Be a lighthouse

Once my family bought a big framed print of this sublime photograph from Ikea. It's the kind of photo you can't help but create a story for, incidentally it's also the kind of photo that makes its way into lots of stories. It came to mind when I was reading the Rime of the Ancient Mariner last year, and when I read Lighthouse Keeping. Who is the man in the doorway, and is he coming out or retreating back in? Does he live in the light house? Does he live alone? Where is his boat - will the wave wash it away and will he ever get back? I always assume that that wave is somehow life changing or unprecedented, but perhaps living in a lighthouse you get used to storms.

Recently I was reading a blogpost by Hannah Brencher, in which she wrote these words that brought this image to mind:

Be a lighthouse but never a lifeboat. The two are very different. A lighthouse stands there tall and shining. A lifeboat is hellbent on saving people. There is a savior mentality stitched into most of us. We want to save. We want to fix. 

You will learn in the next few years that you were made to love and protect, dig and dream. You were made to stare at the sky and ask questions about God. But you, my girl, were never created to save anyone. Be careful not to drown in the effort of trying. 

Metaphors/metonymy and darwish

In the paper I'm taking on postcolonial literature, I've been struck by how weighty words are in the matters of nationalism and justice and power. I suppose I'm thinking particularly of the literature of Israel and Palestine - Israel's deep connection and use of the Tanakh for explain their connection with the land they now occupy, and Palestine's resistance literature and poetry which asserts their connection to and longing for the land and national identity and rights they are barred from.

I was looking this week at Mahmoud Darwish, who I think is the Palestinian T.S Eliot:

[Excerpt from Mural (1999)]

I will walk in my footsteps down the old path through the sea air
no woman will see me passing under her balcony
I have of memories only those necessary for the long journey
Days contain all they need of tomorrows
I was smaller than my eyelashes and my two dimples
So take my sleepiness
and hide me in the story of the tender evening
Hide me under one of the two date palms
and teach me poetry
So I can learn how to walk beside Homer
So I can add to the story a description of Akka
the oldest of the beautiful cities
the most beautiful of the old cities
A box of stone
where the living and dead move in the dry clay
like bees captive in a honeycomb of a hive
and each time the siege tightens
they go on a flower hunger strike
and ask the sea to indicate the emergency exit

Teach me poetry
in case a girl needs a song
for her distant beloved:
Take me to you even by force and prepare my
bed in your hands
And they walked interlaced towards the echo
as though I had married a runaway fawn to a gazelle
and opened the church door for the pigeons

Teach me poetry
She who spun the wool shirt
and waits by the door
is first to speak of the horizon and despair:
The fighter hasn’t returned and won’t return
and you are not the you I was waiting for

I saw myself like Christ on the lake….
But I came down from the cross because of my fear
of heights
and I don’t preach the apocalypse
all that I changed was my pace the better to hear the
voice of my heart…
Eagles are for bards
for me
the dove’s collar
a star abandoned on the roof
and a winding alley leading to the port
This sea is mine
This sea air is mine
This quayside with my footsteps and sperm upon it…is mine
And the old bus station is mine
And my ghost and its master are mine
And the copper utensils and the verse of the throne
and the key are mine
And the door and the guards and bells are mine
The horseshoe flung over the ramparts is mine
All that was mine is mine
Paper scraps torn from the gospels are mine
Salt from the tears on the wall of the house are mine…
And my name mispronounced with its five horizontal letters
my name… is mine:

[...]

This name is mine…
and also my friends’ wherever they may be
And my temporary body is mine
present or absent…
Two metres of this earth will be enough for now
a meter and 75 centimeters for me
and the rest for flowers in a riot of color
who will slowly drink me
And what was mine is mine: my yesterday
and what will be in the distant tomorrow in the return
of the fugitive soul
as if nothing has been
and as if nothing has been
A light wound on the arm of the absurd present
History taunting its victims
and its heroes…
throwing them a glance and passing on
This sea is mine
This sea air is mine
And my name—if I mispronounce it on my coffin—is mine
And as for me—full of all reasons for leaving—
I am not mine
I am not mine
I am not mine

I looked at his use of metaphors and metonymy in a recent essay, and was so amazed at how he used simple expressive differences to create a metaphorical relationship between the exiled self and the idea of nation:

I built my homeland, I even established a state, in my language. If there are no humanistic spaces in poetry that touch on the human, the text dies. […] Homeland is a broad concept, but when we go to the homeland we’re searching for a specific tree, a specific stone, a window. These components are very intimate, and are neither a flag nor an anthem. 

