Friday

The weekend's too short, so let's start Friday ...

On Loss

Three meditations on loss.


One 
At the start of this month, I watched Isabel Allende talking to Andrew Denton on Elders. Her words stayed in my head for days afterwards – she was like a mystical sage. Viz:

Denton: You left Chile and you went into exile because your life was in danger. What is it like not to have a place to belong? 

Allende: At the beginning I was totally paralysed by nostalgia, the feeling that everything had been taken away from me. I had lost my family, my house, my in-laws that I adored, even my dog, my job, of course, everything that was dear to me. And my country. Your country is the place where you don’t have to ask – you know the code, you know the clues, you know the jokes, you have the references, you get the accent. You look at a person and you know exactly where that person stands in the society. You only have that in your own country and, of course, I lost it when I left Chile. I became a writer because I was living in exile and my first book was an attempt to recover what I had lost. So in a way now I have my country in my books.

Two 
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop

Three
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?

He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the ‘Es muss sein!’ of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nagel on Nietzsche

The point is to … live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilised being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

Thomas Nagel, summarising the teaching of Nietzsche

Joanne McNeil on ‘How to Capture an Idea’

Joanne McNeil on ‘How to Capture an Idea’: here.

The World

The world’s existence is separate from my own. It will continue regardless of my existence or contribution. Philip Larkin’s ‘Arrival’ contains an elegant expression of this:

For this ignorance of me
Seems a kind of innocence.

And yet I am in the world, and it is affected by my existence. So this, from the new-agey mockumentary What the Bleep Do We Know!?:

I am much more than I think I am. I can be much more even than that. I can influence my environment, the people. I can influence space itself. I can influence the future. I am responsible for all those things. I and the surround are not separate. They’re part of one. I’m connected to it all. I’m not alone.

And perfection, and happiness?

The purpose of life does not include the pursuit of perfection or even the pursuit of happiness. To pursue these as part of the nature of our being is asking for frustration.

So what is in the package marked ‘purpose of life’?

I don’t know. Or at least, I don’t know everything that’s in it. I’ve taken a few things out, unwrapped the packaging, but never been able to look right into the box.

I think if your personal box doesn’t contain love, acceptance and at least some kind of passion, it would somehow be lacking.

And perfection, and happiness? These things are part of life, but they aren’t its purpose. Hope for them, and when they appear (sometimes together, sometimes singly), accept them, enjoy them.

Hope Street Graffiti

With the sunset in my eyes

Thursday: Just off the Sydney Road tram, a short walk from Blyth and a left turn, and the Hope St Bus Line timetable says the service only goes to 7pm on weekdays.

I decide to walk home down Hope Street. The sun's low and has that wonderful last hurrah glow about it. Sky's really blue, really clear. 


Earplugs have been sending me this:

1. Heaven Can Wait, Charlotte Gainsbourg 
2. Pick Up the Phone, Dragonette 
3. We Walk, The Ting Tings 
4. It’s Good To Be In Love, Frou Frou 
5. Here Comes Your Man, Meaghan Smith 
6. Oh My, Gin Wigmore 
7. Vagabond, Wolfmother 
8. Astral Weeks, Secret Machines 
9. Waitin’ for a Superman, The Flaming Lips 
10. Sweet Disposition, The Temper Trap 
11. 3 Rounds and a Sound (Live), Blind Pilot 
12. Vingt à Trente Mille Jours, Françoiz Breut 
13. Love Her for That, Teddy Thompson 
14. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Wilco 
15. 11:11, Rufus Wainwright 

The street's still light industrial in places, and residential for decent stretches. There’s graffiti at regular intervals, some of it crass or blah and some of it intentional and beautiful. I take photos of some of it, and interesting house numbers, a SOLD sign, a house with a tiled doorbell sign with a missing tile (something-BELL, and something-HARD), and other things.

It takes 25 minutes to walk from Sydney Road home, what with all the stopping to take photos. Life's good.

The Thought Fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed. 


Ted Hughes, 'The Thought-Fox'

When was the last time you flew a kite?

Thunder and rain now after days of heat and humidity. Brilliant for a cool change. And I'm thinking of kites - as you do when thunder rolls.

When was the last time I flew a kite?

I was a big kid, it was a big kite. I flew it once.

This is February

Where I live now, there's an afternoon storm. This is February.

There are mountains, blue, with humid birds. It's summer here.

Emma Jones, 'Zoos for the Living', The Striped World