Vita Brevis

Free flow

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:48:00 +0000

When I started writing I felt that the words I produced were meaningful. Had value. Over the years I filled up notebook after notebook and when I opened them later they seemed to be full of dross, not gold. The sparkle had disappeared. Today I am just writing as a survival mechanism. I have decided to produce a certain number of words a day, as part of a healthy routine, to keep myself alive. It may not do me any good, but I don’t see how it could do me any harm. Except that I might feel humiliated by a continuous stream of meaningless drivel but I don’t think so. I do believe there will be snippets, nuggets, the odd word here and there worthy of existence. And anyway, that is not the point. This is total freedom. I am not here to judge but to do. And in so doing I examine my attitude towards what I produce. If I don’t allow my production to flow into the world, I certainly can’t expect anyone else to. Let alone – perish the thought – welcome it. I’m glad that has been sorted out. Initially we shall concentrate on sheer word count. As in my previous (former?) job, only the actual number of the words is taken into account. Not the content. Not the meaning, overt or hidden. And the first goal is the K. One thousand. Every one thousand words I will put them online on my blog. This opens up a whole other realm of questions. My notebooks will disappear. I could make them disappear now by using them to light the fire, then they would at least have provided me with heat when I needed it. Or I could leave them for someone else to dispose of after I disappear. Fade. Expire. Along with my box of old photographs. My entire life documented up till my son reached something like the age of eight. Then nothing. The smart phone swallowed up all our photographs. No longer printed on paper, they are kept behind a tiny screen. They, too will disappear. Fade. Expire. But that is not the propos either. I am not here to discuss the perpetuation of a message or a meaning but simply to operate the mechanical production of words to see where that will lead me to I suppose. This semantic freedom, writing without purpose other than the act, is vital to me. I really need this feeling of possible discovery. Of being open to opportunity, to learning, to novelty. Strange that access to this activity has been precipitated by crisis. All the well-being gurus try to teach us to reset the vagus nerve to put the body in serene safe mode but in this instance it appears to me that only the extreme imminence of extinction – i.e. danger, necessity, angst – has pushed me into action. Stream of consciousness. I find myself in quiet moments continuing this flow. Wondering about it, reminding myself of its right to exist, of the possible benefits. Looking forward to the next stage, the next discovery. Always surprised by the words that arise. I have been trying to find a suitable title for this file. I have called it “Free Flow” for the moment. The title can always be changed later. It is something like “writing about writing”. But that doesn’t quite cut it. In any case, here I am absolutely free to write about anything. In other files, in other projects, I may pick a topic and stick to it (or try to) or try to tell a particular story, but here it is just a question of letting off steam, warming up, allowing the words to come. And what great fun to be able to scribble sans contrainte, with no-one telling me what to do, and nobody expecting anything of or from me. Just words. Sentences, paragraphs, pages, etc. only a tiny, unobtrusive voice whispering “blocks of a thousand”. Quantity over quality. This is indeed a rare pleasure. A treat. “absolute” freedom. And yet there is no such thing as total freedom, for these words are not just anywords. They are the words that make it through the censorship of the writing thing. Here I am screaming that I want to be free and write any words that bubble up but in reality they are being carefully selected to avoid offending the instances of my consciousness who are in charge. That in itself is interesting because to be able to challenge them they have to be identified and words are good for identifying things, instances, feelings, forces, etc. Words are just so good for everything. Even hiding. Attention span. Without realising it, I have written the same thing more than once. This, I hope, is because this is the first 1,000 word lock and it has taken fur days to complete. The plan is to produce at least one full block per day. A kind of per diems. A linguistic payment I make to myself for existing. And now, as I approach the first 1,000 mark I can feel myself ready to write literally any old thing just to make it to the line. Soit. So be it. No-one is judging. No-one cares. Well, that is a little unkind and untrue. I care, I suppose. I do feel slightly guilty a the idea of producing words just for the wordcount but that seems to be part of the deal here. First ascertain your ability to produce one thousand words. Then look at what shape those words could take. What influence I could have on them. Intentionality. This is really very exciting.

