This was written in Marva's writing room as the dawn came upon me and found my words all scribble and scrawl...here is the translation of that hopeless handwriting into something that can be said and hopefully worth saying.When one is told that this is the writing room then one has to...write! I was reading TO **** A MOCKING BIRD at the time and was thinking of using Atticus's line of "...a shadow of a beginning..." for a title but that got nicked by another poem. We were staying at High Darren so of course Mr. Keats' line suggested itself to me "...Silent, upon a peak in Darien..." Such is the fractal nature of writing poetry. And the book I was reading as a child in that window just happened to be TO **** A MOCKING BIRD...what goes around comes around.

The Heywood can be heard from A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS. IV v.

The Poe emerges from MY CITY IN THE SEA.

The "Mountayne" comes from Morte d'Arthur X111 xiv. where there is "...harde a voyce..."

The "...ground which is dismayed..." spouts forth from Jeremiah 14: 3-4


The "bewildering minute" comes thanks to Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy III iv

All these quotes for some reason or other could "shake the veil of time" for me as Mr. Elliot would put it.

The warmth and friendliness of the people who man the shop is the other vital element that conspires to make a visit to the shop a pleasure to be treasured.

HARD TIMES was at one stage possibly going to be RUST AND DUST. And of course it is Mr. Sleary in HARD TIMES who professes: "People mutht be amuthed!"
Dickens' dad John was the one who was sent to Marshallsea for not paying his baker's bill.
Scrooge going to the light side of course will be the ruin of him as a money lender 'cos he has become just too too nice and let's everyone off! Marley instead of being dead...'dead as a doornail" is very much alive and horrible to boot.

As well as being as "myriadminded' as Coleridge proposes to be and as humorous as could possibly be...old Charlie just wrote beautiful English! I always remember the section with great affection of how the house came to find itself in the street it was in in A CHRISTMAS CAROL.*

As I do of the beautiful section in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND when in talking a bit about...mist Chapter 57 if ya wanna look it up.

"The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water."

That sticks in my head as pure poetry and whatever the story is what I really really remember!

You can now see how and why my title is concocted as I wanted to pay homage to those words and to get a chance to knock around with Charlie and his cast of characters.

*
"They were gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again."

***

From the Italian, literally translated as 'in the fresh'. In English, used to mean either 'in the open air' or, where specifically related to mural painting, 'on fresh plaster'.

Almost always, it is used in relation to dining alfresco, that is, eating outdoors.

Both meanings have been in use in English since at least the late 18th century; for example, in Mrs. Eliza Haywood's History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 1753:

"It was good for her ladyship's health to be thus alfresco."

The lines quoted are from the end of Madame Bovary who expires as the Blind Man sings them in a raucous voice. They are from a  Restive de la Bretonne poem from his"The Year of the National Ladies" way back in 1791. He who was so much into women's shoes that his very name became as one with this particular peculiar fetish..Retifism

"Souvent la chaleur d’un beau jour
Fait rêver fillette à l’amour.

Il souffla bien fort ce jour-là,
Et le jupon court s’envola."

"Maids in the warmth of a summer day,
Dream of love, and of love always. . ."

"The wind is strong this summer day
Her petticoat has flown away."

Brighid reappears in various guises in various times and seems part historic, part mythic -- part Christian, part pagan. One of her dualities is that she is herself but also an incarnate representative of Mary

She is the protectress of dairymaids and is associated with February lambing day (one of the four primary Gaelic holy days, Imbolc, meaning "bag of cream" or "butter-womb").  She was born herself by manifesting from a bucket of milk being carried out the door by her mother, a milkmaid. And the Irish Catholic Church, before it came under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, baptised in milk rather than water. My Auntie Nelly used to put the sign of the cross on the flanks of their cows by dipping her fingers in the milk.


As the first abbess of Kildare ( Church of the Oak ****-dara ) she was followed by an unbroken line of abbesses who commanded great respect from the people and were responsible through the saint’s order for maintaining by precise ritualistic means a continuous fire ignited by St. Brighid before her death in ca. 522. The abbesses were assisted in this by 19 nuns. With the sack of Kildare the fire of centuries was finally snuffed out.



