a toast to sharing, to generosity

A record of two communal festive moments.

Today is the day after our annual supra - a Georgian feast celebrating Georgian music - passed down through generations in the mountain villages of Georgia and still so powerful today even though the languages have changed so much that the meanings of the words have often been lost. Incredible polyphonic singing in which the voices stay close together - a social singing where the solo voice is no more important or superior to for example the resounding and never ending drone of a bass part - sung in such unison that the snatches of breath taken to maintain that sound cannot be heard.

The warmth of the supra, and the remembered aftertaste and after sound of the delicious foods - layered Georgian honey cream cake, spinach, pomegranate, beans, cheese bread, a quince concoction, the Georgian toasting call and punctuations of Georgian song  - is combined in my case with the warmth of an earlier meeting on the same day of a small group of haiku writers - sharing our own and others' haiku. In this small group, gentle and uninterruptive, the theme is the senses, the topic of discussion moves to quite deep philosophical territory as we consider the place of the senses in an experience of residing in the now, the here, the immediate, untrammeled by thoughts of past or future.
The haiku are superb as is the willingness to discuss comment and alter to get the words and feeling exactly where we would like them to be. Topped off by a small delicious repast which includes both Christmas cake and homemade butter bean hummus...

There is something about the bringing and sharing of food in an atmosphere of artistic openness, generosity and yes again sharing that warms and warms so deeply

To friendship! To generosity! To sharing!

riddling in to the Old English world

Very happy to report one of my translations of the ancient Anglo-Saxon riddles (riddle 65) is now up on The Riddle Ages site https://theriddleages.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/riddle-65-or-63/

My commentary follows next week.

I have been working on translations of Anglo Saxon riddles for a while now and have five good ones and several more in progress. However, getting on Riddle Ages is an exciting new venture for me, since this site is run by Anglo-Saxon scholars. No mean feat to meet, as a non Anglo-Saxon speaker, with their approval.

I have signed up to translate two more of the riddles - there are over 90 of them and they are slowly posting them all up in numerical order so quite a few left to do....

Maggie Scott, with whom I work, and the Riddle Ages editor Megan Cavell have been most helpful with my naive questions and assumptions about this ancient language I have forgot. And now I am looking forward to any comments the site might generate so I can learn even more about the language and about riddling - something we still do as I was reminded in Hereford when I witnessed a young boy entertain his grandfather with a series of riddles to which, probably, they both knew the answer, but which acted as a strong bonding exercise nevertheless and which they both clearly enjoyed - the ritual of it, the team-playing it involves: knock knock says one, says who says two....

broken toes - the narrow and wide

In many ways narrowing down really focusses the mind and senses.

When you can't use and know you mustn't use some unprotected snapped or fractured bones (and note, as my highly-qualified medical niece recently revealed to me, in medical terminology 'fracture' means 'broken', not a milder version of the same, which is what I and my literary friends used to think because why would you use two words to mean the same thing? - I am beginning to wonder if there is a potential pot of funding waiting here for an impactful creative writing research project to identify and expose/disseminate other such common but deeply-confusing misunderstandings experienced by people like me who won't take a broken bone seriously if it is called a fracture), yes, when you are unfortunate to have such a broken bone, or more than one, then you begin to appreciate everything those bones so quietly enable - crouching to garden; twisting to reach from a top shelf; the spontaneous little stroll down to the market, coffee shop, train station, running - in any form, yoga, trekking over rough country, inching over rough pebbly tracks - indeed every time I need to shift balance in one tiny way or another, those little toes really pull their weight.

When they break, or if they break, you also get to appreciate the foresight of the planners, designers, lawmakers in buildings and public transport systems that have taken the option of providing special seats, escalators, lifts. A visible limp, or even more visible crutch (I didn't get to have one of those), really clears the air, giving you space to move, averting that fear that someone will bump into you or tread on your foot, and bestowing upon you the right to ask for someone to give up their seat to you, together with the probability of receiving a very gracious response as well.

It reminds me of the time, after my first session with the Theatre Anthropological group in Japan as part of our year-long training to act in the Noh play I and a friend had translated, that I had to go to work with severely deeply sore tendons in my legs from over-exertion at the simple exercises our unrepentant director had had us do for a rather too extended period. I learnt, slowly and painfully, that you could negotiate your way all round Kanazawa University on disabled ramps without have to lift one foot up a stairway, despite the fact the campus is set up in the hills. I learnt because I needed to. I couldn't move up or down without great cost, so much so that in order to leave the room after teaching a class in a more or less graceful manner I found myself clandestinely clutching the table so as to lever myself up without too much of a grimace of pain.

