The Seasonal Turn: A Meditation on Change & Loss

 'You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.'

 ~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

'And you would accept the seasons of your heart just as you have always accepted that seasons pass over your fields and you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.' ~ Kahlil Gibran

It's September. The end of summer, the start of autumn. The month when nights start to overtake days. Back to school month, back to work, back to basics. The 'scythe' of the harvest coming to cut us down or sweep us onwards.

And I'm having a hard time adapting, a very hard time. Like a lot of people I suffer from SAD - Seasonal Affectional Disorder (self-diagnosed but not self-inflicted) and dread this time of year. It's like I 'rage, rage at the dying of the light', but to no avail. The darkness keeps on seeping in, evening after evening, and with it, the fading of all summer memories, those shiny evenings and days full of possibility. Now all that seems null and void somehow, a vague far-off memory. And I'm left miserable and moping, trying, but failing, to find my feet in a new season, a new interior and exterior landscape. 

Everyone identifies with a season. My favourite is spring - the season of beginnings, when the earth is starting to awaken after a long winter's sleep and everywhere hope gleams in the brightening of the sky, the lengthening of days, the greening of our surrounds. If I could describe it in a few words it would be: hope, possibility, enthusiasm. And you're supposed to embody the attributes of the season you were born in. Autumn is the complete opposite to spring and so I find it incredibly difficult to set my inner bearings to. It is the opposite of everything I love inherently. 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness....' I think Keats forgot to mention 'melancholy' in there when he penned his famous 'Ode to Autumn.'

I know there are so many people who love Autumn, seeing it as the crowning jewel of the four seasons with all its colours and poetic licence. Next month, when we're almost knee-deep in leaves, I'll have adjusted just enough to learn to like the season, because of course I appreciate that every season has its merits, and as an artist, you can't but be open to them. But it still stings my soul a little, all the while.

The seasons of course have their reflections in life. The cyclical process of change and the different emotional landscapes we must go through are signalled by the earth's seasons. 

And it's especially this year that I feel so keenly the stripping of the trees and the approach of the dark. I feel it because I have just lost someone -  a light, a love, a muse, a possibility. And with that, the season creeps in as a spectre I suppose. 

'Pathetic fallacy' - that technique in writing in which the weather mirrors the emotions of the characters - feels so true to form right now. The past month it's done nothing but rain. And the sky has greyed over with big steel clouds, suffocating, heavy, pressing down like a gag.  And if that wasn't bad enough, now comes the turn in the season: the odd yellowing leaf in foliage, the chill in the air, the dark days, the long-lasting nights - the pre-cursors to the barreness and bleakness that is to come. Change, change, 'a terrible beauty' being born. Everything seems to underscore the emptiness and sadness I feel. In another season, maybe I could triumph over this personal loss, but in this one, I feel like I'm sinking into its sorrow.

There's no more euphoric sight in nature to me than trees in full bloom, thick and green. They represent new beginnings, possibilities and hope, in thick leafy abundance. When I see them lose these leaves in winter, I can't help but despair a little - that pathetic fallacy again, but vice-versa. Exactly as Hemingway said, it was like 'part of you died.' And now I feel it all the worse, because this time, it's the same with my personal situation. I know the change has to happen, I know emptiness will only lead the way to new growth, is actually necessary for it, but still, it doesn't lessen the pain of it. 

'In this world of change, nothing which comes stays, and nothing which goes is lost.' I know everything is a part of the cyclical process, but is it ok sometimes, to step back and mourn some losses? I know people come and go from our lives, I know no one is permanent. But still, it's hard when you have to say goodbye to someone who has made such an infallible difference in your life. It's hard to let go. With all those memories of spring and summer, all those possibilities, lighting the mind, it's hard now to suddenly to let go and embrace the darkness of the oncoming unstoppable autumn/winter.

But resistance is futile. And letting go necessary. It is an act of love too. Letting people go to get on with their lives, to take paths more suitable to them, and in the long run, better. I know that. 

Well, now I must say goodbye to not just a person, but a possibility. The grand gleam of a life gilded gold with his touch. Myth or not, his presence was a light in my life. A light that dispelled many darknesses. A golden thread to follow. An inspiration. A muse of the highest calibre, the sweetest disposition. Always, there was the golden possibility of finding treasure within ordinary days because he was there - underlying them, as a presence, an influence, an inspiration, a beacon, a motif of magic. Always, there was the possibility of so much more. Potential, like bottled gold light. Summer no matter what the season. Nothing could be brighter.