The **** of the Abbess of Kildare in 1132  destroyed her sanctity and rendering her unfit for her office. MacMurrough imposed in her place a kinswoman of his own.
Her **** threw paved the way for the Norman occupation of Ireland.  


James Joyce was intensely proud of being born on February 02, lambing day, that is on Imbolc, which by the old reckoning shares the claim for being St. Bridgid's Day along with February. The Celtic day was measured in a lunar manner like the extant Semitic calendars so that a calendar day begins at sunset, not midnight). Joyce considered St. Brighid to be his muse and liked to have his works first issued on February 02 to honour her. She is invoked in all post-Chamber Music work. As St. Bride [220.03], Brighid continues to maintain her abbey, now a "finishing establishment" for the "The Floras . . . a month's bunch of pretty maidens." She is Maria in "Clay," the moocow in Portrait, the old milk woman in Ulysses, the maid in Exiles, the broken branch in "Tilly," (one means allowed to stoke the sacred fire at Kildare was to wave air over it with a branch), and a thousand references to milk and things bovine in FW.

The Norman-Anglo Conquest of Ireland began in 1169, when a mercenary invasion force from Norman-occupied Wales captured Wexford and Waterford. A year later they took Dublin, and over the next century, 75% of Ireland would fall. Dermot MacMurrough's wily reign of deceit, beginning in 1132, paved the way for the Norman occupation

***

My Uncle Seanie came in from the farm after working from morning to night. He was a big strong man but he was a tired and weary big strong man. His feet were aching he told me so I got a basin of hot water and washed his feet and dried them for him. I was only a young boy and my Da was touched by this act of compassion and kindness. He told me that the Biblical story of Mary washing Christ's feet and drying them in her hair always made him cry for the tenderness and respect she showed him.

And so many many years later when Monica Sweeney is prepared to kneel and tie his shoelace for him....all these times and stories come together. He never ever ever forgets her kindness and would always quote the Dala Lama's words "...the only true religion is kindness." When he was dying and I would come into hospital he would ask after Gerry and his wife and when Monica's name was mentioned he would always remember her as "the lady who helped me when I couldn't help myself...she was kindness itself."

The philtrum (Latin: philtrum, Greek: φίλτρον philtron, lit. "love charm"), or medial cleft, is a vertical groove in the middle area of the upper lip, common to many mammals, extending in humans from the nasal septum to the tubercle of the upper lip. Together with a glandular rhinarium and slit-like nostrils, it is believed] to constitute the primitive condition for mammals in general.

In most mammals, the philtrum is a narrow groove that may carry dissolved odorants from the rhinarium or nose pad to the vomeronasal ***** via ducts inside the mouth.

For humans and most primates, the philtrum survives only as a vestigial medial depression between the nose and upper lip.

The human philtrum, bordered by ridges, also is known as the infranasal depression, but has no apparent function. That may be because most higher primates rely more on vision than on smell. Strepsirrhine primates, such as lemurs, still retain the philtrum and the rhinarium, unlike monkeys and apes.

In Jewish mythology, each embryo has an angel teaching them all of the wisdom in the world while they are in utero. The Angel lightly taps an infant's upper lip before birth, to silence the infant from telling all the secrets in the universe to the humans who reside in it; the infant then somewhat forgets the Torah they have been taught. Some believers of the myth speculate that this is the cause of the philtrum, but it does not have a basis in traditional Jewish texts.

In Philippine mythology the enchanted creature diwata (or encantado) has smooth skin, with no wrinkles even at the joints, and no philtrum.

In Key Largo (1948), Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) tells a fairy tale to a child, saying that, before birth, the soul knows all the secrets of heaven, but at birth an angel presses a fingertip just above one's lip, which seals us to silence.

In the movie Mr. Nobody, unborn infants are said to have knowledge of all past and future events. As an unborn infant is about to be sent to its mother, the "Angels of Oblivion" lightly tap its upper lip, whereupon the unborn infant forgets everything it knows. The movie follows the life story of one infant, whose lip hadn't been tapped.

In the movie The Prophecy, the Archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken) asks Thomas Dagget, "Do you know how you got that dent in your top lip? Way back, before you were born, I told you a secret, then I put my finger there and I said 'Shhhhh!'"

