It is an intriguing position to be in when you return to a book you have read a few times before and find that when you read if for the third time or fifth time you are reading a book you don’t remember reading before. Language has acted beyond memory or reveals a new layer of recollection.

Sometimes it feels like intimate life can split the fundamentals of recollection and redistributed it in a new way – the old bridge is now a runway; the fountain by the park bench is now a column holding up a parking building; the house with fresh blue paint on the sills rests as a toy in the stream. I’m probably being overly surreal. But, sometimes not only the function of words seems to have changed but the very actions of words; there is a sense of things reorientated to be recognized; a sort of vigilant near-sighting. The actions that prepare other actions have redeployed the chemistry of assumption, prejudice, the exit squeaks – I write for the second time, the personal craving of silence is dust, and find it slicks the foot of a dancer in a community hall, not as I thought some final falling into the self.

I really felt like I was reading Fanny Howe’s selected poems. I really felt a series of cross sections were working for me, beyond the stark beauty and rigor of the language I sensed tangled moments of emotion, of which the action in the world was hinged on consciousness of action bisecting the realms of politics, poetics, aesthetics in ethics, the realm of domestic humour, the giant clobbery feet of memory against the woven strands of landscape, birds.

I think there is something to be said when a writer takes the things which most conflict and converse within them, and reactivate the intersection of these experiences; sensing always an action that is yet to be layered in time.

It was a while back that I saw Josie Long perform at BATS Theatre in the NZ comedy festival – a friend of mine had recommended I see her show after meeting her in Auckland. Comedians always fill my imagination in a special way – for me comedians are often great chameleons, constantly poised at the edge of transformation, hovering just long enough for perception of one form to materialize then bury itself in the lungs of the audience again, kicking up swirls of muddy laughter or painful crystals of hilarity that keep the jaw primed – Josie’s set had some great narrative elements to it, I recall a parable-like quality to the show that seemed to build on certain narrative splinters that veered off into wonderful groves lit by a misguided group of animals caught between leisure poses and attempts at pictorial correctness. Her website is a great place to start if you feel like more info or catching one of her gigs: Josie Long…

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Tom Cho’s collection of short short fiction – Look Who’s Morphing. I had a read of the first story in the collection ‘Dirty Dancing’ which was like eating a really really good piece of fruit, and you just can’t get over how good it is for ages. Here’s a link to the book on the Giramondo site – or you can check out his blog: Tom Cho. Like the pink pop blood of the cover too.

Style Bubble – already enjoying this blog for its personal touch and fashion snaps – both professionAL and AMateur…

Sarah Gruiters website shows off some of her great accessORies…gill neclaces, I can so picture it.

Sophia Kokosaliki sort of designs for a life that could be lived elEGently underwater as well as on land…

Spring 09

A bit of something or somethings that have excited me recently:

1) Finding out about artist Jill Magid who aims to bring things that are far away closer to her body, and who says, ‘when in love I separate a someone from the everyone.’

2) Checking out the website blog Book By Its Cover which has loads of great book-art and book-design stuff.

3) This image:

The Tooting Bec Lido in south London, which ‘is the largest pool in the UK at 91.44 metres long and 30.18 wide. Dating back to 1906, it was a built by unemployed people living in the area. The pool is open to the public from May to September; the rest of the year you can only swim if you are a member of the South London Swimming Club, which has managed the lido during the winter months since the 1990s.’

Today is as good a day as any to launch some fresh posts. It is late 2009 but not too late.

New writing

If you would like to read the short prose story ‘A living spring’ it is here on the Blackmail Press site in their shiny new online Rebel Issue. I have a poem called ‘Embarking on her other names’ coming out in the Brief 38 journal so keep your eyes peeled if this appeals. In old news, head to the Turbine 08 page for a story called ‘Evolving’.

Also if you’re interested in art writing you can find my brand new prose review for the current exhibition Role dot Play featuring Vivian Lynn, Erica Sklenars, and Justine Walker, at Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Search the Enjoy archives for more writing, including the exhibition T & G Building and an interview with Eve Armstrong.

