Negative Capability Brown

This phrase came to me as I was walking back from town with a Primark bag swinging from my hot and sweaty hand.  I don’t like shopping at Primark but I do it because a) I don’t like shopping on-line and b) I can’t afford anywhere else.  So I went in for a couple of vests and came out with an utterly delicious garment that I can’t find a name for.

Whilst whistling through the park and thinking how odd it was that the grass is so dry when a mere six weeks ago it was under water and the paths were so flooded they were indistinguishable from the streams, the thought came to me.  Negative Capability Brown.  I have no idea what it means but I’m damned well going to find out.

OK let’s start with negative capability.  Coined by Keats, it means in essence the ability to immerse yourself in someone or something to such an extent that you become it.  I take this to be equivalent to ‘absorption’ in meditation; a forgetting of self and an immersion in the other; whether that is another person, a song, a flower or a book.  So, putting that together with Capability Brown, what do we get?

I’m not sure.  A landscape gardener who becomes the garden, perhaps?  I’m not sure that it works because 18th century gardening was all about imposing order and vision on the landscape, whereas the Romantic idea was to immerse yourself in nature and become one with it.  So Negative Capability Brown would seem to be a bit of an oxymoron.

Anyway, enough of this banter and on to yesterday’s event, a sort of ‘pop-up’ memorial to Gaz Carnell of Fingerprints.  A dozen or so people met outside the cafe to remember him; I did a poem and Chris Conway did a song; both of which were called ‘Fingerprints.’  There are videos but I can’t upload them at the moment; in the meantime here’s a picture of the garment.  Is it a dress?  Is it culottes?  It ain’t dungarees…

No, I can’t do that either because the laptop and the phone have had a hissy fit and are refusing to communicate with each other.

Kirk out

 

 

25th Wedding Anniversary

Well, today is our 25th wedding anniversary.  Yes, the OH and I have been manacled together for a quarter of a century and I feel as if I ought to do some sort of ‘summing-up’ post but I really can’t because as OH points out, if you sum it up, that’s the end.  A life is only summed up at a funeral; a calculation is only summed up when it’s finished.  And yet it is a kind of calculation because if you add up the days and the weeks and the years and put them one after another eventually you get to 25 years and then you have to stop and think… and what do you think?  Bloody hell! is the obvious thought.  And then bloody hell once more, but when you’ve thought bloody hell enough times you begin to be coherent.  And that’s when it gets hard.  I mean, what can you say about two and a half decades of conjugal manacling?  Well, you can say without fear of contradiction that there’s a history there – a history which means, for example, that I only have to say the word ‘Gerald’ for OH to know that he is being pretentious (see the gorilla sketch on ‘Not the Nine o’Clock News’) or ‘the mushroom pate’ which encapsulates the history of our first meeting or references to herbs such as ‘it doesn’t comfrey you know’ and ‘go the extra chamomile.’

Half a day has gone by and I still don’t know what to say about the last 25 years.  Still, it’s been a good day so far; the tribute to Gaz was lovely, featuring my poem and Chris’s song and a dozen or so people who came along (not bad at half a day’s notice.)  One person however was not having the best day as she had to get to work and had ordered food which took a while to come; then when she tucked into it I spilled my water all over it.  No sooner had this been mopped up than she discovered her dog, a rather nervous rescue animal, was missing.  A short panic ensued till the dog was discovered at the back of the cafe.  Anyway, an enjoyable if emotional event.

Before that I went to the hairdresser’s by mistake: I was just walking down the road and saw a sign advertising half-price cut and blow-dry, so in I stepped and on discovering that the half-price offer was very cheap, sat down in one of the chairs and prepared to be cut and blown dry.  I’m really pleased with the result.

And tonight we’re off out for a meal at Pizza Express.  All this and a free CD from Chris Conway as well!

What more could one ask?

A quarter of a century not out.

Kirk – erm – out

Fingerprints Tomorrow – Come on Down

Tomorrow, 12th June, as well as being our 25th wedding anniversary, would have been Gaz Carnell’s 37th birthday.  I have blogged before about Gaz and the poem I wrote for him

(https://wordpress.com/posts/lizardyoga.wordpress.com?s=Fingerprints)

and tomorrow we will be having an impromptu memorial by the bench outside Fingerprints Delicafe.   I will be reading the poem and musicians may pop up and do a song (Chris Conway is scheduled to appear.)

It all kicks off at 1 pm, after which I shall be having some samosas and crumpets in the cafe.  See you there.

Kirk out

A Poem for Gaz of Fingerprints Cafe

Four years ago Gareth Carnall, owner of Fingerprints cafe in Leicester, was suddenly and tragically killed in a head-on collision.  I wrote about his funeral in this blog post:

https://lizardyoga.wordpress.com/2014/07/29/the-fingerprints-of-life-gazs-funeral/

and now I’ve written a poem for him:

Fingerprints

 

A car crash on a lonely lane

left Fingerprints of loss

witness the neighbourhood remain

for the cortege to cross;

the slow procession, nothing rushed

the street from end to end was hushed.

 

It caught my throat: I hadn’t thought

to feel so much for one

I’d known so little: yet it taught

that when a life is run

we walk so slowly to the grave

as if to make the time our slave

 

For death came quick: head-on collision

in the early dawn

a crash nobody could envision

nor expect to mourn

his flag of life as yet unfurled,

no time to vanish from the world

 

I can’t imagine how it feels

to those who knew him best

the sudden smash of blackness reels

and rocks within the chest

a host all silent in the road

shared common grief as life was slowed.

 

For Gaz left prints of memory

upon the local scene

this heartbeat of community,

the bench outside still green;

forgetting would be travesty

so, fingering the melody

here we sing our threnody –

remember this his legacy.

 

Sarada Gray, 2018

Kirk out