Monday 25 March 2019

Part Two ... because there is more, there is always more. I'm going to write about memories, again, history, personal and social, the who and how it is told. I imagine that Jon will slip into the story because although some people might say "oh shut up, get over yourself, he left you, he died, no one cares" their opinion has to be nothing to me because though he was surely and often a git i loved him and loving him changed me. I cannot deny the changes that happened to me and in me as a result of our knowing each other and so he stands as a markable, remarkable presence. 
So where to start. That so wasn't necessary, but i don't know how to write so there it is and there it is again. Where to start. I am currently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I have just read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Each one of these books are a historical account of a story. Wolf Hall tells a story that has been covered by many, a story that perhaps most English people over the age of seven have an inkling about, and a viewpoint or opinion even now, nearly five hundred years on. Private Peaceful is one of those books that makes you weep for all the men and women killed for living in an unjust time.  Michael Morpurgo, the author, addresses the injustice of 290 British and Commonwealth soldiers killed for desertion in the first world war with his usual grace and gift for engaging with heart, his own i think and his readers. Private Peaceful is a story told by one man, about his life and his brother's life and all that touched them. It's a story about a single death but also the life that led to that death. And living after death i suppose too. It's about how lives link and connect. Because we are linked. We are linked even if we don't want to be, sometimes the links we don't want are the hardest to break. The Sense of an Ending addresses human connection on a very personal historical level. It's a quick read but every word is meat. The story could be anybody's story. If we get to be old the likelihood is that somewhere along the lines we will have done something that perhaps at the time seemed like little but later turns out to have been a wrong. I have wrongs sewn into my seams. I imagine most of my friends and loved ones do too. 
What is it that i'm trying to say by mentioning my recent reading matter. I'm mentioning my recent reading matter because Wolf Hall in particular is making me think about how and who tells a story, or history. And because Britain is my country, and we are in a spot of trouble at the moment, and having a historical moment, and it's causing strife and disorder in the highest court of the land, i guess parliament is the highest court unless you count the Queen. Wolf Hall is also about Britain at a time of upheaval, and to me the story resonates with the history being made today. Maybe it is always like that to a greater or lesser extent. 
Wolf Hall, the book, is also set in my history, my history with Jon. How can something like a book be part of relationship story, i guess in much the same way as anything else if connection was made over a book then the book stands as a open door leading back to that connection. 
Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009 Hilary Mantel, the author, seemed to come from nowhere though in fact she had been a working author for years just not very well known except among her peers. I remember Jon reading it and talking to me about it, sat on the sofa in his living room, my reading it now flashes back to the time, i wish that i'd read it with him but books come when they are meant to and back then i was battling demons on all sides, work, college, my family and his, and all my energy was engaged in not giving in to feeling worthless and worth less than worthless. I am reading it now and thinking about him and that's nice but also quite sad. He's here reading it with me, as is my son, who read it last year, and who is thankfully still living and with whom i can talk to about it. Not talk to a past him but a present him, a now him. 
That's one of the big "fuck-off"s with death, i think. Not being able to hold another conversation except in your head, never to see the other person, to laugh with them, or touch them is really painful. I remember Jon talking to me about his mother after she died. He said that after she died she was easier to get on with because he didn't have to deal with her bad bits and could just relate to the best of her. I didn't know her. I gathered quite early that she and his sister-in-law had been at odds. And that her family rep (Jon, his brother and his brother's wife) was as someone difficult and unpleasant. But that at her funeral someone else had said to him how kind she was. I did not know her so my judgement of her is of no worth, she may or may not have been as described, she may have had reasons to be as she was described. Because people often do and may not know or want to acknowledge why they are as they are. 
Reading Wolf Hall has been mind-opening. Who can fail to be intrigued by that period off history ? It has legend written all over it and creative types have played with the storylines and characters over and over again. It is to me to read about Thomas More who wrote Utopia, to know him as a not-nice character, a torturer, a religious zealot, a mean husband, the image i'd had of him was as a gentle family man, someone almost saintly, this had, in the main, come from a 1970's film i have seen more than once. How easy it is to fall in with a narrative if it is the only source drawn from. 