Now - to do without that. 

The only thing I can compare it to is going rapidly from summer to winter. Loving the sun, and then learning to live without it. Like the displacement of SAD, or a kind of jetlag of the heart, a leaking and losing of light like blood. Now, I must learn to stand tall with bare branches and brace against the wind. With possibility gone, the bleakness of the season looms large. I wonder do the trees ever dread the winter, ever fear it?

So now as this person moves on into a different season of his life, I must too. Confront the season ahead - hunker down, wrap up, find new ways of lighting the dark - and stop dwelling in what might have been, in summer memories full of butterflies and sunlit amber evenings, nectar and giddy shine. Because summer doesn't last. No matter how much we wish it did. Life moves on. The great world spins on. And with it, I must too. As Tennyson put it,' forward, forward let us range, let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.'

I don't know if this post has any place here, but maybe it'll resonate with someone. I just needed to write it. To shed this deadening feeling that's been on me, like a deadbolt of chains, a stiffening of stone, since September has started. And to write something without acknowledging it, would seem a lie somehow.

As I sign off, I'll say I know there's gold in autumn too. The light, the leaves, the harvests that can be reaped. And that's where I'm trying to set my sights on now. And not endure the fate of Lot's wife, who turned to stone for looking back. 

In the epigram to this post, I've quoted Hemingway. Though not the full quote. After those lines, he adds: 'But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.' Yes, I know it. Now just to believe in it.  And to find that 'serenity' to watch through 'the winter of my grief' as Kahlil Gibran says so beautifully. That would be nice.

~ Siobhán 

***

A poem to illustrate these thoughts:

Unloving – Carol Ann Duffy

Learn from the winter trees, the way
they kiss and throw away their leaves,
then hold their stricken faces in their hands
and turn to ice;

                         or from the clocks,
looking away, unloving light, the short days
running out of things to say; a church
a ghost ship on a sea of dusk.

Learn from a stone, its heart-shape meaningless,
perfect with relentless cold; or from the bigger moon,
implacably dissolving in the sky, or from the stars,
lifeless as Latin verbs.

                                   Learn from the river,
flowing always somewhere else, even its name,
change, change; learn from a rope
hung from a branch like a noose, a crow cursing,

a dead heron mourned by a congregation of flies.
Learn from the dumbstruck garden, summer’s grave,
where nothing grows, not a Beast’s rose;
from the torn veil of a web;

                                              from our daily bread:
perpetual rain, nothing like tears, unloving clouds;
language unloving love; even this stale air
unloving  all the spaces where you were.

*And a  song to sing them ~ 

 

Solitude: A Writer's Privilege & Prerogative

Sometimes, I need to be alone. I need the solace of solitude when the world, in the words of Wordsworth, becomes 'too much with' me. 

My alone time is so important to me. It is the bedrock of my being. The foundations of my creativity. I need it to recharge and enhance my thinking and feeling and understanding ability. 

Without periods of solitude, I'd implode. I'd cease to be me. Especially after lots of time spent socially, I need the antidote of quiet time to recuperate and recover my self from the voices and influence of others. I need it to differentiate and consolidate the individual from the collective and find my bearings once again, as Virginia Woolf said, 'myself being myself.'

I can't go for any long lengths of time without this sacred time to myself. I'm sure this is true for all writers and creatives. How else would we create? Or germinate the seeds for creating? Like any seeds, they need dark and deep quiet.  

Just as Charles Bukowski says, solitude is as necessary to me as anything else, even more necessary than company. Without solitude, I wouldn't be a writer. In order to  write, you need to stand apart from the crowd to observe. Solitude is this observing space.

And I not only need solitude, I like it. I welcome it and revel in it! A free space where I can  spread my wings and know my wingspan. I relish time spent alone. Without it, I'd be a lesser less-known version of myself.

Well, I can't explain it any better than that. But just have a look at the collection of quotes below by many great artists and writers who truly knew the value of solitude.

enjoying my quiet time, 

~Siobhán

'Solitude'

"I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I refuel." - Audrey Hepburn

"I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.” ― Charles Bukowski

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

 "I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.” ― Henry David Thoreau

"If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.” ― Leonardo da Vinci 

"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” ― May Sarton

 "A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.” ― Franz Kafka

"Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.” ― Paul Tillich

"Solitude is independence." - Hermann Hesse

"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” ― Virginia Woolf,

 How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?” ― Mary Doria Russell,

 Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” ― Natalie Goldberg

"Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.” ― Philip Larkin

"I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

 "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” ― Henry David Thoreau

"In solitude the passions feed upon the heart." - Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

RIP, My Beloved HP!

