Greer Gilman's Blog, page 77

Time and times (anew 4)

They half gaze at a paler shadow, out of darkness; but their eyes are shut again with spiderwebs.

They are waiting for the fiddler’s second coming. For the hypnopomp.

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Time and times (anew 3)

I love how the stone seems to waver, like a half-spelled metamorphosis; or like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper. They are struggling to wake.

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Time and times (anew two)

They’re a tipsy wedding party—says the usual legend—caught dancing on a Sunday to the devil’s fiddle. Some are frozen in a sprightly round, as for The Beginning of the World; some lying in a drunken heap. This is the West Country, and the cider goes straight to the legs.

(The ghostly splotches are where my lens kept getting splashed.)

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Time and times (anew)

The day after the memorial, steepholm took me to the stones at Stanton Drew. Three circles, a cove and Hautville's Quoit: you go through a farm gate with a box for offerings, and there they are, out standing in the rain.












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Time and times

Under reconstruction!

Apologies for the mangling. Hope it's fixed.

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Tempest & teacups

This was hanging out above the clothesline at Phoxinus' house.  All part of Englishness, along with shepherd's pie, The Archers, pots of tea, and hedgerow jams.

21 April 2012

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Christmas Common, Oxfordshire

20 April 2012.

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Anxiety

In a dream I was asked if I would interview papersky . Sure, I said.

Now, said the dream. In French.

What?

Oh, we'll give you the questions. Just read them.

And I was pushed out onto a platform in a steep steep lecture room full of vociferous French university students, already on their feet and arguing.

I stood at the focus, like the body for dissection.

And the paper I had was in English, to be rendered on the fly. They were knotty questions, stiff considerations of philosophy, of the nature of time and space. All subjunctive at the very least.  And as I stood trying to remember the French for, say, tachyon, and was it du or de la, the words kept dancing on the page, as they will in dreams, shifting and reforming sentences.  I kept losing what I'd just remade.

The crowd was getting supercilious. Five hundred Sartres and de Beauvoirs.

And to my horror, I was wearing an orange dress. A lysergic print chiffon, and worse, a fragile, borrowed dress, too tight across the bodice and the long restrictive sleeves. And already I'd torn it, trailing yards of petticoat, a taffeta that rustled like the crowd...

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Advisory

So in the dream, I was listening to the BBC telling me what words were difficult to spell today.

"...and Birmingham."

"Birmingham?" I said, buttering my toast. "Why Birmingham?"

And the radio answered, "The 'k' is silent."

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Wings of tree

The angels at Upwell.

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