Comfort

Comfort (verb): to ease grief or suffering; to console

Some losses take us unaware… no, that’s wrong. Surely all loss takes us unaware, even if we knew to expect it, to dread it.
How to console someone bent under the weight of grief? Love of course, embraces, but also meals, cake, wine, perhaps silliness to forget for some moments?
I’ve wondered before and still don’t know why sweet things bring comfort. Is it a chemical thing or do sweet things like cakes and jalebis comfort because they remind us of childhood, dappled with happinesses?
Children are good at happiness – they have a talent for it.
I’m grateful for this, and comforted by it.

I found this poem by Jalaludin Rumi in a November post:

“What Shall I Be

I have again and again grown like grass;
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels:
After that soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine. I shall be that.”

And I found this, in a borrowed book of Faiz’s poems:

“Loneliness

Today loneliness like a well-tried friend
Has come to be my evening wine-pourer.
We sit together waiting for the moon to rise
And set your image gleaming in every shadow.”

The poems are beautifully translated by Victor Kiernan. I think loneliness must be grief’s cousin. Grief has no brothers or sisters, is alone.

Anne Carson said, in Decreation, her elegy to her brother, something about surviving loss and fashioning it into something you can carry.
These thoughts comfort me, these images of grass and feathers and something precious to carry always with us.

p.s. if anyone is reading this, what comforts you – what book, what thing? Writing?

The workings of Art

Dear blog, you shy shape-shifter,

I’ve neglected you. This time it’s not the house, the kids or life’s other distractions – it’s because i’ve working hard on the play! For this, I owe much to Ella Hickson, my mentor, who has not only shown me the way with a detailed map, but also arranged regular checkpoints and fired the starting pistol.
And I probably wouldn’t be able to do this, not now, without support from the Arts Council – I’d be struggling as a badly-paid, inept temp. So thank you ACE, and thank you ME for persevering and continuing to re-apply again and again (and again and again) for funding. But enough about me.

In David Edgar’s wonderful book, How Plays Work he gives us the definition of a play from Doctor Johnson’s dictionary as ‘A poem in which the action is not related, but represented; and in which therefore such rules are to be observed as make the representation probable.’
He goes on to list the three kinds of probability:
Plausability – does the play fit our knowledge of the subject or experience of life?
Coherence – does it hang together internally, do its bits add up to a whole?
Conventionality – how does it relate to other stage plays and other fictions we’ve internalised.

He then moves over to the director Peter Brook, who outlines the two fundamental elements of any work of art. The first is concentration: by reducing the chaos and redundancy of the world and eliminating what doesn’t interest them, artists draw attention to what does interest them. According to Brooks, ‘Shakespeare seems better in performance than anyone else because he gives us more, moment for moment, for our money.’
The second element, according to Brook, is pattern. ‘Brook is convinced that there are rules of proportion and rhythm (like the mathematical Golden Section or the rule of three) which are more fundamental than taste or culture, which touch us because they are the expression of natural laws. So that, like concentration, rhythm draws attention to essences and relationships we’d otherwise miss.’
So, continues Edgar, ‘music is a concentration of the pitch of normal life organised by melody (change over time), rhythm (repetition over time) and harmony (things happening simultaneously). Similarly, painting organises the formless clutter of the visual world into echoing or contrasting colours and shapes. Drama borrows the patterns of other arts (the rhythm of dialogue, the balance of a stage picture) and – through the more abstract rhythms of emplotment – adds some of its own.’

Last weekend, I saw Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind at the British Museum. Wow. And yes, Art matters. It mattered 40,000 years ago, enough that a sculptor spent 400 hours working on a single sculpture… over how many months, years, in between seeking shelter and food and trying to stay alive?

What a cozy existence I lead in comparison. I resolve to picture my growing debt, those numbers, as some shadowy, mythological creature as I work in my warm, lit-up cave. To ignore it would be foolish… and no doubt its presence makes me work harder.

The uses of the erotic

I’ve been considering the meaning of ‘erotic’ and recently came across an essay by Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic, where she says:

“…’erotic’ comes from the Greek word ‘eros’, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women…

The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experience it, we know we can aspire.”

Of pornography she says:

“…pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

And she says this, which I like a lot:

“The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.”

In trying to understand the transgender woman in my play – her emotional/physical/sexual identity – in order to respresent her in an authentic, dignified way, I’ve just listened to a talk by a neuroscientist explaining why heterosexual men like she-male porn; and I’ve been watching the video diaries of trannygirl15 – a lovely MtoF transsexual student from Quebec who talks about her transition and experiences. I also watched a she-male video on youtube which was interesting but uncomfortable.

I’ve come to believe that the reason a man would love a transgender woman is particular to who he is and who she is. I don’t think he loves her because of how she is but despite it…
At least that’s how I’d like it to be – about love in the end, rather than sex.

