well, hmm, it's been a while

yes, well it's been quite some time, i must admit. my fingers are rusty. don't seem to want to play along. oh well, must begin somewhere....

....i am married now. ring on my finger and i feel different. more centred. perhaps more grown up - meaning more willing to be responsible for my actions. it is truly a beautiful thing and i certainly didn't expect it...the feeling i mean...of being beautiful, of life being beautiful in a crystalline sort of way, like droplets shining. i saw this recently on a snowy day walking. was in a field, a golf course actually but you couldn't tell but for cute depressions in the snow. the sun smokey over the hill in the west came through cold steel clouds and ringed them with its light. the flakes came down steady and landed sweetly on my clothes. little flakes, individual ones, presumably a result of the cold air, they didn't have the required wetness to bind. each flake was clearly visible, its six points quietly stating something perfect and fleeting.

marriage is like that. so is everything else actually, but marriage has (or should have) a deliberateness about it that brings one's attention together, finally, for moments of perfection.

here's a photo that sort of gives you an idea of what i mean.

what i see

welcome again. it's a silly world and i thought it wise to reprint - steal, pilfer, capitalise - this email from a friend currentyl travelling in belarusse. she's been there for several weeks (months?) dancing on the edges of the 'revolution' and reporting via email in caustic, heartwrenchingly oblique (bleak?) field notes on what she sees, hears, smells, tastes and imagines.

i hope she doesn't mind this theft. i am not sorry. life is one big pastiche and plagiarism, and 'you' ('one') doesn't exist anyway, which reminds me about a story i heard on the radio the other day: a young writer (17) received a $500,000 book deal for her first novel (in proposal form) and second novel (not yet conceived). the first novel was duly written and published, whereupon it was found that this book took much of its narrative structure, and wording directly and indirectly from a previous work by a different writer.

my thoughts on this? nice one, sister.

so, without further drum roll..............

These are things I will forget to tell you about otherwise, because
they aren't neat anecdotes but ramblings.

FIRST, I would like to say that in the morning the fog lies on the
fields like a flood and it looks very beautiful. I saw it off the
train. I knew this before, but I always forget it until I see it
again. So get up in the dark, kids, take your bicycles and go and see
the morning mist.

SECOND, Russian men don't like Juliet Binoche.
I don't know if it was just the selection of Belarussian wierdos I
know or if it's general, but they had such an odd reason. They say she
is TOO FEMALE, LIKE A FEMALE OF AN ANIMAL SPECIES, AND THIS
HUMILIATES THEM. Now, how wierd is that? I haven't a clue what they
mean. Also I rather like the idea of being female like an animal
species. I could live in burrow and eat nuts. Phillipe added the coda
that in her private life the Binoche is a whore, which comes as no
surprise to him. BUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT? I mean, if you have the
opportunity...

THIRD, which was somewhere in the same conversation, the assembled
company agreed that I was very decorative to look at, but they would
be afraid to go out with me. This was their attempt to console me for
a broken heart. This amused me. They said that English men must be
very brave (to go out with me, they meant). This did not amuse me so
much. I am evidently a Gorgon. Brass hands - check. Shap fangs - check
- hair of living snakes - good heavens, I AM!

FOURTH Belarussians - and by extension Russians, for they are the same
people whatever the Belarussian nationalists claim - are so
unthinkingly racist I cannot quite believe it. I met this floppy
haired bloke, young, maybe 22, likes, you know, nightclubs pop music
taking drugs, looks like every kid in Europe and America, no skin head
nationalist by any means. He lived in Whitechapel for two months. Oh
yeah, how was that? Too many Indians.
I said, Too many for what?
Ummmm, he said, too many for England?
I said What do you mean too many for England? It's an island, not an
aeroplane, it's not going to sink. And it's like that all the time.
Have you been to Uzbekistan? No, I don't like those bastards.
Georgians are bad people. I don't like black people. Do you know any?
No, but I saw one once and I knew I didn't like them. I know this is
normal and I am wierd, in world terms, but it's so difficult to cope
with. They can't bear homosexuals either. So if you're a black,
Georgian homosexual life must be really really bad.

Last, in answer to two questions posed by some of you re that supposed
broken heart:

1. Amy de Wit, all you do is make stupid jokes. Do you have no
feelings at all? Do you have no heart?

The answer is that, unlike Elvis Presley, I'm afraid I DO have a
wooden heart. Or at least, I did until I decided that a heart shaped
heart was rather twee and not so useful. So I took it out and carved
it into a whistle shaped like a bird. And then I gave it to a crying
child on the Northern line, somewhere between Highgate and Camden
Town. So, no.

2. Did I ever get to meet that poor sod in Poland again?

No. I spent Monday in a rubbish tip with a load of really angry tramps
who wanted to kill me with a spiked stick. Then I spent Tuesday in a
graveyard with some drunk people. Then I slept, or rather lay awake
listening to the snoring policeman, in my clothes on the train. I had
dirt from the last two days smeared all over my face. I had birds nest
hair. I had a spot. I got sunburnt in the rubbish dump, so I had a big
red face. I know I should be used to that as between sun, cold
weather, riding a bike, taking a bath, chlorine, some washing powders,
some cosmetics and perpetual embarrassment I always have a big red
face. Yet I persist in the belief that I have the morbid complexion of
a Victorian heroine. Wierd huh?

