album cover, leonard cohen from 'songs of love and hate', 1971

CHAPTER TWO - Leonard Cohen

WEEK FOUR. conversation by clair and neil

 

4

"Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair, She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear, Did you ever go clear?"

lenoard cohen

~ ~ ~

No reactive mind
Free of all time
Put me down, I won't fall over
Even  at a funeral.

Lock of hair behind your own little window, holy relic of the delusional donor,
I love you, hair, for who you are.
Are you sad?  Is Jane sad? Is Leonard sad?
Will Leonard get under hairperson's skin?
No one, hardly, (it's single figures, if anyone at all)
Is free of thoughts unkind.

But hair knows something.
neil

"did you ever go clear?"...did you ever manange to tell/hear/think/see/find  truth?

truth is what im interested in

it shines 

somewhere by the rainbow

clair

Is it alchemy shining by the rainbow,
in a pot?
(Rainbows are viewer-specific)

Here is the big truth:
Everything comes from nothing.
...neil

you have just make me realise that rainbows are a particularly good symbol in this instance, because, as you say, that truth is so often viewer specific. i'm going to look for definitions of truth...

truth:  the quality or state of being true
true : in accordance with fact or reality

... mmm! the oxford dictionary not really helping.  (clearly a bit behind the times...;)


because as we were saying, lots of truth is subjective, it is seen through somebodies eyes, filtered by their perceptions, experiences and beliefs. my experience is mine and your experience is yours.  i can only experience you though my experience or you, not you through you yourself. and visa versa.

so i wonder what i'm looking for when i say 'im interested in truth'?
maybe i'm interested in perception when that perception is reached through a clarity, insight, non-defensive, wiseness and logic.  i think i enjoy that kind of truth! ;) anyway, i know when i hear or find truth cos it shines in a different colour!

i'm going to get a definition of 'absolute truth'...

absolute truth: The Absolute is the concept of an unconditional reality which transends limited, conditional, everyday existence

mmm, i think i like truth that is a bit closer to 'absolute truth'..! (but then my ex-boyfriend did use to say 'you want the moon on a stick'...)  hee hee :)

  

Yes, I like the sound of that kind of perception. It's possible, now and then, by degrees, in waves!

sorry, neil, not quite sure what this is referring to ? ;) 

It refers to the kind of perception that is reached through "a clarity, insight, non-defensive, wiseness and logic", the kind of truth you enjoy. It's the kind of truth I enjoy too and, occasionally, I believe I have experienced it, now and then, by degrees, in waves!  

 ...And what does wanting a moon on a stick mean exactly?

that you want it all... i guess... i dont... (but of course i do..)

What's it made of?

its made of the moon :) 

 If you had the moon on a stick  and you took a lick, what would it taste of?

                            
chalk...but the moon on a stick is not not strickly for eating...

~ ~ ~

"did you ever go clear"? leonard cohen

there is some discussion about what leonard meant when he said the words, 'did you ever go clear'.  there is some support that the 'clear' he was talking about came from launguage used in scientology.  

i write this to bring, for those of us who didnt know, context to the following...

c

Scientology's big-carrot, (there's only one bigger*), "Clear" mind  (achieved by deprogramming workshops etc, estimated cost, $128,000) perceives reality without distorting filters, i.e. the Truth, but has such a mind ever actually existed?
 "A Clear is a being who no longer has his own reactive mind, and therefore suffers none of the ill effects the reactive mind can cause. The Clear has no engrams which, when restimulated, throw out the correctness of his computations by entering hidden and false data."
 *"Thetan"

 thetan : in scientology, the state of operating thetan is a spiritual state above clear.

neil

~ ~ ~

For me, being present is synonymous with being true.
Occasionally, every now and then, I feel like I am  present in the present... not interfering, not not interfering...
Relaxed. Alert.  Just being.
Just not looking for my keys.
But a dog is never going to understand the  internal combustion engine.
I was once  fancied myself a guru, other people even fancied me a guru!   Now I am meek and humble...
mumble,
toil
and tumble.

