Jólabókaflóðið

It began with runes… and ended with a flood. A flood of books... the Icelandic tradition of giving and exchanging books on Christmas Eve, then curling up in a cosy, fireside reading nook with a cup of hot cocoa.

During World War II, paper was one of the few items not rationed, so books being given as gifts began a tradition that continues to this day. During the Reykjavic Book Fair, a catalogue is sent to every home, from which books are selected. A 2013 study carried out found 50% of Icelanders read eight books a year, and 93% read at least one. My friend Georgios says his New Year's resolution is to read a book a month. In my own reading life, the books on my shelves gather, but my eyes, my energy and my concentration cannot keep up the pace I once considered a natural part of my day. Christopher Norris, pioneer of World Book Day in the UK, has been trying to encourage a national Jólabókaflóðið... 

If you were to give a book tonight, or receive one, which book would you want to curl up with? I have Jessie Burton's Medusa - The Girl Behind The Myth,  I gave Mum a Domêstika course on the Japanese art of kintsugi - how to repair your broken ceramics with gold dust, enhancing their original beauty, which, while not a book, is its practical equivalent, and for Pops, the audiobook of The Virginian by Owen Wister, the original Western... I mean, just look at that cover!

'Course, if you were struggling to think of a book, there's always yours truly's latest, which is now the number one book under an Amazon search for 'lupus' or 'auto-immunity'. In the UK anyway, thanks to the lovely folk who have already bought and reviewed me. So, on that cheery note, a very merry Christmas Eve to you all. I am flat out fatigued with year numero deux of Pandemicness, but am holding steady with Chotu and Perveen on either side of me... 

EVERY BRILLIANT THING

I was watching the Korean drama, Romance is a Bonus Book, when, in the penultimate episode, our heroine Kang Dan-i, is horrified to find plagiarised translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's epistolary 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. My face resembled hers in that moment, for a different reason. I had only just heard of this novel in the strangest of circumstances.

A week ago, my childhood friend Arzanne sent me tickets to a play. She had already attended it, and it had moved her so much that she wanted to share the experience. And it was an experience... I have watched plays online since quarantine began - Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag for Soho Theatre on Demand, where our donations helped to keep theatre cast and crew afloat during these audience-silent times, and Frankenstein with alternating lead roles between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller for the National Theatre at Home productions we have been so fortunate to enjoy free for a week each. (Frankenstein's monster also finds The Sorrows of Young Werther in a leather portmanteau... but that wasn't my connection). 

Every Brilliant Thing, a play written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, does not require its audience to be silent. Would it terrify or invigorate you to be part of a play, your own participation fuelling the thing itself? A woman suffers depression. Her husband fetches her little boy to the hospital. That little boy must live, now and always, with the shadow of an unknowable beast stealing his mother from time to time. Macmillan's play has been traveling the globe, and the director/actor use the alchemy of their nation's idiom to alter the words but not the impact or emotion of the original idea. 

In Bangalore, the actor Vivek Madan, used to performing in the round, graciously invited our tiny screen faces into his home. Some of us had already been sent a word or a sentence - a brilliant thing on the list of the little boy who walks through darkness towards manhood, signalling for light with 1) Ice cream 2) Water fights 3) Staying up past your bedtime 4) The colour yellow... which reminded me of Albert Espinosa's memoir The Yellow World, and the yellow benches it inspired for sparking conversation between strangers... on and on to me at 521) Plinth (not the easiest word to wrap one's tongue around mid concentration!)

A thousand brilliant things... 2389) Baby elephant... ten thousand brilliant things... 10,000) Waking up next to someone you love... And somewhere, in the midst of that list, a book appears - the one that has for 250 years touched a raw nerve of how to be young, and filled with desire, and the thing you want not wanting you... and how, with that seeming failure, you exit the world, with violence and the poetry of your grief. The book has been banned for showing the way out, literarily speaking. 

