I have been rather lazy today, so what's new? I was waiting for the gas man to call and service the boiler, and yeay, he fixed the leak, apparently a ‘union???’ had come unscrewed so no it shouldn’t leak water onto my towels and need topping up every so often, anyway I have been reading a book while I waited for him to call, actually the first book of four, by a friend of mine. She is an amazing philosopher and deep thinker which her book reflects entirely and I am loving it. It makes me a little sad though because although I have a great degree of intelligence it was never developed because of the circumstances I was born into and it makes me feel so frustrated. On reading her I feel so hopelessly inarticulate and she is able to write the things I know and have in my head but cannot verbalise, still I am delving into her wonderful mind and finding a lot of comfort and excitement there and I wish I had not been born into poverty and had the education that might have made me such a different person, maybe even the person I dream I want to be… Ah well.
Anyway, the book I have just finished is ‘Landing on Clouds’ by Olivia Fane. Apart from making me feel so inadequate as a writer, which is my problem, nobody elses by the way, this book has given me so much inspiration and I decided that even if I was an intellect I could never measure up to Olivia … she would deny this profusely and accept and acknowledge me as a person and everything I know as something so wonderful… by the time you leave her she has made you feel good about yourself and it makes you question what the hell is in your mind to be so negative….oh forgive me, do, for using her christian name, but I know so much about her, and so little, that I feel as I read her books I delve more and more into the person I know. Olivia is an amazing woman apart from her writing. strip the world away from Olivia and you would still have a person who is interesting, articulate and interested, a person with an incredible understanding of people and the world around her, a philosopher, a mother, a writer and a person with so many exciting stories and a zest for life that I can only weakly aspire to. I have written many a poem from experiences I have had with her and the children. My own children love her and look forward to being with her but ok I am going on… It is just a book but I have been criticised for using a similar style of writing and have then struggled to replace it with something other readers were happy with. I needn’t have bothered and now I have decided to write the way I want to. So if it doesn’t make publication, we all dream of that don’t we? it has made me happy to write it. Olivia’s books are so very much ‘Olivia’, in each one I see her character, a piece of her personality , so why should I write my books to please other people. I have to include a quote…. a fair explanation of Olivia from ‘Landing on Clouds’…
QUOTE’…what does a ghost feel who stretches out his ethereal fingers and arrives at something solid? Isn’t it infinitely easier for us to imagine a spiritual existance than for a spirit to imagine a corporeal one? I can imagine the spirits debating the existance of physical bodies. ‘mummy’ says one of them, ‘what does “touch”mean?’ ‘It’s a myth my dear,’ says the mother spirit, ’some say there are tiny particles in space, some say they’ve had a personal experience with them.. But they can’t prove it, and they can’t begin to descibe it. Take my advice darling, the modern way of looking at it is simply to suggest that the inexplicable doesn’t exist.’ Well, the son spirit grows up and lo and behold, as he’s floating over a sunny part of the ethers, he suddenly experiences the warmth of the sun, but he can’t talk about it to his friends - they consider such words as ‘warmth’ to be a mere metaphor. The son spirit says ‘No, no, I promise you, this happened to me.’ but the experience is so other-worldly as to be unimaginableand they say to him, ‘Are you sure you felt something more than an ordinary feeling of love or wonder or goodness?’ ‘It was better than any of those,’ says the son spirit, ‘but I shall never convice you. You will only know the truth of what I’m telling you when you feel the warmth for yourselves.’ QUOTE
And that is the exact way I feel. I want to write what I feel, not to explain it to others, not to make others believe what I see, feel or experience but because it is what has made me , well, me! So I thank my gas man for giving me the waiting and reading time, for dear Olivia for writing the book but mostly I thank my life experiences and the people I have met along the way, both positive or negative, who have contributed to my understanding of the world around me… and who have inspired me to continue writing, as Olivia has, about what I know, about a part of me… If someone else reads it I am thankful that, for just a short while, I shared a little part of me with someone else…. [quote from 'Landing on Clouds' by OLIVIA FANE]