Anxiety Asunder
I am reading Reality Hunger — A Manifesto by David Shields. God help me but it is like going down a ladder and having a spade shoved into your liver at every rung.
I don’t like nor dislike it per se. It is engaging and then infuriating and inbetween infurigaging.
One of the most immediate noticeables is how for all he demands this and that and dismisses and disputes, he paid scant attention to his own tone in his tome.
Much of what he states so far (I am in maybe the 70’s) I can agree with, however then he takes off down some dead bolt drift and oblivious to his own (emphatic) tone manages to contradict the very thing he posits.
If I had the time I’d write a similarly numbered Manifesto back to him or even a numbered response.
The problem with the deadbolt drift to dogma is one can almost hear the chorus of approval awaiting and clapping as he pulls into his platform and there’s nothing worse when you’re reading something that so clearly desires to be an interrogation or an uncovering. Ironically he’s placed it, sometimes, in terms that suspend any uncovering as the tent is so firmly pitched it won’t allow the wind up its gusset!
Before Hunger comes Appetite. This is Indigestion rather than Hunger.
In the process of ousting 32 slugs from my vegetable haven, it reminded me of a writer friend who recently began drawing intensely and described these epic 12 hr marathons drawing an egg. I scanned the soil today so intently, cm par cm for any sight of any sized or version of the blighters. The recent Peat Moss disaster helped matters enormously, it’s so much easier to see anything in peat moss compared to compost or clay.
And much did I see. I couldn’t believe the tribes of creatures who inhabit my little box there. Esp. impressive are the small fellas who can curl up in an instant ball. They look like wood lice but have to be something more complicated than wood lice. Weevils?
It was a very satisfying excavation, defending my stems and emerging beans and I bagged 32 of them away to a salty end. The guinea pigs are benefiting from the Community Garden as they get to scoff down much of last year’s carrots that have been left over winter by my fellow gardeners and now lie hurled into the compost patch smothered in seeded yellow kale. Into my bucket they go and Alfie-Cyril and his brother plough through them.
Today again the Mason Bees had a chat with me. At first nothing, but then as I stared at the soil they began warming up and then moved into quite curving soliloquies. My ears tune into them as I hunt the soil for the unwanted. It is quite gorgeous their chatter and travels quite an auditory distance once you tune it in. I wonder how they sound during the rain.
If any other person invokes the smell of books and the musk of bookshops I shall have to expire.
The most recent sensory memory I have of a bookshop is that of a putrid rotting vermin corpse … dead somewhere in the vicinity of the BC Labour History titles I rifled through to retrieve the Premier’s Radio Address from 1935. (for a very reasonable price I hasten to add)
The Bookseller did warn me about el smell. His advice, don’t sniff.
I can’t quite comprehend this balding nostalgia for sniffing books. I have 2 dozen better suggestions of things to inhale. I remain unconvinced that the book needs to be gilded inside a (psychological) tabernacle.
Twinned
This is a Met Eireann forecast, but it could nearly be our forecast right here on another West coast.
Occasional heavy showers.Lows 3-7C.Bright Tuesday with scattered showers.Cloudy, drizzly weather will develop on W coast later.Highs 13-16C.
I just reviewed our longer term and summer forecast. It will be wet and cold right through June, so the speculation goes. Yet the summer rainfall chart suggests below normal. We really have to compete for data, all the detailed weather analysis seems to always favour the East of the country. We have weather too! It may not seem as drastic, but when you’re living under the dripping pipe as we have been the latter weeks, it has its own drastic note that demands interrogation and an understanding of whether there is any variety to be found within it. (I am convinced there is, but have yet to raise any army of agreement over it!)
The great thing about the constant drizzle is how much you notice the colours once it, momentarily, abates. Somehow tho’ the drizzle needs to be embraced and all its qualities explored and examined.
Missed identity
Two strange incidents of misidentification this week.
A Brussel Sprout plant I bought at the Farmer’s Market months ago has sprouted a head of brocolli.
The second yesterday I bought a lamb steak, labelled as such, cooked it, ate in and 5 mouthfuls later realized I was certainly eating beef, not lamb at all.
There’s the question of visual recognition in all this, which I shall evade. I read rather than examine.