Wet thought

 

 

 

 

 

 

My early-ish swim in the community pool continues, as I find an alternative to my local pool that is closed for annual maintenance.  Apart from two Dutch visitors who looked shocked to be at the pool so early in the morning and equally shocked to find someone else there, I have swum alone.  Which is good.  Not because I am misanthropic, but because the pool is too small to do reasonable lengths and the only way to get value for money for your effort is to swim in circles.  When you are swimming in rapid circles in a smallish pool, there really isn’t room for anyone else, not that that would stop me, as avoiding people gives an added interest to the almost terminal boredom of straight-line swimming.

     And, I’m saving money!  My original plan was to go and swim in the municipal pool in Gavà, where you have to buy a pre-paid card for a certain number of swims.  This plan may yet come into operation as I am watching the temperature and the weather: I don’t swim in the cold or the rain.  I may be a dedicated swimmer but I am not fanatical!

 

 

 

Yesterday evening was another meeting of the Barcelona Poetry Group.  This time we had two Americans, two Indians, a Catalan and a Welshman and a dog.

     I had a relatively clear run through from Castelldefels to get to the meeting and, arriving early I was told about the medical issues that have recently been affecting the dog.  Today a further visit to the vet and hopefully some good news about how to proceed with her treatment.  She is now 11 years old, but looks younger and is still spritely.  We live in hope!

     The next meeting will be in October (we have a meeting a month, though a few years ago they were weekly) and I am responsible for choosing the topic and selecting a couple of poems for reading and discussion.

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

“Dreams and Nightmares” was the theme for last night’s meeting and the discussion was wide ranging, thoughtful and thought making!  I realise that this group is the only opportunity I have for an in-depth consideration of literary topics, and I truly value it.

     The poems we read were “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes – a fairly famous poem and one surely known by generations of American school children – and “Scarecrow on Fire” by another American poet called Dean Young.

     The title of Young’s poem was immediately arresting and put me in mind of Dalí’s painting “The Burning Giraffe” which haunted my as a kid after seeing it in (I think) The Story of Art for the first time, and Hughes’ poem has Surrealistic touches throughout.  It may also be significant that the image of the scarecrow is often used as a metaphor for Man, “an empty coat upon a stick” in Yeats phrase, a worthless thing unless “soul clap its hands and sing” to give meaning to existence.

     There is a great deal of negative language in this poem: disappearing, alleyways, small, graveyard, black angel, goodbye, last, winter, nothingness, stitching, vomiting, nightmare, illusion, dirt, wound, but there is also the assertion of “Hell, even now I love life” and the last words of the poem “This is my soul, freed.”  But there are no exclamation marks after either statement and that omission lessens the force of the positive.  And his freed soul is linked to water boiling, to evaporation, to vapour, just like his line where he says that “Maybe poems are made of breath” an exhalation into emptiness, just as earlier in the poem he asserted that, “We all feel / suspended over a drop into nothingness.”

     This is a dense poem, rich in images and associations from a poet about whom I want to know more!

     A key part of the evening is a short meditation on the theme, accompanied by a randomly chosen essential oil.  This is a nod to Californian Hippydom and was instituted by the founder of the group as a defiant reminder of her home state, and is continued because, well, it’s a nice idea.

     After the meditation there is a period allocated for writing.  This can be one the theme or not as the individual desires, and the end results of the writing can be shared or not again as the individual decides.

     I wrote on the theme and came up with the following.

 

 

The Dream

 

It is unnoticed ease,

a facile roll of incidents,

a wave of disparates,

that link and coalesce to make

a comfort carapace

that frames fragile reality.

A passageway located

Nowhere and yet Everywhere.

A known unknown.

A shell, a wall, a hill –

and all, yes all,

within a moment’s touch;

though sense is different.

 

Dimensions wax and wane

to morning’s death.

 

 

Something to work on!

 

     And now to start thinking about the theme for the next poetry meeting.  Among my first thoughts were “Courage” “Fear” and “Food” – gives great scope for the poems that we can talk about.  I will think on!

 

 Barcelona Poetry Group can be reached via this website:

 

 

https://www.meetup.com/es-ES/barcelona-english-speaking-poetry-group/?_cookie-check=XfrmrxLlMnboHNW7

 

Have phone: will learn!

