Saturday, 9 May 2009

Make The Days Count

Well, here to the subject I originally wanted to deal with in my blog most.

I love writings (mainly Plath, Poe and recently Rilke) and I have written words for years and years. Notebooks full of them. All testaments to something a little more than disillusioned with how most of my hopes found me. Poems and stories hide me.

The most important thing about words is that they are about as subjective as you can get. And not a kind of subjective that you can ever explain. It's a kind of subjective you would not necessarily know of or tell of. It's hidden in the connotations; it's in how we build the words and their precise meanings for us. We learn all our words differently, and every time we hear them said we build on that meaning. It stems directly from our experiences; it makes them as personal and varied as secrets.

Here are some of mine:




Ignorance
For today, I'll have a soul
to
hear hoof prints in the musk,
And I will paint the whore before I see her;
A painted face with pointed tones,
she rides with bells on her
Toes
And shades herself from the sun
with her fancies.
I will soil that girl

I want to know one thing in my
Grammatical twirls
One thing that would be a fact
That could still iron it’s shirt at the edge of the world:
That would be a gentleman to
Never break my conviction
And be a savage; ruthless and always
Halve my belief.
I curl a page about my hair
And I wear it like a halo;
I suffer to silence
And suffer to hellos.
At the edge of my world I really know very little
And force out of myself
Repetition and rhythm and rhyme
And every refuge of wit
That danced off my tongue arm in arm
With doubt.
No one should believe the halves that perform on my stage;
All my shirts stay creased.




This is in reference to something my dad always liked to tell me. "You can tell the measure of a man by what he would do if no one ever found out" ; if you were stranded alone on a desert island and still washed your hair and ironed your clothes (with a heated rock or some such), kept your sanity with your hygiene and let that keep you human, you would be a little more than what everyone else is.
Here I am saying that I am not. Here I am saying that I really have no idea what the fack I'm going on about most of the time.

Make The Days Count
Faces in the rocks
like to smile, and stay smiling
and trace their shapes into the dirt.
Their races are silent with their permanent grins,
and I ask
why anyone would want to carve something
that stays forever;
that sings for no woman's ear
and smiles for each of her tears.



A smile will change you and how you see some person's action. That is something that really is quite worthless when you think about it, and it definitely is not something that you should try to hold onto forever. Forever is something even more worthless than that. So all I want really is to make the days count. Do something worthwhile everyday. The last two lines are just meant to show how emotions become irrelevant when it's coupled with the concept of eternity. I only say "woman's ear" instead of "no one's ear" as a bit of a feminist point. People still say "man" when they mean "people". This is just a bit of a sad dig at how our language turned out.

So here are two, not particularly special, poems of mine. But on the subject of feminism; I went to see Annette Messager's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a few days back. The main theme running through it was definitely very feminist, but the whole feel of it was something I could really relate to. She forces children's scary world into an adult perspective so well. She makes it creepy. She makes it angry. She makes it new. Even 30 years after she first made the art, it still feels very relevant and alive. And that is rare with modern art. The newer it is the quicker it seems to get outdated. A favourite: "Les Enfants aux yeux rayƩs" (children with eyes scratched out). She carefully put together a whole photo album of random children of different ages out of magazines and newspapers, until one day she couldn't handle all the unknown eyes staring up at her "testifying to her lie (lack of children)". She violently scratched out their eyes and now she says "they are truly my child".
Not every woman wants to be a mother.

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