Balance Beaming

Doing yoga (nothing serious, just once a week) has reminded me of nothing so much as going to Occupational Therapy when I was a child. Then, as now, the problem was an inner-ear-derived lack of balance, but I've since learned and absorbed little tricks to help hide the fact. That is, until I have to strike a yoga pose that requires only one of my feet to be lifted off the ground a twisted around at a weird angle. It's funny because it feels so much like re-visiting Peninsula Hospital every Wednesday and being asked to perform similar feats.The difficulty is something I associate with childhood.

I remember walking along a balance beam and rolling around the floor--game-playing as therapy. But my favourite experience was at the end when my therapist (a curly-haired woman who was the first colour blind person I'd ever met) would allow me to root through a treasure chest filled with sand and pull out one of the little toys hidden around the base.

            

Finland

Oxford preview of the LOST Theatre production of Book Ends, along with a new play called Finland.

ALEX
Oh shut up.
ABIGAIL
I see us, now, very clearly. On holiday. There is a heavy mist resting over everything and it’s cold. Unexpectedly cold. Unbearably cold. The ground is damp, with patches of snow. We shuffle along a path, me with my hood up and you getting all wet. The rain still trickling from the trees. You’re ahead of me, leading the way.  
ALEX
Where are we?
ABIGAIL
Finland.
ALEX
Oh Finland, finally.

Late Fees

Inv #                         Description                         Amount
   479428 OVERDUE  Wings of madness [videorecording] / France 5 ; d     $0.75
   515070 OVERDUE  Le Dernier metro [videorecording] = The last met     $0.25
   515071 OVERDUE  The iceman cometh [videorecording] / produced by     $0.75
   515072 OVERDUE  Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein [videorecording] : =      $0.50
   537322 OVERDUE  Hits [sound recording] / Joni Mitchell..........     $0.50
   537323 OVERDUE  Aberdeen [videorecording] / Norsk Film AS presen     $0.25
   587193 OVERDUE  Aberdeen [videorecording] / Norsk Film AS presen     $1.25
   431123 OVERDUE  The Decalogue [videorecording] = Dekalog / direc     $0.25
   431126 OVERDUE  The Decalogue [videorecording] = Dekalog / direc     $0.25
   431143 OVERDUE  Eternity and a day [videorecording] / directed b     $0.25
   438041 OVERDUE  The book of illusions : a novel / Paul Auster...     $0.25
   451193 REQUEST 08-15-10 02:59PM: The West Wing. The complete fou     $0.75
   468248 OVERDUE  Jaguar of sweet laughter : new & selected poems      $1.75
   468249 OVERDUE  Ballets Russes [videorecording] / a Zeitgeist Fi     $0.25
   604098 OVERDUE  Ballet suites [sound recording] / Shostakovich..     $1.00
   604099 OVERDUE  Solaris [videorecording] / Mosfilm Studios ; Sov     $1.00
   615873 OVERDUE  Campo Santo / W.G. Sebald ; translated by Anthea     $0.25
   662380 OVERDUE  Hits [sound recording] / Joni Mitchell..........     $1.75
   662421 OVERDUE  Children of a lesser god [videorecording] / Para     $2.00
   667287 OVERDUE  What I loved : a novel / Siri Hustvedt..........     $2.75
   677610 OVERDUE  The West Wing. The complete fifth season [videor     $0.75
 

An image from Wings of Madness, listed above. A documentary about Santos-Dumont, the early aviator.

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 11:26 PM, David K. O'Hara <dohara50@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear K,
...
Currently, I'm back in California, staying in my mother's spare spare bedroom and trying to get a handle on my future. Or trying to will one into shape. I've been applying for temporary teaching jobs out here (to no avail) and also to permanent university posts on the east coast and back in the UK, most beginning in January. I've yet to hear anything, though. Mainly, I'm just re-acclimatizing to old surroundings and trying my best not to fall into old habits, old systems of thought. I've been thinking a lot about the concept of redemption lately, primarily because, the other night, I happened to read Cynthia Ozick on the redemptive thrust of literature:

'The tales we care for lastingly are the ones that touch on redemption--not it should be understood, on the guaranteed promise of redemption, and not on goodness, kindness, decency, all the usual virtues...Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are responsible...above all that we can surprise ourselves...Implicit in redemption is everything against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and harm and elevates the life-giving...'   

Please do tell me anything you've found particularly inspiring lately. Again, even the smallest thing...

Personally, I've been a little bit obsessed with public libraries, falling in love with these old school American architectural lovesongs to the book. Seriously. I'd forgotten them. The quaintness, but also the wealth of real, intimate culutre. The kind of stuff that gets clouded from one's vision after three years in the Bodleian. A strange sort of giddiness totally absent in academia. 