I will not resort to using a lot of words where a few words would have served the same purpose, conveyed the same meaning. As I reach the end of this first line I am already eagerly looking forward to the next one. And they may merge and blur into one another – the idea is at least one thousand words, not one thousand words precisely. 1006

Shoot to kill - in memory of Jean-Charles de Menezes.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 08:06:00 +0000

On the way to Willesden This piece was written in memory of Jean-Charles de Menezes. When my alarm goes off, I am so startled for a moment I don’t remember where I am. Through the window I see a weak sun struggling to break through a clump of orangey cloud above the city rooftops. To me, the default state of the sky is clear blue. I vaguely clock the cloud as a blemish, something somehow slightly morally wrong. Something that somebody forgot to clean. Or could not clean. I wonder about this feeling, make a mental note to try to work out what it means, and I fall asleep again. When I wake up for the second time, I’m late for work. 9.33. I come out of my flat in Scotia road. Nova Scotia. A metastasis of Scotland. Britain is Great, but the Kingdom could hardly be called United. None of the other countries in it likes England. The English are full of themselves. But London is different. London is not England. London belongs to the world. Everybody loves London, the red double-decker buses, the Hackney cabs, and the black&white chequered police. The Paki shops conveniently open round the clock. There’s a buzz here. I suppose you could say there’s a buzz in all cities. But the London buzz has nothing to prove; it just is. When I first arrived here, even though I don’t really like cities, I much prefer living in the countryside, I got a high from it. The traffic, the crowd. The scene in the pubs. The clubs. The restaurants. Now I’m used to it, I fit in better. I’m moving at the same speed as everyone else. When I hit the pavement like this in the morning, it’s there, in the air, the acrid tang of London-ness, pinstripe suits and bowler hats. I slide into the movement, everybody hurrying, first thing in the morning, everybody determined to get to work as fast as possible. But not really rushing. There’s no aggressive feel to it. It’s all very tame. Things do get tense at times. I’ve felt that tension. At Nottinghill carnival once, I left my friends and wandered along a street with different bands playing different types of music, it was weird, like changing worlds, and I got this strange feeling, walking past, it hit me, there was a patch with electricity in the air, it felt really violent, the vibes were really heavy. It didn’t feel much like a carnival to me, more like a kind of war going on in the music. When I got home I switched on the telly and there had been a murder, right in that spot. I’m nearing Brixton tube station when I realise the tube is not running. I like the area around Brixton tube. The market, the lane. I like the kind of villagey atmosphere. I speak to my boss on the mobile. I have to go and fix a fire alarm. I’ll take a bus to Stockwell then the tube from there. Lucky I have a transport pass. You can jump on any bus or tube. I’ve never been to Willesden before. There’s a first time for everything. It never fails, every time I get on a bus I go upstairs and I get a real kick out of it, it’s like going sight-seeing. You forget you're going to work and you see your surroundings a bit like in a film. I like the atmosphere on the buses. The people are busy, pre-occupied, but not hostile. Tolerant. There’s a tolerance about London you don’t feel in other cities. Probably to do with the eccentric side of the British character. Punks. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I’m not being objective. Anyway, the atmosphere changes when there’s a strike on. That’s such a hassle. Normally people here leave each other plenty of space, but when everyone is packed in like sardines there’s no privacy. And then the bomb scares. They really fuck everything up for everybody. Those explosions last week, that was terrible. I wanted to buy a motorbike and avoid public transport altogether. What kind of warped minds would target people in double-decker buses? People trying to get to work, people at work, the labouring classes, they’re just as oppressed as anybody else, you would have to be out of your mind to think they were responsible for the state of the world, we’re all having enough trouble coping with the state of our lives, it’s hard enough when the buses are running on time. Wreaking havoc for no good reason, or maybe they think they have good reason, but the target is totally wrong. It doesn’t affect the people who make the decisions. They don’t use public transport for Christ’s sake. I can’t fathom their reasoning. They must be pretty desperate, that’s for sure, but what makes them think they can have any effect on anything by blowing people up and spreading terror at the bottom of the heap? It only serves to spread misery, and there’s too much of it around in the world already. Maybe they think that anyone who lives in a country that has built its wealth on oppression is fair game. But all governments are corrupt. Power corrupts. The more you have the more you want. You would think that the experience of the twin towers would have put an end to this useless, random violence. They hit the jackpot, hit the