I liked seeing the tall trees wave, friendly and rhythmic, behind Vivek as he moved with expert familiarity around his home, us in his home, known words on his tongue and making space for unknown words on our tongues... Occasionally, he'd call out a number and be met with silence... sometimes a zoom call is a fumble! What is worth living for? Many things. Who gets it right for a child? A counsellor with a sock puppet. Or an idea to record the good thing that lives between our fight or flight stress mechanism. Depression changes the chemistry of the brain of children... so should we lie to our children to protect them? Should we share the nature of the beastly growling lurking thief of happiness and peace of mind? I think it is difficult either way. And with that in mind, QTP, the theatre company producing the play, arranges for a mental health practitioner to join the audience at the end. How loving, how considerate. 

I liked seeing the sky darken behind Vivek, and then turn black. Night had come for him and everyone else watching in India. In my pocket of the world, sunshine streamed through the lilies and rose bush and the white butterfly pranced, keeping her promise to return to me year after year after year. The play was directed by Quasar Thakore-Padamsee, who, not enamoured of attempting an online theatrical experiment, was inspired to take that leap of faith by his fellow producer Nadir Khan, another childhood friend of mine. Nadir and his brother Darab were a brilliant thing when I was a girl growing up in Bombay. Two more brothers to add to mine, two more friends to make life worth living and memories worth holding dear. So many brilliant things, couldn't we just cry thinking about them? But we don't. Because we forget. Or make ourselves forget. Maybe your children could start their lists? And maybe your parents, too. 

Number 7,800,000,000) Us. You and me. 

ROUND UP 2017

I've never done a round up of a year before... maybe a little hopeful contemplation as the year floats away that I did alright, I wasn't a complete disaster, love prevailed... but I feel like recording a few things for this last day of 2017. The brights and the shadows. 

The year started off with a flurry of rejections, which does rather set the spirit at a low hum of despair. But in amidst the form rejections, I had several personalised letters, which I have since learnt is an achievement in itself. Here is the most special among them - inspite of the rejection, I genuinely loved it.

Dear Shaista, Thank you for sending me Blind Wolf, Butterfly Woman and for giving me the opportunity to consider your work. I was consumed by your poignant, affecting story. I found it beautifully and truthfully depicted and it resounded with me deeply. You demonstrate remarkable courage in expressing your story, and I hope that you have found the writing process in some way helpful. Your attitude to your condition is truly an inspiration. However in spite of this I am unfortunately unable to make you an offer of representation. I am really concentrating on building up my fiction list, and while your story is incredibly moving, I am not sure how I would break it out commercially, with a mainstream publisher. The market at the moment is so competitive and publishers are being extremely cautious, particularly when it comes to acquiring memoir. However these judgements are always subjective and you may well find someone who feels very differently. Again, I very much appreciate having had the opportunity to consider your work and wish you all the best in finding the right home for it. Best wishes, ...

Then I had a rejection from the University of Cambridge to do an M. Phil on Vietnamese American post-war literature, and then I had an acceptance from the University of Cambridge to give a TEDx talk on creativity!

I think I successfully convinced everyone in that room that creativity can and must be taught, particularly to young children, and particularly at school. Perhaps I will share my speech another day. I didn't realise it wouldn't be recorded, but it was a TEDx salon talk, and those are more intimate. It was a special day, the 25th of January, Mum and Dad's anniversary, and as you know they are very much central to my creative life.

In February I was rejected (or rather not included) in (ironically) the Anglia Ruskin University TEDx event. I don't know how the event went in the end - it was inaugural, so hopefully it was a success. I was extremely fortunate to have been excluded because I developed kidney sepsis at the end of a lovely but hectic surprise visit from the Singaporean crew. Mum's birthday on the 10th of February was a wonderful time of celebration until right at the end, when I was bundled off to A&E, burning up, throwing up. Mum even wore mismatching shoes to the hospital, it was so muddled a morning.