I am devastated. I am so sorry to say that my beloved HP laptop, after 4 years of excellent service to me, has met its demise. And oh dear reader, the loss!

I feel like I've lost a limb. A phantom pain. So I thought I'd write about it - to offload my grief, to give you all a heads-up on my maybe future absence and to pen an honourable epitaph to my trusted writing machine for so long.

I enjoyed such a special relationship with my HP. It was my trusted steed that carried me into word battle, not just my writing instrument, but my writing incentive. How it would assent to my every demanding whim and finger tapping frenzy without freezing, without complaint, without malfunctioning. It was one of the sole things in my life that could live up to my fast-paced synapse-firing thinking. (I am currently using my sister's laptop, an obstinate Dell - how many times it has tested my patience - and although I am thankful, it will never compare to my beloved neat and nimble and speedy and extraordinarily efficient HP.

My HP was conducive to sporadic writing fits. Its keys were soft and responsive to fast typing (whereas these keys are heavy and cumbersome and not made to glide with the speed of a writer's words!) Oh how I long for its black keys, finger smudged lighter in the middle from use. I love the sound they'd make as they tapped frantically along to the sparking of thoughts. God I miss it!

And I've been so less prolific now because of the loss of not just my writing medium, but all my files, that have been banished to hardrive limbo until I invest in another new laptop. (No I didn't back-up - the pain!)  And how to do that exactly? Where would I start? Losing a laptop is like losing a pet. How can they be replaced?

I feel so lost without it. So cut off. Feel like I'm floating along in limbo ever since. My laptop connected me to my power source: my writing. Sure, I scribble in notebooks, random pieces of paper whenever inspiration strikes, but it's NOT THE SAME. For me, computer script has always been synonymous with a  finished written product, the professional draft, not the pencilled one. The ease of editing and pasting and chopping lines can never be equalled with pen and paper.

I know most writers would profess their love of the quill and paper method, the alchemy of ink transforming a blank page, but I don't! I need my computer to do that for me! Pen and paper just screams amateur, reminiscent to me of diary scribblings, doodles, and worse -feather-light ramblings that will never be committed to digital permanence and weight, ideas, in their most infant stage, with no hope of growing into fully-fledged scripted pages.

Oh the ache of it! To be disconnected from all my years of wordship is hard to take. I feel so wordless - the intellectual equivalent of legless I'm sure.  And to be writing on another person's computer doesn't feel right. I can't find my groove. Can't navigate through this model's slow and bedamned programs compared to my own! (By the way, any Dell owners ever experience random demonic cursor leaps?? I'm typing along and suddenly I'm three lines above typing----- malforming a perfect sentence into gibberish. It's out to get me, it really is. I feel my nerves fraying every moment I'm on it - THEE most annoying thing a writer could experience while in writing mode, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

So I'm going to have to sign off and maybe not write again until I can find a suitable replacement. Every day without my familiar blue screen and hundreds of Word files of thoughts at the click of a very compliant mouse is one in which I feel blanker and blanker. Can words really affect us so much? Yes! I'm sure if you emptied out my insides you'd find Garamond fonted words, entrails made of sentences and ink where there should be blood.

And my poor desolate HP now lies with its heart (hardrive) removed, a big blank black silence. I am sorry to think I will never see its blue light power up again or hear its welcoming start-up ping or  be comforted by its blue-sky Word backdrop or feel its heavy weight on my lap or comfortingly smudged keys fit snugly beneath my fingers.

Nope.

If you don't see any posts from me in the next while, know dear readers, that I am in mourning for a dear friend. A medium and a mentor. Know that somewhere out there, in the non-digital universe, I am surely scribbling, but only on paper. Until that opportune time, when I meet the next ideal HP and take to the neon lights of Word again.

Laptopless and lost-in-limbo -

~ Siobhán.

