cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)


WEEK EIGHT. conversation by clair and charlie

 

8

Her wistful face haunts my dreams like the rain at night.  Tagore

                                                                            ~  ~  ~ 

The sound of rattling nails wet against a midnight window scratches open my eyes. I feel her fingers on my neck, like a gallows touch, tracing where the noose should go.  Her hair drips red dye onto my white cotton sheets, repeated slowly again and again, a dream stuck in the moment of a stain I cannot lose.  Do I dream her, or is she dreaming me?  Her face turns, seductively, secretly, a smile half hiding a snarl. The roses have left the vase, petals into ash.  I try to go back to the seed of us, lost in vodka shots with grains of gold and cherry lips eloquently murmuring on Dostoevsky, long before we kissed among brambles of a deep French wood.

If I reach to hold your silver hand it feels like scars fusing in the blood and puss of a beautiful love turned bitter beneath the moon.   You said to leave your life, but she keeps returning, reminding me never to find the footsteps that might lead me across snowdrifts and sandbanks of sleep, to this awakening.  A drop of sweat from my forehead mixes with an eye's slow tear. The end of rain is dripping from my iron guttering, like your stilletoes running away, like the echo of my own breath will vanish. 

charlie

the roses have left the vase.

feelings are so transient, such an unknown quantity...they were in full bloom, they were so real. they had me thinking that i was in love.  and so thus i was. surrounded totally and beautifully and held and left free. 

as we grow in years we get so clever... so 'in the know', and in the same moments, (and in the same amounts) we get deeper and deeper and much more lost and more lost.  perfect balance. natures little balancing act.
cl



The wistful face that haunts is the expression of knowing we etch upon the skin of memory.  We find new eyes to shape reality through experience, but look back to reread the past like a favourite book or game, finding new levels, deeper meanings that reward knowledge with more to understand.  Perhaps the face is but a mirror to my own searching, looking back at me ahead, as though two figures in a tug-of-war of definition. At least the rain at night replenishes, even as it destroys.  Rivers always reach for the sea.
ch

yes, i love to look to nature and animals for the answers that get lost in humans self consciousness and inhibitions.  like the river running to the sea. like the birds building their nests in trees.  like the ants carring grains of found sugar back for tea. 

.. ..

V  v 

cl

... Like a world bigger than me.

Why does she  choose to haunt me?  Why does the rain and night possess me? Why am I  me at all.

 In such transience, I recall the magic of a human quality to create the shape of things, like colours in a palette of possibility. And of all the dark and light mixed on canvas: her face, rain, a night, expose me as nothing more than images and thoughts in the sensation of life. 

My dreams haunt her face. Her night haunts my rain. 

I ache always for the touch of soft skin or water to remind me of me.

How intoxicating it is to be haunted, or a heart carried by an ant.
ch



the rain haunts the night.  the night haunts its' sky.
ants love carrying hearts.  they are their perfect size.
 (and full of delicious strawberries and cream .)). hee hee
clair


thanks charlie poet. X

cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
 WEEK SEVEN. conversation by clair and anna

 

The sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?  Tagore


~  ~  ~ 

I like that I found this after doing several days of washing up, while listening to Sounds of the Seventies on the radio, dancing as I cleaned, splashing water around. It led me back to 'For a Dancer' by Jackson Browne: "Into a dancer you have grown/from a seed somebody else has thrown/go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own."

anna


it is natural for the water to reflect the surface it is travelling over.  

i guess this is true for so many things... everything exists because of the last thing and the thing before that or the present thing.  how we all interact with our world... how it is all a game of dominoes.
clair


"Will you carry the burden of their lameness?" echoes through my mind. I have been 'lame' and am still limping, though my gait is steadier day by day. I won't carry the burden, but will lend my arm. It is hard to stand tall and strong alone. We interact with each other as well as with the world. I am he and you are she and we are all together.
Anna

i like that  anna, a lot...  .)

...maybe each of us 'carries' or holds each brilliance and each 'weakness' but each of us carry it differently...with different accent and dominance... different ways of interacting with each holding, or lack of holding, (dropping) we encounter...
clair

Those sands, those begging sands, in the way. Just grains - no bigger than a grain of sand, we say - but see what they are when gathered together and how they change. We struggle to walk on dry sand, run and dance and whoop across the vast open freedom of wet sand at low tide.
 
This makes me ache to swim alone naked in the sea at night.
 
