Flower. Memory. Song.

Pictures of flowers are not art unless they are done by Georgia O’Keefe and perceived as sexual metaphor (though the artist herself was slightly cross with these interpretations). Instead their images are everywhere as short hand representations of trite emotions, as easy photography. The Victorians made a brave stab at creating an entire language based on flowers and quaint and courtly as this is, theirs is an age of such florid sentimentality that it has fallen by the wayside. To admit to liking flowers is perhaps now on par with expressing a love of teddy bears and red hearts. But I like them and particularly their careless blooming in spring. Just today for e.g. I saw the sloping end of a railway station ablaze with the gold and red of flowering weeds and it made me happy in an irrational, unpredictable way. So I can’t help photographing them. As I did on a walk awhile back. I particularly loved the way the azaleas looked like snow deposited in front of the house and the last of the rain on the ipomoea. 

Azalea Snow

Pink bauhinia

Ipomoea

Magnolia

But I like the sturdiness and colours of grasses too and if I had to choose I would perhaps live in a house full of grasses inflected with a few flowers. 

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In better times the middle of October would have meant wishes for my uncles whose birthdays lay barely a day apart. The first time one faces any kind of loss, its intensity burns away so much that you are shaken, purified, every detail and date burnt in your memory. Then it happens once too often and you grow resigned, a little tired. You understand that even these emotions are impermanent and everything will be obliterated by time. It becomes easy to present yourself to the world as if unmarked. But somewhere deep inside it still remains incomprehensible and a small kernel of grief ebbs and swells with the days. I feel sorrow for my uncles, for the sudden cruel way in which things ended. Some days I miss them and search for the gaps in their lives, look for clues in old pictures for the young men they were.  And I want then to conjure them up once more and wish them a happy birthday. 

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I have been listening to more English folk, e.g. Barnacled Warship, this week. Like most of Johnny Flynn’s songs it has the strange quality of seeming archaic and modern.  I like his songs well enough but I am strangely taken up by the lyrics, the language in them. It’s been a very long time since I wrote poetry but reading the lyrics jogged some dormant part of my brain.  I haven’t got to the poem stage but a few phrases that could form the basis for a poem flash through my mind once in awhile.  Perhaps a fuller immersion in poetry is needed!