Left in Command

Which foot do you lead off with? Without thinking because the brain knows it's a given and the command is too strong to override: this is your dominant side and therefore it naturally follows that this foot should take the first stride. Instinctively, it pushes off as if it were the more outgoing courageous twin to which the shyer twin will always fall in with, although the choice not to does not exist as does the choice to assert some authority. That only occurs when the reserve has to lead for some reason and when again the choice not to isn't even an option.
And here, as in there – the paragraph above, just to make it clear, I'm talking limbs and not twins. Because we like to think, perhaps at times condescendingly so, as twins as individuals, which they are, but they also come as a pair like legs, and will lead or follow and reverse that order according to their comfortableness in each situation. Feet and legs can do that but it takes more thought to adapt and it usually only occurs when one is incapacitated. That there is a hierarchy in the body however should come as no surprise since its communication network undoubtedly formed our organisational structures i.e. business has borrowed the idea many times over. Don't you agree? Well that's my theory anyway; one that I'm sticking to and that I imagine has been voiced before. I wouldn't have the audacity to claim it as my own – who do you think I am? I'm just a humble servant. To my body. To nature. To man, by which I mean others, in the service to and of.
And this humble servant hasn't conducted a survey which could turn the whole dominance theory on its head. What if, unbeknownst to us, we all push off with the same foot? And the notion that it's always the same foot as the hand with which we write is presumed? If that was the case this theorising would be held up as a joke, is in fact already a joke (yes, as quickly as all that) to be summed up succinctly as: an hypothesis put forward by an uneducated woman of no sound scientific or medical knowledge has been swiftly disproved because she was too bent on sharing her views and forgot to do preliminary research.
Actually, that prediction is about to be realised, and by my own foot too – the left one. For in walking to answer the phone and then circling the living-cum-dining-room-cum-kitchen I've noticed that my left foot is not always the first to launch itself; sometimes, against all odds (those in my head) the right foot leads, and entirely of its own accord. Although I also have to report that seven times out of ten the left foot commands the way. And so typically, as is my habit, I've undermined my own attempt to prove anything, though it's never anything of any significance anyway. Too many anys, too many possibilities. Which is me in a nutshell: greedy.
But I have qualified (to myself) one thing: that lefties are not, as one Italian writer put it, less predictable, they're unpredictable. In every definition of the word. I'm not sure we have a Commander. Well, obviously the brain, but it is I think more susceptible to whims, creative or orderly. In a left-dominant body order is chaotic rather than rational. You might say: can it be called order at all? I might answer: it's a functioning disorder in a right-sided world. At one time it was seen as a disability: people were forced to write with their right hand, but now, as much as they're able, lefties make their own adaptations, and even catch those not versed in these ways off guard. I, for example, can't always control my arms; they're quite independent of me, whereas left-footed footballers give the appearance of being in control and, deliberately or unintentionally, fool the goalie. The same I think must apply with throwing punches or possibly karate kicks. Limbs (and their appendages) don't always go, least of all land, where you think, where you hope, you're directing them, and neither does for that matter the predominantly left-sided brain. 
In command, left is nomadic in style. As if it recollects being uprooted from anywhere it called 'Home', or ancient times when lands lay unnamed or even unpeopled. Charted courses are viewed with contempt and uncommon methods toyed with, not however to simplify nor reach the intended goal but to widen the net into which if it likes it might (or might not) sail.