Newer writing

I’m finishing up a collection of writing I began in 2008. Whether the writing is prose or poetry is not so important right now – I’m focused on creating sharply focused dramatic situations through character, narrative, and tight-rope adventures in language (that is, I am exploring territory that someone described to me as ‘language as texture and language as meaning’).

I hope to post some observations and some writing as I go.

Thanks for joining this All Well Afloat caravan, pausing at watering holes, and wearing sunscreen.

Rachel.

ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin temperamentum ‘correct mixture,’ from temperare ‘mingle.’ In early use the word was synonymous with the noun temper.

What makes writing temperamental – the correct mixture or have the right kind of social or linguistic skills that allow it to effectively mingle and communicate?

I like the ring this question has with this quote that introduces Louis Zukofsky’s Little, ‘Where coincidences intend no harm’.

I have been reading Alan Brunton’s collection fq, which is at times lucidly evocative, ‘imagining brothers and sisters, material worlds inside,’ and is host to a cast of characters and a vague sense of plot, plotting with and against them, through 132 poems.

There is also a range of formal arrangements, with some of my favorite stanzas dripping down the page, offering a kind of unconscious leak to spring up, or a slow thought to be stretched and vanish.

It is ugly but temperamentally so, there is a sense of ‘correct mixture’ passing through a host of minds, jammed into conversations, hunted and distracted.

Richard Powers suggests that ‘what’s seen (through the looker/character) reflects the lookers inner values,’ – this is a good principle. It also needs to extend to how its limitations could easily iron out the way characters, like writers too perhaps, absorb and dismiss their own principles, when they lead themselves by questions of value and perception – not entirely located in their body proper, but tangential, temperamental, seeing by mixing and going missing.

Alan Brunton goes missing a lot, his voice gets mixed up with his characters, his characters get mixed up in the plot, the plot gets mixed up in formal drips and avalanches, the landscape is full of obstacles and light.

I’m trying to write by incorporating ‘mixture’, a sort of atmospheric temperament through the language that persists or insists on sinking piles through thought, opening and closing the latches on life. It is a dance between the general inner value and the particular coincidences perhaps that linger there, and a bit of the reverse:

This is an example of general, well meaning, fumbling of the particular:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself and adjective meaning ‘places on top,’ ‘added,’ ‘appended,’ ‘imported,’ foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”

- Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red

The lyric poem component is a reworking of the earlier poem Possessed and takes certain echo’s from the monologue story that accompanies it. I wonder if it will be necessary in the end to keep the titles of the lyric monologue pairs the same, or if the echo’s will be able to stand on their own. I have much more work to do before making that decision!

The possibility of a prolonged monologue still interests me – and increasingly it will depend on experiments I make with structure and what I can roll with in the surprises the writing presents.

Food for thought. Which reminds me, it’s time for lunch.

We’re going to take your elbows – they’re to go on without you.

*

I’d thought what it held was water, that the spring was like a fountain in a town square or hidden in the dent of a rock, or cast out of the earth by restless pressure.

It turns out that the spring has nothing to do with water. It has nothing to do with a town square with a dry flaky pavement, or the snuff of a cave, or even the inside
of a dark place being squeezed from its tube.

The spring is warmer outside than inside. It is out-living. It dances around matter
and what I thought a moment ago and what I think now can be possessed – can be struggled out of.

*

I watch my elbows with difficulty; chart the undergrowth of everyday tasks, familiar gestures that have become so assured. Time makes the body assured.
There are other factors I’m sure.

In the body is a muscle-listener, tenderness, a tongue tinned, quiet with lowly oxygen.
In this observance bells are cast. Pores ring. Temperature is right. Favourable conditions melt to music.

Life, without bells or hands to warm them, is lost in thought, or hope – anywhere close.
I will fold my skin. I will shake it out, and dance and dance. I will let go
and only tell the story at my feet.

*

And the goose bumps of my skin will withdraw from significance. I won’t be hidden, I wont be awake. I will only listen, outwardly. I’ll tell you eventually that it wasn’t my elbows you wanted, but something I never knew I possessed.