Birthday Blues (And Pinks)

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time - Jean Paul Richter

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter

~ Mark Twain

But meantime let me whoop it up,
And tell the world that I'm alive:
Fill to the brim the bubbly cup

- Robert William Service

Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no in-between when it comes to opinion on birthdays.  Me? I LOVE them! We Ariens aren't ones to shy away from a celebration of ourselves.  We're all about the self, so why should we shy furtively away from birthdays, our very own validation markers?

Indeed, why shouldn't birthdays be celebrated? They're important! Trés important. More important than other calendar events, like weddings and themed holidays. Why? Because they recognise the gift of our presence here in this life. Our presence in other peoples lives. They are our very own anniversaires (- the French for 'birthday').  Why shouldn't they be acknowledged and celebrated?  Is each and every one of us not important enough to celebrate - regardless of our age, situation or mood-o-meter? Of course we are! Birthdays are our guaranteed one special day of the year. And I don't think it's selfish to demand recognition for them; it's our right.

Lots has been said about 'birthday blues', the accompanying twinges of sadness that come with getting older, but I prefer to focus on the 'pinks' of birthdays - ie: the cake, the greetings, good and real candle wishes, presents, blushing attention and all the sugar-sweet malarkey. I quite like being the centre of attention for one day out of 365, doesn't everybody? 

And if you ask me, birthdays should get to have gift-lists too, as well as just weddings and the like. Birthday gift lists would be a lot more exciting for one thing - no domestic  essentials for the birthday boy/girl nooo!  Our wish gifts would be in the realm of the exciting, impractical, fun and maybe just that tad bit fantastical (well, if you don't wish, you don't get!) Mine this year goes something along the lines of a trip to Paris (the ultimate gift ever), a pink-iced cake, a bouquet of peonies (but they're not in season yet!), a tattoo (all in the name of self-declaration and the marking of a new decade...), a publishing deal would be nice (as would a lottery win), a stack of coloured macaroons (possible, very), and topping it all off right now as I'm looking out the window to a dull and grey day (groan) - a sunny day. Yes, a big smacking smiling sun, that would be nice (ye gods, if you're listening...) *Excuse the self-indulgent listing here, but all in the name of if I write them, they may just materialize thinking...

Nah really, all anyone wants for their birthday I think is not even to be the centre of attention (eh-hem, well...) but just to know that they matter. Hence all the heartbreak that ensues when birthdays are forgotten, dismissed, fall under the radar etc. Their specialness diminished, and somehow, in the process, your specialness too. That's where the real birthday blues lie, not in the silly aging phobia.

Speaking of age.... well, as Mark Twain pointed out - it doesn't matter if you don't mind. Some people blow the aging process all out of proportion. They see birthdays merely as clocking up the years, the dreaded digits, rather than affairs of celebration and existential exuberance.  I don't get this. I don't do age-grieving. I don't dwell on the 'the years clocking up.' And I don't get people who do. Ok, you may suddenly wake up one day and think - "heck  I'm ____ age already! How did that happen??!!"  But then I look on the flip side of it.

Everything I've learned in those years. Who I've become. All the moments I've experienced that have taken their place in the gold of memory, priceless and timeless. Because time isn't measured in years, or days, or by clocks. It's measured in moments. One of my favourite writers Jeanette Winterson has the perfect line to explain this: "the continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative,  there are only lit-up moments and the rest is dark." And there is only now to concern ourselves with, the here and the now, the present, which is indeed a gift we are continually unwrapping. 

As  Gertrude Stein said, 'we are always the same age inside.'  We are indeed. If you feel young, you'll always remain so. And another wise comment from Henri Frederic Amiel, 'I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.' Never a truer word said. The people who complain about getting older in numbers are usually those who are getting older inside. Woe are they. As Picasso once said 'it takes a long time to become young.' It does.

And now on the eve of turning thirty (yes, the big 3-0, imagine!!!), I'm looking at Billy Collins poem below and thinking that the aging despair, the sadness, the regret should be multiplied to the power of 3. The nostalgia for all the years that have passed. But no, I refuse to look back, I'm an eternal optimist and its all fronts on forward. (But I've included the poem anyway for all those with a predisposition to the birthday blues...)

Thirty to me, means consolidating those flighty feelings I discovered in the flingsome twenty-something years. It does not mean old. It means maybe something more akin to maturity (yeah right, my inner daredevil spats!), but yes, it almost feels like a mellowing out. And by no means, do I feel the panic stereotype of my age-bracket that has afflicted thousands of peers - to settle down, get married, get a mortgage, get monotonous. Heck no! I'm too free-spirited for that. Thirty is just the beginning of more,  'everything I know I learned after thirty,' (- George Clemenceau) and I get the sense that the best is yet to come. More wingspan.

