Walking The Elephant

For my birthday, Girl bought tickets. My birthday is in January, but the show I favoured wasn’t till now. And I was quite certain I would not write about it, for mostly I prefer to take something ordinary and paint it up in the glitter of my proficient vision. To start with the extraordinary seemed like cheating, like a lazy exercise. But sometimes an imaginary elephant turns up and fills you with such wonderment! I have been to the circus, ladies and gentlemen; a circus unseated, where you wander, with the crazy performers, and they swing over your head and stewards in leather kilts are busy keeping the balance between thrill and law suit. What the troupe present is inspired by the journey of a wedding gift elephant. Walking from Lisbon to Vienna, thrilling and alarming, it represents the bewildering, discomforting delight of the unfamiliar, the push to believe that things can be different, the very extraordinary wonderment that transforms what was previously regarded as mundane. Proximity makes the magic powerful. I feel unlocked. I feel like I’ve mastered the trapeze myself. I feel like taking my elephant for a long walk.

Comments

The Cranky said…

It sounds both thrilling and magical! Sometimes divesting ourselves of the usual, the habitual ways of seeing things, not only relieves us of a half-realised burden, it becomes a spell-binding path into the numinous.

Oh, and happy (very) belated birthday.

26 August 2012 at 06:13

Contact Pants Conundrum

There is weather today, I do note it: take a few moments to reckon the size of a cloud (big) and the frequency of rain (sporadic.) Centre of my interest though is a stack of magazines. Not the fashion kind. This is martial arts research. I'm not even sure what it is I'm looking for, but intuition calls loud. A range of old adverts skew some amusement. Contact pants, for example. Pants are not trousers where I come from. They are underwear. Professional contact pants: improved smirk value. But why would a person be likely to purchase a grappling hook and a lock pick set? For specialists and hobbyists only, the blurb assures. Guidance on the pheromone spray that attracts women against their better judgement? I doubt it works any more proficiently than the mysterious potion that defines your muscles while you sleep. But, then: I wonder is some sprayed on this paper? What was my intuition thinking, making this ghastly shout… Tea break time. There's a lot of words...

Back From The Future Blog Party

Another joint blog adventure- if you want to see who else said what the list of participants is here . The premise is this: 'You're up before dawn on a Saturday when the doorbell rings. You haven't brewed your coffee so you wonder if you imagined the sound. Plonking the half-filled carafe in the sink, you go to the front door and cautiously swing it open. No one there. As you cast your eyes to the ground, you see a parcel addressed to you ... from you. You scoop it up and haul it inside, sensing something legitimate despite the extreme oddness of the situation. Carefully, you pry it open. Inside is a shoebox -- sent from ten years in the future -- and it's filled with items you have sent yourself. What's in it?' Here's how I imagined it: Before dawn? Shadows outside, first forming. Sleep has gone, I don't know where. Coffee I can find. All the way from Machu Pichu, this fair-traded pack. Scissors are in the drawer, which ...

A Happy Kind Of Idiot

I am watching hazel leaves shimmy in a breeze, they are keeping time with the buzz of nettle stings that run from my fingertips to my elbows. It feels like I'm wearing gloves made of needles; why didn't I just wear gloves to clear the nettles from the raspberry hedge? But I like to know the plants, how they grow, how they smell, how they stain and sting, what bugs shelter in their leaves, what grubs and gastropods nestle at the roots. How the roots sneak under weedblocks, moon-pale, and over open ground where they are purplish, bullish. I like the work to affect, I like interactive life. It has a little pain and a lot of interest. Not all the nettles are gone, of course, some must be left to house caterpillars, and they are a healthy vegetable for people too. Today’s crop is for compost though, to feed the soil, the miracle stuff from which this abundance grows. How could I not wish to be close to that? At home I have a shower, scrub my sore hands- and still I sm...

Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Search This Blog