And now? It's hard not being able to nip out when I like, but the compensations do stack up. Incapacity awakens such kindness and generosity in others, friends, sister, niece, colleagues, neighbour - offers of lifts, shopping, drives, cinema trips, meals, a supportive arm, an invitation to come to stay while I heal. It also provides plenty of writing time and a great excuse not to hoover or dust or weed for a while if I can manage to let the resultant clutter not get me down. It is an interesting experiment in exercise-desistment and how that might affect well-being and how to compensate for it - more meditation is a good idea.....  As conditions prolong, it becomes, too, needful to work on my own reluctance to receive help, and also to work on learning to ask for it, as well as beginning to decipher the thin but very important line between keeping safe and stable, letting things get stronger, and the alternative of striking out best or even worst foot forward to allow weight-bearing to play a positive role. I don't want to learn funny walking habits by hobbling around on my heel for too long and then promptly create some other problem as a result of that. Been there already....

There is the joy of firsts, coming outside for the first time in a week to hear and feel the sunny growing green airs of summer, climbing up (very carefully in a toe-footed sort of way) and picking the now very ripe, because not picked for so long, clusters of black blackcurrants and red gooseberries on my steep grassy bank, making a trip to my local town, to the big city, an afternoon stretched-out half asleep on the slightly damp grass near one of the outdoor sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park soaking in the unusually strong sun of early northern July, and revelling in the (imagined?) sense of a vitamin D topup in process. Mmmm can still feel it now. Narrowing down, widening up.

Performing virtually in Amsterdam - a video

I spent a good two hours last week recording this excerpt from my new 'brief brief: a riddle', an extended visual poem on the process of translation, particularly challenging to perform not only because of the many visual effects but because of the inclusion of Friesan, Scots and Old English in the text - none of which I can really pronounce. I also forgot to brush my hair before the first take so had to scrap that one and start again. I never even thought of considering the background which is rather higgledy piggledy to say the list. And uploading it on WeTransfer took about two more hours...

Who'd be an actor!

The launch of the Versal issue (no 12) in which my poem features is on Sunday 11 June in Amsterdam. I'm sorry not to be there but very glad I was able to join in virtually.

Hope you enjoy the excerpt!

http://www.versaljournal.org

May Proliferations

I sometimes dread May - the garden explodes with life, flowers yes but also weeds and I cannot bear it - an uncontrolled untrammeled mess - reflecting perhaps the chaos in my head pre-poem, inter-collection, running up to the deadline of commission - which is the place I am now. But I cannot bear to pull the weeds. I even feel apologetic about the dandelions - although I do pull these knowing the fluff from their seeds will float not only all over my garden but my neighbour's.

Currently the garden is a glorious chaotic riot of colour as daffodils persist, forget me nots invade, pink, white-rimmed, orange, red etc tulips tower in all sorts of unexpected places, submerging the hyacinths, and then the other flowers that I have forgotten I planted and forgotten the names of also surprise. Going away for a few days is a treat because when I come back the colour has changed in all sorts of unexpected ways. But I have a struggle with the dandelions, the ragwort which as a responsible horse lover I feel obliged to pull is lurking and the foxgloves seem to proliferate every year - when is too much foxglove? Already the ferns are shooting up, curling their ends, and the plum tree is in a sulk, still straggly despite my crude efforts at pruning last year and definitely refusing to blossom while continuing doggedly to branch and branch and branch.

I am that plum tree - I don't want to write even though I know I must and must produce by next week. Not poems anyway. I am busy on a monograph about the thickness of language, reading Tolkien, Wittgenstein, Nick Humphrey, William James. I wading into it thickly and more thickly, and the creative elements don't seem to get much of a look in apart from the occasional haiku (what a saving grace that little form is and the Yorks/Lancs Haiku group which every month call me to produce at least one for their northern peripatetic meeting).

What I am proud of is my thin roadside verge, not really mine but not really anyone's - unadopted they say. So I've provisionally adopted it. Previously it was a tarmacky gravelly thin scattering of soil but now it is green with fern, dandelion (I allow them here this wonderful glowing flower), an occasional nettle - thinned by me, grasses, and other wild flowering weeds. This year it also had snowdrops, now forget me nots and a even a few tulips - more next year as I realize the battle with the squirrels is not fought on the road - they prefer privacy for their tulip and hyacinth robberies. Perhaps this is all I am doing at the moment, finding a place for creation where the squirrels won't rampage. And perhaps my unusually quiet calm demeanor in front of an impending deadline is a reflection of a deep certainty that the creative well will well and well in time and timely if I actively wait.

