Continuing the work of The Gardener
September 22, 2008
Message from Mrs cs:
I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to those who have felt moved to send me messages both publicly and privately. My apologies that I have not yet manage to reply to you personally but I will do so once the obvious chaos dissipates.
I haven’t found many unpublished works by Steve that I feel are appropriate to add to this site at the moment. I am working my way very slowly through all of the posts and printing them for Steve’s Dad but I do find it hard at times. However, I have been giving some thought to what to do with Steve’s blog.
Certainly, I feel it is entirely appropriate to leave it ‘live’ so that others who have an interest in doggerel can read it. I have also been considering adding a new page to document the ‘rescue’ of the garden which is sort of where our on-line life started many years ago with a little website documenting the garden and plants which is still out there frozen forever in the year 2006. I do wonder whether it is ‘right’ to use Steve’s blog for this purpose, so if you have any thoughts about it please don’t hesitate to share them.
I’m still trying to sort out what I have to live on and trying to adjust to life without Steve so there won’t be a lot of news as we go into Autumn and Winter. The good news though is Steve’s Dad is going to make it possible for the garden to be kept in its present form (1 acre) so I won’t have to make too many agonising decisions about where to cut the garden off. It also means that there is a real prospect for me to remain at Hedgelands.
My plan is to create a new page or pages to share progress (or the lack thereof) in the garden (this post being the first). I don’t expect many to read this part of the blog and to be honest the work (and the progress reports) are dedicated to Steve – besides his ashes can’t be scattered about until I’ve got the grass at the very least under control!
Michele
(aka Mrs cs)
PS . should visitors wish to comment or post doggerel, poetry, questions about plants or gardening I have left that facility (for the time being) in place. Sadly, I will not be quite as engaging or talented a host as Steve but I will do my best.
September 23, 2008 at 12:23 am
Hi, Michele. I often drop by, in the fatuous hope that it’s all been a terrible mistake and that Steve is still at the old stand. I’m glad to hear you’re well.
I’ve had a brass plaque made with the words:
Stephen John Bailey (cynicalsteve) 1959-2008
Poet, Gardener, Scientist
“His foe was folly and his weapon wit”
I passed it on to the sexton of St.Anne’s who told me I must now wait for a bench to be assigned. “How long will that take?”, I asked.
He shrugged eloquently. Were he a Muslim, he would have said “inshalla, (as God wills).
“I’d be happy to buy a bench and install it myself”, I suggested. He looked at me as though I’d suggesting turning the Rectory into a combination knocking shop/crack house. Oh, well.
I must be patient. I’ll send you photos as soon as it’s done, though.
Love, Mishari
September 23, 2008 at 7:06 am
Hi Mishari, thank you for letting me know about the plaque and I think the inscription is a lovely one. It doesn’t surprise me that benches are limited and that it takes time. Steve would be touched by the thought as am I. I visit his blog every day but it can be hard to read through the comments. I’m sure that will change over time. All the best Michele
September 23, 2008 at 7:30 am
Hello Michele, like mishari I’m often a passing visitor to steve’s site, sometimes spending time looking at the flower photos that steve posted – they capture something that feels …. well, calm, I suppose.
I’m happy to hear that you’ll be staying on at Hedgelands and planning an assault on the garden. Steve’s dad sounds like a good egg
Best wishes
September 23, 2008 at 7:33 am
ooo look, I’ve corrected my email address and now have a purple people eater icon
September 24, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Hi Michele
Another frequent dropper-in. Thanks for the post and I’m glad to hear that you are having some good news in these dark times. A “new page to document the ‘rescue’ of the garden” would, I think, be a welcome addition and give us all another reason to meet here again.
Take care
Billy
September 26, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Hello Michele, I also look in here from time to time (as you can see). It’s obviously left a gap for several of us. It’s good to hear that you are tackling the garden. There must be a lot of fine plants out there.
I can’t go on the beach now without collecting pieces of sea glass, which I either bottle (Mishari’s suggestion, I think) or (the larger chunks) toss onto my front garden, which I made into a replica beach a couple of years ago. Consider yourself the inspiration for a new pastime.