big time, they had their fifteen minutes fame. Everyone was shocked, for days every television screen in the world showed the aircraft banging into office windows, the billowing smoke, the buildings crumbling, repeated ad nauseum. But it backfired on them. When I first saw that footage I said to myself ok, they’ve made their point, now people will take them seriously and try to find out why they did this. What is the message they are trying to get across. But the images were alternated with Bush’s speeches about ‘look how evil these people are’. All that planning and all that successful death and destruction to be simply labelled “evil”. I imagine an ideal world in which somebody would have said, right, let’s sit down and try to work out what we did to provoke such monstrous hostility so that it doesn’t happen again. Instead, they completely ignored any possibility of causality and proceeded to use the whole episode as an excuse to steal more oil. Where will it ever end, this spiral of violence, the whole system is so sick, what is there to believe in anymore? The rich and powerful don’t even bother to hide their corruption, there’s no need to, in a world where theft is universally admired and the greater the spoils the greater the admiration it arouses. People step down from executive positions because they have made losses for a company, throwing people out of work to preserve the interests of the stakeholders, in return for golden parachutes worth hundreds of years of a minimum wage billions of people have no way of procuring. My parent’s generation believed they could make things better for their kids, and they did, but what are we going to tell our kids? Sorry, junior, the planet is stuffed with radioactive nuclear waste we didn’t know what to do with so we’re counting on you to be smarter than us and work it out. The pulse, the beat. London has a beat of its own. The music is exciting. Brazilian music comes from deep in the body. The emotional being. Love me. Love this moment. The London beat is more from the head. The body follows the head instead of the head following the body. I’m not saying it’s more intellectual – some bands are pretty basic, but there’s a kind of denial – ‘I don’t have a body’ - I could be reading too much into it – Brazilian music is soothing to the soul, but maybe that’s because I am Brazilian - London music is stimulating, it seems to cry out a kind of uncomfortable fact that won’t go away, and yet is difficult to express. Maybe it’s the weather. The weather is important here. Londoners all talk about the weather non-stop, they live in hope of an improvement, of a clear sky, and yet the country is situated slap bang in the middle of a cloud belt. It can’t get better. That’s the impression I get, that they’re all optimistically hoping for an improvement that is not coming. There’s something about bad weather that keeps you active though. The music here is probably a symptom of that. A wake-up call. Let’s roll our sleeves up and muck in. There’s no temptation to lie in a hammock when the temperature is barely tolerable. But I’m surely reading too much into it. Cut off from nature. There are no wild animals here. No dangerous spaces like the rain forest in Brazil. The jungle. The snakes. They don’t even have mosquitoes here, really. But they can make fun of it all, they can laugh at themselves, and at their situation. That’s what I like about Britain, the sense of humour, their most dangerous snake is Monty Python. So I’m going to fix a fire alarm. I jump off the bus and go into the tube station. The air changes again. Stale air. Stale underground air. Smells slightly like a mine. Minas Gerais. I pick up a free newspaper to read on the tube. I like these free newspapers. You have to be careful with money. Everything’s so expensive in a city. My dream is to be able to leave here in a couple of years, go back home and get myself a place in the country, near my family. Get married and have kids. With the money I earn here I would be rich at home, I could live really well, help the family. But it isn’t that simple. Most of my wages go on rent and utility bills, then I go out for a drink, clothes, films. There is not much left to send back home. I stick my pass in the slot. Here we go through, can’t help feeling a bit like cattle being herded. I don’t mind the metal mechanicalness of it, I’m young and agile, and you just go with the flow. But how would I cope when I’m old and frail? Anyway, I won’t be here. I don’t intend to stay here forever. One day, when I have enough money saved, I’ll go back home. Buy a farm, settle down. Maybe later on I’ll bring my kids here, show them Big Ben, the National Gallery, Nelson’s Column, Buckingham Palace, the works. I’ll take them upstairs on a double-decker bus. Down the escalator. Lucky I’m not claustrophobic. I’m sure there are people who feel uneasy on these steep escalators, taking you down, down, relentlessly down ever deeper into the ever-staler air. That’s one thing I won’t miss about London. The stale air in the underground. Hey! My luck’s in! There’s a train at the platform. I break into a run and jump in. And my luck’s in again, I’m quite tired, I stayed out late last night, and here’s a vacant seat just waiting for me. Happiness is sometimes just a tiny detail like that, the train waiting for you, with a vacant seat, you have your newspaper to read, a job to go to; yes, sometimes that’s – what’s happ-