Back in again with more infection at the end of March and into April... and then again in July and August... I had two PICC lines for two different infections, which took such a toll on me. And yet, while in hospital, I recorded a video to accompany my book for a crowdfunding platform called Unbound Publishing. When I was rejected from that I did feel quite awful. I spent September in bed for the most part. For World Poetry Day at the end of September, I recited poetry in the hospital chapel, which was very healing, and by the end of October I felt inspired enough by my summer experience of video making to start a vlog channel and recorded four wonderful talks with my friends Colette and Daisy on living with lupus. I was on radio in November reciting poetry and talking about hospital shenanigans, but that wasn't recorded on a podcast either, so hilariously the only two people who heard me live were the two people I told - Mum and Dad, the two people who listen to me every day, anyway!!

- And our beloved friend Victoria who drove me to the radio station and sat quietly, and supportively, in the booth beside me!

And finally on Boxing Day, I had a piece published in sisterhood mag, on my complicated and beautiful religious and spiritual life. Deeyah Khan, the founder of the magazine, and an extraordinary documentarian, had tweeted me earlier to consider contributing, and I am so glad she did... 

http://sister-hood.com/shaista-tayabali/half-parsi-half-muslim-full-woman/

We lost dear friends this year - our beloved John Haybittle, and two days ago, our childhood friend Vinit. We celebrate how wonderful they were, and hold on to each other more tightly. Tomorrow it will all be the same, and yet a little different. Happy New Year, my dear friends, whichever it is. 

MARIE KONDO AND THE SPARKING OF A CERTAIN JOY

for Richard, who misses my blog posts

It seems strange to speak of joy, or write of joy, when all around us joyless events directed by joyless people rip at the fabric of our lives. Every day I look about me and give thanks for clouds in the sky, and not drones, for roses beginning to climb our trellis, and not militia, for my mother loudly shooing away the muntjac and a squirrel I've named Nutkin, rather than... anything else. None of these are small things. They constitute the biggest thing of all - freedom. A word that almost feels sacred now. Almost like superstition. Better not utter it out loud, in case those that lurk in the dark places encroach upon your light. 

And yet of course this is the paradox of a life like mine: if you keep small, and hide away as much as possible, tending to the bird feeder and sorting through your books, you wonder if after all you ought to be trying for the other life, the one with the spotlight and the megaphone, denouncing hatred, fighting for rights, yours and those denied others. Then your body reminds you of its tumultuous nature - scar tissue, antibiotics and a twenty year long fight to stay alive.

Into my small but sweet life, a fellow patient gave me The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. My friend is Italian so the book was actually called Il Magico Potere Del Riordino. It was her personal copy, with notes to herself inscribed in pencil. It has taken me a few years to actually begin the process of tidying up my life in the specifically thorough way offered by Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo. The KonMari method.

There are two books, actually. The second is called Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying, and this one is filled with delightful illustrations. There is a certain order to the process but always the same outcome - to spark joy from the tiniest of your possessions. Gather your belongings into their particular categories. Hold each object in your hands, and consider it. If the time has come to send it on its way, thank it before you despatch it. [The first edition was given to me by my friend Angelica, and the second guide by my sister Angelina. I take my angels where I get them.] 

I find myself telling people truthfully what I am 'up to' - facing that dreaded question of 'What are you doing now? Have you published your book yet?' If only writing a book and publishing it were as natural a pair of siblings as we imagine when first embarking on that book. I have tentatively begun the second - never mind what it's about - but first, I have a date with a woman named Marie, who is leading me towards a certain joy. 

WHAT MATTERS NOW

Sleep has always been a shy, mysterious, elusive sheep for me - rarely does she come when I call.

But lately, sleep is more fractured than ever.

I read in a piece by Mary Karr, poet and memoirist, that during this year's American election, doctors suddenly had a rush of patients ringing in or reporting as emergencies, cases of false tachycardia. My own persistent tachycardia this year may be rooted in more determinedly medical background, but now I wonder if I too am experiencing a world wide case of shared disturbance of the heart.

These are troubled times. More so than ever before? I think not, on our personal levels. But on a global level, I believe we may be experiencing a seismic shift in our comprehension of the state of things. 

A thing I think: human beings are extraordinarily clever at denial. In our bones, we know we must die. But we also know we must live in the face of such irrefutable knowing. To live as though you are not dying is the art and craft we develop innately, from our first squall. 