The three aims of life

In the beginning of Ararat, Louise Gluck’s 1990 poetry collection, there is a quote by Plato:

“…human nature was originally one and we were a whole and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”

I’ve also been rereading The Complete Kama Sutra, which began as research for my courtesans story, to answer the question ‘what did they do exactly?’. In the introduction, the translator, Alain Danielou (also a French historian, intellectual, musicologist and Indologist) writes:

Eroticism is firstly a search for pleasure, and the goal of the techniques of love is to attain… infinite delight. The refinements of love and the pleasures that include music and other arts are only possible in a prosperous civilization, which is why the Kama Shastra, the Art of Love, is linked to the Artha Shastra, the Rules of Prosperity and the Art of Making Money.

And if love doesn’t last? I’m thinking aloud… wondering how often a woman without husband or children can feel confident of her place in the world. Perhaps if she’s fortunate and determined.

According to the Vedas the three aims of life are Virtue (dharma), Wealth (artha) and Love (kama). These were meant for men, but let’s include women.

So I’m going to think about pursuing virtue and wealth. And perhaps love – not infinite delight, not at the moment (I’m in the library) – but the other side of love: the thing which is always shifting and changing colour.

Quiet days, soft nights

One of the best things about Christmas, after the tree and the lights, is the lull after Christmas: how quiet it is, how slow. How lovely to hide away in a burrow, lined with moss and cushioned with leaves.
But in the absence of a burrow, there is bed, and a big pile of books beside it, to read my way through:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Iliad by Homer (Robert Fagles transl)
Decreation by Anne Carson
Vox by Anne Carson
How Plays Work by David Edgar
The Secret Life of Plays by Steve Waters
The Invisibles: A tale of the Eunuchs of India by Zia Jaffrey
The Ninjas by Jane Yeh
The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Tea at The Midland and other stories by David Constantine
And the books I want to get:
Archipelago by Monique Roffey
The Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd

In a piece Jeannette Winterson wrote for the Guardian a few years ago, entitled ‘Why I adore the night’, about winter dark, and the importance of dream time, she says:

The night allows this dream time, and the heavier, thicker dark of winter gives us a chance to dream a little while we are awake – a kind of reverie or meditation, the constellation of slowness, silence and darkness that sits under the winter stars.

The Courtesans Reply

My book is out. I was prepared to love a spineless thing but it has a spine!

It’s available through Me or from the following local bookshops: Herne Hill Books, Chener Books, Rye Books

You can also buy it from Amazon (it has a different cover and no spine). Try this link if you’d like some of your money to go to a good place instead of all lining their tax-avoiding pockets

https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/support-a-good-cause/step-1/?char=93766.

It is also available in Canada and the US through Amazon.

The Next Big Thing

My poet/writer friend Seni Seneviratne has introduced me to The Next Big Thing where I write about my new poetry book – The Courtesans Reply

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

It was inspired by a translation of The Caturbhani, four monologue plays written in Sanskrit and set in the courtesans quarter in India around 300 BC.

What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

Actually, I’ve thought about this because I’m adapting the book as a play, and I can see it as a film… perhaps directed by someone like Samira Makhmalbaf.
I would love for the actress Manjinder Virk to play one of the courtesans. The characters are all Indian/from the Indian subcontinent, and all women, apart from Sukumarika, who is a MtF transgender character and would be played by a man.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The Courtesans Reply is a long poem sequence imagined in the voices of Indian courtesans: women who were known for their skills in 64 arts including music, storytelling, dancing and the art of love.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

I began working on the first poem in about 2005/2006, but didn’t know it would be a sequence until about 2008. I redrafted a lot, working on individual poems, so I didn’t really have a full first draft for another three or four years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

My biggest inspiration was Glimpses of Sexual Life in Nanda Maurya India: an english translation of The Carturbhani by Manomohan Ghosh.
I was captivated by the courtesans glimpsed through the narrow gaze of the male narrator, and as I began to imagine their lives, I found myself straying further and further from the original text. Given a voice, the courtesans had their own stories to tell.
I also drew inspiration from The Complete Kama Sutra and other historical texts, and although I believed my characters were real, that they were once living, it is fiction.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

What drew me to The Caturbhani was the erotic charge of the writing, and the way this was married to a subtlety and modesty that is characteristic of the culture of the Indian subcontinent. That the courtesans enjoyed their sexuality and took pleasure unapologetically was important to me… even in light of their situation in life and lack of choices.
I hope readers will fall under the courtesans’ spell as I did.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

My pamphlet is published by flipped eye, an innovative press I admire for its ethos and for the quality and range of the work they publish.

Interviews coming up on The Next Big Thing:

Anna Stearman: http://annastearman.com
Meryl Pugh: http://furtive11.wordpress.com