Ella Rose Muse: the story: Superhero Rose & talks with Aslan

Friday, 10 February 2012

Superhero Rose & talks with Aslan

You never know what you're going to get when an email from Rayment Kirby arrives in your inbox. I'm a bit in love with these. The first one casts me as an angelic, peace-giving Superhero (well, that's my interpretation of it anyway!), gently administering good will and benevolence to all humanity below. Ha. This should probably be on my business cards (ya know, the ones I rarely remember to actually give out). Seriously though, I love this image! Thanks Rayment.

I love the second one too - so warming to look at in our current snowy conditions! I wonder what hot havoc I'm stirring up.

And now, to cool things down again quite considerably, here is how beautiful the woodland park where I live is looking at the moment (OK, I don't actually live in the forest, though I did see a tent there recently which made me sad... Seriously, I would HATE to be homeless at the moment. Well, ever; but particularly now). Such a perfect scene for Narnia-esque imaginations...

Finally, an irrelevant and unnecessary facial appearance from my cat, Sascha Tom, aka Mr Fluffy Bum/King Fluffalot/'my darling big boy' (sometimes I address his highness as the latter in earshot of my not-quite-boyfriend, to freak him out for my own amusement), mostly due to his particular talent in the heft and fluff departments.

Well, I had to test out my new camera with a willing (lazy) subject, didn't I? He has been following me around obsessively for the last few days, maintaining entire conversations with me around the subject of 'Meeuugh' and 'Meeuh?'. He's a rescue cat, and couldn't purr for years (or perhaps he was hard to please and wanted us to earn the audible evidence of his pleasure), but now, I'm happy to say, he is an accomplished maker of the rumbling throat music. He also once tried to follow me into the bath (though changed his mind in mid-air and managed a sharp reverse). He's cool. I love him a lot. Look at his lion face.

I've had so many dreams about Aslan appearing (only to stare at me, wisely; he doesn't tend to say much, after all) in my backgarden. Those precious moments normally serve to punctuate the episodes of intense warfare where I (with bafflingly extensive abilities to be violent) have to single-handedly save the world or run and hide (usually through rivers or in caves; I think my unconcscious mind is a few centuries behind current events) from world-destroying bastards. It can go either way.

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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Friday, 10 February 2012

Superhero Rose & talks with Aslan