Suzanne

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

Leonard Cohen

2009

The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant...

Kate Chopin: The Awakening (1899)

Diego Rivera: Espalda desnuda de una mujer (1926)

The Queen of the Forest

Just to brighten up this blog a little...

Maldita Resaca

In a desperate attempt to fall asleep again, she counts the freckles dancing on his back. His skin smells like man and yesterday´s smoke, the beat of the previous night still thudding between his ears. She smells of him, her fingers of intoxicated cigarettes.

Every morning after the night before, almost without fail, she wakes up at 9 am and is unable to go back to sleep. She counts the number of drinks she consumed - not too many but, as usual, enough to keep her from having her much looked forward to Saturday morning lie-in.

She insists on staying next to him under the covers for what seems like hours, then gives up and goes out onto their little balcony to up to fill her lungs with the torrential rain that has not stopped since destroying their collection of herbs the previous afternoon.

The neighbourhood wakes up and stretches its limbs. Construction workers start their sporadic, lazy drilling. Unhappy little people are dragged by their grouchy mothers to look for unhappy little boots for the rainy season. The trees want to lie down and curl into a ball, drenched and tired by the continuous downpour of rain.

He wakes up and sees her on the balcony, a blurry naked figure hunched over a forest of droopy pot plants.

"Good morning," he says.

Maa, jota ei ole (Edith Södergran)

Ikävöin maahan jota ei ole,
sillä kaikkea mikä on olen väsynyt himoamaan.
Kuu kertoo minulle hopeaisin kirjaimin
maasta jota ei ole.

Maasta, jossa kaikki toiveemme täyttyvät ihmeellisesti,
maasta, jossa kaikki kahleemme kirvoittuvat,
maasta, jossa vilvoitamme raadeltuja otsiamme
kuun kasteessa.

Elämäni oli kuuma harha.
Mutta yhden olen löytänyt
ja yhden olen totisesti voittanut -
tien maahan jota ei ole.

Maassa jota ei ole
kulkee rakastettuni, otsallansa sädehtivä kruunu.

Ken on rakastettuni? Yö on pimeä
ja tähdet vapisevat vastaukseksi.

Ken on rakastettuni? Mikä hänen nimensä?
Taivaat kaartuvat korkeammiksi,
ja ihmislapsi vajoaa äärettömiin usviin
vastausta tietämättä.

Mutta ihmislapsi ei ole mitään muuta kuin varmuus.
Ja se kohottaa kätensä kaikkia taivaita korkeammalle.
Ja vastaus tulee: Minä olen se, jota rakastat
ja aina olet rakastava.

And some more Doris...

'What use are men?' asks Lessing
Doris Lessing
Men are a 'haphazard species' says Doris Lessing

Veteran author Doris Lessing asked her Hay festival audience what use they thought men were - in an ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek way.

Lessing's latest work The Cleft is a sci-fi fiction which imagines what happens to a mythical world of only women, when men are introduced.

In her eyes men had been introduced to "pep up" a slothful, lazy world of women," said the 87-year-old.

"This is what I think men were for. The Y chromosome.. to pep up everything".

She said men were a "haphazard species" who always have to be looked after and died "much too easy".

But she admitted she would not want to live in an all-female world.

The novelist and essayist, on the final weekend of the book town's 20th festival, spoke of how her latest work had attracted criticism because of its inclusion of the mutilation of baby boys.

But she said it contained much nastier scenes - including a gang rape of a girl who escaped from her all-female world.


We like to think we are motherly and kind and that we are not going to go to war, but it's not true, is it?
Doris Lessing

And she asked why that should be?

"Obviously because its a female's lot to be raped," she said, and then referred meaningfully to some of the current strife in Zimbabwe - she was brought up in Rhodesia.

"Believe me, if you're a woman wandering carelessly in Darfur... rape is the least of it."

But asked by a member of the audience if it was men who waged war, she replied: "I have not noticed that women, when they get to be prime ministers are particularly peaceful."

On the contrary she said some of the worst crimes had been committed by women.

She said: "We like to think we are motherly and kind and that we are not going to go to war, but it's not true, is it?"

'Something abrasive'

Lessing described how her latest writing had been partly "inspired" by her own experience of giving birth at 19 and the woman in the next bed, already a mother of two girls, harshly rejecting the son she had just had.

She said the woman's reaction to her new-born was "primitive " and "shocking" and added that often these supressed ideas resurfaced to colour her writing when "without you even knowing you're doing it".

Lessing lamented the lack of modern science fiction writing and spoke of her own love of writing for the sheer surprise of what happens next.

She said she was often surprised by criticical reaction to her writing - the early reviews to her 1962 masterpiece The Golden Notebook were "horrible", she said.

Lessing said "There's something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross".

But she said as a writer it was important not to care what other people think and that the profession must honour that.

"We are free... here I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?"

(BBC News 2 June 2007)

Khuda-hafiz, Benazir

There is a photograph of me taken in the summer of 1990, my first full summer in Pakistan. I'm 9, a blonde, skin-and-bones girl, standing erect with a big smile, my two big front teeth gleaming. I'm wearing my mother's red-framed sunglasses and a pink dupatta wrapped around my head. I'm dressed up as Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's prime minister at the time.

Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister of a Muslim country in 1988, a year before my family moved to Pakistan. She seemed a breath of fresh air in the political spheres of Pakistan, if only for being a woman, and quite charismatic at that. She was prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, and was going to lead her Pakistan People's Party in the elections of January 2008. She spent years in prison in solitary confinement and in exile. The footage of her stepping down from the airplane to her homecountry after a 9-year absence shows a more human side to her as she wipes tears from her face, overcome by emotion.

When the news announced her death yesterday, it wasn't so much a feeling of disbelief and shock that overpowered me but a sick feeling in my stomach of yet another disappointment, another violent act to continue the cancerous legacy of Pakistani politics. "The unrest", an overused expression in the English-speaking media that I have grown to strongly dislike, has continued to grow in that weary artificial nation since the day a group of Oxford-educated gentlemen - who had never set foot in their colonial relic - forced a border halfway down the Indian subcontinent and created The Land of the Pure.

Ah, Pakistan. You break your people's hearts. What will become of you?