Category: Melinda

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One Day

Second poem from yesterday, as mentioned last night on Facebook – written yesterday evening just before I went to bed (I’d had a night cap of Becherovka with my hot chocolate, and was quite merry).

One day I’ll leave this house,
walk to the bus stop,
catch a train to the city,
or anywhere else,
under the sea,
and into the sunrise.

Or go like a snail,
with my home on my back,
to the forest, or the marshes,
or into the sunset.
To friends, and memories, and new beginnings,
talking and laughing and dancing and singing.

But today I am here,
and here is my home.

Linda Rushby 19 June 2020

What follows is a few lines I jotted into my notebook after I got into bed – they’d popped into my head as I was getting ready for bed, and sort of follow on, but are a bit different. It was actually after midnight at the time, so I added today’s date.

While there are:
Books left to read.
Words left to write.
Waves to listen to.
Gulls to fly over me.
Songs left to sing.
Wine left to drink.
Places to return to.
New ones to find.
I am glad to be here.

Linda Rushby 20 June 2020
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Non-attachment

What will I write about today? Therapy day. What will I talk about? I have two blog posts to read out, at least.

Is anything shifting inside my mind? If it is, it’s probably due to the lockdown, which has given me peace and space to be by myself. But it can’t last forever. How will I cope when I have to start engaging with the world again? Well, I have some control over that. When I first moved here I felt I needed to get out and make contact with other people. Now that seems less important. When I was a child I was told that shyness and introspection are things to be conquered, but these days I can see my self-containment as a gift. Am I getting any better at managing my response to and interactions with other people when they do happen? I suspect not, but I’m more comfortable about avoiding them, and less concerned about ‘missing out’. I can look back on memories of happy times with friends without feeling an urgent desire to repeat them – which is a good thing, I see that now. I can have my own happy times,

Trying to explain how I feel about that at this moment, I’m grasping for the right words. Contentment, maybe? No, too mealy-mouthed. Maturity, a feeling that I am on a mountain top, where I can look back and see my life and the things I’ve done, experiences I’ve had and people I have known laid out below me – no that sounds arrogant, which isn’t at all what I mean. Enormous peace that I can be who I am. Gratitude to all those people who have loved me and whom I have loved, forgiveness of those who’ve hurt me and of myself for hurting others, and knowledge that I no longer have to seek after love, but can be whole and by myself. Non-attachment, not detachment.

Well, what a wonderful epiphany for a Thursday morning – one which won’t last, I realise that. But it is there, and might return. I want to sit with this, be bathed in it, but also to keep writing, to complete this task, this daily commitment to myself, if for no other reason than that I can then get dressed and have my breakfast.

I’ve just expanded the sentence about being on a mountain top, and it’s brought back to me a quotation I first read almost fifty years ago, when I was a student and I have to admit I got it from the cover of a Strawbs album, but I think it was originally from Lao Tzu (a name which would have meant nothing to me then). I will have to look it up…

For once Google let me down, but I did manage to find the album on my shelf and scan it in – and lo and behold, it’s from the Buddha. Doesn’t quite say what I wanted though.

I expect Lao Tzu would have said it better.    

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Spitting into the Wind

Yesterday there was something in my head that I wanted to say, but I ended up saying something completely different, and thought I would save it for today. Then this morning I couldn’t remember what it was and started thinking on different lines. Then I got an inkling of that thing from yesterday, but not sure now if I want to say either of them.

In fact, I’ve just made the classic mistake of looking something up before continuing, and having wandered into and down the rabbit hole of Google and Wikipedia, I am even more confused. But I have discovered that although for years and years I have believed that Newton’s three laws were the same as the three laws of thermodynamics – they’re not. Bugger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially if you only know the names and not what they actually mean.

However, on the subject of universal laws…

All living things must die, and everything must change (that’s where the three laws come in, but unfortunately not Newton, so I can’t use the quote: ‘God said let Newton be! And all was light’ which is by Alexander Pope, and the reason I was poking around the rabbit hole in the first place, because I couldn’t remember who said it).  

All living things must die. Everything must change. A flame only burns until it runs out of fuel (that’s what set me thinking about the three laws). And – spoiler alert – anyone who is listening to the current Quandary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 extra should look away now – the Great God’s message to his creation is: ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.

Any universal truth is fundamentally banal. (Who said that? Me. I don’t claim it to be original, but if I’ve stolen it I don’t know where from.)

It may be argued that true happiness means accepting the impermanence of all things and deciding that life is still worth living. On the other hand, maybe the route to true happiness is to stop thinking about all that bollox, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Perhaps this is a fundamental difference between two types of people (the Cassandras and the Melindas) – or maybe (more likely, I’d say), there is a spectrum between the two, and we all find our own place.