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 16:15:00 +0000

Meditation. Looking into the void. What do you see? Stars. A black, pulsating void with lights and stars in it. Then the devastating feeling of not being loved, of never having been loved, of the total absence of love from outside and then the happy remembrance that there is an abundance of love on the inside. And the vulnerability, the despair, the sadness, the fear of never having been loved remains as a lure, the proverbial seduction of despair. Then I turn to money and I feel the anguish of lack and the rabid jealousy towards those that have. If I think about why I am here and if there is any truth to the idea that a soul chooses a birth to learn a particular lesson I am sure mine is connected to money. But as I write that I remember Lacan said “Money and mother”. It’s all anyone ever talks about in therapy. So it can’t be particular to me. I have to find what IS particular to me. Or at least try. I sometimes feel overwhelmed at all the fragments of text in small files. What can I do with them? How can I find a way to love them? How can I sort what is important from what is not important? Back to the beginning. I have to start again at the beginning, or call this the beginning. Stop bemoaning myself for not being able to write the story I feel somehow morally obliged to write, that is not my story, and come up with a good, decent, thoroughly enjoyable free-flowing story starting today. Find out who I am and what I have to say.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:16:00 +0000

The accountable journal. Believe it or not, I am still thinking about who the narrator is or could or should be. But none of my hesitations or doubts can stop the story from being told. (oops, this is not that file. But what does it matter? I have to just come out and admit it, I want to write every day as a way to de-clutter my mind. I can’t “force” myself to produce something “worth” reading for someone else. But I can keep a promise made to myself to allow myself to allow the words to flow regularly. As soon as I cover “allow to flow” I immediately think of menstrual periods and the stress, horror, shame, pain, inconvenience and dread they caused. Until they didn’t. Part of me wants to write “that” story, write everything concerning menstrual periods I experienced in my life. Then another story could be sex. Sexual arousal. Sexual satisfaction (what??? I wrote that because those two words are so often used together and because it is more satisfying to write “sexual satisfaction” than to write “sexual frustration” and I think oh my god how the words I write manipulate me, have an effect on me and I feel suffocated and yet isn’t this a slight chink of enlightenment? Not only can I force (entice, allow) myself to write every day but I could also influence the words I write to influence how I feel. Short circuit!!! I feel as if I had never imagined that possibility, of writing for myself, because it is selfish and greedy and ultimately incestuous?

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 15:08:00 +0000

A story I didn’t want to tell. Or didn’t intend to tell. I have a lot more work to do, a lot more thinking to do, before I can start the writing. So, yes, here I am write in the thick of it, having decided to start, having started, nothing holding me back and yet discovering that I don’t know how to tell the story. Who is the narrator? Or narrators. Perhaps all the characters should tell their side of it. It seems somehow wrong that the person telling it is not directly involved but isn’t that always the case? Or maybe I should tell another story en attendant. About a girl who wanted to sing. Or something else or someone else. The story hasn’t been chosen yet. Once again, I lay myself down to the power of the Muses and lay my fingers on the keyboard and open my mind and allow them to decide what they want to say through me. Why was I born? Why did I fall in love with words, with books, with music? Who am I? or as Margeurite Duras put it, what would I write if I were to write? Not the story that has been blocking the entrance to my cave for so long. Not that one, that I have been telling everybody I’m writing but I have only been thinking about. Time flies whether you use it or not. You know you will make progress if you force yourself to produce words. And yet you did that before and all it got you was a trunk full of notebooks. You refuse to admit that you must choose the destination. If you want the car to drive you to a place of its choice then you will have no right to complain about where you are or about being lost. You are older now, surely mature? Wiser, yes.

Pouring. Just pour on the paint and then tilt the surface. Looks strangely like chagreen. Verdigris. One part of me wants to write freely and allow the words to tumble out and another part of me believes that words that come out fast can only be senseless. Every small step into existence requires the breaking of inner barriers. Did I ever even ask myself if I want to make sense? I thought I wanted to find out who I am, explore my inner self, introduce it to the outside world, allow the words to tell me a story I do not know, surprise and entertain me. All and none of the above.

Trickle

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 08 May 2023 09:31:00 +0000

Well, it may not be a gushing torrent but stream on it does. Like that solar-powered fountain in my parents' Scottish garden that sprayed in intermittent spurts when the clouds moved on. Mettre ça chose au monde. It doesn't have to be regular. Maybe it could no even be regular; that would be somehting quite different.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 16:59:00 +0000

I never did find my voice. I mean, the voice I thought would pour out of me like a stream, telling it all, with no effort on my part. I catch a glimpse of a world with no animosity between people. A world of benevolent kindness. I wonder if the two things are related. Me not finding my voice but stumbling on the possibility of an emotional truce. This failure to realize one’s potential breaks my heart. We are all such a disappointment to ourselves and to everybody else. In my emotional truce zone, we all just have the right to be, to exist, to live and breathe and eat and sleep and talk and not be judged. Then there is music.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 25 May 2022 10:14:00 +0000

What happened to the idea that I would write and post

ten lines a day, at least not at most

and every single turn of the earth

would bring forth its crop of I wonder.