n

a dog might not understand the internal combustion engine but thats why she is very good at being in the present. she is just being. a state animals find, through their relative simplicity, easy, while humans earnestly limp along somewhere in the distance behind.
c

You differentiate animals from humans by their relative complexity/simplicity.  What do you think caused humans to start losing their innate animal ability to  be present, to just be?  When did it happen?

it happened with the advent of self awareness and was probably evident as soon as humans became humans...

c

Aren't there other animals with self-awareness besides da oowoman and da ooman?
n

interesting point, and more interesting, how does it effect them...maybe they havent got the levels that we do and which can make things uncomfortable for us?

Magpies have been shown to possess self-awareness, possibly connected with their covert collections of shiny loot....

Some models of therapeutic bodywork use the model of the "splinting reflex" to explain human's emotional/perceptual limitations and difficulty with recovering from past hurts.  When a bone breaks, the muscles automatically contract around the fracture to form a protective splint, to minimise further injury. This can also be our response to non-physical traumas and we don't appear to know how to let go again, when the reflex is no longer needed.

When an animal experiences trauma it feels it, it trembles and shakes and the trauma dissipates. Humans, according to this model, don't do this.  The model doesn't explain why we developed this quirk, though... Civilisation?  Personally, I tremble quite easily nowadays!

i think that with awareness comes the ability to make things voluntary (rather than involuntary).  for example, most of the systems within the body are involuntary (digestion, circulation etc). but breathing is both voluntary and involuntary, we have some control over it and also it can do it without our conscious help. 

i think our awareness picks up on the involuntary protective mechanisms you talk about and starts mimicing them, well after their natrual sell by date.

is it nice, self awareness?

I'm not sure - I think the splinting reflex model suggests that it is through awareness that the stupid body (autonomic nervous system?) can be redirected (reminded).

Self-dissolving self-awareness is the best!

~ ~ ~

Anyway pondering and back to your words on absolute truth, I remembered radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, (dead at 81) who redefined god as a verb. as a verb..? 'to god, i god, you god, they god'... how does that work please :) You've got it there pretty well :). Similarly, if you had a cold, you might say "I'm colding" rather than "I've got a cold", thus expressing the truth that a cold is an interactive process rather than an static object. i like plays on different things...experimenting... is she bringing god into the individual and not having it as an entity outside? God cannot be brought into the individual because "God" is a verb i.e. an action or a process, perhaps in the same the same way that life cannot be put into an organism - it simply arises out the organism's own organisation.  I didn’t know she was dead, just last year.  I’ve often wondered how she was faring; did she have enough money to feed herself? well i doubt whe died of starvation ;) hee hee  Here works included: "Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big." It's not easy being an radical old feminist theologian in Born-Again America... Perhaps you could say something about transcendence. this makes me laugh...mmm,,, transcendence***not sure... what would you like to say about it? :) Ha! Well, I asked because you included a definition of the absolute as "the concept of unconditional reality which transcends limited, unconditional reality."  I wondered what your vision of before and after transcendence is, and the relationship between the two. When you have found absolute truth what will it be like? for you? it will be like long green grass and open windows :)    Sounds lovely.  Also, reminds me of the ancient Greeks' Elysian Fields, the final resting place for the souls of the heroic and virtuous... warm caressing meadow grass.   As we were contemplating  absolute truth, my inner  eyes were already pointing heavenwards, towards the blinding bright light of enlightenment, so the moon was suggesting herself to me on your stick as absolute truth on a stick! The expression initially brought to mind the pop star  Prince (who wrote this song about losing love  Madonna (or Kylie?) once  referred to him as Sex on a Stick. So I guess that was influencing my perception of your moon. on my wall for a long time, in which a figure attempts to reach the moon with the aid of a very long ladder.  I can't remember whose aspirational zeal it referenced, mine or my partner's, probably both, but I remember that her untamed, uncompromising and passionate desire for the moon wrought terrible destruction on us both! Blake did his engraving at the height of the French revolutionary terror. like your style n :) Thanks.  I like yours too.  neil

                 album cover, leonard cohen from 'songs of love and hate', 1971


CHAPTER TWO - Leonard Cohen

WEEK THREE. conversation by clair and aisha

 

