Call Me by Your Name

Call me by your name
and I'll call you by mine.
Narcissus, Narcissus.
Echo, Echo, Echo.

And a History of Power


We will struggle,
and when we do,
you will always win.

The Red and the Green.

Just colours
just duality
then details.

Their ways are many
yet frequently aligned.
And us receiving,
receiving.

I interrupted,
said goodbye,
and joined my mother
waiting.

Punk bands that had the desire and energy to take to the stage but once there having nothing to say. Orange juice. I said: even when people appear to have something to say it’s the being on stage that is the satisfaction they seek. He said: it was the ‘nothing to say’ that was the point of the being on stage, bringing our attention to the emptiness.

How we use memory and personal stories to communicate importance, making sure we actually exist. Authenticity is the new black and the making and eating of food a lifestyle statement rather than a preparation of available produce to fill that space inside. If I can tell you why something is important to me then maybe you will take the time to listen and it will become important in the telling. Is anything so important though, in the fleeting, and regardless of experience now past? And do we celebrate this non-attachment or question an inability to contact and communicate the attachments we actually have? ‘There will always be haters’ he said. 

Without precedent or invitation, I tell her about the beautiful scenery in the TV programme I’ve been watching set in New Zealand and how everyone used to ask me whether I had travelled there when I was living in Australia, it being so close, and I tell her that I hadn’t and how I would like to go there someday. On top of the lake. Behind those floated and thin words, I wonder why I am making this conversation when even I am not convinced, only more aware of our worlds apart.

here is the horizon

Vesna Vrodljak flower collage 

back home

lanzarote

A Return to Water

She was still pregnant, and he had left her for another woman. Shocked by his duplicity and so lightly done. A twilit landscape. A coastal town. Like a mad woman without words, out beyond language, she clawed at the sea wall. Held back and down to frustrate this lethal compulsion - a return to water.

Another night. I dreamt that I was pregnant or that something was happening inside me, my tummy steadily and slowly expanding. No kicks or movement though and it seemed to me that there was no human life inside, only emptiness or a growing silence.

We were to have one therapy session a month in a public space - in what could have been a public library, a bookshop or a junk shop. No customers but their potential and no books that I cared to read (thank you very much). Three places; one where you borrow things that are not your own, one where you buy new things that become your own and one that holds lots of old things belonging to other people, he pointed out.

Dreams to the Post-Self

I had returned to Edinburgh to study and was searching for the flat which I had purchased at a distance without viewing beforehand. It took me some time to find the right door, the numbering system not one I immediately recognised; three numbers, one variant. 

I could see the sweep of a hill behind the houses, a gathering of trees atop, the promise of the sea and a church bathed in setting light; independent impressions. I compared this view to the view I held up in my hand on a postcard. It must be this door, a coral coloured door. This location, this aspect, distantly but distinctly familiar as if I had made this return before, perhaps portentous this feeling.

Once inside and looking around fellow student flatmates unmet appeared, already settled in. A larger than life-size cardboard cut-out of a female actor in corset and suspenders propped up in an armchair directly opposite the main entrance. 

Apart from that one bright view which seemed suspended in no particular fixed place once inside, the flat was dark. Windows in the living room looked out onto a close external wall, heavily curtained, the sills and ceilings above wet and dripping, paintwork peeling. My heart sank. maintenance. money. mistake. 

We walked into a small bathroom where the light returned, a window opened out or maybe the outside came in. I saw myself in a mirror, long haired. A warm breeze, two birds on a tree; a moment that slowed down and righted.

Now looking behind doors in anticipation of finding at least a bedroom in which I could be well. A shock at the discovery of what was to be my room. The door opened onto a large, low ceilinged, windowless and wet space, tiled over with colourful swimming pool tiles as if once partly underwater. Shallow troughs - perhaps waterways, low walls, metallic steps, a hose. All in a disquieting and irregular arrangement that I could not recognise or make sense of and knew I could not live in or even happily beside.