autumn – Page 2 – mariaology

Playlist: September 2017

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Late night listening to the sound of the planets :::soundtrack::: Adult Sadness Vol. 2. The sky is a dark green borrowed from a pen I once had that smelt quite rotten, not unlike the algae in the Queen’s Park pond you can’t touch because it’s poison bloom. A sign tells you. Underuse of racing ink. Toy cars with ferric metal. Lungs clotted orange. Weather for ducks. Earnest shrills in the steam//screwed repression. The feathers in my window shiver in the draught and there are many fibrous villi around my ribs that stir, muscle and sinew twitching.

Maryhill is lovely in autumn, all brick and scaffold, all concrete and leaves. Struggle of unfolding, furls come slowly their upward petals turned sunward for silk in lieu of caress. Lights glimmer vague at dusk but among rust and green there are delicious marbles of red, tiny gleams. Tin cans in windows. Glass reflects this wool coat, its pale blue shape containing my body. A scratch, diskette release. Let me know what you think of winter; it’s something I suspect we’ll disagree on. Church bells ring in distances, always three minutes out of sync. 1,2,3 (!) My alarm clock feels ornamental, like the inessential flourish of an amateur artist. Precious, the ephemeral perfection of certain ~simple~ things. Sufjan singing amethysts and flowers on the table and the gathering of leaves in dry cold fingers. A honey-tinged moment of regress. When she died we built a house out of sticks and acorns. They say they won’t break your bones. Most of us snap limbs climbing trees. Karmatic trauma of perilous branches, the wounded arborescence conveying refuscent regret.

I am sorry we both suffered. Tinge of tears: mostly the sting of decayed mascara, delayed asterism of accounts, of admin. A sort of mourning when you peel at the bark with your chipped fingernails, the roughness because you never learned to file. You liked black paint, the name ‘Lamp Black’. Technically I would stand at filing machines with a block of mahogany and a terror in my gut that I might shave off the first flesh of my knuckles if I was not careful, if my attention lapsed for a second—which of course it was liable to do. Cloud patterns, sand particles, root of palm. The tender, meaty abrasions. A leaf in the window. A fudge of trunk. A windmill pirouette in split sycamore seedling. A man at a gig with a fidget spinner, reenacting the gleeful vacuity of a faraway childhood. He likes the repetitive beat, has a fiend in each pupil. In a dream I did nothing for days and loved it.

They shoved yellow bricks on the topsoil, building a road. Composed monotony of Sunday morning, purplish as old Cadbury wrappers, melting to grey in the blinds, the unfinished business. The city got thinner; people lived off vegetable scraps, acidic drinks. The lovely vodka was tonic for the soul. Add cranberry and stir with three wishes. Lime dash, cheap taste of the bitter quarry. Trust me, this can all go away. Tartly. The beauty of how easy it can all go away. Close your eyes and reach for the dead, a charnel miasma of dark and brilliant matter. Check lunar spells, the pulpy, rhythmic etcetera. The smarted tongue of demethylated plasma. The visceral, cavernous depths of Nick Cave’s deranged baritone, the dripping blood that seeps between two tunings. My face without water. Apocalyptic nothing. Dawn skin, imitation foundation, polished silver. Wasn’t it some ride w/ flashing lights and a siren that shredded the nerves in your spine? Things recall home. A patience.

Find myself besotted by violins and even bagpipes for the first time in my life—something about the possible soaring. The violet sublime of imaginary mountains, 23 minutes from KO to summit. Duplicity. A very weird light on the river amorphous, the narrow rapture that glimpses distance. Glasgow is O so grey and so close(d), except for special streets where sky can be seen. Washed-out autumnals, palette of eyeshadow crushed upon absent downs. The baby fly drawn to the white screen light. Flicker of water. Cradling. Give it your interest, invest in gifts. Conduct flowcharts, erect monumental spreadsheets. Working for eloquent pennies and smiling at genuine occasions, deferring the plunge of a vast anxiety.

Chance encounters with beloved people. It’s getting chilly; I notice the wisps of gold on your fingers. Tiny clatter of teaspoon, agreement. Just the want of nourishing. Can I help you with…? Careless loungewear. Languidly envisioning bike rides and the sweet nicotine of his neck, maybe not present or else a taurine sunset burst harsh on canals. Walking hours just for circling. Euphoria of autumn, the crapulent auroras of thought. Remember me here and here alone. Deepen the nauseous voices with chlorine, the temporal wound of music which eked out several nights, no grace. Brain fog(?) / darling the chosen cottage was swamped in starlings. She wants it! In my milky cocoon I slip into sea. A truly invisible misery that flourishes with absence of sunlight. Yet these have been glorious days, phantasmic fall. Lagoons of jewelline, arboreal beauty. How far the pretty trees seem, so close to fading. These are the first weeks. A new leaf being this fragile contusion, gilded with flavanols.

September a full month, fat on Lindt-rich dusks, transitioning through ending. (Un)start a record. What we write being less than unwanted dreams of childhood bedrooms. A still-written diary, a remark of childish handwriting. Sometimes the sound of the lock recalls being young and waiting at a table with homework, the dog snoring. Absence wafts through floorboards; the city flats have hallways that smell of spices and home-cooked food. The luxury of illusions. Homegrown squash from the neighbour’s garden; a generous, ministerial grin. Star Trek boxsets. Subway blasting ersatz fumes of bread. Give us our (daily) bread, your most aesthetic cucumber shred. Flour turns to flower in the whirl of a trip, slappy hour calyx. Fetishistic love for cigarettes; loathed tobacco discount nausea. Too long among clouds of nitrate, butane. Stealing the stuff in bars when hungry, letting the soothing crunch give seconds of life. Keep walking, look focused. Be watery, light. Release apophenic reactions to overwhelming reverie. Let the glassy-eyed night remain hypothetical, lull your throat with cinnamon tea. Play for 2hrs+ and expect no refunds.