3

"I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert.
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record"
lenoard cohen

reading this just reminds me so much of days at college  when i started listening to leonard cohen...the feeling of  the beginning of non child/adult space, and the place i found myself in then...

is it most important to keep records when you feel you're 'living for nothing'?...(its bound to make good songs ;)

and is emotion stronger when life is, (or feels) meaningless?  and so we should write it all down.  my feeling is that we should get practised in writing it all down what ever the weather...kind of a way of freezing feeling, to be revisited later...

clair

Is it possible to write down and document the nothing, the absence of
things and happenings. ‘You are living for nothing now…’, were we ever
living for anything else than nothing? Just the illusion of something.

Was it only of our creation that everything felt so purposeful and driven.
Like an empty room which feels too stark, only echo and a repetition of
emptiness… so we bring in bookcases and meaning in order to furnish our
life because nothing is too loud, like a gaping mouth and no song.

Or is the beginning of nothing the start of possibility and freedom, that
the bonds of spiralling thought are cast off and we are only here, now in
this moment, heart beating, breath in, and then out on a loop.
aisha


exactly, such compulsion to fill it up, to make ourselves at home with cushions, inside and outside.  to cushion the fall.  

maybe she was really living.  maybe she had chosen to live like that.  because it makes experience intensify - without the distraction of comfort, in its many many shades and gowns of texture and colour
clair 

I like the idea of cushions on the inside. To absorb the shock, reduce the
echo and provide somewhere to nest up.

Wondering about recording the now to document and to keep account of the
minutes passing. It feels like writing for a distant future time to give
the current moment dimensions and meaning? Strange speaking for a future
self to recollect and savour the event once is has past and again we come
back to being in the present just for the presence of that moment and no
further end. Is that possible or by using letters and words to encase it
in, it some how becomes an object to be viewed and no longer experienced.
Like you say, good content for songs ...that can then be listened to by
others... needing expresion for the moments they find themselves in.

I like this simple view about writing, "It just takes 26 letters to create
the universe, the word is dismantled and then reassembled through the lens
of a pen and verse." The South African poet Lebo Mashile
Aisha

mmm...imagine if there lived a man in a valley far away from all.  he was born in the valley and when he was very young his mother had to leave him in the hands of the lady birds and butterflies, beetles, ravens and crows, furry rabbits and badgers, foxes and sqirrils, spiders and snails, apple trees and wild strawberry plants.


slowly he grow up and went about his exsistance, no pen, no paper, no other human, just him and the valley and the animals that lived there.


when he slept all the baby bunnies and grown up rabbits slept around his body and close to each other to keep warm and cosy and not alone.


when an animal was ill and slowly died he buried them lovingly in the soil and topped it off with a little plant in the ground.


nobody has heard of him and nobody will read or hear his thoughts or his music before and after he has gone.

mmm...
c

Are we the only ones to record thoughts, expressions or stories? Maybe...
they are documented in the surroundings we live in. No person saw the man,
or knew of him but the wind tuoched his face, the ground rose up to his
footsteps and the animals felt his heart beat. A life well spent, taking
only what he needed and giving back in love.
Aisha x


yum yes. well exactly and nice. i deeply know my heart would sing if it spent more time with animals.  it is one issue for me, with city dwelling, as i speak of domestic pets.  i am a bit pet hungry. again. 

i have even been thinking, as not allowed a pet in this city dwelling, of taking some fish and putting their lives in a biorb.  very nice aquarium. those tiny weeny fish ones which glow under the light and swim in showls.  not very vegan for a vegan i know. 


