Listen to the gulls.
Are they laughing or mourning?
Who are we to ask?Small bird on the roof,
Linda Rushby 17 July 2020
pecking amongst the red tiles.
How simple your life is.
Two Haikus Inspired By Birds
No End
Two compliments about my writing yesterday – one from an old friend on Facebook, one (actually, several) from a new one over socially-distanced coffee on the beach. As usual, I was overwhelmingly stressed and apprehensive about meeting the second, but found myself pouring out my life story and then apologising – even when I waved my arms around and knocked over my coffee, she cleaned it up before I could even think what to do next, and offered to buy me another one (I refused, naturally – it was my fault that it happened.)
I sometimes wonder why people are ever this nice to me. They learn, of course, when they get to know me better.
We first met on a writing course immediately prior to lockdown – I might have mentioned that before? I’ve got a feeling I have. I’d said something about my thirty-year-work-in-progress fantasy novel, and she said: ‘I’ll look it if you like, bring it next week and I’ll let you have feedback the week after’. I felt really embarrassed, but I printed out the beginning, past the ‘inciting incident’ (hero’s journey creative writing course BS jargon) and handed it to her at the next session. I’m not really sure why I, but I suppose I just thought: ‘oh screw it’.
At the next session – which was the last of the course – she was very complimentary and full of questions. All I could say was – well, I haven’t done anything on it for fifteen years because I don’t know how to end it, or even to get closer to the end. We all went to lunch together as a group, and I’d taken my books with me to show the tutor (it was a general invitation to anyone who’d got a book to show). She picked up ‘S2S’, started looking at it, then said: ‘Can I borrow this?’ so of course I said yes. We exchanged emails and made a semi-arrangement to meet up for coffee in a couple of weeks, but of course that didn’t happen. Since then we have exchanged irregular emails and last week finally fixed up this meeting.
I was relieved to find out that she hasn’t been doing any writing either, apart from a journal. We grinned wryly at one another about good intentions and motivation.
She writes short stories –and has sent one in to a competition since we last met. I said that I don’t do short stories because I can’t think of endings. I guess I’m basically a poet, since that’s all the muses – or the Universe, or whatever’s responsible for this stuff – ever seems to send me. And I realised – though I might have had this thought before and forgotten it – that the advantage of poems is that they don’t really need tied up endings or conclusions – they are just there, and open to whatever. Well, the ones I write are.
But the weird thing is that I’ve completed stories in the past. I guess it’s all about luck.
Dreams
I’ve had a poem kicking around my head since the weekend. Every so often a new line or few lines will pop into my head and perhaps I’ll jot it down – though when I checked last night, there wasn’t so much of it as I’d thought.
It’s had a couple of working titles: first ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, and then ‘Riviera Reverie’ – though strictly speaking it’s become more about the Camargue and Languedoc, and I’m not sure which bits of the French Mediterranean coast count as ‘Riviera’. The current first line is: ‘Picture a landscape in Van Gogh colours’. I keep picking away at it like a jigsaw, like the partially done jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting on my kitchen table.
Poems don’t usually work like that. They pop up mostly complete, or if it’s just a couple of lines, they disappear again quite quickly, they don’t hang around for a matter of days.
Just had an oddly surreal experience. A van drove past my window with ‘Books2vessels’ on the side and back. Obviously, the ‘Books’ part grabbed my attention, but it had gone out of my line of vision before I had a chance to look properly, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d seen. I googled it, and yes, that is the name, it is a registered company based in Southampton (so not unreasonable to be driving through Southsea), but all I can find out about it is the Companies House details, which don’t say what it actually does. Maybe it’s a library or bookseller that specialises in supplying books to people on boats? Maybe even – given that it’s in Southampton, cruise ships? How intriguing.
I was thinking a few days ago about dreams – not the sort that come in sleep, but idealised plans, goals and wishes for the future. One of those things I’ve written about before. What dreams do I have now? Most of my past dreams have come true, but not with the outcomes I’d imagined. For years I dreamed of finding a soul-mate, or at least a lover, but I realised in the end that dreams which depend on other people for their success are very difficult to manage. When I look back on my ‘successful’ dreams – eg leaving my husband; travelling; doing a PhD; moving to Southsea – sometimes I can feel despair that the underlying wish of them all – that I should become a better person, more content to be myself and take pride in who I am – has so spectacularly failed. But if I think – what was the point? the answer is that if I hadn’t tried – if I’d stayed with my husband, for example – I would always wonder about how different my life might have been.
Now it’s become clear that that underlying wish is impossible – that I am who I am and can’t change, can’t become a better person, can’t learn to love and/or have pride or respect for myself – what would be the point of striving for more dreams?
