quiet today.
 Space then for Nowick Gray, though he must stay the far side of the fence:
"At dawn you shall appear,
A gaunt, red-wattled crane,
She whom they know too well for fear,
Lunging your beak down like a spear
To fetch them home again."
'An Homage to The White Goddess' must have a place in a secret place well hidden within the secret place, at the heart of all the garden, her roots deeper even than those of the ancient, wordless, talking trees that are her proud guardians.
She is of the Dreamtime.
10:36:47 AM
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dimanche 15 août 2004
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Up in the house I was out of bed by around seven this morning.
Late yesterday evening, the Wildcat arrived.
So much catching up to do, we were up well into the early hours.
The logistics did work out, somehow, in my small part of the house, three of us!
A little more sleep tonight than last would be good if I'm to be bright, bushy-tailed and, especially, sensible tomorrow...
Stepping out for some air, Ellie, I strolled down past the paddocks and the copse and came across the fuchsia patch.
This variety goes, the flower girl told me, by the nice name of "dancing flame", which caught a mood of the moment.
9:50:02 PM
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samedi 14 août 2004
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Suddenly Ellie.
Indeed, that's how it was.
Astonishingly Ellie. Inevitably Ellie.
 There was a conversation with Sam a few days ago. One of so many. He's such a bright fool.
Like Coyote.
Like Loki.
"Are you jealous?"
"No. Maybe a wee bit. You know. It's lovely here, but it would be so good to be between the mountains and the sea."
"Nick, that's not what I meant."
"Of course I'm not jealous. Why would I be jealous? Even if I am jealous, I don't have any right to be jealous. Don't be bête."
"I'd be jealous."
"Well, I'm not!"
"La Corse! So beautiful, the sun, the air, the warmth, the white cemeteries ... the sex..."
"Ne me torture pas avec mes souvenirs! In any case, she's just with friends. Plural."
"Do you know that?"
"Yes. No. Yes, of course. She is."
"Of course she is!"
"Alors."
"When's she coming to the pizzeria again?"
"I don't know."
"Soon, I hope."
"So do I."
 But we don't want it raining hard in the garden, do we?
No long low heavy skies. Just cumulus clouds in the blue, a shower storm or two, enough rain for the plants.
They're still so young and fragile. A good shower.
If heavy rain comes, it should be like African rain at the end of an afternoon, the kind that makes you want to rip everything off your body and dance on the grass, looking up at the sky with mouth open and eyes closed, feeling the big drops cool and stinging sweet and luscious as they burst and turn your skin into valleys and hills.
Natural fertiliser.
The hosepipe and the big plastic bags of stinking manure are kept close to the kitchen, by the Front Door, along with the crossbows and the handmade grenades.
They're reserved for people who come in that way and don't know about Ellie's garden.
It's in the public part of the house that the cupboards are, full of ideas, jokes and traps for the unwary. The Insult Cupboard. The Disagreeable Notions Cupboard. The Metaphysical Cupboard. The Diatribe Cupboard. The Brickbats Cupboard. The Armoury. The Funny Hats and Silly Walkingsticks Cupboard.
The Visitor's Entrance, open all year round, for those who explore, at their own risk. At their peril.
That's where I keep the News, the Reviews, the Gossip and Acid, other Dangerous Chemicals, the Bleach and no Whitewash.
No heaviness in the garden; it's a place for fresh air and imagination. Just being and the lightness of being.
So the thinking stops and and the words are blown in by the wind.
Yet this garden began, Ellie, in thought and in words posted up in the other side of the house, accessible by the Front Door.
It's been so long since you've been able to tell that I found just the right tone, but I'd like to play those notes again and stay with that music until you are smiling and laughing once more.
Wearing just as much as you choose.
May I tell you what happened?
Before you inspired me to make a garden,
there was my first letter to Ellie.
After my last one to Eleanor.
It was in four parts.
I have kept 'Thinking', to serve as encouragement to the Wildcat when next she becomes insecure and self-conscious and wonders: "What's the point of going on with my novel?"
From London, she mailed me the start of her book, saying that as long as I didn't read it and tell her what I thought, she'd feel like she was standing in the street with no clothes on.
I told her that apart from spelling mistakes and errant punctuation, it was "very good. Honestly."
"You're not just saying that?"
"Me, you brainless bitch? Really, sometimes you're a silly cow and a twat and a half, Emsie."
Since she was comfortable in London, I told her what she was in real English.
She got dressed and has written much more since.
The second bit, longer, was 'Gifts'.
It was about gifts. Yours, Ellie, and mine. I don't know whether I shall keep it, but you won't see it, not in writing, there are better ways.
The third bit was "Sex, lack of sex ... and creativity'.