now im thinking again of him lined up with all the forest animals each of them smiling...
c X


I think animals make us appreciate simple things like smelling are
surroundings, taking time to get strokes and loving and to be joyful in
seeing people. Not so sure what the licking your bits or smelling other
dogs bum holes can teach us. But on the whole they bring new aspects to
our life. I just want more wild nature in my life. Building a house in the
desert, well sounds alright with big skies and endless stars but I would
miss the trees. For me they are the natural cathedrals, rising high up up
up, teaching us how to be strong, to accept the patterns of change and
offer everything in abundance. I would prefer to be the tree providing
holes for woodpeckers, insects for warblers, bark for lichen and shelter
for deer, than the man. At night when we sleep, they are our guardians,
keeping watch and breathing deep.
A xx


:)... yes they are very good at breathing.  


their needs are so very differnt...they are so strong and atrong in all weathers, so happy in water without raincoat or shelter, so too in the scorching sun without sun cream or unbrella...

~ ~ ~ 


i think the women in leonard cohens song wasnt looking to find peace or nurishment  "i hear that your building your little house deep in the dessert"  ... that idea of pushing yourself to your limits and not caring either way...maybe a metaphor for putting yourself in a harsh place and seeming to have choosen it...
 
i was just imagining that everyone had a comfort/love/energy metre gauge natrually in their arm, like the dial on a dashboard which shows the petrol level which everyone could see


and in the same way you put petrol into your car, people could feed what people needed back into them...  and easily because they could see on the gauge what was needed...it had lots of differnt levels on it, like need to receive gratitude or be heard or be smiled at or to have fun or to recieve touch or whatever ...


and everyone was invested in keeping as many people as poss 'topped up' because they knew that was how the world was most beautiful.

~  ~  ~


thank you aisha for writing with me.  i am really enjoying this writing project and have enjoyed writing with you.  and am looking forward to the next person i write with and so, like leonard cohen said, "...keeping some kind of record"
c

     album cover, leonard cohen from 'songs of love and hate', 1971




CHAPTER TWO - Leonard Cohen

WEEK TWO. conversation by clair and anna

 

2

"New York is cold but I like where I'm living,  There's music on Clinton street all through the evening"   lenoard cohen

                                                                            ~  ~  ~ 

Somehow I can only hear this to the tune of America by Paul Simon, although it doesn't quite scan. Perhaps because Songs of Love and Hate is an album of Len's that I don't know. We call him Len in our family since my kids saw him at Glastonbury a few years ago (the one year I didn't go, damn it) and called me after the performance, moved beyond words. My daughter and I then went to the Big Chill, specifically to see him, and stood swaying and singing for two blissful hours... I'd loved the first two albums back in the 70s and I'm Your Man, whenever that was and his words gradually crept into the kids' hearts as well as mine, over the years. I've been going to gigs since 1969 (Crosby, Stills Nash and (for the first time) Young), so I've seen a few, but Leonard Cohen perfoms in a way that touches me and makes me want to be a better person, more like the version of him that I project onto him.
 
I assume the music on Clinton Street is good music, which would enrich life - is it just nearby so you can always pop in, or is it loud so you can always hear it? And now I think - what if it was drum and bass, night after night? But he likes where he's living, so it's all good.
 
xx
 
ps Now I can't work out if I sent this already, but since finishing it I've checked out the album and of course I know most of the songs on it, especially this one - was I thinking I had to own an album to know it?
 
xx
anna

i think its cos there is often music there...the music becomes part of the walk on clinton st and becomes part of your memory of that town...

i saw len at big chill too.  and i snuck in to the brighton centre and saw his last 4 songs.  the one on my entry was famous blue raincoat. yum...

he's pretty badass.  its a paradox but often true, that the first music of an artist becomes less dated sounding than the music that follows.  songs of love and hate, as it played recently on my record player, had no hint of date, no hint of less, just everything deep and strong and heavily romantic...
clair 