And yet, here I am, awake in the middle of the night; and yet, here we all are, anxious for what is to come. 

Buddha would say, 'What has come to be', meaning what has come, has come to be, because of all things past leading to this present. Not inevitability as fate, rather a collective gathering of historical human action and consequence has brought us to this pass. 'This is because that is'. We cannot unlink ourselves from each other. Frederick Douglass believed America to be wilfully blind in 1862 ('We have sought to bind the chains of slavery on the limbs of the black man, without thinking that at last we should find the other end of that hateful chain about our own necks.' from his speech 'The Reasons for our Troubles') and wilfully blind she continues to be. 

But here we are, on the eve of a new leadership, which will implicate us all, wide awake, hungry for comfort, with very little comfort to be had. 

Last evening before I fell asleep for a while, I attended a paper on Vietnamese-American writer lê thi diem thúy, author of the acclaimed novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and later went to a theatre performance of A Room with a View starring Felicity Kendal. While watching E. M. Forster's novel turned to play, I was making all sorts of connections between modernism and post war immigrant diaspora writings, until Kendal spoke this line: 'Novels aren't silly. Literature can influence things, sometimes.' She was speaking as Charlotte Bartlett, but it was Forster asserting himself, for all time, with that dictum.

It was a clear bell reminding me of the more recent affirmations of Toni Morrison and Atul Gawande, Mary Karr and Junot Diaz - the arts matter now more than ever. Our individual voices, thoughts, small decisions, matter. Resistance looks like protest marches, but true resistance begins with just one person choosing to think or behave in more awareness of themselves and one other. Look a little closer at the fellow human being beside you. Perhaps he is crouched outside the theatre, soaked in his black garments, because it rained while you were inside the warmth of the theatre, and he was outside making his sign (PLEASE HELP), awaiting the richest of the town folk to bring his coin collection up to the figure necessary to enable a night in the hostel. 

Perhaps you saw him and crouched down beside him and emptied your pockets of notes and coins. You put your hand on his shoulder and he said, 'God bless you.' Perhaps you walked by, not seeing him at all, heading to your car, your home, your family. Perhaps you saw and walked quickly past anyway. 

Be sure he saw it all.

Illustration by Nino Novellino via Read What Rosie Wrote

BOOKMARK A POET

A few months ago I was interviewed in style (at home no less) by the short story writer Alex Ruczaj for the Cambridge radio station Bookmark, which she, until recently, co-presented with Leigh Chambers. I've known Alex a while and attended a fiction workshop that she organised. She writes beautiful stories, with fascinating character premises and a blog. It's nice knowing working writers - writers in the middle of their craft - who have little ego and lots of passion. Or at least it seems that way to me. The best part about my Creative Writing Masters has been the development of friendships with writers who make the world of being a writer feel real.

Leigh Chambers (left), Alex Ruczaj (right)

http://cambridge105.fm/book-night-28-03-2015/ should provide you with the link page, and if you scroll down to where it says Podcast: Download, click on 'Download'. That should open up the radio interview link (oh how tremendously technical I sound). I am interviewed 34 minutes and 45 seconds into the programme, to be exact…
http://cambridge105.fm/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/bookmark-2015-03-28-13_01.mp3
I hope the link works but if it doesn't - I shall tell you I sounded quite good according to reliable sources. Alex asked me about my blog - how I began it, why I began it and the wonderful paths it has led me down. Sometimes I miss the first years of blogging - there is something I yearn for about those times - lost now to the mass of social media sites. I am not sure what it is I yearn for, but I know it is a shared longing among my early blogging friends.

Where I sometimes write by the window, and where I was interviewed...

I meant to upload this interview soon after it was available online, but my mind lately has been distracted by writing my first book. An exhausting business. How do they do it? However. Onwards.

