I Read Jung (With Dog)

Having finished Ulysses, I've gained the confidence to read other books that have been tapping me on the shoulder for years. One such is Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections, recommended to me by  Anne. It's as if, having climbed Everest, I can consider K2 (though I'd like to make clear this is a metaphor - I have attempted neither, and if I did, I would need to be carried or air-lifted down at some point).

I'm currently dog-sitting a beautiful lurcher, and she and I take long walks together. Sometimes, on these walks, I listen to the birdsong in the woods, or the lambs bleating in the fields, and sometimes, I plug myself into my phone and listen to a book. And this is how I've read Jung. 

It's not an easy read - though parts of it are. That would be my review if asked for a line for the back cover. 

As Jaffa was trotting about, this is what I heard the other morning, and it illustrates my summary: 

"I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do." Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams and Reflections. 

When I heard this, I stopped and typed it into my phone to remember the wisdom.  

I called Jaffa to me, and she came up, looking hopeful. I read out Jung's words to her and she looked at me with her deep, kind eyes, hoping for a more edible treat, or perhaps something on the interpretation of dreams, then trotted off, ears flopping gently with each step. She urinated on some bracken. 

Jaffa understands life as the stream passing by, as Jung describes it, into which she occasionally makes a contribution, or dips her paw, her tongue, her whole body. I have a tendency to try to make cherries grow on stalks. Jaffa doesn't. When she offers her contribution to the undergrowth, she does it because she is a dog, not because she hopes to make cherries grow in a pine forest. 

Hmmm. 

I finished Jung's book on that walk, and, as with Ulysses, I'll read it again one day, and perhaps understand a little more. In the meantime, I understood enough to know that my life is much richer for having read the book.

Jaffa is asleep as I write this, maybe dreaming of rabbits.  

I Say Yes

I've finished reading James Joyce's Ulysses in time for its centenary year. This wasn't my plan when I picked it up for the first time in, when was it? 2009 I think. It's taken me twelve years with many pauses, re-starts, pauses. 

The copy of the book I bought at the Keele University bookshop (I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the time, was open to influence) has travelled with me, sat on various shelves, its spine cracking, the edges of its pages yellowing. 

The book was recommended to me by Scott McCracken, by Miss Cooper, by Jeremy Fisher, by Pope Innocent III, by Sue the Librarian, and all of them in it for the literature. I took it with me to France, to Italy, to Wyle Cop, to Ceredigion, and even to Dublin itself. It weighed me down with its great reputational promises and its respectable unrespectability. I began to think it had defeated me.

What is it to be so famous and to represent a formidable pinnacle of literature, to become reading for the super-diligent? By degrees, Ulysses became a monument to a decline in concentration, to my perception that the pandemic and Facebook between them had done for my ability to read at length. What I could manage had been reduced to Guardian articles, or, on a good day, Billy Collins' poems.

In the process of finishing Ulysses I think I read the first Episode, Telemachus, five or six times. In consequence, this may be the section I'll remember second best of all. I'd go far as to say it's an Episode that I understand. 

What helped jumpstart my 2021 attempt was the way my son Jonty, now also reading the book, treated it as if it were, well, just another book. He looked Ulysses in the eye, as if he were equal to it, which he is. And in doing so, he showed me that I am too. "It's really funny," he said. 

What? Funny?

This was the tip I needed, and when I got far enough into the swing of it, I also laughed out loud, even guffawed at times. I skipped lightly over the parts I couldn't make head nor tail of, seeking out the plentiful, juicier moments. Soon I was halfway through, then three quarters. I could hardly believe that the end was so nearly in sight. It was as if I had started reading downhill.

What I hadn't expected, even so, was how I would be swept away at the end in a rush of supreme recognition. How is it possible that it took me so long to get to that place, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, with all its rampant recognisable humanity? 

As I had also unloaded my reading troubles on Carol on our long car journey to our performances in Devon last August, I gave her the good news in November. It's done. For my birthday, she gave me the apron of the book to mark my achievement - it felt as good as any prize-giving, and although I'm wearing it at every opportunity, the apron's still clean - it's a reading apron after all. 

