Monday, October 22, 2018

2 villanelles and a resolution


I remember thinking up a Haiku last year while on a run, something about the sea and the fullness of love. I edited it my head on subsequent runs, using my pace to count syllables 5 - 7 - 5. And then one day I wrote it down and it shined in front of me, a poem, not perfect, but made.

After Wales with Jacob I was determined to write about the experience as a whole, and decided poetry would work. I decided to challenge myself with a villanelle, remembering how I hadn't been utterly satisfied with one I wrote as an exercise for a prac crit class in 2016. The Wales villanelle involved me making lists of words that rhyme with 'Wales' and 'recall'. Eventually it wasn't perfect, but if I am to start on the project I want to start on, I need to settle for less than perfection and practice patience.

I'm going to make it a point this year to write (and read) more poetry. Partly because I want to cultivate a habit and turn the phrases that sometimes drift into my head into cohesive (although not all poems are) creations and also because I am beginning to doubt my ability to finish a novel during term time, when reading about artefacts and theory is taking up most of my reading-time, and I refuse to relinquish my literary identity.

(Also partly because I am inspired by this instagram account and it haikus (for former lovers) which illuminate modern american woman dating life with so much wit and humour.)

Hopefully I'll produce a poem a week. Anyway. Here are two villanelles, two years apart:

Villanelle
2016

It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide
Though I always thought it’d happen by falling up the stairs
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

As a child, it was the distant rumble of brontide,
A flash of lightning that through me tears
It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide

In school I learnt of genocide
A million, million deaths. Not mine, but theirs.
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

In her bedroom, I sit beside
My grandmother, and we say our prayers.
It might be slow as starvation or quick as a landslide.

A million conversations, but this one sticks: ‘Abide
With me. Be my guide. Lead me to the unknown wheres.’
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

There is that odd moment when earth and heaven collide
A peace that passeth all understanding as your world goes up in flares.
It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide.
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

Villanelle 
2018

When I say, 'Remember Wales?'
I do not ask for mere recall.
I mean that love and hope prevail.

Dwell on our God of fine details -
fifty pence fares and blackberries small -
when I say, 'Remember Wales?'

Dwell on our God who doubt curtails -
extinguished by stars and mountains tall -
and trust that love and hope prevail.

If comes a time when love grows stale
let's to those days determined crawl
when I say, 'remember Wales?'

Though on the summit storms assail
I know your hand prevents my fall,
I know our love, our hope, prevails.

When we have walked the final trail
we'll know, God's truth in us unveiled
we'll know, and we'll remember Wales.
In us, God's love and hope prevail.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

some beauty from today and yesterday

Image result for cezanne still life clementine

I am sitting on my bed, satsuma peel on my right hand and general mess on my left, thanking of how beautiful a fruit satsumas are, particularly in the sunlight.

I cycled back from Charmaine's house on my longest cycle through London yet, about an hour from Baron's Court back up to Highgate, but it flew by so quickly, mostly because I was absorbed by how beautiful everything was. I went through Hyde Park and had a brief glimpse into the army and horse building, a looked up as the sun gleamed on the Albert Memorial, I saw the Christmas lights all ready for the celebration season up along Oxford Street, and smelt fresh croissants as I went past the Lidl in Kentish Town. London is built beautifully, but it also has beautiful moments when the traffic isn't packed and people are less frantic (Perhaps because it is a Saturday? Or the frantic people are still in bed, exhausted from yesterday's frantic-ness?)

My mind has been on beauty a lot this morning - I am reading an article by Susan Sontag on Posters, and she talks about how a defining feature is their aestheticisation of information, how in some cases they exist as beautiful (art?) objects in their own right.

