Water

Shoes in Fairy Tales

Slippers. 1892. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here is a wonderful post on Shoes in Fairy Tales by author Joanne Harris. Enjoy!

Shoes in Fairy Tales

Kissing

"...Praise the deep lustrous kiss that lasts minutes, blossoms into what feels like days, fields of tulips glossy with dew, low purple clouds piling in beneath the distant arch of a bridge.... Let the tongue, in its wisdom, release its stores, let the mouth,tired of talking, relax into its shapes of give and receive, its plush swelling, its slick round reveling, its primal reminiscence that knows only the one robust world."

Kissing Again Dorianne Laux

Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance (ballet) by Matthew Bourne

One of my Christmas presents is Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, a ballet that has a Gothic feel in the fairy and vampire tradition. You can read more about it here. Or watch a teaser video here.

A new Beauty and the Beast and it's gorgeous!

Perhaps Sisters are not always kind...

My Dream

Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night

Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth.

I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled

Like overflowing Jordan in its youth:

It waxed and coloured sensibly to sight;

Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled

Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew,

Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew.

The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend

My closest friend would deem the facts untrue;

And therefore it were wisely left untold;

Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.

Each crocodile was girt with massive gold

And polished stones that with their wearers grew:

But one there was who waxed beyond the rest,

Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown,

Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast.

All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale,

But special burnishment adorned his mail

And special terror weighed upon his frown;

His punier brethren quaked before his tail,

Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail.

So he grew lord and master of his kin:

But who shall tell the tale of all their woes?

An execrable appetite arose,

He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in.

He knew no law, he feared no binding law,

But ground them with inexorable jaw:

The luscious fat distilled upon his chin,

Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes,

While still like hungry death he fed his maw;

Till every minor crocodile being dead

And buried too, himself gorged to the full,

He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw.

Oh marvel passing strange which next I saw:

In sleep he dwindled to the common size,

And all the empire faded from his coat.

Then from far off a winged vessel came,

Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame:

I know not what it bore of freight or host,

But white it was as an avenging ghost.

It levelled strong Euphrates in its course;

Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote

It seemed to tame the waters without force

Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat:

Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands,

The prudent crocodile rose on his feet

And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands.

What can it mean? you ask. I answer not

For meaning, but myself must echo, What?

And tell it as I saw it on the spot.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

On Writing: Print it off!

I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: "Life is short, art is long." 

Ursula K. Le Guin

On Memory

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future. 

Elie Wiesel

Faulkner on Memory

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

William Faulkner

Ghost town

Delta church in a field

Faulkner on home

I wish I was at home, still in the kitchen with my family around me and my hand full of Old Maid cards.

William Faulkner, (when living in Hollywood)

Columbus and Greenville Railway Bridge over the Yazoo River, MS

I am haunted by water, especially the muddy rivers of my childhood. I grew up swimming in lakes and bayous and never once thought of what lived in the water as I do now. One of the happiest moments (recently) in my life was standing on a bridge looking down at the Yazoo River. To say I felt a chill would be an understatement. It was more of a grand attachment like I had been lost, and was now suddenly found. I understood something then that I cannot describe here, some secret about myself, some holy truth and I've been living that truth ever since.

Quote

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.   

William Faulkner

Natchez Trace near Rocky Springs

Elmwood Cemetery Memphis TN

Specificity

Went to sleep last night with a few writing problems. Not new ones. Old ones. Trying to figure out how to tie all my work together. That's always been a sticking point for me. After all, I tend to write about location and setting. My work grows around place. I might get inside the head of "The Other" but my plain people are Southern. These days I work for specificity in all ways when putting words to paper. Plot. Story. Character. Description. Mood. Metaphor. One links to the other. 

Specificity is always a challenge. 

I must have been stressed. I've got deadlines and deadlines. I have drawn lines in the dirt that I cannot cross. So all night long, I worked on this problem in my head and dreams. Fortunately I woke up with the problem resolved. But I am so tired. I kept waking up, writing things down. Sleep was more like naps. I thought of my mother often. My aunts. My people.

I've been to this house. In daylight and in dreams. Memory is a strange thing. But without it, we are nothing.

Haint Blue Porch Ceiling

Let's catch some haints

Faulkner's headstone this time of year.

Cemetery in St. Francisville Louisiana

Once Upon a Time, I ate my lunch among these stones. I can still close my eyes and see those moments. One stone in this churchyard reads, "Every time the wind blows, it tells a tale of thee."

Poe in Allegory (Juvenilia) aka It's October 2013

(Something I wrote as a teenager, a very young teenager, around thirteen or fourteen years old.)


Poe In Allegory

Amid the cool dark of endless space
A single crimsom flame does race.
Behind it across an ocean of blue
A haunting shape does pursue.
This shape gains speed with the light of day.
In the cool of night it loses its way.
While it moves across the sky,
The shape falters and asks itself why
It pursues a thing it will never possess,
And why it does not pause forever to rest;
Yet, always in the light of day
The shadow moves faster along its way!

Alas! Night is a time for stars and dreams.
Life is not what it is or what it seems.
There is no shadow, only the glow of the moon,
And the warmth that it brings never too soon.

                                     Copyright © 2012  Madly Jane

Cicada wings

I adore cicadas, an odd thing, but they interest me in all sorts of ways. How does one shred its hull? The sound a cicada makes cheers me, the steady hum and drone. I hear the sound all the time.

The Ghost in the Room, Mother

Originally there was a video here by Florence and the Machine. It's a placeholder now.

EDITED:  the summer of 2019. This is the week (2013) that I learned my husband was going to possibly die. I was so upset I got the shingles. I knew that I would write this blog without mentioning his illness, because this was how he wanted it to be. There would be no talk of illness and death and "cancer comes back in a third and all that" because this was the way he wanted it to be. He would fight it and I would help him, take care of him, support him, and do the best that I could with my work and life. Rereading this blog, I see how there are so many things I did not follow up on, which is perfectly normal, considering my life at home and how I chose to live it. I posted this, because I missed my mother. I wanted to talk to her and this was our song, which I only heard later long after Mother died. I never listened to music at this time, or any other time. A whole decade, I could not listen to it. I could not listen to anything. Everyone I loved died in a decade, and then my husband got sick. It was never the same. Nothing was the same. Then he died, too. Don't fret I survived. I'm not the one who is dead. Not yet.