Voice

Distinguishing truth a challenge, surreal times.

Where is the voice or voices really telling it like it is? Always something made up, faked, misinterpreted.

Who can understand the complex workings of minds? Chemically, emotionally? Too individual. Begged and borrowed. Fluid.

Picture credit: Freeing the Voice, 1975, Marina Abramovic (source: WikiArt).

Inspired by Jackie Kay's introduction to Bessie Smith.

Written June 2023.

Jus' the Day

Then it was June, and the sun shone fiercely. Eyes inward on memory, laughing outwardly at Granma and Grampa. Still figuring, still drawing patterns in the dust with a stick, though the dust be a table and the stick a finger tracing its surface. Still feeling out of sync with the machine, goggled and muzzled like the driver sitting in the iron seat. Goggled mind, muzzled speech. Oughtn't to talk as I do, should keep my views in my head. Should only in my protests (with and against the world) sell Good Used Cars.

Preachin's a kinda tone a voice and preachin's a way a lookin' at things. Listen for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm. Is it telling or instructing? Fella has a story: It's a free country. The concrete road a mirror under the sun.

Well, I don' know what the country's comin' to. I jus' don' know. But it ain't the people's fault.

They only knowin' the results, not the causes. Results, not causes. Losses. The road.

Disliking sun and wind and earth, resenting food and weariness, hating time. Cars from all the country. All headin' west. The road full a them families.

This here's California, an' she don't look so prosperous. This here's a murder country. This here's the bones of a country. This here is California.

Acrost the desert such purty country – all orchards an' grapes an' yella oranges, an' lan' flat an' fine with water thirty feet down, layin' fallow. Good lan' ain't worked. Ever'thing in California is owned; ain't nothing left. Purtiest goddam country ever seen.

Land and food. Good green fields. Earth to crumble, grass to smell. Fallow fields a sin; unused land a crime. Jus' layin' there. Or raisin' one thing – cotton, peaches, lettuce. A temptation. It ain't our'n.

This here's Hooverville. Ever'body lookin' for work. Ain't no work. Ain't no crop. The work's done. Movin' on, shovin' north, a-going south. Take what we can get.

Workin' an' getting' our pay an' eatin'. Eatin' good for twelve days. Layin' pipe; good job, but it ain't gonna las' long.

Always scuttling for work, scrabbling to live. An' lookin' for pleasure.

A wave of bathing – children, men scrubbed clean. Best clothes, freshly washed. Hair braided and ribboned. A string band: guitar, harmonicas, fiddle. A dance. Sets people up an' makes them proud. Makes 'em think of ol' times.

Odour of sweet decay: ferment and rot fills the country. Sorrow. Failure.

Goin' in ever' gate, walkin' up to ever' house. Lookin' for somepin ain't gonna find. A-gettin' tired. Got to get bread an' meat an' coffee with sugar in. No slip, no groceries.

Ever' little step fo'ward, slip back a little, but never slip clear. Can't get straight. Crackin' up. Ain't no fambly now. Ever'body's gittin mean. Ever'body.

Cotton Pickers Wanted. White cotton like popcorn. Got a bag, a good cotton bag? Lines of people movin' across the field, talkin' across the rows. This is good work. Good pickin'. Until a great cotton-pickin' machine come an' put han' pickin out. Cotton's done.

Jus' try to live the day, jus' the day.

Picture credit: Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940, by Dorothea Lange (source: WikiArt)

See The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

Written June 2023.

Tap, Tap, Tap

The memories we hoard, the photos, the audio files, the stories, ours and those related to us. Words on a page become not just words on a page telling a story, an entirely unconnected story, but personal memories. Like a bird tapping with its beak, they tap, tap, tap and unlock them. The mind is flooded while the eyes still roam over the page where this other story of other lives is being told.

Food does it best. A tin of evaporated milk is mentioned and I see it, taste it, smell it, remember it poured on cereal, corn or bran flakes. Carnation. (Am I confusing it with condensed? It was likely there was both in their unmistakeable tins.) Meat wrapped in paper and I see ham sliced by the village butcher, feel the paper. Sensory doors have been opened.

Sometimes it's characters. I see myself in them – as I was, as I am – or I understand their perspective. Or I see in them a relative and perhaps appreciate what I overlooked or failed to grasp. Or I answer them back, argue with them, for they have touched on a subject I knew but didn't know how much I was sensitive to. Schizophrenia.

Why speak of it? Why think on it? Because we are all stories, many stories. Because dead is not dead.

Picture credit: Woodpecker Tapestry, 1885, William Morris (source: WikiArt)

See Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood.

From journal, May 2023.

Hammer-blow

Sit up straight, don't slouch. Stand up straight, shoulders back. An instruction given by adults, an instruction I now tell myself, and still, as always, gradually slide into a lazy posture. I can be attentive in this pose, or at least I think I can, although perhaps I'm only semi-listening, semi-taking-in whatever is being said or whatever my eyes are running over. My mind is possibly wandering aimlessly elsewhere, it's attention only a little caught by some word or sentence vocalised or written, which sets it off again in another direction.

This is happening quite a lot with Margaret Atwood, because her stories seem to prod and poke old thoughts, old memories, old times, or impart, like a teacher, aspects of a question or text I hadn't considered. Robert Browning's The Last Duchess is looked at with the eye of a student and an examiner; the whole plot of Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles is described in a single paragraph. 'Tess had serious problems.' My mind sees Gemma Atherton as Tess and Eddie Redmayne as Angel Clare. Were either, I now wonder, right for those parts? Was the version they starred in like the book? Have I read it? I can't remember. Hardy was not a prescribed author. Seamus Heaney was, as was the bloke who wrote Z for Zachariah, and, of course, Shakespeare. It's only in adulthood I wish Hardy had been a set author, like I wish a different Shakespeare play – we did A Midsummer Night's Dream – had been assigned. It's still today my least favourite. Okay, I hate it. We pulled it apart and dissected it too much, and, in truth, I thought it silly.

But then I think myself silly too, in both senses. My over-active mind runs away on its own, to lands unknown or to mapped territory, and gets lost. Hesitates somewhere, departs from the way, and pours over, some years later, the missed or not taken turnings. My musings the same as Atwood's: Have I missed my own future, the life I was supposed to have? Where was the point I missed it? Did a hammer-blow, delivered by my three-old-cousin with a grown-up tool, to my eight-year-old forehead dampen my spirit and cause a chemical imbalance? Has owning a flat and furnishing it with my own possessions slowed me down, shut me off from what should have have been mine?

There are too many whys, too many maybes. If that other place, that other future ever existed, it's gone now.

Picture credit: Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1966, Yoko Ono (source: WikiArt).

See Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood.

From journal, May 2023.

Knitting a Yarn

Commence at the commencement, where only fairy tales begin. Once upon a time there was a spinster in her cradle, cut out for spinsterhood long before her birth. When older, and well established as a spinster, she thought she'd perhaps had a voice in the matter, had perhaps chosen this course for herself. Her purpose not to procreate but to read, often absorbingly, sometimes mechanically; to at all times keep her eyes and fingers employed. And indeed she may be right, for, if reading and a little life experience had taught her anything it was that a crowd out for fun could easily become a mob out for blood. She did not dispute this truth but rather feared it.

Picture credit: The Artist's Wife Knitting, 1920,William James Glackens (source: WikiArt).

From journal, May 2023.