Words that sing

In the supermarket
I turn to pick up some tomatoes
and find my feet
pivoting in a dance step.

Later on, choosing a bag of sugar, I notice
they’re doing it again - one foot
skimming the outline of the other,
rhythmically crossing
in front
behind.

And I realise that, this weekend
I have danced further than I have walked
and my feet are enjoying
their new,
less pedestrian,
vocation.

Indeed my feet feel alive -
tingling softly with a happiness
that seems to have very little to do
with what my mind is thinking. So
wherever I go, I arrive on a cushion
of happiness
(like a hovercraft on air)
which makes it hard to be sad, or daunted.

A strange feeling -
to walk around on happy feet
and feel cheerfulness spread up my body
as if every tiny cell is dancing
to some unheard music.

The idea of a learning curve suggests smooth and inexorable progress in acquiring new skills or knowledge… and completely misses out all the dips and plateaux and sudden leaps that tend to happen in real life.

Last night I was dancing tango at a milonga (i.e. a tango-dancing party ), and got a bit demoralised because I didn’t seem able to do anything I’d been so proud of myself for learning lately. I had started to feel I was, though not an expert, past the beginner stage and able to dance a creditable tango. But for some reason it just wasn’t working. Despite trying to follow, I kept misreading what I was being asked to do and either pausing or heading off in the wrong direction. And I was frustrated, and felt fairly sure my partner was frustrated too.

It was made harder by the fact that I felt very conspicuous - the first dance I did I was one of three couples in a room of where about 50 people were watching, and the other dancers were all really really good! I’m not normally self-conscious, but I’m at such an early stage with tango that it did get to me a bit. The fact that I knew very few men at the milonga and so didn’t get invited to dance very often didn’t help much either!

But I’m getting better at this learning lark, and recognised a dip when I saw one. And so I refused to let myself be discouraged, and compared my abilities to previous times when I’d felt bad about my skills, rather than the times when I’d briefly felt I knew what I was doing.

On the way home I deliberately expressed my frustration about not dancing as well as I had hoped to. Which was useful, because people explained that dancing at a milonga is often harder than dancing in a class because there is so much less space, which means that the leader often ends up having to do unexpected things (e.g. stopping to wait until there’s space) that wouldn’t be necessary in a class. Which helped too - clearly dancing like that in milongas is a slightly different skill I need to work on!

And finally, the eternal advice “get back on the horse again”.

So enough blogging - I’m off to another milonga tonight!

The dusty attic of the human mind
is choked with a sprawling, cobwebby pile
of junk accumulated over the years.

A cramped glass stiletto
(with a mouse
trapped in its toe)
and a pair of red shoes with an evil leer.

A frog croaking wistfully,
lost in the gilded circle
of a princess’ heavy crown.

An overflowing porridge pot and
a golden apple, marked with a
bite gone brown.

A donkey skin which is stained with blood,
and a pair of
- amputated -
silver hands.

A few pomegranate seeds scattered like red tears
on the lid of an empty box with a bleeding key
A broken laurel branch carelessly jammed
Into a dusty jar of magic wands.

From under the heap, a woman emerges
brushes poppy seeds and salt grains from her body,
revealing its (non-symbolic) naked glory.

She stretches cramped limbs,
ties back her flowing hair,
and heads off to create a more original story.

This post responds to One Single Impression’s prompt of “myth”. It picks up on a theme in an earlier post - that some myths imprison rather than inspire, particularly the myths about women.

The myths or fairy tales referenced here are all about women in some way or other, and have often been used to suggest that women’s domestic or passive sexual qualities are the only ones that matter, and that curiosity, desire and independence have no place. Some are less familar or oblique references, so I’ve provided links below.

Some of these stories feature in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women who Run with the Wolves, which digs into the heart of these stories to find a much more affirming message for women. (For example, many of the interpretations of Bluebeard are judgemental about the woman’s curiosity and lack of self restraint in opening the door, rather than applauding her courageous determination to find out the truth.) I really enjoyed that book and found a lot of resonances in her interpretations. Here I’m thinking of the surface meanings which are much more apparent in our societies.

Photo - Junk by Carrie Always at flickr.

Links:

Cinderella
The red shoes
The frog prince
Crown - any story where the ideal is to be a princess!
The magic porridge pot
Golden apples appear all over the place e.g. Atalanta, the judgement of Paris
Donkey skin - for a heart-breaking retelling of this story, I really recommend Robin McKinley’s Deerskin
The handless maiden
Persephone
Pandora
Bluebeard (see also my earlier poem “Opening the Door“)
Daphne
Magic wands - thinking mostly of Cinderella again!
Seeds and salt - tales like Vasilissa or Rumpelstiltskin where the heroine must sort huge piles of grain.

The condor soars above the ruins where sandstone glows like fire 
And infinite blueness haloes the idols that inspired a lost empire.