Which has brought me back to the thing I was thinking about yesterday – or the bit I can remember – that for me, euphoria (Melinda) can’t be separated from existential despair (Cassandra). It’s over thirty years since I first sought professional help to ‘fix’ my psycho-emotional shortcomings, and the paradox is that any attempts to convince me that I’m ‘fine as I am’ miss the point that if I really was ‘fine’, I wouldn’t need to be convinced, I’d already know it. And if I’m not, any amount of wishing away that sense of ‘unfineness’ without accepting it as fundamental part of myself, is spitting into the wind.

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Coffee Angst

‘Stay alert.’ Your country still needs lerts.

I won’t make political observations on this blog, unless it becomes unavoidable.

How is the world this morning? The sunshine has returned, after a day’s conspicuous absence, but the wind is rough and bitterly cold. Probably no breakfast in the garden today.

My stovetop espresso pot has let me down twice in a row. I am concerned. Did I just not screw it up tightly enough? Twice in a row? Does the seal just need a good clean, or replacing? I used to have a spare seal, among the stuff that got moved from place to place, one of those things that you don’t expect to use so shove it somewhere and forget about it. I’ve checked the kitchen drawers, it’s nowhere obvious. It came in a pack of two from the Italian supermarket in Bedford, reminder of happy times in my first flat. I wonder if it’s open? Not that I can drive a 250 mile round trip to buy another even if so. I can’t remember how old the pot is, but it’s had a long and useful life, maybe time to let go. Once I was surrounded by coffee-making devices, but all I can find now are the Portmerion cafetiere, which is too big for one person, and the Tassimo, which requires pods, and I have a limited supply. Anyway, the espresso pot is my favourite. I will check the Caffe Nero and Whittard’s online shops, though I wonder how much they charge.

Coffee is important to me, it contributes significantly to my quality of life and sense of wellbeing, but when I start to think about the conditions of its cultivation, processing and transport across half the globe I feel a sense of gloom and angst stealing over me. Tea is probably no better, not to mention chocolate. We take these things for granted, these products from the other side of the world, we expect to pick them off the supermarket shelves in their shiny packaging and not give them another thought.

The mug from which I’m drinking bears the message: ‘Save water, drink Prosecco’. Enough said. I am lucky, I have a good life, I like to think I am a good and thoughtful person, I like to laugh, I like to drink coffee and eat chocolate and enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. Sometimes I get a glimpse from another place and think: is this a fools’ paradise I’m living in? Am I part of the problem?

The wind howls and rattles its way round the edges of the window, the wires radiating out from the telegraph pole vibrate ominously.

I don’t know where these thoughts come from, or what I will write when I sit at my computer in the morning. Every morning it happens this way. I may plan one thing, but I ride the current and it takes me to another place.

Happy Monday friends, and always remember: our country needs lerts.

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Writing Joy

Everything I say or write
comes from a thought,
a spark inside my mind.

That almost – almost – follows a haiku structure. Just needs a little tweaking to fit it into that 5/7/5 syllable pattern. That’s what the words do, when they occur to me, they often lay themselves out in a rhythmic structure – usually iambic, often in short, sharp lines like these. Sometimes I’ll combine them together into longer lines, hexameter or even heptameter, and then I might throw the odd shorter line here and there, maybe at the end of a stanza. So, in the three lines above, the first two could be combined into a single line with six feet, followed by one of three.

Don’t ask me why I’m sitting here analysing my own poetry style this morning, god knows, it’s not as though I don’t have other things to write about – though having said that, I can see why I did it that way, it was just that the first sentence that came into my head when I sat down at the keyboard did so in that rhythmic way, so just for fun I laid it out as a poem – albeit a pretty trivial one.

You may have noticed that when I’m writing prose, I often go in for long, rambling sentences, lots of embedded clauses, lists of this and that, shamelessly long processions of adjectives and adverbs, diversions and distractions, self-references, repetitions and contradictions, mixing metaphors with abandon, alliterating whenever I can get away with it, indulging myself in ways that no decent editor would stand for thirty seconds. That’s when you can tell that I’m writing for myself, for the sheer joy of the words and the exhilaration of it all and because – well – I just can’t stop myself. Personally, that’s when I think my writing is at its best, when I read it back and it makes me smile for the fun of it and the magic of it. That’s what I think of as my Tristram Shandy style, and I hope you (if there is a ‘you’, whoever and wherever you may be) enjoy it too, and don’t find it too irritating or forced, because it isn’t forced, not at all, even though (as now) it may sometimes be self-conscious, that’s not because I’ve deliberately set out to write this way so much as I’ve stepped into that stream and allowed myself to be taken along by the current, because I’m enjoying myself.

