Oh fickle mistress, Time!

Well, a whole year's passed and I haven't even tried to post a jot onto this blog.
Dimitri, now aged 10 months, is largely the reason. So I haven't been unproductive, just not been productive in the literary sense.

Not entirely true. I have cobbled together two ballad-type texts. When I unearth them I will post them here.
I wrote them as songs to be sung, less poetry per se.

I have resolved to just make baby steps in my return back into the realm of scribing.
I don't think I lost the Muse in one day and in one fell swoop, so I don't think I'll be
gaining her trust in one go either.

Below is an offering:
Whiteout

If death were water he'd be silent snow
A suffocating airless soft but cruel pillow
Sapping oxygen from breath, 
Stinging eye and mouth
Silencing for e'er perhaps 
A drunken layabout.

Venture out prepared and wrapped
Wary be of the snow ye must
For it's seemingly gentle feathery touch
Can cause fracture in the most robust

Achingly beautiful though it is
Do not be easily seduced
Don't venture over pond and ice
In open field don't be ambushed.

For once, a beleaguered little maid
Had in tiredness lain in snow
But for a moment she thought she laid
But in a moment her heart did slow

Her breath was deep at first, and strong
Her hands were warm and begloved so neat
'Gainst the wind her bonnet tight
But gnawing frost her neck did bite

Upon her cheek crystal sweat clung
Upon her brow and bosom too
Into her bones the chill did creep
Into her skin through cape and shoe.

As she wilted and bent within
Paper flakes were sharp and fearce
The freeze grew strong and vehement
Her eyes so tired the ice wind did pierce.      

Where did you wander?

Odysseas Elytis...Here I begin again, to try and restore my ability to write. The muse had fled, dejected, ignored. I have an awfully inferior brain, you see. It lapses. I fear I have sustained psychic damage, chemical damage perhaps, to the extent that I had forgotten I loved poetry. You could say I'm just out of practice and you would be right, up to a point. For writing poetry has never been entirely effortless for me. There was a point where I had steadily built writing into my life, formed a habit of it so to speak. To transmit what I was experiencing in the form of verse became second nature. Sadly, all that good work has been laid to waste and now I must try to remember how I lured the Muse to my side in the first place.

It took time then and it will take time now, to gather the strength and concentration.
I realise I need to feel emotionally strong to begin the discipline again. I know this may not be true of others who effortlessly pen away the hours, heads flooded with pictures and sounds, no matter what disasters abound around them. But I have to concentrate in order to write, and mostly I find I am tired from mundane activities. My senses are dulled and stifled at the end of the day, the only time I have to write. Now I must try hard to sharpen those blunted sense..

My latest attempts have resulted in song ballads, not my usual free verse. I found it a useful exercise to focus in on form and dramatic monologue, just to get back into the act of putting pen to paper. Useful exercises but hardly resulting in texts of mind-blowing quality.

And so, I study my masters, from the beginnings of my poetic stirrings, from Aeschylus and Elytis and Kavvadias I translate.

Titanic or Starship Enterprise?

"Of children as of procreation - the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable." Evelyn Waugh

"This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind." Desiderius Erasmus

"Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation." Walter Benjamin

No, they won't look after us in our old age, and yes, they spoil our figure, wreck our nerves and cost a fuckload of money. Bin lids. Why have them?

If you don't want them don't have them, it is the responsible thing to do. I wouldn't change my baby boy for the world. Children give life meaning. If we are simply to live and then die without having left any bit of us behind, then what was the point of our life. My late boyfriend, Ash, died before we had any children. Those first nights after his death I prayed I was pregnant. When it became clear that I wasn't I cried inconsolably for days because there really was nothing left of him. I wasn't given the opportunity to even carry his child, his legacy into the world. I often think of the childless widows everywhere who have been robbed twice.

In this, our Western world of artifice, where we are encouraged to desire only that which can gratify us instantly, in the savage competetiveness of the workplace, and within modernity's constrained living conditions and even more strained human relations, there exists the opportunity to be selfless, to attain that little-mentioned and rarest thing, grace, to acquire something strongly discouraged, humility, and exercise that equally out-moded virtue, temperance.

My son has impacted on my life in ways I never could have imagined when all I had to think about was myself. Patience and quietude characterized my pregnancy and the first few weeks of his life. Graceful (and grateful) was how I felt when I was holding him and gazing in awe, day after day. I am not religious in the slightest but I now understand Christianity, the cult of worshipping the innocent infant. No wonder that innocence and purity were once highly regarded and held as the greatest prize on earth. It is the most beautiful, most evanescent quality, a frustratingly intangible thing that is more abstract than the notion of love.