A coruscating, honest energy; a heartbreak falsetto. Be mine, be mine. It’s a love-heart candy or Spinning Coin song or a leaf trampled wax-red in the rain. The gleaming of complexions fed on beta-carotene. Waiting for the top to stop, its twirl collapses the triplet realities. Trap pop and unripe nectarines, paring of skin. Wake me up when. The haunt~~ing~~/ed seventh circle. Shellac memories comb trellising mystery. The Lynchian roar of Mercury’s industry. Chewing dates for luck, mulling imminent (Pause) the solitary red-berried rowans at church. Each apparition of Sebaldian land: the Suffolk coast, the labyrinth; the breathlessness of melancholics. Krapp’s remembered lighthouse, Sarah Palmer’s ceiling fan. Again, the twirling. Things that keep me awake, the static turning geometric shapes. Cyclonic diagrams of elsewhere tornados. Gently, side to side, a new tossed pound from the mint. A fresh pack of gum going stale in the rucksack. Suspense! Many day trips or nights you hoped might go on. Graveyard hookups. Rain lashes, splashes, makes it deluge a cache of murmuring sound, of hypnotic water, a lariat looping nutritious conditionals. I listen in sleep, I fall asleep to rainymood and its ambient coolness unsettles the sheets, loses the cookies. Precipitation is a quality of the tongue, without moving a lively swill of ice, of breezy smiles. Full in the no-going, the onward falling. Tell me your everything. Swaying skeletal trees are absurd. If you were in a flat and on someone’s floor and the furniture spoke to you. Be mine, be mine. September’s coming soon / blinded by the moon. Things which trigger the shifting year. Seasons are an art form in letting go of an Earth; molecular moves manifest as scent, burnish, colour. Smoke gets in your eyes, the squint-making light. Rush of the somewhere tap, free cold water, accompanied nights.

Close out. Pluto a drone in the back of my mind, the x-rays made of millioning crystals, lattices cut on the frost of midnight. At what time, the secret ossified entry beckons. Baudrillard winks with a follow me, as if he knew the currency of emoji. Emotional seduction. I say it in loathing, stuck on the affluent salt of my copper-hued cravings. You are an apple pie with a crust of ashes, you are the zone of the saddest parties/pastries. Someone taught me Jupiter’s salad of flames, or gestured towards her salubrious eye. The sky retains that tip of fire, spilt ink of other-terrestrial planes. Sonorous longing, your favourite spooky IPA. We need a holiday and a coffee, a combined electricity of homeostasis. Human profusion: a pool of Buckfast, VHS reels, vacant pleasures. Layered bodies, microbials enmeshed. SmoOoo00oth. Hatched exactitudes coke residue lumps of OCD. All good people are slowly leaving. New ecosystems persist less algorithmic than ferns, but equal to measure of possible lushness, the spiral and point of rising life. These addictions enriched with chromatic schemes of arguments and gin, or whatever the superlative spice. A price on each arrogant lacquer, a month out of season, already stewing. Braeburns juice the pallid enamel, keep us up stung without sleep. Tell me I’m leaving.

Car Seat Headrest – Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales

The Pastels – If I Could Tell You

The Delgados – The Past That Suits You Best

Roddy Woomble – Every Line of a Long Moment

Savage Mansion – Do You Say Hello To Your Neighbours?

Spinning Coin – Albany

Angel Olsen – Special

Frightened Rabbit feat. Julien Baker – How It Gets In

Jane Weaver – Modern Kosmology

Four Tet – Lush

Gross Net – Citadel Ghosts

Slowdive – Trellisaze

LCD Soundsystem – black screen

Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

The Horrors – Gathering

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away

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fall logic

Playlist: August 2017

Start with the kernel of something. The year’s first fallen acorn I have not seen yet, though pinecones have been thrown in the direction of whoever. Hypothetically, my life as a typewriter, the body punctuated with the same mechanical violence. Clattering impression of symbol. A certain attention to gardens, as if in longing for confinement, safety. Time spent in Cambridge. Willows sweeping the skin of the river, an endless wandering the result of what. Hard work, long mornings in bed with the warm aluminal form of a laptop. White glow, silence. Someone mowing their lawn too early. Being what it is to be lonely not letting the light in except with broken blinds it comes fractured, skewed, something. The early fears abated, return to trust the body. Sun beaming through unfinished paint, the colour of mauve roses, faded hydrangeas. There is a hyperspace in which the dreams become apartments with balconies folding to abyss, you lean out singing it felt like a kiss the crystal taste which is what a violent text a certain whisky with peculiar salt with the flavour of drowning. Shades of cool. Allergic to punctuation after so much editing. Late night taste of Mogwai, Aphex Twin in the long long mornings. The perfect cupid’s bow of her lips. A geometry of light on the living room carpet. Sit in me, wheat-coloured pool of Vitamin D. The gunshot pulse of the stuttering track. I close my eyes for the White Lodge, the shrouding. Mountains come up and when we are at work we hum the Song of Healing while customers come and go in a panoply, in circuits; the moon too close like a lump of cheese with a million calories like terrible space debris coming. There’s an underpass where the dank canal flows thick as a black black oil, as molasses. Closer, the exact texture of fishnets. Something of your composition, a fear. The cold and lovely brass legato. Confessions in brown paper-bags. These are penny sweets, many regrets, many ice-coloured touch of the tongue that flickers its absence. A pleasant stasis, curled fingers which wait for the rise of the chest and the breath that is chemical alone, that is Tennents at seven in the morning on a lino floor. Berryish, bitten. Making no sense of Four Quartets but embracing the paganism, looking equinox ready with a garland of wilted daisies as if August never happened. The goddess in flesh, Lana Del Rey with her seamless fragility that adds joy to melancholy, etc. You know it. Conor Oberst telling stories about Woodie Guthrie and another life-changing duet on Lua. Voices as clear and pure as expensive vodka, distilled through a mountain stream in the elusive valleys of sadness. Somewhere south of America. I see a desert. There are plants needing repotting in my room. A 39-minute album. A mixed-up connotation, lumps of quartz from a beach near Cardross. I wonder about the temperature of water. Last year’s gatherings, the same melancholy. The absolute cool refreshment of this late-summer’s day. Remembering Lilt as a Thing! Train rides, shudderings, altered temperatures. So much goddamn analysis. Saying it like a litany, my goodness my goodness my goodness. Enacting mythology of objects surrounding. The glass of ice cubes precisely polished, a sequence of droplets. Clotted spectrums. The time it takes between ordering and serving, circling like ravens or trying to negate the game of waiting. Complaints. August being the flourishing stammer of a potentially bad dissertation. Potentially not. Sometimes salt and vinegar just tastes good. Wake up to the sting of your own tongue. Passing creepy, sapphire hot-tubs at four in the morning while old-school Coldplay floats on by mysteriously. Bones sinking like stones. Floating on home at 9am past phalanxes of school children and furious mothers. With all these roadworks, the pavement is but a treacherous ridge between spaces. Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to prove something. Philosophical brutality. Voyage to the capital for Tom McCarthy. Sunlight and absurd erotic fiction displayed in cardboard boxes. The boiling point of all these projects. Nectarines. How everything these days just feels like browsing. Are we yet ready for nostalgia and autumn, and whichever comes before the other? I keep re-watching the same old episodes.

