Prayer

pain and reward
no more.

take it, pour it
drink it.

numb me from
the crown down.

take what I hear
and make it echo.

make it so I hear it,
respond to it.

but never let the
meaning reach the source.

never let me involve
forever and ever.

Cycle

leave
go far

turn
and return

changed
and burnt

from
the underground

Love

wake me up
sweating
take my hand
and lead me
henceforth
down the path
of self doubt

Converstions with you.

Last night I finished Madame Bovary.
Well done?
I thought so, because I didn’t like it any step of the way.
Enlighten me…
Lets just say I have decided not to be unhappy in my bourgeois state. And even if I am, I refuse to have an affair and condemn my children to sliding down the social scale.
I feel priviledged that you have decided not to cheat on me.
You should.
It seems strange that you have even considered it.
Behold the power of great literature.
Was the novel a moral reminder? Did you need a reminder?
Yes. It also reminded me to think of the boredom I experience.
What do you propose to do about that?
Well I’m defiantely not having an affair.
Good.
Yes, I think it’s the best decision.
For whom?
All of us?

An exaggerated sky

I’ve been reading a lot lately.

It began with my desire to escape, which, if I had to pinpoint a time, began about December 3.

So instead of screaming off into the distance I dipped back into my vast collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I love them. I know most of them off by heart and they are the only romance books I will read. Mainly because the romance plot line is wrapped up with so many historical details and truly witty dialogue. No one has sex, barely anyone kisses and it’s all about the social mechanisms that get people married. Anyway they have been my staple escapist tactic from about the age of 15, and they didn’t fail me this time either. The one that caught my imagination this time was ‘The Quiet Gentleman’.

Luckily for me, by the time I had exhausted the plot line and sticky taped at least two pages back in (a large majority of these novels were bought second hand and much loved), Mum had return from overseas and had a lot of novels I could/can borrow. So I took ‘People of the Book’ by Geraldine Brooks down south with me. I really, really enjoyed it. And in those funny ways that life seems to through similar things your way at the same time, it’s about a book. Sorry but I’m not going to book review here…the way that links with my life is that I’ve been making paper. Recycled, handmade paper. And now I’ve been thinking about learning how to bookbind. I’ve looked up courses and there is a day one at UWA and a 10 week course at TAFE. Money and time play a real part in my decision here, but I think I will do the one day course and see how I can go from there.

Such is her writing skill, I moved onto another by Geraldine Brooks about the plague in a village in 1666, ‘Year of Wonders’. It’s good too, but I am reading it backwards because I know she loses her small children and I find that such a disturbing thought to read at the moment that after the first chapter I skipped to the end. Because by working backwards through the novel I can build myself up to the disturbing bit. Strange I know…but I have no problems knowing the end of a novel, and it never keeps me from reading (or attempting to) the novel. I like the journey of how it gets there just as much as the end point.

So as a distraction and a sideline I picked up Umberto Eco’s ‘The Island of the Day Before’. Not a particularly light distraction. In fact this would have to be about the fifth time I have tried to read this novel. I get lost once the main character discovers the chickens. But I like to try and I love a passage almost at the end.

“Then the story of Roberto della Griva would be merely the tale of an unhappy lover, condemned to live beneath an exaggerated sky, a man unable to reconcile himself to the idea that the earth wandered along an ellipse of which the sun was only one of the fires.

Which, as many will agree, is too little to make a story with a proper beginning and a proper end.”

Umberto Eco “The Island of the Day Before” trans. William Weaver Minerva Great Britain 1995 p512

I don’t know why and I don’t always understand it, but it feels so lyrical and it makes me think beyond the realm of which I exist in.