It was short; under that title I never wrote a word.
It would have told you the two simple reasons I decided to forego a "relationship" with a woman for so many years.
None of that matters now.
Marianne has her first boyfriend, her mother has stopped doing everything which made me renounce sex, and the dark days are over.
And I see no pressing need to write to you about creativity, unpacking ideas best considered in the fullness of time and friendship.
 The last bit was 'Wise' and might have been the beginning.
It consisted of one sentence:
"You must, please, stop hinting that you think I'm so clever and wise and understanding, after doing it again now that I've asked you whether I can call you by your name."
When I replaced my August 1 blog entry with a brief note, it led to this exchange in 'Your views':
"Comments in response to this post:
"I'm sorry you've felt the need to do that. No one should feel censored or censured for what they write on their blog. It is an unspoken rule within the Blogosphere that the blog is one's own private kingdom and to hell with what other's think. I hope this event won't force you to stop blogging and continuing to write about subjects and events in the way that you do. If so, I for one would feel the loss.
Lynn • 8/3/04; 9:58:59 AM"
"Dear Lynn. At last, heartfelt thanks for this comment and encouragement.
I have no regrets about the self-censorship, since I went too far. While the reaction from somebody who remains a close friend -- and not the 'object' of my deepest affections, who was oblivious to this episode -- was equally misplaced, I guess I deserved it somehow.
In another letter, somebody else asked me to reinstate at least what I said about a couple of poems by W.B. Yeats. Here you go:
In roughly the same period, more than a century ago, that Yeats wrote 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' (Greatest Love Poems), which ends with one of his most renowned lines, he also penned 'The Cap and Bells' (Bartleby), which is also a favourite of mine.
What I didn't know, but should have done if I had any sense, before reading Warwick Gould's commentary in the appendix to 'Yeats's Poems' (the lot, ed. A. Norman Jeffares), was, as Gould put it, '...the jester offers the lady his soul and heart; she is not affected by either but by his cap and bells. Yeats later said this poem was the way to win a lady, while "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" [...] was the way to lose one.'
Now there was one piece of advice I am belatedly but strongly inclined to heed!
taliesin • 8/10/04; 11:51:47 AM"
So it's suddenly Ellie.
 With that, my life has begun to make sense again.
I'd like the garden to be a place for sharing and poetry.
I shan't ask you to bring your own wine.
But I dream that you might like to plant seeds of your own.
The way the garden has to have a fence, it has to be my place for you.
But you're smart enough to learn to fly over the fence, so that you could be a full partner in the friendship here, with a free hand of your own in the design.
12:45:02 PM
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vendredi 13 août 2004
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Well.
Only if you must.
You see, if you tell me your favourite colours, then I could suit these pages to your taste.
After all, you ought to have a say in the shape and feel of the garden, don't you think?
Especially since I've stayed in a good mood despite the difficulty of writing up a wonderful but painful movie this morning and this evening's almost inevitable arrival of two problems.
 The first was something Steve 'The Twisted Genius' Jobs did to the Rolls-Royce, in his insistence on staying the Right Side of the Law by breaking it.
I sorted this out with a hack and found while getting the car back on the road that it's better if you hack the hack, a trick I'll tell the Mac community in the morning.
Then there was the latest twist in the Wildcat's Adventures in London, involving an irritating domestic cat, a possible trip to Cornwall and a half-mad girlfriend. That was more difficult to sort out.
If you drive on the Left, it's easier.
I learned an interesting fact from the Kid. All that majority of people who drive on the right are Napoleon's fault. Including Americans.
The Brits are not "quaint"; they simply still get it right by being on the left. In ancient times, we were all lefties.
Ship captains, canal barge haulers, Métro and train drivers still are, if you've ever given the matter any thought.
But none of these people ply their trade on Parisian streets.
When I'm rich, famous and grown-up I'll buy you the Rolls-Royce of windows on the world and creativity tools. There's no reason somebody with your skills and independence of mind shouldn't be one of the happy few.
It's not that everybody who peers through stolen Windows users is a conformist, unfunny and unlovable.
But it's no accident that in 'You've Got Mail', Meg Ryan, the children's book lover and small shop owner uses a Mac, while her mass market bulldozer of a foe, soon to see the light and fall in love with her, Tom Hanks, uses Micro$oft.
Here's another outrageous demand.
I don't just want to know what whiter shade of pale, or otherwise and more, I should use to plant the flowerbeds, but I need a name.
The ghost in my machine has been so well behaved that I help by naming bits for people who matter to me.
That's why the OS 9 partition is called "kora 9", the for-the-use-of friends part of OS X (where the mouse is in the Deskgirl picture) is "sondra's gift" and the iPod is "phoenix".