September 28, 2008 at 9:36 am
Michele, I came across this most welcome news from you two days ago. But I did not feel able to post. I returned to the page I’d been reading before I went online … about Penelope Fitzgerald working on The Blue Flower — which just might be the perfect book for you, now, if you haven’t read it.
A few sentences from the place where I’d last stopped, I read:
=== It appears . . . that she wanted to incorporate the anachronical story of the discovery of the blue poppy in the high Himalayas in the early twentieth century by Colonel Eric Bailey — from whom it derives its botanical name, Meconopsis Baileyi — and a mysterious Jesuit priest. All this is the pollen that led her to the poet Novalis and his incomplete mystical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the beginning of which she quotes teasingly in the wonderful seventeenth chapter ‘What is the Meaning’: . . . I long to see the blue flower . . .’ In Novalis, the flower is a reminder of the golden age when plants and animals spoke and told their secrets to mankind. In a dream he sees it mutate into a sweet girl’s face. ===
. . . not just A flower that I think the dgg showed us on this site, and possibly the same as the one in your striking glass composition. Also a coincidence of names; a poet who died too young; Catholicism (the religion of his upbringing, later rejected, cs told us); and finally, German, the only foreign language he admitted to knowing, which belongs to the country where you met.
Yes I was overwhelmed.
Iamnothere/Frances, this is also a post for you. Isn’t it time you came back to the blogs? I miss your gentle teasing, not just of me but all of us.
September 28, 2008 at 9:41 am
Sorry, not the country where you met, but where he was a student when you met in Austria — on a skiing holiday, I think he said.
Also, I did not mean to make a tall ‘a’ before flower. The computer did that all by itself.
September 29, 2008 at 7:32 am
Hallo MM, parallaz,wordnerd7. I’ve been distracted lately so haven’t been as attentive as I would wish. I’m pleased that you visit the site to look at the images of the plants.
Hang on to your seaglass MM – seaglass is a finite resource which is fast disappearing. I expect you have a wonderful collection already.
wordnerd – One of the attractions of blue poppy was, of course, its name. The coincidences are interesting. Reading anything serious at the moment is beyond me – still trying to catch up on year’s of missed sleep.
I do have a few photos of plants but they are not as revealing about the plants as I would like. The leaves on some of the trees are just on the turn and I hope to share some images of these trees doing what they were planted to do in the near future.
Take care
Michele
September 30, 2008 at 7:45 am
I don’t know what Iant would make of them, dear Mrs cs, but I simply enjoy coincidences for their intrinsic beauty, the way I do rainbows.
There was a bit more to the collection I set out for you.
I’d actually been thinking of you a couple of pages before I got to the one I’ve mentioned. About two dozen paragraphs earlier, it said that PF’s very first book was a biography of Edward Burne-Jones:
‘With her _Burne-Jones_ she had repaid a debt to an artist who, in an epiphanic childhood moment, when the sun shone through his stained-glass window, ‘The Last Judgement’, in a Birmingham cathedral, had awoken in her a sense of ideal beauty in art.’
Just before the original snippet I pasted in, I read that PF had originally wanted to be an artist. Her actual careers as wife-and-mother, teacher, then biographer and novelist, were the compromises she had to settle for. The frustrated artist in her fell in love with that blue poppy before she thought of writing about Novalis, and it was the flower that sucked her into his story:
‘She is on record saying that in an ideal life she wouldn’t have gone to Oxford to read English, but would have become an artist. . . In the 1970s, one of her many projects was a book on flower symbolism in the original pre-Raphael painters of the Quattrocento.’
. . . The Blue Flower is a very short novel, its ideas and feelings phenomenally compressed, so its actual reading won’t take you very long, when you get around to it, some day. . . Understanding what I do of it has taken more than one very happy immersion in its pages, for me . .. I know that you probably can’t summon the concentration for fiction, at present. It’s been like that after the worst traumas of my own life. The overwhelming sense of shattering gets in the way of building up the fictional world you must, to follow a story.
