The Cerebral Mum

Something brewing…

April 18th, 2010 Comments Off

When I first came back online, and when the need to write was just beginning to make itself felt again, there was just… The blank page.

I couldn’t remember what I had to say so urgently before and it seemed as though no new thoughts were pressing me to write them. But there is a germ here now; yeasty, brewing. It is listening to music while spinning its gossamer strands for me to gather. And all these words before those words are just a humming until the real song comes.

While I sit here waiting – poised and alert, catching at the scent of both danger and safety – while this story unfolds itself, there is other writing that needs to be done. One with a deadline, and another to complete earlier thoughts.

Instead of starting on those, I am sitting here, mixing metaphors and not worrying about it. And playing the same song on YouTube over and over which relates to yet another piece of writing that has been brewing but which I haven’t yet found time for.

In so many discussion and debates about issues that I’ve had recently, I keep coming back to the idea that “art is the lie that shows us the truth”. (A line which strangely found its way to me again today through a twitter link from OverlandJournal to an article on The Faster Times about an editorial by David Simon in the Times-Picayune in which he quotes Picasso.)

I keep coming back to the idea, also, that living is art. And the way those two disparate thoughts conflict with and yet elucidate the other is a philosophical wonderland. Even more so when we include the beauty of reason.

All these silvery trails crossing and recrossing. It isn’t quite time to make concrete their nebulous connections with these things working in my mind.

-It’s all connected, I say.
-What?
-Never mind. I’m just drunk on cold air and 3am.

Very little of this post makes sense, really. It is just random words strung together with rhythmic movements while time passes quietly. What is written is inconsequential, or perhaps… just gigantically and complacently inadequate.

It isn’t 3am but 3am is where I am.

I’ve sifted through boxes of writing today…

April 17th, 2010 Comments Off

I seem to be in the place where everything appears imperfect, unfinished. It is all in pieces.

But I’m at peace with that.

I found an old song I barely remember writing. It seems complete in its simplicity.

no man
no man
no man is an island

i am
woman
i drown like an island

here is
my sand
beach yourself on my shoreline

because i
will stand
though the water’s are rising

i’ll hold
your hand
your hand
when the tide becomes lightning

and then
i’ll dance
i’ll dance
ill dance
and it won’t be so frightening

because i’m
woman
and i drown like an island

and no man
no man
no man
is an island

Friday night…

April 16th, 2010 Comments Off

There is some longing to be out in the world again; at night, when noises are life and messy.

I miss the stillness found there while surrounded by the electricity of people moving.

I miss being present outside of time.

I miss the vortex, the hunger, the sinuous bodies and all their abandon.

No sensation here. All is quiet and dim.

Class clown or teacher’s pet…

April 15th, 2010 § 5

Earlier this year I was talking to a relative, who would probably prefer not to be identified, about a couple of things I’d like Caspar to be able to do as he isn’t at 3yo kindergarten due to single-mother budget constraints. One of those things was a music class, and I’d found one that actually had a pay-per-session Mini Rock Band at fairly reasonable prices. The other thing was a weekly sports class but the price, if I’d enrolled him for the entire year, was not much lower than kinder would have been. I was trying to save enough for at least a term of that, mostly because I wanted Caspar to get some experience with a structured environment to help prepare him for school.

So… Just your general parent-of-a-small-child talking to a parent-of-small-children conversation.

Except for the, “I’ll pay for that. Sport is my job,” with a shrug of the shoulder because it’s NO BIG DEAL. (Which made me cry a little bit because when you’re a single mother everything is your job and it gets a bit exhausting.)

Anyway, the point of this story is not really about how great it is to have very tall, baby-boy relatives with the highly under-rated sense of masculine, familial duty. The point is that Caspar had his first sports class today.

The question in my mind was… Which Caspar will he be when we get there? If it was the painfully shy one, then it might not be fun the first few times.

I took a wrong turn and we were 5 minutes late, everyone already lined up and ready to go. I held open the nets for us to squeeze through and join them… And he just ran into the thick of it.

He did try to follow the instructions as they ran, or stomped, or jumped from one side of the nets to the other to warm up, but he was just so excited (and giggling constantly) that co-ordination or anything that required slowing down was not on the cards. And when they formed a circle to do some bending and stretching, he, apparently, belonged in the centre of it showing off his crazy wiggles and fake-falldowns.

Attention-seeking Caspar had been another on my list of possibles. I think it is something that might be an issue in the first years of school. The problem is though, he is so delightful he’ll probably get away with it. (Which reminds me of my Grade 3 teacher, Sister Ursula, handing my empty workbook to my mother at the end of the year and saying, “I made sure she learned everything, but she is just so full of joy that I didn’t want to restrain her.”)