Thanks for this - I am loving it! x
anna

for me the sea is so deep and vast and cold, in my memory, that i am scared at the thought of swimming in its body at night...what makes our experiences different?  are you talking of a sea which surrounds other countries?

mind you, the motion of the sea is more than beautiful, i like to lie star fish shaped on the top... the more relaxed you are the more you float. then i am wafer thin.
me too x
clair


I was thinking of the freedom, the sensations in your body and soul, but when you ask 'where?' I realise it was Shoreham beach.
 
And when you say 'scared', with a jolt I remember that I almost drowned there, twenty years ago, underestimating the sheer power of a rough sea, not even considering the shelving of the shingle or the point of the tide. My costume filled with stones, dragging me to the bottom. As fast as I could push myself to the surface and grab a pinch of air, I was dragged under again and again and again. At the moment of knowing I could not last without a proper breath, soon, very soon, I was thrown out and onto the beach. My legs, past the knees had turned white with lack of oxygen and could not bear my weight.
 
And yet I write of swimming alone in the sea at night without a trace of that experience in my mind.
 
I won't go in a rough sea on a shingle beach ever again, but a calm, flat, shallow sea on a moonlit night...
anna


yes, i see....pretty cool that you can write of swimming alone at night without being haunted by that experience... .)

i was just thinking, there are special skills, possessed by everyone of us...things we are specially good at, (they could be quite unusual skills or those not recognised by our consumerist and money driven society), but wouldn't it be amazing, if all our special skills were seen and logged and then our job on the earth was centred around those traits and we could all be special and the absolute genius that we are, and in the job we do.

one of yours would be this.
clair

 

cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK SIX. conversation by clair and alex

 

6

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.  Tagore


~  ~  ~ 

mmm!  what do you reckon alex, because the sun is a star or am i being a little literal?

clair

I think I'm going to be more literal. Too many tears in the eyes and you can't see anything. Don't cry over spilt celestials. No need. There's enough to go round (and around, and around, and around). No teary orbs orbit ours.

alex 

oh i see ;)  hows your valentines day been ... whats it all about and why is love so hard to find?
clair 

I spent St Val's finding different kinds of love to the one that's hard to find. They were everywhere, often inside me, pouring out, bounced back by the people around me.

I think 'society' likes to define certain things narrowly. It gives us things to pursue. Why that is I don't know. I guess maybe it takes up time we could spend changing society, but how does a collaborative structure have so many vested interests?

Happiness is the same. It can be hard to find and far away, or it can already be in your point of view. Every time you look at the sun and realise 'it's for you'. Or the stars. (Or the tears).

alex 

...i know there are many things to love and find love in it is true.

... me too sceptical of what society tells me to do, feel, eat and be motivated by, but this search for romantic love seems to be a true desire and drive of my own.  i find myself feeling very trustful of it.

in fact, when i look at society, i am possibly most in tune with society around relationships... for example that they are important, that people like to find another...  that they be monogamous...
c

I feel the same, I think, but lately I'm less trustful of it. I don't trust my truths, to be honest. Don't believe in them as solitary. There is not one truth, just multiples.

But I can say that shedding tears for the sun of loves lost, has made me missed the stars of all the world around me. There is a directness here. I've spent so much time longing for something specific and defined, that I never notice the wealth of similar but different brilliances all around me.

Many things look like this.

alex 

nicely said alex, absolutely.  i think part of societies training is the believe that we always need more (normally material).  its absolute madness and i too have been finding moments when i feel my self to have everything i can possibly need, and more. yum .)

clair 

That sounds like an ending.

an endding to the writting?

Responding. Conversing. Oddly you're in charge. Your game. Natural ends sometimes extend, naturally. Which way next? Whichever way it goes. Blinded by tears or not. Enigmatic mischief maybe.

 why dont we think about all the things that happen tomo which feel particulaly sparkely.
a sparkle diary :)
clair *

sparkle diary
~ shower today was particually good.  blind in bathroom down becuase of builders and thus soft artifical light from hall came in mimicing evening time.  the feeling of evening in the morning.
~ walking in sunshine...felt like the first time in many months. fresh, light and peaceful...
~ someone touched my hand while i was walking along with them,  that felt warm.
clair

Blue eyed dog.

Sea sprinkled perpetual motion glitters to the right while golden cliffs stretch into the future to my left.

Turning back, the sun turns reds, sinking down into a cloud above the sea.

Behind, where I was before, the moon is a furred gold.