'New York is cold but I like where I'm living....'
I like where I'm living too - I was going to write Brighton is... but I like where I'm living, but there's nothing I want to put in that gap. I find the hilliness hard while I have this ongoing exhaustion, but without the hills there'd not be the views and I love the views. 
anna

yes i try to avoid the hills on my bike too ;) the view is great when you get on top of one though...cityscapes do it for me actually...sometimes i think about what i would choose if was going to have one of those wall sized wallpapers which makes a massive massive picture, you know the ones i mean? ... ive seen a cloud and mountain one and the inside of a caravan one! but i would probably be drawn to a cityscape...all that darkness interrupted by all the tiny living lites...

clair

I don't think I'd like that wallpaper, whatever the picture. But I discover (late in life), that I love the city - or this one at least. If I had to make a choice, it's the coast that holds me. I love its endless mutability - the infinite combinations of tide and light and weather. I love feeling on the edge of humanity, not surrounded by it - looking out and seeing the emptiness. I love how it makes me get over myself - I'm nothing, just a grain of sand, here for a moment, gone for eternity.  Inland ain't got that.

mmm...i like to hear about that, i find myself surprised with how difficult it is for me to connect with nature in deep way...the reality that we are on the very edge of a massive piece of land...


i am surprised how the water stays where it is (most of the time)...the way that it natrally comes in and out in and out but creates its boundary and then keeps within it and with so much land to cover it finds itself happy there.  or naturally there...


it is a beautiful evening tonite, at 10pm soooo warm...i just went out walking.  not a single bit of coldness left. all warmed up by the sun...
clair

                           

             album cover,  songs of love and hate, leonard cohen 1971



CHAPTER TWO - Leonard Cohen
WEEK ONE. conversation by clair and brid

 

1

"It's four in the morning, the end of December, I'm writing you now just to see if you're better".  lenoard cohen

                                    ~  ~  ~ 


after being in my new nest for 2 weeks i brought a table from the car boot sale and got my record player out for the first time in many years.  the first album i played on it was 'songs of love and hate'.  what sincere company.

how many 4 o clocks in the morning do we see?...many less than 4 o clocks in the afternoon i would imagine...

ive often consisered which is the loneliest hour of the night, and i think lenoard cohen has it pinned...4 o clock being far enough away from the late bars and far enough away from peoples beginning of day.

on occasion that i find myself in 4 o clocks company i might remember him.  
clair

A chorus of birds announce afternoon tea perhaps while the 4 o clock sun finds a little cloudless spot to peep through -just long enough to brighten a March day.

Delicate lime green fluff balls of the pussy willow tree bobble and sway as the sun appears .

Birds fly in pairs.

Clumps of yellow buttercups peep out from the foot of a ditch,

Mother nature is exploding.A white horse swishes flies away with its tail.

The 4 o clock dawning that woke up the wanting sees  its reflection but can barely make it out.

It is soothed and sated and can hear a whisper of the words that came in early

'Love is at the heart of it all'.

 Brid

'the 4 o clock dawning that woke up the wanting'... nice... are we free of wanting when we are asleep?...or is it that we are just not aware of it and instead it filters into dreams and is perhapes remembered to us only when we awaken?

sleeping is such a mystery...im just thinking about whether there are any animals who do not sleep...i think some fish sleep with half a brain at once ...i was always curious, as a child, when my goldfish slept, because she never seem to stop swimming...
clair

Dreaming allows each us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

Day dreams are more of our own design

A midday blank canvas might allow me to remember another December 4 o'clock afternoon..

A day when I  took you muffins and dreamed ............

My soul wanted an adventure and my heart paid the price.

But this March midday dream invites you to share a muffin again sometime.....

