The large puppy dog is lying on the floor of the study groaning with boredom. I am not letting him outside to play because the garden is slowly flooding with irrigation water from the mountain, a widening pool of pure clear water that is channeled into the back garden once a week for two hours. This keeps much of the garden alive in summer drought.
Dog: Life is elsewhere.
Mid-week again. Lay awake for hours because the full moon coming in through the bedroom window made me think it was dawn and I kept thinking I should get up and make some tea. A night of whining mosquitoes and itching calves. Nightjars crying, a barn owl hooting from a nearby oak tree.
Eventually I sat up at 3am and read some Gertrude Stein, which put me back to sleep like a baby even though I love Stein and think she had her brilliant moments. Readable she is not.
Gertrude Stein: “There was never any beginning or end, but every day came before or after another day. Every day did. Little by little circles were open and when they were open they were always closed.”
Tomorrow I’m going off to have lunch in another village, sitting out with friends at a cafe table under sycamore trees eating artisanal cheeses and tiny crafted salads, pretty desserts of Cape gooseberries and fluffy meringues, very cheffy food, but it will be good to get out and relax and have a day away from the writing and dogs. Then the housemate and I will do some non-essential shopping and I can get wild rice, unsalted butter, goats cheeses, bulb fennel, flaky sea salt and ripe pears. Maybe some hair colour. Should I go dark ash blonde? I like the sound of it but the actual colour is never what it looks like on the packet. I might come out streaked dark and ashy and blonde which would be disastrous.
My dogs all lying on the floor looking up at me in boredom and rage. Life is elsewhere. My neighbour is clumping up and down the road and gravel drive in gumboots, carrying a bucket so he can pinch my irrigation water for his young fruit trees. I must go out and have a nice brisk argument to start the day. This meek shiny brown hair is not me, a witchy tangle of ashy blondeness might suit me better and give the underlying grey some way to show itself undisgracefully.
More Stein! On staying in the moment, that impossible desirable state of being… the dog has eaten a lump of skirting board.
“Ida never took on yesterday or tomorrow… Why should she when she had always been the same, when whatever happened there she was, no doors and resting and everything happening… Really there was never anything happening although everybody knew everything was happening.”
Going to see the two exhibits of the Steins collection was ..inspiring and disturbing.
Gerturde has a fascination with the “portrait” and I have seen enough of her “portraits” to last a long while.
“For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” Thus wrote Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in 1938.
They did have quite an amazing collection of art though…..
They did, Dee, a remarkable collection of Picassos and Matisses and other Modernists. I must write more about Stein another day.
I just changed my hair color and you just described it. As a disaster. But I kinda like it. It is a nice change from light blonde.
I have seen lovely ash-blonde heads and am quite optimistic by nature — glad you found something you like
I am so relieved that I’m not the only one who finds Gertrude Stein brilliant but unreadable!
Thank you. You made me feel infinitely less stupid today.
G sometimes I wonder if there is an academic conspiracy to pretend some incomprehensible writers or thinkers are accessible. They’re simply not.
witness to a conversation between my adopted son and his boy friend recently:
son: what are we doing tonight? are we going downtown?
bf: I haven’t called any of those people yet.
son: well are we going? what are we doing tonight?
bf: we’re right here, this is what we’re doing right now. I’m just doing this right now.
me (to son): he’s living in the moment.
bf: see? I told you! that’s what we’re doing.
Love it! Kitty this made me laugh so –
Life is elsewhere. It is a delusion of mine. I went into Boston for the Epis. Divinity School celebration on Monday and convinced myself that I should move there. And take my son and his girlfriend & our two dogs. Life is right here in front of my woodstove, the ticking of the clock in the next room.
On Saturday, I can go back to the city and flirt with girls and eat cheffy food.
Carol there are all kinds of geographic escapes and mental escapes and illusions about elsewhere, other places, other rooms. I do this so often when I feel bored or lonely or stuck. It is just an illusion.
Enjoy your flirtations and cheffy food!
Stein must have been an interesting person to get the ire of Hemingway who hated her. But then he hated himself.
You’re right Syd, for much of his life Hemingway was a self-hating alcoholic. He was also homophobic and I think misogynist too — inevitable he would hate Stein. She had a genial contempt for him and some pity.
Ash blonde is tricky to work with as it can go lilac easily. | stopped home-colouring when a friend noticed how nice my hair looked after a salon job and I asked was it really that bad when I did it? Her vigorous nodding was all I needed.
My 13 year son visits his friends via xbox and it’s not easy to get a word in edgewise as they constantly kill and tell each other what to do.
Stein wasmore diffcult than her writing and Alice is much more readable.
LILAC! That scares the hell out of me. Jan out here, salons are probably more risky than home-colouring. Youngsters teach themselves to cut one another’s hair and then open salons.
That virtual connectivity — the other day I saw two boys walking together down the road smsing each other as they went. Another kind of reality and relating.
Do you have Alice Toklas’ cookbook?