LCD Soundsystem – tonite

Kiran Leonard – Could She Still Draw Back?

Big Thief – Masterpiece

Conor Oberst – Napalm

Girl Ray – Trouble

John Maus – Hey Moon

Clarence Clarity – Naysayer Godslayer

Four Tet – SW9 9SL

Oneohtrix Point Never – Music for Steamed Rocks

Mogwai – Coolverine

Lana Del Rey – Shades of Cool

Au Revoir Simone – Lark

Lomond Campbell – Father is a Craftsman (Modern Studies cover)

Julie Byrne – Morning Dove

Walking Home with Angelo Badalamenti

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[a daily freewrite]

Sinister synths fill the bloodstream. It is very late, too late to be out walking like this down Kelvin Way which tonight is another planet, leaves falling slow like so many flakes of golden, sorrowful snow; not normal, not real, just swirling in loops and spirals, falling as if in slow motion—and my walking is the inversion, fast-paced as I cut through the piles of leaves, my legs making shapes against the air which is freezing.

I think: the spider at my window. It has lived here for months and is gradually fattening. Its web spreads daily like a tapestry; it lurches across its pretty stitches to devour some unsuspecting insect.

I think: it is too light to be dark. What is that spooky glow at the end of the road, why the blueish mist, the streetlamps the colour of mulberry?

In my ears like a virus the saxophone spreads, its screech rising to a terrible pitch; then falling, descending, counterpoint to that butter soft double bass…

The trees are too tall for a city. They are tall, sinewy trees – almost fully without leaves – which gather instead in great waves on the pavement swollen with the imminence of my kicking and scattering – they are so dry and crisp like just so much beautifully burnished scrap paper torn from centurial newspapers. I am very little, smaller than the fence posts, picking up the fattest five-pointed leaf, glossily gold and glazed with rain.

The familiar chords are placed in the air, like the liquorice laying of vinyl on a turntable. The air which would be so still if not for those billowing leaves, for the quiet display of traffic, which passes smoothly like a reassurance, like airwaves heard vaguely from beneath the sea of sleep. The sounds in my head sway as if I am rocking to sleep; I keep walking, walking…

Bars and cafes locking up for the evening, their emptiness betraying a certain extravagance of decor and objects. Why this painting? That mirror? What are you hiding? The screens of the evening are everywhere. One I may fall into, one I will crack and smash. I am pressed against the glass, watching the precisely symphonic arrangement of chairs and tables. I wonder which guest had moved the backs slightly, had pulled off the cloth, had spilt blackcurrant wine on the white linen like blood.

There is a screen in the distance, golden brown. An advert for Grouse whisky. The houses which look down on me are especially macabre, tenements of sandstone washed ashore from the bleakness of history. Ghosts are in the window, knowing the shadows of their past passing futures. I feel an affinity. These are curious ghosts. I am too warm. I shirk off my rucksack, my black leather jacket. I feel the air whip fast at my arms, bare. It is proper cold tonight, crisping and shrivelling the skin of my lips.

This sinuous, heavy, resonant bass. Is it in time to my quick footsteps? I feel myself slowing down, oozing in a scattering of atoms. I have lost my train of thought. Something about an essay, the impossible engorgement of several million objects. Just so much of Blanchot, of Stein’s poetry. I rub my eyes, reddened I guess; the lamplight too bright on the white bits. Such shadows! I am followed by my own tall, anorexic twin. She is Slenderman sized, long-limbed as a willow.

I feel like dark chocolate, like coffee. I feel quite decidedly empty.

The passing of strangers speaking into phones. They are all web-caught, a sequence of whispers. I hear them as if through the static of radio. There are cats screaming in distant alleyways; I imagine them mouthy, a jawfull of mice, ecstatic and tortured. A blackness comes over me again. The muscles slacken.

This is the lounge jazz of hell. This is the seductive coloratura twinkle of a mystical piano, the refusal of a chord to resolve itself, the slow-climbing bass, the way the xylophone draws us closer to a beautiful death. It is a shimmering, blood red pool. It is fire; it is lava, like noirish Irn Bru. The scarlet curtains part to reveal us. I think of the cave, of the spider, of the sapphire light. A bluegrass guitar severed, shredded in dissonance. The sweetest, purest soprano, worthy of Elizabeth Fraser, fair queen of Grangemouth…Here we are in the mountains, the laces of silver rivers, the dark pines, the water spilling over the ridges, the unfolding of clouds like a book of spells…Smell of woodsmoke clotting the tired red strands of my hair.

I am at a door. Is it the colour of midnight on a moonless night?

Still I am alone. The ghosts have departed, the album has finished. All is silence. I am home.

Sunflowers

The glow of the oil lamp
melts through the misting dust
that coats the light in the kitchen,
all airy, greyish, mossy and ochre
as the painted walls

(…In the evenings and mornings there are the same
slants of sun or moon, geometries of the cosmic
playing games upon the carpet).

Two weeks ago, the gloom was cut
with a bunch of sunflowers, hacked clean with a knife;
their extravagant heads all smiles and brightness.