'That would be lovely 'you said.

and by 4 pm the ether knew and we were both contented 

Brid

i love that...the bit about dreaming allowing each one of us to be quitely and safely insane every night of our lives.

its pretty freeform its true, i recollected my own dreams this morning with a degree of astonishment..!

im writing to you now. a letter. carried from my home to yours.

all those lost handwritten words and letters, sent instead, by electronics.

but actaully, thinking about it, i did send two letters this week.  to my mum and my auntie.  its a real pleasure because i have some special and lovely paper and envelopes and some equally lovely stickers. and feathers.

when i went to post them i asked the man in the post office if he has any stamps with flowers on them.  looking a bit perplexed he pulled out some starwars looking ones. all black and gray.  i said that they werent very flowering and then he remembered he had some animal ones. they were as cute as flowers and i so chose the polar bear one. all white.

thinking about it is also sent a letter to lenoard cohen once.  full of poems.  i notice he hasnt got back to me. how rude ;)
hee hee
clair

I'm sure Leonard enjoyed your poems but just didn't get around to replying !!

I overheard a conversation on the train to Dublin. A gentleman seemed to be on the phone to his office and he said 'on the desk you will find two reports 'one is printed and the other is in my own hand'

I loved the idea of his own hand or hot from his hand.

I plan to write many letters but it sometimes takes me years to get around to it.

I wrote a letter in my head today as I cleaned the bathroom.

With great brush strokes of energy I told you in no uncertain terms what I thought of you.

Reeling me in like a fish and letting the line go whenever you took a fancy to.

I'm mad .mad  I told you

-do you know that this is a great way of getting jobs done and composing a letter.at the same time.

I may write it sometime or I may not but I really should get a scissors and cut the line.

Brid

hi brid, i like that conversation you overheard too. i LOVE overhearing stuff. i like hearing the humanity. thats whats great about trains.  little tiny windows into the private life people just cant help but let into trains...

is it different in ireland? ... cos here in england people dont generally talk to each other on trains.  i tend to but i'm an exception. and i dont as much as i used to. but i do feel to reach out. i can really feel to reach out...

clair

Clair -I think most Irish people like to talk no matter where they are and since the Celtic tiger ran away we have even more time to talk.

A great chat was been had at the supermarket checkout today between an elderly lady ,an elderly gentleman and the cashier .They were discussing the weather and one of them said

'I hear we are going to have a great sunny August '

and not one word about April ,May ,June or July .

Talk about living in the moment my daughter remarked outside the store.

Brid 

i see :)... do you think there is less lonlyness in ireland?

clair

Clair.

Loneliness is a terrible illness of modern society.People trying to buy a reason to live.

I would like to think that we are moving away from that now and are more aware of the emotional and spiritual needs of EVERYONE.

But just when we thought Ireland had hit rock bottom – or rather because we actually have hit it – suddenly there’s a bubbling of ideas about what we could and should be doing to make it a better place
Communities are realising the strength of their voice and the need for inclusion.

I  think we should invent another currency that belongs to the common people and let the commercial banks deal in their currency.

Maybe the old time barter system where we would do job for job.

'i think we should invent another currency that belongs to common people and let the commercial banks deal with their currency' 

good work brid, couldnt agree more.  nicely said.  could the currency be love? 

clair

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

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK TEN. conversation by clair and iain

 

9

Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.   Tagore


                                                                            ~  ~  ~ 

this reminds me of how all emotion can be beautiful.  sorrow is 'hushed into peace'.

one of my little quests at the moment is to find a beautiful place for all emotions...anger, tiredness, loss...

recently i have found anger to be beautiful. anxiety is one that i have found harder to experience as such...

clair

vigil in a still forest

frozen within the trees

time, events, balanced brick by brick

stepping blinkered and petrified aware

sorrow, fury, loss

from then, and ahead when will have to look upon

the people surrounding yet again

iain

the frozen forest thaws out its arms and legs

and begins to grow summer clothes

clair

a new morning creaking awake

a wood limb window at the edge of the forest

sun upon the sill, skirts and shirts,

settling evenings sorrow aside

and a wandering path ahead.. away

iain

we have been having such beautiful weather, sunny every day, like its july...  i think this countries culture, and all cultures, are bent around the sun...all the winter each year keeping its people alone and inside...

