My status is Facebook and the Spiritual Poem

A Facebook Status

Why oh why oh why, is it so difficult to find tights that fit comfortably? I am neither excessively fat nor tall. Who do they make tights for anyway?

My response

Ladies step away from the counter and let an expert on finding tights that fit get through. The motto one size fits all was scribed by a skinny person of restricted growth. If you purchase Xl or XXL tights the length versus width dilemma prevails. They may come up to your chin but they are also so wide they would give Norah Batty a run for her money. Alternatively they are not too saggy but the crutch comes up to your knees. Tights were developed to meet the needs of the sixties, a mini skirt or hot pants with stockings was not seen as cool then (although now I am sure you could get away with it and do as a fashion statement providing you are under 25 or Lady Gaga).

Stockings had their own small agonies a suspender belt can leave huge welts around the hips that Torquemada would find satisfying on a heretic and if the suspenders are not long enough or the stockings too short you have every chance of having to walk like Quasimodo. I became used to stretching up to get something off a shelf in a shop accompanied by the painful ping as a suspender gave way under the strain and hit your thigh with all the recoil of an industrial strength catapult.

Bearing in mind the above I now usually go for jeans or trousers with socks or the comfy top pop sock so beloved of the vascularly challenged and at my age I thankfully no longer require the added contraceptive nature of tights especially in confined spaces such as cars and linen cupboards.

Then of course you do find the perfect fitting tights and discover they are made in factories in third world country manned by small under nourished children or they disappear from the shelves because the manufacturer has gone out of business because there is only a small pool of long legged women and possibly transvestites that love his product. And don’t get me started on leggings and the hybrid bastard jeggings.


What has this got to do with life as a poet and writer you ask dear reader and the answer is everything has something to do with your life as a writer and poet.

I have been thinking a lot about Facebook lately and why we use it; in view of its upcoming floatation on the market there has been much said elsewhere. It may be the spawn of the devil, it may waste the users time when they should be out talking to real people, but it also lets ideas be exchanged, projects floated, information can be sought and gained. It can support the Arab Spring, it can bully teenage girls, it can allow people spread across the world to see a new born baby held by its mother, it can tag someone in a photo of a drunken office party in a pose they deeply regret. We give advertisers their data, their demographs, their potential targeted markets, in return they give us a method of communication and a global forum. It is not compulsory, we choose to use it. We may have to be canny about privacy settings and access but it can allow others a tiny window into a life. Hang onto that thought of a window for later.

I have also been putting together a reading of spiritual poems by women poets over the centuries. Spiritual I have taken in a very wide context but I have been struck by how women write about things we may term as spiritual but how few are often represented in some anthologies. I have managed to find two or three anthologies of Spiritual poems by women that have been intriguing reading in their variety and approach. Spirit comes from the Latin root suspire to breathe, and the breath is the backdrop of all poetry, the silences as much as the words; the full stop, the comma, the dash, the moment of the line break , the white space around the stanza , all this is how the poem breathes. So given that perhaps most poems are spiritual but to that perhaps should be added the dimension of depth, how a poet struggles with their existence, or the why of it all. It is a bit of a cliché that all poetry is ultimately about sex and death, you could add that even sex and death as themes lay upon the foundation of why. Why do we strive for sex and love? What is love and death? What is our place or purpose on this small spinning rock? These questions are the life blood of poems that could be termed spiritual dealt with at a macro or micro level.

So now to draw together the threads of the spiritual and Facebook I am posting a poem by Adrienne Rich the wonderful American poet. Her poem might not be seen by some as spiritual but in my book it breathes it. Read it and then apply it to Facebook , some interesting connections are made, remember I told you to hang onto windows.These lines alone especially resonate with me re Facebook.

‘We see each other daily and in segments’

‘Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.’


The second stanza alone makes me approach Facebook in a new light.

It is, for me, a beautiful poem that demands we look at our own lives, how we take people for granted. That saying good-bye to those we shall see tomorrow places those around us in a different light, enough to make us step back and value them. All around the world at the very moment you are reading this someone, somewhere is saying good-bye to someone they will not see tomorrow but think that they will because they believe life is ordinary like that. Death and leaving are also very ordinary. That thought alone is worth a small breath, a little space to breathe.


Stepping Backward

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers--
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers--
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection's school.
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation--
If not our own, then someone's, anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature's one I want to memorize--
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.