I walked about Warsaw wearing a pair of two-dollar
bug-eyed-alien-from-Mars sunglasses and a headscarf, which I think
looks great but I know that most of you do not agree. I felt like a
chic Sixties film star escaping the paparazzi. I looked like a crazy
lady with food spilled down her coat and a big bit of toothpaste, I
discovered late in the day, caked onto my Hermes bag. No, I didn't
even try and meet that poor sod in Poland.
I did see a load of photographers taking pictures of the president or
someone, at a big parade. But photographers from a distance, well, all
cats are grey in the night.

God, I'm going to have to lie down after that. Never mind, it's the
last thing I write for weeks and weeks. Thank you, ladies and
gentlemen, we are now floating in space.

the plant poem

in the interests of public safety i have declared 2006 the year of the plant poem. here's another one:

try it. it tastes
good.
and it's healthy.


and yet another:

is green a state of mind or
are we being too subtle?


i hope you will all join in the festivities.

love

md

if all the plants did sing

a poem for plants

green is a chlorophyll paradise and i love you

thank you very much

that and other true poems from the plant world can be found where there are cracks in the industrial pavement. i know this to be true because industrial pavements are incapable of love, and, true to cementic law, also incapable of hate. but for the very reason that it is possible for there to exist cracks in these industrial pavements, we love them. with all our hearts. if it weren't for the cracks we wouldn't even see the pavements. there would be nothing to show us that there was nothing else.

oh bollocks. methinks i do sound like my old school master telling me that the salty, overcooked green beans are good for me. they weren't and aren't. but the truth lies bare and cold: cracks in the industrial pavement are there for plants to discover and for us to enjoy. what this means for the efficient transmission of emails and blogs i don't know.

another poem for plants

been here a long time. be here a while more.

good night, hugs and love to all.

md

some of this is beautiful

i hope this works. this link business. again i am slightly flumoxed by blogging. not sure why (i bother - oh brother). anyway, there is, or should be, or was, or might be, or so they say, a link somewhere in this post to a beautiful website.

meanwhile it is snowing in boulder. there is snow everywhere. even on the ground. what is life like on pluto? is there snow there too? i don't think so. certainly not as much snow as here in boulder. please write soon and tell me what daily life is like so far from the sun. maybe you can look up into the sky straight at the sun and not have to squint. when i do that here in boulder i have to squint. in fact i have to squint continuously here in boulder because it is either full of sunlight, even on the ground, or a bright white sheet of snow, even on the ground. do they sell sunglasses on pluto? i'd love to know this, and other small details.

marlowe diego

no, i really mean it

"most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. freaks were born with their trauma." - diane arbus

"...and," i would add, "they quickly realise, or drown, that it doesn't matter."

i mean it.

ie. (since i think a better explanation is necessary) you are not important. you are not special. if you were that would imply that someone else wasn't. that's a disgustingly self-centred point of view that is the root of all unpleasantness on this planet. this is different from physical inequality or ecological imbalance which are simply states of being, properties of physicality, neither 'good' nor 'bad'. ms. arbus's point is that trauma is a fact of life. don't ignore it, don't pretend you don't feel it, but don't over-dramatise it. get over it, already. take responsibility for yourself - especially if you're over 18.

and spread the love.

md

je m'en fou

funny thing life. life is a funny thing. so many of us (all?) are so convinced so much of the time that we matter, that our pain matters. perhaps this is true. perhaps it does matter. perhaps the act of believing that it matters makes it so. i would suggest however that this is not the case. i would suggest instead that we don't matter, that our pain matters to nobody, not even ourselves.

of course, this doesn't take away the fact that life is funny. in fact the funny thing is that despite not mattering, we are nonetheless incredibly real. that's a good one: you're real but you don't matter. true but irrelevent. sort of liberating. which is the funny bit. the really good bit. the bit that feels so real it starts as the deepest gut-wrenching sob and ends as tears of laughter streaming down your face. i feel like that a lot. i look out the window...right now...and see the darkness of boulder - a wide bar of dusty black with a satisfying thin strip of deeper black speckled with a dozen street lights, the sphere of their radiance stretched by the invisible screens on my windows into coptic crosses. these are the lights in the near foreground. further out, along the line that divides the dusty black of the sky with the deeper black of the earth are twinkling pinpricks of house lights and perhaps even the lights of the freeway and denver.

and all this, all this space out there that just 'is', without any effort from me, triggers deep emotion inside me. the lights in the darkness remind me of london and all the wonderful bitter memories associated with that. and i delight in the sensation that these memories, that that life, that this life, that all the possible histories and futures associated with that one thought, that one feeling, are so real and yet don't matter at all. or perhaps i should revise the hypothesis to say that none of them matter more than any other, than each other. a semantic hair splitter, logically the same, yes, but as the words sink into your heart, world's apart ontologically.

so it's a funny thing this life that i find myself in, every day, as i seem to do without much fail every morning. i could so easily be 'not' that it always amazes me that i am not 'not', and that is really a very comforting feeling to have when all else fails. and perhaps i should revise my initial statement that we all believe so much that we matter. i think it more accurate that we very often realise we don't matter, but misinterpret this to mean that we should be 'not'. this is a mistake. we most definately should not be 'not' since we clearly 'are' and what matters isn't how we feel about our experience of not being 'not' but that we feel it at all. mattering isn't qualitative. how can it be when nothing matters more than anything else? mattering, like not being 'not', just 'is'.

love

md.