 

In a desperate attempt to improve my Spanish, Toni has introduced me to the addictive delights of Duolingo, the free (though it tries its insistent best to make you part with money) app to improve your chosen language skills.

     Toni, of course, is using the app to learn French and Italian, to add to the three other languages that he already speaks, and his frenetic efforts are stimulating mine in a more structured way than heretofore.

     The basic structure of the app is fairly simple, relying as it does, on repetition and short chunks of aided learning to consolidate the lessons as you listen, write, and speak to get your way through.

     The clever bit is found in the structure around the lessons.

 

     

 

 

     As you start off you have a number (5) of hearts which are your lives.  You lose a life if you answer or respond in a faulty way, and if your lives run out, the lesson ends unless you buy (with real money) replacement lives or, you do a practice lesson which will give you a ‘free’ life and you can get another ‘free’ life if you watch an advert.

    If you want unlimited lives or advert free learning, then you can upgrade your experience of the app by paying for such delights.

     But it is constantly emphasised that you are part of a learning community, with Spanish there are (according to the app around 450,000 other learners working along with you.

     You are placed in a group and your progress as you gain crowns and gems, and points is to try and get to the top of your league so that you can be promoted to another division.  You start in Bronze, and I have worked my way up to the Silver Division and, if I keep up my work level, in the next few days, as long as I am in the top 15 people in the league, I can be promoted to the Gold Division.

     Along the way as you accrue points, or learn new words, or come top of your league, you are given bonuses, so there is a constant sense of achievement and of competition.

     I have to say that it is well worked out and, even as I recognize that I am being manipulated, I am willingly and enthusiastically accepting the stimulants that the app provides.

     There is also a certain amount of ‘heart’ in the attitude of the assessment of right and wrong, as sometimes you will be given the benefit of the doubt and be marked correct, when you have a ‘typo’ in your answer.  And, at the moment, the app does not mark you down for omitting accents, though they do point out when they are missing, and I fear that such indulgence will not last for very much longer.

     However cynical I am about the essential expectation that eventually the learner will tire of adverts and losing lives because of slip ups with tired thumbs and writing ‘an’ instead of ‘the’ in a translation, I have found myself spending more time working on my Spanish than I have in the past.

     Goodness knows how long such dedication will last, but this first free week has been, if not exactly pleasant, then at least acceptable, and the work rate in terms of time and accessibility, has been acceptable.

     I will bow before the power of one of our family sayings and agree that “Anything is better than nothing” and carry on!

 

 

“The Ten Books That Everyone Should Read” as a civilizing concept outlined by Suzanne, continues to reverberate in my mind, and I have asked a multi-lingual polymath of my acquaintance to try and write his own list of ten books.   

     I think I might extend the request to a wider group of friends and see what they come up with.  If nothing else, it could suggest a range of writers that might be worth exploring!

 

 

My poetry has stalled.  I have a number of attempts that are looking wan and broken on their sheets of A4, and it is about time that I revisited them and decided if they are worth salvaging in some way or other, or whether they should be ‘filed’ under ‘oblivion’.  Though I do find it hard to actually throw away anything on which I have spent a reasonable amount of time.  I am a great believer is the ‘there must be something lurking of worth somewhere’ in what I write, even if it doesn’t quite work out!

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 21 – Palm Sunday 5th APRIL

Where do you start with ‘irony’ in the sort of build up to Easter that we are having this virus-infected year?

     Our next door neighbours are showing their piety on Palm Sunday by defying restrictions and working flat out in constructing and installing the new kitchen in the house that is either going to be their new home or is going to fetch them a pretty penny when it is sold.  Or perhaps both.  What there isn’t, is respect for the day religiously, politically or healthily!

     The churches have been closed.  The KKK-like religious processions have been cancelled in Spain.  The pope spoke in a wet and empty St Peter’s Square.  In all the coverage of the pandemic, I have heard little from religious leaders, and little to nothing of God.  Even Trump’s fanatic fundamentalist base has not vaunted god above science.  Just as Capitalism turns to Socialism in times of crisis, for government to do what Capitalism cannot or rather, will not do, so Religion turns to Science to cure what it cannot.