I suddenly remembered I had had the plan

the intention and the scheme - another "also ran"

to be productive in a regular way

until life, the universe and everything

somehow got in the way.

That's what happened to the I, dear.

Edge of pre.......

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:15:00 +0000

Maybe find

And maybe within the thin ten

Lines I’ll find myself or someone

Or something else, must be

Open to new exes and periences, be

Cause there is a reason

We just don’t know it.

There you go again.

Edge of precipice

Don’t lean forward too

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 07:32:00 +0000

Could I steal

Could I steal your idea, though

bending it slightly to chill

the shrill outside calm?

Learn the rules to break then, stand

a side or front, deeply dipping in

to the silent cosmos

while the grass grows green again.

Oh the wind.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 15:06:00 +0000

The wind blows. The wind talks to me.

The wind roars. The roaring of the wind. The wind lashes out. The wind knocks things over that go scurrying along helpless, rattling on the hard ground, the sound fading into the distance.

I hear the wind deep down in my bones. I hear and feel the wind at the centre of me and it feels so good. Outside it is cold, dark and windy and the sound of that wind blowing brings me indescribable joy. A profound sense of comfort and happiness, at being cosy and warm inside while outside the elements rage.

The tempest rages.

The weather wails.

And I remember that exquisite feeling of being warm and snug as a bug in a rug underneath the covers, in my bed, with the wind howling and lashing the rain against the bare pane.

I remember.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 22:31:00 +0000

Quelqu'un d'autre	someone else

Personne ne t'aimera comme tu voudras être aimée	No-one could ever love you the way you want to be loved

Fait de ton mieux et moi	You do your best and I'll do the rest
Fais c'que tu peux et moi je ferai mieux	Do what you can and I’ll better it

Someone else had to write it. I couldn't. I was too involved in it, too … the stakes were too high for me, I had no emotional distance no cool, no "recul" – yes, it had to be written by someone else.

Il fallait que quelqu'un d'autre l'écrive. Je ne pouvais pas. J'étais trop impliquée, l’enjeu était trop fort, je ne pouvais pas prendre de la distance, rester zen, avoir du recul – oui, il fallait que ce soit quelqu'un d'autre qui l'écrive.

Et au lieu de trouver quelqu'un d'autre pour l'écrire, j'ai gardé le stylo en main et j'ai écrit autre chose.

And instead of finding someone else to write it, I kept the pen in my hand and wrote something else.

Who's who and what's what

Qui est qui et quoi quoi

Je m'amuse, j'ai ma muse

I'm having a good time, I'm inspired.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 15:51:00 +0000

Yes, this could indeed become a habit. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump the gun.

Take a rain check. A lovely expression I guessed meant to check the weather before confirming an appointment. In fact it means “a ticket given for later use when a sporting fixture or other outdoor event is interrupted or postponed by rain.”

Take a rain check — politely decline an offer, with the implication that one may take it up at a later date.

However, this is not a postponement. It is a writing offline with the intention of putting it online by clicking on a button called “publish” but with no expectation anyone will read it. Years ago, when I started this blog, I had some kind of expectation of a reader stumbling on it randomly and I did, in fact, find such a reader once (or more precisely, she found me, or she found y prose) and she very much appreciated a tiny impro on the theme of a phrase from Shakespeare. Today my friend is bringing dessert from a well-known frozen food chain and calls it “Monsieur Picard” and I think why does she assume it was Monsieur who started the company and not Madame? The can of worms does not shrink just because we try to ignore it. There is a difference between men and women and it makes me think.

Going Dutch again

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 19:00:00 +0000

So tomorrow came and went. Didn’t make a dent in the urgency of conturgency. Compulsion to play, nay: to trickle and spurt. No-one needs to get hurt. It can all be achieved amicably.

Founding myths. Stories that structure our experience. As I mentioned in Toast to Jujube:

"There was no little Hans the Dutch boy. The Americans made it up".

We were told that Hans saw water trickling through a dyke and stuck his finger in and saved his entire village from flooding. Because the small stream would have grown to a bigger stream and burst the dyke. I am using that idea by writing a tiny amount with the intention of using the power of the stream to burst the dyke. Write a sentence or two every day and soon the words will swell to pragraphs and even pages. We are entangled in narratives. We are caught up in and made up of meanings which have no direct relationship with reality. We must write our own stories in order to exist.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:42:00 +0000

Les sens de l’étang

No more maybes. Tomorrow we shall begin. To write the wrongs and pen the sheep, for a lamb’s a lamb for a’ that.