forests are good examples.  they nearly die in winter.

clair

rah and hazel alive

crisscrossing the trail ahead

summers journey

out into the open breeze and light

across swift meadows, gullied brooks and dreams

loss carved stairs in the hillsides

rucksacks of brick

with life, zipping in front and behind

bringing such smiles

iain

'loss carved stairs in the hillside' a lovely line but reminds me

how humans give consciousness to nature.

when nature doesn't mind...

doesn't care or not care

it is perfect at being itself (without be concerned with being perfect)

and that self is not concerned with animal, house, garden, grief, happiness, loss, growth, giving or taking away.

it just is. again and again.

its so sunny again today, how we all love the sun, does it love us?

unrequited love

it was raining so much, how we started to dislike the grey and black rainclouds.

unrequited dislike...

clair

some say that we are the earth
the awareness of nature
an expression of its self
and through us, it can see
through us it’s life could seed other worlds
through us it should be safe
but this problem of our grey and black rain clouds remains
the sun would surely love us
if it could see us throw off our overcast skies 

iain

iain, i like this alot, totally badass...

clair

iain can be found :

www.iainstruth.co.uk

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

CHAPTER ONE - Rabindranath Tagore
WEEK NINE. conversation by clair and justine

 

9

Once we dreamt that we were strangers. We wake up to find that we were dear to each other   Tagore

                                                                            ~  ~  ~ 

we are all strangers, before we meet, mother and child, brother and sister, lover to lover.  that often amazes me.  how important people become. inyet everyone was  first a stranger.

there are so many hearts wandering around. so many strangers.

clair


In the past, i could never have imagined knowing him how i do now. All those years, just saying hello or occasionally a little smalltalk. It's funny looking back but wonderful too. We could never have got so close then and when things changed, so did we. i love that, love every aspect of it. i could never have predicted this and would never have wanted to. Waking up with him that first night, still just friends and feeling like i could trust him completely. For me, that was such an amazing feeling.
justine

yes, people, synchronicity, allowing thing to happen, naturally.  so beautiful when you are in this space. to allow. rather than force or even to direct... just to let it be, him be...just to let him in, it in...

clair

True, its so difficult in life to just allow things to happen. so often we feel that we have to be in control, or at least pretend to ourselves that we are are. But then being out of control can be a horrible feeling too. Perhaps, like so often in life it's about achieveing some sort of balance
justine

i remember, when i was a child and with my mum in the car and passing another car, driven by a man and me saying 'we could have just driven past by future husband then'.

i think at an early age the enormorty and possibitly of 'strangers' was in me.

when is someone not a stranger? when you smile at them a certain number of time? when you begin to speak to them? would someone be a stranger if you said nothing but started to kiss.  still a stranger?

and can you love someone you have never met or known of?

clair


Thats a pretty incredible thing you said to your mum in the car, no wonder it stayed with you.
Sometimes i wonder if there would be less hostility in the world if we weren't all strangers. So often, someone meets someone who they have a pre-judgement about and when they get to know that person, they're shocked to discover they don't fit their (often negative) stereotypes. perhaps if we humans all had discourse with others of different races/religion/sexualities, etc, it would break down at least some prejudice and there would be less hatred in the world.
Justine

it reminds me of a very cool experiment/study.  i'll tell you the coutry where it took place when remember it.

it took part in a library, but instead of getting out a book you got out a person. there was an index of all different people, different races, different cultures, differnt ages different backgrounds, different preferences in music, life style etc.  and people could get someone out in the hope that their prejudice would be challanged by actually meeting them.

v e r y good i reckoned.
clair

that sounds like a fantastic idea. such a simple way to get people to communicate and hopefully break through barriers

justine

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