Just one last thing . . It’s important for you to know that although the book is about a life cut short tragically, it isn’t in the least depressing. Without a drop of sentimentality, PF turns Novalis’s brief existence into something like a rainbow, to go back to where I began – makes sure that wonder about someone like him ever having been on this earth far outweighs the sadness about his end.
October 5, 2008 at 2:09 am
What is a blank page, perhaps one where words are inadequate.
Words sometimes sit on a page, have no life. But your words Michele in your blog on 12th September are alive, they are a testimony to love. They convey a love that is/was not selfish.
Take peace, take time,
Frances/Iamnothere
October 5, 2008 at 3:09 pm
The blog of yours I was referring to Michele I now note was 27th August, not as typed above.
Wordy,
Guess what? I’m all worded out.
October 6, 2008 at 6:37 am
Welcome back, Frances, and no, please don’t let yourself stay worded out. It simply isn’t a choice, you see.
. . . But if you are telling us that you feel you’ve been bumping up against the limits of language, because confronted with the inexpressible, then I do understand.
I’ve been rushing . . . from A to B and back again . . . and in this ridiculous state, snatched the wrong pile of photocopied pages from a dusty table. On the top page, there was the lit. critic George Steiner pronouncing,
=== To understand music is to be confronted with the surprisingly confining limits of language. Only dance, perhaps, can explicate music. [. . .] Now it is precisely this utter presence beyond verbal paraphrase or proof, beyond logical diagnosis, which seems to attach to the ‘borderline’ but immensely significant phenomena of religious belief, of eros and of death. ===
Anyway, Frances, when did you experience the first symptoms of de-wording?
. . . Now, Steiner’s ability to think and write like that, at least sometimes, puts him almost beyond criticism, for me. I miss being able to argue about him with the dgg, and the incomparable joy of ‘talking’ to him about so much else, just as I don’t doubt most readers here do.
So I’ve been looking up old conversations, and here’s one from neither GU nor his own site — for Michele to add to her collection. The subject was the putative literary movement [tremendous coughing fit here, for some reason] known as the Brutalists:
===============
cynicaloldhacker
Joined: 20 Sep 2007
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:05 pm
I’m glad a kind of entente cordial has been reached… I think most of the posters on here would get along with the brutalists in person too… maybe part of the reason you argue is because, really, like soon-to-be-lovers in a romantic comedy, you have so much in common…
steve
Joined: 05 Aug 2007
Posts: 99
PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 9:48 pm
Indeed, cynicaloldhacker – Bruty is in the eye of the beholder….
The appeal of the writers of Brute
Is an attribute not in dispute.
Indeed, just to know ‘em
Inspires a warm poem;
They’re really quite cuddly and cute….
obooki No.2
Joined: 01 Oct 2007
Posts: 49
PostPosted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 11:02 pm
There once was a writer of Brute
Whom someone else tried to refute,
But he spent far too long
Showing that he was wrong
So at last he gave up the dispute.
=====================
October 6, 2008 at 6:55 am
De-wording wouldn’t be a bad idea, for me . . . What a muddle.
I meant our doggerelist for ‘him,’ here:
‘of ‘talking’ to him’
Also, that I’d love to know who ‘cynicaloldhacker’ was. A dgg copycat?
October 8, 2008 at 7:11 am
Thank you for the sentiment and verse Frances. And many thanks for the extra on the book The Blue Poppy. It does sound an interesting read. Still trying to do practical things here at Hedgelands. There is a damp patch in the cob. I am hoping it is caused by the lack of guttering. So the search for a builder to replace the guttering is on. I will also have a cob specialist come in and inspect the wall to make sure it is solid.
I do have some images but the weather has been so wet and dull that I’m reluctant to post them. I used to get so much done but at the moment I have little energy or enthusiasm to spare so manage only to do a few things. I’m hoping this changes.
Take care
October 15, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Michele, take your time. We’re all going nowhere.