This has been some of the problem with Brexit. Maybe any conflict where sides have arisen. I guess all the time there's a need to look more than one way if wanting a rounded understanding is wanted.  If wanting a rounded understanding is needed. If I see only my own point of view as valid then all i can do is dance on the spot and hope that enough people will dance on a spot close to me so that i feel myself not too isolated. Alternatively if i am prepared to see, to feel, to engage with other people's thoughts, needs, feelings then i have opportunity to step out of my spot and make my dance a more moving thing. My opening out to others creates space for interaction that holding myself tight shut like a shellfish on a rock will never do.
Because i don't think any one person can always be right. Most of us will have come up against someone who believes themselves always right. But, really ? Really ? I don't know how to deal with people who are never wrong. I suppose that the drip dripping of time will wear them down in the end but whew in the meantimes saint's preserve me from having to spend too much time with those who are are without fault. 
Er hum, where am i going ? History. Memories. Well a lot of my blogging has been about memories this past year and i have a project idea building at the back of my brain about memory, same as a million other artists, authors, play-writes, poets, film makers and all the others with a calling to the arts. But memories are a very personal form of history. And yet even as we write and read back to ourselves our own histories, they trip and fall and become imperfect. When i wrote a few weeks  ago about the church at Wenhaston and the devil weighing the souls, that was my memory, but returning a week after i saw that my memory had missed St Michael, and that he was the one doing the weighing and the devil very close by was just looking on waiting for the wicked to be weighed and passed on to him. And before that i spoke about my hair being green when i was pregnant and straight after i remembered that it was probably pink and blue and bleached a good white blonde and the green had been cut off just before i got pregnant.
Recognising the holes in my own memory make losing Jon feel harder because i know that the time we spent together is passing into kodachrome dream-like images, images that replay and feel real but also not real. I don't know how better to describe the feeling. It's hard to accept someone i love being so physically cinematic, so physically distant, but that is how it is for me now. It hurts, i don't want a sugar coated Jon, i want him good and bad, as i always wanted him. So, and there's that "so" again,   i find him in books, and fields, and hedgerows, and, and, and: and what i find is feeling, the feeling of him, it's not him, but it's him as i knew him, sometimes brilliant and sometimes a bastard. And the bastard is not such good company but i did learn a lot from the bastard in him just as learned a lot from his brilliance. 
Do I close there ? I struggle with endings. Some people are good at them, are masters, but i don't know how to close, for me there is always an after. Perhaps it is that sense of one thing leading to another and another and tho' threads drop and fall away new threads pick up the stream and go forward. Now I am walking the coast path very very slowly and maybe I'll blog about that next and put in a picture or two to lighten my blog. But it's life isn't it, it keeps going.
In a few weeks time Britain will or won't be a part of the EU but life will go on and the body of our country will have moved little. What the politicians are fighting over is a lot about money, i think, and power. Some care about the human cost and some don't. And i'll give my vote to those who do. And some care about planetary cost and some don't, and similarly i'll give my vote, my coat, to those who do. And that in the end is all the little man/woman/child can do is give their coat of arms to the causes they feel most strongly for, whether in their personal or political life. And there perhaps i'll end because it's as good a place as any.   

Friday 22 March 2019

Here goes again ... launching myself into another blog ... many years ago when i was a child my dad used to sometimes take me as his sailing crew. I wasn't his preferred crew, my oldest sister Vicky was keener and more competent, but sometimes, not often i would be there in the boat with him. It would be planned the day before, getting up at whatever time was needed to catch the high tide, gearing up and going to the boat yard to rig the boat, it was a Tideway, a wooden clinker-built boat that my dad maintained well because that's how my dad is. When the boat was as rigged as it could be on land he would wheel it on it's squeaky trailer to the harbour slipway, along with all the other boats and their sailors, with me following. I was a bit of a puddle of a child, not sharp or clever or agile, I suspect taking me out sailing was a bit of a chore for my father, but the thought of launching into my blog brought back the memory of getting into the boat, leg deep in water and over the side before my dad pushed the boat out getting in as the boat sailed out into deeper water. I think of the salt smell and the clinking of metal ropes and the flapping of sails and the shouting and excitement and i think thats a good memory to have tho' i suspect i was really only part present as i was/am not really all with it, more often than not i am faraway in some dream world.