The final reading was all done and dusted in less than a year among the bed sheets and pine cones and sometimes with the sea lapping at my feet at Fairbourne. Penelope is the most wonderful thing I've ever read because it's wonderful, and because it came like that cold beer, crisps and pie I ate all at once at the pub at the foot of Cader Idris after misreading the largescale OS map on the descent.

So yes to the book which sat on my shelf plump and teasing with its thousands upon thousands of tiny pawprint words yes the twelve years the eighteen episodes yes the rollicking kidney of Irish history fried up in memory yes the guffaws yes the blushes and the winding boredom with another mug of coffee yes the classical religious literary references assumed in hours of lying there propped up on one hand making no sense and then sense coming unravelling its freewheeling veracity all over the inside of my imagination and yes yes I will read it again Yes.

I Unwrap Three Gifts

In the years we knew each other (not enough) GKA brought surprise into my Christmas Eve, or whenever it was we were able to get together with a few friends. He brought presents for us all - treasures he'd found on his meanderings round the charity shops of Shrewsbury. On these evenings there were no expectations, no disappointments, only the excitement, the wonder of a child's Christmas.

I'll tell you about three of these gifts, ones that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life, because that's how it rolls, isn't it? (Graham would've liked this touch: to be cast as all three wise men in the nativity play -- at last).

The first gift is gold and green -- a precious casket which says You are special. It contains a paperweight, and a paper.

It's gold - pure and true, heavy, precious, rare. 

The second gift is strong, saved for an emergency which hasn't yet happened. Souvenir from another land and time - if I need to open these tiny bottles one day, I expect what will remain is perfume, a prayer of alcohol and malt, of memories of holidays, of those holy days of happiness. 

The third gift is the place Graham still is, all residue of him. To wrap this for me was what he was like -- he found the solar system in an Oxfam shop, then gave it away. And with this must come the last poem -- the one he read to us in the park in September.

Starlight

I will bury my bones beneath the earth

grow flowers from my soul

trees will feed from my essence

I shall be forever untarnished

eternal gold

I will scatter my ashes across the sky

fly like flocks of birds

like moths before the moon

I shall become the wind

travel fast

until I burn

yeah! burn in the heart of the star

Graham Attenborough, 2021

And there's something else. A gift which couldn't be wrapped. And it's this -- that it's possible to dance to Handel's Messiah, and that joy when doing this is inevitable. After we'd opened our presents, we'd push back the  coffee table and prance around: And the Glory of the Lord. All We Like Sheep. His Yoke is Easy. Hallelujah! 

Here he is, wearing a coat made by Gabriel. Here he is. My beloved friend. Here he is - Graham, GKA, Gray: half fallen angel, half risen dervish. 

Love to you, love to you all, at Christmas. 

 

I Ready For Change

A change is coming. It's in the season - I am readying myself, need to prepare physically, mentally, for some experience or action. 

And so, I've started to read again. It's not that I stopped, but that I've been consumed by work, so eaten up by its immediate demands that I could hardly look at poetry, fiction, non-work-non-fiction, for the pain its absence causes. I think this shying away has been a sort of self-preservation too: to read great poetry and great fiction is to encounter the world in truth not found in sociology texts, rarely expressed in academic articles. To read what's written from the heart of experience is to know without doubt that freedom does not come from working harder, smarter, having what's been cited to me as a 'can-do attitude' (as if unquestioning obedience were some sort of virtue).

I've read The Great Gatsby again. I've read the newly controversial Some Kids ..., have just begun Beethoven, A Life in Nine Pieces. I'm enjoying making headway with Ulysses - hadn't realised how much fun it contains. I've dipped into the work of Adrienne Rich, Kei Miller, Philip Gross, Andrew McMillan, Gillian Clarke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, TS Eliot ... into the books which have been waiting patiently for me: my poet friends and familiars. They've soothed me, reconnected me to wider, deeper spaces. 

