The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
‘The Rock of Doom’ by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.
From the ‘Perseus Cycle’ – http://beautiful-grotesque.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/perseus-cycle-edward-burne-jones.html
“Let these words touch you as my hands.” Twitter @HANKarcher
I was six or seven years old, at infant school, when my classmate Tony revealed his feelings for me; he gave me a box of chocolates. I remember my teacher being very puzzled and ‘keeping them safe’ in the stock cupboard.
“Are you sure they are for Helen?”
Alas, glasses and geekiness then ensued and I waited in vain for another Valentine’s day delivery at infant, junior or secondary school…Sob…
“My aim in this blog is to draw attention to beautiful, thought-provoking and inspiring words.” (October 2011) But perhaps Tony was right in thinking that there are some things that words can’t quite express. Love, in every sense of the word, is a deeply personal, intimate and extraordinary emotion – a tender, warm, passionate affection – beyond language or intellect.
Amidst the rose-shaped soap, fluffy pink pigs and DVDs of ‘Titanic’, I do not dare to suggest that I can label your emotions or tell you how to feel. I humbly offer a few suggestions of apposite and compelling words for Valentine’s Day.
To begin, a triplet of songs. The first is “heartfelt and nutty in equal measure”; Madness, ‘It Must be Love.’ The video alone will bring a smile to anyone’s face:
“I never thought I’d miss you half as much as I do
And I never thought I’d feel this way, the way I feel about you.”
The second couplet is The Cure live; a whimsical pairing of the melancholy ‘Catch’:
“Yes I sometimes even tried to catch her
But I never even caught her name”
and the effervescent ‘Why Can’t I be You?’:
“You’re so gorgeous, I’ll do anything!
I’ll kiss you from your feet
to where your head begins!
You’re so perfect!
You’re so right as rain!
You make me, make me, make me,
make me hungry again.”
The lovely e.e. cummings, of course, offers a myriad of stunning and consummate lines:
“love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star”
‘being to timelessness as it’s to time’
‘Dancer’ by Joan Miró
or, from perhaps his most famous poem, [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
where nothing at all needs saying”
‘It is Born’, Pablo Neruda
‘Red and black’ by Mark Rothko
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Kurt Vonnegut
Pity the poor semi-colon, misunderstood and unloved, like Turner prize exhibits,
“more powerful, more imposing, more pretentious than a comma” Gertrude Stein
They are only trying to do their job – to connect two independent clauses.
If you are still intimidated, take a look at http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon It will reassure you that, like all of us, semi-colons only need a little TLC.
I rather like them; they make me feel special.
So I was delighted to discover a poem by James Arthur entitled, ‘In Defense of the Semicolon’:
“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships
that only idiots need defined by punctuation.”
— Richard Hugo
“But it’s a reassuring logic that rivers freeze
because your hemisphere has rolled away from the sun,
that cities rest because there must be time for resting.
I could never deny it, or disown my desire
for the certainty of home, for mills and reservoirs
I always come back to. I’m thinking of a girl
pinning butterflies through her bangs, the first woman
I ever asked to marry me. She was slight and strange;
her brother lived in England, and was dying there.
Years after our split, she and I met in an open-air restaurant
crowded with chatter and cigarettes. I was still very young,
still afraid of being abandoned at the terminal.
She no longer ate; she had lost teeth and some hair,
she said. There were pale islands of skin
where the butterflies had perched. The waiter came around
to refill our coffee, a phone was ringing, and fifty feet away
streetcars jostled like dusk nudging against darkness;
even between those two there are gangways:
moveable bridges ship to shore, small therefores.”
However faint and small, there is always a connection, a gangway, a puncture mark – across hemispheres, memories, darkness – between you and me.
Winnats Pass, Derbyshire http://ispilledthebeans2.blogspot.co.uk
The charming photograph above, belies the true nature of this landscape. The name ‘Winnats’ means ‘wind’s gates’, and the road that winds through the pass is both narrow and steep (a 1 in 5 gradient).
Whilst I enjoy the gentle, rolling Cheshire plains (with a stop off for cake and coffee in Knutsford), it is the gnarly, stubborn Derbyshire peaks and the wild Yorkshire moors that really do it for me. Enough of the green and pleasant. Get me on t’moors with some jagged rocks, lowering clouds, blighted grass and crazed-looking sheep.
Well, until it gets chilly…
This probably says rather too much about my personality.
So I shall gently lead you to the quote from ‘Wuthering Heights’ that I find in my mind most often,
“I have no pity! I have no pity! The more worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails!
gesturing you in the direction of Ms Bush:
and then I will abandon you to your own thoughts…
'Night sky' southsidehappenings.blogspot.com
“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.” Rita Mae Brown
I’m having a bit of a ‘Prof Brian Cox’ thing with the night sky at the moment. I keep stopping in my tracks, open-mouthed, and exclaiming, like a madwoman, about the moon, stars, clouds. In fact, I’m quite fascinated by the sky, day or night. Recent morning clouds have been particularly spectacular. Even today’s grey clouds steaming across the heavens are inspiring. Must be my age…
Take a look at The Cloud Appreciation Society website cloudappreciationsociety.org/ if you don’t believe me. There are clouds there to satisfy even the most jaded palate. Natural, harmless and free recycling at its best.