Darwish (like many Palestinians) was living in exile from his birthplace. For the exile, lacking the national institutions or the political recognition of statehood, a flag or anthem is futile, so those common metonyms for homeland are rejected and personal, or ‘human’, recollection is preferred instead.Whilst the exile cannot claim a metonymical relationship with the homeland, since his contiguity (both in the figurative sense of sharing a close association with and the literal sense of sharing a border) with the homeland is denied him, he can still share a metaphorical relationship with their homeland. By recalling ‘a specific tree, a specific stone, a window’, he can claim a sort of belonging to the homeland, and those unrelated symbols become metaphors of home. Despite different figurative and literal domains, human recollections serve as source domains or vehicles for the target domain or tenor of homeland; this way, language becomes the way the exile ‘establish[es] a state’ even while stateless.

3 songs that made me cry

Bainton's And I Saw a New Heaven, which reminds me of Grandma. I sang this with the choir very near the time she died last year. This Monday is the anniversary. I didn't think time could have such have profound effect of recollection but I've been having dreams of her, and seeing her in the faces of old ladies I pass at bus stops when I go on runs, and, at the Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky concert J and I went to on Saturday, thinking of how she'd move her hands to classical music. Last week the combination of feeling sick and the sight of a street sign saying the Cambridge half marathon was happening on 4th March (a day before I ran it last year and the anniversary of her funeral) meant it turned into a very teary cycle.

The female solo in Tres Ciudades: 2. Barrio de Cordoba (she comes in around 2:11 and brings the song into an entirely different dimension).

Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars - the choir sang this on Sunday, when I couldn't sing. Instead, I sat in the congregation and got to experience evensong as someone who just arrived, ready to hear and rest and meditate and receive the Holy Spirit. 'Seek him that turneth the shadow of death... into morning'. So many poets write about death as sleep, and eternal life as awakening. But 'morning' is better, I think. Sometimes waking up is a difficult process, fatigue still exists and sleep seems preferable. But morning means the sunrise and its beauty, it means warmth and light and birdsong and the contemplation of daffodils and prospect of breakfast.

Week Snippets

On Tuesday morning, the sun was so bright that despite not feeling absolutely well I just had to chase it - I went along the West Cambridge route and wondered how I'd write my running if I had to, the sensation of it all and how different that sensation is in the morning. One thing I really wanted to put into words is the particular feeling of the top of my running tights just brushing my waist, which always makes me think of men circling the waists of ballet dancers while they pirouette, just brushing their waists with --- and then I realised I didn't know the name of that part of the body, the skin between the pointer finger and the thumb. That question was left unanswered, occasionally re-surfacing to make me wonder, until J googled it and we discovered it's name - purlicue.

I wrote an essay on a poem titled 'a drift', which made me pause for a while and think - what's the difference between 'adrift' and 'a drift' and what do the different meanings mean for each other? Adrift means movement without propulsion or intention/direction, but a drift could be the 'conscious direction of action or speech to some end; the end itself; what one is ‘driving at’; purpose, intention, object, aim' (do you catch my drift?)

The various and contradictory meanings of words is so fascinating - last week I kept thinking of how cleave can mean both cleave to (adhere/cling) and cleave from (sever/split), and the week before the word that kept tumbling around in my mind was 'whatnot', which can mean ‘everything and anything’, which conveys mess and lack or organisation or principle, but it can also refer to ‘an article of furniture consisting of an open stand with shelves one above another, for keeping or displaying various objects’, that is, an organising piece of furniture! 

Wednesday - Valentine's Day. A couple nights before I'd looked at J and asked 'So - Valentine's Day - do you want to do anything or keep it chill?' ('please say keep it chill please say keep it chill please say keep it chill,' I thought) 'I thought we could just keep it chill?' he said. Happy sigh. What did happen on Valentine's day was lentil dahl and playing cards with J and Izzy till late, which made me very content indeed.

This morning I woke up and Hannah's daffodils had bloomed, open and yellow and the first thing that greeted my eyes. I ended the day with something similarly yellow and happy - a big plateful of socca for dinner.