I felt and embraced humility in those difficult days of pregnancy, emraced my vulnerability (never have I felt so helpless or felt the world to be so perniciously cruel) and I thought of my mother, sister and grandmothers and the millions of women who have born, were bearing and would bear children, and give them, yes, GIVE them to the world. Children are not 'had' nor held, they are given. It is done, just like a risky business deal or a throw of the dice, in good faith. And anyone who has had kids, believe me, will tell you that they are a bigger rush than any speedball at a celebrity party or skydive over the Amazonian rainforest.

Here we come to temperance; Paul and I have re-thought the debauched excesses of the past and have, gladly and with a surprising sense of relief, tempered ourselves, our lives and our thinking. When you carry such a precious load through life you make damn sure everything about you is ship-shape and Bristol fashion! If you never want to glow with pride or love beyond any love you've ever felt, or have honours bestowed upon you that you could never have dreamed of, then keep stockpiling the Durex!!!

Fishface

Peace the sailor prays, caught in a storm on the open Aegean, when dark-clad clouds have hid the moon and the stars shine no longer certain;

Peace prays Thrace furious in war; peace prays the Mede with quiver richly adorned; peace Grosphus, that cannot be bought with gems nor with purple nor with gold.

It isn't treasure nor even the consul's lictor that can banish the soul's miserable tumults and the cares that fly unseen about the paneled ceilings.

He lives happily on a little, on whose frugal table shines the ancestral salt-dish, and whose soft slumbers are not carried away by fear or sordid greed.

.......................................................................

Care mounts even the brass-bound galley nor fails to leave behind the troops of horse, swifter than stags, swifter than Eurus when he drives the storm before him.

Joyful let the soul be in the present, let it disdain to trouble about what is beyond and temper bitterness with a laugh. Nothing is blessed forever.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus Ode II-XVI "Otium"




So, peace is to be valued above wealth or power, says Horace, and he is right. Peace and quiet are something you come to value when you become a parent, that is for sure. And now I have my otium between 9 and 12pm I thought to post something. Today was mine and Paul's first anniversary. He gave me a lovelly bouquet of flowers (I'm a sucker for flowers!)I returned the love by buying him a babmoo plant and some awsome biscuits, and a joke present that he will no doubt use as a wedge for a table or something. (See Paul's blog). We valiantly chose to venture to the West End to Soho's Cafe Fish for a fab meal avec l'enfant terrible, which had to be cut short due to the demands of said enfant. I was blessed with the Holy Trinity (vomit, piss AND pooh) during my meal!!! He has terrific comedic timing, my son. It was like acting in a Marx Brothers' film, where the pies are flying across the room but you've been hit so many times, you are the body who is writhing and floundering hopelessly on the custard and cream covered floor with no chance of ever getting to your feet!

At the end of the day there is fuck all you can do except clear the shit up, smile and say 'God bless us, we have a beautiful baby!' and beam as you do the walk of mortifying parental shame from loo to table, hoping that that the other punters will be dazzled by your smugg, though taut, artificial and slightly-disturbing-if-you-look-for-too-long smile, hoping they will not notice the matching streaks of vomit which adorn both front and back of your carefully chosen outfit for this special occasion. We fed and changed him but he proceeded to squeal till we hurredly paid and left, convinced that the one generous feed we'd brought and fed him was insufficient, as anxious new parents with a huge guilt complex do. When we exited the restaurant the little bugger fell into a deep slumber while we battled through crowds to secure a carton of formula and a find a bus home.

Never take your infant to your first anniversary dinner! It'll be an unmitigated disaster.

Once home, the real fishfaced grumpiness set in after his supper. In order to pacify the uppity little man, we dutifully abandoned the movie we were going to watch and settled for Dr Strangelove as it was on TCM. But the sound had to be turned down so low that Paul started to feel terribly tired and had to go to sleep.

There endeth the lesson: Horace is rightly in favour of otium over power and wealth but there are nights when otium is the last thing on your mind. Plus, I heard it was an ambivalent state: in order for otium to exist here, there must be war, famine and pestilence elsewhere. A bit like the pleasure/pain priciple. Well, welcome to the Hotel Slocoravdis. You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave without your keys and Oyster card, too much formula and two of everything.

