031. I'm not myself

I've loved the inspiring piece for today's since I first saw it on day 11, carefully copied into my inspirations OneNote notebook, waiting for me to come up with something suitable... I'm not sure I can do it justice, but I will try anyway, the piece is Mindy Brays "Almost Dismissed", mine a savaged self portrait. Self image has been a topic of discussion with my friends just recently, so it felt like the right time for an attempt.

Don't, it stings. Her brain ticks, wheels within weals.
Let me help
No, it's your fault. You wanted to leave.
Sighs, almost. Maybe the next time. You are centripetal.

030. Skirts

Today, so much choice, I didn't know where to start, and so I procrastinated half the day away... head in novel, snoozing in bed, watching repeats on DVD... More playing with the dozens of lily photographs, more interesting shapes as they fade, dessicate.
Finally I got it whittled down to Beth Stone's "Wedding Bells are Ringing", as it occurred to me that despite the bells ringing at 7am, 7pm, sometime around teatime on weekdays and Saturdays (and a lot more on Sundays); I have never seen a wedding at the Evangelical church across the road. Pfff... bury my head back in the books... pick out the wisdoms that I will continue to ignore.

"I am happy on my own until I hear other people enjoying themselves, and have to compare myself to them. If there were no other people I wouldn't feel alone" - Steph Swainston; The Year of our War

"Wisdom never comes from staying at home and avoiding unhappiness. In order to become wise you must go out into the world and be tossed about in its storms, stripped bare by terrible experiences and confused by good ones" - Steph Swainston; The Modern World

Steph Swainston on Amazon here

029. Restrictions

Sabin Aell has some fantastic photographs on the beauty of everyday things - if you haven't seen this series I won't spoil it by telling you what the image is, but urge you to get over there and have a look. I love the restricted colour palette of her pieces, and so I've paired it with a limited colour piece of my own; a not-an-everyday object, the less-than-obdurate stone-scapes of the Burren. A longer poem of mine inspired by the Burren landscape is at The Camel Saloon.

It is more exciting, when it shouldn't be                        

at all. I can't explain the pull                                                  

any other way, it's not me                        

that is holding the thread taut, not                                                  

this time, don't you agree                        

028. Dancing

I'm putting together Edition #7 of the >language>place blog carnival at the moment, with the theme unwritten language / unnamed places; and I have been browsing through some submissions on the subject of the sound of words and the language of music. Very appropriate then that I choose Dorothee's "Dancers" image for today...

The waves dance, the tide is coming in and they push each other on to greater feats of daring, reaching further and further up the beach, dazzling each other in sparkling splashes, iridiscent in the glowing northern sunlight. And oh, the sun, its light flirting with the water, its warmth felt bodily, pressing against the sea in the dance. Over and over, the rhythm of the folding, spurling water. Sun, oxygen, water; drawing the red rust jewels from the abandoned axle, and who knows how that ended up here being rocked in the slamming beat of the waves, which unfortunate tractor met its end on a nearby coast? But it is all one now, the swirling shimmy, a primal waltz. Fall in with me.

027. Veils

I am tired today, and my mind is foggy. The perfect simplicity of Nicolette's "Corner" is my inspiration, and I paired it with an image called "Light Curtain". It was a visual poem, the original can be seen here, but today the words don't feel right. The last couple of pieces I've done have included some fiction, but I am not 100% satisfied with them, and yet, they were the best I could come up with at the time, which is probably why I am not satisfied... vicious circles... like the mosquito bites on my arms... just at table top height , so irritable when typing.

                             I showed you
                                                          everything that was behind the veil
                             but, now,
                                                          I think we both prefer that
                             I put it back.

026. Fragile

Today's post is inspired by two of my favourite-so-far participants in the 100 days project, and a newbie. I know there is so much to see in the project, and with the type of pieces I am doing I do have a bias towards the visual artists when posting; I hope to be able to use others words more to inspire me in the future, but here is a joint attempt...
Stand up Sina (Day 26 - just gorgeous) and Catherine (Iceland slipping through my thoughts, and allowing me to bring out this picture of twigs growing alongside a waterfall); and a hand-clap to George Sebastian-Coleman (Conversations 3) for the following words of wisdom.
Woman: Routine. Routine kills everything. When you date, the other person is the thing that makes things special. When you marry, they're just part of the everyday.

