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things I want to tell my children but might forget – winter walking

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Walking in streets

Wherever we decide to go, we will be likely to be walking down streets to get there.  Hopefully it will be a sunny day, either crisp and cold, if it’s winter, or a fresh feeling in the air if it’s spring, or a hazy sunshine if it’s summer, or a bit blustery if it’s autumn.  If it’s raining, we will all have umbrellas.

As I am writing it is winter, so we will think about winter walking in streets.  There are two main kinds of winter walking.  The first kind is on a bright sunny day with blue sky.  On bright sunny days, it is normally colder, so you get some startling sensations.  One is the sensation of the bright light dazzling your eyes.  It is true that there might be a brighter light in summer, but in winter your eyes may not have seen such brightness for a while, so it feels more intense.  Also, if there is a frost or snow, the bleached colours reflect the sun more, adding to its intensity.  Another sensation is the breathing in cold air through your mouth.  Winter time often means spending lots of time indoors, with only indoors air to breathe.  This makes the sensation of breathing in outside air startlingly distinctive.  It is like breathing in freshness and adventure and mystery and delight.  As well as the feeling of the cold air in your lungs, there is the sharp tingling of the cold air being breathed through your nose.  However warm the rest of you is, your nose is poking out and gets the full freezingness of the atmosphere.  Even if this is a little bit painful, it makes you feel alive.  And this distinction between warm and cold is something you can only feel in winter.  In the summer, your body is warm, the air is warm, your breathing is warm.  But in the winter, while you may be warm as toast, the air around you is cold as ice.  These changes in sensation are one of the most exciting things about winter walking.

The second kind of winter walking is on a day when the sky is filled with a blanket of cloud (this is called being ‘overcast’).  Unlike the crisp clear blue sky winter walking, overcast winter walking feels mysterious.  The cloud dampens all sounds and makes even your steps sound covert.  Overcast winter walking calls for quiet voices and holds a sense of waiting – will it snow?  You are huddled together with everyone under a winter duvet, but everyone is in their individual world wondering what will happen next.  Even if the temperature is the the same as crisp clear blue sky winter walking, the sensations of seeing, sniffing and breathing are all a little bit attenuated (this means being held back a little bit, or reduced).  This makes it just a little bit easier to go quickly going about your business, as if under the radar, always ready to make a run for home.

found poem, London, autumn 2014 – commentary

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So as you know I have been hesitating on whether to comment on poems or whether to leave them to their own devices.  On the one side is the risk of over-explanation (see ‘on leaving things unsaid‘), on the other is my memory of my sixth form project on metaphysical poetry where the explanations of teacher unlocked meaning and allowed me to take part in the poem in a way I would never have done otherwise.

A reader commented about the London found poem that ‘I don’t understand it but of course understanding isn’t a valid expectation to have’, and this has been resonating in the echo chamber of my mind ever since.  Is it true?  I think understanding is a wonderful thing to have.  Understanding brings illumination, and even though it will always be partial, this brings a powerful sense of connection, and warmth and excitement.

So here I am going to put a little bit about what the poem revealed to me, and why the things I saw in London on that adventure turned out to be in the poem.  Of course, my own understanding is only partial, but maybe it will provide some interesting light.  I will also show where I have changed the poem (in two places) since I originally posted it.

So first of all, I don’t have any agenda in the found poem discovery process.  All I do is be on the alert during my time in the city for fragments of text which stand out for some reason.  Then, when I get home, I let them all sit around until they form themselves into verses.  To be honest, I didn’t really think that the things I’d seen that day in London made a poem.  I felt a bit disappointed and I almost didn’t even embark on the discovery process.  But once I’d written out the bits of text (recorded on my camera), unexpected connections started to emerge.

What struck me straight away is that there is a theme of restlessness, and design, and home.  The theme of design is not a surprise because I was at the design museum, but what came together is the idea for me that our lives are our homes, and that we have a role to play in designing our life-homes.

From this, the verses started to sing to each other.  The first question unsettles us as to whether we have become stuck in a rut.  And then the answers also have that fretful quality.  I have now changed lines three and four around, as I realised that the ‘sheer frustration’ line is an answer to the companion line.

I then loved the mix of very everyday imagery (about the pencils), the idea of story versus limited options, the challenge of designing a home and the emotional power of that, and the fact that are homes-lives are also kinds of monuments of what we value, and the powerful question as to what others might make of our choices.

I was a bit hesitant about allowing the Charity text fragment into the poem; it felt a bit out of place.  But I also quite like the out-of-place things intruding.  Out-of-place things can put the mind into an interesting state of trying to discover a meaning.  So in time this stanza has made me dig.  The meaning that has arisen for me is that it links to our own possible poverty (of meaning, of aspiration) in our lives, and how that allows a dynamic where we need charity (also an old word for love) to connect us to abundance.

The poem then connects the idea of home and meaningfulness to belonging, which is expressed through the words about membership and uniting.  Our actions to address our inner restlessness may also need hard work (engine rooms), courage (bold moves), and experimentation (hop on hop off).  In these verses, the work of life-design is taking shape.

I also hesitated over and then relished the inclusion of the reference to the story of our fall from grace, because it also helps to point to where we may have sewed flimsy ‘clothes’ to cover up the nakedness we feel in our lives.  This question cannot be neatly tidied away, so it leaves a lasting vulnerability within the poem itself.