Memories are funny things. This year past has been full of memories of Jon, i think i've mentioned that before, and as memories of time i spent with him and without him have surfaced within the net are other memories and they are all very live, vivid and visceral in quality.
We are as living beings and bodies a container for the life we've lived, I think. I am repeating myself please excuse me. Repeat is a thing, part of our patterning. Here we go again, this way of living that actually doesn't quite work for us hitting up against the same or a similar obstacle and until we learn to meet it in another way. 
We, who is this we ? I've noticed i slip into this when i blog as if i can speak for others when i only speak for me. because how can i know how it is for someone else. Maybe it's only me that repeats mistakes, responds in the same way to some one or something that gets to me, makes me feel bad, or good, tho' feeling good would seem like less of a problem. But then what if good is an addiction, this drink makes me feel better, now i need this drink to feel better, now the drink doesn't necessarily make me feel better but i need it because if i don't have it i feel awful. I'm speaking with very ancient knowledge about drinking. Falling back into my late teens when my drinking was no more than any eighteen to nineteen year old's drinking but when if i hadn't had my daughter it might have gone bad. 
I am throwing up yesterdays because over the past few weeks i've been thinking about time. It began when i started using my instagram account. 
I'd had a look at Patti Smith's and looking at hers gave me ideas about how i could use that platform to make notes in a slightly different way. All social media platforms eat time. This blog is no exception. But if they perform a useful function then they are worth the time. This is a kind of diary. Twitter and facebook i mostly use as scrapbooks/notebooks often posting stuff to myself much as i might jot down a note on a scrap of paper. Face book memories are great. On twitter and facebook i get waylaid by national and global politics, then i become someone i don't like, mouthy and horrible, but i can't seem to help myself. I guess it's one of my patterns, it forces me up against a version of myself i am not comfortable with but can't let go, a part of me that has to fight when i think something is foul. A legacy perhaps from feeling desperately vulnerable when my children were small and Thatcher was in power. Anything that triggers feelings i recognise from those days tends to make me edgy and ugly. My body contains the fear and darkness of those days. Or maybe it is something even earlier in my life, something wary that hates to be confined. 
But back to yesterdays and why i am throwing those up in this blog it's because beginning to engage with instagram has made me wonder how long is an instant ? Is an instant a lifetime ? A lifetime of a species ? A lifetime of a world ? Is the lifetime of a thing that lasts less time, a mayfly for instance, of the same worth as the lifetime of something more long lived, a human, you or me ? Does their instant  weigh the same as ours ? 
Here I am a series of breath filled incidents that occur from the moment i'm born, or maybe conceived, until the day that i die. Does my instant go back into my ancestral past ? Does it go forward beyond my dying to my descendants and those i have touched whilst still alive ? 
It feels strange to me that a person's instant might end when their physical body ceases to live because those and that which i love and value is part of my being and so continues to be part of my being. Will that go on forever. I think of the me that got up early to go sailing with my dad, that me is still me, and the person i was before i had children, and later the young mother and the woman i am now. Every part of my being is part of my instant, my now, and in that instant, that now, even tho' some of the people and places i was once connected to are no longer accessible physically, their being still lives in me until i forget or die too, until i dissolve into the ether. 
I can feel resistance like a wall of wind as i write now. I am trying to finish this blog but i keep writing and then deleting what i've written and starting again. I don't know how to meet my next day.  I want to talk about Jon but also I don't. I want to stop grieving, I'm tired of grieving, is that a terrible thing to say ? I want to let go. But also i don't. I don't know how to move on without losing him. He was important to me and so the thought of forgetting him hurts. But forgetting will happen I think. Is that why i am calling my life a single instant so that the time we had together still retains some presence in my everyday ? He was far from perfect but a person doesn't have to be perfect to be loved do they. 