Why tomorrow? Is there something new that can be borrowed that isn’t a present today?

No-one will say.

The engine ticking over thinks it is idling, biding its time for the great take-off, but it may just putter out. Tout dépend de l’essence.

Predication

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 13:30:00 +0000

Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to do what I don’t do today

Maybe the story will right itself and I’ll be okay

The world around me will suddenly astound me

Metamorphose into something grandiose.

The easter egg will split open and out pop ibuprofen or some such medicament to solve our predicament.

Art for heart's sake

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 09:27:00 +0000

Art is a haven because it is the best humans can do.

It heals the soul because it is an act of gratuitous love.

The best of human endeavour consoles us and protects us from Barbary.

Loving art won’t pay the bills but it can give us the courage to keep on struggling to do so.

Sharks, Nazis and the Female Orgasm.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 06:43:00 +0000

The other day, I came across the astonishing James Rhodes who did a Ted Talk with the words “sharks” and “nazis” in the title because these words apparently attract a lot of hits. The female orgasm part of my title is because I have always been kind of fascinated by the female orgasm, being female and being in the awkward position of not knowing whether or not I have ever experienced one. There have been occasions when mind-blowing excitement thrust the words “yes, this is it” into my mind. At the time I was absolutely convinced. But today? What do I believe today? We all know that even with the most honest of intentions we re-write our past, creating a narrative we can live with. Or by.

Maybe I have said this before, or

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 15:17:00 +0000

perhaps you will never know, for I can never show – to you – this vast treasure of leisure. No need. Seeds and ropes and not without hopes either, drunk on being selfed.

You and not you. Me the steady beam, the seam ingly granit trusted bicycle pumps and four reeled gigs.

Whirlygigs. I did not ask permission, there was no-one there to rule fictition

At the time. mime, crime, wime, sime, hyme –en tropé.

Y love is linga kwistic

Super cally fraile istic

And I shall exit piaely dotious. You can’t be too koshus.

What is new is that I do not want you ha! Be yourself! All I need is to have for a fleeting moment known you, interspersed my atoms with yours

Ephemeral attraction and the

Week force

Mundane, mundane.

Wordrobe

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 15:29:00 +0000

Wordrobe.

I am often pleasantly surprised by typing mistakes. This is a nice one. It made me want to stick it in this blog and I notice with alarm that I did not post anything in the first six months of the year. And yet I hanker. I think kind of continuously of vaguely things to put in here or write or about what is already here and the nice pictures and moments spent composing the posts and what will happen to it? Where will it all go? I'm not planning to die immediately but I will die sometime and at least no-one will have to burn this or have it pulped...

Theason's bleatings

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 14:17:00 +0000

Time to dither, hither and thither, step outside,

forget the ride through decadent streets and sleet-blown alleys,

so much rhyme and reason, it's almost out of season but the urgency pushes on, round the corner of the cliff,

as stiff as a dyke's beak, liberating, stipulating, triangulating our movements by GPS,

and the goddess of Scottish literacy, a thoroughbred with broken capillary cheeks, reeking of peat-smoked whisky tries to hide from the wide angle lens of surveillance.

Everything is filmed, nothing seen, the camera rolls, on and on, never stops, until then – you know, that moment.

Those that I loved lived here and are no more, does this shoreline even know it? How can I define it, reach a plateau, for a rest, the right of egress…

An old seam

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 11:30:00 +0000

Barony Colliery, the Barnie Pit, the coal mine my father (and his father) worked in has long since been closed down. Ever active in the imagination.

Talking about digging, I just had the urge, following the horrors in Paris last week, to re-post the story I wrote in response to the bombings in London ten years ago.

In memory of Jean Charles de Menezes

On the way to Willesden

When my alarm goes off, I am so startled for a moment I don’t remember where I am. Through the window I see a weak sun struggling to break through a clump of orangey cloud above the city rooftops. To me, the default state of the sky is clear blue. I vaguely clock the cloud as a blemish, something somehow slightly morally wrong. Something that somebody forgot to clean. Or could not clean. I wonder about this feeling, make a mental note to try to work out what it means, and I fall asleep again. When I wake up for the second time, I’m late for work.