VANESSA AND HER SISTER (AND ME)

Yellow bunting hangs from trees, and since there is only one (stalwart) lady heading up the queue outside the Cambridge Union Chamber, my friend Sylvia, my mother and I decide to lounge in deck chairs, have tea and elderflower, and discuss literature: the perennially delightful question and answer of 'What are you reading?' and 'What did you think?' When we are satiated, we turn lazily to the lady in the queue, only to discover there is now a snaking river of women and we must forfeit our front row seats. We are here for Vanessa Bell; Vanessa first, and then her sister - today Virginia Woolf is the one in the shadows. Never far, or hardly done by, but the conversation this afternoon between the doyenne of historical fiction, Philippa Gregory, and the darling of the Bloomsbury world, Priya Parmar, intends to focus on the painter, the portrait artist, the one who held the centre so others could come apart - Vanessa Bell.

Priya used to be a blogger (although she promised me at the book signing she would restart her blog) so I already knew she had been friends with Philippa Gregory for a while - ten years I discover. Philippa (I can call them by their first names, can't I?) began by determining that the tenor of the interview would be intimate, they would talk as though they were at breakfast or tea, interrupting as friends of longstanding do, and interspersing memory and anecdote. It was utterly perfect. It doesn't get better for faithful readers than to have writerly friends, genuine friends, chat, confide, illuminate. Witness: Neil Gaiman with Terry Pratchett, Junot Diaz with Toni Morrison, Lena Dunham with Jennifer Saunders...

It began with the chicken story - they both had chickens at the first moment of email encounter - and meandered through the personal responsibilities of holding history in your hand and then braiding it with imagination into fiction. At various points, I focused on Philippa's shoes - they were deep electric blue, heeled and seemed to have a life of their own. My view was slightly squinty, between heads but I had been too shy or diffident to ask the volunteers whether I could snag the empty front row seats for the sake of my woebegone eyes. They were reserved for the hearing impaired, not the visually impaired. Maybe next time, I'll ask. I refrained from audience questions too - although I wanted to know if Priya came from the harmonious duality of an art/writing family as I do. She captures that particular tension of roles once defined in families, being rearranged. But art in any family transmogrifies its inhabitants. It is never enough to be painter or writer or poet or scientist. We must be all, if so inspired.

Today marks a week after the last Rituximab cycle. I have since seen my consultant and although she agrees the disease is active, she is hopeful the chemotherapy will help. I used to have a doctor who concluded every conversation with the words, 'Let us wait and see.' So it is with my consultant (a Virginia Woolf lookalike if ever there was one). We are waiting, and seeing. I am trying my best to brave the daily fevers with as little anxiety as possible. And only those who know, know. 

When I presented my book for Priya to sign, and mentioned I was a little in love with her blog The Plum Bean Project, she was surprised. But her sweetness radiates and she graciously accepted my fangirling homage. The moment was, unbeknownst to me, captured by the official photographer of the Cambridge Literary Festival, Chris Boland, who being a friend, sent me these pictures...

What he didn't capture was Mum, who is an avid fan of Philippa Gregory, introducing herself and fangirling in a much more sophisticated, respectable way. Author and appreciative fan shook hands, because Mum had brought none of her many Gregory books. All in all, it seems only right to start the nieces young on the wonders of historical fiction…

You can find more of Chris Boland's photography at his website Distant Cloud Photography.

SHAISTA'S BOOKS

This year begins the sixth year of my blog Lupus in Flight. Six years! I have never been so conscious of time's passing and her markings as I have this year. It feels a little breathless all of a sudden. It feels as though everything has already happened. Everything that truly matters is already in place. I was a curly haired child with goober glasses only yesterday. Tomorrow my nieces will turn thirteen, my cousins will celebrate their silver and gold anniversaries, my school friends and I will look into each other's eyes and shake our seventy year old heads in wonder. How? When? we will say...

My body hurts today. I stop, breathe, look deeply for the site of hurt, but I can't quite separate it. Hurt is always difficult to isolate. Remember the scene in Amélie when the little boy's marbles, hard won in the playground, burst out of the pockets of his uniform and to his horror, roll away? Never to be gathered. The best moment of his life becomes the worst, the unforgettable tragedy. That's how it feels, sometimes. All my precious marbles are in place, tucked safely into pockets of my soul, but my body's cells and organs are threatening to tear the seams, spill everything out. I rely on you to remind me we are all connected by the red thread and nothing that once was found can be lost.

