As those who read the last 4 or is it 5 yrs of posts here may gather I am a victualler of the ordinary, batty and odd moment. I cherish or trap it in life and in fiction. I enjoy it in a glimpse or happening and probably imagine it when it’s not actually happening.  I’m also endeared to what comes before and after it. Thus the other night there was a great moment or two before the unfortunate plunge to back banjaxing with the backflip.

At first the coach asked me to demonstrate how to throw it over this large roly poly cheese thing to the other mainly men who haven’t yet learnt it. He was full of the bravura over this which was rather catching and I said as I watched these various blokes going back and side and crash over the foam this is a rare moment where I am stronger than them. It won’t last because they, of course, when taught, will master the move. But then, at that moment, I was the strongest.

He and I then took the backflip to the sprung tumbling run and did them in twos. Then he said ok take a break. Breaks are not a major occurrence in my vocabulary, so I took the solo move over to the industrial trampoline where I knew I could continue it unaided.

I threw a few and stood off. A young man who began training at the same time as me before xmas asked “What goes through your head as you throw that move” so I explained that if anything goes through my head it is to not let thinking interfere to just rely on the body and be aggressive and determined. If I contemplate it, I will surely screw it up, because rationale interferes. I told him not to be in a hurry to achieve it, it would come and to  work on his strength and how mighty he was doing. And he is really doing mighty this fella, since it is hard to enter a place and watch people doing much more advanced moves than you’re able to and to take the time to learn the basics properly.

Over empowered by compliments and inquiry and I returned to the trampoline threw one good one, collected a compliment and an instruction and then the next one I threw, screwed it up mightily and have spent the past 72 hrs apologizing to every torn muscle in my back. Clearly it pays to take a break!

Today in sharply different circumstances (a funeral forum) I saw a man refuse to give up his moment. He would not hand back the microphone and he dug in there and delivered what he’d come to say (he was v frustrated by the system and the govt and regulations around burial it sounded like).  God bless him, I admired him. Earlier we’d been chatting about the acoustics in the room, which were difficult and he was having a hard time hearing. He had told me lightly …. “When you get older, you don’t give up, you give it to them.” He read what he’d determined he wanted to say aloud from the back of a rectangular aquatic blue diary (day planner). It was great. He was great. And since he was on his two feet rather than a sprung unpredictable piece of fabric trying to twist upside down, well the outcome was more of a ruction than a rupture.

Supine, divine 39

Well there was much to be said for 39 and the, for the most part, supine birthday. The salmon dinner cooked by my beloved was divine. The dodge of the hockey play offs by me (not he) was equally divine. I took a brief foray into Mark’s Work World to ogle the talking tire gauge and discovered it is no more to be ogled. I did notice a peculiar line of clothing called figure enhancing which appeared to offer false padding to women who would have no use of such padding based on the regulars who enter the place. Frankly who in their right mind would be going to Mark’s Work World to get their bust fashionably enhanced. You tend to go their to buy steel toe boots, or illuminous traffic vests or scrubs or thermals or/and or/and not to come out looking plus busty!

I did not dally due to me banjo’d back. I’d several film recommendations from friends and decided on Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and Swept Away (Lina ? hold on a minute til I watch it). It was moi and the couch and my knitted blanket. Icepack, advil, glass of wine and Godard. It was quiet and dandy. My males were busy and joined me when they were finished being busy. It suited all of us and we all suit each other.

One moment it was going so well. Then there followed an instruction. The next moment it was no longer going so well. The reluctant backflip that was not reluctant and will not be reluctant the next time. The incursion was the brain on the backflip.

Or is it the gliss to middle age that is reluctant?

Whichever, whatever, however, in the meantime an icepack and back reassurance pills and the robust determination to be back at the mat next week or some week soon. Strangely undefeated! Supine but undefeated!

Dialects

In the car with the small male who requests the hockey match on the radio, ma obliges, as I listened it was delivered in language a code that tripped me up. What’s a PK? Translation from the back seat. Which team is this? Why did that just happen? Small male patiently obliges. The talk turns to play-off hockey and how this is a different kind of play (akin to tiger mauling I deduced) to normal hockey. Perplexed we carry on up the hill. In my head I am thinking in another language, but the unfamiliar dialect continues to draw my attention and prompt questions. Small male speculates. Phone rings when something occurs in match of significance. It is Tall male to weigh in with the news to small male.

We are on our way to mama’s extra gymnastics session. A last minute decision.

Initially there’s only one woman throwing beautiful layaways and somersaults, (new language, my dialect) while two men are stretching. Again and again the woman peacefully tumbles. Then something happens. We’re talking about planes and ash when she hits the ground. The language/dialect changes tone, over content, to analysis.