     To be fair, most of mainstream religion sees no conflict between religious belief and trust in science.  Nowadays.  Those battles, since the time of Galileo, have been fought and lost; and what Churches now rely on faith rather than Insurance Policies to keep their institutions ‘safe’?

     It is, of course, easy to spin the Holy Week Story to fit the narrative of the virus; metaphor is a willing façade.  Today, in the Christian calendar is a day of triumph when Christ rode into Jerusalem in glory – though riding on an ass: tempered triumph - and that triumph soon to be translated into abject defeat which in turn transmogrifies into the ultimate triumph of the empty tomb.

     Pandemics do concentrate the mind.  A highly technological society brought low - so much for civilization and medical expertise!  All our bright and glittering technology unable to stop the virus from killing tens of thousands and infecting, god knows how many.  Our society has been literally brought to a standstill: achievement brought low, but resurrection is a vital concept and all of us sequestered in our homes and looking forward to, no, expecting a triumph of medical science to deliver the vaccine that will release us all and allow a continuation of the old way of life, our own social resurrection.

     The Holy Week story is one in which you can find triumph, deception, hypocrisy, populism, testing, faith, hope, death, defeat, disloyalty, fear, despair, community, faction, belief, confidence, loss and fulfillment – and those words only scratch at the surface of the complexity of the narrative so it is hardly surprising that it fits the present situation.

     At the end of this pandemic, will churches be filled with people giving thanks for deliverance, or shunned by people who didn’t give god a thought during the crisis?  I will wait to see.

Castelldefels has just been on the afternoon television news informing us that the Red Cross has been going to closed schools’ kitchens and ‘liberating’ the food which can be used to feed those in need rather than staying in the fridges and eventually becoming unusable.  This seems like a self-evidently good idea and I wonder in how many other places this is being put into operation.  There must also be restaurants and the like that are never going to be able to use their food supplies in time?  Something to think about, especially as governments like the one in the UK is already distributing food parcels to those who need them, surely there must be systems already in place to take advantage of any extra supplies?

Today is the start of my annual Holy Week Poem Writing Stint.  And yes, I do know that Palm Sunday is not the official start of Holy Week, but I make the rules here.

     I am well aware that this choice of poetry-writing period is an odd one for an avowed atheist to take as a key time for production, but it has become something of a tradition and I look forward to it each year – just to see what I produce!  As I have said elsewhere, "I read myself in writing"!

     I aim to get the idea for a poem each day, and then to write it up to the level of a rough draft.  Each day, until Easter Sunday, I will try and get the draft downloaded to my poetry blog at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.  I must emphasise that my ‘daily’ work will only be a draft and I reserve the right to work on the poem after Holy Week to get it to a more polished state.

     I welcome your company on this annual journey.  The best way to follow my poems is probably ‘the morning after’ when there should be something to see from the previous day!

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 2 (First forray)

One of those characteristically Castelldefels brightly-dull days where the sun has not appeared, but it is certainly near or thereabouts.  At least it isn’t raining, so we can put the continuation of the Pathetic Fallacy behind us.

     On the positive side, the poem about wasps has developed into something approaching a working draft, so there is something to be said for toiling at home when escape is not an option.  Now comes the really hard work of looking through the draft and being as critical as possible about what works and what doesn’t.  I find the structure of a poem the most taxing.  After all it is easy for the person who has written it to sense the scaffolding of sense that produced it, but it is much more problematical for those who only read the finished poem to sense all of the underlying thought that has been stripped away!  I will give it a couple of days and then try and read it with new eyes.

As I have given a title of ‘Day 2’ to this post, I am obviously trying to emulate my experiences while being in hospital and producing something approaching a Diary or commentary of my experiences. 

     But, and it’s a bit ‘but’ – my experiences in hospital were extraordinary: I was in a new environment; the experiences were unique for me; I was quite seriously ill; I underwent a whole series of medical interventions etc., Each day was a revelation as new things were done to me, using a variety of exotically technological machinery with a variety of medical personnel in different locations.  There were the reactions of friends and relations, the way in which my life was suddenly taken out of the ordinary and catapulted into the extraordinary: it was a life-changing experience.