In Action Comics #719 the Joker says a clue is right under Batman's nose. This leads him to a Dr. Philip Drum..

In the book Prince Ombra by Roderick MacLeish, the "cleft on our upper lips" is attributed to being hushed by a "cavern angel" just before we are born.

LISTENING TO YOUR FAVOURITE PIECE OF MUSIC

Oh you were so
quiet

I hardly heard you
tiptoe silently in

settle yourself
amongst the strings

talking to me
now in cello
now in violin

the heartbeat of a drum

the exchange of laughter
between  glockenspiel & xylophone

making a point
with either

the tiny ******
of a triangle

or the crash of a symbol.

I listen to you talk
to me in music

the candlelight
grows dim & then

as softly as you came

you leave

leaves

(fluttering against
the windowpane) .

I feel you leave
leave before the movement ends

footsteps
in the silence of my memory

me nearly

forgetting

that you've died

listening on
until the end

as the music

cries.

Hermann Hesse's beautiful poem IM NEBEL( IN THE FOG )...is what is running through my mind.

IM NEBEL VERSCHWINDEN means to vanish into the fog. I thought if I am about to vanish then I might as well go out dressed in Hesse's words.

IM NEBEL

Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Einsam ist jeder Busch und Stein,
Kein Baum sieht den anderen,
Jeder ist allein.

Voll von Freunden war mir die Welt,
Als noch mein Leben Licht war,
Nun, da der Nebel fällt,
Ist keiner mehr sichtbar.

Wahrlich, keiner ist weise,
Der nicht das Dunkle kennt,
Das unentrinnbar und leise
Von allen ihn trennt.

Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Leben ist einsam sein.
Kein Mensch kennt den anderen,
Jeder ist allein.

IN THE FOG

Strange, to wander in the fog.
Each bush and stone stands alone,
No tree sees the next one,
Each is alone.

My world was full of friends
When my life was filled with light,
Now as the fog descends
None is still to be seen.

Truly there is no wise man
Who does not know the dark
Which quietly and inescapably
Separates him from everything else.

Strange, to wander in the fog,
To live is to be alone.
No man knows the next man,
Each is alone.

–Hermann Hesse, Im Nebel from Unterwegs (1911) in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p.

My attempt at an attempt to capture this moment is a poem written in all this wonderful sunshine with the bees jazzing with the lavender bushes and my mind is....thrown back to a winter long long ago in a lonely hotel where the neon fizzles off and then stutters on. . .

Sir Duke would not have his piano tuned to perfect pitch as perfect pitch didn't sound genuine...lacked that human touch...human warmth. So too this moment( I had to decide what to leave out as much as what to put in )is a perfect moment in an un-perfect world in a NY off the beaten tourist path. I would take the A train myself the next day and would leave this moment behind me...run away from it only for it to turn up 25 years later right smack in front of me as Guildfordian bees played the jazz of this summer's day.

A lifeline is a strand of yarn that is inserted into the work so that, if an error is encountered, it is easy to rip back to that point. Lifelines are often used in lace knitting. Leave lifelines in your work until the piece is complete. To insert a lifeline, thread a tapestry needle with…

From the old man shape shifting into his different positions of self to the tiny tiny dancers being put through their paces this was a wonderful moment of Paris that seemed to be part of a movie we had stepped into...a little piece of wonder.
A ballet student usually first learns how to do a sissone at an intermediate level and at young ages.  This is to ensure the dancer has enough basic strength and comfort with basic steps like plie and saute.

From there, a student will learn variations such as jumping and landing on one foot in attitude or arabesque (sissonne en avant) or other positions. The step can also be done petit in variations or in petite allegro combinations. Because of the difficulty at quicker speed, sissonne is usually taught slow and big as part of grande (or medium) allegro combinations first.

***

Sometimes study and sleep don't mix and I tell myself: "If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will." These were just some of the quotes from Mr. C and Mr. H that were floating about in the old noggin as sleep and study fought to a stalemate for the mind of this poor student.

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 13)

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”
--Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 1)

“There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.”
― Raymond Chandler, Playback

“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye