Hope

Novel’s gone off on its first round of submissions. All the big guns. They were given a deadline to make up their minds – which is today. So today I dare not venture anywhere near my yahoo inbox. Then, after lunch, I came across some very appropriate lines from Byron’s journal on the subject of hope –

Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure – worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious – does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow – a fear of what is to come – a doubt of what is – a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? Why is this? I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from a precipice – the higher, the more awful…

Walking by the sea

Walking by the sea. I took off my shoes and let the waves wash over my bare feet. Mills, my father’s whippet, was with me. Now and again I raced her over the sand. She would shimmy past me like a rugby wing back avoiding a tackle. I needed to feel like a teenager again. Needed to reassert a vigorous ongoing relationship with the soil underfoot. Finally I sat on some rocks and watched the waves.

       When I turned inland I saw two moving white columns in the sky which at first glance I thought was smoke. The two encroaching formations rippled into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. My vision blurred for a moment. Then I realised I was witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds.  The abstract shapes they formed were flawless . I stood with my hands on my head as the birds tapered into a long undulating line which gently vanished behind the surface of things. The same thing happens when people die - they vanish behind the surface of things.

Magdalene

   I spent the afternoon in the church of Santa Trinita pretending to be a middle-aged English woman with a guilty secret lodged in her breast. Would all those sacred images have thawed her brittle crust and inspired in her a longing to let out the truth? The wooden Magdalene might have shaken her. The idea of Magdalene with the vessel of consecrated oil is fascinating: it's a metaphor perhaps of the female's power to heal, an emblem of her sexuality and its powers of replenishment and protection, though the Church would not see it quite that way. And despite her wizened corroded appearance the Magdalene in Santa Trinita still has her healing balm.

My failure to win her back (part two - and again never sent)

The almond trees are in flower - the white flowers like snow blossoming from scarlet buds with tiny thumbprints of golden pollen on the anthers - and something of their wistful haunting beauty now hangs lazily over the city at night. As I write laughter rises up from the bars down below and the smells of Florence at night in springtime....In this rustling air, our bodies quiver. All's possible, all's unpredictable.

    Today, up in the hills, out on my own, I was suddenly, as if the wind had made your skirt rustle and lifted up into the air the familiar smell of your skin, granted a vivid sense of your presence. Now and again these moments arrive when we're able to see things as they really are, in relation to eternity and not to the thick fog of our fears, insecurities, conceits and hurts. When I returned to Italy after the summer I had a first class sleeper on the train from Paris all to myself. I was too excited to sleep and didn't. I remember in the early hours of morning the train stopped at a station - there were palm trees and marble platforms and a certain distinctive smell - and my whole body with a joyful shout knew it was back in Italy. Italy in that moment became everything I've experienced here - all the train journeys, all the conversations, all the embraces and all the goodbyes. Everything I had ever strongly felt here was returned to its original purity, endowed with its virgin vitality. It was almost as though I had died. I remember then wishing that you could see me just for a moment, just long enough for me to give you back the smile you so often inspired. In that moment all the horrible aggressive bullying and sermonising I was guilty of fell away and there you were again - curving like a question mark and forging in me a longing to hear your answering voice in the dark. I realised then that in all probability we will die without ever again speaking...

The Letters of Love Never Sent

This will be the last letter I ever write from my room by the river and it's probably appropriate that it should be to you since you are without question the person I've thought most about within these four walls. I'm sorting through my possessions and have realised how little you gave me, how little tangible evidence I have that I even knew you - two letters, a few photos, a few scraps of paper with messages on them.

     Last Saturday I went to a wedding. It was in a beautiful 13th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside. At one point I went outside and sat on the steps - there was a beautiful choir with these ethereal voices silvering the air and the meadows were bristling with poppies and cornflowers and as always happens when life is suddenly too beautiful for words you become part of the moment.

     Perhaps I didn't admit it to myself but I realise now there's always been hidden away in me the hope that you might suddenly discover one day that actually you couldn't go through the rest of your life without seeing me again. To imagine that moment - you shyly telling me the more vulnerable truths - enables me to realise how vast still is my capacity to be happy. That's another gift you've given me - because even if it never happens it's very close, like something in a neighbouring field which if I stand on tiptoes I can see and embrace as an inspiration at least. 

Constancy vs Betrayal

Constancy... that small change of love, which people exact so rigidly, receive in such counterfeit coin, and repay in baser metal.

On the money or too cynical? But having come across this quote of Lord B’s in his letters I was reminded of Joyce’s The Dead which I’ve recently reread. For the uninitiated the story undergoes a transfiguration when a husband discovers his wife has always secretly loved someone else. The husband suddenly sees his wife in an exalted light. Joyce loved his epiphanies and some were more successful than others. This particular one always struck me as bogus – an awkward artistic device to arrive at the required emotion, like Hollywood distorting historical facts to give a film more scope for cheers and boos.

But then I thought about it some more. Essentially we demand constancy from our lovers and friends to keep our illusions about ourselves in tact. Ironically though it’s often the act of betrayal that knocks us out of our pinched complacencies into a wider world. So Joyce, albeit a tad clumsily, was right after all…

Vampires

Historically nature, like the moon, the sea and sensuality, has always been represented as feminine. Because of its tidal procreative function. Also associated with the feminine are certain traits, like passivity, receptivity, tears, while their opposites, assertion, projection, shouting are traditionally considered masculine. Nature and the conflict between male and female principles has always been the subject of art and literature. Every good book or painting has something fascinating to say about nature and sexual identification if you perform a little archaeology on it. Every period in history also has a distinctive attitude towards nature, often reflected in the art and literature of the time. What is our present conception of nature? In our virtual technological world nature has once again been exiled into sentimental notions – adventure holidays, Sunday afternoon flower arranging, workshop breathing exercises and diagrammed sexual callisthenics. In other words, Nature isn’t the stinking slop in a sewer pipe or the bloody beak of a bird spiking a live worm; it’s the rolling Tuscan hills or a pack of puppies playing in a park. Nature though is a vampire. It exists to suck our blood. The beautiful male vampire is another of our attempts to glamorise and romanticise nature. But, interestingly, an attempt to make Nature male.