I can't sleep…
Wonderful a fistful of snow in the mouths
of men suffering summer heat
Wonderful the spring winds
for mariners who long to set sail
And more wonderful still the single sheet
over two lovers on a bed.
I like quoting ancient verses when the occasion is apt. I remember most of what I hear, and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true.
Photo: Harmonic Hesitation
Mining Poems or Odes won the BAFTA Scotland award for best short documentary in 2015. It’s 11 minutes long. You will say you don’t have time. Save the link and come back to it. It’s that good. His accent, his passion, his story, the cinematography – all hypnotic.
“The Scottish poet Robert Fullerton is a former shipyard welder who was an apprentice when he found his love of books thanks to his mentor. Like its subject, Mining Poems or Odes finds beauty in language and in the docks of Glasgow Fullerton’s thoughts on mining and lyrical readings of his poetry with scenes from the Govan shipyard’s distinctly working-class milieu.”
Here’s a large chunk of excerpts from the documentary:
Continue reading “They’re almost sacred. Words…Head. Heart. Pen and paper.”
A writer named Lorne Ladner described it. Bubbles came up on the water. Then blood came up, and the water stilled. As the minutes elapsed, the people in the crowd exchanged glances; silent, helpless, they quit the stands. It took the Seminoles a week to find the man’s remains. At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way, on two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you’d hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s. One line of a sonnet, the poet said—only one line of fourteen, but thank God for that one line—drops from the ceiling.
~ Annie Dillard, from “The Writing Life”
Notes:
What’s the significance of words strung together like gleaming pearls lassoed around your neck.
…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
I roll them around my head like a handful of marbles in my right hand, glassy, smooth, and manufactured in absolute perfection. My Marbles. Mine.
As Firth read Thomas Wolfe’s passage, it was lightning, an electric current, the body shivering from a forced seizure.
I grabbed the remote control to pause the streaming. There was Firth, in the frozen frame, holding the pages of the manuscript, waiting patiently for me to catch my breath, to digest the words.
Yet there’s been no digestion. I float down a slow moving river that loops, bathing in the beauty of the words, the rhythm of the passage and the mystery of their meaning.
…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
What unfound door?
What forgotten faces?
Notes:
Thomas Wolfe: Who better to talk to than the man who created something immortal. More and more I trouble myself with that. ‘The Legacy.’ Will anyone care about Thomas Wolfe in 100 years? Ten years?
F. Scott Fitzgerald: When I was young I asked myself that question every day. Now, I ask myself, “Can I write one good sentence?”
This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place. […]
The ten following chapters explore writing so fierce in its focus that it can change the vision of its readers for good in both senses. […] A book that brilliantly shows how such seeing might occur in language, written as it is in prose that has ‘the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree’. And for over a decade I have been collecting place words as I have found them gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. […]
Many of these terms have mingled oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognizable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs and grass when freeze follows thaw, a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name. Shetlandic has a word, af’ rug, for the ‘reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’; another, pirr, meaning ‘a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water’; and another, klett, for a ‘a low-lying earth-fast rock on the seashore’. On Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight. […]
There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, ‘Wow.’
~ Robert Macfarlane, from Chapter 1: “The Word-Hoard” in Landmarks
Note: Portrait – Wharfedaleobserver