After that, he did some soccer exercises; slightly calmer, slightly better at following the instructions, only needing a gentle reminder to go to the back of the line after he kicking his goal instead of the front of it. And then it was time to cool down, which is when possible Caspar #3 showed up.

Playing musical hula hoops, jumping into hoops when the music stopped and having to share hoops as more were taken away, he always found his way into the teacher’s hoop. Sitting down in a circle to sing the goodbye song, he completely ignored the huge gap and squeezed himself right in next to her, almost landing on her lap and staring up at her with that flirty little sparkle in his eyes.

My charming little suck-up.

But the short story is… The first day was wonderful. Caspar wishes he didn’t have to wait a week for the next class. I think it will be very useful. And I love my unnamed relative.

(If you are wondering… The classes are run by Ready Steady Go, which operates throughout Australia, and I highly recommend them to anyone who has a pre-school age child!)

Miscellaneous Voices Book Launch

April 14th, 2010 § 3

I went. I listened. I chatted rather ineptly. I bought my copy. Review coming sometime.

But buy it now anyway.. Miscellaneous Voices Book Launch ~ Caspar Reading

Caspar’s launch review? “Grown-ups are too noisy.”

Fragments on writing…

April 14th, 2010 Comments Off

I’ve been thinking about my writing a lot lately, grasping towards its purpose, its style, its reasoning, its ways. I can’t quite capture it all yet, or transform those thoughts into an eloquent essay.

So I’ll just wander through pieces here, touching words.

A lot of reading has been done, online and off, and I’m seeing so much tightly controlled beauty, where the control is invisible so that only the beauty is left. It is uplifting and humbling writing, with a rich, sparse poignancy.

I have always had the feeling that my writing was “immature” but I have always “known” that I was a writer, that that gift was somehow mine. Perhaps the discipline required to publish, or of even trying to publish, is what is missing .

But something in me still loves strong wind on the mountaintop, the uncontrolled wilds of words; their tangled hair. Something still says more is more, even while bathing in the luminance of not-one-unecessary-word. Even while envying that stunning, profound writing, where things are pared down to essence, where exposure is the slow stripping that takes place in the process, not the text.

But I do not think I am that writer. I am that writer dancing topless on a bar. That vulgar, irrational, angry, joyous, defiant writer who still, at 37, writes words with no control and finds beauty and coherence in their incoherence. And I am still that reader who is happy to be tumbled about in waves and and then lie battered on the shore, spattered with sand and salt and words, vibrating somehow with the pattern that wasn’t written.

And I wonder, today, if Violette LeDuc would ever have been published. And I wonder, re-reading Camus’ Letters to a German Friend last night, what an editor would say to him now. As a writer praised for that discipline to strip away everything but what is essential, those essays now seem overwritten, hyperbolic. They are impassioned, anachronistic. They are difficult to critique, in the same way blogging is. They must be read within their historical context and can only be uncomfortably defined as “literature”.

Except… I am not uncomfortable.

I think perhaps there is room for the immaturity of unreasoned pains and passions in some future literary canon. That perhaps discipline and craft are not always central to a writer’s worth. That the mess of what is, while we are within it, can be as permanently moving as a slow unravelling.

April Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse – Call for Submissions

April 13th, 2010 Comments Off

The April Carnival is being hosted by ~Enola~ and all the details for submission are listed here: Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse – get your submissions in.

I absolutely love the theme for this month which is Along the Path of Healing…

I’ve noticed that through my progress in recovery from child abuse, I’ve tended to align myself with others that are similarly situated along the path of the healing process. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes it helps to read posts from others that are at different stages than you. Whether it reminds you how far you’ve come or gives you hope to continue plugging along, reading about others’ healing journeys can be inspirational. So, this month, write about your own healing process. If you are toward the “end” (if there is such a thing), what would you say to those just starting out? If you are at the beginning, where do you want to be in 5 years? What does “healed” look like to you?

As always, the post you submit doesn’t need to follow the theme, doesn’t need to have been written especially for the carnival or even need to have been written this month. And you don’t have to be a survivor to submit: All voices are welcome.

You can submit any post that relates to Child Abuse. On the submission page you will be asked to pick a category of – Advocacy & Awareness; Aftermath; Healing & Therapy; In the News; Poetry; or Survivor Stories. Pick onethat fits best but do not be overly concerned about it. There is no “right” answer. I’ll reorganize so that it makes sense.

Submissions are due by April 21st.