Adrienne Rich

Facing up to Facebook,the Camera and Charles Simic

Oh dear god help me I have added a garden and a virtual bookshelf to my Facebook profile. I am beginning to keep a note of how many published writers or poets my friends seem to have whilst I have my hairdresser or did have before she deleted me for some reason which may or may not be connected with the fact that the last time I went to see her she was appalled at my attempts to cut my own fringe. I pointed out that it was getting in my eyes and it was only a few snips here and there. I kept to myself the thought that I was hardly likely to book an appointment with her at £25 a time just to have my fringe snipped. She pointed out that she wouldn’t begin to know how to write a decent poem or story so why did I think I would know how to cut my own fringe properly. We have been together for a number of years my hairdresser and I, we have a strange relationship which swings between honesty and marital bickering.
“I think I’d like my hair really short this time, almost cropped.” I demand.
“No, you’ll look like a bloke or a Nazi prison camp guard.”
“No I won’t, I think it would be quite funky especially if you put blonde highlights in it.” I stand my ground clear in my vision.
“No, you’re fifty-five you can’t do funky, whatever that is when it’s at home and you are not exactly elvin faced and as for blonde highlights ….”
There is a pause whilst she looks for the word she is running after but is defeated and just pulls a face into the mirror. Of course I am talking to her via the mirror I am seated facing. I stare ahead at the reflection of her sucked a lemon face.
“I just want something different I’m bored with my hair the way it is.”
She takes on a soothing tone as if she is trying to get a child to eat Brussel sprouts.
“It suits you like it is now, it just needs tidying up that’s all, I’m not going to do something you’ll regret tomorrow.”
My hairdresser always uses the word tidying when referring to my hair as if it is a teenager’s bedroom. I half expect her to snip old coffee mugs and apple cores out of it and pull unwashed knickers from under my fringe.
I give in of course as an hormonal tightly wound hairdresser with a very sharp pair of scissors in her hand is not easily defeated and I keep going back to her because she knows my hair and all its strange eccentricities. She also never asks me where I am going on holiday but asks if I think war is ever justified, is repressed anger a recipe for disaster or what do I feel about meerkats? She is a Fen hairdresser with brains and attitude.
However despite my returning custom and our discussions about life, love and the universe she has deleted me on Facebook. How does one react to this. I could just take it that as a twenty-something person she doesn’t want me having access to her profile or her world of friends.It could be an accident I tell myself ny way of consolation and then start to wonder why being deleted by my hairdresser is such a terrible thing.

There was an article about Facebook in the Independent on Sunday yesterday that pointed out that many young people are leaving this ‘social facility’ as it chooses to call itself as the wrinklies were beginning to colonise it. Anything that your mother or even granny can join and paste up their favourite music of Celine Dion or Pink Floyd is not worth belonging to.The article pointed out that perhaps the younger generation are beginning to value their privacy whilst we oldies are flinging ourselves headlong like lemmings into virtual spheres of intimacy.
Perhaps we are seeing the first fully monitored CCTV generation coming through, big brother can not only follow you re your mobile phone, credit card use, internet communications etc it can physically keep an eye on you. I watched a policeman the other night in town tell a group of boys to take their hoods down. He was restrained, polite even jokey but he obviously felt that the CCTV cameras in the Market Square, where they were grouped, needed to see their faces. They had committed no crime, had done absolutely nothing wrong but wearing their hoods up obstructed the cameras view of their faces, as he kept pointing out to them. Of course they knew that and he knew that they knew that but it was the game they had to play. My civil liberties head fought with other emotions. They did look an intimidating group but merely because there were about ten of them, most of them gangly with fags poking out from under noses that were still too big as their faces haven’t caught up yet. I know people who have had their sons beaten up in town (Fen Towns are less than quiet idylls on a Friday night). I had watched on the local news as CCTV helped convict some men of brutally assaulting some Polish men in Wisbech and I was glad that CCTV was used to convict them.

Big brother might have our best interests at heart; if the likes of the Wisbech Friday Night Fighters, a group who specialise in terrorising foreign workers are to be discouraged then in this instance CCTV may be a good thing. Of course CCTV is only as good as the people that use it, it is a neutral tool. Just as a gun or a knife has no morality, it is the user that endows it with a good or evil purpose, is CCTV a neutral tool?. A camera can watch as a policeman beats up a black suspect, as it did famously in the States, just as easily as it can monitor a group beating up a Polish man, a gay man, an Asian,a woman, a Jew, someone who happens to brush shoulders with a psychopath on a Friday night. If you are doing nothing wrong what have you got to be worried about? That is the usual defence of its use. Cameras can be made to lie, you only have to watch any Hollywood film to know that a camera can make boys fly on broomsticks and awks walk the earth.What I worry about is who keeps it all in focus, who wil have the final say on this is CCTV use subsumed into the democratic process. I don't recall voting for or against it either in local or parliamentry elections. How do I get my say in where and how it is used?I worry that Hitler and other dictators would have loved CCTV if it had been available to them.