M-L feels biased when her friends arrive with such blank faces. She hears footsteps on the tiles outside her door and already she can tell that these footsteps are expecting something from her.

The sound they make is rapid, even though it is summer and there is no real reason to be rushing toward the doorbell. The footsteps want to be seated, inside, where M-L will entertain them with her fine nose, and her partner B will prepare cooking smells that will go home with them in their dresses, ties and cardigans.

M-L has a concealed forehead. Her streaked hair is bracken that forms a blind spot where other people might just frown. You can see the faint undergrowth of her scalp through the sticks of hair. She has a mouth that says modest things that are pitched by her voice so that they glint a little like new coins. Her nose is delicate, with freckles that look like abandoned loose change. As her most endearing feature she secures and maintains her friendships with her nose and its active curves.

On a Tuesday, which is today, near the start of summer, M-L opens her door five times to let her friends in. She emailed 8 invitations, and she is a little pleased that she only has to open the door five times, rather than 8 times. B has a spinach parcel in the oven already. She calls it a parcel because she likes the thought of putting a gift in the oven and getting an even crispier, extra golden gift back.

Really its proper name is Spanakopita, which translates as Spinach Pie, and it is a recipe that B picked up off an ex-partner who was also a chef. M-L told me once in confidence that if not in the company of others, B and her find it overly easy to fight about Spanikopita and its origins. Thought M-L finds Spanakopita delicious she will only eat it when she is secure and confident in the company of her friends. Spinach Pie is a special treat for both B and M-L for very different reasons.

At about 8pm the friends take their seats at the long table in a room separate from the kitchen. At the table B has already placed her chin into the intimate bracken of M-L’s hair in a way that takes for granted the familiar smell she finds there; she no longer makes a lingering request. It is the place where B goes to centre herself in the company of M-L’s friends. M-L’s voice squeaks a little more than usual, as if she is experiencing a rush of goose bumps and is trying to hide them. Her friends pay particular attention to her nose, and I can see that it is a rock that they are all trying to stand on.

M-L toys with her blind spot. She has developed habits that her friends have come to rely on and being a rock is one of them. Her nose is a small island on which the people she loves congregate. They can throw stones off into the outer zones of her features and see them ripple, amused and almost hoping that the pebbles will some how bounce back and smack them lightly on their foreheads, an intimate ellipse like baptism.

This never happens, and they are all relieved and made awkward by disappointment.

I am attracted to M-L’s right elbow, and in the past this has been a problem in our friendship. I do not take much interest in her nose, and do not get much satisfaction from watching B hide a little in the thicket of M-L’s hair above the assembly of her friends. I rarely join the congregation in the middle of her face and in spite of myself start to ask B about where she found the delicious recipe for Spanakopita.

I do this even though I can see the party on M-L’s nose squirm and pick up wine glasses and take sips at great speed without comfortable breath in between and grip the glasses with both hands like bulky stones that can’t be thrown.

I resort to buttering the bread on my plate. I ask M-L how the life drawing class is going, all the while buttering the bread that flattens under the knife and is sucked down and breaks open and shows the flat-bone plate.

M-L uses sentences that have been practiced on others at different times earlier in the day, and she adds warmth to the details that bring her drawing class to life by making the words travel the full length of her tongue; the story pumps with quiet stamina.

I excuse myself from the table and go to the bathroom. B follows me and asks me if I’m all right, and I say that I have perhaps enjoyed too much rich food. The greasy marks on my wine glass are there when I get back.

The friends have left the safety of the island and are in different places of the flat, talking or stroking an object or helping tidy up the kitchen now that the plates have been cleared and dessert needs to come out. B begins to talk about the origins of her name, and the origins are admirable and have a deep root to them, and slink under the growth of time to a point made intelligible by darkness.

M-L leans over my shoulder, beside me but a little behind with her elbow almost touching my back. She wants to know what my name means. I tell her ‘a living spring’ and she says she never thought that a spring that is coiled and metallic and that hovers between the earth and the sky could be living. I do not say nor had I, but nudge the bend of her arm onto the launch of my back.

Under energy saving light bulbs, B gifts us Sorbet.