A baffled and hot wind from the north, dashing back and forth. Leaves scurry across the kitchen floor, the dogs run in and out thrilled by this moveable feast of a wind, combining the dust of butterfly wings, fragments of ash from wood fires, particles of bark, moss, dried cattle dung, insect larvae, rumours of rain.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
I’m reading the poet WS Merwin and writing up a grocery list that begins with dog food before tofu or green tea or handbound notebooks for private journals. Another lazy day on a long holiday weekend, the housemate finishing cold coffee as she calls up to see if she can find a place on a Salvation Army farm for a homeless young alcoholic.
And spilling dried fennel seeds into brown paper packets to dry, sweeping a thick carpet of leaves (beaten copper shavings) off the verandah, putting black-eyed beans to soak in a deep enamel dish. The tabouleh yesterday worked well, so now I surge on an adventurous spirit and dream about cauliflower heads cut up and toasted with black mustard seeds, turmeric and spring onions. Or brown rice with sesame seeds and flaked almonds, crispy caramelised onions, lashings of chopped fresh parsley.
Work waiting for me, the folders on my desk. More rooibos tea in my old blue-and-white Greek teapot, the temptation of aniseed rusks made by a neighbour. The Great Dane has munched some of my small foxy dog’s plumed tail, not aggressively but from boredom. Stories that dash back and forth in the psyche, not unlike a directionless wind. Stories that have their jumping-off place in my life, in suppers with friends and the blueness of dawns after a sleepless night, in snatches of conversation overheard, in the poetry books piled on my bedside table. What can be said, what is possible in conversations between friends or lovers, between strangers pausing to exchange greetings on a country road? Or in what Yeats called the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart‘.
Reading Yeats as a schoolgirl, beguiled with his musicality and unsure of his layered meanings, his oddness and idealism and crazy, cracked poems: An elderly English teacher born in London’s East End talking about the Victorian tinkers and beggars who would take rags and marrow bones away, render down the bones for tallow which would be sold to candle makers, the rags patched and reused for coat linings or shoulder padding, resold. The heart there in a scrapheap, a junkyard, to be repaired and rendered down, melted and patched over and over again.
The ‘supreme difficulty’ we each encounter when we try to write from the heart, tell stories that matter..
Virginia Woolf on Montaigne, via Cassandra:
Montaigne…refused to teach, refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to communicate, to write himself down, to tell the truth, ‘and that is a rugged road, more than it seems.’
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
Yeats’s notion ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the human heart’ resonates for me and reminds me of William Faulkner’s idea that good writing comes from ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’. Wonderful writing and thoughts here as ever Louisey.
Yes, I know that quotation from Faulkner, Elisabeth, and that is the dilemma. To have the courage to explore those inner tensions, not necessarily to resolve them but to understand them better.
Writing from the heart always make me afraid of what others will think.
Me too, Lou, but living a veneer or pretence is no answer — we all have to probe and occasionally take those awful risks.
your words blow through the kitchen of my heart, from here i see the garden and thus begins again pull of here and there, now and then. you move me, thank you.
What a lovely comment Madeleine! Thanks for stopping to post.
I love the “foul rag and bone shop” image. That everything, especially foul things, can be made useful.
I’d love to believe that Mary Christine — that all the foul and useless and discarded bits can be made useful and redeemed.
So many good thoughts from Yeats. I remember reading him in school and thought him more profound than many of the poets of his day. Hard to understand but so profound. This one would get to me:
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.”
Ah, that is a lovely lovely quotation, Syd — I have the collected poems of Yeats and read there often, such Irish passion and beauty and heartbreak in his vision. I once wrote an essay of about 40 pages on his Sailing to Byzantium and memorised the poem.
Such yummy writing, right from the start with the baffled and hot wind.
Thanks so much, G.