So it is with my books. The last time I read a book all the way through in a few sittings was in 2012, at the start of my Masters. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, in case you were wondering. Since then, another glaucoma operation has put paid to my ability to read with any comfort at all. I can still read but I find myself picking at the tops of books, first chapters, beginnings... And then hurriedly gathering another to me. I have read so much and want to re-read so many, but there is always more and more to read. Social media is battering away at my eyes with its continuous streams of articles. All so interesting, so much entirely unnecessary. I must choose between this and that, but which to choose? Either I disengage or try to keep up.

Stop the clock for a moment and celebrate what you have read, Shaista, is what I tell myself. So a week ago I started a new blog - a library is what it intends to be. A reference of books I am reading, have read, crave. The title is simple - Shaista's Books - no Latin words here. Just a Persian one. I have already written four posts so will you stop by and take a look? The posts will be linked to the top right hand corner of this blog so you can always access the other blog. I am often asked what I'm reading or if I have books to recommend; the new blog is the beginning of my answer. At any rate, it's an experiment, just as this blog once was!

SPINE POETRY: THE HIDDEN POETRY OF BOOKS

SOUL MOUNTAIN

Till morning comes
a princess remembers
secrets of the heart -

the bride stripped bare,
the blue flower,
the glass palace,
a city of bells;

Old path, white clouds,
clear light of day -
surprised by joy,
our feet walk the sky;

Only love is real.

(c) Shaista Tayabali

This piece is inspired by a New York artist, Nina Katchadourian, creator of the 'Sorted Books' project - where photographs of clusters of books form an idiosyncratic poetry of sorts... a hidden, spine poetry, revealing something of the reader's tastes, and simultaneously testing the constraints of language and grammar. I was hoping to include a poem in time for National Poetry Day, but I am excusing myself on grounds of an outrageously painful eye. I did have a poem published in time for Volume Magazine though!
Most of my books are in boxes in the garage (I have been living a nomadic life this summer moving from place to place, but I will be settling somewhere 'propah' soon) so a couple are a selection from the general home library as opposed to just my own. 
This poem joins part of the dVerse - Poets Pub where a constellation of poets share their talents, offer advice and challenges... try writing a spine poem with your own library selection :)

I think this one by Samuel Peralta is brilliant...

The Passage

Only the sea keeps

crossing the chasm

Inside the tornado,

gravity,

the conjuror's bird

glimpses

the possible past:

the hundred secret senses,

the gates of exquisite view.

THE YELLOW WORLD

I don't normally do book reviews because I've always trusted that books find us and even a passionate book recommendation cannot save it from poor timing. So this isn't a review, just an About A Book I Liked. It's called The Yellow World and it is a very neat, concise memoir by a man who once was a boy who had cancer. I know. I'm really selling this to you :)

I felt quite jealous reading it because in the book, Albert Espinosa recounts how the cancer kids (the Eggheads) were part of a tight, intimate clique. They shared their lives, experiences, journeys, losses and banded together against and with the different shades of the disease. I've never had anything like this. Mine has been a desperately lonely road in the hospital, especially when I was a teenager and even in my twenties. My friendships have always been with the staff, especially house cleaning and nurses.

On Thursday, during my infusion, I met a young man who could easily have been Albert Espinosa in disguise. He was freshly graduated and didn't mind letting everyone know he was now part of The First Class With Honours brigade. 'Me too, me too!' I wanted to boast. He was very cool in a Cool Patienty sort of way - showing off the expensive diabetes contraption attached to his flesh. We discussed the possibility of subcutaneous infusions which might be in my near future (the prospect of self injecting does not appeal), and he had some good advice about it. He talked a mile a dozen, but what I envied was his life in his usual hospital, on his usual ward. 'Everyone knows each other. We've all been coming there for years. We have the same three nurses. It's brilliant!' And then he dropped the real gem - they're allowed to manage their Own Drips! That's unheard of. I've never been allowed to manage my own medication on the infusion bay. How green I felt, how green with envy... I doubt we will see each other again. As the record stands, I don't think I've ever met the same patient twice and I've been at this gig for almost seventeen years now. I did meet a lady, once, for a second time - she recognised me because the last time we'd met, I'd inflicted a leaf on her with a poem inscribed on it...