Understanding is a curious thing. The effort to understand can be unbearable, filling space with questions and mind-noise, but understanding itself, i feel, is quiet. I wonder if maybe the only path to understanding is to let go of some of the questions (some questions are un-answerable) so that silence and softness allow understanding to nestle gently in the steady beat of my heart, so the steady beat of my heart can carry me forward into tomorrow. 
I think this blog is to be continued ... this is maybe part one 

Sunday 3 March 2019

Two blogs in a row because the karma thing keeps coming up, my thoughts feel unfinished . And also because my blog serves as one of my notebooks, easily accessible and something i can refer back to, an old fashioned diary i guess. I write in notebooks too and sometimes i'll open one up and come across thoughts written years ago. The other day i found the one i was scribbling my pain into when i first heard that Jon had died, the first weeks when i was obliterated by grief. 
Why bring up grief, and Jon, again ? It's over a year since he died. Shouldn't i be over it now ? Shouldn't i have moved on ? Shouldn't i let go and stop making a fuss ? And of course that sort of is what happens. Life goes on, the absence is not exactly filled but becomes familiar. Tears which were daily are now not so frequent but sometimes, sometimes, grief grasps you by the throat and pushes you against the wall, and all you can do, all i can do is go with it, let myself feel whatever it is that i need to feel. 
There will be triggers of course. The spring weather last week did it, Jon loved those first few days in spring, he'd have been out in his garden with his shirt off in shorts, all hop-skippy in the sunshine. And, before the spring weather, the rugby which he loved. I remember him buying himself an England rugby shirt in the last year we were together, little things like that made him sweetly happy, he wasn't good at treating himself so it was nice when he did. Before i knew Jon rugby meant nothing to me, big blokes running round a field with an H shaped goal and mud was how i saw it. Jon explained it to me a little; and talked about playing rugby at school; and because the six nations was something he loved i loved it too; we'd arrange our weekends around the games he needed/wanted to watch and snuggle up in the warm to watch them together, it was all very cosy, wintry afternoons on his sofa  are cherished memories. 
And see that's how it goes with the missing of someone who is dead. In my head i can go back to those times and that's nice and i am glad to have so many gorgeous moments to crawl back into but it hurts that they are done, that there will never be more, that he can't feel the sun warming his flesh, or the rugby rush of testosterone. 
And so i return to karma. Because maybe that is also what karma is. Maybe it is the traces you leave in another, traces you leave whilst still alive and also after you are gone, after you are dead. 
Way back in the mid eighties when i was first pregnant with my daughter some members of my family were not thrilled. My paternal grandmother sent me a letter saying that she didn't want to see or speak to me again because the child was a bastard, and my aunt wrote suggesting an abortion. People have reasons for doing and saying the things they do and say. I was a feisty nineteen year old with green hair and attitude and no one was telling me what to do so i can't really claim to have been put upon tho' it wasn't the warmest of family welcomes for my daughter. 
But there was one member of my family who responded with extraordinary kindness. And with that kindness she left her mark. That person was my Auntie Leska. Auntie Leska wrote me a letter saying she thought it would be hard but that she was pleased i was keeping the baby. She knitted clothes for my unborn baby, wooly tights with braces in the bright colours i asked for. It meant a lot. Even the arrogant teen that i was knew that i was being shown how to be good. 
Here, this is what i mean about traces and karma. Our lives leave marks, good and bad. Some people leave us bruised or broken, some leave a stain or a scar. Others by their being give hope, make good, make things better. Our memories of those who have marked us is how their karma is carried forward. My Auntie Leska is long dead but what she did, who she was when she knitted my daughters layette made a difference and means she still lives in me as someone who showed me kindness, and my daughter, and maybe my grandchildren too. 
Last summer i went to Wenhaston, Suffolk to see a small art show in the church inspired by an artist called Becker. It was good to see the exhibition, the work gave me food for thought, but i was pleased too to have been drawn to the church because there is a fantastic medieval painting on one wall a part of which has the devil weighing out the dead's souls. Is this perhaps a version of karma ? There it is, the good deeds and the bad. And in the end by your life shall you be known. 