October 18, 2008 at 8:25 am
hi michele,i have not visited here for many months and this is the first posting i have left here since perhaps aug07,,we (steve and i)discussed your stained glass and how the lettering was executed,,
i learnt recently that steve was no longer posting
and wish to offer my condolences to you and to tell you that your wonderful steve gave me a wonderful gift when he invited me to visit the poetry threads on the gu site,,i had no interest
in poetry by other people at that time,,that invitation has lead to many many deeply pleasurable hours passed reading the threads woven by mm,bm,,wn7,pa,atf,bos et al and of course the notorious wombat kid,,thank you steve for a lasting gift,,a true treasure,,as were you
and as a final interaction steve one of my headlines that you enjoyed just for you
Departed Doggrelists Deed Defies Description
October 18, 2008 at 8:41 am
I do wonder whether it is ‘right’ to use Steve’s blog for this purpose, so if you have any thoughts about it please don’t hesitate to share them.
this site is a garden,,the posts are the blooms
the writers the birds and the bugs and the friendship is the wind and the sun and the rain
dropinbucket
October 18, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Hello dropin, thanks so much for this chance for a small smile:
‘Departed Doggrelists Deed Defies Description’.
I imagine that the dgg would award it a
(only I think you’re saying that he _did_ . . . ha!).
Departed Doggerelist Defies Description is the real problem . . .
I can’t imagine what missing him must be like for Michele when those of us who never laid eyes on him, and have full lives, are still feeling the lack of him like a stinging laceration. I have to keep reminding myself that he himself was a coper par excellence, but that only goes so far.
. . . Now that I’m perfectly alright again, so in no danger of fishing for sympathy, I can say that I spent the second half of September all but flattened by my first vicious bout of something like ‘flu (24-hour hacking) for years — actually, since the last time I experienced losing someone as completely unbearable. The manager of my local vitamin-and-herb shop said that there were no viruses going around, and no one else I know was ill, so I expect that a spell as a pathetic sickie was an attempt to grow a psychic scab of sorts. . . or, as people say, to ‘numb out’.
I’ve hesitated to post on this subject — but some screen names have disappeared altogether both from this blog and GU, and it has occurred that others might be, or have been, in similar straits, and could be relieved to know that there is someone else thinking, but none of us are really real to each other, so how does such a reaction make sense???!? . . . and also . . . damn-and-blast! and every foul scatological word in the dictionary, etc., etc. . . . ah, 21st-c modernity . . . [sigh].
_Maddening_, aside from anything else, not to be able to ask him, dgg: did you mean Starless and Bible Black, the one track, or the whole 30th Anniversary King Crimson album? . . . I’ve been listening to a dazzling scrap of improv. funk on it, ‘We’ll Let You Know’ in an endless loop for hours at a time, for days. Have no idea why its appeal is so sticky; but am sure he’d be able to explain. He did, after all, predict what I didn’t believe for a second when he was still here — that I’d _like_ prog rock.
Michele: this post comes with an extra-big hug for you, a fierce hope that you stay well, and this vote in favour of:
=this site is a garden,,the posts are the blooms=
October 18, 2008 at 1:13 pm
. . . and it has occurred _to me_ that . . . etc..
Frances/Iant: any chance of you returning — if only to vote?
November 3, 2008 at 2:58 am
buckets water gardens,,
november shows a small shoot
this garden lies fallow
but not forgotten
November 4, 2008 at 3:58 pm
hello Michele
nothing more
to say
just that
I still visit
often
on quiet days
November 7, 2008 at 12:03 pm
…as do I. I often go back over old conversations here, re-living the pleasure they gave me. The teasing, the bantering, the outbreaks of seriousness…I hope you’re well, Michele.
November 7, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Thank you for sharing your verse dropinbucket and parallax. I haven’t had the energy to read and re-read Steve’s blog for a while. The house has a few issues that need to be addressed and it is taking much of my concentration to navigate this. I am finally feeling a bit more comfortable with what needs to be done and what can wait. I’ve also asked for some assistance in starting the garden rescue … well a small patch nearest the house at any rate.
