IN SEARCH OF DELIGHT

With every year that passes, I seem to accumulate a smaller number of blog posts. I think this is the inevitable fate of The Blog as a vehicle for our thoughts. Technology intruded in its rapid way and demanded a change - but for the writer, all the modes of transporting thought to word remain alive, however strained the thread.

It has been a very difficult two months. The beloved friend I wrote about in my last post, Victoria, would have read this post, but for her life in this human form taking flight on the 29th of August. A month later, Dad, who had been having trouble with infection in his ears, had episodes of losing consciousness, developed a high fever and was hospitalised with E.coli sepsis on the 18th of September. Here we are, at the end of the month and Pops is still in hospital. His infection markers have all returned to normal but his hearing has not. Communication has been a struggle but he is as ever graceful, remarkable and heartbreaking in the loveliest of ways. Dad, I miss you horribly. Come home soon.

In between, my brothers and Mum's brother have visited and done the supportive work that makes family continue to be family. In between, a young boy cycled up to my house and seeing a handbag unattended, stole it. This is the intersection of being human. My lapse of judgment in doing a careless yet trusting thing - oh it's a young boy I've seen many times before, cycling up to ask if he can wash our cars, I can leave my bag unattended, the front door open while I dash out to the back for... what? I cannot recall now, as I was waiting for friends to take me to Victoria's funeral. In my bag was my mobile phone - which, once upon a time, might not have impacted my life too much. But, today, our little devices hold worlds within them. 

I had a bone infusion yesterday. I picked up a cold a few days ago while at the hospital with Dad, so I feel rather heavy and my eyes feel bleak. But Dad is sitting up, practising his standing with the walker and I have hope returning for the first time that we might bring him home by the end of next week. In the meantime, I am doing the homely things of cooking meals for Mum, chicken soup for Dad, laundering clothes from hospital and watering the precious indoor plants that Mum tends to with a far greener thumb than my own. I just pat them on the head and apologise and they pat me back and say they understand. 

In the meantime, I have rewatched several old favourites... aren't movies one of the greatest reasons to stay alive, stay reminded of why we are and who we are? 'The Young Victoria' is sumptuous in its romantic portrayal of her courtship with Albert, 'Mrs Harris Goes to Paris' is delightfully Parisian in her search for the dreamiest Dior gown and 'Miss Potter', one of my most favourites... not only for its charming illustrations of Jemima Puddle-Duck and its central character being the excellently feminist Beatrix Potter, but also for the sweetest musical refrain... 

'Let me teach you how to dance,

let me lead you to the floor;

simply place your hand in mine,

and then think of nothing more.

Let the music cast its spell,

give the atmosphere a chance;

simply follow where I lead,

let me teach you how to dance.'

 

NUREYEV: LEAPS OF FAITH

Rudi made me cry. 

I don't cry at or during films anymore, mostly because the varying levels of discomfort my eyes are usually in, make it hard for me to escape entirely into the visual world before me. But the life of Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev contained within a single powerful documentary, All The World His Stage, had me in tears for much of the second half.

Exile is a common enough story for many of us. Voluntary or involuntary. But in Rudi's case he was a pawn of a nation, a government, an ideology that his body and will refused to succumb to. Of course, his defection in Paris in 1961 had nasty consequences for his friends, the 'kitchen culture' crowd, who had, in secrecy, danced and recited poetry and played under the wrap of darkness. But they separated him from his mother, and more than anyone else in his family, I think that may have been the worst of it, though in the end they let him back for the days before her death. They say that although she was failing to recognise anyone else, she knew he had been to see her, but what was that one moment against all the years - the millions of yearnings, and achings for home?

And then there was Dame Margot - La Fonteyn - the substitute mother figure? No, she was more, she was everything to him;  after she died, he had no one; he would call friends before dawn, and say nothing, only cry. She was on the verge of asking her husband Tito for a divorce, and then he got shot, and Fonteyn's mother said how will it look if you don't go immediately to his side? How will it look? Even the greatest prima donna ballerina obeys when her mother says those four sinister words. That was the end of Nureyev and Fonteyn, so said the documentary, although in reality they danced for years afterwards, and stayed close until her death. 