Yesterday I went to the Wellcome Collection with Pierre - we spent most of our time in the museum shop, and I asked if he could have three books (and only three) from the shop which he'd choose. He recommended 'The Architecture of Happiness' as one of my three, which after hearing his glowing review I promptly bought of ebay for a quarter of the museum shop price. After reading an excerpt of it I now want to read all things Alain de Botton:

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

In Wales Jacob and I tried to think up the things that made a good day - things like prayer, doing something difficult, gratitude, self-reflection, movement of some kind, spending quality time and having quality communication with God and other people... and doing something beautiful. I am feeling very much that I've been fortunate to have lots of beautiful things done to me this morning, like seeing the misty morning air settle on the brick buildings of Mayfair and having such a sweet satsuma. I wonder if peeling a satsuma can be considered a beautiful thing?

Here's a beautiful thing for you - murmuration.

Friday, October 19, 2018

Weekollage




As I cycled over regent's canal on the way to SOAS this morning, I spoke (as you do) to my bike. 'You're doing an amazing job - I'm so glad I have you,' I said, smiling down at her.

Oh yes, she's a her.

It's time to introduce Liv. After the faithful silver bike that carried me to lectures, choir practices and supervisions all three years of Cambridge was laid to rest (un)ceremoniously at the SOAS bike racks (I still need to figure out what to do with him), I bought Liv from a man named Angel. At first I had some reservations - her brake pads needed replacing, she was a little smaller than Old Silver, and her chain wasn't gleaming, although Angel assured me that with some oil that would be fine. But I needed a bike, and Liv was blue and light and cyclable and so I bought her.

On the first ride home her chain came off (entirely my fault, for messing with the gears) and I thought, 'oh no'. But after a liberal spray of WD-40 and a session with the guys at cycle republic, she worked fine. If Liv was a person she'd be a 65 year old lady, with blue highlights in her hair, and a penchant for poetry and walks and fruit crumble. In other words she's a bike after my own heart.

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Aside from Liv, London has become a lot more personable.

I've joined a bible study group in church, which meets every Wednesday night. On the first night, I was loathe to go, having ended a lecture in school at 7.15pm - 15 minutes after the bible study began. I began steering Liv back home, and then felt an inward pull and stopped. 'Alright God,' I thought, 'I feel like maybe you want me to go for the bible study, but I'm tired and the cycle back from there is even longer than the cycle back from here and -- I just want to go home.'

'So if you want me to go,' I continued, 'I'm going to ask for a sign. If the time it takes to get there is less than 20 minutes, I'll go. If it's more, I'm going home.' (When I left school it had been 19 minutes, and I'd cycled a little in the opposite direction so I was hoping geography was on my side.)

Google maps read 18 minutes.

'Right, God - another sign please because that could have been a fluke. I'm going to check facebook and if there's a notification from the church then I'll go.' (There hadn't been any notifications when I last checked facebook before getting on my bike, so the chances, I thought, were low.)

Lo and behold, a notification.

'Okay God, you're a lot more technological than I thought. I'll go.'

And it was just the thing I needed. The people there were honest, welcoming, refreshing and serious about studying God's word. We learnt about realising our own sinfulness and yet also living in joy that Christ freely forgives that, bringing us from exile from his love into his Kingdom and a relationship with God. I realised that although I often confess my own weakness/lack of trust/need for control, I rarely actually perceive myself as 'sinful' in the absolute depravity it is cast as in the Bible. Perhaps because it's always in tension with the assuaging promise that Christ has forgiven sin and made a way for us to access God despite sin, and access the Holy Spirit to combat sin.

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Over the weekend I went back to Cambridge, and it was golden. I'd forgotten how easy it is to see people there. I felt surrounded by community all the time - either close, individual friends like Emily, Naomi, Kerry, Jacob or groups like Choir and the SusSex pistols. I did have moments where I thought 'oh, let me not leave' or where I wished Jacob could hold me forever, but it was more of a wish than a fear of what I'd be for not-having. And that, I think, is a big step.

A Quiet Joy
– Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.