So I was scrabbling around trying to find a nice yellow image to go with my yellow post when I came across this bench... derived from the concept of Random Acts of Kindness, the purpose of the yellow bench is to invite strangers to share a moment, a chat. The business concept, of yellow benches everywhere, struggled to survive red tape and city councils, but one day a woman volunteered to carry the mission forward and put a Yellow Bench in Dublin. Isn't my love of Ireland justified again and again? (I can imagine some of my Irish friends thinking less than salubrious thoughts about the TYPE of person that might want to 'chat', but then again, you never know... you might meet someone extraordinary...)

Images of The Yellow Bench taken from All About Ideas

ICARUS

Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1560s

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The old Masters: how well they understood 
Its human position: how it takes place 
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along... 

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

- W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts 

Twice, in one week, I have come across this poem by Auden. First, it was quoted in the book I am reading - The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, and then today, in an interview with the newly appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, Natasha Trethewey. The poem, she says, helped illuminate her own reality of enduring the grief of her mother's death (shot by her stepfather); an invisible grief, because 'The world was going on about its way while I was over there, this tiny individual suffering what seemed to me a huge loss, what was to me a huge loss. That poem showed me that I wasn't alone in feeling that way'.

For twelve years before starting my blog, I lived an invisible life with lupus. Intense suffering on the wards took place unbeknownst to anyone other than the family stalwarts. So I understand the ploughman's inability to see the 'boy falling out of the sky'. But I understand Icarus too. Last year I was determined would be the year I published my poetry. This year I make no promises. I long to touch the sun but some protective instinct keeps warning me about the fall. Published writers sometimes speak nostalgically about the days when they were anonymous mice, writing for a faceless imaginary reader. The perks of being a wallflower. I may have been a mouse for long enough, but I do love being able to write without pressure or commitment. It is quite delicious.

As are these days unwinding in Singapore and Malaysia with my beautiful sisters. (Of course, being with the brothers is not bad, either :))

Cheong Soo Pieng, Bridging Worlds Exhibition, 1981

Books Actually

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
~ Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice.

On the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, I wanted to share something of bookstores and libraries - I recently stumbled across some of these collections online so they are not places I have visited, but isn't the internet brilliant for couchsurfing? In Paris, there is a bookstore called Shakespeare & Company, which looks delicious...

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare ~ Kenko Yoshida wrote that some time between 1283 and 1350. What would he have thought of a movie palace being converted into a reading room? This is the Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which uses theatre boxes for reading rooms...

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it. William Styron, who wrote that in 1958, would perhaps have approved of the Poplar Kids' Republic in Beijing, China - cosy nooks for naps everywhere!

I quite like this quote: "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you re-read ~ François Mauriac.

There is a bookstore in Mexico which has a trail of greenery wrought around the books, and a tiny one I love in Singapore, which is endlessly quirky, called Books Actually. Bookstores are becoming magical places, but some libraries are really extraordinary, like this ornate cathedral to books in Coimbra, Portugal...

or the University of Salamanca library in Spain, which is brilliantly colourful...

Of course, the college libraries in Cambridge hold a special place, like Wren's and Queen's...

but my favourite bookstore/library was tiny, cramped, dark, dusty, and very likely long destroyed. We used it during our childhood trips to Mahableshwar, a favourite colonial hill station. The librarian was terrifying and extremely strict. The books and comics were crammed together in cupboards, but the ecstatic illusion of feeling one could choose anything and take home plenty, has lasted all these years. I wonder if my brothers remember... I shall have to ask! Meanwhile, am off to hospital tomorrow for a very long day of infusions - and the kindle shall serve as my magical portable library.

Images from flavorwire via and via