We all disperse. There’s few. An hour and there’s more. Then more. The more divide into trampoline, the floor has swollen full of martial arts (all men) and break dancers. There are 3 others who are doing something with the bars on the wall. There’s the solitary woman, the tumbler, whose now on bars. The physical activity is in three dialects. The bouncers, the twisters and the outnumbered straight gymnasts.

Back in the car, the match resumes. The language re-explodes. We listen, talk, decide. The evening will yet be full of even more dialects, strange and surprising, and some as familiar as the handle on a cup.

Becker Part

Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death and Arvo Part’s Te Deum: spuds and butter on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the window of the uterine cafe here. Combination incroyable. I vehemently disagree with aspects of Ernest’s Chapter 2 P 13 Para 1 but we are otherwise compatible.

I continue to think on the line of a tumbling sequence and the shape of a sentence. Throwing a tumble or a single move requires you to launch your body and you will not be assured of the outcome. (ie. feet or flat on your arse). The hop step into the first movement in any tumble (The round off) is critical because you cannot throw it from two feet, it must be from one. Your hands and the snap push you back to two feet from which your pike fall off the two feet and arms already popped up from the floor take you into your back handspring and on …

So we have one foot take off to two feet landing to two feet take off to usually but not always a two feet landing to carry on. And the landing must be solid.

A simiiar insistence on rhythm occurs to me in sentences or rather my sentences insist on forming themselves or emerging along some kind of rhythmic line.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I find my appetite for acrobatic increases and I long to pick up another session every week, but am not sure about the how and where and whether.  Last week a woman remarked that she could see I have muscle memory when I was working with the coach on this backflip. It was sweet and reassuring, but perhaps a little generous. 25 years seems a long way back.

The cure for a headache today turned out to be a rivetting conversation. Thanks L.

*

Today I woke to the thrill that a new baby was in the world and I was going to meet him. I put on my lipstick for I had to be at my best and headed out. I was even more thrilled to find his mother sleeping with a do-not disturb sign on her hospital door. I remembered the days following my son’s birth (which was equivilant of search and rescue of ship lost at sea) the exhaustion was unlike any other ever. It was like being run over by a semi-truck, standing up and running a twenty-six mile marathon and then discovering you’d now to attend a barn dance at the end, followed by some kind of farming inspection after the shindig ended and now off you go to the nightshift.

Your baby needs everything from you, you are his food and he may have a hard time adjusting to acquiring it and your body may not entirely co-operate either. You’ve grown this life, now you feed this life every hour, second hour, all night long.

*

Last night in a strange incident I was caught in a robbing situation at a shop, which then boiled over onto the street and was very startling. There was a moment where I was suspended between this heightened situation and my son was beyond, unbeknownst, in the car. Between he and I were a bunch of unpleasant circumstances that briefly cut off my passage.  It was horrible. Today at the hospital I remembered that early fragility of life and recognized that it still continues in different shapes, despite his strapping height and searing intelligence and gentle jokes. I am glad to be reminded of this.

Single view

Increasingly I have been thinking of the single reader in the last year: if thoughtful literary criticism has little place in our medja then where is it to sit. We can tell such criticism no longer has much if any place because of the obvious “life-span” of a book. The book is of interest when it is released. Sometimes it is not of interest at all when it is released.

This week it came to me on Friday that one solution could be to consider such pieces as photographs and to frame them for mounting and sell them to a single reader rather than a newspaper. Thus the single reader would be assured an exclusivity to your thoughts and considerations and may very well appreciate them sufficient to continue collecting them paying the same fee (v poor) that a newspaper pays. This could alleviate some of the frustration that I experience in taking time to write about books (outside the current conception of lifespan) only to find a newspaper decides they’re not in the national interest and some other old purposeless waffle is.

The backflip has progressed. I am now doing it unassisted on the trampoline. There’s a moment before I throw it that is identical to moments that strike me sometimes if I think about the book I’ve just written.

The impact of the mind on an acrobatic move is massive. And can destroy it. Yet the mind has to be engaged to remind the body. The challenge is for long over high, straight arms, an arch, lift the hips with the legs straight, the push off against the floor from the shoulders for the final snap of the legs. The second part is crucial because that will give you the impetus to follow with more of them eventually.

I think of good tumbling like a sentence.

Cleo 4-6

Cannot sleep between 4am and 6am. Very odd altogether. What’s happening between 4am and 6am that so appeals to my brain? I must have a chat to the birds and find out.

I wake with astonishing ideas in mind on completely useless things like how impractically to build a bookshelf. Or how to invent a bed that keeps the body only in one position (mousetrap bed) and other pointless entities that belong in outer space. Like visions of a garden I have not grown or sporting rebellion.

Last week I invented (realized after the fact) a completely new graveyard that I could practically plot and draw for you in this city … so vivid, utterly disappointing it does not exist.  And it’s not exactly easy to just rustle up your own graveyard. A pumpkin pie maybe. A salad perhaps. …. but a graveyard on an average Monday. All a bit Charlie Brown.