9.33. I come out of my flat in Scotia road. Nova Scotia. A metastasis of Scotland. Britain is Great, but the Kingdom could hardly be called United. None of the other countries in it likes England. The English are full of themselves. But London is different. London is not England. London belongs to the world. Everybody loves London, the red double-decker buses, the Hackney cabs, and the black&white chequered police. The Paki shops conveniently open round the clock.

There’s a buzz here. I suppose you could say there’s a buzz in all cities. But the London buzz has nothing to prove; it just is. When I first arrived here, even though I don’t really like cities, I much prefer living in the countryside, I got a high from it. The traffic, the crowd. The scene in the pubs. The clubs. The restaurants. Now I’m used to it, I fit in better. I’m moving at the same speed as everyone else.

When I hit the pavement like this in the morning, it’s there, in the air, the acrid tang of London-ness, pinstripe suits and bowler hats. I slide into the movement, everybody hurrying, first thing in the morning, everybody determined to get to work as fast as possible. But not really rushing. There’s no aggressive feel to it. It’s all very tame.

Things do get tense at times. I’ve felt that tension. At Nottinghill carnival once, I left my friends and wandered along a street with different bands playing different types of music, it was weird, like changing worlds, and I got this strange feeling, walking past, it hit me, there was a patch with electricity in the air, it felt really violent, the vibes were really heavy. It didn’t feel much like a carnival to me, more like a kind of war going on in the music. When I got home I switched on the telly and there had been a murder, right in that spot.

I’m nearing Brixton tube station when I realise the tube is not running. I like the area around Brixton tube. The market, the lane. I like the kind of villagey atmosphere. I speak to my boss on the mobile. I have to go and fix a fire alarm. I’ll take a bus to Stockwell then the tube from there. Lucky I have a transport pass. You can jump on any bus or tube. I’ve never been to Willesden before. There’s a first time for everything.

It never fails, every time I get on a bus I go upstairs and I get a real kick out of it, it’s like going sight-seeing. You forget you're going to work and you see your surroundings a bit like in a film. I like the atmosphere on the buses. The people are busy, pre-occupied, but not hostile. Tolerant. There’s a tolerance about London you don’t feel in other cities. Probably to do with the eccentric side of the British character. Punks. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I’m not being objective. Anyway, the atmosphere changes when there’s a strike on. That’s such a hassle. Normally people here leave each other plenty of space, but when everyone is packed in like sardines there’s no privacy. And then the bomb scares. They really fuck everything up for everybody. Those explosions last week, that was terrible. I wanted to buy a motorbike and avoid public transport altogether. What kind of warped minds would target people in double-decker buses? People trying to get to work, people at work, the labouring classes, they’re just as oppressed as anybody else, you would have to be out of your mind to think they were responsible for the state of the world, we’re all having enough trouble coping with the state of our lives, it’s hard enough when the buses are running on time.

Wreaking havoc for no good reason, or maybe they think they have good reason, but the target is totally wrong. It doesn’t affect the people who make the decisions. They don’t use public transport for Christ’s sake. I can’t fathom their reasoning. They must be pretty desperate, that’s for sure, but what makes them think they can have any effect on anything by blowing people up and spreading terror at the bottom of the heap? It only serves to spread misery, and there’s too much of it around in the world already. Maybe they think that anyone who lives in a country that has built its wealth on oppression is fair game. But all governments are corrupt. Power corrupts. The more you have the more you want.

You would think that the experience of the twin towers would have put an end to this useless, random violence. They hit the jackpot, hit the big time, they had their fifteen minutes fame. Everyone was shocked, for days every television screen in the world showed the aircraft banging into office windows, the billowing smoke, the buildings crumbling, repeated ad nauseum. But it backfired on them. When I first saw that footage I said to myself ok, they’ve made their point, now people will take them seriously and try to find out why they did this. What is the message they are trying to get across. But the images were alternated with Bush’s speeches about ‘look how evil these people are’. All that planning and all that successful death and destruction to be simply labelled “evil”.

I imagine an ideal world in which somebody would have said, right, let’s sit down and try to work out what we did to provoke such monstrous hostility so that it doesn’t happen again. Instead, they completely ignored any possibility of causality and proceeded to use the whole episode as an excuse to steal more oil. Where will it ever end, this spiral of violence, the whole system is so sick, what is there to believe in anymore? The rich and powerful don’t even bother to hide their corruption, there’s no need to, in a world where theft is universally admired and the greater the spoils the greater the admiration it arouses. People step down from executive positions because they have made losses for a company, throwing people out of work to preserve the interests of the stakeholders, in return for golden parachutes worth hundreds of years of a minimum wage billions of people have no way of procuring. My parent’s generation believed they could make things better for their kids, and they did, but what are we going to tell our kids? Sorry, junior, the planet is stuffed with radioactive nuclear waste we didn’t know what to do with so we’re counting on you to be smarter than us and work it out.