He will not take a risk to be with me because sparks fade, he says. But, oh, how fragile is his world, their world if it must be protected from the real world? It is spring, he cannot help but send out those tendrils, seeking sweetness and lightness and fun and escape. They look so pretty, so hopeful, I don't want to yank them up and put them on the compost pile, but I know it is easier now than to hew at a thickened trunk. Unless, like me, he is a baobab; hollow insides waiting for a glut of water to ride out the parched seasons.

025. U/S bahn

Rifling through other peoples blogs, sticky fingered, I happened on the image below from Bruce Spear, and stuck, happy to be reminded of the recent weekend in Berlin. Although wandering round like a tourist, with my camera dangling from my wrist (as I was a tourist) for some reason I did not take a picture of the ubiquitous patterned glass in the U-Bahn trains, although I wanted to. Thinking of the U-Bahns going over ground and the S-Bahns going underground, and trying not to think of Wombles. Think of journeys, fictions. The vanishing point of  a railway platform.

Kicking at the floor with the thickened rubber at your toes. You would pace if you thought you could get away with it. I look at my feet too, between my knees, the metal grille chair pushing puckers into the backs of my thighs. Your train will come first, the signs say, in 6min, a plastic yellow glow against the black background. 9min for me. Dazed. I would have thought we should have something to say to each other. But then I thought what we did should have felt more, more of something. Intimate, yeah, that's the word. My head hangs and you don't lift it. The air pushes ahead of the train and we fumble for each others hands. Warm still, your fingers. You stand at the doorway as it slides past you shut. Make a "Call You" sign and then you slide away. If my train had come first you would have made me get on it. You are curving smaller, out of reach, into the dark. You are on the circle line. How long will I have to wait for you to come around again?

024. Cinderella

Marcus Speh's collaboration with his daughter has led to some deft myth-making in the retelling of fairy stories, and I picked his Day 13 post as today's inspiration; cheating slightly again by drawing on a Fairy Tale collection I did in 2010. Perhaps that is part of being a magpie, getting the shiny things out of the cupboard and looking at them again, maybe in a new light, maybe displaying them for new friends to see.

In the old days, they wanted me to make then look rich and pretty so they could catch the eye of someone rich, naive and influential. Simpler times, blonde ambition reached no further than catching their prince and having their dream day in the whitest frilliest of dresses with the envious crowds looking on.

It's easier for them now of course, the thirst for fame is as strong, if not stronger than the hunger for a fairytale wedding. Easier for me too, even those that still believe in me I send away from my door. 

I am getting too old to be moved by all of those bright eager faces, and besides the fad these days is for self-belief, not belief in magic. If they don't have that in spades the reality shows will grind them up anyway, just as surely as the days of domestic boredom drove the Cinderellas to become manipulative politicking courtiers.

Now, where's an old woman to get a nice cup of tea from? I call out to Charlotte, still as ugly as ever, to bring me refreshments and hand me the remote control. Britain's Got Talent is just starting...

023. Here be dragons

I was inspired today (again) by Catherine Singer's Icelandic pictures (I have to ration myself or half of my posts would be on Iceland too); and also Barbara Laucius's beach pictures, of broken down driftwood, entitled Beach Worn. Taking Staffa (day 21) into the mix also, along with the eye-shaped curves in Carianne Garside's days 20-22, and admiring the word "basalt", the heaviness and solidity of it, the shiny wet blackness...

  

      Breaking the surface, basalt scales
            drip, dully sheened; sun warming
                  anthracite back. Flex wing muscles,
                        expecting a geological grinding, but
                              silent. Earthbound in the step-off
                                    point between sea and layered airs,
                                          leap to regain fluidity. Somersaults
                                                of pewter, tumbling your buildings.

022. Flowers

With Valerie Brodie's unfurling unfolding rose in my minds eye, I bought flowers in the market this morning. The cobblestones and pavements are at last beginning to be replaced after the market square has been half dug up for what seems like months. Fine grit gets into my open toed sandals. Orange lilies for Seville. Which led me back to Katie Bentley's Rose Cathedral. Growth and death; beauty and religion. My thoughts are too convoluted for straight words today.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these [...] Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. 

This bible quote seems a fine exhortation of passivity, and is followed up with the suggestive phrase "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," with its hints that thinking about tomorrow today allows evil to spill over into the future. For God's sake little children, do not think about the future or you will ruin it.

To be blunt, it's not pleasant to think that Seville is a corpse, that we will all be corpses in the future; but not thinking about it seems to be a case of wilful self-delusion. Blind faith if you will.