Petty things first: 9st 7lb!
I've lost a stone (it's taken 9 1/2 months) which means now my wonderful Mountain Equipment jacket (got as a bargain for £90 struck down from £170, end-of-line) doesn't stretch around my gut (I prefer Deutsch: bauch) when I sit down. This is a very small thing, but it means a lot to me as I've tried bloody hard to get where I am, and if it's only a symbol of willpower, so be it - the willpower is the thing. Besides, barring cut-price bargains I'd have to spend another £150 at the very least to get a shell jacket as good (outdoor people will know what I mean) - and one in dark green as well (I'm not keen on looking like a glow-worm).
My last training walk was 8 1/4 miles carrying a 25lb pack, in 3 hours and 10 minutes, at about 2.6mph (I have a spreadsheet to record and calculate all of this); this makes my lower legs ache like the devil, but this is because the insoles I bought with my boots are all squashed out - the repeated shocks knacker my flat-footed skeleton badly. With new Bridgedales and some Superfeet (bought today), I hope to crack 12 miles in a day as a short-term target - working up to 15 miles, and 20 miles ultimately.
My resting heart rate is in the region of 60bpm - some of this may be due to a slight overdose of ibuprofen & codeine a few months ago, but mostly it's due to my regular application in exerting myself up to, but not beyond, a certain limit whenever I walk. There's a certain sweet spot at the limit of aerobic exercise where I find a rhythm - it hurts, but not too bad, it doesn't get worse, and I find freedom in a mild trance.
I've also nearly come to the end of my epic spending spree on outdoor gear: I have clothing, sleeping bag & mat, torch, stove, etc - I only need a tent, bothy bag, water purification and a few spare items of clothing, and I'm pretty much set up for multi-day hikes.
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I'm sounding out the probabilities of doing an undergraduate degree in literature. The reasons for this are manifold: I need to use my brain to every possible extent; I need also to know that I'm as informed as I possibly can be; and I need to break the spell of silence.
What I really want is to train myself physically to write by taking up an intellectual challenge, and meeting its concomitant deadline - I want to learn as much as I can of the history, ethos, craft and essentiality of writing, by writing.
Recently I found, in the library at Great Malvern, Reading Poetry: An Introduction (Tom Furniss and Mike Bath, Longman, 2007). Reading it from cover to cover, I found a lot that I previously knew (partly from reading fragments of post-structuralism at art college, partly from my scattered but intent reading of modernist and proto-modernist novels, and a few like poets) and a lot that I didn't: Andrew Marvell, John Donne, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Adrienne Rich and Derek Walcott were all previously to some extent closed to me.
As further reading I've ordered from the library Modern Criticism and Theory (David Lodge & Nigel Wood, eds., Longman, 2008) and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (David Lodge, ed., Longman, 1972); and will in the next few minutes order online a copy of Image-Music-Text (Roland Barthes, Fontana Press, 1993).
I'm not consciously attempting to sound excessively learned by quoting publishers and dates of editions; it seems appropriate, though, and if it's not entirely relevant or necessary, it can be put down to enthusiasm - something of which I have over the past decade been in dire need, and which perhaps deserves a little latitude.
The real test will consist in the ability of my green and unshielded hope to weather eleven months until the beginning of an access course in September next year, and then a year of conforming to its no doubt banal intellectual requirements. On second thoughts though, given that my academic record, such as it is, reflects enough of my ability significantly to sway a decision of admission as a mature student, I may attempt to get straight onto the September 2009 BA(hons) at the University of Worcester (I love my flat, it's the foundation of my current wellbeing; I need to study within a commuting radius at least) by writing a test essay - it would cut out a year of pointless bother, I'm sure, and anything I don't know how to do, I can find out.
Of course I know that the undergraduate degree will also involve a lot of banal requirements, but I think I am mature enough, and finally sane (in the sense of 'mentally healthy') enough, to accept unpleasant tasks in the pursuit of subtler rewards.