Rising and Retiring
While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.
Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.
Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?
I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing.
Jigsaws
Said a painter called Vincent Van Gogh,
Linda Rushby, 21 June 2020
‘My surname sounds just like a cough!
It causes such trouble,
because foreigners struggle,
and some of them don’t even know.’
Well, I’ve got that off my chest.
Very late this morning. I woke about the usual time but haven’t been able to get anything in gear so far.
Lay in bed thinking; ‘Why do I bother to do anything?’ Exercise, meditation, shower, blog… nothing particularly unpleasant about any of them, all likely to make me feel better, if anything, but I couldn’t be arsed. Who knows, let alone cares, if I don’t do those things? Only me. I am in sole control of how I start my Sunday morning – any morning – the only obligations are the ones I left off the list: feed cat and open the door to let her out, and even if I missed those for once, there wouldn’t be any sanctions, but I would feel pretty mean.
The sun is shining – once those things are completed (and I’m currently on the last one), I can sit outside and eat breakfast, and then the day is my own. Any day is my own. What shall I do with this one?
I need a new project – all the ones currently on the go are beginning to bore me. Maybe this passion for crochet is waning, and I need to find a new one. Current best guess is jigsaws – I started one on Friday. Some weeks ago, when lockdown was well bedded in and I was responding by frivolous online shopping, I ordered three jigsaws from ads on Facebook, none of which have yet turned up. Having cleared the kitchen table of the card-making/paper-crafting stuff which had been there since the beginning of March, I thought that maybe if I started doing one of the many jigsaws I’ve acquired in the past and never done, that would speed them on their way. I chose the most recent one, which is of Van Gogh’s painting of the café terrace at night – which is what inspired me to pen the limerick above,
Of course, I could also put my energies into something practical and useful, like tidying the study. I started on that yesterday – emptied a whole box of old photos and albums and stuck them on a shelf, then put the box in the recycling bin – which sounds good, but I only put that particular box in here last week some time, prior to that it had spent some time in the hall, after I took it out of the Chinese cabinet in the front room so I could clear away some of the bags of yarn and half finished crochet projects. Okay, slow progress, but it is progress.
Yesterday I ordered a replacement stylus for my turntable. When that comes, I can start playing my old records again, maybe transfer them to the PC. There’s a project. Hope they’re not too damaged.
I could even sort them into alphabetical order.
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,
Linda Rushby 19 June 2020
and here is my home.
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:
Linda Rushby 20 June 2020
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.
The Way of the World
First, here is an update on some issues you may have been wondering about:
Coffee Pot: Gave it a thorough clean, paying particular attention to the threads where the two halves connect, and it seems to be okay.
Hedge trimmer: Used the fuse from the room heater, and it now works, so on Sunday I cut the edge next to the gate.
‘Walnut’ poem: Went through all the files in both my ‘blog’ folders, but still haven’t located it – though did find another (pretty rubbish) poem. I’d completely forgotten Now wondering if I should go through old notebooks in case I hand-wrote it, but that seems very unlikely given that I have this memory of someone commenting on it on Facebook.
Dodecagram: Now converted into an octagon with somewhat wobbly sides – I gave up at that point yesterday, but thought of something else to try when I woke up, so now eager to get back to it.
Other than that: how am I feeling? Well – trying not to let my anger at the current political situation overwhelm all good things, let me put it that way.
Except… Around twenty five years ago I was working with a man who was very charming, not physically attractive, but he told a good tale, very persuasive, good listener, GSOH – yes, I’ll admit that I was a little in love with him. But as we grew closer, I discovered one fundamental flaw in his character – he could say something with the utmost sincerity, conviction and plausibility, then a few days later say the exact opposite with equal sincerity etc etc. If I picked him up on it, he would laugh it off, smooth talk his way out, make me question my own memory of what he’d said previously, or just dismiss it as unimportant. Now, I’ve said before that honesty is in some ways my downfall, I can’t tell a lie to save my life. In fact I once said to him that I wished I could bullshit the way he did – it was something I genuinely admired, the way he could always find an answer for everything , always steer the conversation to his own advantage. But somewhat to my surprise he was deeply offended.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that he always said whatever came into his head at the time he said it, whatever suited his advantage at that particular moment, and he honestly didn’t realise that he was contradicting himself, or that to do so was in any way morally wrong.
You can see where this is heading. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It angers, frightens and depresses me that these days that sort of plausible deceit is just the way of the world, prevalent among our leaders, large sections of the popular media, almost a prerequisite for gaining any kind of power. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, they can’t get away with it any more, it does, and they do.