The pulse, the beat. London has a beat of its own. The music is exciting. Brazilian music comes from deep in the body. The emotional being. Love me. Love this moment. The London beat is more from the head. The body follows the head instead of the head following the body. I’m not saying it’s more intellectual – some bands are pretty basic, but there’s a kind of denial – ‘I don’t have a body’ - I could be reading too much into it – Brazilian music is soothing to the soul, but maybe that’s because I am Brazilian - London music is stimulating, it seems to cry out a kind of uncomfortable fact that won’t go away, and yet is difficult to express. Maybe it’s the weather. The weather is important here. Londoners all talk about the weather non-stop, they live in hope of an improvement, of a clear sky, and yet the country is situated slap bang in the middle of a cloud belt. It can’t get better. That’s the impression I get, that they’re all optimistically hoping for an improvement that is not coming.

There’s something about bad weather that keeps you active though. The music here is probably a symptom of that. A wake-up call. Let’s roll our sleeves up and muck in. There’s no temptation to lie in a hammock when the temperature is barely tolerable. But I’m surely reading too much into it. Cut off from nature. There are no wild animals here. No dangerous spaces like the rain forest in Brazil. The jungle. The snakes. They don’t even have mosquitoes here, really. But they can make fun of it all, they can laugh at themselves, and at their situation. That’s what I like about Britain, the sense of humour, their most dangerous snake is Monty Python.

So I’m going to fix a fire alarm. I jump off the bus and go into the tube station. The air changes again. Stale air. Stale underground air. Smells slightly like a mine. Minas Gerais. I pick up a free newspaper to read on the tube. I like these free newspapers. You have to be careful with money. Everything’s so expensive in a city. My dream is to be able to leave here in a couple of years, go back home and get myself a place in the country, near my family. Get married and have kids. With the money I earn here I would be rich at home, I could live really well, help the family. But it isn’t that simple. Most of my wages go on rent and utility bills, then I go out for a drink, clothes, films. There is not much left to send back home.

I stick my pass in the slot. Here we go through, can’t help feeling a bit like cattle being herded. I don’t mind the metal mechanicalness of it, I’m young and agile, and you just go with the flow. But how would I cope when I’m old and frail? Anyway, I won’t be here. I don’t intend to stay here forever. One day, when I have enough money saved, I’ll go back home. Buy a farm, settle down. Maybe later on I’ll bring my kids here, show them Big Ben, the National Gallery, Nelson’s Column, Buckingham Palace, the works. I’ll take them upstairs on a double-decker bus.

Down the escalator. Lucky I’m not claustrophobic. I’m sure there are people who feel uneasy on these steep escalators, taking you down, down, relentlessly down ever deeper into the ever-staler air. That’s one thing I won’t miss about London. The stale air in the underground.

Hey! My luck’s in! There’s a train at the platform. I break into a run and jump in. And my luck’s in again, I’m quite tired, I stayed out late last night, and here’s a vacant seat just waiting for me. Happiness is sometimes just a tiny detail like that, the train waiting for you, with a vacant seat, you have your newspaper to read, a job to go to; yes, sometimes that’s – what’s happ-

Et que rire

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 16:16:00 +0000

The message changed. She started to write down her message and it was very brutal and each amended version was softened. Or, on the contrary, she started with a wishy-washy, ambiguous stance which became more incisive with each re-write.

- I'll get by

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 15:14:00 +0000

Button up the back.

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 14:44:00 +0000

I found myself becoming attached to this piece of clay as soon as I had gouged out the eye sockets and marked the position of the mouth. Is this normal or is my narcissism pathological?

I kept on loving it, I said goodbye to it when I went outside for a break, up to a certain point, when I lost the contact. When I opened its mouth (the theme of the workshop was the scream) the weight tilted forward and I had to prop it up against a block of wood to work on it - so I didn't feel as close to it, I couldn't squeeze (hug) the whole head into shape - also there comes a point, as in a painting, where you become scared to touch it because you think you'll spoil it rather than improve it.

But I came through the other side and started liking it again.

And I starrted thinking about relationships, between me and the clay, between me and the blog... Sylvia Plath's poems with their piggy and fishy air.

As you can see, my head doesn't button up the back...