on frivolity

Further sign of ageing - a surprising, and ugly, impatience with frivolity. O Time, what hast thou wrought.
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antidote

Cinematic trope from martial arts movies: the concerned best friend / faithful lover / devoted son or daughter / loyal disciple rushes back from the seventh mountain behind the seventh river on the seventh moon of the seventh month with the antidote to the deadly poison that is slowly sapping the lifeforce out of his/her buddy / lover / parent / teacher.

No faithful friend / lover / child / disciple in sight, but thank goodness for good poetry. Here's my antidote to Lawrence:


The Snow Storm

I walked down towards the river, and the deer had left tracks
deep as half my arm, that ended in a perfect hoof
and the shump shump sound my boots made walking made the silence loud.

And when I turned back towards the great house
I walked beside the deer tracks again.
And when I came near the feeder: little tracks of the birds on the surface of the snow I'd broken through.

Put your finger here, and see my hands, then bring your hand and put it in my side.

I put my hand down into the deer track
...............and touched the bottom of an invisible hoof.
Then my finger in the little mark of the jay.


(Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time)
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woman in love... NOT

"Women In Love is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another... to him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same."

- John Middleton Murray


To be fair, I don't agree with this entirely - the characters are very distinct, and there's more to the novel than sex (though not much). And I must say that Lawrence is one of the most skilled, observant chroniclers of sexual politics I have ever encountered - his grasp of the complexities of the interactions between men and women (and between men and men, women and women) is probably second to none.

But oh, what kind of person must Lawrence have been, to have written a novel in which everything tends, turgidly and pulsatingly (and yes, that's the paradox), towards death and dissolution, and in which there is no love, only the will to power and the will to possess - no compassion, no tenderness, only animal desire either loosed or repressed.....

Lawrence is poison, and I need an antidote - NOW. Suggestions, anyone?
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this is newness (2)

I'm trying to remember if I've ever felt this way before. I don't think so. This is newness - this dazed sense of the future opening up before me with choices that are really mine to choose, and this yearning for 'more and more and then more of it', as Marie Howe put it so memorably in 'What The Living Do'. It's like standing before a vast piece of empty land with a shovel in hand, wanting to rush out and turn the whole into a ripe billowing field of every possible crop ever known to mankind - and knowing that I have only a shovel, and that no one plants a field with more than one main crop at any one time. Sure, there's crop rotation, but which shall I start with first? And how to choose?

That explains the relative silence on this blog over the last few months - too many things happening, life moving in too many unexpected directions more quickly than I am used to. Real life happening, so that suddenly the cyberlife seems that much less interesting and compelling. I really don't think I'll be doing too much random fandom websurfing in the near future - real life beckoning, and oh so much of it - there's just no time to waste on the internet anymore.

Not that I'm complaining - it's good to feel alive, it's good to want things, and it's good to be able to see possible futures, possible desirable futures, even within whatever constraints life has put in place for me right now. It's new to me - and I'm relishing the feeling, but at the same time, I can't stand here gaping with my shovel forever.

So, I'll need to get a move on. I need to decide. Oh God help me make the right choices, and at the right time.
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