Restaurant review: Dunno. Wasn't in there long enough and ate so fast i didn't taste anything. There was vomit and faeces.

Terra Firma

"The Rules According to Which the Thélèmites Lived

All their life was regulated not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their free will and pleasure. They rose from bed when they pleased, and drank, ate, worked, and slept when the fancy seized them. Nobody woke them; nobody compelled them to either eat or to drink, or to do anything else whatsoever. So it was that Gargantua had established it. In their rules there was only one clause:

DO WHAT YOU WILL!" Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel

And he does...


Well, His Majesty hath arrived, rosy and sweet as morning dew!
Who knows what love is unless they have gazed into their own infant's eyes. Infants are blind and innocent like angels and I am not being sentimental. They remind us of all that is pure and natural, all that we have forgotten and all that we will come to forget in time. They remind us of how harshly we have been judged and how harshly we judge others, forgetting that we all started on equal footing and were shaped by time and circumstance in our myriads of different ways. The world is a hurtful place and we have all become mistrustful. Infants remind us to forget all that negativity. New life is a positive force.

In him there is true free will, raw and untainted. His potential is vast and unknown and I hope as parents we don't stifle his spirit. For the moment we are content to simply gaze at him and let him be. We marvel at his every feature and pinch ourselves like unlikely lottery winners. We wonder how he will change and what other delights we are in store for.

Nikkos Odysseus Spencer Slocombe, welcome to the world and welcome to our arms. The gift of life is bestowed upon you so remember your manners and you will go far. Maybe not as far as Frank Turner the Wondering Minstrel but far enough to get away from your degenerate parents and their retarded friends. Be good, be better, be strong and don't be a wise ass. No one likes a wise ass.

Quadrant? Astrolabe? Sextant? Equinoctial Ring? Anyone?

“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.” Carl Schurz

Dammit! AO is upside down and wouldn't be turned round, despite the best efforts of the doctors at the hospital.
Time is hurtling towards Friday morning where I get sliced open like a mango and I get handed a baby. The only phrase running through my brain is “ How will I know what to do with it?”
"You'll be alright" Paul softly cooed, but I continue to swim in the waters of disbelief.
I still don't fully believe I'm going to be some person's mum. Even though I know I have a little ally inside me now I am having thoughts that it may rebel and we may become warring factions, i.e. it won't like us. Anyway, too late for that. I'm slowly leaving altruism behind as an out of date, damaging mode of thought.

There is nothing left to do, yet there is everything still to do. For one thing, I'll be an invalid for at least a week after the big C section, so boring but strenuous things like cleaning must be done. Shopping must be ordered and hair must be cut. Yes, it might sound strange but I've thought about it and it is not possible to go to the hairdressers with an infant who needs you to whop’em out to feed it every 5 minutes. Wholly unwelcome in any hair-cutting establishment!

As my anxiety mounts, I'm eating like it is my last supper and curiously, I am sleeping quite well. I am trying to keep calm and of course I do keep it together in front of people, but there are moments when I'm screaming inside "HELP! HELP! How do I do this?", I cry and roll my eyes up to the sky like some innocent creature (which I assure you I am not), as though asking for some deity to deliver me from imminent pain. Then I stop just as quickly as I started, resigned in the knowledge that no one can save me, no one will do this or anything else for me and so I kick my own metaphorical arse back into reality.

I just try to regulate my breathing and focus on thinking positively on breasts, yes, my breasts. If I can crack the breastfeeding, the theory reads, I'm half way to a happy, contented baby. Its all about food and security. Babies don't understand anything else, none of us do really. I've been forced by circumstance to relinquish thoughts of an idyllic home birth, the wonderfully heroic act of pushing a new life into the world is a shelved plan A. Tempering myself, I am embracing the lesser heroism of undergoing abdominal surgery. I know we have to suffer for our children, but my vigorous, ardent, Arian self wanted something more war-like, more valiant and, well, macho, 'ard, if you like, where the birth was concerned. Caesarean sections are cop-outs for pussies, (pun half intended), for vain females who want to preserve their perfectly tight quim or who wish to avoid incontinence, or for rich females who have an army of helpers in attendance to wait on them hand and foot while their wound heals, I thought, or at the very least, that it was the only option as a result of some unfortunate event. But a C section is what the doctors are recommending for me now. They should know. I've never done this before so what do I know. In them we trust.