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This Wednesday, my lecturer called me 'a woman after [his] own brain' in a spontaneous exclamation reminding me very much of Leo. His lectures are all about the body and Islamic architecture, examining how each becomes a metaphor for the other, and how architecture becomes representative and symbolic and manipulated in the cause of the body politic, and how ideas of purity, taboo, boundary (and their opposites) are figured in buildings, which then become part of the experience of living as an embodied being -- and so the building itself is 'embodied'.

Speaking of body things: I've definitely been having a lot more positive body thoughts lately, which has been all the more wonderful because I haven't been surprised by them - they feel natural and unexceptional as they should be. Partly it's because of a good routine of running in preparation for the 10k, the mornings (or evenings) down the parkland walk and in Hampstead heath are usually fresh and exciting and having a reason beyond my body for running is useful too - now when I run it isn't just me and my legs and the world (which can be either incredibly soothing or a disastrous echo chamber, depending on how my brain is being), it's also 17 November and Jacob and all the people who have donated and the charities.

(Also I'm about £50 away from my target for TRIBE --- if you're reading this and have spare change for a good cause please consider putting it into these anti-trafficking charities!)

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On Wednesday I also received a letter from Alex -- it got terribly soggy on my rainy cycle to school (Project get Miriam a raincoat that actually keeps the rain out begins NOW) but I unfurled its damp pages and read them during a break in the lecture, and felt so glad for her honest words.

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Yesterday I met Rachel Dunn, and felt so joyful. We talked poetry, adjusting to London, the danger of finding identity in productivity, the joy of finding joy in another persons joy, how marriage can be missional and not just a love-club for two, sacrificial love... It was beautiful to talk to someone without feeling the need to go to the 'next thing', to just relish their presence and company. Rachel introduced me to Alice Oswald, after we discovered our taste in poetry is weirdly similar (think T.S. Eliot and Yehuda Amichai), and I've spent the morning poring over her poems instead of reading about pop art.

Full Moon
– Alice Oswald

Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep.

It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole.
I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,
except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.

Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,
Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,
There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer
Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There's no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?

Sunday, October 7, 2018

The first week of London



Last night Jacob and I watched Brooklyn, a movie I watched when I was in Cambridge years ago. I remember the painful identification of the fear and loneliness of homesickness I felt with the film the first time I watched it. This last week I've felt bouts of a similar feeling, but more generalised. I can't confine last weeks feelings only to homesickness, because while I miss people at home that's not the only thing I'm missing. And missing isn't the only feeling either.

This is harder to explain than I thought it would be - we should go back to Wednesday last week.

Wednesday was the first day I went back to Cambridge. I took a train and read Birdsong on a sunny seat and found my way easily to Sidney without looking at Google maps. Within 5 minutes there I'd met 5 people apart from Jacob that I knew. Jacob and I made lunch, and over a faux-argument about whether peas are more bean or more green we found ourselves laughing and then hugging.

And then the laughter was replaced with the intense feeling of longing met and grief found. I was surprised at how much I realised then that I'd been missing him and the conflation of joy at being with him again and sorrow at knowing we only had a few hours before I had to leave again brought sudden tears to my eyes.

When I got back to London that evening I had some trouble with my bicycle and tube regulations, which eventually left me saying a hasty 'thank you' to the tube staff and speed walking my way out of the station, trying not to break until I was standing outside the red walls of Kings Cross station and I let myself cry. It was about 10pm and there were still many people on the streets, and yet I felt like I couldn't ask anyone for help - things seem to move so fast here and people remain within their bubbles of concern. How would I get back to Fiona's, which was so far away and not the 15 minute walk to Medwards in Cambridge, and on far more dangerous streets? London felt like a ocean and I was unmoored. The contrast in familiarity, safety and friendship that I felt and Cambridge and here, and the geographical difference, was so stark and a combination of lots of the things I was feeling in terms of why London had been feeling like a hostile place.