They lifted the mood when you entered the room,
skin acquiring that olivine hue
from the plants and the shadows;
reflection of the radio, whose channels
remain static, always, in lieu
of music, or a television crackling,
or a body that would clutch
you so tight in its sadness
as to suck away your own.

Crumbs from the dead hours
grow a fur of mould; the pages curl
on a stack of magazines,
whose gloss lacks immunity to dust,
which scuttles and settles
between the pages, closely closing
leaf after leaf, an army of tiny hermit creatures—
Frankenstein splices of insect shells, fragments of lashes,
fibre and skin.

To sweep it would be merely
to cast a new dance of twirling particles.

It is exhausting, keeping things clean;
exhausting
to warm the stove, to watch the hours
unfurling
through the clock on the wall.

The sunflowers fade now; it is properly autumn,
bronze and darkening green.
Their time has been
and I collect the topaz petals, shrivelled slightly
as they catch on the carpet, the stacks of magazines.

September spreads its beautiful disease through the streets
as the leaves begin to fall, oozing soft fire,
the sweep sap of decay.

In the window, the sunflowers have lost their vigour.
They drop; their heads slump down,
defeated, as if shy at their deaths.
Their filaments wither, every yellow floret
sinks, crisp; a victim of gravity.

Every entrance to the room augments their sorrow.
We have forgotten the day we bought them,
or even where they were from.
There is just the slant of light, the green and ochre
smell of cooking, the smoke across the road,
and the knowing that probably
I will throw those flowers away tomorrow.

— 23/9/16

Wasps

Wasps

I heard a dull, sizzling thump and a wasp fell into my room. It fell through a crack at the top of my window and disappeared among the sunflowers, shivering, then stopped dead, seemingly. I was not bothered at first, because I thought the thump was merely a moth, or a postcard dropped off from the wall. Then the wasp appeared again. I saw it whizzing out of the flowers and it hovered round the glow of my computer. It was inches from my face.

Naturally, I panicked. I stepped back as if someone in front of me was holding a gun.

Seconds later, six more wasps swarmed at my window, pelting themselves against the glass. I could hear their angry buzzing humming in my ears, which were already ringing from a gig that night. Quickly I leapt up to shut the window, but another two got in somehow.

I ran out the room. Everywhere I looked, I could see things flitting around me. I don’t know if they were real or imagined. It was like standing in a forest, surrounded by the glitter motes of midges, only not half as pretty and in fact pretty freaky. I thought I was hallucinating. I could feel the flutter in my chest, like the insects themselves had gotten into my ribcage and were seething to get out. I was only a little bit drunk.

Gutted my flat for the fly spray. Thank god I found it.

They were crawling about in my lampshade when I tentatively opened the door. Three of them, glutted on light, their tiny bodies blown up to absurd proportion through the illuminated paper. I stood stock still and waited. They didn’t seem to want to leave; they’d found their paradise up their in that giant orb, lovers of sun that they are, like the elderly expats of Benidorm. So I pounced with the spray, gushing it upon them, tearing through the paper with all those solvent chemicals.

I thought how kids might sniff this stuff to get high.

I thought how I might kill the plants by accident.

How one wasp was still lingering, so close to a pot of aloe vera.

Then it joined the rest.

Could I smell the burning of their furless bodies?

They fizzled out, drunkenly, from the lampshade, stumbling through the air and dropping to the carpet, one by one. Brutally I crushed their writhing bodies with the bottom of a mug, mashing them into the pieces of notepad that covered my floor. The stains of their deaths would remain, irrevocably, tiny, upon those pages, like just so many slight smears of grease. Traces of vague terror, like a half-remembered dream.

Is it bad to kill animals? Even these pointless, evil creatures? Of course it is. I felt guilty, but there you are, survival of the fittest.

My head swam from the smell of the fly spray, just so much butane and strong perfume.

I thought: why is it that we humans are so frightened by things so little? I was stung many times as a child, but you’d think I’d get over the fear, the same way I got over my terror of talking on the phone or eating olive oil or standing up in class to give a presentation. Maybe it’s like death, a fear you can’t shake off. I see a miniature demon in the matte black eyes of each of those wasps. It’s like they’re from another world, sent here to torture us. Whole lunchtimes at school we spent trying to slay the bastards, usually to no avail. They just descend on you in September and August, haunt the bins like a bad smell.

They came into my room, the three wasps, confronting me with their strangeness. How ugly they are, shrivelled and wispy and probably a bit crunchy if you dared eat one. Where do they come from? What mulch is chewed in the elaboration of their nests?

I had to scoop up the triptych of their carcasses from my carpet, toss them in with the compost.

Every prickle of skin, each brush of hair or fibre on my bare limbs, I thought was another one, crawling along my pores.

What does it feel like, to have your whole body shudder with the intoxication of pyrethrins? Odour of chrysanthemums. Surely they were only looking for the sun, diving for my window at 2am which was the only lit window in the block? Did my human habits deceive them, fools that they are, for an early sunrise, a portal to a new dawn? Did they want the delicious, golden sap of my desktop sunflowers? I hate them, I hate them. Is it so very bad to hate them?

Maybe somewhere there is a very pure and generous person, who nourishes wasps with banquets of aphids and caterpillars, who smiles at the yellow-black beasties and lets them inside. Who maybe even harvests their nests, provides comfort for the queens in winter, makes good use of the moulded warmth of a soft, unused loft. Who tries to welcome them to their city.

In another life, there’s a feral child of the forest or street, letting them creep up and down her arms; welcoming their buzzing, contrapuntal to her own sweet breathing. She’s not me.

I wouldn’t harm a fly, I wouldn’t touch a bee. Maybe I’d even feed it honey. My friend used to nurse them back to life when they were dying on the pavement.

Wasps though, wasps are something else entirely.

They can cling to the carrion of the suburbs and schoolyards all they like, enjoy the spoils of autumn’s decay, the fading of other insects among fallen leaves and shrunken bracken, the tattered remains of crisp packets. Still, if they come in my room again I will kill them with spray. I am that sincere in my cruelty, that human, that absolutely succumbed to stupid, distorted fear.