Thus deflated, I try to forget the fact I will be neatly sliced and then sewn up again and am trying to focus on the person I am going to meet.
This person, a stranger, will be my legacy. We invest so much of ourselves in our kids that we also have to safeguard them from our aspirations as much as from our failings. Will we be loving enough, good guides and teachers and will we be appropriately ambitious? Will we be accommodating enough? Can we ensure some kind of future for them? The answer is that there is no answer. Only that, a vision is needed, we need to set an ideal in our sights. To have no ideas whatsoever about how you’d like to bring up your child, is to be braindead, to have no direction is foolish. I have learned that if you are going to exert some energy you need something to direct it towards or it might be better not to bother. No one likes the feeling of running and getting nowhere.

Well, that is enough. The centrifugal force that is my unborn child is challenging my bodily posture and so I have to get out of this uncomfortable chair. So long, friends and readers. I cannot say with any certainly when I will be back in front of this screen. But I can be certain that life as Paul and I know it is about to metamorphose into something peculiar. We are about to transported to Parentland where I hope we can retain some of what we call 'ourselves'.

Wish us luck!

Iceberg!

“At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.” Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Curse of the White Witch, cunting Narnia bollocks!!!!! 2 weeks without heat or hot water!!!! 8 months pregnant!!!!
Well, the boiler got fixed just before Christmas, on the proviso we didn’t use the washing machine because of the highly, ahem, imaginative plumbing rendered by the installers. Anyway (deep pregnancy yoga breath), it is being sorted as I type.

The run-up to Christmas was not easy, as the anniversary of Ash’s death was on the 21st Dec and it was a solemn day for me, full of traumatic memories and difficult thoughts to grapple with. It was a landmark, however, in the sense that life trundles on regardless and the measure of our character is shown in how we adapt and carry on living, I suppose. Only, sometimes I feel so low that I wonder if I really have moved away from the frightened, wracked and bruised person I was after Ash checked out of the Grizzly Living Motel. I feel guilty still about loads of things, including feeling that he is far better off where he is, combined with feeling awful for having moved on, having had luck enough to find a man who I’ve fallen totally in love with, and having fallen hopelessly pregnant at the drop of a hat! But like I recently wrote to a mate I went to school with, these good things only happen when the conditions are right. The forecast for my life’s course, I’ve always believed, involves hard fucking work. Happiness is not an automatic right. It is a gift you give yourself.

Zero hour is approaching. It has not been made easy by my sister’s illness. Again I will expound, thank the Gaya, God, Mohammed, Buddha for Paul. Without his support and total understanding I would not have survived this far. My sis had a crisis and ended up in hospital again before Christmas, and again on New Year’s Day evening. The NHS is fucking about with her medication and some complications arose the day before yesterday. She's ok now but that’s another story...

Most provisions are organized for The Arrival, which is just as well as am having mobility issues which prevents long shopping trips. Thank God for on-line shopping or we wouldn’t have been half as organized for the ‘festive’ period. That’s another joke, being organized. Well, I would if I could but I can’t. Manage to keep a thought in my head, that is. My brain has retracted as much in fear of what is coming as the fear of ending up like my other internal organs which have been crushed up against my esophagus. Dyspepsia. Nice. Aside from broken sleep nothing to report, unless horrendous stretch marks are of any interest to anyone! Doubt it.

Apart from the stuff (God, we are drowning in stuff!!) we are also having to consider Cargo’s future and spiritual well-being. At least one aspect is almost sorted, that of the Godfather(s)…EVAN! YOU AWAKE? YES IT’S YOU I’M TALKING ABOUT!!! One down. Have yet to ask Tiger Flea (Jeiff) if he would honour us. I hope he accepts because Daddy-O and I have our heart set on the comedy value of the Christening photographs owing to the huge disparity in height between the two chosen Godfathers!!!

As for Godmothers, I have decided that if it’s a girl she should have three, like Sleeping Beauty – slightly nauseating, I know.

That’s it for now. Ears have been bent enough. Checking out. …And a Happy New Year!!!! I actually mean it, you cynical bastards!!!

Ooh! Ooh! Another restaurant recommendation: Mogador Maroccan Restaurant, Portobello Road (no 300 and something, on the north end of Portobello, up by George's Fish bar, so get out at Ladbroke Grove). Totally affordable - about £20 per person. Best starter is the augergine and the seafood platter for two. For main course I recommend lamb with prunes and apricots - meat is melting off the bone - superb, the fish (seabass when we went, done on charcoal - heavenly), pheasant meat in filo parcel - exquisite but it is for those who like sweet tasting things. We didn't get as far as desert.