The world wanes and so it grows.

Frederick Buechner writes:

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don't be afraid.

At night, I lie awake. Surely: somewhere in this world, in some forgotten language, there must be a word that means both beautiful and terrible, side by side. I cannot reach for a pencil or the light, for we are big spoon and little spoon - too tender to disrupt.

I know that outside, life is burgeoning: nectar drenched and pollen dusted.

Some weeks ago, alone here in this house, I read a book so terrible and beautiful that sometimes I had to get up and pace in between paragraphs.

There is no neatness in any life - great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue. The face at the door is just that - the face at the door. All lived lives are a mess. The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries. For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is.

How cramping, how limiting.

For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives.

Soon the greatest neatness of my life began to diffuse.

Even now, so many years later, I find it difficult to fully understand how it happened so quickly, but each word written in those notebooks became like a stitch pulled out from our relationship. I read and read and read - every spare moment of my day and night - and the stitches snapped loose one by one.

I fell into those books like a frog into a well.

- Tarun J. Tejpal. The Alchemy of Desire. 

Beautiful and terrible.

A man sits at a table in Gugulethu and with a knife and a fork eats the heart of his girlfriend's lover. A woman's eyes are gouged out for the sake of a cellphone. Someone who has less than me offers me something: here, you have this. Torn apart and stitched back together again. Love has tides that ebb and flow.

Some questions answered and George Clooney, continued.

Google Analytics tells me that this blog has had 628 visitors up to date, for the month of November. Not big on commentary you lot, but I understand that, this being a series of random things that probably don't form a whole. For some reason, though, my snippet of a story yesterday elicited a flurry of e-mails. Even a phone call or two.

~ Thank you ~

So, to answer some questions:

No, Mister Clooney is not my favourite actor. I'm more of a Boy Next Door kind of girl.

I saw Up In The Air one night in March and this little story popped into my head as I later lay in bed. Eventually I got up to write it. (Another sleepless night ...) It was a gift for The Lip, who remains a great fan of George Clooney.

Yes, I do have more stories. There are poems too. And recipes.
 

The photo was taken on the way to Beira, Mozambique. I need to go back there some day.

Movie most enjoyed this year? An Education.

And Roy: thanks for the offer. I'm flattered. But I'm taking a sabbatical. For now.

George Clooney and the Unseen. Part Two.

Although I never considered George Clooney to be mating material, my friends and family all teased me mercilessly. I tried to tell them how I felt: He is not a good-looking man. He is a bad, no, atrocious hunter. He is way too tall. He walks funny. He calls me Addle.
    But they carried on and so I learnt to smile and ignore them. The previous faded man who had visited us, was known of only because of the outlandish pair of pants he had left behind, and the mark of his height on the wall of the fane. We as a tribe had little curiousity or wish to know more. The children followed George Clooney for a few weeks, mainly because of the novelty of it, but when that wore off, he was mostly on his own. I could see that this bothered him inordinately. I guessed it was because of his lost life of celebrity and that he missed having an entourage. The men tried to teach him, but his hunting skills remained poor. The women giggled behind their hands when he approached.

At night in the hut we would lie at opposite sides, facing each other. In the morning we woke at the same time and talked about our dream. George Clooney could not understand how we could dream the same dream together. Often we would continue a conversation that we had started sometime in the night, in the middle of a dream. It left him mystified, but also filled him with delight. After some time, once we had become comfortable together in our dream world, he showed me what it looked like in the jungle where he came from. I was enthralled by the high structures and moving machinery. The amount of people in those dreams was staggering. It was a big surprise for me to see amongst the faded ones, some that were drenched in a kind of glossy darkness. There was a dreadful odor in those arid tree-poor places, filled as they were with all these bleached and tarry people. Some nights George Clooney would meet others in my tribe for dreams. But mostly it was just him and I.
    When the cool rains came, we moved closer at night. I knew without him saying so, that I was also not attractive to him. We shared warmth as cubs would do. Between us was a bond like that of a sister and a brother. It was better, because we were not born to it, but had chosen it to be so.

Written by Lily Turner, March 2010. Conclusion to follow.

Keepsake #2.

 Stamped on this ring are the words: Suikerbossie ek wil jou hê. It's a line from an Afrikaans folk song that translates to ‘Sugarbush I want you so’, sung by girls and boys a-courting. A Suikerbossie is a sweetheart but also a kind of Protea bush which bears South Africa’s national flower.

I no longer wear it and the white line on my finger has faded.