And will I ever open my window again; create that rectangle of air that forges its gateway to the morning rain, the telephone wires, the birdsong and greenery of the garden?

Long Hair: A Love Story

A long time ago, far out in the constellations of mythology, Rapunzel let down her hair. And what lovely hair it was, a waterfall of gold, spilling from the window of her tower. Answering the call of her keeper or lover, she unravelled her braids to form a rope. Rapunzel’s hair, then, provided the connecting threshold, the thread that stitched together her turreted psyche and the world outside. It was also her downfall, allowing her to have illicitly a lover. Her keeper, Dame Gothel, became jealous and cut her hair, and left her to live a withered existence out in the desert. The tale takes us from the lush beauty of a ‘splendid garden’ to the arid desert, where eventually Rapunzel and her lover reunite and find happiness. It’s a peculiar tale of desire, entrapment, revenge, femininity; a tale which sets the scene for wider cultural mythologising of long hair. It’s a mythology that we’re still fascinated with, as the popularity of the Disney adaptation of Rapunzal’s tale, Tangled (2010), attests.

History and myth are glutted with references to the power of lengthy tresses. Take Samson, the Israelite leader who lost the source of his strength when his lover Delilah betrayed him and cut off his long hair. Or the Sif, the wife of Thor, whose wheat-coloured locks were cut off and stolen in her sleep by the malevolent god Loki. After Sif’s husband entered a threatening rage about the hair theft, Loki ordered dwarves to weave Sif a new mane of hair out of threads of gold, more long and beautiful than before. There’s also, of course, Medusa; the monstrous Greek guardian whose hair famously consisted of venomous snakes, and whose eyes turned their onlookers to stone. In his essay, ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922), Freud suggests that her snaky mane is linked to the castration complex, the (male) fear of having one’s genitals effectively guillotined. Freud’s typically eyebrow-raising essay links Medusa’s head to the female genitals, and the supposed threat of castration a boy experiences if he catches sight of these genitals. Well, apparently, Medusa’s snakes also alleviate the terror of castration, since they provide supplementary figures for the penis, thus filling in the implied absence of castration. And of course, Freud throws in a cheeky sexual pun, as Medusa’s head makes her ‘spectator stiff with terror’, and thus not only turns him to stone but also arouses him: ‘[f]or becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact’. Yes, quite.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=0CAcQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Frap.genius.com%2F821579%2FAesop-rock-the-mayor-and-the-crook%2FThen-rock-like-medusa-glances&ei=hgxSVMKiNZDwaN3qgMAI&bvm=bv.78597519,d.d2s&psig=AFQjCNEsGHzxRr7-50RvUoDaEL2wpaitkw&ust=1414749689575329 — Medusa.

Well, it’s undeniable that literature has tended to represent a woman’s long hair with desire, sexuality and beauty. Take this passage from Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Medusa was astonishingly fair;
She was desired and contended for–
So many jealous suitors hoped to win her.
Her form was graced by many splendors, yet
There was no other beauty she possessed
That could surpass the splendor of her hair–

Yet while her hair made her an object of desire, a thing to be ‘contended for’, the ‘splendor’ of her snake hair also symbolises her multiplicity. As the snakes are full of a life of their own, Medusa cannot be pinned down, her personality is multiple, endless. Her hair is its own being, extending in legend and through history. It is slippery, but also a symbol of her power. Indeed, Hélène Cixous reclaimed Freud’s psychoanalytic pinning of Medusa to advance her feminist call-to-arms for women to rethink their sexuality in relation to language. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) Cixous critiques the way Freud’s castration complex reinforces the mythologising of Woman as hysterical, as the Unknowable, ’dark continent’. As weak, passive, mysterious. Through writing (extending the lines of multiplicity that we find in Medusa’s hair), women may reclaim themselves, reach out and produce their desires and being through writing. Just as Cixous herself reclaims the mythical figure of Medusa from Freud’s cigar-stained fingers: ‘she’s not deadly’, Cixous argues, ‘she’s beautiful and she’s laughing’.

There is something joyful and exuberant about long hair. Think of the connotations: a young girl skipping through a field of wheat, streaming behind her a cherry red ribbon. An Austen heroine waiting to be the belle of the ball, or the flame of The Little Mermaid’s rippling tresses. It is a distinctly youthful trait, too; a symbol of childish innocence. In Victorian society, only children tended to let their hair down in public; if a girl wished to be seen as a woman or ‘lady’, she must pin up her locks, dress them in ornaments and braids. Letting one’s hair loose as a woman was seen as a sign of wantonness. Thus, the artistic portrayal of woman with their tresses flowing free represented a kind of back-to-nature aesthetic, a fetishising of the body, the long locks relishing a kind of originary femininity and sensuality. Perhaps also a wildness, a breaking forth from repressive societal values – the kind of constructed femininity that kept women as the domestic ‘angels of the house’. Think of the young Cathy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), her hair streaming behind her as she gallantly trails the ‘savage’ Heathcliff over the hillsides, or the iconography of the ‘fallen woman’ as depicted in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Women who did not look in the mirror and reflect back the pale perfection of the chaste Victorian angel, but positively glowed with their own matter – their glorious hair – their sensuality. There is something in that: the glorious feeling of standing on a cliff edge, letting the wind whip your hair across your face and fill it with billowing energy. Just don’t try it when you’re trying to eat ice cream.