Picture credit: The Football Match, L S Lowry

Everyday

I'd be mad to leave my cell, although who's to say I haven't already left it, taken that plunge; I could have by now, out of desperation, to escape the all-pervading noise that comes from without and not within. I am silent compared to the happenings outside, and tolerant to a certain level. I've had to be after what will in six months be ten years, if I'm still here of course. I have a feeling I may not be, but then I succumb at some point every year to that urge to look around. It doesn't usually amount to anything, because as I've said already I'd be quite mad to, and well, the fear of actually doing that always gets me in the end.
Maybe it's not fear exactly but an undeserving attitude. Because if I left I'd want an upgrade (if I have I hope I got it! Or I'm happy with whatever new compromises the new arrangement brought) which due to being a solitary creature I doubt I'm entitled to for my needs are few and could be fewer. Why have more when you can live comfortably with less? That sort of thing. As it's one thing to entertain wants, but quite another to hunt them down, and often when found they're unaffordable anyway or would bring inconceivable, impractical changes that would upset routine and so are seen as disadvantageous. Unless, of course you're reached a stage (or an age) where you're more malleable. 
I haven't. And I'm doubt I'm going to, because you grow used to what you used to and can't imagine different, until of course you change it and then you can't imagine otherwise. Circumstances brought me here (am I still there?) and now I don't think I could go back to where I was before, (before before?) even though I was less shut-in. Does security do that, I wonder...as back then my job was more secure than my home, but in securing a home, my own home, jobs became insecure. Jobs, plural. As if I outgrow everything too quickly; as if I refuse, outside of this box, to be contained in a box. It's a paradox because I like nothing better than shutting myself away. I am very content, to be alone, on my own. And yet...
...the outside seeps in, through glass, through wood, through walls, and wears me down like a rock made smooth by bracing elements and resting ramblers. This should, you'd think, make me more tolerant, in my mind, with my body: I am one with Nature and lively life, but no, it doesn't do that. Roughness is smoothed; hardness is added, and rock-like formations, developed over years in the usual susceptible locations, remain so. The stomach is soft, the back is visibly notched. Kafka felt a physical repulsion, and sometimes I feel the same. He was not one for lively life and neither was Dostoyevsky.
I weather, I've weathered more stuff than I thought possible (and that's not a lot if you care to compare to people that have really been through it), but when indecision weighs heavy all the time, almost one would say obsessively, it's more than enough for one person to bear, especially when there are instances when life, with all its colour and noise, seems unbearable. And where adding any other would make that weight heavier still. That's not depression - that's just a facet of life. We are all different and all built differently. Why is it we cannot accept, good-naturedly, the naturally reserved, more sensitive person? Those allowances are not made; we have to make the best of what we are, where we can, and divulge little about it, or you might find as Kafka did that what you took as understood is later misunderstood or held against you. But then he, as we all do, also had faults which although obstacles were not as stubborn in character and could have been overcome if he'd had more patience, more self-assurance and less fear.
I am not a better mortal than he. Our position, in general, has similarities, and as an example he's interesting (there were others before me like me!), but I can no more change or escape what I am than he could (do I want too?), not without causing torment somewhere. At least he moved around somewhat, both in travel and accommodation, which is more than I have in my thirty-odd years. Then again, perhaps I'm wrong to assume I haven't moved to a more sparsely inhabited part of town, where my complaints have been minimised but like Kafka my misgivings have not.

Picture credit: Conscience (Judas), 1891, Nickolai Ge

Pistachio Ice Cream

Family history is an obstinate yet gratifying puzzle.
Is that a statement? A personal view? A deliberate contradiction? Yes, yes, yes and not like When Harry Met Sally as in said with quite the same wild abandon, though I guess you might echo such enthusiasm to a lesser degree if your interest (or trade) was genealogy.
I have an interest, but I'm not well-versed in it. I have to rely on the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? and suchlike to not only whet but satisfy my appetite; that and snippets that crop up every now and again in relation to my own muddled origins. Muddled as in I can't get it or keep it all straight in my frenetic head, and therefore it's impossible to write down though there have been instances where I tried as well as to impel others to map out uncles, aunts, cousins and relate remembrances. These attempts were, I confess, too much – I gave up, indignant at my paltry efforts to get relatives to write something, anything down! And yet in spite of these failures, the curiosity remains in my own and everyone else's.
When a tiny detail, or a person even peculiar to me or some other, that's been previously overlooked emerges it brings forth a memory of eating pistachio ice cream for the first time: Tunisia '95, at a table of holiday-makers, which with the exception of my parents were all strangers, in the hotel's dining room, because when the spoon brought that first taste of ice cream a light shade of green to my tongue the world in which I was sitting shuddered. Like a small tremor you're unsure you've experienced and yet you know it happened. And continues happening, at least for as long as there was ice cream to be spooned into my baby bird-like mouth, by my own hand for I was a big girl, fourteen or thereabouts. The room wobbled and everything else around me faded: faces and surroundings blurred and voices seemed farther away, as my senses were flooded with and adjusted to this new flavour, the likes of which we didn't see much of in the UK.
And now pretty much the same occurs when an unexpected piece of information suddenly surfaces, except its effect is more like the fizz of sherbet or the pop of popping candy. Like a lit firework, rather than a pistol with an empty chamber; there's a flash of cognition, and my brain rather than diving for safety absorbs the full impact, as if I were indeed still a child firework-gazing or searching the night sky for comets. The main difference being that depending on what's revealed I might flounder around a bit after. Basically, it's pistachio ice cream with toppings that either pack a bit of punch or are a mix of crunch and chew, before it becomes just a puddle of fat and sugar, and part of you: who you are and why.
Well, I had that experience again recently. And it wasn't even something earth or universe-shattering. Or even entirely new. Nor had I gone looking for it; how it found me was as much about choice as it was about serendipity. One of those evenings where you're looking for something to watch as you prepare dinner, and where the subject incidentally happened to be what I planned to eat: pasta, and the manufacture of it, which was quite fascinating if you have an interest in knowing how raw ingredients become what they become, in the various dry packaged forms we know them as. And because I'd recently been reading Primo Levi I was intrigued by the inside of factories of any description, but it was the pasta that opened a door, unsurprisingly and surprisingly, to Italy.
In short, it occurred to me to question my remembrance of my grandparents using, correctly, tagliatelle with meat sauce and making an authentic lasagne: why? how come? when the English were and still are for the most part ignorant about what types of pasta to use with what, which led to my mother and learning that it was thanks to her aunt, my great-aunt Sandra. Alessandra from Vicenza, who met great-uncle Paul in Italy during World War II and was, so we assume, a war bride. My mother remembers her making her own pasta and hanging it to dry like on a washing line: sheets of it aerating; and she was practically salivating down the phone at the memory of her braised peaches in juices. 
And so another link, its influence having been authenticated, ends in a puddle of pistachio ice cream.