     Is being in lockdown in your own house an equivalent?  The whole point of the experience is that I will not be meeting new people, going to new places, or experiencing technology that is new and foreign.  Everything will be domestic in the true sense of the word, because what is in my house now is what I will be utilizing to keep myself (and Toni) sane during the period of my incarceration.

     As the Emperor of Digression, I have never found that the lack of ostensible material has hindered me from discourse.  I am reminded of a piece of wisdom from my father, “No holiday has ever been too long for me!” where my dad was intimating that only a person with little innate intelligence would be bored by of the offer of free time.  In the same way, the imposition of House Arrest in the interest of health could be viewed in the same way.  Material to engage an active mind is always all around you, so fifteen days of only having to rely on an extensive physical library, free access to the Internet and Social Media, gardens back and front and a south facing terrace can hardly be described as hardship.

     I am on the cusp of the age where it is advised that one should emulate the actions of Simon Stylites but without the expansiveness of an open column top to live out your existence.  And, depending on which authorities you take as your guide, the exclusion will last for anything up to three or four months – which, according to my calculations would give you a free month of summer sunshine to enjoy before the re-emergence of the reinvigorated virus in the autumn sweeps you away.  But what do I know about such things! 

      Whatever, it does appear that we are going to be forced on to our own resources, though as I have indicated above, that means something rather different from the circumstances that were faced by fourteenth century folk trying to escape the plague, or indeed seventeenth century people trying to flee the Black Death or any of the later scourges inflicted on mankind.  Modern technological folk have the resources of almost infinite knowledge to draw on, libraries of digital books and concert after concert of whatever music takes your fancy.  Although I do not participate myself, I should imagine that half the world is, even as I type, engaged in some form of armed conflict via their computers, and I am sure that the makers of Fortnite and their like must be raking it in!

Our group of houses has a communal pool and I have just noticed that the pool person from the firm engaged to service the things is at present using the long stemmed net to clear the water of the organic debris that has been floating on the surface.  The middle of March for an open-air pool is not a key time for use, and keeping an unused item ready for use during a national emergency does not seem to me to be a priority.  But it does make me thing about the workers who are doing the skimming.

     I am sure that pool cleaners are not the highest paid workers in the area and I wonder what sort of provision for enforced non-working their employers have made?  Are these workers in the position that they have to work because staying at home without any money coming in is not an option for them and their families?  And if that is true for this particular section of the economy, just how many other workers are in a similar position.

     It has been put forward that the Blond Buffoon only “suggested” that large-scale entertainments and pubs and clubs close down rather than have “ordered” them to have closed down is because with a governmental order, businesses affected could then sue the government for compensation.  In Spain and in Catalonia the government has ordered sequestration and, given the usually precarious economies of bars and restaurants and especially seasonal businesses that we get here in the sea side resort of Castelldefels, there must be a frightening number of enterprises that are looking at financial ruin is this state of emergency goes on for a long time.  Governments have talked about financial help, but I expect that the only real, efficient and quick financial help will be given to big business and the banks and the smaller folk will have to do the best they can.

     It is hardly surprising if small businesses look at how governments have acted in the past and decided that they only chance for survival is to work as long as possible – hence the slow pole dipping of the pool person I can see from where I type.

As if to make my life just a little more enjoyable, last Saturday the house intercom squawked into life and I was informed that a package was due for delivery.  This turned out to be an imposing gadget and something that I had ordered from Kickstarter or the like ages ago.  I am now the proud possessor of a Narwal robot hoover and mop!  The gleaming white machine lives in what looks like a squat clinical white plastic bin with a rectangular opening at the base for the machine to recharge and clean itself.  The USP of this particular form of multi-cleaner is that during the ‘mopping’ stage the thing regularly comes back to base to clean itself and then go charging off again.

     As we have tile floors throughout this machine is ideal for our needs – and my particular need not to do hoovering and mopping!

     Toni has been out to get bread and some food and found the roads strangely empty and the queues in the supermarket not as large as he had expected.  We are now well stocked; the only things that we lack are facemasks.  I have ordered some, but they are not expected until early next month!

