Saturday, September 13, 2008

Written versus pictorial images

Hi fellow bloggers

Today we fly to Byron Bay, via Ballina, leaving at 5.30pm. I’m more uneasy than usual because we are leaving Ella behind. She will come up two days later, one day and a bit to be exact on the Monday morning, in order for her to compete in the National History Challenge on Sunday. We had thought the interviews were to be conducted on the following Sunday. I call that wishful thinking. You want it so badly that you don’t read the instructions.

I’m sure it will all be all right in the end. For now I am on holidays for the grand sum of one week. I need a break. My voice has gone to laryngitis and I can barely raise a shout.

For the last few days I have been haunted by dream images.

Green Tree Hill.
We are standing at the edge of a clearing, a small group, my children, my siblings. We have caught the train to Cheltenham station and we leave the platform on the cemetery side. It is the cemetery side of the station that I am looking at but it seems different somehow, as if we have arrived in the country.

The man is foreign. Puffy face, dark eyes. He holds the baby in his arms underneath a coarsely woven blanket. I know it’s a baby because I can hear it crying. He looks as though he feels trapped, standing there on the edge of the clearing as if he had had some intention before we came along but now that intention has changed.

We’ve stopped him in his tracks, he hesitates and just as I am about to offer to hold the baby for him, he throws it down onto the stony ground beside him and bolts. He is gone almost before we register the thud of the baby’s head against the hard earth and I am horrified at how close I had come to being able to save this baby. If only I had known. Why couldn’t he have put the baby down, not thrown it down so heavily.

The thud of the head on the ground and then it rolls out of the blanket. The baby’s head has been severed and rolls over with no body attached. Its eyes are open, brown berry eyes as deep in colour as a pool of blood, wild staring eyes. I can only register the severed neck and cannot bear it any longer. I wake up.

Interpret this dream as you will. I have thoughts but I won't include them here, other than to speculate that the dream says something about the severance of intellect and body that I struggle with much of the time.

Lately, I have become frustrated with my blog. It is far too text based, but unlike some of the other blogs I enjoy, , , http://lucaantara.blogspot.com/and http://abyssgazing.blogspot.com/

I will need to find some real images to include. Then I will feel more complete, less like a head without a body. In the meantime bear with me. I will improve.

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