Screws and Fuse Blues
After my post yesterday I went hunting for the poem I mentioned, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think I know the title: ‘Walnut’; I know the last line: ‘I was younger then, and I looked good in pink.’ I can remember the experience which inspired it – both at the time I wrote it (finding a matchbox with ‘Walnut’ on the side) and the memory of that restaurant in West Hampstead which it triggered. I know it was in this house, so has to have been within the last three years (most likely 2018), and I know I blogged it (or at least put it on FB) because I remember a comment from one of my FB friends.
I’ve scoured through my poetry folders, through this blog and the previous one for that time period, even my two Facebook pages, but with no luck. All my blog posts are saved in Word in either of two folders, one on Onedrive and one on my desktop, the former imaginatively titled: ‘Blog’, the second: ‘blog’, saved with a filename of the date when they were written. I didn’t look at how many files were in those folders, by that point I was losing the will to live.
The day went on. I decided to fix the hedge trimmer (I cut through the cable when I tried using it last month). When I went to the shop on Wednesday I noticed the hedge is growing over the gate so that soon the postman won’t be able to get in (or I out – I could become like sleeping beauty, there’s a thought). So I got out all the tools and found the bit that I’d cut off (it was still over one of the kitchen chairs), unscrewed the connector that my ex attached the first time I cut through it, cursed the fact that I couldn’t find the better screwdrivers and myself for not being able to get a screwdriver into the slot correctly and hold it tight enough to actually turn it so I always ruin screw heads and drivers alike; chanted to myself: ‘don’t lose the screws’ but of course did, lost every little thing that could be lost and had to look for them all three times, but that’s my life in a nutshell, just a normal part of dyspraxia.
Then when I had it all back together I plugged it in and – nothing. Of course, it must have blown the fuse when it happened. Did I have any spare fuses? No, but I remembered two old appliances (coffee maker and microwave) were still in the bottom cupboard – but both their fuses had already been cannibalised. Went round the house looking for other things with fuses that I don’t want. Found my old hairdryer and tried that, but it still didn’t work, that probably blew when it broke as well.
In bed this morning I remembered I’ve got an electric heater I shouldn’t need any time soon. I’ll try that today.
The Women That I Was
When I do my morning practice, thoughts often turn up in my head, potential poems, phrases from somewhere else, or bits of songs. This morning I decided to put all my incense cones into one box and mix them up, and while looking for a box I found a tiny box of matches which I remember once set me off into reminiscence and caused me to write a poem, some time last year, I think. Memory squared. I’m going to look out that poem later.
I had the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ in my head when I woke up (a song for our times if ever there was one) and as I started on my yoga stretches, and was thinking about that and the poem inspired by the matchbox, the phrase ‘the woman that I was’ popped into my head. I knew that it, or a phrase very like it, was from a song; the word wasn’t ‘woman’, but it was sung by a woman, and it wasn’t Joni Mitchell, but if I could work out what that two-syllable word was, I’d know. Then it came to me in a flash that it was ‘Gypsy’ by Stevie Nicks. I’ll have to fish that out later as well. And ‘Dust in the Wind’ – which is by Kansas, but I always forget that, or I think it’s Toto, and when it popped up on Amazon Music the other evening I had a laugh because I saw the connection between the two and why I mix them up.
The poem was about the woman that I was, though it wasn’t so long ago, about ten years. And the woman I was in it was who I was for a very short time and I’m not her any more – all we are is dust in the wind. I liked her, I liked being her. She was a bit wild, Bohemian, a dreamer, and she called herself Melinda – she came and went – like Ruby Tuesday – and she had a Bohemian adventure in 2013, but it didn’t work out the way she was dreaming of – nothing ever did – and perhaps that was her last gasp. So who am I now? Cat-by-Herself is my current persona, she emerged from the shadows – ooh, how long ago? Somewhere on a train, between the Camargue and the Balkans, perhaps, or Sofia and Istanbul, or on the shore of the Black Sea. She was the fourth corner (according to CG Jung, all threes need a fourth for completeness) – and she was the resolution of what someone flatteringly called ‘the Lovely Triad’.
I thought I’d left them all behind – Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra – but they all pop up from time to time. Melinda is the poet, after all; and Cassandra, the gloomy prophetess, the brain-the-size-of-a-planet whom no one listens to, but who still gets excited over the flash of intellectual connection; and sad Belinda sitting in chaos with her permanently aching heart. I still need to find a way to reconcile them.
Memories
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.
The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.
What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.Then thirty years later
Linda Rushby 17 May 2020
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.
Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.
Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.
And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?
With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.
Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).
I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.