Rosetti's 'Lady Lillith'. Source: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/english-literature-studies-brighton/brightonline/issue-number-two/the-fetishization-and-objectification-of-the-female-body-in-victorian-culture — Rosetti’s ‘Lady Lillith’. Source: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/english-literature-studies-brighton/brightonline/issue-number-two/the-fetishization-and-objectification-of-the-female-body-in-victorian-culture

Today, like everything else long hair has been sucked into the commercial imperative. Perhaps that is why long hair has been associated with anti-capitalist and consumerist movements: the lengthy tresses of 1960s hippies, Marx with his wild white beard and mane, the fluffy mop of Che Guevara. Long hair (especially the unkempt dreads of the hippies) was never really a friend of the drone-like demands of the job market. A short sharp haircut symbolises ‘cool’, edginess, the new freedoms enabled by consumption (think of the bobbed Flappers of the 1920s). Advertising impels us to buy products, perfect your femininity, express yourself through a new style; a new cut, spray, or shampoo. ‘The latest hair trends’, the V05 website proclaims, ‘help you express yourself’. Every day is a decision about how one will adorn oneself, about one’s performance; hair becomes a web of possible signifiers, waiting to be decoded by an image-consuming public, or at least by that stranger across the street. Femininity is a performance, but the secrets of self lie in the hair. There is Kim Kardashian, that postmodern queen of the feminine, a patchwork of skin and plastic flesh, of shiny dye and hair extensions. Websites will spend considerable time and space unpicking the details of Kim’s hairstyles, as she shifts chameleon-like from blonde to black to ombre. It seems that still we read a women through the strands of her hair, as if they were lines of text.

In Greek mythology, the long-haired Sirens were alluring femme fatales who seduced sailors with their bewitching singing, leading them to perish and shipwreck on their islands. The beauty of these long-haired beings is thus inherently linked to danger, a threat to the freedom and power of masculinity. We might make a connection to the emasculating anxiety of becoming trapped in feminised domestic space. We might also make a connection to the contemporary use of the word siren in relation to (often long-haired) actresses: she’s a real screen siren, we say. Again, these sirens are beguiling, but often perilous in luring their spectators into the isolated islands of their cinematic fantasies.

Yet in addition to these chains of mythology, hair at its most basic component is protein: an element of our body which symbolises nurturance and life. Like our hair, we are always changing, growing. If we look after our bodies with sleep, good food and exercise, it shows in the glow of our hair. A quick flick through a photo album will reveal a history of hairstyles, which reflect not only on the (dodgy or not) cultural trends of the period, but also on ourselves. Who we are and were.

the mermaid in Splash. Source: http://mermaidinengland.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/mermaid-splash-darryl-hannah1.jpg

My own hair history is a fairly interesting one. I’ve always loved long hair, ever since (perhaps even before) I watched a rented VHS copy of Splash (1984) and decided I wanted to be a mermaid. Refusing my mother’s futile attempts to brush my hair, I went to school with a witchy mane which was only sometimes contained in double, Heidi-like braids. There’s a picture of me at my seventh birthday party, with it all crimped as I grin at the camera, wearing 90s-style Baby-Spice white leggings. It would’ve looked almost cute, if I didn’t have a full-fringe which took over half of my skull. Safe to say I’m not such a fan of primary school photos…

At least I earned the comparisons I (still) get to Hermione from Harry Potter (and not just through the geekery department). Kids at school would ask me if I ever bothered to straighten my hair (or at least brush it, one girl sighed) – this was back when everyone had to wear their hair poker-straight and smooth as if it had been recently ironed, Bridget Jones style. All that static flattened out; everyone a clone. You could almost smell the whiff of burnt heat spray as the other girls glided past. I wanted GHD straighteners for so long, that by the time I got them (a joint present for me and my brother, who was then going through his wee 12-year-old emo phase), I quite liked my hair a bit wavy or curly. I still have and use that same pair of trusty straighteners, incidentally.

Hair was always a contentious issue in my schooldays. The P.E. teacher would warn us every week that if we didn’t have it tied up in class, we’d be forced to wear rubber bands to pull it back. I’d always imagine the excruciating sensation of pulling a rubber band out a ponytail (along with half of my hair), every nerve searing with dread. By the time I was thirteen my hair was pretty long and for Halloween I bought some of that wonderful Stargazer semi-permanent dye and made a half-successful job of my hair. I think I got that sort of ethereal/faerie/cyborg look, as I dyed the top half pink and the bottom half blue, and my bad dyeing skills meant I actually got quite a cool ombre effect as the shades blended into each other. I wasn’t so good at clearing up the spattered mess of the bathroom, which resembled a mediocre Jackson Pollock painting by the time I was finished.

Me with pink hair for the Halloween Disco...and a Carrick Academy tie. — Me with pink hair for the Halloween Disco…and a Carrick Academy tie.

Oh, and with said blue dye I also did my brother’s hair once. My friend and I bought him some cheap permanent blonde stuff from Semi-Chem, thinking that because his hair was so naturally dark it would need a bleached out base. I didn’t think the blonde would do much at all, maybe only lighten the brown a bit. Somehow, however, it worked a treat and he had the most, um, skunk-like streaks of yellow in his hair. Diligently, we applied the blue dye, forbidding him to look in the mirror until it was finished. With everything all rinsed out, I suppose he looked more like Sonic the Hedgehog than the Billie Joe Armstrong look he was probably going for. It also didn’t help much that I also let my friend cut his hair in the Debenham’s family toilets (while I sipped warm wine mixed with whisky from a plastic sports bottle – classay!), leaving chunks of it over the floor like it was the detritus of some old, innocent self. After a few week’s of swimming lessons, the chlorine made the blue bleed out into a measly green, and he’ll probably never forgive me for that.

The best hair I ever had was platinum blonde. I loved it so much. I guess it was my failed scene-kid phase, when I wanted hair that was long and spiky and backcombed like a rat’s nest, a white canvas to set off my black liner and neon eyeshadow. The bleach process took over three hours for the hairdresser to do, and probably cost all my birthday money and a month or so’s worth of EMA, but it was worth it. I was born a bonnie wee blonde, but cursed with the family trait of having this fade. Having bright blonde hair makes you literally dazzle. Anita Loos was the first to say that ‘gentleman prefer blondes’, and it’s become an adage that blondes have more fun. I don’t know about all that, but you do feel like you’ve become some diamond in a sea of dull, radiating a new light. It fades though. The roots cut in like black leeches and the strands dry out like straw. You get bored. I let the blonde grow out and kept the tips as a kind of proto-ombre (I swear I got there before Alexa Chung et al), which remained as a kind of limp homage to my teen years pretty much until about a year ago, when I went the whole way with the brunette thing.

