Blood on the tracks
My sister was down from Scotland with her two youngest and I was playing Fuzzy-Felt with the five year old. We made a station, with giant flowers, horses jumping clouds, and passengers’ faces along the side of the train, leaving lots of limbs unused.
‘Oh, we can scatter these on the tracks,’ I told her.
She looked at me and giggled, conspiratorially, eager to join me in my corruption of the wholesome game we played.
‘That’s what happened when you play on railway tracks,’ I told her. We’d run out of black lines to make rails from, so I passed her the red ones, ‘here, you can use these under the body bits: they’re stained with blood.’
Her mother came over to admire her creation and was shown red circles that represented the pools of blood she’d added. She looked slightly strangely at me.
*
On Tuesday, I went to see Mariana Pineda by Lorca, at the Arcola. I enjoyed lots of the ideas within it, but found some of the acting a little leaden. Perhaps it was a failing of the script which contained seasoned stereotypes used to more easily convey concepts. The heroine, who assists her rebel lover in his cause, is caught by the authorities. Despite realising the worthlessness of his ‘love’ she chooses to stay true to him, and to die and leave her children orphaned rather than reveal his possible whereabouts. It exemplified to me how ‘honour’ is a greater motivator than love, and 'love 'can be for some external ideal that has little to do with the reality we live with. People everywhere die and kill for honour: they sometimes say it’s for love; but that can’t be true.
There were a whole load of themes on ‘love’ and ‘honour’ I was going to elaborate on, but they’re easier to talk about than write about; so anyone who might be reading this has been saved.
*
On the evening that wild_boys said she was feeling shit, a friend sent me a link to this bastard child of Eddie Izzard and Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, delivered down a birth canal awash with sticky Euro-electro-pop, and I immediately thought of her and meant to post it that night. Am I allowed to admit I think I might like it, and I might be up at the front, maddest of the lot of them; because street dancing can be such fun?
And if you haven’t already seen this, um, well - sooo sweet, sooo sad, sooo good (I had to read it twice to realise; but I am dumb).
Also, for dans_la_reine I have an old, unfinished and rubbishy poem that’s should never really be thrown out to the public if I wish to maintain any sense of self respect; but some of the stuff she’s been raising recently brought it to mind.
Object
Did I invite you to objectify me?
For when I dressed this morning
It was not with thoughts of you in mind;
And if I’d pulled on some saggy, baggy slacks
Would I now be an object of your derision?
I can’t escape you see, from my physicality,
And so I make the best of this situation
Taking pleasure in the things it brings
While avoiding overt manipulation.
You may now think me some kind of whore
With my tongue all over some man I’ve never met before,
But just because I kindly spoke to you
Doesn’t mean I want to kindly fuck you too.
Do I have to be regarded as
A cock tease when not an easy lay?
Must I keep my sexuality under lock and key
Afraid of what some fool may think or say?
I never wished to be some thing for you to fix on
That’s not to say in different circumstances
I might not behave a different way
But quite frankly, I wouldn’t ever rate your chances.