The violinist Yehudi Menuhin called Nureyev a panther. Parkinson asked him to describe how things had been in Russia when Nureyev was a child. 'Bad,' replied the dancer. 'But how bad?' pressed Parky. Because people always want to know how bad, from the safety and comfort of their own lives. Richard Avedon photographed Nureyev's leaps into air as though he were challenging gravity to call him merely human, but Bob Dylan wrote 'No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.'  

The documentary was at once the embodiment of freedom and simultaneously a chaining down, a weighing down of things that are bigger than us, wider than we can control. Politics, AIDS. Being called Russian when you are really Tatar, but no one knows of Tatars or their complicated history with Russia...

 Ah... go watch the documentary if you can. Also Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two. Also M.I.A, about the Sri Lankan Tamil English singer and activist Mathangi 'Maya' Arulpragasam. Also, the manager of the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse has promised me the Nureyev poster when the film has finished running... these are moments worth living for.  

THE PUMPKIN SMASHERS (A SPECTRAL POEM)

The trick is not in the knit,
it's in picking up the fallen stitch.

You can carve anything into flesh,
given a knife, a little strength.

Usually, it's the other way round, but now
we bring darkness to light,

bring skulls to life, even though the grin
terrifies. We persist. We leave our orange

gifts out, like half peeled bananas,
to tempt the jungli revellers.

And then they come, Houdini's ghouls,
to trick or treat you - impossible to tell -

until they leave you, empty of sweetness,
wondering why you invited fear to drop in.

But then you turn to the scared faces within,
your little caped monsters, and you draw

your own fake grin. And when you tug
on the bucket of myth that lives inside your skin,

you are Mother; from you, blood,
from you, ferocity begins.

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2015

My Halloween poem was inspired by friend and poet Caron Freeborn, whose casually used phrase, 'the pumpkin smashers', to describe the grown boys who mirthlessly destroyed her children's evening by smashing in their pumpkins, has become a poetry prompt among her circle of poets.

Halloween confuses me. I got into the spirit of the thing a few years ago: pumpkins were carved, children stopped by in masks, bleeding ketchup across our porch... I have never enjoyed being frightened. I don't particularly care for deliberate ghoulishness. Especially after hearing of Claudia Winkleman's daughter bursting into flames because her cheap supermarket costume (highly flammable) brushed past a lit candle. A candle sitting plumply inside the hollow of a pumpkin lining the pathway to a friend's front door. (As a result of Winkleman speaking out, many supermarkets are increasing their fire safety standards.)

Ah, but I do try for the spirit of the thing.

Did I not scamper off to Spectre? The latest Bond, timed perfectly with the 'ween spirit, centres itself in Día de los Muertos festivity in Mexico City. An earthy enough beginning, and I was all in. But as the hours wove on through cybersecurity and threats that were more elaborately verbose than actual, I found myself consciously trying not to roll my eyes. One eye might have rolled, a little.

There seemed to be at least four or more scripts stitched together by an extremely unwieldy surgeon. Bad enjambment. A disjointed skeleton with an excellent mortician filling in the gaps with superficial make up. The grisly scene with the eyes would please any horror film aficionado. But the seduction of/by Monica Belluci, left me neither shaken nor stirred. The villain did not frighten me - I only thought, dear Christoph Waltz, you seem so nice! And worst of all - the pièce de resistance - were the moments when the character of Léa Seydoux, a superb young actress, equal to any Bond, found herself hiding behind Jim. No! I thought, but did not holler, into the dark theatre. After all, there were men there, enthralled. By cars that were bullets, and bullets that were bullets, and women who looked like silver bullets... If you like that sort of thing...

I missed you, Judi Dench. I loved you, Skyfall. You almost had me then, Mr Bond, but now, I'm underwhelmed.

*Sigh*. Somehow, I don't think he cares...

(This poem and piece are participating in Open Night at Dverse Poets Pub over here: www.dversepoets.com, October 2016)

GEETA SAAR - THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

'Whatever happened, happened for the good.
Whatever will happen, will also happen for the good.
What did you lose that you are lamenting about?
What did you bring with you that you have lost?
What did you produce that got destroyed?
Whatever you have, you received it from here.
Whatever you gave, you gave it back here.

What belongs to you today, belonged to someone else yesterday
and will belong to someone else tomorrow.'