Before the poem closes, there is an appeal not to lose sight of children in our life designs.  Children embody our shared vulnerability, and this appeal then also calls us not to create lives that fail to acknowledge this.

The close then returns to mystery, to happenstance, along with searching and intentionality, which resonates back to the idea of design.  The first line is lived intensely in the present, emphasising the continuity of the process of life-home creation.  The second line evokes total commitment.

Originally the poem ended with the exhortation ‘Go to it’, but on reflection, it feels too heavy handed to address the reader in this way.  So this has been edited out, and instead the reader can identify with the speaker in the last lines.  Here the ‘you’ is less direct, and the reader then has more freedom to choose to join the speaker in the exploration of ‘everything’.

Since I have understood the poem in this way myself, I have enjoyed the sensation of life-homes being created, amended and adapted, of the importance of our vulnerability and the joy of a ‘hop on hop off’ approach to experimenting with new hobbies, ideas, reading, and so on.  I continue to enjoy the challenge of the first line, which reminds me to keep adventuring, to be brave to explore new things, and to be alert to places where my life-home habits and routines become confining.

reflections on blogging, one month review, part one, ‘scrapbook of fragments’

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Well, I’ve managed a more conventional timescale for my blogging review this time.  A month.

Unlike seventeen days, a month is enough to become aware of patterns in yourself, not knowings, hopes, delights, perplexities.  Over the last week, especially, I have become aware of ongoing questioning of some aspects of what I am doing, both in the critical-inquiry sense and also the curiosity sense.

However, it also turns out that a month is also long enough to create deeper reviewing thoughts than I expected.  So I am going to post this review in parts…  Here’s part one.

In my ‘about’ page, I talk about this being a ‘scrapbook of fragments’, and this is indeed exactly what extraplorer has turned out to be.  I have felt settled enough with everything to post it (the one thing I felt unsettled about I took down), but I am aware that it is all higgledy-piggledy everything together as if I’d tipped a box of myself out onto the floor.  This is definitely liberating for me in terms of what to write, but it also does make me feel slightly uneasy, like I should tidy it up.  I peek at other blogs and think, ‘hmmm drop-down boxes with categories might be nice’.  But then I also like the idea that a reader could have an exploratory experience because everything is not neatly labeled and put in filing cabinets.

The other aspect of the ‘scrapbook of fragments’ is that it does not have an overarching story.  I would quite like to make one of these, like, ‘this is who I am and poem a means this and thoughts b means that’, but I’m aware that my desire to impose this kind of order will set me up to conform to what will at some point turn out to be a limiting narrative arc.

In my original idea, I thought that my ‘scrapbook’ might hint at some kind of underlying unity, and I think I do have a sense of this.  One thing I love is the ‘cloud’ of tags, and I like to see it and think of the nice things that there are to write about in the world.  Admittedly I do err on the positive side with my tag words, so it is true that ‘darkness’, ‘death’, ‘sadness’ don’t feature in the tags although they do have a place in my writing.  But still, that is part of what I want to achieve with my work – to point towards beauty and truth and love, both despite and because of the hard things.  Besides, sad things get plenty of attention without me adding to it.

This leads me nicely on to part two, ‘discovering more beauty through writing’.

found poem, London, autumn 2014

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When was the last time you had a first time?

I forget where we were.

Desire or restlessness?
Sheer frustration inspires new design;

I can’t remember where we were, I mean.

Design solves problems.
Robin Day cleverly extended two short pencils lives
by joining them together
with a piece of metal tubing.

Every stone tells a story;
not a multiple choice.

I had a strong interest in housing,
the relationships between our homes and ourselves being a particular area of fascination.
However, this is an emotive subject and managing the enormity of the scope has probably been
my biggest challenge.

Bringing joy to everyday.

Now my heart turns to and fro,
In thinking what will the people say.
They who shall see my monument in after years,
And shall speak of what I have done.

everything that is letting happy in and other things life don’t give itself

Membership makes a difference.
Charity was born of the marriage of Poverty with Abundance,
and certainly it cannot come into existence
without the presence of the two,
side by side.

Unite in good cheer.
Engine rooms this way.
Make bold moves;
hop on hop off.

And the eyes of them both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they sewed fig leaves together,
and made themselves aprons.

take extra care of children

You never know what you are going to find.
I had to look at everything.

Notes on locations:  This is a more complex poem than the previous found poems. In order, the source texts are from: advert (Bakerloo line, Paddington, southbound), poster for concert, posters at Design Museum (DM), DM, overheard fragment of conversation, Robin Day studio replica at DM, advert, exhibition subtitle, James Christian quoted in DM (abridged), poster, Inscription on Hatsheput’s obelisk (DM), scrawled answer to question ‘What is good design?’ at DM, writing on a wall at Tower of London museum, quotation on fence around building site near Stonecutter Court, Starbucks poster, Sign at Tower Bridge, scrap of paper at DM, Routemaster Bus, Genesis 3:7 quoted at ‘Woman Fashion Power’ exhibition at DM, sign on tube, two fragments of David McCandless’s talk for the Royal Statistical Society, pattern on a scarf (DM).

inventory of subpersonalities – commentary

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The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people.  The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while.  My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me.  I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices.  I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project.  The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.

Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem.  Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.

A couple of notes on the poem:  The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant.  Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete.  Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting.  The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling.  This makes the subpersonalities relational.  You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list.  This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.

The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend.  Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly).  Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).