Picture credit: Pistachio Ice Cream, eRecipe

Error is Such an Ugly Animal

The past has always deeply interested me and so I write of it and in it. Huh? Yes, prior to publishing this very article it will be reread for any missed grammatical errors by a future self. I have no idea what she'll think but I can tell you this much: she won't change one single word, with the exception of maybe a missed comma or two or a misspelling. Though usually the past me (me now) checks before saving the finished copy and the back-up, because accuracy is important particularly if you're book or name-dropping, and as I think you might have noticed from previous essays (is that the right word? Check later- Ed) there's been rather a lot of that. This year. No, last year, as of when penned not published.
Readers, I confuse you. Purposely. How can I not when I myself - past or future – am in this state? That's the one thing I can say with certainty I'll be, though to what extent I cannot since that depends upon other factors over which I have less control, and such events as they occur may over or underwhelm me yet leave me somewhat at sea, and so this is the general state you'll find me in and under which I write. Write sometimes not very well and other times better, but as I said I don't, no stubbornly refuse due to some moral code, to rewrite what's written. Ever.
Once you begin to erase, you might as well redo the whole article. Which is fine if that's your design, but not if it's just because your eyes now are not the same ones you saw the piece through originally, because subtracting and adding to in a different mood alters the narrative and makes it altogether something other than it set out to be. It is what it is: that same space can be never be recaptured. And sometimes, though rarely, it improves on renewed association. Mostly, all you feel is indifference however, since you're unable to enter into the same spirit in which it was completed. Therefore readers, you are the judge and jury. But in this code I'm not alone as I do recall reading of at least one other writer (I forget his name though I'm 99% sure it was a him) who like me also resisted re-editing. (Was it Graham Greene? -Ed)
Yes, such revisions could elevate so-so prose to greatness, to success that you never dreamed of in a million years, but that for me has never been a goal. Or a dream. Not even as a path to being a better, improved writer, or at the very least known of. I really don't care about any of that. I'm not that kind of writer. Are any of us really? that sit day in, day out in a front of a screen tapping keys recording whatever waylays us. I don't even do that. I have a routine, sort of, which usually involves a few hours from late afternoon through to evening. My brain's not up it to in the mornings; it's primed for work, functional work of the administrative kind which yes, can include household matters, not the structure of prose.
Can I claim to write? when surely all I'm doing is putting words together and when those words have often been infiltrated by another writer's. Not their exact words, unless it's a direct quote, but their ideas and the thoughts they've subsequently given me. What this admission is not is a confession of plagiarism. No, it's more an exultation in another's words, fictional or autobiographical, and an unleashing of what that's inspired in me and maybe a reaching out to others, not that I'm convinced there's anybody else there. Is there? (I'll confirm the circulation figures later-Ed).
I don't mind if all I'm doing is talking to myself though; I've been doing that my whole life. You could say my love of words, which the English language is endowed with, has shades of religion. I wouldn't argue with that analogy or think it was somehow blasphemous; I mean, the Bible doesn't have pictures does it? (You may be going a bit far here -Ed) Well, my grandparents' cloth-bound bibles never did, nor have any I've ever glanced through in hotel room drawers. (Change the subject -Ed). The meeting place for this love is here, whether those works testing my powers of recall are amateurish or accomplished, where it is honoured in tones that are perplexing, depressing, philosophic and enamoured, and where error, unlike the old saying, is not such an ugly animal. (For the old saying, in full, see The Wrench, Primo Levi. -Ed).

Picture credit: Flood, 1996, Paula Rego