Stars and snow in the gritty cinema world. Poor horse.

alex

lovely .)

clair

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 


CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK FIVE. conversation by clair and jesse

 

5

The mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.  Tagore

~  ~  ~ 

very mighty indeed and without a blade of grass.  blades of grass are not natural dessert company. not enough water and too hot for their bodies who, if there in the dessert,  would dry up and become dust themselves...

do desserts really pine for blades of grass?  
clair

deserts are deserts they know who they are. i think there are a few romantic ones who like leonard cohen records but, like len him self, after the first eons of lonliness perhaps they can be self reconcilled. also the desert is a monster. they eating all the grass up. what they really need is some trees.
jesse


hee hee :)
trees grow from grass so theres no chance of that .)
how does lonliness get reconciled?  i dont think leonard cohen reconcilled it through more lonliness... not for long anyway!
anyway, can lonliness become company?
clair

what trees grow from grass? anyway i think loneliness can be reconcilled because lonliness is being disatisfied with oneself in the end. but how long can we live like that? we finally must welcome ourselves into the world, make the introduction both ways and hope we stay friends for as long as possible. us deserts are very harmonious and beautiful places.
j 


yes, from each blade of grass one tree can grow. they grow out of its little head and eventually the roots engulf the grass blade  which is then looked after by the tree.


indeed, but what i was asking, was not if lonliness can be reconcilled, but, if lonliness can be reconcilled by lonliness itself? ...  like i find, when i am bored and then the boredom starts to get extreme then it stops being boredom (intense boredom is more like panic or anziety) and thus bordom gets reconcilled by boredom itself...  very good process indeed!
c

i don't know except that it sounds like you're doing some very important research - and this is part of that research too. this is a good process you're coming out with some gems and good lyrics.  

i was daunted the other day by a short journey on  the metro without a book to read but then realised it wouldn't be too bad just having my own brain for company for a few minutes. took a couple of breaths and forgot all about it of course.
j

yes i can imagine jesse. reminds me of an old boyfriend i had (not you) who, fetched his book to read while he ran his bath.  perfectly normal you say ...  i just thought it was completley mad.  

....im the opposite.  i am only just learning how useful external stimulation can be and recetly have taken to watching  'human planet' series the last one was about jungles.  oh my god, my jaw was dropped nearly all the way through. gosh!  i love other ways. 

funny how different people are.  in the everyday.  how much of it is habit?

im enjoying our conversation :)

c

we had some friends over for dinner tonight, our violinists dad and his wife, and she was telling us how she cried when she walked in notre dame cathedral in paris. all that height and history and all the piles of stone and piles of people worshiping together across time for the last 1000 years. these places are very special and very human. 

old tagore seems to have decided to treat everything as if its a human. which has its charming side but im afraid i find it dismal and shallow. i want a sentece like that to ring, to resonate on every level. he should have wrote pop songs, perhaps he did churning out lines like that for 600 pages its what the french call first degree. ie no other levels. i look for more and i find nothing but my self in the desert turning over a rock, looking for more and not finding it.

j

how do you feel about cathedrals jesse?    

i would like to see a sentence that you like and which is multi dimemtional for you if you feel to share it. :)  incidently, you art the second person who didnt get on with this line of tagores,  (although i must say i quite liked it...)

c

hi clair, 

i was just myself thinking the same thing. how wrong to complain without offering an alternative. i'd like to offer you something by joseph conrad or dosteyovsky both of whom i've just been reading and enjoying. my notes from the books i've been reading arn't at hand so here's a few off the internet. 

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man." dosteyovsky. 

this one from joseph conrad could do just as well for the desert: "The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power."

mmm...i dont see many of these qualities in man either...

... and can the sea be deemed to be conscious?  and if not, can the sea be expected to be responsible? and if so, responsible to whom or what?  

nature is nature...not for or against us.  
just its natrual self.
c

still neither of them are the kind of sentence i had in mind. here's one from rumi, lens favourite:

"There's the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night."  rumi
j

merci jesse

c

jesse and his projects can be found :
thisisthekit.co.uk
morningstarsmallorchestra.org.uk
fullmoonorchestra.org

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 


CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK FOUR. conversation by clair and laurence

 

3

 

It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom. Tagore.

