Three of my ma’s cows are dying. The other day I was talking to her on the telephone and she described how with milk fever the cow falls down or sits down and may never get up. They’re big enough animals, even the pedigree ones who are small compared to Angus (Sp?) so it’s not like you can give them a hoist and a hug like you could a cat. It was a terrible image that of the farmer devoted to her heifer and to lose it this way. A slow and painful detaching. Helpless. A wasting. Spectating. The other two have different maladies. One of the three is certain not to make it.
She described how she had to scramble to provide for her two motherless calves. They need a primary milk from the mother she calls “beastings”. She’d some frozen from last year’s calving, but it ran out. She called on a man who helped her with some of his own and a black bucket of milk to tide her over.
When I think of the incredible labour that goes into raising cows, especially the way my ma raises them, it would be like having your years of work go up in flames. And like all loss it’s final.
Proustian malady 447. Rotation #4
Of all the possible ends to this farine free week on a Friday I did not expect it. It’s true I was dreaming. It’s true it was perhaps a vicious dream either a high action Scooby Doo style leaping over icebergs, no that was the night before dream, no it was another dream, I woke and recalled only a stern voice yelling “These are basic notes!” and perhaps I was aiming a bucket at the head of the yeller and for whatever reason my arm was above my head. I put it down. And it’s true there was a sharp pain the next time I moved and it’s true that I complained ouch my back and noticed it was 7.15am. And moved again and winced some more.
Sometime later my partner offered to massage it, and it was true that it was too painful. As the morning wore on I could tell I had put out a rib, maybe. I could tell only maybe because I’ve popped out ribs at least 3 or 4 times in this life and I know exactly the pain you can feel when you breathe. The thing about popped ribs is I have no patience and need them relocated back in because they’re so painful.
I presented. I complimented the Australian physio who put the ribs back in on the other side the last time. It’s true that when he touched my back and said pull here, move there that it was agony. I was surprised the ribs were so high up, I was surprised the ribs were hurting lower down and I was completely shocked when he calculated I had popped out a total of 4 Ribs.
That was what was true about that moment that I had managed to pop out four ribs while being asleep. Scooby Doo indeed. It wasn’t so much the pain, it was that it was so unexpected and the number was so unexpected. 4. Quartered. Like a ransacked piano. No notes, rather than basic ones. In 48 hours the pain will soften and recede, and in 5 days I won’t feel a thing. Now it’s dull, but like the same old note again and again. But I do find the whole episode terribly funny.
Beckett on Proust, in Proust (published 1931)
The scaffolding of his structure is revealed to the narrator in the library of the Princesse de Guermantes (one-time Mme. Verdurin), and the nature of its materials in the matinée that follows. His book takes form in his mind. He is aware of the many concessions required of the literary artist by the shortcomings of the literary convention. As a writer he is not altogether at liberty to detach effect from cause. It will be necessary, for example, to interrupt (disfigure) the luminous projection of subject desire with [p.12] the comic relief of features.
It will be impossible to prepare the hundreds of masks that rightly belong to the objects of even his most disinterested scrutiny. He accepts regretfully the sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry. But he will refuse to extend his submission to spatial scales, he will refuse to measure the length and weight of man in terms of his body instead of in terms of his year. In the closing words of his book he states his position: ‘But were I granted time to accomplish my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time, now so forcibly present to my mind, and in it I would describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure, because, like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives – separated by so many days – so far apart in Time.’
Intestinal holiday
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_wCuUrsLjU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
A poem today for parents of children having surgery and one dear friend, in particular. We are thinking of you. I think you’re partial to the odd blast of RLS. Courage! xx
| The Sick Child | ||
| by Robert Louis Stevenson | ||
CHILD. O Mother, lay your hand on my brow! O mother, mother, where am I now? Why is the room so gaunt and great? Why am I lying awake so late? MOTHER. Fear not at all: the night is still. Nothing is here that means you ill - Nothing but lamps the whole town through, And never a child awake but you. CHILD. Mother, mother, speak low in my ear, Some of the things are so great and near, Some are so small and far away, I have a fear that I cannot say, What have I done, and what do I fear, And why are you crying, mother dear? MOTHER. Out in the city, sounds begin Thank the kind God, the carts come in! An hour or two more, and God is so kind, The day shall be blue in the window-blind, Then shall my child go sweetly asleep, And dream of the birds and the hills of sheep. |
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Loach Tank
I have been scuba diving in the warm tank of early Ken Loach’s films the last 2 days. Poor Cow (1967) Looks and Smiles (1981?) and Family Life (1971).
In Poor Cow I was struck by the many references to council housing, the housing list, and getting a flat and how central housing was to everyone’s lives. How your life could only really start or settle if you obtained housing. In a parallel to Betty Lambert’s Vicky in her novel Crossings(1979) the character Joy (played by Carol White) sees her possibilities improving only if she meets a nice fella.
Vicky’s situation in Crossings is different in that she cannot cease or chooses to return to Mik and is unable to define any life of her own minus him, even going as far at the end of the novel to suggest she actively set him up to be part of her epic destruction. Maybe it’s that I happened to read and watch these two pieces in close proximity that the parallel struck me. Crossings was a novel that both enthralled me and at time did my head in. The last chapter felt like the final 3 miles of a 26 mile run. Lambert’s novel is like an overbouncing basketball landing in so many corners of the pitch … but it’s also deeply interesting and I’d love to know if those who felt so ardently against it when it was published would feel the same now rereading it and reconsidering it. I think it was a brave and difficult book for Betty Lambert to write. If it has a weakness it is that of the playwright coming to the novel with a chaotic “everything in”. That said I also enjoyed the chaos.
Back to Loach:
Looks and Smiles is all dole, unemployment and army recruitment. Set in the early 80’s the posters at the job centre included “Go to London”. My favourite line in it is when Mick (another!) when he visits his ex-girlfriend (who been at the curling tongs and has sublime Geordie accent) to attempt to win her favour back says “You never told me you had a budgie.” “What’s there to tell,” she replies. God is in the details I sighed.
I am winding my way through Family Life, trying to figure out who the psychiatrist is based on. It reminds me a tad of Allen King’s Warrendale (documentary). Just as Looks and Smiles was redolent of Wiseman’s Welfare.
Yesterday I happened to catch in its last hour online a Nightwaves interview with the playwright Tom Murphy on the restaging of a play The Sanctuary Lamp he wrote 30 years ago and caused uproar at the time.
These were notes I scribbled of things he said.
“The most loathed word I have from my youth is Respectability, I absolutely hate the word. Everything became more conservative.”
Murphy talked about having lived in an Irish ghetto in Birmingham He described a cult of violence “men walking with what was called the gimp, thumbs sticking out from either side. They didn’t belong to England, they didn’t belong to Ireland, they felt guilty about Ireland, felt they’d done something wrong, during their annual sojourns back to Ireland they discovered doubly so that they didn’t belong.
There was a great deal more, but one of the main discussions centred around what the reaction would be to the restaging of the play at the Arcola Theatre in a now predominantly muslim community Dalston. I have to track down more specifics.
His first comment on respectability was in relation to what happens to a community when people leave the way they did at that time. Always wondered why more was not imported back in to those places — the way the exchange happens between say languages. (Hiberno-English-Hiberno English and now sraid Gaeilge in reverse back to Gaeilge.)
The Guardian also ran an interview with Murphy very recently and so you get a great sense of him and some of his work from this article
Yonks and yonks ago I heard Murphy intone “What gets me mad gets me going” and I regularly appropriate his phrase when I am in the swing of vexation (vexating).