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Reading my earlier posts, I find that there was a lot more lot more high-voltage arcing going on - if anti-depressants can be said to change a person by making them numb in a certain way, then perhaps mirtazapine has made me so; but I couldn't have carried on like I was. What I've written here is generally the skimmed top layer of a rather horrible vat, and a few more bolts of stunning vehemence would have cost a few more months of throttled failure, a thousand more hours of glacial horror.
I don't believe that an artist's suffering makes good practice. There is a particular kind of suffering which is inextricable from the teleology of creation, and the necessity of wielding the scalpel without anaesthetic makes courage a necessity for an artist - but no-one can do good things whilst destroying themselves. In order to do 'good works', what one needs is fortitude - to which one can then introduce the proper admixture of sensibility.
Friday 17 October 2008
Wednesday 19 December 2007
XXX
A quick history that explains most of it, hopefully without being too boring.
I was born, I gurgled, mum gave me a crayon, I started drawing.
I went to school, the teachers said "Stop drawing! Do as you're told!"
I kept on drawing, secretly, but I still won the paper aeroplane and model car contests.
I went to high school, the teachers said "Do as you're told! Call us Sir! If you don't do exactly what we tell you, you'll end up working 5am shifts in a factory for the rest of your life!"
I said, "Bollocks." I still got 7As and 2 Bs.
Then I went to 6th form, met my friends, got an A in art and a C in German without turning up to half the exams. 6th form was quite good, I suppose.
After that I went to three different art colleges, never met a single real artist in any of them, and took up a career as a full-time depressive alcoholic. They were right: disobedience leads to ruin.
I still think I was right and they were wrong, but that's not the question these days - it's purely practical.
These days, I merely dream that I still have the potential to do something good in my life - in reality, I take another drag at a rolly, another swig of Special Brew, and thank god for the wealth of my father
I was born, I gurgled, mum gave me a crayon, I started drawing.
I went to school, the teachers said "Stop drawing! Do as you're told!"
I kept on drawing, secretly, but I still won the paper aeroplane and model car contests.
I went to high school, the teachers said "Do as you're told! Call us Sir! If you don't do exactly what we tell you, you'll end up working 5am shifts in a factory for the rest of your life!"
I said, "Bollocks." I still got 7As and 2 Bs.
Then I went to 6th form, met my friends, got an A in art and a C in German without turning up to half the exams. 6th form was quite good, I suppose.
After that I went to three different art colleges, never met a single real artist in any of them, and took up a career as a full-time depressive alcoholic. They were right: disobedience leads to ruin.
I still think I was right and they were wrong, but that's not the question these days - it's purely practical.
These days, I merely dream that I still have the potential to do something good in my life - in reality, I take another drag at a rolly, another swig of Special Brew, and thank god for the wealth of my father
XX
I can't believe what I wrote before. My emotional conviction is that I have wasted my life so far, but I don't believe that I can do nothing but acquiesce in decay.
All I want to do is write stories that deal with my own affective hollowness and hopelessness of love, about my own experiences of amorous failure, and of finding such overwhelming satiety in unexpected phenomena of such monumental beauty, that all other concerns are washed away.
I think my love life has been so unsuccesful because I'm a romantic, of the old school - Sublimity is what I need. There is no such thing as true love between Romantics, only confluence of a cataclysmically sublime experience.
I think I would have done better to be born a gentlewoman whose literary* parents indulged her passion from and early age, and to have eloped with some poets to Switzerland, thence to partake of Laudanum and set down the strange phantasies that came to me, as if in a dream, but with every solidity of physical apprehension...
*feminist mum, of course
All I want to do is write stories that deal with my own affective hollowness and hopelessness of love, about my own experiences of amorous failure, and of finding such overwhelming satiety in unexpected phenomena of such monumental beauty, that all other concerns are washed away.