And the condor soars above the ruins and rubbish on city streets
Where barefoot children play with stones and pester tourists for sweets.

The condor soars over jagged peaks caught by glaciers in a serpentine net
That shone white-bright against the sky - the continent’s proud coronet.

And the condor soars over jagged peaks, now denuded of their icy crown
Now only rocks and gravel remain to show where the glaciers once ground.

The condor soars past hills which once were made of silver and gold
The land of nobles bright with diadems, skilfully hammered and scrolled

And the condor soars past hills whose gold was shipped away to Spain
Now dusty relics in darkened museums are all that still remain

The world is changed. This is no longer the realm of Tiwanaku and Inca
Yet still the condor soars above its ancient Andean finca.

 >>>>>>>>>>>>

This poem is a response to Rick Mobbs’ inspiring picture above. As I’m currently living in South America, I was struck by the many shapes which seemed evocative of the artefacts found in Tiwanaku and Inca ruins, as well as the image of the condor that is so characteristic of the Andes.

And yet the lower part of the image seemed to suggest decay, and made me think of other sights that are sadly just as characteristic as the Andes - the consequences of poverty, climate change and past imperialism. And so I wrote this sonnet, which contrasts the past and the present.

(Finca is a Spanish word meaning the land that is someone’s property.)

Sometimes life just strips you bare
With cruel words or thoughtless actions
The barren ache of a lover’s “don’t care” 
The flaying words of heightened passions.

Sometimes life just leaves you huddling
Turning your back on life and light
Hugging to yourself the sorely troubling
Anguish of your lonely plight.

Sometimes life sends you nights spent alone
Fighting the nightmares with hands cut raw
Staring into darkness as blank as bone
As your thoughts obsessively worsen the sore.

Sometimes life, like some mystic rite
Demands that you strip yourself totally bare
And face the darkness of your inner night
To discover the limits of what you can bear.

Sometimes life, through suffering, shows you
That nude can be both strong and frail 
As, through exposure, your courage grows, you
Learn naked warriors can still prevail.

This was inspired by the monday mural at poefusion - the evocative image above uploaded to photobucket by ncajayon4.

Some days walk slowly past.

Limping,
or dawdling,
or just plain tired.

On the flat path,
yesterday’s pebbles become
daunting obstacles
(remember -
it’s much, much easier
to trip over a molehill
than a mountain.)

Nowness is diluted.
Vividness muted.

Nothing is wrong and yet
each moment is heavy
with the absence of 
the active joy 
of everything going just right.

Muscles miss the effort of climbing
as much as the easy swing of descending.

Time dawdles from day to day
wrapped around bright flashes of
things that insist on being noticed.

But these slow times
are just as much a part of life
as the roaring torrent of ecstasy and heartbreak that is love,
or the surge of adrenaline in a body facing times of stress and change.

Patience is as necessary as courage.
And the flat path is also
part of the journey.

So I walk on
through the ambling days. Certain
that interesting times are ahead.

I’d forgotten that this week’s Totally Optional Prompt was to write about tempo… but maybe it was working away in the back of my mind, because I wrote this, and only after writing it realised that this was very appropriate to the prompt!

Sometimes I wonder - “Just how we will meet?”
In the elegantly intimate embrace of tango?
Clumsily colliding on some unfamiliar street?
Or both reaching out for the same plump mango?

Voices finding harmony in spontaneous duet?
Or a very civil handshake in an office’s formality?
Wrestling with each other in a martial artist’s sweat?
Arguing about the state of affairs bizarrely called normality?

Defying fear of strangers on the underground at night?
Or comfy on a friend’s introductory settee?
Surfing in the tangled web of true and false bytes?
But there’s no point guessing where and when it will be!

One day it will seem that our souls were born to merge.
But only by chance will our paths at last converge.

A sonnet inspired by Sunday Scribblings’ prompt to write about a chance encounter. It’s both serious and light-hearted, which is very much the way I’m taking my search for a new partner!

I’ve been reading Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness (for some of the key arguments, see this TED.com video), and thinking about the idea that our level of satisfaction depends on our expectations. 

Gilbert quotes a startling experiment that shows how important our expectations can be. One group of participants was promised a reward (e.g. £3) for their participation, but then told that there was a mistake and they would receive less (say £2). The second group were promised a lower amount (e.g. £1) and received exactly what they were promised. A rational argument would say that those receiving £2 were still better off and so should be happier than those receiving £1. But in practice the first group were more unhappy than the second - because they didn’t receive what they had expected to receive. One group thought themselves £1 better off than nothing, the others felt they were £1 worse off than £3.

It’s one of those ideas that starts to apply itself to all sorts of areas of my life and thinking.

One of the most difficult aspects of my current work situation is that people feel that they were promised more (by my predecessor) than I am able to give them. So unfortunately what I am able to offer, although generous if considered objectively, is deeply unsatisfying to them because it’s less than they were expecting.

