A Poem for Everything



Soundtrack - The Mirror Pool - Lisa Gerrard

The picture above is the first page from my first scrapbook - at last. I have to say that most of the rest of this scrapbook is not similiar to this, being mostly composed of adverts for bands from the NME, though I have customised a lot of them with lots of very messy oil pastel and most of that in the red and blue you see above. The text on the right hand side is the leaflet for the Tate exhibition where the public were invited to bring along their own surreal objects. You may be able to read it - I can but I know what it says anyway. I have just noticed that the edges of the picture are far too precise where the scan cut them off. I will feather them a bit. I started off this book by calling it "Book of Scars" after the minor hanger-on of Andy Warhol who used to collect pictures of actual scars for her own scrapbook. The leaflet on the left is the Tate's text on the Ian Hamilton Finlay Exhibition of 1991. This was full of very funny stuff, a lot of it about Dazzle Ships as I have already talked about. Am I actually talking about things or just writing about them? I would like to think that this stuff is like speechified ramblings but despite my saying otherwise, I do actually think about what I write down and very often (unless expressly forbidden by an Oblique Strategy) I do undo bits, even whole sentences which don't fit in or sound bad or are too private. I nearly took out the bit about the cushions the other day. By the way, the reason I don't sit with cushions on my head is because they are all still packed in a box in the garage. We only have the huge cushions which came with the new sofa (Settee - whatever) and they make your scalp ache with the weight. I just had to look up the word 'settee' on Merriam-Webster and it is derived from Settle which reminded me of the large settles in the Kitchen of a colleague of my Father. It was a big rural Style Georgian house - comfortable but quite roughly built, all Agas and tiled floors - a bit Wuthering Heights I suppose. I really wanted to live in that house. This was before we moved to a house similar in style if not size. I will dig out some photos of it if I can. Actually I will ask my graphics Partner (My Dad) to send me some on disk. It is not fair that he has so much time to be able to to all the stuff I want to on the computer. As he can actually draw as well, he has a good eye for the effects. I will try to get a copy of the picture he took of a Dandelion head which he put through filters to get a wonderful art work. For years I tried to persuade him to take up painting again - I bought him water-colour sets at Christmas - but it has taken the purchase of the computer to spark him into activity. I think he tried painting when he broke his leg in 1984 - that was my fault; We went walking up a mountain just West of Porthmadoc and he slipped. I heard a crack and my first thought was that he had smashed his new Zeiss binoculars. To be honest I was actually slightly relieved that it was his leg which had cracked as knew he would be less upset about a bone than the bins. We had an interesting hour or two in Bangor Hospital after a Taxi ride from Porthmadoc - which had no X-Ray facility. That was where we met a man whose teenage daughter could not speak English. I am sure that no-one in Wales can not speak English now but in my early flus of Political Correctness (I was a student at the time) I found that quite encouraging. Practically, you have to speak English in any part of the UK but why should you. I think anyone moving to the Welsh speaking parts of Wales (and sadly these are small) should have to do at least a basic Welsh course. My mother could speak Welsh after reading the Teach Yourself book. I don't know whether she read it because we have Welsh Relatives (My distant cousin, Jan Morris) or because she just liked learning languages. I can't remember how well she spoke it though one day I was addressed in Welsh when we staying in Llandanwg becase my Mother had been speaking to the person in Welsh. I was about nine at the time and I wasn't actually with my Mother at the time and got a bit frightened. I didn't realise that (nearly) all Welsh people spoke English as well. When I was really little I used to be really scared by a schools program about the French Language. The people in it used to ask questions in French to the Camera and I was far more scared of that than I ever was of Doctor Who.

All of this has finally brought me to thoughts which sparked the title at the top of this entry - A Poem for Everything. I had one of those weird moments you get when something you are thinking about suddenly comes into focus. I once had a few minutes when EVERYTHING in the world was explained. I was on top of the herefordshire beacon on a late summer day and just felt completely at ease that I understood why everything was here. Of course it passed when reality bit and I always felt cheated that my vision was lost. It was really just excess teenage analysis. I have been thinking about a long poem for ages now and the other day I extended the idea to be a poem describing everything I ever thought about. Obviously this is completely unrealistic so it had become an idea to describe a place in my mind which holds information about everything I have ever thought about - a sort of vision fo a physical room with key objects for all the subjects. The real poem would be a window onto those things and would give a limited view of the complexity of the real thing. I suppose that a Blog like this is an attempt to talk about everything I have ever thought about but of course 99.9% of everything thought about just gets lost in memory - not destroyed of course - just hidden and un-sorted. You need a really organised mind to keep it all safe for recall later and only Geniuses and psychopaths have that (Think of Hannibal Lector's house of memory). None of this poem is written down yet - none fo the words are even in my head yet but the images are there. When I first though of them they were very comforting. Watch this space.