A 'Songbird' is indispensable in a garden, but should have a more romantic name.
I would be most honoured, Ellie, if you'd care to baptise her.
if you don't want to dub 'Songbird' with your voice, then you could have 'Fiery Cat', which boringly means she's a cat and she does her connections by firewire...
Tomorrow, I might explain a little thing or two.
Changing the subject.
9:54:19 PM
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jeudi 12 août 2004
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...a dream which has lasted a lifetime and was stronger still when I woke up this year?
 Call it banal if you must, tell me it's all just a fantasy, dismiss it as an obsession, run for the mountains if you like.
If you get as far as the foothills, I'll catch you there and throw you into a clear sea.
Where it's warm.
And where you can see the bottom.
Of the sea, I mean.
Not mine.
But watch where you tread, for it's so hot by day in the desert.
Maybe now it's time to come in from the cold of the nights...
You never can tell.
I can't.
Tellings have never been my thing.
I listen to the ladies instead.
Even the ones who don't behave like ladies.
But especially those who do.
Southern belles.
There are two (if not three) southern Belles to the right.
But I only know one (if not two) of them.
 Susannah, Heidi, Suzanne, Anne, Heidi, ?, Barbie ("please, not Barbara"), Kathryn, Ghyslaine, Harriet, Sandra, Nikki, Catherine, Sondra, Uma, Sylvie, Meg, Miki (Michelle), Diane, Ashley, Wildcat, Ellie.
Now that took some remembering, there were two Heidis, and ? is on the tip of my tongue. I'm stretching my neuron to find the name again, but I don't want it to snap.
She was Indian, met in India and just may still have the last surviving copy of my first novel.
Was I too shy to write down her name in my copious account of that journey?
How absurd. Perhaps I didn't want it to get out to my mum.
Five of these women I never met, and one, among five actresses, I did, years after she charted the course of my dream.
She was even lovelier older than she was young.
When I read one day that she'd survived an unhappy marriage, I was furious.
What a waste.
But then women are like that.
The wonderful ones often wind up with thugs.
If you don't believe me, just take a good look round in the Métro one of these days.
 Maybe it's cheating to include two models and three actresses who became part of the dream but never of my life, but our minds are richer than "reality".
One of those names was, for Marianne, my long-ago and very short-lived equivalent of three of her mother's fellers after me.
Almost as bad as the creep of a banker I would kill if I ever saw him again for what he said to the Kid behind her mum's back.
Things like "it would be so much better for us if you were dead, you pathetic little creep". The Kid never told her mum, suffered in silence rather than "hurt her". But when I found out, I did. Against Marianne's will.
There was the biggest explosion since Nagasaki.
I've not done too badly for pictures, considering!
I don't have two I'd like to add, but haven't added the one I do have which would make Marianne howl (if dolphins can howl).
If it has any significance, 18 of the 23 are blondes, and all but three have -- or had -- short hair.
Is this supposed to mean I'm turned on by a "type"?
 Because I would never have thought it. Nonetheless!
And if you'd asked me before I rattled and shook my tin of peas very hard, I'm sure I'd never had said "17". Seventeen!
I mean, normally, I can't even count that far.
I don't have enough fingers and toes.
Perhaps if I used ... well, other bits.
That's what women taught me.
To use other bits.
They let me start with their little toes. In those days I could count to 38.
One of them even suggested that I electrify her all the way to fingertips (whispered that if I managed that, then she'd teach me to count to infinity)...
I might have said four or five...
What liars we are to ourselves.
 Try it yourself one day.
You might be just as surprised.
If I've left anybody out, which I strongly doubt, that would mean digging far deeper than I care to stir the soil.
Who knows what horrors hide in the bedrock, like nightmares under the bed, ready to crawl out and turn on the alarm clock?
If there's one thing in the world I don't like, it's clocks. Grubby little insects.
Nothing but ticks.
Irritating things. They get under the skin.
Especially in the morning. Leave you no time to do anything else.
Nice neat things.
Like waking up gently to make love before breakfast.
Toc! Take that, ticks!
"I wanna die before I get old."
By the way, what the hell does "neat" mean?
Are you going to teach me another language or what?
 Perhaps I shouldn't tell you which one of these women was an angel on all fronts before breakfast.
A grumpy angel, sometimes, but always an angel.
In point of fact, as politicians and other idiots say, there are several angels here. Some of them are writers, two are painters, one is a graphic designer, and three are poets.
That's to say, I hope one still is, because after she left me to chase an American girl -- in vain -- across the Atlantic then came back for a while (the tail between her legs being better news for the tail between mine) she quit me for somebody stable.
And dull.
Last time I saw her, she wasn't boring, but her flame was flickering alarmingly low.