And I went swimming again this week in the reservoir. I had been waiting all August for the clouds to clear, the temperature to rise. The sun has been elusive, but when I turned to friendship, to LJ (who never shies away from experience or action), I found I could risk the plunge, even in 16 degrees under cloud. I went in not hot but bothered, came out cleansed. We sat afterwards in our usual spot, drinking tea, and the clouds cleared enough for there to be blue and gold. I carried the water's coolness into my evening, to the warmth of a poetry picnic in the park with friends. I began to remember who I am being, why I am doing. 

I Take the Plunge - drawing by John Rae

I Scrape My Toast

The rasp of my knife

against charcoal, smell of fire:

an autumn hunger.

Drawing "I Burn the Old Year"  ©John Rae,

From I Buy A New Washer (and Other Moderate Acts of Independence) - available from  liz.lefroy@btinternet.com, The Poetry Pharmacy, Castle Bookshop, Pengwern Books

I Harvest My Crops

In the spirit of lockdown, and by way of testament to enduring friendship, I've been growing potatoes on my roof garden in tubs given to me by my longest-serving friend last Christmas. Everything to do with this process has been slightly more complicated, but much more enriching, than pandemic shopping: taking compost out of storage in my attic, climbing out of the window to plant seed potatoes ordered online during the #th lockdown, working out how to water the tubs in the dry spells with arcs of water poured from a watering can from the same window. 

After the problem-solving, and the anticipation, the harvest has been so satisfying - searching through soil to find, well, to find these:

I've staged this harvest, taking only enough spuds at a time for the next meal in order to achieve that tub-to-table-in-20-minutes freshness which has been the whole point, or at least a good part of the point. I've served them with mint from the window box, and roasted them with rosemary which grows next to the mint. With the next and final serving, I plan to smother then in buttery sage - the window box sage is flourishing, having been dug up and sent to me by Morar by Royal Mail last autumn. She'd read I didn't have any to go with my parsley, rosemary, and thyme (I Bottle Abundance). 

The rest of the point of the harvest has been to do with the pleasure of engaging in the physical world, the necessity of it. The joy of it is the reminder that growth often takes place out of sight ... but oh ... this is beginning to sound like it's heading in the direction of a sermon ...

You're right, dear reader: I'm going to use my potato harvest as a metaphor for creativity. You see, all the while these Charlottes were growing underground, I've been working on poems hidden in a file on my computer since 2019, now published by Fair Acre Press. I'd originally hoped their coming to light would coincide with Beethoven's 250th birthday in December 2020. This late harvest has also come in stages: a Zoom launch, a reading at the Poetry Pharmacy, and then a performance in mid-Devon on a summer's evening of extraordinary heat and calm. 

Carol Caffrey and I had hatched the idea of a joint event back in the spring when our host, Richard Higgins, was looking for productions for a short season of open air events. It had seemed, then, so theoretical, so impossible: the chances were that it would never happen.

And then, it did. 

Our journey down the M5 and through the high-hedged lanes was long. When we saw our names in huge letters on arrival at Brushford Barton, it was as if we had dug our hands into the soil, and, unbelieving until the moment of contact, found potatoes ... 

The following evening, in the house's beautiful enclosed courtyard, Carol's performance of Music for Dogs was wonderful as ever. I've seen the play six, maybe seven, times and it's just as well, as this time I was on sound desk duty. As she performed, in addition to the pre-recordings, extra barks floated across from the nearby lawns - Carol integrated these into the story like the pro that she is. She was amongst dog-lovers, and the audience loved her and the play, laughing and sighing in all the right places. 

When it was my turn, I read, for the first time, the whole sequence of GREAT MASTER / small boy, finding inspiration from the company of Beethoven himself. Richard had placed a wonderful carving of the Master next to me on the stage, complete with a 250th birthday candle.

For the two days we were at Brushford Barton, the world felt complete - a place of kindness, of hospitality, of growth and creativity: a place in which it is safe to be an artist, to bring new things to the surface, and to enjoy them in company. 

I Repair to London

It was the promise of meeting up with school friends, one who's flown (flown!) over from the USA, that fixed the London weekend date in my diary, two days after the launch of my latest pamphlet of poems. The train journey to London from Shrewsbury should be a simple matter compared with the 'freewheeling across' Europe remembered in GREAT MASTER / small boy. Wellington, Birmingham New Street, Coventry, Milton Keynes. 'Lützel, Bingen, Mainz, Würzburg'. But this is 2021, not 2018.