I read these words - the essence of the Bhagavad Gita - on the morning of a curious day. I was not very well but determined to catch The Theory of Everything at the cinema before it disappeared. I broke a rule by smuggling in a non-sanctioned cinema drink (coca-cola not bought from the cinema offerings) and once seated, proceeded to be mesmerised by the effects of my action. The bottom quarter of my latest journal of poetry had been resting in a pool of spilled coke for the few minutes it had taken to reach my seat in the dark, and many of the endings of my poems have turned into a kaleidoscope of smudged colours and shapes.



You know me - I handwrite my poems on handmade paper. I dry flowers and use real ink. I have never considered making copies of entire books or typing up poems beyond the world of my blog. You might think this sort of thing has never happened to me, but I don't have that excuse. Once, in Italy, I stood on the edge of a pier scribbling verse. A boat was gathering speed in the near distance. A laughing crowd on board smiled and waved at me. I waved back. A wave, a real watery wave of enormous proportion grew like a Hiroshige painting and engulfed me, my book, the lines of verse…
I love my poems and I feel sad for a while after these strange encounters of loss, but the lesson in detachment and impermanence never fails to impress me.

The Theory of Everything was a lesson in impermanence and the laws of change. Eddie Redmayne deserves every accolade. His portrayal of Professor Hawking's descent into the deepest human understanding of the nature of time is subtle, intelligent, worthy of the subject matter. The ending is terribly moving because the director uses a cinematic ploy to imagine time rewound. Redmayne's Hawking slowly gets out of his wheelchair, stands up, his feet uncurl, his legs walk him down steps, he reaches down to pick up a fallen pen. The moment does not feel like fantasy. Professor Hawking's special gift is to make us believers in ourselves, first... the universe and its cosmology, second. 

(The Geeta Saar quote was taken from the instagram account of Deepika Mehta, a yogini.) 

HALLOWEEN CUPCAKES BEFORE SKYFALL

Autumn isn't exactly sizzling this year, is it? Perhaps it's just me, my eyes are woefully aggrieved with my overuse of them. My operation cannot come soon enough. Chop that scar tissue, dear surgeon, I am ready! Ish. 

Occasionally though, I see a patch of fire, usually behind gothic grills...

Yesterday I was invited to a pre-Halloween cupcake tea party... well, I made it a cupcake party by baking twelve Consistently Reliable Cupcakes and I flung in a cola-cake for luck. One of the little girls was NOT convinced by the idea of coca-cola in her cake... but I won her around! Or rather, I should say Marian Keyes won her around... it was her recipe, albeit highly re-arranged from the original (sorry M!)... see the little scuffly, crumbly pile at the Central Ghost's feet? While I was asleep, my mother decided too much icing was going to waste at the edges, and scooped a spoonful into the middle, perhaps hoping I wouldn't notice? IT'S IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CAKE MA!!! Anyway....

After cake and sangwitches, tea and bedtime stories, the grown-ups, self included, went to see Skyfall, the new Bond. I had the pretty nails to show for it, a bright yellow dress with ochre boots (very autumnal) and just before the show, we even had a martini! Well, I shared mine... a delicious Polish appletini thing... just to get in the mood...

Now, the truth is, I have never really been a Bond girlfan, too many car chases, too many cars! but with this Bond, with these Bond women, I'm all in. Although, hasn't Judi always been the coolest, ever?

'Bond Women'... did you know we are to have no more Bond 'girls'? Nice idea, although there are aways some rather sticky ends for the beauties...  Javier Bardem, the villain, was righteous in his peroxide, cyanide hell and the roll call of eminent British actors was just fantastic - Ben Whishaw, Dame Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Naomie Harris... it was so character-driven, told such a strong story that had you never watched a Bond before, it would not matter. 

Tomorrow is my pre-op and despite not being an agent for MI6, I feel absolutely shattered. I prop myself up with the good news that Malala is out of danger, and recovering in Birmingham, but falter at news of Hurricane Sandy hurtling towards New Jersey. (Apparently, someone has dubbed it 'Frankenstorm'... who?!) Sigh... there's always a storm somewhere. So how about a chirpy picture of nail art?

Not very Goth, are they? They have butterflies and little pink daisies on them...
I ought to try these, like my friend Vicky who writes a blog at Books, Biscuits and Tea... now hers are Frankenspooky, don't you think?!