My Space and Facebook are all scanned by powers that be for potential threats. American servicemen in Iraq are now banned from posting on Myspace as they were posting too many negative comments about the war which their friends had access to. Myspace has a young and predominantly working class demographic, precisely the demograph the Army would draw recruits from, they might not want future recruits being put off would they? Facebook on the other hand was started by and for college students and thus mainly officers are using it and therefore note Facebook is not banned by the US Army for use by the military. See this link that was sent to me by a friend. Why does that not surprise me. Youtube videos made by serving soldiers are also being scrutinised closely.

However in the era of easy access(in the affluent West at least)to the means of disseminating information via the internet quickly and globally the camera is big brother and also big brother’s restraint. I noted that as the policeman was telling the boys in my small town to take down their hoods one of the boys was videoing him on his mobile phone…it could have been on Youtube or photos of the incident on Myspace or Facebook a few hours later… the camera can cut both ways.

Listen to the poet Charles Simic read his poem Cameo Appearance to underline how the camera can be used to illuminate or hide things in the shadows, it is merely the servant of its masters.


I’m off on holiday now for a while. I may try and post from pastures new ie the lakes where I am intending to wander like a cloud or a bunch of daffs and then on to an Arvon course from which I hope to return stimulated and fertile with ideas, if not in need of a de-tox for my liver if past Arvon courses are anything to go by. I shall take photographs of any unsavoury or suprising incidents to post later or to blackmail people with depending on how I am feeling.

Facebook, The Way of the Bow and Paulo Coelho

I have just returned from having lunch with a cousin. We are kissing cousins in so far as we are the affectionate one peck on the cheek cousins but not bear-hugging, Italianesque triple kissing cousins as I have witnessed at some other family gatherings. Of course this outward display of affection bears no correspondence whatsoever to the love you have for someone, that side of the family is Yorkshire and reticent after all. Travelling back on the bus, trying to reduce my carbon footprint a tad I decided to use my Wallace Stevens thinking time on how we greet each other and how we display affection.

I have for some reason slipped into being the recipient of what I feel is the greeting reserved for the elderly. “You’re looking well.” I got it three times last week from friends. One of course would prefer,
“You’re looking gorgeous /stylish/beautiful/perky/sexy/fantastic." Any of those descriptive terms would do. But no, I am starting to get the, “You’re looking well….. despite your handicaps/problems/disposition/haemorrhoids/age which feels like the continuation of this statement left hanging unspoken in the air. Once you get over fifty perhaps the only thing you can expect in a greeting is some indication that the greeter is pleased that you aren’t dead yet and are managing to stay out of incontinence pads and hospital.

Perhaps I am being oversensitive here and churlish the “You’re looking well” comment might also encompass the greeter’s genuine pleasure, amazement and admiration at your ability to maintain a facade of well being. I should be grateful for such greetings but still I can hear endless old women at bus stops when I was a child nodding to each other and saying “You’re looking well.” and the classic response,“Mustn’t grumble.”

I have recently joined Facebook and am now trying to navigate all the greet and meet display behaviour that goes on with that. I have had graffiti on my wall, been given mice, penguins, fish, drinks, nudges, etc. I have had offers to be bitten and turned into a Zombie, a werewolf and a vampire. This is a whole new world of social expectations of how we greet and show affection to others. If someone sends me a fish should I send one back, likewise the drinks. The social etiquette of this cyber world is beginning to become complicated. Will Person X accept my invitation to be a friend if they don’t what does it say about them and me. I have accumulated friends of friends, people I don’t really know. I have worried about declining an invitation to be someone's friend because I have no idea who they are but then three days later I find out that I do know them but I had only met them once with a friend of a friend at a poetry reading etc. Will I hurt people's feelings if I don’t let them bite me or give me fish or hide their offering of a small duck on my profile. The angst associated with this is endless. I have sent people small offerings myself and watched to see if they display them (like the aunt’s awful vase that is brought out only when they visit but now on Facebook the awful aunt with bad taste can visit at any time of the day or night and see that you have hidden or rejected her lovely vase). Is Facebook a way of playing Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon…you know that game when you start with anyone’s name vaguely associated with Hollywood and then name someone connected with that name (a film they were in together, they were married, they opened a restaurant together etc etc) and thus the idea is that it will only take seven names to arrive at a connection with Kevin Bacon. On Facebook perhaps I am only seven degrees away from Seamus Heaney or Gore Vidal if I play my friends right, seven clicks on faces in profiles and I could be on the Queen’s Facebook page. At present I am two clicks away from George Szirtes a former TS Eliot prize winner, he or one of his friends must have at least been to a garden party at Buckingham Palace (does this count as a viable connection).