In the days following, I developed an eye infection, discovered my bike was kaput and needed replacing, struggled to talk to people in my course/on the scholarship, and went for a lecture that didn't seem to say anything although it was 2 hours long. I felt so tired - simply doing the basic things like cooking and having a shower and getting to campus seemed to take so much effort. One evening when I called Jacob it all sort of descended on me as I looked up at the ceiling and wondered if I could actually do this year. 'This is so much harder than I thought it would be,' I told him.

But since then I've had good lectures, met really kind and welcoming people in church, found my way back home from school without getting lost, and got a new bike. (She's called Olivia, and if she were a human she's be about 65 years old, with dyed blue hair and a light, gentle voice, full of joy but also comforting) There have been moments of still feeling lost, but with every cycle up the archway hill it gets a little shorter.

On Thursday I saw waiting for Will on a bench on the top of Parliament Hill, when an old man approached me. 'May I sit?' he asked. 'Of course,' I replied.

His name was Lucello, and he told me about his varied and exciting life - his move from Milan to South Africa under the pretence that he was a bricklayer, although he'd never laid a brick in his life. 'After the first day my hands were all torn,' he said. From bricklayer, he became a carpenter, then a window dresser and stand maker, which included moving to England. He spoke for about 30 minutes, and I was happy to listen because in his presence I felt the rare feeling of slowing down, and stopping and being wholly absorbed in a life of adventure and uncertainty that wasn't my own. Knowing from hindsight that all works out in the end, in some way or another 'if you have enough cheek and enough-- enough -- ah you know what I mean?' (he said, trying to get at the sense of confidence and dauntlessness and risk that I think is best summed up in the word ballsy) was comforting, reminding me that - hey, I'm only 22, and I've only been here 2 weeks, and life with unfold itself according to God's good plan. I might not know entirely what I'm doing but I'm going to be ballsy about next week, I'm going to learn without fearing that I'm the least experienced and qualified person in the class, I'm going to talk to people without the fear of being thought odd or the fear of rejection.

A mystery; or my misorientation



The strangest thing happened on an early Thursday run. I ran down the Parkland walk, across the railway bridge and into Finsbury park, wanting to get to about 7km this morning as my long-ish run. Heading away from the railway bridge, I did a loop round some trees in the park, and after a while more decided that it was time to begin returning.

Return is always a time-confounding moment in running, because particularly on routes one is less familiar with, I find that the first half of the run into the unknown usually goes quite slowly (at least perceptually) while the return flies by far faster.

But this time return was even odder. I followed a path, that led round the gentle bend of a lake - 'The Lake', a sign said. After passing a children's playground, I then ran through a garden with pink and red flowers beds in either side of me, and continued straight.

Until, I noticed before me a lake, gently bending, with a sign 'The Lake' beside it. Puzzled, I kept going, and passed a children's playground. I stopped when I got into a garden with pink and red flower beds on either side, and felt shakey and confused. This was the exact same place I'd been running through less than five minutes ago and yet I was sure I hadn't made any drastic loop. I wondered (quite seriously) if somehow I'd stumbled into a time loop, or had some sort of pre-emptive vision. Because how - how??? - in the short time between seeing the lake and seeing the lake again had I possibly gone round it? Particularly as a) it wasn't a small lake, b) I'd left its contour, and c) I was, as far as I could perceive, running straight.

Shaken, and conscious that I needed to get back so I could get to my lecture on time, I asked a man who was walking towards me in an orange sweatshirt pushing a buggy where the railways bridge to the Parkland walk was he turned and pointed behind him to the right, so I thanked him and began running in that direction.

Less than 5 minutes later, I saw coming towards me...a man who in an orange sweatshirt pushing a buggy. The same man.

'What is going on?' I thought, and slowed to a walk. He looked just as puzzled as he caught sight of me.

'Are you lost?' he asked.

'Yes, do you know how to get to the railway bridge?' I asked, the déjà vécu unmistakable, and he pointed before him to his left.

This time I did find the railway bridge, but felt like I wasn't in reality until my feet touched the path of the Parkland walk, a straight path with no bends and no lakes, and no time loops! (that I have yet experienced)