I think my love life has been so unsuccesful because I'm a romantic, of the old school - Sublimity is what I need. There is no such thing as true love between Romantics, only confluence of a cataclysmically sublime experience.
I think I would have done better to be born a gentlewoman whose literary* parents indulged her passion from and early age, and to have eloped with some poets to Switzerland, thence to partake of Laudanum and set down the strange phantasies that came to me, as if in a dream, but with every solidity of physical apprehension...
*feminist mum, of course
X
I don't suppose there is anything worse for the poet-prospector, the insatiable addict of the Mother Lode, than contemplation of a wealthless future whilst the wealth-giving oil gutters its last from a deep-drilled well.
This stuff of glory is hellishly deceitful, to a fallibly deceitful mind; perhaps if one were a saint one would live suffused, but I doubt any saint has felt the need to write poetry, for the same reason: poetry is the simulated sainthood of the sinful - that is to say, poetry is the fiction of divinity, not the actual, and poets themselves have far more in common with demons, being often in daily conversance with the same.
I've been reading about saturation diving recently: divers enter a pressure vessel, are compressed to a high atmospheric pressure and breathe a precisely controlled mixture of gases, so that they can carry out work at several hundreds of metres of depth; afterwards, they are required to spend long periods, even days, being gradually decompressed so as to avoid the boiling of gases in their blood which had previously been kept liquid by the high atmospheric pressure inside their chamber.
I've no analogies to draw; nothing in my present life moves me very much, and nothing in reading about such marvels of technophysiology moves me to write much either.
I sometimes have the idea of drawing up a design for my perfect house (combining observatory, library, catacomb, rather personalised dungeon, etc) and given up, because I am not architecturally trained. I'd love to design an aeroplane, but I lack the engineering and aerodynamical skills; there's not much else I'd like to do.
I like to get drunk, because at least then I can ramble on about things until I get bored/fall asleep/trash my room so dad has to come and sort it out.
My life is useless. This is apparent to me now in the utmost clarity - I've had the suspicion since about the age of 15 or so, but it's been glaring me in the face for so long, and every single thing I've tried, every suggestion I've followed has failed so absolutely, that it's about time I faced it once and for all: I am a failure.
If there is one conclusion I've come to, it's that there are two things that could have saved me from this rock bottom (I'm only saved from homelessness by my father's financial help):
1) Utter, ruthless arrogance
or 2) Courage.
Since I have neither, I'm likely to go on for a few decades more, putting a brave face on things as they slowly fall apart, until my liver gives out on me.
I am a poet with nothing to write, an artist with nothing to paint, a musician with nothing to play. Dumb, invisible, and silent - a shadow of what could have been. A waste of rare vitality, a crime.
This stuff of glory is hellishly deceitful, to a fallibly deceitful mind; perhaps if one were a saint one would live suffused, but I doubt any saint has felt the need to write poetry, for the same reason: poetry is the simulated sainthood of the sinful - that is to say, poetry is the fiction of divinity, not the actual, and poets themselves have far more in common with demons, being often in daily conversance with the same.
I've been reading about saturation diving recently: divers enter a pressure vessel, are compressed to a high atmospheric pressure and breathe a precisely controlled mixture of gases, so that they can carry out work at several hundreds of metres of depth; afterwards, they are required to spend long periods, even days, being gradually decompressed so as to avoid the boiling of gases in their blood which had previously been kept liquid by the high atmospheric pressure inside their chamber.
I've no analogies to draw; nothing in my present life moves me very much, and nothing in reading about such marvels of technophysiology moves me to write much either.
I sometimes have the idea of drawing up a design for my perfect house (combining observatory, library, catacomb, rather personalised dungeon, etc) and given up, because I am not architecturally trained. I'd love to design an aeroplane, but I lack the engineering and aerodynamical skills; there's not much else I'd like to do.
I like to get drunk, because at least then I can ramble on about things until I get bored/fall asleep/trash my room so dad has to come and sort it out.
