Bumbling Poetry No.5

This is the most nervous I've been whilst writing one of these posts. This is a new poem, and my first attempt at some kind of traditional form.

The Giving Tree

Sinister and obscene, this tree, Fruit but

No leaves.  A raven, some black bird besides,

Shamelessly plunders, bobs and weaves, dips in

And out, considered. Surely it’s rot? What

Wholesome thing, could plump and hang, from a starved

Mother? The bird covets every tweak, lost

Meaning, this omen in winter apples.

Uncanny, yes, wunderbar too, he’d say,

The Austrian, he’d say ‘daddy’ once more,

Right with faulty reason.  Perhaps this tree

Is from the giant’s garden. The boy Christ,

Feet kicking air, clung to old gnarled limbs, life

Pressed in like clay. Now sprawling roots reach out,

Seeking the sick and wounded, willing ‘Heal’. 

After writing this I discovered that as well as being a lovely, tender children's book, The Giving Tree is also a slasher movie from 2000 featuring Molly Ringwald, huh.

Bumbling Poetry No.4

This piece is about knitting, that's how kitsch and twee I am.

Token

A token for the not yet new

Taking shoulders in hand

My thumbs touch.

Awaiting the small heavy fever

It will take many tokens

To make safe.

All potential in the bud head

Sweet but diminishing

Coddled up tight.

Hope holding back time’s arrow

Constrain her plump future

With my poppet.

Gracious knits - Birthday edition No. 2

It was my friend Sarah's birthday recently, and being so close to the cardigan project I didn't have time to make her anything in advance, so I took a request from her and created this:

Pokeball tea cosy! Trying to think of puns to do with this I decided that Tanninmon was a really good pokemon name, also Assamsaur.
I used this pattern for a child's hat and split it in half over straight needles.
Tea cosies are a lot of fun to make, especially when you know there won't be another one quite like it. It also makes me feel oddly smug to make something entirely from my existing stash and not have to pop to the market for finishing bits.

Bumbling vintage finds

Like all savvy and well-raised young ladies, one of my favourite hobbies is scouring charity shops, or thrift stores if you're not a Brit. I mention this because one recent trip has turned up some truly amazing artifacts in the form of some vintage knitting patterns:

Look at the scorn these 80's (?) children are getting from the wholesome and funky 70's children.

Floral jeans, head scarves, big jumpers, it all comes back around. I really want to try the one on the left, it looks like it will be challenging in the best possible way.

I cannot express how excited I was when I found this little gem, look at how cool this girl is, and I could emulate her for a mere £4.00!

This lot is going to keep my needles smoking for quite a while. I will of course post the results.
I've been writing a lot recently too, evidence of which will be here shortly.

To the Lighthouse, in my mind.

It’s taken me a long time to work out what I’m going to do with my book posts and I’ve decided to write about the associations, links and mental tangents the books I’ve been reading have led to.

To the Lighthouse has been my first successful attempt at reading some Woolf, I bought Night and Day a long time ago and could never get past the first few pages, so I was wary but determined with this one. I am not a student of literature, I’m a social scientist and tea lady who likes to read, so I am not coming from an academic standpoint on this, but reading To the Lighthouse I was reminded of a lecture I once heard Will Self give on Radio 3 on the subject of the naturalistic novel and attempts to give a realistic representation of human thought, and after a little digging, I found it here (my favourite bit- ‘My shin is…itchy!’). It really is worth watching but at an hour long I don’t expect you to, so here is a bare bones summary; trying to write human thought as a comprehensible narrative is a daft idea, because for the most part we don’t think in language. He breaks up points by exclaiming ‘What are you thinking, right now?’ and postulates possible answers, some more coherent than others, arguing that the mad-sounding, word salad style answer is only slightly more realistic, and much less pleasant to read. Language is inadequate, and narrative even more so, because the mind does not go along the lines of beginning-middle-end, A to B to C. This is imposed afterwards to retroactively make sense of and present internal experience for inspection. Self suggests that the way we do this has co-evolved with the novel in a transactional modelling of consciousness, that we are what we read, which on a personal level I feel holds ground, mostly from all the times I’ve felt like my life is imitating a Graham Greene novel.

The thing that Self says that strikes me most, is that the ‘realistic’ thought narrative is a collective therapy for author and reader, persuading each other that we all have legible and comprehensible minds. Social psychology was my worst subject at university, but the idea that finally hooked me into it was that there is no true coherent self, no one constant core identity that can be tested and revealed, rather we are all composites of different identities that are pulled out for different contexts and interactions, no one is more tangible than the others, just more commonly used. This is how the average person contains a double helix worth of dualities in attitude and belief, depending on who they are talking to, what they are talking about, and what identity they are using. Case in point; I believe this but I also believe there is a me with persevering qualities, people who know the real me better than others, and for some reason I was still surprised when, having heard Self and studied what I’ve studied, that I read Woolf and thought- Yes. That is my experience of being as well. We have to buy into this idea of ourselves, so I would agree that thought written as narrative is a kind of collective therapy, because without the pretence of a united self, well, we’d crack up.

However, one of the reasons To the Lighthouse is often praised is for the way Woolf wrote the volatile and highly changeable nature of internal attitude and feeling, and I would argue this makes it more representative than other naturalistic attempts at the mind, but it is still a matter of degrees towards the unachievable. Reading the internal thoughts and feelings of Mrs Ramsay and family I was genuinely shocked by how much of it echoed my own experience, and I think that’s the way to admire Woolf, for her achievement in representing the reflective phenomenology of thought. It doesn’t matter to me that the way it appears on the page, or in my memory, isn’t representative of the ‘real’ processes, it matters that that is how the combined effect feels when I think about it. I appreciate Will’s point that it is naive at best to present a narrative as representative when it simply can’t be and I agree, but I think there’s a lot to be said for striving for truth, falling short and creating something worthwhile, as long as the limitations are acknowledged. Something he concedes himself, saying that just because a novel is written using flawed naturalistic assumptions does not mean that it is not a work of genius.

And To the Lighthouse certainly is that. It’s beautiful and haunting and awakens a gnawing fear of the everyday tragedies that time makes of all our lives, and at the same time is not a disheartening read for that, the lyrical prose convince you that the beauty contained in life is worth it all, well it does me anyway. Having devoured this, I am more than willing to give Night and Day another shot, I was hasty before, which isn’t like the real me at all.