 But when she was fierily and fiercely alight I stole her from a very gifted jazz musician.
That act of villainy led to the last major Anglo-French war (which is to say, a mere family quarrel since the days of Guillaume le Conquérant) in my historical knowledge.
The cross-Channel 'phone calls were as explosive as V2s.
They told me about V2s at school, the older teachers with their war stories.
About the boy who said one day, "It's all right, sir, I can't hear it any more. The engine's stopped."
Though the pianist surrendered, it was with hatred on his part and no truce was ever signed.
But then most Brits would tell you they'd never sign a ceasefire with the French, even on their deathbeds.
 And that, I'm so sorry to say, was my only truly successful act of theft.
But I was too good for my own good, Ellie.
Always have been.
One woman I fancied is married, and I'd have liked to but she's wedded to my best friend.
Even when being a dismal, selfish bastard, which is rare, he's still my best and oldest male friend, along with a cousin of mine.
Hmm. It took those two a long time, now I think of it, to make good friends themselves.
The battle of the egos between another great jazz musician and the would-be writer who finally became one, very much later, was quite a spectacle.
I hope you meet the cousin one day.
He was born 20 days after me.
Our mothers had a race, they say, and mine won.
That was probably one of her biggest mistakes, since I've been a very precocious and premature late developer ever since.
Anthony, though, has always been the funniest person I've known.
But shouldn't we get back to the ladies? After all, one of Anthony's got most interested in me when she was through with him...
With two exceptions they're all beauties.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's - ?"
I bet you don't know the answer to that one.
I do. Always did, it seems. Always will. So does the Kid, whose had the sense to begin to lose hope of meeting her.
And so did the woman who gave me 'Gaïa', with those mysterious words about it being for somebody else.
 Of course, the somebody else will never believe me.
I don't think she's too silly (I'm the silly one), but she's stubborn. She's not quite got the squarest jaw here, but nearly.
If ever she did believe me, I'd be the happiest man in the world. Or well on the way to it.
But who has a right to be happy, after all?
Trouble is, I've so little experience of robbery.
Outrageous cheek, yes, but not stealing or borrowing or pinching, simply massaging feet and "upward and onwards still to urge our flight" (as Goethe would say. Well, he did. In 'Faust'. And you know what happened to Doktor Faustus. Except that Goethe was merciful, like the composer Busoni in his mind-blowing opera, not like that French crap. They both, those Fausts, found Her before they died) ... and ... em, what I first learned properly in 1980 ("late developer," I told you.)
"T'es vraiment culotté!" people tell me.
A lot.
If only!
Though I prefer to wear hotpants.
When it's hot.
Not when it's hotter.
 Indeed, I was so bad with padlocks, chains and strings attached that only three of the most "significant others" had or have other guys at the time.
I did get within a hair's breadth on the pillow of stealing one of them (but I don't have a picture of that ... close-cropped blonde), or was it the other way round?
I think it might have been the other way round.
Until I did something so memorably stupid that she threw me out, since this was one of the few occasions I behaved more boyishly than she looked.
Uh-huh.
Maybe I do have a "type", after all. Could it be the boyish look that appeals to something deeply embedded in my most peculiar DNA.
Oh God, do you think I'm a chromosome short, as well as making do with one neuron?
At least it's a very competent neuron.
There's something almost chakra-like about the way it begins where my legs meet and goes all the way up to my third eye.
Bloom of the lotus and all that...
Don't say "bollocks!" It's true, my love.
You're not going to ask how many of the 17 I slept with, are you?
No?
Good.
I mean, that would really be telling now, wouldn't it?
I never have been able to tell a good story, you know. Let alone write one.
But I'm pretty hot on dreams.
Hot?! I'm burning!
Stories and poems are things I'm wonderful at reading to people. Ask the Kid.
Especially in bed.
Ellie. Especially Ellie. Got anything you'd like to tell me? What's your favourite colour?
9:29:48 PM
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mercredi 11 août 2004
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Welcome to your pages.
Have no fear, Ellie.
I can't be wise, understanding, funny, intelligent, kind, clever, perceptive, tender and good.
Just look where being any of those things has got me in almost 48 years, will you, girl?
Absolutely nowhere.
 Let's face it.
What of the dream?
But.
If none of the above things have ever won or kept me a heart, I can still be cunning.
It would take somebody very cunning to find the garden unless I told them where to look. Or you did.
So I won't. How about that?
Oh, the spiders will find it, so will the trawlers and so will the other bots. But the bots are just machines (which is why they are called bots).
It takes people to know how to use those machines.
And to keep secrets.
Now, Ellie, shall we get on with it?
4:50:36 PM
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© Copyright
2007
taliesin.
Last update:
21/09/07; 22:19:25. |
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