But a life lived looks different from different angles. I am very far from being saintly, when someone pisses me off i will lay curses on them, and hope that life slaps them down. But curses backfire so i try now to hope that people get what they deserve. However this too is unreliable, lovely people get hit with horrible things and horrible people seem to be able to be horrible with impunity. Hashtag Jacob Rhys Mogg for instance.
So that's what i mean about karma being more subtle than my British brain seems to be able to grasp. And i think it's because stories look different depending on your perspective. This i guess is at the root of most conflict. Two people with different ideas of what's right will fight it out, to the death if necessary, if neither one can find it in themselves to see, if only for a moment, the other person's point of view. If both parties are able to step into the other one's shoes then conflict resolution might be easier. The problem would likely be the same but seen through understanding eyes, listened to with understanding ears, felt with a body that recognises the other as equal, maybe then the problem becomes objective rather than subjective. I hope what i've said there is what I mean.
I can talk this talk, we can all talk this talk but conflicting interests are not easy to resolve even if everyone is tired of fighting and longs for peaceful resolution. What am i waffling on about now ? It sounds a bit Brexit-y, but it isn't so much that, what I'm thinking about is how i am struggling to let go of feeling angry with Jon's family, their manners seemed hard when we were together and drove a wedge between us. I have struggled to understand why they were the way they were then, and later why they didn't offer him more help, why they seemingly just let him drink himself to death. 
In the week after Jon died, before i knew he was dead, i was talking to my son who had just come back to England after two years in Singapore, i was saying how the time when i was with Jon was the only time in my life when i'd felt like i'd got it, that i was winning (winning is a word Jon gave me, if i was having a difficult time he would say/text/email me - "are you winning?").  i said how i didn't understand his family. He suggested that maybe Jon and his brother weren't close, as i am not close to my sisters. I guess that could be why. In 2016 after he had been hospitalised a second time I wanted to walk him dry, to get him close to nature which i knew from our time together put a spring in his step, an appetite for life and twinkle in his eye.  But i needed their help, i needed them to be on side. I wonder if they hadn't hated me so much they might have helped, i wonder if he would still be alive but it's neither here nor there because what is is. I guess that is their stain on me and maybe i have left a stain on them. My refusal to give up on the beautiful memories i have of him is perhaps annoying to them, maybe it upsets their story because i tell it from another angle and rather than join the dots they need and want to keep to their story and not connect to mine tho we were together for six years and shared so much. 
That's life isn't it. When Jon and I fell out and it wasn't worth fighting over i'd let hm know i'd given up by saying "hey ho" and i guess that's all i can do with his family, all i can do is say to myself "hey ho" and let go.  

Saturday 2 March 2019

I had not realised it had been so long since i blogged. I see from my posts page that i had an aborted attempt in late January but it stayed as a draft and won't get published. But it's not for lack of thought just lack of clarity of thought. And that may seem laughable as my blogs are usually just a meandering ramble through the inner workings of my mind. 
I have been wondering if that is good enough. I have been wondering if airing my thoughts as if they are of consequence is ok. I have also been conscious that words are one thing, and words are part of my work process, but that words are not my medium i am not a writer or poet, i play with words i do not work with them, maybe i will one day but at the moment my voice in writing has the timbre and crack of a young boy on the edge of adolescence. I have been thinking i should put more pictures in my blog, make it more about my work as an artist. But then where does my work as an artist start and stop. Vocational professions are not the same as sensible jobs that pay the bills. A vocation is something undeniable, whatever you do it calls you back. 
Many years ago i remember having a shiatsu tutorial while i was training. It was a moment when i met one of my edges and as i was walking home i remember thinking "oh no, i have a vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner" and then thinking "damn, now all i'll be able to drink is water, and i'll have to be  more perfect than i want to be" i did not want to be that person, i ran away, stopped training for a few years, refused the vocation. But then my body brought me back, my elbows ached so i went for a shiatsu treatment which inspired me to go back to my shiatsu books and complete my training and then my elbows were fine again. It sounds a bit mystical but i find life follows a truer path if i accept my body as my guide. 