Indeed, 'we turn not older with years, but newer every day' (-Emily Dickinson.) We are continually learning and renewing.  Besides, if you're young-at-heart, like all Ariens are anyway, you never grow old. We're still the babies of the zodiac and children at heart, waiting for the next adventure around the corner, measuring time in heartbeats, not heinous years. 

On a last note, birthdays to me are more than anything else, a chance for new beginnings. With all the planets behind you, you have more chance of making a fresh start in your astrological new year than the calendar new year. Birth days are like standing on the edge of the past, about to tip into the future, a horizon up ahead, a blank slate, and everything and anything you want to be beckoning ahead. Your future in front of you like a great ribboned gift. That definitely calls for some celebration and cheer.

Now I'm off to 'whoop it up/and tell the world that I'm alive', woo-hoo!!!

(And a Happy Birthday to all other April babies out there!)

~ Siobhán :)

A poem for the birthday blues...

On Turning Ten - Billy Collins 

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

And one that gets at the real meaning of birthdays...

A Birthday Poem -Ted Kooser 

 

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

Imagination Vs Reality: Feathers & Bricks

'They say that most of what happens to a writer happens only in their head.'

There's one occupational hazard about writing that affects me majorly in real life and that's imagination. 

Specifically, over-use of imagination, over-reliance on imagination. Which translates to unintentional illusions and alternative realities made of the fine fragility of feathers that collaspe under the weight of reality's bricks eventually, leaving me in a heap of broken-dream rubble.

See to create fiction requires a lot of imagining. Lots of wondering and pondering, fantasising and make-believing, using and over-using of this power. To live in the real world requires....a blocking out of that power? My real world, and probably that of many other creatives, is more than scaffolded with imagination. I imagine things better than they are at times. I add and embellish and decorate the bones of day-to-day life with ideas, visions,  reinvention of what-ifs and what could bes. I refuse the black and white platter we're offered and choose instead to paint scenes with the coloured palette of possibilities. I see things as I'd like to see them; I see things as they settle into mutable shapes in my mind, not as the sharp lines they actually are in reality.

I first became aware of this at a creative writing group once when a participant remarked to me after I'd read out some work 'how she'd love to live where I lived, with all the magical surroundings and people' - she was referring to all the moonlight vistas, emerald-green wonder and blue-eyed muses I'd charted in my writing. It occured to me then that this must be how I see the world; not how others see it, not how it actually is. I was telling stories to myself I realised. That's how I lived, through stories. Through stories I'd read, watched, and created myself. The fabric of my life was a narrative I was continually creating and re-creating.

So I've come to realise that I have the power to create my reality somewhat. Mythologize things  into magic. Like an alchemist, turn the cold metal of mundanity to shimmering warm gold, ordinary to extraordinary. It's like I'm pre-programmed; if I didn't do this, then the world would seem a very plain place to me. That's why I believe stories are so important to us. They have been since the beginning of time, since narrative first began with a few scratches on cave walls.  

We need stories. They are our way of making sense and meaning of this sometimes blank of existence. No one likes to be faced with a blank page after all, our instinct is to fill it. So we tell stories - to each other, to ourselves, to understand our world, but more so, to know that we matter, that things we hold dear matter, that everything has meaning beyond this sometimes bottomless insignificance that confronts us from time-to-time in the form of ennui and emptiness. 

One of my favourite books is Life of Pi by Yann Martel. In it the author chronicles a young boy's experience lost at sea, alone on a lifeboat, with only a tiger for company. (Yes, a tiger. Read it to believe...) Without giving the story away, the book highlights the importance of fiction in our lives, the vital necessity of it for our sanity, our survival, our sense of self.

So being able to tell stories is good, right?  In certain situations yes. In others,...  I don't know. I've gotten myself into tricky situations due to an over-active imaginative impulse... When it comes to matters of the heart for instance, how to know what's real and what's imaginary? How in the heck do you decipher reality when you spend all of your time creating an alternative one while in writer-mode??! You see my dilemma. Most people have 'common sense', a gut reaction, which is their foolproof guide. I do too, but it's just that imagination interferes, and I don't know which to trust, as it's usually imagination  most of my waking life.