~  ~  ~


I guess if you believe it to be a wonderful way of saying - no beauty without heartache - it leaves me wondering why that is?

laurence

i guess when something exists, in this case beauty, there is inevitably something available to die?  but also, as you say, does beauty always die?...even in death?

for me this sentence by tagore, implies that it is the hurting or taking...the using up of the planet earth which keeps us, in someway, happy.  stray birds, the book where this line was taken, was written in 1916... an early premonition of the consumerist catastrophy we find ourselves and the beautiful earth in now?

clair

So do you think human's have a natural proclivity towards consuming everything in their path, need it or not?

L

i think some people and some cultures, in later years
c

The current fear is everywhere that the earth will at some point not be able to withstand the amount of human-made tears thrown at it. However I think there is a positve aspect in Tagore's line in that the sense and sound of it is cyclical, and I don't see the idea that the cycle will become out of kilter in the line itself.

Incidently I love the way the line feels like a shoot pushing its way through the ground until the final word, bloom.

L

nice :)  

everything is indeed cyclical... as is life and death.   things can go through ememse change, for 'good' or 'bad' and still be deemed cyclical. so although there feels truth in what you are saying, what does it mean?

c

What I am saying is the line itself doesn't forecast doom, rather sustainability. I was on the tube yesterday and there was a Keats poem which seemed to go one step further....

L

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.  
Keats

there is a tin can blowing in the wind outside

it is annoying and beautiful
it is blowing up and down the street like a child clattering along on his old rusty bike
never too tired to get into bed and head home
c

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK THREE. conversation by clair and charlie

 

3

 

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.  R. tagore 


~  ~  ~




i am thinking how similar flowers are to human beings.  with their heads and their bodies and their arms and the way they blow around in the breeze. 
clair 

I am haunted by the shadow of what is not. In the fall of a dandy lion seed,  in a hand that touches skin no longer, I hold onto possibilities like melting water, and wonder, are we shaping fragments to suffocate love, or reaching closer to what makes us more than memory of an I or us?  It is too much to conceive that everything is as confused as me, that even a bee flies in torment from the sun.  At least a tree reveals our stillness. Kicking at fungi and leaves, I revel in undergrowth, run through thought.

charlie

what is confusion?...is it a reaction to what is pure and complete but which is just difficult to understand?...

as much as i myself try to understand, do things need to be understood?... do we need to understand all the processes of the body for our body to perform those functions perfectly? and if not then how helpful is that understanding? ...or is it just simply baffling?

animals are better at just being, following their wings and finding the right things! the bees probably especially!

thats what i think... though thought can be very beauty-flowered!
cl

i think the ultimate moment is one where thought is no longer required, because it has created itself - but you have to get there through understanding and the sensation of experience, which is the hard bit. I'd rather be a bee then be me, until i think about it....

My mind's latch opens.  Unguarded at last the day retreats from urban defeat.  Heavy battalions of consciousness sink in the evening mud.  I gallop free, leaving my rucksack of thoughts and identity, a traitor from reason. If they catch me, will they shoot me with being?  I want to, want, to, do.  Once I knew how to make a kite, but now I fly. 
ch 

     ~   ~   ~

...winter got his spikes out again today...i soooooooooo wish i had got it together to go somewhere warmer... gosh! that would be like a dream!! an absolute delight!!! my body wouldnt know what had happened to her. away from his frostly footsteps and in a warm cosy land.     mind you, how loved is janruary? no wonder he is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bitter!!  would it help if i loved you? how quickly would you change?... does being warmer interest you?...i could feed you soya hot chocolate and sugar coated blueberries on toast until you lost your spikes or until they became a little rounder.  ....do you like the sound of it!?   reply ASAP cl

there is such heavy superficiality under the sun. The glint of false surfaces, shaded eyes, sleeping meaning lost in cocktails and deckchairs. l love the chill of real frost, kissing with steamy breath, the ice and thaw of thoughts, the journey of darkness into spring dawn ahead. ...

ch

charlie, if i ever catch you with you passport lined up in some que waiting to go somewhere hot i shall tell mr frost who will come swiftly into the airport and chop it up with his gigantic frosty scissors! 

mmm...

cl

;)


~ ~ ~

there are lots of crazy sounds tonite coming from other peoples lives.  they let me in to their world a tiny fraction without knowing that i exsist or can hear them.  and i lay listening.

cl

In the bath, blanking out voices of the day from people I don't really know, with commentary on a game I don't understand crackling from a black box, and I think of how a kiss dissolves everything between us.
ch

how is your book on snogging coming along charlie? ... all the different receipes for different kinds of kisses... can you send one to the blog?  it would be nice to see :)
cl

i'm in my hotel in exeter, room 101 funnily enough....the book has stalled a bit as i'm not sure it can be done without another artistic snogger collaborating ...but here is an example ...

