Spring is here, and apart from occasional grey clouds and hail, we have blue skies and sunshine most days. It's grey now, but chocolate milk muesli is a good distraction from drab weather, especially when combined with the Secret Life of Walter Mitty Soundtrack.
It's funny, I started writing this with a clear intention to get to the end. It's one of the things on the checklist pinned to my board: 'Write blog'. But I don't really feel like completion at the moment. I feel quite happy to let my fingers and my thoughts take me where they will. That's sort of how I wrote my most recent essay, on Time in Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Winter's Tale. I meandered into ideas like Schumann's Resonances and how the world is speeding up, cryogenics and hourglasses. I wonder if wearing watches is a form of enslavement, constantly having the consciousness of time ticking past.
’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more.
Paulina's words (those heartbeat like iambs, quickening the statue into life) remind me of Rezia in Mrs Dalloway (The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him) which reminds me that I am dangerously close to really loving Virginia Woolf's works (first Eliot and now Woolf) not with the love that made me re-read 'I hate Fridays' more than seven times, but the sort of tugging, achy love that hit me when I read about Leo Deakin in Random acts of Heroic Love, or Leopold Gursky in The History of Love, or Laura in The Brief History of the Dead.
And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back n inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Last term I had a project of pushing myself to do new things every week, new recipes, new places to visit, new experiences. But a couple of days ago I realised that every day every where someone is doing something new, and new things are being discovered all the time, which filled me with so much joy. It is not necessary for me to make new head ways in the world. I can, and I will, but I don't have to. Which is nice.
I feel like this song has become quite apt to the direction this post is taking. This post will have to take a new direction now, however, because I want to tell you about last Friday night.
Benjamin Franklin Leftwich is such a beautiful singer. He closes his eyes when he sings, and sometimes winks, which seems more like nerves than cheek. He performed in the Portland Arms, a small pub in the seedier part of Cambridge, and as Alex, Mariella and I walked there we saw a woman who they said looked like she was on drugs being threatened by two menacing-looking men. I certainly didn't know what to do, and sort of froze, and walked forward because of safety, and then walked back because of conscience. Thankfully Alex had a good head on her shoulders and called the police.
Before Benjamin Francis Leftwich came on, there was an opening act, Denai Moore, who was really good, soulful. Benjamin Francis Leftwich started with Tilikum, which was like rain on dry ground. He held his guitar really close, and stood out of the spot light. For a couple of songs, he performed unplugged, which, in the intimacy of that small room, felt incredibly special. One of his songs had the line 'I am young, and I am yours. I am free, but I am flawed.' which is basically my prayer when I speak to God.
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