I have been wrestling with my desire to restore the garden as it was before Steve became too ill to work and the reality of being one person with limited financial resources and being only the undergardener. This dilemma has generated a great deal of angst. I will have to make compromises but hope I can preserve the spirit of his garden. He was most enthusiastic about his trees and I will certainly keep as many of these as I can. But I fear the big herbaceous borders may be greatly reduced in size in favour of shrubs and trees due to the time it takes to keep them in good shape.
Physically I am well enough but have started to try to improve my health and fitness which suffered especially in the last two years. I am sleeping much better if not solidly through the night. I’m not myself just yet but I do have moments of being myself (if that makes sense to anyone).
On a more positive note the autumn colours at Hedgelands are building up but the weather is either too dull to get a decent photo or I’m too busy getting ready for a fair when the weather is good. Typically, today the weather was lovely but I was driving myself slowly mad with the display indoors. Tomorrow the weather is set to be nasty and who knows how this might affect visitors to the fair (let alone the financial turmoil of late!).
I will post up any progress but things seem to be taking a long time to resolve at the moment.
take care
Michele
November 9, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I too continue to pass by and when visiting the Guardian web site, I often find myself wondering how Steve might have responded.
Thank you for taking the time to keep in touch with the virtual world.
Is all Steve’s verse on the site now? I was wondering if it would be possible to put a compendium of his verses in one place. May be, some day, when memories are less raw, could you write a little more about Steve: who he was; his life; his illness; his hopes and fears? It would be appreciated.
November 11, 2008 at 9:03 am
I know that Steve requested help from people who posted regularly here to gather in the strays from other boards and several were located and posted (with links to the original board) here. There are some unfinished / unsatisfactory verse which remains unpublished and that was Steve’s decision which I will honour. He wrote hs verse longhand and then slowly slowly typed it so I have written copies of many of the pieces you read on this blog. There is only one that doesn’t appear here and it is too personal to post at the moment. So most of his work is on this blog.
I’ll consider writing a short piece about Steve I certainly have written a few already for different purposes but those were very brief. He didn’t want to let his illness totally consume his life. His verse and his blog and the relationships he made through them were free of the illness to some extent. You got to see the best of Steve. I often feel when reading his comments here that the ‘Steve before the illness’ was still there battling away in defiance of his affliction.
Michele
November 11, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Thank you Michele, I cannot help feel that there may still be the odd verse somewhere in forgotten blogs. Sometime I may see if I can unearth anything else. I feel that there was an integrity in his blogging persona that is rare in the forlorn anonymity of the blogosphere.
Wishing you well, Martin
November 14, 2008 at 5:12 am
Hello, Michele. Please don’t feel obliged to *reveal* Steve if you consider it at all inappropriate. As a remote and virtual friend, I’m content to remember Steve in the way he presented himself on his blog.
It’s good to hear that you’re finding moments of being yourself. I know that cliches are inadequate, but they’re usually built around a kernel of truth, so as insufficient as this may sound: time takes away the sharp edges of pain.
best wishes
November 14, 2008 at 5:33 pm
I’m with para, Michele. Although I’d very much like to know more about Steve’s life–where he grew up, went to school, what he was studying in was it Vienna? Is that where you met? But I don’t need to know. The person I came to know and like very much on-line was a fully-rounded figure.
I guess it’s just a natural curiosity in people one likes and/or finds interesting. It’s why my book-shelves groan with biographies and autobiographies. But if it makes you at all uncomfortable, then please don’t.
Regards, Mishari
November 15, 2008 at 8:16 pm
mishari,,
The person I came to know and like very much on-line was a fully-rounded figure.
I guess it’s just a natural curiosity in people one likes and/or finds interesting. It’s why my book-shelves groan with biographies and autobiographies.”"”
ever thought of writing one ?,,hint hint
it starts with words on a park bench,,
nice to hear the birds singing
in this garden michelle