Recently i have been thinking about karma. Now although i have practised yoga for about thirty years and read about other cultures the culture i stem from is white British christian. That's fine. It feels and sounds a bit heavier and more solid and unbending than i want to feel but that's my roots and because of those roots my relationship to the idea of karma can be a bit crime and punishment, eye for an eye, simplistic. My experience of karma is more subtle. I am sure i am not alone amongst the people i know to hope that karma will catch out the people who i feel have wronged me, or, who i feel are wrong per say (people who kill or maim animals, people who preach malevolence and so on) but damn that karma button it doesn't seem to work like that. And i think maybe it doesn't work like that because karma is not so caught up in the instant and my simple animal being is. 
Of course if someone metaphorically bites me i want to bite back but that is reaction not response. If i pause and think around a thing there is almost always a path that brought me and that other into conflict. The conflict may not even be about me, or them. 
The evening i heard that Jon had died my son gave me a book, i was still in innocence having been away and not picked up the email informing me of his death. The book sat on my shelves for over a year, books are like that, they are patient messengers. The book is called Frog by Mo Yan and there's a line it that caught me sharp "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" those questions seem to relate to karma and the trace we leave behind. 
Now about that vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner, it turns out that i am fine with being a person who mostly "only drinks water" and as regards being perfect that was always an impossible task because believing myself perfect would be the imperfection, perfect is not possible although sometimes for a thin slip of a moment it can feel as if perfection is a thing that we hold in our hands only to know that holding it too often breaks the moment and there's no going back. 
Because there is no going back. "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" what do you think ? I think that each of us leaves a trail, a tale, although seemingly we might start anew all that we left behind us is there in our wake. 
When i met Jon and fell in love, i took him as a blank page. But that was stupid. He said he was an alcoholic, had been to prison, had slept with his wife's best friend, Auntie S, and so on and so on, but in that blissful whirr that is head over heels in love i let myself believe that that was his past. But our pasts are never our pasts. Our present being may ameliorate the wrongs we have done another but they don't undo the wrong. And everyone gets things wrong. 
remember asking Jon what he did with his daughter when she visited and he said "i couldn't even look after myself let alone a child so she has never visited" talking about the time between his time in prison and the time i knew him. He told me another time about breaking his parole and staying in a hotel and then in the woods before he was caught and it was in those heady weeks when we were getting to know each other and his sinful ways were not an issue because i had a small bucket of sin of my own. But i think now that, of course, that was his tail, his trail, his tale, the story/stories he told me were new to me, but were also lived by those who knew him while they were happening and were likely not good memories. 
What am i getting at ? Karma. Our lives are full of mistakes and the expectation that others will forgive or get over our mistakes is unreasonable, when we wrong another we violate their line. The knack is to try not to do that but life is constant compromise. If I make a mistake that mistake passes into the history of the world. There are many worlds, great and small, and each of our actions has a consequence within a world because not one of us lives in complete isolation. I think it's the consequences that are our karma. 
This is why i say that karma is more subtle than brutal desire for vengeance. Karma keeps going, it keeps going and going and going, it may not be you that reaps the dividend of your ill will or carelessness. See how for instance it is not the generation that has polluted that will bear the brunt of climate change but the generations that are being born now, that it is the children who are speaking out because those who are old have failed to respond with common sense to a real threat to existence.
That is a great example. It happens at lesser scale too. Our family lines are made up of the ancestors who bore us. Our mother's womb and the squit that our fathers invested in our mothers is our birthplace. We are the product of that womb, that squit. They are our inheritance, and more precious than gold, or land, is who we are, what we give to the world in our being. A child conceived and carried to term is witness to the connection it's parents made and bears the karma of that interaction. It comes into the world as a product of that union, carries the essence of it's parent's and their parent's and their parent's quality as it's non-negotiable life spark. 
Oh what ? Am i being preach-y ? I think i am. I think i am saying "be love" "be your best" because being anything other than that will ripple out into the wider world and that wider world will surely be sweeter for the love and the best of you than it will if give it your bad. 
I write, as always, as I think, the punctuation is lousy, please accept apologies, and whether this blog is my good or my bad i can't tell it is only me. Maybe now i need to sit on a rock for a little while and contemplate a little further before i throw more concrete words out into the ether.