“At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them. Read our manifesto and see how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking’ “
No-one enjoys the company of the professional whingers, the emotional vampires who suck all the joy out of life. You know who I mean. But although I am a cheery optimist, a ‘glass is half full’ kind of gal, in general, I am also a realist. As ‘Noah and the Whale’ put it so poignantly:
“blue skies are coming but I know that it’s hard” (Blue Skies)
As the name of my blog suggests, I respect the light and the shade, the clouds and the silver lining. This may explain my somewhat late appreciation of Leonard Cohen. A friend at school was obsessed by ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, whereas I found it far too gloomy. Nowadays, I admire Cohen’s sensitivity, honesty and insight. So thanks again to the inspiring gerryco23.wordpress.com/ for introducing me to ‘Anthem’,
“a reprimand to… life’s complainants, eroticists of disappointment, lovers only of what’s flawless and overwrought.” Howard Jacobson
Forget chasing “somewhere over the rainbow” for an impossible perfection; “There is a crack in everything”. But it is through these rifts, breaches and faults that the real beauty of the universe is revealed: a hopeful, tender and honest glimpse of our humanity, “warts and all”. It is the flaw that guarantees it is the genuine article.
So enough of wishing for blue-sky perfection. Sit back and relax, with Leonard and I, and enjoy the language of the thunderclouds…
The Legend of St. Eustace
“Words are these quite amazing things. Who would have thought that 26 assorted symbols, and some dots and dashes, could express all that we know and can ever know?”
So says my Uncle Stephen.
And words are amazing. They express what we think, but more than that, they form and transform our thoughts and feelings. Our ideas and emotions have to be channelled through the words we know. I believe that if you think in a different language, you think in a different way. The French equivalent of ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’ is, ‘Put that in your pocket and put a hanky over it’! Far more civilised. And you can’t play ‘footsie’ in German, it is ‘fusserotik’, which sounds much more thrilling!
Sadly, I’m not bilingual nor a linguistic expert. I did, however, work for a couple of months in France and found expressing myself in another language both frustrating and exhausting. In fact, I could not be myself. I had to be someone else; someone who expressed certain thoughts and feelings simply because I didn’t have the skill or knowledge to be myself. An inability to express myself in words meant an inability to BE myself. Very philosophical. Very unsettling.
But back to Uncle Stephen. He sent me a lovely email in response to my blog and included a list of books that have meant something to him. The one I wish to mention in this post is ‘Riddley Walker’ by Russell Hoban, “a post-apocalyptic tale set in a future where dogs have become humanity’s enemies and history is a rubble of allegory”.
The websites gerryco23.wordpress.com/ and ocelotfactory.com have thoughtful posts about the many threads that run through the book, including King Lear, The Fall, Punch and Judy and the legend of St Eustace.
It is the language of the novel (appropriated by the Mad Max film ‘Beyond the Thunderdome‘) that is so intriguing: a ‘”smashed mess” of English “that, like the cities, knowledge and technology of the 20th century, has been been blown apart by nuclear catastrophe”.
The central character, a twelve year old boy, who finds meaning in stories and actions, says:
“I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you.”
Only words.
Our past, present and future contained in twenty-six assorted symbols.
“Words in the air pirnt foot steps on the groun for us to put our feet in to”
In Two Minds by Kolyn Amor
“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.” Alain de Botton
I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person but there are some things I really struggle with. If you need directions, I will invariably send you in the opposite direction to that which you should be going in. And my eyes glaze over at any attempts to explain algebra to me. I just don’t care what x is equal to. It’s happy being x. Leave it alone.
I retained enough knowledge of physics and Russian (yes, really!) to pass exams, but then my brain dumped all information it considered to be useless. Now I can’t ask my way to Moscow, but can recite ‘Jabberwocky’ off by heart! The mind is a very strange thing!
Philosophy has been one of those things I’ve found difficult to grasp. But I’ve read ‘Porcupines: A Philosophical Anthology’ by Graham Higgin and dipped into the gorgeous ‘The Philosophy Book’ by DK Publishing in an attempt to broaden my mind.
So may I take the liberty of drawing your attention to a website and accompanying Twitter of a philosophical nature for your delectation and delight. Firstly, alaindebotton.com/, a stimulating meander into the realms of literature, religion, love, beauty, travel and work. Some harmless self-promotion too but it is so charmingly and tastefully done! Who can resist ‘The Architecture of Happiness’ or ‘How Proust can Change your Life’ ?
Secondly, alaindebotton on Twitter – full of delicious, pithy thoughts to accompany your day, like the one at the beginning of this blog.
And in a brazen act of self-advertisement, have I mentioned that I am now available on Twitter too?!
“Words are also deeds.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
James Joyce by Barrie Maguire
View from a bridge, Florence
This blogging lark is a bit more complicated than I thought! There has been a bit of a gap because I thought that my attempt hadn’t worked. But hey! Here I am in cyberspace!
Thanks again for visiting my blog where I hope to explore what happens when words collide.
I’m only a beginner, so please bear with me!
sedsemperamor 