Isn’t that something like what I was writing about yesterday? I remember using the metaphor of being a surfer – being carried by the waves of thought, not able to control them but managing my responses to them. Oh, so much I thought about saying before I sat down in front of this keyboard this morning, and none of it has been said, or will be said in the twenty words remaining to me. But I’m glad I’ve written this, and hope you who’ve read it are glad too

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Rhythm, Rhyme, Alliteration

Outside my window,
two women, two dogs,
and a child in a buggy.

White van, grey car,
man jogging in shorts.

You can make a poem of anything if you let your mental flow flow itself into certain rhythms – but why would you bother? Those first three lines could be a haiku in form with the removal of one syllable and transfer of another between lines, but it wouldn’t be a haiku in spirit.

When I was checking up on terza rima last week, I was interested to learn that Italian lends itself particularly to rhyming forms because it’s quite a pure language with very consistent word endings that provide lots of rhymes, whereas English is more of a grab bag of influences from all over the place, and notoriously inconsistent when it comes to spelling, pronunciation and word forms – though by the same token we have the most gloriously extensive vocabulary to pick from. Plus, of course, where they have Dante, we have Shakespeare, who revelled in blank verse, playing games with words, and, when he couldn’t find the one he needed, inventing new ones of his own – which after four hundred years are so deeply ingrained that we take them for granted – I’ve probably used a few already this morning, without even knowing (not the child in the ‘buggy’ or the man ‘jogging’ – or maybe he did use them, but with different meanings).

The other thing I wanted to say about English is that it is very rhythmic, and it’s thought that the popularity of iambic forms of poetry in English (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables) is because that is the natural rhythm of English speech. It can be very banal (tum tee tum tee tum tee tum) like nursery rhymes: ‘Mary had a little lamb’ or sublime: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

Anglo Saxon poetry, like ‘Beowulf’, had no truck with rhymed line-endings, but was based very strictly on maintaining the rhythm, and also on alliteration – more emphasis on words beginning with the same sounds than ending with them.

Well, this is just me talking off the top of my head from my interest in poetry and language in general, no references, no citations. Just interesting nuggets that I’ve picked up from reading, listening and generally being interested in this stuff. But after having spent three weeks writing poetry every day, I suppose I’ve started to think more about where it comes from. It’s always been a bit of a mystery for me, how words come into my head and settle themselves into certain patterns. Because of the way my brain works, all my writing feels like taking dictation – the words come, then I write them down, or I don’t, and they wander off again.

Maybe in a past life (if I believed in such things) I was a bard, declaiming the old stories in a smoky hall, feeling my way through the rhythms and the sounds of words. I like that idea.

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Dilemma

Because I thought up a poem (of more than four lines) first thing yesterday, I ducked out of writing anything else for the rest of the day. I guess that’s cheating really, but it’s not the first time I’ve done it. Today I’m clueless as regards poetry, but we’ll see how the day develops. I write spontaneously or not at all. If there isn’t that voice in my head telling me what to write, it’s all much too stressful. Of course, when I start writing, I often get into a flow, but usually what flows out is more of the same; hard to spot the gold dust, however fine the sieve.

Last week I sent the link for my blog to my therapist (we’d discussed it the week before and I asked if she’d mind or if it would be professionally inappropriate). It made our weekly Skype session a bit odd, as we started talking about poetry and writing in general and bizarrely I felt a bit awkward. She said she liked my poetry, but the rest not so much, because of the way I write about myself – which I found quite surprising, because I thought I’d been remarkably chipper recently. She commented that she could understand why my friends get exasperated with me over it, but that’s inevitable, isn’t it? When I write I’m writing about the real me, the person I am inside, the person I live with first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the woman I wake up in bed with at four in the morning, not the fantasy Melinda or Cassandra they have in their heads, so of course they’re not going to like this woman with all her self-loathing and insecurities – she’s hardly an attractive person. Isn’t that why I write about it? Because I can explain who I am without being shouted down and told not to say those things, like my brother reducing me to tears in a curry house or the ‘friend’ who rang when I was very depressed and then hung up the phone because she didn’t want to hear me talking about how I felt.

The therapist wants me to stop judging myself but how is that even possible? How can I think honestly about myself and the things I do and the thoughts I have without making implicit judgements – the language doesn’t exist. I can say: ‘I know I’m lazy, disorganised, chaotic, forgetful – most of that is down to dyspraxia, and I accept that that is who I am and I can’t change’ – but I can’t say any of those things are not true. Are there any words to describe those characteristics of my personality that don’t carry some negative charge? There have always been two choices: to become a better person, or to accept who I am and say it doesn’t matter. This is the dilemma which has torn me apart psychologically and emotionally all my life, and still does.