the blonde days... — on holiday in Italy…

looking blonde and melancholy — me all blonde and melancholy

And now I just wished I was ginger, or at least half ginger. That’s my plan now: gradually get more ginger. There’s something special about ginger hair; the way people try to hide it with lovely euphemisms – strawberry blonde – the way it’s linked to a fresh freckled face, or strange stereotypes (ginger people don’t have souls, I’ve been told). Its Celtic connotations. I want the amber and russet tones of Pre-Raphaelite tresses, that look gorgeous in autumn. It’s a sort of long term life plan, but probably achievable, although it’s one of the hardest colours to get right. You could end up with some cat-vomit orange, or a lustreless red, if you’re not precise with your dye. Yeah, I’ll do it gradually. It took me a while to get my hair as long and strong as it is now, so in spite of that saying ‘it’s hair: it’ll grow back’, I’m not risking my mane anytime soon.

Lily Cole in all her gorgeousness for Vogue Italia (source: pinterest)

The best hair colour and freckles ever. source: pinterest

Sure, I love the idea of hair makeovers. Get several inches lopped off and highlights put in and maybe an undercut. It looks cool on loads of people. But I’m definitely one of those strange souls who finds their hair a total comfort blanket, a scarf in the winter, something to chew on idly when I’m staring at a computer screen. I like being able to hide my face in awkward situations, or conceal the fact that I’ve made no effort with my makeup. It becomes a kind of signature, and people remember you by your hair. It would be hard to lose that, like shedding a self.

However, I’m not denying that long hair, rich with sensuous mythology though it is, isn’t a proper pain in the arse. The brushing, painful detangling, the half-hour plus hair-washing, the problem of it getting stuck in the door when you’re trying to clean the microwave. How to wear it for work; nobody wants a spaghetti strand of hair in their £18 steak. You do come up with a good routine though and it becomes manageable. I promise, it’s worth it.

Desire, jealousy, strength – all things long hair represents in myth. Sure, everyone has bad hair days, but maybe a bad hair day with long hair is more a ‘I just came out of the ocean’ look rather than ‘I just woke up’. Long live the mermaids.

Long hair-care tips:

Wash as little as possible. I wash about once a week with a teaspoon of shampoo and a heap of conditioner.
Good diet! Eat all your greens: kale, spinach, celery, avocado and broccoli are best.
Coconut oil: heat some up and slather your hair in it and leave overnight for a nourishing hot oil treatment.
Buy a tangle-teezer and make your life 50 x easier.
Try to sleep with it in a braid.
Wash it in the coldest water you can stand, and only start to blow dry it when it’s about 80% dry, so it’s getting less heat damage.
Soft scrunchies are better than harsh bands!
Give yourself or get someone else to give you regular almond oil scalp massages. A splash of peppermint oil mixed in also stimulates growth.
Regular trims will not make it grow longer (myth myth myth!) but obviously keep your ends in good shape.
Try using colour-depositing shampoos and conditioners as a less damaging colour upkeep as opposed to layering up permanent dye. Henna can also be good, although it doesn’t ever wash out, so be careful and do a strand test.

a drawing I did of 'scene hair' me. (oh god) — a drawing I did of ‘scene hair’ me. (oh god)

River Walk

Fridays can be good days. I think I should appreciate more how pure a Friday can be, when the weather’s as warm as this. It makes you feel free, when you can wander through the wonderland of leaves without a jacket, feeling the breezy air on your bare arms. So after my seminar I decided to go on a walk along the River Kelvin, and take lots of pictures because everything seemed so bright and fire-coloured and beautiful…

The whole way I listened to my favourite Nick Drake album, Five Leaves Left; with its haunting vocals and the drawn-out pull of minor strings, it provides a lovely soundtrack to the autumnal landscape…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llNpigCSAZE

Kelvin Way in the afternoon

Over the old bridge with the copper leaves and the stark white of a high rise

(because it’s Glasgow)

white hand, violet light

Friends of the River Kelvin (next to the outdoor gym)

Kelvingrove Park

dying roses

toadstool/fungus

I love autumn.

Autumn Reflections

The dawn cracks open the sky like a chestnut, and gold light pours on the concrete and grass like showers of molten topaz. Somehow it’s October and I’m wondering how I got here. Where the summer has disappeared, along with the warm air and the billowing roses, with August and its hydrangeas; it seems time has elasticated itself, and snapped at the strangest of places. Everything may break free now. The world slows down, as trees shake themselves clean of another year. Leaves cascade on the ground, and as I walk I hear the susurrations of their skeletons, rustling like the sound of rain at night.

Autumn is a quiet season. We retreat inwards. Gone are the sparkles of summer voices, the throb of fashionable neon and jet planes soaring to boozy utopias. The Pimms is perhaps swapped for something richer, sweeter, warming. A good cider, red wine, some inventive cocktail combining Kahlua and caramel-flavoured tequila. You think of those people hanging out of balconies, their bare skin glowing in the cold air, the slivery iridescence of cigarette smoke curling from their nostrils. There are the box-sets, the television dinners. Going out is such an effort; it is the not knowing, the tentativeness of the weather. Things would be easier if the sky kept to its promises.

I wanted to go blackberry-picking this year. I found a place along the Kelvin where they sprawl out of the bramble-bushes, poking like fat sapphires through wire mesh fences. I need to find some leafy suburb for conkers. When I was little, we spent the October holidays at my Nan’s in Milton Keynes. There was a copse of horse-chestnut trees and every year we brought back a black bin-bag full of conkers, and I’d shine them up with vinegar and nail varnish before taking them into school. There’s something incredibly satisfying about the way they feel in your palm, solid and smooth, nourishing somehow. I didn’t quite make it in time for the blackberries, but I did the walk again all the same, sweeping my feet through the trails of leaves. Autumn had left its burnished light, a shimmer on the river. I love the feelings of these late afternoons, where darkness is like a comforting hug, handed through chasms of stars and amber.

