A bit of bliss is going on right here, right now
underneath these bread and cheese trees
next to the Cliffs (of Shag)
on this gorgeous Autumnal afternoon.
Sun is warm, sun is delicious, sun is burnishing…..
This is delightful…..
All I need now is a nice cup of tea
Thinks Hazel.
……. Oh!…. Mmmm …..
…………Here it comes!……..
Words & Photo: Ian Nisbet
Watched a BBC 4 documentary this week on the development of Monasticism in Britain. It showed how the illuminated manuscript The Lindisfarne Gospels was made.
Hazel has also made an illuminated manuscript of the W. B. Yeats poem ‘The Stolen Child’. Here it is.
Illustration: Hazel Brown
Intricate. Beautiful. Illuminated!
Hazel: I began reading D H Lawrence when I was 14; he was my absent educator, my fictitious lover.
He spoke both to my body and soul; that ‘fire’, that ‘spark of nature, his lust for life and sensuality resonated with me. I felt I had found a true soul mate – if only in literature. I had been feeling strong stirrings of my own sexuality since I was about 11/12 yrs; such a passionate, fiery child on the inside – though a thin, blond haired waif on the outside – so no one ever guessed just how fiercely I burned, how I percieved the rest of humanity.
I felt he was speaking for me….who did not have a voice…..
@
Ian: I got well into Lady C last night; in chapters 9 and 10 I had to slow my reading right down so as to read every single word in every single sentence, so as to be there with the pair of them; and the great thing about Lawrence is he can get you there, on the outside and deeply inside – as if you were experiencing WITH, not just reading ABOUT; but you have to pay as much attention as he is to every detail of the present he is laying out before you. Its like you become aware inside this awareness of his characters, as if you actually become them, get transferred or transformed into them.
To really read Lawrence I feel I have to up the intensity level in my imagination to a very high concentration; otherwise I don’t engage with the whole experience, the full richness.
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Hazel: Reading Lawrence is re-affirming my own sense of self, re-activating that life force which can get rather fogged by all we have to deal with in the ‘outside ‘ world.
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Ian: Lady C’s Lover isn’t obscene at all is it? He does get onto an OTT wave of purple rapture, which can seem too much; but thats only because he was passionate about life, about his life, about his one and only wild and wonderful life, all too soon too quickly over.
So i can forgive him all his excess and his soap-box preachiness because he continues to open our minds and our hearts, and our little John Thomas’s and Lady Janes even now.
You feel better for reading him than not reading him, well i know i do, and thats all that counts.
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Hazel: Yes, you do feel better for reading him. He brings such insights and riches.
He said. ” I love wild things…almost to foolishness.”
@
Here is the 1993 televised version of Ken Russell’s ‘Lady Chatterley
Sean Bean as Gamekeeper Mellors is a revelation (Joely Richardson as Lady C is pretty good too)
Hazel and I watched it on Youtube tonight.
…”I adore that hut”….. (texts Hazel)
……”Its great watching it together Haze…” (texts Ian)
……”It is!…..I love our…Lawrence connexxion…….and this film……says it all…although I want to say so much more………” (texts Hazel)
“I shall always be yours in the wood”….. (says Sean B to Lady C)
A wood is a wonderful place to be.
Subliminal Threads 