A lays down face up on their back, and B lies chest down with their head raised above A so their face is on top of A with their nose places where A's chin is. As B begins to kiss A, opening out lips and sliding tongues into eachother's mouths, so the opposite facing tongues will be able to glide along their surface area and rub up and down as part of a deep kiss known affectionately as 'the cat'.  
Just one of 101 and more ways to re-connect through the meditation and art of kissing.

ch

wow charlie, you really are something else!! @ * & :)
cl

  

cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)

 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore

WEEK TWO.  conversation by simon and clair

  

2

 

O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words. R. Tagore

~  ~  ~ 


The only footprints you'll ever find in your words are your own. Do the vagrants need you to speak for them?
simon

mmm... yes but things, people and other animals, can inspire words...so words get tainted or painted ... what colour are your words?....what colour do they enjoy being/would you like them to be? 

can there possibly be a colour which is not enjoyable...?

ive been realising the absolute beauty of all emotions... for example, the absolute purity and beauty of anger ...this emotion is not a demon...no more than any other... its the way we use it (or abuse it) which causes the dis ease and recently, when i felt anger, inside, i felt like smiling...
clair

Words, whether beautiful or ugly, are always limited. Unlike silence. Emotions, whether pure or muddled, are never more than a small part of who we are.

S

is silence unlimited?  i guess silence in itself is never ending, ever growing!  as nothingness is... never ending and eternal ... 

the less there is of something, the less there is to disappear or fade away ... but! silence and nothingness have the following limitations - sound and somethingness.
c 

Silence and space enable sounds and things to exist and vice versa. A sound needs silence out of which to emerge. Without things there would be no space, as space can only exist between things. I like living in a universe that is beyond my imagination. 

S

so do you feel that you need to have something in order to have nothing?  i feel unsure...i think that nothingness is so cleaver and self sustaining that it needs absolutely nothing and it can go on f o r e v e r!  it never runs out.  

and is someone genius without something seeing that genius?  
and is someone loving without someone to love? 
c 

simons music is found : http://www.myspace.com/lunarians

  cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)
 

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK ONE. conversation by clair and alex

1 

Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh. R. Tagore.


~ ~ ~


everything is one. leaves whisper secrets of life and death round our feet and ankles, birds come and go in the same way. everything which is alive is dying.... is that true of everything?
clair
 
Everything is two, too. After I sigh I breathe in. Everything which is alive is living. Even as it dies. The end is in everything, but beginnings are too. The leaves underfoot may be dead, but look what they inspire. Breathe in...
alex
 
am i ready to really breathe?.... its a long time coming, shallow footsteps of breath have come awandering... but they must...or i must... push a little more deeply 
clair

Breathe. Push. Deeper. Birthing, or nine months earlier. Either way is creative. We dig through the ground and try and find the living. Is it all just struggling through rocks and earth? Sunlight dapples ground through leaves as they fall. Colour dances under footsteps. There are songs about autumn leaves. 

alex

      'we dig through the ground and try to find the living'.
  
i like that.

what is capable of loving...  is the sunshine? like honey it falls, getting smiles from faces as it does

...and animals who like to live alone, do they love less?

c

If I can love then so can you (and the sunshine and the honey and the lonely and the falls and the smiles and the faces).

So nothing can. Or everything. Is love? Everything is love. Nothing is.

The leaves don't crunch underfoot once the rain comes. Mulch underfoot. Something to grow out of.

When will I grow out of it.

Love. Mulch.
a

mmm.... lovely.  the trust...the surrender that we will feel where to grow from... and to.... it will be dark,  there will be roots and depth... 

...like intuition...is strong like special soft magic.  magic whos ears pick up the silence in things... the place where the feelings are... some feelings who get covered in soft blankets and some who wake up like flowers.
c 

Wake up. Can't see the trees. Can't see the birds. Everything is in mist. Clouded hidden and lost.

Want that autumn sadness back. Better than this bleak waiting to grow. Silent sleeping flowers must wake up soon.
Roots laid in autumn leaves wait patiently.

Can I?

a

what was nice about the autumn sadness?
c

There's nothing wrong with endings.
a

alexs blog is at 

http://unstruck.wordpress.com/