Tag: writing

Pleasures in life

My happiness is sometimes derived from:

The scents of acacia flowers, honeysuckle and snowdrops; the taste of greengages.

Moments when I feel I love what I am doing: when I get excited while reading research or creative writing – and, consequently, when I feel like I can contribute to the research or I can create stories – either through words or photographs. When I am inspired – to create and to live fully.

Meeting people I truly connect with. Everything is genuine and pure, everything flows, the masks are left aside, and no one questions another’s words or feelings. You just know what is happening, share the same smile, and are able to live, truly live in each other’s company without performing. The feeling of belonging.

Peace of mind, in general, or moments of blissful lightheartedness. When every veil of worry, gloom or heaviness is lifted up and I feel unconditional love and self-love within. This is also when I can appreciate every simple aspect of being. It even feels like my body is lighter, like I float, just as my thoughts do.

Wandering in fantasy worlds reminiscent of my childhood.

Running. Setting goals and accomplishing them.

Finding a film I am profoundly touched by. If you know me, you know how intensely I can immerse into films. I become the character, I live the films when I watch them. The pleasure consists in the experience itself, in losing and finding yourself in a concept or a story. It can be revealing, too.

Adventures. waterfalls. explorations in nature; admiring its grandeur, but also the grandeur of an old temple or a rich urban or futuristic noir-looking area.

Those rare moments my writing always eventually comes back to; the ones I try to grasp through words, but fail. Those surreal moments.

Living in a place decorated by me, where I can have my own space, a secret garden where my pet would dwell, and arch-shaped windows. The decor would be elegantly dark in some rooms, fantasy-like in others, and there will be at least one room with everything in it white and light (see Valerie’s room from “Valerie and her Week of Wonders”). There would be Gothic art, paintings spanning different cultures, motifs, and ages – with a preference for Pre-Raphaelite depictions of mythological scenes, candlelit rooms at night, and classical and dark atmospheric music filling the hallway. Ideally, I’d have this variety of design styles to suit my whims.

To mention a one-off: Hearing Sharon den Adel’s angelic voice for the first time, and seeing her on stage at Artmania Festival.

What makes you happy?

August 5, 2016
Hebden Bridge ruins

We arrived at the Hebden Bridge train station: On our side – flowers and yellow bricks, on the other side- a wall of trees. Overall, there was an aura of dreamlike atemporality.
Remember “Life on a train platform” by Octavian Paler. Remember that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath graced the valleys of this town with their presence. Sylvia Plath: enrapturing writer, with a devouring lyricism wrapped around her being. I still have to finish her Unabridged Journals, having started reading them at Essex.
They buried her in the small village of Heptonstall, not far away from Hebden Bridge. As expected, Heptonstall is my future destination, together with The Brontës’ moors. Yorkshire nature, with its trails of whispers, is full of literary references, and exploring it is a wonderful experience, bleak at times, but wonderful nonetheless.

Sitting at the Stubbing Wharf, a pub from Hebden Bridge with Plath, Hughes writes his reflections in the eponymous poem from Birthday Letters:

“This gloomy memorial of a valley,
The fallen-in grave of its history,
A gorge of ruined mills and abandoned chapels,
The fouled nest of the Industrial Revolution
That had flown.” – Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Plath writes about the Bronte Moors:

“There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.[…]
The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Grey as the weather.[…]
I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.
The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among the horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.” – Sylvia Plath, Wuthering Heights

53.743304 -2.013021

April 16, 2016
A poem: Wither

I gather tokens of death
in appearance fragile-
with thorns hidden
underneath.

A hand reaches out…
Blood lingers
on thin skin.

Petals burn,
Smoke intoxicates:
you breathe it in.

Funeral words carved
in marble skin-
paralysed,
you listen blindly
as they inhale life.

January 4, 2016
Transcendence

Red cheeks and fairy dust in her hair.

Fragile lips and bones, pointy ears, rosy shiny skin.

What is our purpose, Magna Mater? What is it with all the human images flashing in my head, leaving this bittersweet feeling in my body, just before they transcend it? I feel the chaos of the sea, the murmur of the trees, the warmth of a sweet dog’s coat, the loneliness of the ruins. I feel all this – it seems to have happened centuries ago.

The aftereffects of the trip…You shouldn’t fear. What is left now is to revel in the delights of the present – to lay on the soft warm bed of leaves, gazing upwards while the clouds become stars. I am telling you this because there is no purpose, not in the way you think. The effects of hurt and human agony are latent – they will remain concealed within you until they lure you in their net once again.

May 1, 2015
The suffering of the ancient

She awakened only to realise that the echoes of the past were still there. She got up and ran towards the end of the hallway, where she used to tell jokes and laugh with her sisters. The statues were staring at her, from both sides, from above, through hollow, yet somehow luminous eyes. These eyes, both demonic and divine, had been following her every move ever since she was left alone in the house, years ago – centuries ago in her mind. She never knew their verdict. She found herself in front of the back door, never the front door, never on the way out. The garlic was hanging above the door as ever, next to the artificial withered-looking flowers. She never understood why the lord insisted upon keeping such strange, unwelcoming decorations. They used to have many unpleasant visitors lurking around the house indeed, but they were the kind that fed upon her happiness, not upon blood. And the flowers… what was the point? Artificial flowers looking withered – how peculiar!

There it was. The garden where they dwell. Their souls were entrapped in the past – they succumbed to a dreadful repetition of agony; an eternal reenactment of their fate. There was something tragic about the way in which they were displayed: each in their own place, yet all bound by the obligation to keep the Show going beyond time. Like pieces of a living puzzle, or fragments of a graphic novel, or carvings in the Cave of the Making, each depicted one sad episode. They were surrounded by glittering blues – portals through which M. could relive the suffering of the ancient.

December 1, 2014
Diary entry: library

The pleasure of feeling beams of light piercing through tired, stained windows and caressing the air impregnated by particles of dust. The pleasure of being inside, away from the unbearable, threatening sunlight. Expressionistic shapes are formed on old grey walls holding Pre-Raphaelite portraits of mythical women. A shuttering of a window, a shuttering of a book, a shuttering of a mouth after a hasty yawn. Steps – some confident, some shy, some confused or determined, intermittently disrupting an enchanting silence. Wings cleaving the warm air surrounding a five storey building populated by anxious or dreamy souls. A crow gazing straight into the eyes of a figure that returns the gaze, seemingly bewildered. The sound of the wind shouting at buildings. The sound of nature against architecture. The sound of destruction, the sound of collapse.

October 1, 2014