Later the recipient of this email told me that she herself had gone to the library to look up this essay of Ozick's, but someone had torn it out of the book.   

Return to Sender

I once knew a girl who said she wanted to live in the countryside. She used to send me postcards and letters telling me about this, describing the life she wanted: picking apples and working sometimes in some dusty old general store where old people came to drink coffee in the mornings. She hoped, one day, to find herself drinking bottles of beer on a porch somewhere, watching the sun go down, maybe listening to the radio, birdsong in the trees. Once, when we were on the phone late at night, she told me how she would paint in an upstairs bedroom she had converted into a studio, with windows that overlooked a lawn, a hammock, a tandem bike leaning against a fence. In her most honest, most vulnerable moments she might mention children and trips to a lake with water wings and blankets and buckets and spades. It bowled me over, hearing all this.

We kissed once at a party. That's how we met. She had herself an awful boyfriend at the time, we got talking, we had an encounter in a hallway. As far as I know, she's engaged to a lawyer now (who, I’m told, treats her very well) and lives at the edge of a city she once refused, categorically, ever to return to. She no longer writes to me, or phones me late at night. Last I heard, she was dreaming of traveling to India, or New York, or Japan, like all the other women I know.

For the Love of Gold Days

A rather heavenly home I found once while wandering around Sweden on Google Maps...

My Sister the Poet

I am sitting alone in her room, again. This is the room where she writes. There is a lamp, a window, a gauzy curtain, an empty bowl of cereal with spoonfuls of milk left inside.

There are one or two bookshelves (stuffed to the gills) and a typewriter, a selection of pencils: it’s neither a study or an office, though, but a private space. The ghosts of words faintly traced into the wood grain of the tabletop appear wherever the light lands in front of me. I am surrounded by her things, little objects she has touched and moved around many times like so many talismans (which she told me once, standing on the lawn outside, came from the Greek word "telein" which means "to initiate into mysteries"). I can see her fingerprints on these picture frames, this loose button, this seashell with its pink underbelly. I am not quite trespassing so much as interloping, here, sitting in her place, waiting for her, ostensibly to ask her some nothing question about the time, or about the weather, or about a phone number I've forgotten. I'm doing what I assume she does, whenever she's in here, waiting for words and images to come. Cozing up to them, sneakily.

  

I sit here at her desk, but she is not here with me. I think I can hear her faintly, pacing, humming under her breath while she feeds the cat and waits for the kettle to rumble and click. And so I just bide my time before she comes back again and asks me to leave. I prepare myself for this dismissal, for the smile she'll shoot me, which will take me bashfully from her seat with the creak in its legs. It's a sound I sometimes hear elsewhere in the house, this creaking, coming through the walls, telling me she's hard at work. So I lean back a few times, trying to get it exactly right, this sound that is hers alone. I relax carefully into that chair, calling its owner back to me.    

The Unseen Sea

This is a still from a batch of footage found in a basement in Australia. It was filmed sometime in the 1930s, by a Sydney dermatologist named Ewan Murray-Wills, and forgotten about. The footage shows dancers in The Ballet Russes picnicking and cavorting on Bungen Beach on their off days. Some seventy years later filmmaker Gillian Lacey and musician Alexander Balanescu used the footage to create a performance piece called Play.

Writing this, I realise, how much I long to see the ocean again. Most nights I walk along the sports grounds where Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile--there's a high fence that runs along the pavement, and for some unexplainable reason, I always imagine an unseen sea on the other side. 

Another year, another play. To be performed at London's The Old Red Lion Theatre as part of RedFest, from April 16-21. It is a vignette called For All We Know and it involves a blind man listening to the ghost of his dead wife. At one point she reads aloud to him:

We were in the parks one morning, you remember. You had... (Turns page.) Slept in my living room the night before and, uncomfortable, you rose early and suggested we go for a walk before you caught your morning train. You made tea and we took these with us, in mugs. I can still remember the cold of the ceramic and the heat of the tea inside. Also my imagining your feeling the same simultaneous hot-cold feeling on your lips. It had been a cold night and there were heavy mists resting over the field, along the river. The parks were empty. The sun was burning through. Your glasses had steamed up and you took them off, and I can remember you looking at me, somehow more freely than you ever had before, squinting my direction. I could see your breath. I could see your hands were shaking. (Pause.) Then, coming to the riverbank, we stopped, we stopped talking. (She stops reading.) I took your tea from you and threw it in the river. I threw it in the river with mine and you looked at me. I looked back. I tore open your collar, you lifted my dress. With your hand you felt along the inner-seam of me: the same simultaneous hot and cold...