May explosions can't be controlled, not by me at least, but enjoyed and worked with - letting them take their own rhythm and very speedy pace with an occasional encouragement to shape and direction  seems to be the way forward (not forgetting the RHS expert gardener I know I can call in if things get too jungly - although I am not yet sure what form that takes when I thinking of poetry commissions!?)

water's sound

After the tanka workshop:

the need to go on a walk with an empty head in the hopes that into it will run the word for the sound of water flowing quickly and with music down a gully...

running back to the death of Samora Machel

Running in a group is easier than running alone. I know that - I can get out of bed much easier for that than if it is just for me. Running while talking allows you to run without getting puffed. I know that too, was just reminded of it this morning (but it makes no sense). Running on a march allows you to achieve great distances of sustained jog, especially when chanting - I found that out in Zimbabwe many years ago, when, by no means a runner, I joined a march after Samora Machel's strange death. 

This requires a little backhistory for some of you perhaps. Samora Machel was the first president of Mozambique, and much much much loved by Zimbabweans for his support of them in the long guerrilla fight for independence at a time when Rhodesia's conservative white government restricted access for black Rhodesians to land, education and even the right to walk on the main street (First Street) of the capital city, then Salisbury, now Harare. It was a very harsh time and surely left huge psychological marks. 

The extremes can be indicated as follows. When the country became independent, and many conservative white Rhodies left the country, a great number went to what we knew then as the Racist Republic of South Africa. Fable has it that they were too racist for the South Africans, and a number of these then went on to Perth. (This was apocryphal and may not have really been true but we all believed it - it chimed with our several experiences: black, white, Zimbabwean, expat). Certainly, of those that remained, tempers could run high. I remember shaking with rage at a high-class tea party shortly after I arrived in the country, in part because of the extreme racism being articulated in polite conversation, in part because it was being articulated at full blast within the hearing of the black servant, and in part because of the fact of a servant and of the treatment of that white uniformed man - quite elderly, whom the host referred to as a 'boy'. I also remember, a year or two later, being chased from a braai (a Rhodie-style barbecue) by the host waving a (steak?)knife after our discussion of the rights of black Zimbabweans got too heated. This time there was no rage for me - I was laughing, though scared, and yes for once running fast! I was used to such disagreements and had accepted them as par for the course if I was going to attend a Rhodie braai and say what I think. You just get accustomed to stuff.

In 1986 Samora Machel died in an aircraft crash on the border between Mozambique and South Africa. The world outside believed it was an accident. No one I knew in Zimbabwe did. But then we were used to reading between the newspaper lines - a skill people in Britain lacked as I discovered on my return home a few years later. How could this accident have happened over the only small patch of South African soil on the aircraft's route, or, as some said, off the plane's route? Too much of a coincidence for us. People were distraught. It was like your father dying. I went to a gig at Queens - one of the best venues for Zimbabwe music -  Tobias Areketa was singing a new song about Machel. People were dancing with tears running down their faces, including a wheelchair-bound war veteran at the front of the dance-floor, reminding us all of why Machel was so much loved.  You can listen to that song on youtube, wonderful youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpqObGE4WtA and note the apparently cheerful guitar melody counterpointed with the mournful notes of the singer. The word 'baba' means 'father' in Shona. 'Mai we' (am I spelling this right?) is a lament. I am sure you can pick them out. Imagine that dance floor. Take yourself there. 

But tempers ran high then too. When I and my (white) friend went downtown to join the march to mark our sadness at Machel's death I was grabbed by the wrist by an irate marcher who wanted to force me to join in, until she realized, with delight, that I was intending to anyway. What I hadn't understood however was that the march was a run, and a run to song and chant to the stadium (5 k away). I was not a runner then, nor any kind of athlete. I had bunked off games when I could at school, choosing Hungarian instead (it was a very academic school) and had never taken sport up since apart from the occasional walk, except perhaps after heated Braai discussions..... However on the march I made it all the way. My feet stung at the end but I was happy, euphoric, incredulous. It was the rhythm - of the chant, the music, the marching feet, and the rush of emotion that drew us into one strong running body, even me.

Wow I didn't know that spiel was going to take me where it did!! Lovely lovely Zimbabwe.