And now I'm wondering if I'm destined to make the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to figuring out what's real and what's imaginary in that airy-fairy vague realm of love. Is the proof in the actions, the words, or how I interpret them? Is the truth in my head the pure unaltered version or has imagination enveloped it in a misty aura, tinting  it opaque? I can't decipher reality from imagination at times; and without that gift I wouldn't be able to sit down and write and create worlds out of my head and see life as great big coloured Wonderland full of possibilities and surprises.  But with it, my vision is obscured when it comes to calling it as it is. (Added to this I'm also a diehard Romantic; which results in a highly potent mix of misguided idealism, unyielding optimism and mighty misunderstanding!)

Like right now. Right now I feel stupid for having read signs wrong; putting two and two together and getting five; believing in a rainbow instead of a black and white reality. A Sylvia Plath poem is going round and round in my head which explains my state exactly, because yeah, it is enough to drive you mad! And the repetive haunting echo of the villainelle structure just goes straight for that silly soft part that actually was stupid enough to drop all defences and believe. Here:

Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath        
         
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 
And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: 
Exit seraphim and Satan's men: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, 
But I grow old and I forget your name. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 
At least when spring comes they roar back again. 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

They say that most of what happens to a writer, happens mostly in their heads.... Yes, I think I made you up inside my head. And that makes me wonder now -  what else did I make up? 

George Bernard Shaw once said: 'Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.' And I'm starting to really believe that. That only in the hold of the imagination does perfection exist, in love, truth and beauty, the great grail trinity. Seems reality comes up second-best every time.

So I turn to the page, where it's perfectly acceptable to imagine, and be rewarded with the contentment of creation. The permanence and importance of it. Instead of self-doubt and recrimination.

The sobering thought of facing reality is a thorny one. But facing reality without the cushion of imagination, definitely worse.  In the coming barren days, it'll be imagination that tends to these raw wounds reality has inflicted. I need this trait to create. Without it, I wouldn't have  a hope in hell of ever filling a page. 

There you have it, another writer's dilemma. Has anyone experienced this occupational hazard? How do you deal with it? Is there a chance of reconciling the two? I'd love to know....!

 

But for now I suppose, if it came down to it, I'd rather be buried by feathers than a tonne of bricks. 

~ Siobhán. 

(And another poem, the medium where reality is tilted until truth glints off it. And apologies to Sylvia Plath for showing her gloomy side once again here, there is more to her than deadpan despair, will include more of her neutral poems in future..) But for now, here's an achingly accurate picture of regret:

Jilted - Sylvia Plath 

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,

My tears like vinegar, 
Or the bitter blinking yellow 
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love, 
Gossips late and soon, 
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of 
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum, 
Puny, green, and tart, 
Droops upon its wizened stem 
My lean, unripened heart.

This blog was soundtracked by the magnificently morose, The National. A perfect pitch to match the notes of disappointment and disillusionment, for when the castles come crashing down: Fake Empire -The National

*images taken from weheartit

Message in a Blog Bottle

Lots of flotsam and jetsam floating around in my head to write about, but only one of them  keeps bobbing to the surface again and again: LOVE. 

Now I don't want to get all sentimental and sappy, but bear with  me. We're in the month of August, of sandy beaches and yellow hay-bales and harvests, honey-warm evenings, and last hurrays for summer love. (And I also want to change subject lest I'm boring readers, was going to change font, but opted for the personal option instead...)

Love is what it all comes down to isn't it. What we all want to hear about, read about, experience. And what could be more heady than summer love? That daisy-chain delicate ditsy ice-cream-gooey head-over-heels-tumbling evening-rose-glow lantern-lit type of love. 

Romantic love has been thee Muse of writers for millennia. Without it would poetry even exist I wonder? Poetry is the medium for strong emotion after all and what could be stronger than love? I bet the sheer unexpressible agony and torment of it drove people to try and unleash it in words for some peace of mind. Poetry unravels knots in emotions, gives them depth and breadth of expression so they can become clear. If you have a dilemma you can't figure out  - try a poem. They're like wizards - they provide answers in an instant. And oh, when it comes to the pain of unrequited love what better to relay your misery than a poem? All the best love poems speak of unrequited love. Just look at the multiple volumes of W.B. Yeats. Where would he (and we) be without the object of his unrequited affections Maud Gonne?