     The sun is now making a weak attempt to shine and so I think that I will go out onto the terrace on the third floor and take some unaccustomed fresh air (air made a damn sight fresher by the lack of traffic on the roads) and a little sunshine.

      This is the life?

Sunday start

A lazy day today, I didn’t get up until 8.15 am!  I decided to give swimming a miss and will compensate by having an extended bike ride on the way to and from getting lunch in the local chicken place.

     I’ve completed the quick Guardian crossword, though it was a little more taxing than usual and I am sometimes stuck by the brevity of the clues that give a slanted version of the necessary word’s definition, so I often get the word before I realize its link to the clue!  Still, it’s done and that gives the start of the day a sort of achievement to add to the impetus of filling time with something useful.  Not that I have to search around for things to do as each day ends with my only having completed a part of my ‘to do’ list.  At the moment, for example, Catalan homework is handing over me and this writing is, yet again, displacement activity to compensate for my not doing it!

     There is a whip to get me in line with the work that I need to do for Catalan, as the examination for this section of the course will take place on the 13^th of this month.  We have been given fair warning, have been told what sort of vocabulary is going to be tested and have been given direct and clear indications of what sort of writing we will need to complete.  With such clear directions it is perverse and churlish not to get stuck in to the work and start the process of learning.  But I haven’t yet got round to starting this.  In my notebook that is supposed to be for my ideas for poems, I often find myself writing encouraging or admonitory notes to myself about work that needs to be done.  This writing too is another way of my communicating with myself to get geared up to start the hard work of learning.

     I find learning new words difficult; I discover a new, often useful word in Catalan, look at it, try and memorize it, write it down a few times – and then it’s gone.  The amount of effort needed to set the words in my memory seems disproportionate and I therefore tend to enter my learning zone with negativity washing around my mind.  I try and reason with myself: I live in Catalonia, I am surrounded by the language, learning it is merely a matter of common courtesy as well as increasing my understanding and so on and so on – but whatever psychological boosts I give myself, the simple inability to retain new vocab. Is a settled fact.  This in turn means that the examination will be another depressing indication of inability as I stagger my illiterate way towards the end of the scholastic year!

     In my own language, however, I continue to thrive.  The latest work on the ‘recalcitrant’ poem is producing good results.  Even though I may not have written a single line of poetry, the ideas and some phrases are steadily coalescing and the structure is beginning to emerge from all my pencilled scribbles.  I know for past experience that the present discrete idea elements scattered throughout the pages that I have already written will, eventually come together into a (hopefully) coherent poem.  Even if it doesn’t, the process is one that is enjoyable if demanding!

 

Today is Saint David’s Day and I have hunted around (as I do each year) to find the little artificial daffodil (purchased in aid of the Marie Curie Foundation) to wear for my National Day.  And, each time I wear it, it focuses my attention on my nationality.  In my next book, The eloquence of broken things, there is a section that brings together poems I have written that consider my nationality and what it mean to me.  For a numerically small nation, identity is a constant preoccupation and with the swamping proximity of England and the overwhelming use of English as the language of Wales the relationship between Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom is a critical element in the national sense of identity.  Each St David’s Day has become an opportunity for me to indulge (and I think that is the right word) in a particular form of introspection that rarely affects me on other days of the year – which is significant in itself!

     Only once has anyone commented on my wearing of a daffodil on St David’s Day and I assume that it will go generally unnoticed today as well.  Though there is a slightly different dimension because daffodils are yellow. 

     Let me explain.  I wear a metal pin of a yellow ribbon to show my support for the Catalans who are still in prison or restricted in their public lives because of the Spanish justice system in the aftermath of the referendum for Catalan independence.  Putting the question of independence aside for a moment, I consider the jailing of so many Catalan politicians to be reprehensible and perhaps an indication of the politicisation of the Spanish justice system. 

     The reaction of the Spanish to the Catalans has sometimes been little short of paranoid, with some instances of the banning of the colour yellow e.g. football supporters wearing yellow t-shirts or scarves having to give up pieces of yellow clothing before they were allowed into the games!  So a yellow daffodil could be seen as a statement of support for the prisoners and Catalan independence.

     In my case as I am wearing it next to the yellow ribbon, obviously for aesthetic rather than political reasons, the link is more obvious!