Once, we had a school project, to gather up all the fallen leaves we could find and press them into a picture behind glass. A lesson in natural materials, perhaps, in arranging colour. We were flattening the landscape, making art; in the veiny intricacies of each leaf lies a million hidden histories. We’ll never know, and they’ll fade and die eventually.

Autumn is always a time of nostalgia. It is that paradoxical time where death reveals itself through visceral beauty. The life forces of summer unfurl and wither and fall away, and yet there is a beautiful melancholy in the sad palette of reds and golds and browns, the snuffling of squirrels amongst tufts of bracken. Everything is scattered: the husks and roots and fragments. You find them in the strangest of places, tucked not only in forests but flowing out of drains, wedged in concrete and windowpanes. People spend their Sundays loafing with films and Scrabble and roast dinners. Or maybe they don’t anymore; but maybe they did once.

By September, we’re back at school, back at uni. Fresh starts amidst the fall. Sharpened pencils, the smell of polished leather. The heating goes on for chilly mornings. Socks warmed up on radiators. That was before I had a flat of my own, and became too stingy. The wind, like some malicious spirit of winter, slips through my single-glazed windows, blasts the rose from my cheeks. I make do with the illusory effect of candles, the quick fix of hot water bottles. You can warm anything with the scent of nutmeg and cinnamon, a flash of cayenne pepper. Stodgy soups and slabs of bread. I watch the pumpkins fill up in the shops, imagining a sea of faces, waiting to be painted on. Or carved out. Stacks of apples to be bobbed, pubs to be terrorised by the horrid costumes adorned by students. Halloween is not quite what it was when I was younger. I miss the parties with the clouds of cobwebs and incense haunting the rooms of my house, fake spiders draped from the chandelier; the echoing sound of dub-step, and the taste of vodka and food colouring. Edible brains and blood-coloured fizzy laces. The sugar-rush; the hungover fall and slumber. Soon there’ll be fireworks, splintering pigments across the sky. As ever, I’ll watch them from the high-up floors of the library. Remember being in first year, where I sat on a Saturday night, my eyes blinking at a computer screen as I read Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’, for a seminar. The rockets flared and pinks, yellows and blues blossomed in flowers of light as I imagined his vision of desperate apocalypse.

That same semester of uni I sat in a cold lecture theatre, teeth chattering as I pressed my face into a perfumed scarf, the animated man standing on the podium in a tweed jacket reciting snatches of Shelley:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes […]

And I, feeling so small and new and ignorant in the world, was sucked in by the spirit of the wild West Wind, not knowing how it would take hold of me and make me fall in love with this city that I have now grown so used to. Fallen into, as one sinks into a favourite old sofa. The ‘hectic red’ is blood-like, beautiful, sinister. Isn’t it lovely, to imagine every leaf a little ghost, cast away from its tree into a journey of exploration and retreat? Wearing the plum-coloured lipstick, the thick mascara and black coat; could not I be one of the ‘pestilence-stricken multitudes’? For autumn is infectious; her colours allure like the striped warnings of insects, the ‘Smoking Kills’ labels on cigarettes…we cannot help but buy her palettes, absorb her force through woollen fabrics…

image source: ladyhollyshawblog.wordpress.com

Slowly, it would be nice to become more ginger, adding redness to my hair through soft washes of auburn. I would like to have hair the colour of leaves, as they enter that strangely vibrant stage of fading. From fire to fawn. Can you not imagine the smell of the roses as they wilt for winter, so luscious in the fat of their fragrance? There are roses, still, weathering the rainfall and cold. There are white ones on University Avenue, dripping with raindrops; their petals lie about them like the shredded remains of love notes.

By the time autumn has ended and entered the shrine-like stasis of winter, I will have forgotten my sorrows, finished my dissertation. This is all hope and relief; but isn’t that what autumn is: the sparkle of Christmas festivities on the horizon, the embracing of frugality and calm after a toxic summer? Apple pie, with ice cream and Amaretto, instead of beer and salad? An ethereal, rustic beauty that inspires fountains of poetry? For what better thing to do on a crisp autumn evening, than to sit at the window with a cup of tea, leafing the pages of a book and feeling purer – not just a hipster, defined by the vague fashions of everything around you – but a lost soul re-enacting the perfect scene of reading, as it plays out through the ages. For global warming might prolong the first fall of snow, but for now autumn will always be coming, and there is nothing quite like language to capture the tinctures of foliage, the crunch of acorns underfoot – the endless song of autumn’s calling. Right now it is raining – a luxurious, slow rain that pours through the one o’clock darkness – but next time the weather is good, I will go to Victoria Park and watch the swans, white against the scarlet leaves, the silver glass of the pond.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

(W. B. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Poole’).

Ten Things for Autumn:

Apple Pie Soup http://thesoupfairy.tumblr.com/post/19640840152/apple-pie-soup-literally-my-favourite-soup-ever
Blackberry gin! http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/blackberry-gin
Burgundy lipstick http://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/beauty/how-to/a4900/rules-for-wearing-burgundy-lipstick/
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Autumn Song’ http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blrossettiautumn.htmhttp://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blrossettiautumn.htm
Manic Street Preachers, ‘Autumn Song’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw9tazfA3aY
Go foraging for mushrooms and fruit, or just fairy-spotting
Cinnamon-stick candle http://www.yankeecandle.co.uk/en/restofworld/shop-by-fragrance/cinnamon-stick/icat/cinnamonstick?setpagenum=
Ginger tea http://www.ecogreenstore.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1372&gclid=CjwKEAjw2f2hBRCdg76qqNXfkCsSJABYAycPz_Ug8Seq2xidtaVJGBOBCdbZNqgIe2J0dfvrqB6pGBoCgTXw_wcB
A tartan scarf
The Alasdair Gray exhibition at Kelvingrove http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/kelvingrove/current-exhibition/Alasdair-Gray/Pages/default.aspx

mushrooms in Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, Edinburgh

three haiku for tomorrow:

sky of fire opal
opens a new morning of
coldness and woodsmoke.

a new harvest moon:
I could take all these gold days
for some old solstice.

these trees shed apples
to sour in the turning ground
as those other hours.

Tag: autumn