A Painful New Affliction

… I have been in a tizzy since reading his accusations. I wasn’t exactly in great shape when his letter arrived. Like many elderly men, I have to swallow all sorts of pills. I take Inderal and quinidine for hypertension and cardiac disorders, and I am also, for a variety of psychological reasons, deeply distressed and for the moment with ego defenceless.

…

Edad con Sus Disgracias is the title Goya gave to the etching of an old man who struggles to rise from the chamber pot, his pants dropped to his ankles. ‘Together with most weak hams,’ as Hamlet wickedly says to Plonius, being merciless about old men. To the disorders aforementioned I must add teeth with cracked roots, periodontia requiring antibiotics that gave me the runs and resulted in a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut, plus creeping arthritis of the hands. Winter is gloomy and wet in British Columbia, and when I awoke one morning in this land of exile from which I face extradition, I discovered that something had gone wrong with the middle finger of the right hand. The hinge had stopped working and the finger was curled like a snail – a painful new affliction.

Actually this image, from the Museo del Prado, is entitled Comer mucho (To Eat a Lot) was part of an album of sketches made between 1824-1828. The catalogue entry reads 'A heavy man, perhaps a tonsured friar, is poised above a toilet, either rising or, more likely, about to descend to relieve himself after having consumed a large meal. In the shadowy background, a second man observes the operation with a smile or smirk.' It is close enough to the image described above to warrant inclusion here.

Quotation From: Saul Bellow Him With His Foot in His Mouth Penguin 2011 [originally published 1984].

Visceral Opinion

Shags seem to spend a lot of time drying off their wings. This one was right in the middle of the University campus on a hot sunny day. There were plenty of people about, above the deeply channelled Water of Leith.

Until something clearly spooked it. Like all critters it made its visceral opinion known before flying off.

The Past is History

What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.

Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction.

The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of a future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

Quotation: Elizabeth Costello by J.M.Coetzee. Vintage. 2004

A Tentative Outlay of Wrinkles

Concerning Mrs Harold Piper at thirty-five, opinion was divided – women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corner of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers – she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.

...

If Evylyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties in came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her. A tentative outlay of wrinkles on her face suddenly deepened and flesh collected rapidly on her legs and hips and arms. Her mannerism of drawing her brows together had become an expression – it was habitual when she was reading or speaking and even while she slept. She was forty-six.

F.Scott Fitzgerald The Cut-Glass Bowl Penguin 2011

Summer Spoonbill

The lower reaches of the Leith Stream are confined between ugly concrete walls. Here, as it runs between the College of Education and the Polytechnic, the river (it's hardly a stream, despite its name), is partly tidal.

I was walking on the footpath beside it and as I crossed over the footbridge startled a shag, which flew off. But I didn't disturb the lone spoonbill, as it looked for tasty morsels in the green algae.

Royal spoonbill numbers have increased since 1940 when they first started breeding in NZ. There is a small local colony which breeds on the small offshore islet called Green Island. That's probably where this bird has come from.

Pietro & Tommaso

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

The Queen’s Necklace by Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011

Yellow Carpet of Kowhai Flowers

Our garden kowhai is usually a late flowerer.

This year it has flowered to excess.

As have most of the flowering trees and shrubs around town - the rhododendrons have been magnificent.

Of course, as spring progresses, the florets fall - leaving a bright yellow carpet.

Filling up the very large leaves of the Chatham Island Forget-me-nots, like some overflowing wine goblet!