Knausgaard

I have just finished the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle A Death In The Family. I have to tell you this is the most brilliant book I have read in a long time, and I am about to start the second part without delay! They're around five hundred pages a go,without chapters, and I have been gripped from start to finish, immersed in the interior life of Karl Ove, who begins to feel like an intimate friend. I keep thinking that this is just not like anything else I have ever read, and surely that alone is exciting and inspiring.

Some reviews have dwelt critically on the number of words, lines or pages Knausgaard devotes to the mundane details of life, like making a cup of coffee, lighting or putting out a cigarette, or cleaning a filthy house. This is one of the things I love. Knausgaard knows no fear of showing the mundanity of existence exactly as it is, and devotes page space proportionate to the amount of awareness it takes up in our daily lives. It's almost an exercise in mindfulness at times. Descriptions of cigarette ash falling to the ground, or the colour of tea swirling into the boiling water in a cup become almost meditations in their own right, without being required to serve the narrative or plot development in any special way.

But more so much more than this, Knausgaard lets us inside his mind and his body, the moment by moment impressions, feelings and experiences of an adolescent in love with music, enchanted by alcohol, fascinated and puzzled by girls. Later, the intimate experience of learning of the death of his father in his late twenties, and the process of dealing with the aftermath of the death with his older brother in the following days. I have never read an author so willing to reveal the workings of his mind, his emotional reactions, his idiosyncratic observations, and weird personal associations with what he observes. The only writer who comes to mind at all is WG Sebald, whom I also greatly admire. There's a sort of brooding mood, an awareness of the deep significance apparently ordinary events and impressions can assume in the mind when they touch off memory, emotion and literary or artistic associations.

Now

In many traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, the circle is a powerful symbol for the sacredness of all things. Throughout these traditions there are rituals in which the image of the circle is used like this: by drawing a circle around yourself and standing in the middle of it, you realize that you are always at the centre of the universe. The circle that surrounds you shows you that you're always in the sacred space.

..........

The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you're in the centre of the world, standing in the middle of a sacred circle. It's no small affair, whether you're brushing your teeth or cooking your food or wiping your bottom. Whatever you're doing you're doing it now.

Pema Chodron

Cross

Stomping up the lane after throwing the dead daffodils on the compost heap. It's windier than I thought and the lane is having one of its extra steep days. I feel cross with the wind as I emerge at the top of the lane, and turn left onto the wet and muddy path. I am cross with the mud which is slippery, messy and inconvenient as hell, despite my wellies. And cross to find a dog running up behind me, its collar tag clinking, a young woman following, who smiles as I turn enquiringly to see whose dog it is. It looks like George, L the joiner's dog, so maybe this is his daughter? I am cross to feel this dog following me. I'm not good with a feeling of someone behind me. Nothing feels right.

Something about my clinical supervision session this morning didn't feel right and has left me feeling uneasy, and, well... cross, angry, fed up, upset. I think maybe she isn't after all the right supervisor for me. It's a challenge to have to start looking for someone suitable again, to move on after nine months, but I need to trust my instincts. I don't come away feeling supported, enriched, challenged. I am feeling so much better about myself and about the prospect of more work, it feels crucial I have the right support in this process.

L is suffering with allergic rhinitis and its most recent twist is painful sinuses, or is it toothache? She had an appointment with the nurse practitioner today, who pressed on her various sinuses and expressed a view it probably wasn't sinusitis, and recommended a dentist's appointment, which has now been made for Thursday. Meanwhile the earlier rhinitis symptoms seem to have receded somewhat. She's had a nasal spray and been taking antihistamines for a few weeks now with intermittent benefit. It's all very confusing, frustrating and for me there's this awful feeling of not being able to help when my partner is suffering and miserable. And she is rarely this miserable...

In better news, I'm off with a fat cheque in my hand to pay off the mortgage tomorrow, my Mum's estate having finally been distributed!!

14.27 From York

Huge lakes of rainwater like cold tea in the fields. Silver birches at the bottom of the railway embankment, their thin trunks catching afternoon light filtered through pale cloud as we approach Micklefield -.the first stop, as the conductor announces. I have a new blue pair of trousers in my bag with a small damp patch where the torrential rain penetrated my bag. I declined the paper carrier I was offered in the shop, as it would have been reduced to pulp by the time I'd walked to the station in the downpour. Enough sun to cast shadows on the platform at Micklefield.

I visualise being at the centre of a sacred circle, as Pema Chodron suggests, and consider that everything that enters the circle is there to teach me something. How would my life be if I could sustain this perception? Who would I be if I were always at the centre of a sacred circle? Who indeed would I be if, as Tara Brach asks, I didn't believe there was something wrong with me? Already shaking free of this belief, though it clings in places, sticky. If I didn't live with the persistent dim fear that I'm doing something wrong, or ought perhaps to be doing something different, something other than what I am doing now, and now and now... what then? If I believed that there's nothing wrong, nothing that needs changing, and at the same time that change is always possible, indeed inevitable. But the kind I can have a hand in can be hard to identify. Puts me in mind of the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Home

Whenever we think of home we come to this
the handful of birds and plants we know by name
John Burnside


Home

This small space in which I live my days
This square or two of Ordnance Survey map
My house a tiny rectangle beside the road
The boundary of my garden a dark line.

This place where I sleep and wake,
Eat my breakfast as the sun creeps over the hill
While small birds visit my garden; sparrows,
Dunnocks, starlings, blackbirds,
And sometimes a pair of goldfinches.

My feet in slippers tread the same familiar path
Across the floorboards, my feet in wellies
Step by step up the lane and through
The mud and puddles, and sometimes
Fast-flowing stream of the path
That leads to the Moor.

This Moor I know like the rooms of my house,
The backs of my hands, this Moor
In its seasons; growth of heather,
Bilberry, bracken, moss and bramble,
New shoots, flowers, berries, then the
Colours changing with autumn's decay,
The ginger grasses vivid in the rain.

And where the water flows when it rains
Too much, and where it sits, the path that
Skirts the biggest puddle by the broken gate,
The sheep that watch me from their field,
The wind at my back on stormy days
Threatening to push me over.

Possible

Returning home
everything seems possible
fine clouds thinning

Chim Chim Cher-ee

The chimney sweep came today with his apprentice, whose role was rather simple at least on this occasion. He brought the gear in, he took the gear out, he lent Richard, the boss, his mobile phone in order to use its torch to establish the presence of a flue liner, and he brought in two business leaflets and a Certificate of Chimney Sweeping. This last headed The National Association of Chimney Sweeps, strapline 'Helping to protect the consumer'. Richard informed me my chimney should be swept every six months (six months??!!) For shame! It's at least three two years since we had it swept last. Ho hum. Well, now we know. The handful of little and not so little lumps of shiny creosote he showed me was enough to convince me. He had a face hewn from the local millstone grit and a manner to match. The sort of bloke who makes me feel posh and awkward. And he managed to take an extra tenner off me, on the basis that in six months' time he'd charge me a tenner less than the going rate. I am not quick to spot these kinds of manoeuvres. I said I'd want to talk to L (who was out, and would have spotted this) before booking the October sweep, but of course now I'll have to - or sacrifice my tenner.

Can't stop singing this now...