New location for my blog.

Now at http://breathlessinorewa.blogspot.com

3. Inspiration and Sources

What will I write about in this blog of mine? I suppose all diarists over the centuries have asked themselves that.

I'll write about anything and nothing, as fancy takes me. When fancy fails I'll raid, copy and paste from the plentiful material I've accumulated over the years, material stretching back to my childhood letters, my first diary (1959), and files of scribbled notes and ideas squirrelled away and boxed up periodically for transit from place to place - from multiple addresses in London (Queens Park, Enfield, Leytonstone, Finsbury Park, Carpenders Park) to multiple addresses in Auckland (Milford, Takapuna, Papatoetoe, Otahuhu, East Tamaki [Sugar Mountain], Whitford [Amberfields], Milford again, Orewa). One more Orewa to go and that should be it.

I retired in 2002 at the age of 62; partly on health grounds, partly because I could afford to, partly because I'd worked at The University of Auckland for thirty years and that seemed long enough, largely because I wanted to devote more time to writing creatively. Between 2002 and 2005 I wrote two to three hundred thousand words: some poems and short stories, the drafts and redrafts of two novels, a children's story, a television script, and a short book on my experiences in a creative writing programme. Just as suddenly I stopped writing and decided to amuse myself painting. I joined James Lawrence's class in Abstract Acrylics at the Mairangi Arts Centre and later, when my lungs complained about the fumes from acrylic paints, a class in watercolours at the Lake House Arts Centre in Takapuna. A couple of Christmases ago I suggested to all the members of my jigsaw-puzzle family that they might like to pick a watercolour from my boxful as a part-present. They all did so bravely, diplomatically claiming that they had found one that they liked.

We had a big clean up prior to our move to Orewa culminating in a garage sale on Saturday October 8th. Sharon was amused to see that I was happy to part with my recently purchased books but packed up all the tatty old ones to take with us. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) was for sale but not The Portable Nietzsche that, the flyleaf informs me, I purchased on 16th March 1963; its paperback cover is now almost worn away. I have the Nietzsche on my desktop along with a 1975 Penguin Education edition of Walt Whitman's The Complete Poems, half held together by brittle brown pieces of sellotape, and an almost new copy of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude, purchased online a few years ago. Most of my books are in storage in the garage here but I deliberately kept these aside. They are three of my dipping books.

I was brought up in a very religious household. Like newspaper horoscopes read with the morning's toast and marmalade, the bible was consulted daily by my parents (and briefly by me too in my teens) for inspirational verses to shape the day's activities. So when I lack inspiration for my blog I will go dipping, open a page and see what jumps out. When thinking about today's blog I opened The Book of Disquietude in this random way. It was pages 122-123 and contained the start of a new piece, number 211 titled Lucid Diary.

I have no doubt that if Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) were alive now he would have been an inveterate blogger. The edition of his work that I have here contains five hundred and twenty three pieces spread over a little under three hundred pages. Largely unpublished in his lifetime, the introduction by Richard Zenith informs me, he left an archive of 25,426 documents, wrote poetry under three different names and created over 70 'dramatis personae' in his 'theatre of himself'. Pessoa, like an addicted game-player on the internet, lived in and for his writing and only returned to the reality of the physical world when he had no other choice.

Perversely I dip into The Age of Disquietude to cheer me up. Bernardo Soares, Pessoa's partself author of the book, has a vision of everyday life that is bleak and despairing. He describes the 'paltry pinnacle' of his job as an assistant bookkeeper for a fabric warehouse as 'like a siesta', at the same time recognising that his ability to feel and think is 'a function of my denial and evasion of duties.' Soares/Pessoa turns the agonising miracle of self-consciousness, and his unflinching conviction of the futility of life, into art. And when his ability to dream ebbs away he finds himself abandoned to 'musing on my dreams, and so I leaf through them, like a book one leafs through over and over, finding nothing but inevitable words'.

But such words.

2. Transitions

I have thought about blogging for some months now, enjoying as I have Kate and Harriet's russellcake.blogspot.com. It will be a major transition for me to start up a new life online, but a necessary one in a time of major transitions.

My first blognotes were written on 16th October 2011 in a M.I.L.K notebook containing a few scribbled jottings made between 'January 10th 2003, Opononi, Northland', and '29th July 2009, A Life in Pieces'. They are notes about pivotal points in my life, looking forward and looking back, about the curtailments of age and health and the ineffable sadness of lost lives, friends, loves. 

On October 17th Sharon and I moved from Milford to a six month rental in Orewa. So we are in transit for a spell having sold each of our properties and pooled our riches to purchase a single level apartment (18 Eaves Bush Parade) under construction in Kensington Park at the north end of Orewa (http://www.kensingtonpark.co.nz/). It is on the north east side of the top floor of the three-storey Streamside block (the left hand end if you are looking at the drawing), planned for completion in late March or early April. From our rental we can wake to the banging of the carpenters and step into the street to see the building taking shape at the end of the road.

It was the stairs that did it. I need to eliminate stairs from my life. A three level townhouse was becoming more than my hips and lungs could handle.
According to The Rock Follies...

Until you put
Your foot
Upon the stairway
You'll never know
What the stairway is
Or where it may go

Go up the stairway
It's time to climb...

in the expectation that the stairway will lead to better things. Not for me thankyou. My climbing days are over.



Mary and I built Sugar Mountain to those 1976 Rock Follies lyrics (www.therockfollies.co.uk/songs.html) but now I seek a life with Sharon on a level plane. For me stairways are only good for going down. If I want to go up in the world I look for a lift or an escalator.

There is one last stairway I will climb, however. It is to the top of Streamside before the lifts are in and the building complete. As soon as the developers allow us access I'll take my camera and post you the view.

For reasons that will become apparent if you follow my blog, I have adopted the pseudonym Breathless. Yesterday evening New Zealand joined me struggling to breathe in the tense last minutes of the All Blacks' 8-7 World Cup win. Sacrebleu. That was close. 

1. All I need

All I need is some air I can breathe...

 ...and to love you.

I tried to add a link to The Hollies song 'All I need is the air that I breathe...' but obviously mangled it (thanks Rob for the alert). You can find it on youtube together with a more recent version by Simply Red.

I never cared for the song much but the refrain, with my minor amendment to the lyric, has taken meaning for me in recent years. Why this is so will become clear should you wish to follow me into my new online world in the blogosphere.