My life is useless. This is apparent to me now in the utmost clarity - I've had the suspicion since about the age of 15 or so, but it's been glaring me in the face for so long, and every single thing I've tried, every suggestion I've followed has failed so absolutely, that it's about time I faced it once and for all: I am a failure.
If there is one conclusion I've come to, it's that there are two things that could have saved me from this rock bottom (I'm only saved from homelessness by my father's financial help):
1) Utter, ruthless arrogance
or 2) Courage.
Since I have neither, I'm likely to go on for a few decades more, putting a brave face on things as they slowly fall apart, until my liver gives out on me.
I am a poet with nothing to write, an artist with nothing to paint, a musician with nothing to play. Dumb, invisible, and silent - a shadow of what could have been. A waste of rare vitality, a crime.
Tuesday 27 November 2007
Damned
Given two observations about human nature, first that no economic trend can be reversed, and second that pride is politically the strongest emotion: we don't have much time left, if 'we' means civilisation as we know it.
Humanity has the potential but not the capability to save itself. Most of humanity will die in the coming extinction, and wealth will be the only differentiation. I've not enough faith in the wealthy to pronounce favourably upon the human race's post-global warming history.
Most of us are condemned. This puts us pretty much where everyone except the rich have been in history: damned.
Humanity has the potential but not the capability to save itself. Most of humanity will die in the coming extinction, and wealth will be the only differentiation. I've not enough faith in the wealthy to pronounce favourably upon the human race's post-global warming history.
Most of us are condemned. This puts us pretty much where everyone except the rich have been in history: damned.
Saturday 17 November 2007
A Big Walk
I walked 21km or 14 miles on Wednesday - I started at 7:15am, and managed to get up to Holt Fleet bridge via Bevere and a big detour around the old canal at Hawford, then back down the other side of the river through Holt and Grimley, over the Sabrina bridge and up to Shrub Hill by exactly 1:30pm (the time I'm due there).
more photos
My feet hurt like fuck after, but they seemed to recuperate pretty well. I didn't get any lasting aches - which I was worried about, given my fairly twisted lower skeleton - so perhaps I might be able to pull off this whole wandering thing after all.
I think the reason for the pain was my usual fast walking pace - I'll need to slow down a little if I'm to carry on day after day - I sped up somewhat on the 'home stretch' , and got a bit of an endorphin rush out of slogging hard. On the whole though, pain sets in after about 7 miles and stays pretty constant after that - with more rest and without pushing myself so hard, it should be possible to walk further without inordinate discomfort.
I measured the distance (using pins stuck in the map along the route, and a thread wound around them) and time by periodical checks on my mobile phone, and calculated my average speed at about 2.5 miles per hour, which is OK considering the amount of time I spent fannying around lost in the vicinity of Hawford, and rests (I didn't take a proper rest except for 10 mins at Holt Fleet and another 10 at Holt).
This was the furthest I've ever walked in one day in my life, so I shouldn't be too annoyed about how knackered I was at the end. I'm not, because aerobically I was completely fine - if my legs and feet weren't aching like bastards I could have gone on walking till I dropped.
Another important thing is that I've worked out the whole breathable fabric/sweat/heat/chill economy thing. Helly Hansen Pro-wool base layer and Gore-Tex shell meant that I was cooled just enough by sweat - after a while, you get to an equilibrium whereby the fabric keeps you just warm enough, and your sweat keeps you just cool enough before evaporating. The windproof Gore-Tex meant that I didn't instantly chill when stopping to rest, but it was advisable to put on another insulating layer before the warmth generated by walking conducted and convected away.
The golden rules I've found when dealing with sweat under clothes in a cold environment, are a) wear breathable fabrics, and b) it's better to be warm and clammy than cold and clammy. Wind will instantly chill all the moisture clinging to your body if you expose it - you want that moisture to be warm, so it will evaporate away.
more photos
My feet hurt like fuck after, but they seemed to recuperate pretty well. I didn't get any lasting aches - which I was worried about, given my fairly twisted lower skeleton - so perhaps I might be able to pull off this whole wandering thing after all.