This game of course relies on other people’s friends letting you become their friends and that’s where it all falls down as I am immediately back in the playground wondering why on earth the cool gang would want me to join them and not wanting to embarrass myself by asking as I may be rejected, deleted and not offered fish or mice. I note I have only sixteen friends whilst others have scores I can at a glance see how unpopular I am and rate myself against others. See what I mean reader this way lies madness and social dysfunction. Perhaps I am not sending enough smiley fish or drawing on others walls or telling them about my favourite movie/song? I have signed up for a facility that allows me to post questions, should I ask why I am friendless?

I can feel myself getting very hot and sweaty on the bus and a lie down in a darkened room is fast being required but then a small ray of light enters my burning head as we turn onto the by-pass. I actually use the word friend very sparingly, a friend is someone who knows me totally and whom I trust without or should I say beyond question and whom I know trusts me. I have very few such friends and that is wonderful as such friends are rare and precious. Facebook friends are perhaps just people trying not to be isolated, to form a quick community of belonging based on whim, interests and mouse click. I went into the market in my small fen town yesterday and as I walked around I was aware of how many people I met who I know to say hello to and who know me in various guises, neighbour, mother, professional, volunteer, resident of this small town for twenty-five years. Were all our nods, friendly eye contact and greetings the same as a mouse click, a cyber fish, a Zombie bite? I don’t know the answer and I don’t ask the question in the expectation of a yes or a no.

It may be that cyber communities are the way forward in a fast-paced isolating world where we need such things to keep a feeling of connection. I wonder whether on Facebook someone would send me cyber chicken soup if I was ill, would I bother to tell them I was ill on Facebook in the first place. On Facebook you are only what you want others to know butthen that is true of us most of the time. A neighbour brought me real soup when I broke my leg a while back but of course she could because she’s kind, a few yards away and is there even when the power goes off. However spontaneous expressions of caring are always to be welcome and I am grateful that someone would want to click on me in their day for a minute or two as in reading this blog for instance which I take as a form of greeting.

I have been reading short stories and essays by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho who appeals to the old dippie hippie in me. He studies Kyudo, which is the Japanese Art of the Bow, refined to a state of meditation.
I have just sent out some poems and am contemplating sending out the novel in the autumn and this particular section from his book just spoke to me. Of course just substitute writing/poetry or anything one is serious about in this world for the word arrow but of course you and he know that already.

How to observe the flight of the arrow (Taken from Like The Flowing River)

The arrow is the projection of an intention into space.
Once the arrow has been shot, there is nothing more the archer can do, except follow its path to the target. From that moment on, the tension required to shoot the arrow has no further reason to exist. Therefore, the archer keeps his eyes fixed on the flight of the arrow, but his heart rests, and he smiles.
If he has practised enough, if he has managed to develop his instinct, if he has maintained elegance and concentration throughout the whole process of shooting the arrow, he will, at that moment, feel the presence of the universe, and will see that his action was just and deserved.
Technique allows the hands to be ready, the breathing to be precise, and the eyes to be trained on the target. Instinct allows the moment of release to be perfect.
Anyone passing nearby, and seeing the archer with his arms open, his eyes following the arrow, will think that nothing is happening. But his allies know that the mind of the person who made the shot has changed dimensions: it is now in touch with the whole universe. The mind continues to work, learning all the positive things about that shot, correcting possible errors, accepting its good qualities, and waiting to see how the target reacts when it is hit.
When the archer draws the bow string, he can see the whole world in his bow. When he follows the flights of the arrow, that world grows closer to him, caresses him and gives him a perfect sense of duty fulfilled.
A warrior of light, once he has done his duty and transformed his intention into gesture, need fear nothing else: he has done what he should have done. He did not allow himself to be paralysed by fear. Even if the arrow failed to hit the target, he will have another opportunity, because he did not give in to cowardice.
PauloCoelho

Goodbye and thanks for all the fish..... hasn't someone else written that line before?