Long time, no see

After struggling to figure out what my password was for this account for a good 10 minutes and finally caving and resetting it (I know it was 'Pancakes' related, but just couldn't remember the finer details), I had to laugh at the one single lonely post I had put up here. In November. 8 months ago. It is now August. The snow has melted, England is past its most bitter winter in 20 odd years and thawed out again into the summer heat of the inane teenage hoody riots. During this time I could pretty much have created and fully grown a baby.

If it's any consolation (to myself), I'm almost certain I started out like a million other bloggers did. With a post about my good intentions and my love of words and my 'meaty wisdom' to all wannabe writer's to get on and just bloody write...and then...of course...by being mute for 8 months. If I had created a baby fair do's, but I haven't.

So, password reset (nothing to do with pancakes, it was making me hungry anyway), I am up for giving this another go.

Have just finished reading 'Under the Jaguar Sun' by Italo Calvino. A fantastic little book made up of three short stories. He died whilst writing the book, which was intended to be a book based on the five senses. The three stories are all consuming. They do not describe or focus on senses. They are the senses. Calvino writes through the organs of the mouth, the ears and the nose in his three pieces. The writing is unusual and fragmentary, but oh so flowing at the same time - if it can be these two contradictory things at once, which it seems to achieve. Fragmentary perhaps, because it disclocates us from the whole body. It hones in on that one sense like it was the only sense. The only perception. And then the writing, the story, the ideas, the feelings flow beautifully and intrinsically through this single organ. There were many sentences that struck me. I love books where a sentence, or a few lines here or there just stick out. A piece of art in their own right. A little truth in amongst the lovely jumble sale.  Here are a few lines, precisely like that from the first story in the book 'Under the Jaguar Sun':

"Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intensity of serpents' - serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinago a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas."

I even love the end bit, where Calvino drifts off into what seems like a Mexican menu. Somehow it just fits. Mouth, teeth, chewing, swallowing, consumption. The need is basic and everyday. We need food - to survive. The need is based on emotion and yearning - we need sex and comfort and intimacy. The need is greed - we desire beyond our means. Our desire leads us on an endless bid for consumption. One that can never satiate our hunger.