I think the reason for the pain was my usual fast walking pace - I'll need to slow down a little if I'm to carry on day after day - I sped up somewhat on the 'home stretch' , and got a bit of an endorphin rush out of slogging hard. On the whole though, pain sets in after about 7 miles and stays pretty constant after that - with more rest and without pushing myself so hard, it should be possible to walk further without inordinate discomfort.
I measured the distance (using pins stuck in the map along the route, and a thread wound around them) and time by periodical checks on my mobile phone, and calculated my average speed at about 2.5 miles per hour, which is OK considering the amount of time I spent fannying around lost in the vicinity of Hawford, and rests (I didn't take a proper rest except for 10 mins at Holt Fleet and another 10 at Holt).
This was the furthest I've ever walked in one day in my life, so I shouldn't be too annoyed about how knackered I was at the end. I'm not, because aerobically I was completely fine - if my legs and feet weren't aching like bastards I could have gone on walking till I dropped.
Another important thing is that I've worked out the whole breathable fabric/sweat/heat/chill economy thing. Helly Hansen Pro-wool base layer and Gore-Tex shell meant that I was cooled just enough by sweat - after a while, you get to an equilibrium whereby the fabric keeps you just warm enough, and your sweat keeps you just cool enough before evaporating. The windproof Gore-Tex meant that I didn't instantly chill when stopping to rest, but it was advisable to put on another insulating layer before the warmth generated by walking conducted and convected away.
The golden rules I've found when dealing with sweat under clothes in a cold environment, are a) wear breathable fabrics, and b) it's better to be warm and clammy than cold and clammy. Wind will instantly chill all the moisture clinging to your body if you expose it - you want that moisture to be warm, so it will evaporate away.
Friday 31 August 2007
Walking in the Dark
I'm just back from a walk over to my old house and back, about two miles each way - I came back along the river, and had the opportunity to take photos of swans with a flash. Flash at night can have interesting results, but the subject has to be just far enough away to look mysterious - any closer and the usual flash glare takes over, any further away and the picture dissolves into low-light CCD fuzz.
I think the reason I love walking outdoors at night so much, is because most of my favourite memories of the last decade are of spending time wandering after dark with friends, drinking cider and talking. Any weather is good, in any season - perhaps some wouldn't enjoy it, but one night sitting talking on the footbridge behind the old Diglis industrial estate (now yuppified) in the pouring November rain (Nooooo, I curse you Guns'n'Roses!), is the best memory I have of L. On the other hand, T and I both know that a bottle of gin and a deep February freeze can sometimes mix badly - "I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, it's too cooooold, my fingers are numb," etc etc etc in gin-sodden fashion.
Although I sometimes feel like I've gone through a spacetime warp into some kind of Jamie Oliver version of Midsomer Murders, Worcester is wonderful for night-time walking - in Manchester I had to get a bus out to Alderley Edge or wherever, but here I'm two minutes away from the river, and fifteen minutes away from fields and the edge of town. Night-time in the city is public; in the country, it's private.
Speaking of fields, I must start to plan this year's mushroom-picking. There's a field quite close that's grazed by cattle; in a few weeks time when it's colder, and there's rain overnight, it'll be time for a dawn mission.
It's odd how long you can spend programming, seemingly suspended in (caffeine-)time, when you've got a task in hand. I got up this morning at about 9am, and started work on a web database application I'm doing for the Worcester Citizens' Advice Bureau; the next time I looked at the clock, it was nearly 5pm. If I could have a job like this that'd pay (it's voluntary), I might actually stick at it (although I'd rather be freelance - dancing like a puppet to the hands of the clock is not a way of life I consider justifiable).
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Syllabically-spoonerised word of the day:
Phaustroclobia
Soundtrack:
Chopin's Nocturnes, played by Maria João Pires
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