Window seat, masks, hand spray, packed lunch, bicycle - my new risk assessment. Taking my bike I reasoned, would enable me to ride to my destinations protected from threats encountered on the London Underground and its ultra-confined spaces. On my way to Shrewsbury station, I realised I'd forgotten another risk: I was wearing the wrong trousers. Wide and cream-coloured, bought as an attempt to fit in with London chic, they flapped against my bike's well-oiled chain. I stopped to roll them over my knees, made it to platform 4 three minutes before departure.

'On the last morning, you'll rucksack-up, / then lower your pack to the floor, / consider the weight of things.' My sons are moving on, and I'm travelling alone with the weight of a Brompton, folded. Companionship comes in many forms, and I have projected personality onto my bicycle - she is blue, she is named Boudicca. 

Blame the blockage in the Suez Canal, or the pandemic rush to get bicycles out of sheds, but the cycle shop nearest to London Euston is all out of bicycle clips and reflective ankle bands, and has been for months. Whilst telling me this, the kind assistant passed me a clutch of rubber bands in assorted sizes. "Try these," he said, with the confidence of someone who can speak several languages. Boudicca, were she able to do so, would have commented that I looked like a low-budget Tintin as I climbed onto the saddle, and set off for Tufnell Park.

'This is the birthplace of four symphonies, the violin concerto, / a clutch of quartets ...' 2018 - Pasqualatihaus, Vienna. 2021 - the Tufnell Park Tavern, Tufnell Park. 

'This city's a miniature of empire' - as true of London as it is of Vienna. The cycle route took us down the back streets, under railway bridges, past car repair shops, close to tower blocks. It took us over tarmac, and took us over glass. Nearing the pub, I felt Boudicca's back wheel resist the road in the way it does as a tyre deflates: instant lethargy, forewarning of the need to lie on one's back with one's wheels in the air.

'beached on the rounded island of myself '

A piece of luck - we were yards from the reunion pub, and I had arrived early, with time to fold up and consider my options.

My option was to be where I was, and enjoy my reason for being there: companionship which has stretched over forty, fifty years. Those school friendships are like music, 'stretched and plied like toffee    like smoke    like guitar strings'. They are part of the background which I wanted to foreground, revel in, for those brief hours in the pub, before they receded again.

'The next part I've rehearsed in my head.' I would take Boudicca, folded, on the tube from Tufnell Park to Stockwell, a straight, Northern Line route, and find my longest-serving friend. She will be sitting with G., at the end of her garden path. This herringbone-brick path has become a summer avenue of love-in-a-mist. She will be pouring champagne, and we will talk about how, the next day, we will face together with her bike (Cleopatra - good in a crisis) the challenge of changing the rear tyre on a Brompton for the first time. We admit what we know: that  it will be harder than fixing the front tyre, involving, as it does, negotiating gears and the chain. She will lend me scrubs and gloves for the procedure (direct me gently, saying, "Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty" and other wisdoms learnt, though not at medical school). 'You understood the maths of it'. 

We will lunch on home-made faux gras pate and brioche with her mother Morar, my adopted mother, and no one will mind that my hair is unbrushed, and that I'm not wearing my wide London trousers, will be oily around the edges.

Vienna, 2018. London, 2021. I feel repaired by these journeys, and their memories, by the companionship of my family, my friends, my bicycle - all of this giving life rhythm, tone, timbre, beat. 'Whump Whump Whump Whump' goes the swan lifting from the River Severn, goes the flat back tyre, goes the pump inflating the new inner tube readying for the next ride.

Coda

This is the peculiar alchemy:
to be caught up in someone else’s song,
be drawn over strings, or hammered out,
plucked as a guitar, or blown across a flute.
 
It’s a hollowed space, a refuge, place of hope
which shows us all our losses. It’s where I go
when I exhaust the words for love and sorrow.
It’s music.

GREAT MASTER / small boy is published by Fair Acre Press. If you wish to buy a copy, please email liz.lefroy@btinternet.com for details