Also, dipping your pen into the ink of love can create beautiful blooms of poems, elaborate with emotion. With a Muse, poems write themselves, glorious treasure you never knew was there, distilled from the sweet nectar of love we keep at our cores.

Okay, I'm drifting off target. (And here's where it gets personal; but writing is hardly for hiding, its for proclaiming) Me, I kind of like someone. Well no 'kind of' in it , hence the heartbreak (sigh). And he's like a summer's day (so no need to compare thanks Mr S.) Does he love me, does he love me not? Oh damn those tiresome age-old refrains! I'm reminded of Romeo's definition of love at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, that "love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears: what is it else? a madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving sweet." Hmm, bittersweet alright, but spot-on. Shakespeare knew his stuff when it comes to matters of the heart. All very relevant especially when things are as that great old love cliche goes: 'complicated'.

And in the midst of endless pining and wallowing, it strikes me that love is a bit like being involved in the creative arts. Following the dictation of creative urges is a bit like following the dictation of your heart: they both demand daring risk-taking, believing, trusting imagination and intuition time and again over logic and reality, and an unrivalled, fierce degree of honesty that leaves you vulnerable and utterly exposed while all the while urging a total disregard as to what others will think of you. Ahh. Neither easy pursuits, but ultimately necessary if you want to  be: a/a great artist and b/experience real love. 

Both also require a huge leap of faith. When the words come, you have to grab them and transcribe them and believe that they'll yield results. Believe in the starry void they materialise from and that it'll always be there.  Believe that they will close the gap between imagination and reality. Love also demands a big leap of faith. Almost equal to that required for a moon-landing. Or a trapeze jump. A believing in possibility over all else. A leap that will close the distance between two people, just as it does with imagination and reality. 

By the way, what I'm always reminded of when talking about these 'leaps' is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade film, where Indie is on the hunt for the holy grail (coincidentally enough). When faced with a number of dangerous tasks to get to it, he's met with a giant gaping chasm with no way across. The clue says to take a leap of faith. So he does. He puts one foot out over the edge and steps forward. And voilá, a ledge appears, seemingly out of nowhere. But when the camera shifts, you can see it was there all along, but invisible from his (and our) angle. So there you go, straight from Spielberg, the rewards of believing. Everytime we write on a blank page, we're taking a leap. And when we tell someone how we feel, a leap into a white space, hoping for stars, with no net below to catch us, except for the buoyancy of faith.

And so dear reader, I am on the verge of leaping. Whether it be into a stone quarry or a bed of roses I don't know. Summer Love SOS: to be sorted out soon! Until then, I stand on a  metaphorical cliff-edge, wind whipping hair, fear and fantasy wreaking havoc with my mind, in amber-light anticipation. Until then, my pen is poised over paper, hovering in mid-air, somewhere between belief and beginnings. 

When love is wrecking your head - like me - turn to poetry. See if it can't put it in context for you. Are you as smitten as Carol Ann Duffy when she's pouring her lover some tea in 'Tea'? Or as melancholy as Pablo Neruda in his Love Sonnets? Try Shakespeare's Sonnets, all secret love and pained pining for someone he can't have. Revel in love's transformative powers in Slyvia Plath's 'Love Letter'. Or sample ee cumming's smitten sentiments in ''i carry your heart with me'. Or any of Yeats for that matter. Or better yet, try writing a poem of your own, for as they say, 'love makes a poet of everyone.'

So that's it, purging done. Message in a bottle (blog) sent! I could share some poems I've written here about how tides are turning in my heart, about mer-men and following sirensongs into deep water, rose-coloured evenings and sun-steeped states, but that would be a bit too premature for the perfectionist 'a poem is never finished, only abandoned' me... But watch this space! Here's something else instead -

Smittenly, 

~ Siobhán.

'A Summer Love Poem' - Nikki Giovanni

Clouds float by on a summer sky

I hop scotch over to you.

Rainbows arch from ground to gold

I climb over to you.

Thunder grumbles, lightning tumbles

And I bounce over to you.

Sun beams back and catches me

over at you.

PS/ I'd also like to share a song by one of my favourite bands The Cure to soundtrack my post! 'Sirensong' captures the dreamy, floaty, swept-away essence of summer love exactly. The melody will sweep you out to sea, all bobbing-wave like and the lyrics glint gold like sun in your mind. (Or so I think anyway....) Could be a mermaid's lullaby or indeed a real siren song... check it out here

*Images taken from www.weheartit.com