Pat Benatar - Wuthering Heights

I am Guitar Girl so this is my favorite version. But today is the birthday of both Emily Bronte and Kate Bush. Happy Birthday!!!

Love never dies. People do.

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night." 

                             — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I feel this very deeply.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” 


                                              ― Rob Siltanen

The Never Ending Why

“I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find the answer as to why we were ever alive. [...] Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over! We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaningless will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing.” 


― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

Summer Flowers

Rose Mallow, 2019

Choosing

“Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.” 
― Katharine Graham
(Choosing to live. Choosing to work. Choosing to be happy. I want my grandchildren to know I fought.)

Beautiful books made into beautiful films.

Summer was never more beautiful than in Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name. I love both summer and the 1980s so this little sensuous feast was pure delight. I mean, I could watch it for the pallet of colors alone or how the sounds of nature were carried on the summertime breezes. It felt warm all the time, even comforting. There was music, then kisses and water. I am always writing about water. Water. Water. Water. My memories and fascinations with small lakes, ponds, and little bayous where I used to swim as a young girl, usually in my underclothes, still fill me with such fierce desire. Swimming involves floating and I've written earlier that I love to float, the light sensation of it, like I have stopped time and can simply immerse myself in sounds and smells and touch. This film is all about those things. Meditations. Longings. Awakenings. It's so human in the actual definition of humanism. The individual experience. There is a little trick to life that many never know, but that some find in the pleasures and sensations of one summer. A lifetime can be experienced in a fleeting season. That's all.

A Question for the blog

Wontierioniasiopolis , Mississippi

   I had a question about the blog, well it was really about the town that I use as my location on the Internet. The truth of it is this:  Wontierioniasiopolis is the name of a ghost town in Mississippi.  The name is absurd. I use it as a personal metaphor, implying that Mississippi, the state where I was born and lived most of my life is a decaying and haunting place, a ghost of a disappearing thing. I came from the delta, an even more "particular" and poor area of the state, definitely where the blues was created by the thousands of slaves that tended cotton fields once upon a time. I suppose I belong to this land, that I can never escape it, though I married a Memphis boy and all my children were born in Memphis. Memphis and New Orleans were, for a long time, the bookcases of my life. To a certain extent, they still are. What lies between is this eerie land of massive contradictions, Mississippi, and all the towns are dying or have already died, ghosts. Living ghosts. I am stranger here. I always have been, and yet, I am totally connected. Divided. Ambivalent. Soon I will be a ghost, too.

Spaces

Human nature seems to abhor a blank space on a map. Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other than black darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies, fairies. 

Diane Purkiss, At The Bottom of The Garden

It is what it is

Why do I desire the space?
I was mourning after you
I was lost and lost my shape
There was nothing I could do

I don't want to waste away
It was all I gave to you
Take me back and take my place
I will rise right up for you




from Silence by Manchester Orchestra

Vignette

The term vignette can be defined as a short literary sketch. The word originates from the French word 'vigne', which means 'little vine', as in a short description of an object or scene. An ideal vignette is supposed to be short, to the point, and should bring out the emotions of the writer. It normally appears as a stand-alone piece of literature, or as a part of long stories or stage plays.

            from Penlighten

Poetry by Louise Erdrich

“Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.”

              

                                      Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

Stepping into the real life mix again....

“Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head, 
It will get easier, your dreams are not dead.” 
― Nikki Rowe

Truth and little lies everywhere....

Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?” 

― Angela Carter

On Widowhood

The most unsettling moment of that first year without John was when I went to Physical Therapy at Campbell's Clinic for two torn disks in my back and I had to fill out all these forms, and one had these little squares that you checked, it could be one or all. Like housewife, works outside the home, wife, married, divorced, and it kind of went on in a very modern way. There was none for widow. Laughing. And there were several for jobs. JOBS. 

I didn't mark any of them and I wrote really big on the paper. NOTHING. 

I am laughing now, but when the nurse came in she told me I could not put NOTHING on there. This was nearly half a year after John died. And I was still pretty bummed and depressed, and I told her, "You mark it, because I am not going to do it." It was a total act of rebellion that is so typical of me when I am stressed and find life absurd and just refuse to go along. You know that feeling. I said, "Right now, I am NOTHING and it stays."  

Much later into my therapy my PT guy told me he laughed and laughed and said he would never forget me because no one had ever refused to check a square. I know it sounds petty and maybe even childish, but rebellion and anger were all I possessed at that time.

And it was true. I was nothing. I could not clean house, I could not cook. I could not paint. I could not write. I could not read. I could not watch TV. I could barely sit in a chair for 15 minutes. That was my limit at one time. I did nothing. I hardly had a thought in my head until the following October. 

I look back on this as one of the darkest moments in my life. The fact that I survived is a little miracle. But I did. I never knew I was that strong, because I was not only grieving, I also had an ulcer, gastritis, and lower back problems.

And I was alone. Really alone.

Now, everything I do is just pure joy. The fact that I can do anything is a testament to my own willpower. Widowhood sucks. And as Joyce Carol Oates said, "It is our duty to survive."

Just survive.

Quote on Music

“I make songs to tie people to me,
With a ribbon of fantasy around their necks
Such a beautiful bow
That I hold in my fist.
And will not let go.”

                     Florence Welch

Quotes from Songs

The leading Horse is white, the second Horse is red, the third one is a black, the last one is a green.

The Four Horsemen, Aphrodite's Child, 1972

My Motto for the last two years

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” 

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep Your Own Company

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” 
― John Steinbeck