Janet (j4) wrote,
Janet
j4

To put one brick upon another

Content, yes, I remember. I seem to have stalled on the fact that I haven't written up the Bank Holiday weekend yet, and until I've done that I won't really feel I can go ahead and write anything else, which means all the great ideas I'd like to think I'm having are falling by the wayside. Maybe that's the best place for them, in among the bluebells and all the less poetic flowers, and the grasses, and the leaves that don't seem to belong to any plant in particular, and the turned earth where a bird or a worm has been, and the plastic debris of other people's lunches. There are so many things that if you started to list them all you would die before you had covered one square metre. Yes, even if you only counted those, or these. On the way home tonight all the things were raw at the edges, sun-scissored out of the sky, too three-dimensional for their own good. I wanted to take photos that focused on the solid, cooler things like the darkness between two twigs, a space which would fit in my palm like a stone from the beach; but you can't focus on spaces.

My photos never cut people's heads off, but they always feel slightly out of focus to me, as if I've lost track of what I was photographing halfway through. I probably have. It's hard to keep all the things in my head; one day it'll be nouns that get elbowed out, another day it'll be phone numbers, sometimes I'll trail frayed sentences behind me like ragged skirts or smoke, and some days what vanishes will be the ability to walk from one place to another without just wanting to sit down on the pavement and stop and sleep. But usually when I walk from home to work, or work to home, somewhere with a name so that it can exist for long enough for me to get there, the forwards motion seems to carry my mind along with it; my feet know what they're doing and my head is like this:
A Boy's Head

In it there is a spaceship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.  

And there is
Noah's ark,
which shall be first.  

And there is
an entirely new bird,
an entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.  

There is a river
that flows upwards.  

There is a multiplication table.  

There is anti-matter.  

And it just cannot be trimmed.
I believe that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.  

There is much promise in the circumstance that so many people have heads.

         -- Miroslav Holub
Only in my head at the moment there is a poem or two that I have carried around with me whose names I can't remember, and a plan to get rich by selling something that doesn't cost anything to produce, and words from an email a loved one sent me, and the sickly swerving feeling of nearly running over a pheasant, and a hatful of resolutions I won't keep, and a password and a PIN and other administrative bits of string, and a bit of the Sarabande from the Holberg Suite. And the things in my head make patterns, and sometimes I see shapes in the patterns: a weasel or a whale, a hawk or a handsaw, and ever so occasionally a thing that's all useful-shaped and shining and angled towards my hand. Sometimes it all comes together, baby. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about everything else.
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