Colin Monteath, and the Poppies

Over years I have filled my journals with notes, quotes, and photographs too.  Some of those journals traveled from New Zealand with me, and many many new ones have been filled since I flew.

I love quotes and extracts.  They seem like small pieces of intense wisdom or pure beauty but I keep them all locked up in my journals.  So ... I've decided to go through my extensive, sometimes unexplored, photographic archives and merged some of these collected wisdoms, from others, with my images.

I met with Colin Monteath, author of today's quote, a couple of times during those years before leaving New Zealand.  And even then, I still didn't know quite how to describe him here.  Photographer, mountaineer, adventurer, Antartic expert, writer ... and probably so much more that I don't know about.

Anyway I found one of his books here in Antwerp, wrote to him full of laughter because it cost a lot more than he was selling them new but still, I was working at the time.  How could I resist.

I've never regretted buying that book.  I found the quote, the one on the photograph below, and feel it gives a good sense of the man himself.

As for the poppies.  That was me, crawling around on the edge of the church garden in Mesen, out on Flanders Fields, here in Belgium.  I had some time and really wanted a good poppy shot.

Katherine Mansfield, on Risk

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah.

An extract from one of my 10 favourite books ever.

I am reading an old blog of mine.  I can't help wanting to bring these things forward from 2005 ... 2006, just so I don't lose them again.

For an exile, the habitual place and status of a person is lost.

One who is known becomes anonymous, one who is generous has to watch what he spends, one who is merry gazes in silence.

The fortunate ones are looked upon with suspicion, and envy becomes the profession of those who have no profession except watching others.

Europe, where I lived for years, was full of them, from all the Arab countries. Each one had a story I cannot record, perhaps nobody can record.

The calm of the place of exile and its wish-for safety is never completely realized. The homeland does not leave the body until the last moment, the moment of death.

The fish
Even in the fisherman's net,
Still carries

The smell of the sea.
Mourid Barghouti from, I Saw Ramallah.

Home ...

You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops . . . I tried to catch that moment . . . I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.

Katherine Mansfield, Writer.

I am returning to Genova in July and already my head has begun to fill with what I would like to achieve while there this time.  That city brings me alive in a way that no other place has so far.  Perhaps Istanbul came close but Genova has everything ... in just the right proportions. It is imperfectly perfect for me.

Genova, once known as La Superba, is an ancient Italian city (at least 2,000 years in the making), nestled in the arms of hills that are topped by ancient fortresses.  And at the feet of the city you have Ligurian Sea. 

The first time I saw that sea tears filled my eyes.  It had been a long time since I had been anyplace where the sea looked like home.  I was out at Nervi, photographing a Genovese family, and suddenly I was overcome by this strange sense of being back in a place that was completely familiar.

I have been thinking about things and have this idea that if you ever leave the country you were born in and move someplace else, far away, then eventually the idea of returning home can become as strange or as foreign as living in another country.

And so you move countries and become 'the other', living amongst people who are 'the other' to you.  But when you go home you realise you have become something else there as well. 

And so my place on the edge of lives and cultures is confirmed, probably for life.   That said, there is something else that happens out here.  I love people.  I love when they invite me into their worlds.  In Istanbul there were Turkish families I adored because they took care of me when I lived alone in their city.  That experience of being a guest, of being invited inside, to be a part of this celebration or that, here in Belgium, in Berlin during those months spent living and working there.  Cairo.  Naples.  France. Italy.   It's those insider journeys that make this lifestyle of mine so very very worthwhile. 

Lately I've been reading a series of biographies and fictions about New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield ... searching for clues I think.  Something about her story speaks to me.

She left NZ in 1908 aged 20.  By 1923, she was dead from TB but not before she had revolutionised the 20th Century English short story.  She was a part of the English literary scene at the time and yet very much the colonial from the Antipodes. 

Her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the fringe—the edge of the world as she felt it to be. She wrote as if she’d stayed. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.

Source: NZ Edge.com

I'm curious about her because I relate to her on so many levels.  I feel like reading her story might tell me more about mine.  I yearn for home.  Adore it, am passionate about it and yet ... could I go back and live there again?  I really don't know anymore. 

Ahhh but all of this when really I came to post a photograph I took at the antiques market in Genova, back in May.

An Unmoored Life

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

Kurt Vonnegut, from Kurt Vonnegut - Letters, via brainpickings

An unmoored life ... I think I do a little of that in Genova.  And I'm currently yearning for those two days when I woke around 8am, opened the balcony doors, then climbed back into bed and slept till 11am. 

They were mornings unprecedented and, now, yearned for in these days of not sleeping.  It's been 2am or later two nights in a row, not by choice and with added misery of those early, as usual, starts upon waking.

Today is the day of discussing huge plans.  Then tomorrow is sitting back down with the writing course I put away while the Belgian bloke was on holiday. 

Time flew, or so it seems.

Today is also the day I stop coffee, bread, pasta, potatoes, wine, and all kinds of other things I know don't agree with me.  I shall quite possibly crash into the wall of withdrawal in the days ahead.  My body will thank me eventually but first it will sulk, I'm quite sure about that.

I am so healthy in Italy (except for allergy attacks) and it occured to me that I never eat bread when I'm there.  I drink the very best coffee but I eat minimally.  My body adores me in those times.  I come back to Belgium, the land where one has to think quite hard on how to avoid bread,  and the wheels of Di begin to fall off.

I'm not dieting, I'm only attempting to be a little more conscious of what makes my stomach ache ... what makes me feel ill.  I've been on the run, embarassed, quite mortified, and all of those other things that children of practical folk feel when a wide-range of foods make them feel ill.  Ice cream and jelly were much-loved back in my childhood but honestly they made me feel seedy.  Greed carried me quite far.  I was one of four children and competitiveness may have stalked that table of ours ...

It was the Belgian bloke who enquired about my habit of eating toast after a roast meal.  I told him, a roast makes my stomach hurt, like I'm hungry.  He suggested working out what caused it, the potatoes or the meat, and it's pretty much been all downhill from there.

Conscious eating I guess.  It's bit neurotic for this kiwi girl and yet, I suspect it's what's needed after all these years of using toast and other 'snacks' to deal with the pain caused by everyday meals. There's still a huge sense of embarassment in admitting to known allergies but give me 20 years ... I'll own it all.  Or I will have quietly moved to a better way of eating.

And so it was that I loved Kurt Vonnegut's words ... In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. Those unmoored times are the places and spaces where my body takes over and it does what it pleases with my eating and sleeping.

Perhaps everyone needs a lilttle of that unmoored life, just to know ...

The photo?  From France.

Found ... as I wandered, reading.

Did you know, the British Library has put 1,200 literary treasures from great Romantic and Victorian writers online?  It's true.

This TED talk, Does Money Make You Mean?  was interesting.  There's some lovely stories of good things that people with money are doing ... at the end.

Glen Greenwald, fearless journalist & scrappy fighter, has turned up again, thank goodness.  He's now the editor of a 'news website describing itself as being committed to “fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues'.  You can find The Intercept here.

New Zealand takes 3rd position in the Global Peace Ranking.

A Sherpa and a native Nepali paraglided off of Mount Everest in 2011, they flew into history, and I read nothing about it.  There's a new book ...   Western-orientated media, you break my heart sometimes.

And perhaps that's enough.  Maybe 'more' than enough ...

Another peony.