It’s also relevant to relationships. Before my last relationship, I was mooching along fairly happily as a single person, having been single for several years. Yes, I wanted a partner, but my life was interesting and fulfilling and overall I was happy. During the relationship I became used to all sorts of things that were better than in my single situation - having my self-image reinforced by compliments and attention, opportunities to discover new things, someone who was always there (by mobile if not in person) when I wanted to talk, and all sorts of other benefits. I didn’t need all those things - I’d got on perfectly happily without them. But their sudden withdrawal was a shock. And while I knew that I could be happy as a single person, it took me some time to get back to that state of mind, because I had expected that the relationship level of comfort would continue. Again, it was harder to cope with the withdrawal of something than it was to cope with its absence.

It also occurs to me that this may be why some religious people view the life of an atheist as necessarily miserable. If you have been promised, and come to believe, that you will meet your loved ones again, it must be difficult and painful to accept the idea that you will not. Whereas if you always felt that death was final, you simply don’t feel the same level of disappointment, because you never expected anything more. (Obviously the belief in heaven can help to make the initial grief easier to bear, and will continue to do so so long as you continue believing that. But if that belief ever falters, dealing with the withdrawal is more painful than it would have been to deal with the initial grief without this apparent consolation.)

My experience of having never believed in heaven is therefore vastly different from the experience of someone who has believed in heaven and has ceased to do so. The de-converted seem to get used to the disappointment, with time (Gilbert also argues strongly that we also tend to strongly underestimate how well we our coping mechanisms help us deal with future calamities). But a religious person who still believes in heaven will, if they try to imagine what it would be like not to believe in heaven, is likely to completely overestimate the misery this would cause a deconvert, let alone a life-long atheist like myself.

Somewhere in the blogosphere I came across someone describing how angry they felt with someone who told a child that there was no Santa Claus, feeling that shattering the child’s illusions was cruel. But I was mystified why they were angry at the person that shattered the illusion - rather than the person who set up the inevitable disappointment by telling that child the original lie that there was a Santa Claus. The experience of living in a world without Santa Claus is completely different depending on whether we were told that a world with Santa Claus was possible.

So what does this mean in practice? It should be reasonably straightforward to avoid making promises that can’t be kept in a work situation, and I’ve definitely had a very clear lesson in why this is so important. It’s harder in relationships - because the nature of a long-term relationship is the hope that it will continue, and the mutual commitment to trying to do so. But still, I think being aware of this will help in future relationships - to know that the horror with which the mind contemplates being single from within a relationship is not a realistic perception of the actual experience of being single.

The mind does work strangely at times - but it does help to get to know its peculiarities!

You stare with visionary wonder at a sudden flash of insight
>>And a new light of knowledge starts to glitter in your eyes
>>Doorway to the quest that beckons you towards a mystic prize.
Your eyes are newly gifted with a special, higher sight,
>>Which can never be deceived by humans’ incessant lies.
From you their masks cannot conceal their weaknesses or fright
For in their auras their stories are written in patterns of rainbow light,
>YAnd you are gifted to cure the world with the truth you realise!

But humility and healthy doubt were banished by your insight
>>And obsessive is the light that glitters in your eyes.
>>To be a healer, not to heal, is what you truly prize. 
The brightness of the vision has overwhelmed your sight,
>>With radiant temptation to believe these flattering lies.
Leaving you so cruelly trapped between pride, hope and fright,
That you lash out at any attempt to question the vision’s light.
> Oh, how much more hurt will you do, before you realise?

This poem responds to a prompt at sundayscribblings - to write a poem about vision. For me one of the interesting things about a really powerful vision is what you don’t see - the brighter the light you stare at, the less you can see anything else. (There’s an interesting discussion about the links between egotism and mysticism at Cafe Philos.) 

Those who know my blog well will already be familiar with the experiences that are behind my response to this prompt - I used to go out with someone who believed his energy reading gave him special insight into me. But what he saw was utterly dominated by his fear and projection… and so his “vision” was deeply destructive. 

I am not denying outright that people can have powerful and meaningful personal insights… that would be to commit the reverse error myself. But I think there is a very real danger that insights that are taken too seriously can blind us to other people’s insights, causing us to close off from the questioning that opens the mind. And so, even if the original vision had an element of truth, its effect, in the end, is to block our minds to the truth.

(Photo by jhhwild at flickr.)

Thank god for animal stories. While a
Kangaroo faces a competition enquiry, a
Giraffe leads a dash for freedom in Amsterdam,
And tigers select a new coach.
In politics, a TV chef loses the chicken vote,
Which inspires a turkey’s slow motion coup.
Closer to home, a kind crocodile birdman is to raise funds
To ensure a new partner is found by a golden eagle 
And that the whale meet ends with peace agenda.
Surprisingly, biometrics picks up the penguins.

This is a found text poem in response to a prompt at readwritepoem, based on newspaper headlines that I came across today that either genuinely or apparently have a connection to animals.