BoreHigh

After four weeks in Zhuhai the things that I miss are simple: a good English cooked breakfast, loose leaf earl grey, walking in the peaks with my friends, access to my friends, crisp autumn leaves, the dawn chorus, the sound of the wind blowing in the trees, the colour of the red November sky, changing seasons, hanging out with Patti in pyjamas well into the day ( me nagging), my garden, light beams, - access to places like café 9, the quick walking paths I know in Sheffield between the allotments and so on.

AND, I’ve realised now more and more that I miss my books and access to words that inspire. I’ve given away all the books that I brought to China, except one. We had too many and they were heavy. I read 2 novels on the trains to Beijing but since then, I’ve been inspired by the surrounding sights and smells and people here in China, but in Zhuhai, there seems to be very little except miles of apartment blocks (no parks, temples, centres of art, libraries or interesting shops crammed with things we can’t understand) and so, turning to live every day in our 'budget'(!!) apartment and attending daily at the small class room to learn "teaching techniques", we have both become bored and we both miss something of any substance to read.

We brought the great poets CD that the Guardian produced earlier this year and I’m sitting here in this barren fully tiled ‘sitting room’ listening to the recorded voices of Hughs, Plath, Auden, Eliot, Larkin and Heaney and I remember what their words have done for me and my friends during my college years, in my conversations with friends, in borrowed, lent and shared books and I remember that words move, words teach and words shift us into other worlds. Words draw pictures and they carry such strength, that I now realise that it is the word’s ability to move that I miss. Words alone mean very little but strung together in the way the author chose makes the words sing, move, carry, draw.


And now, I realise that I miss my books, or more what the books do to me. So, I sit here drinking in the lyrical Irish lilt of Heaney, the deep, almost war time voice of Eliot, the interesting voice of Plath and the strong and earthy voice of Hughes (my favourite, I think) and I remember what it is like to be moved by something higher than just words on a page.

So, if you read this, THE MAN that I ‘lent’ my 1920’s everyman Tolstoy anthology to in Sanya and you said that you’d send it back to me (YES YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) - well, I’m STILL waiting for you to return it. And, if we get a place to stay, please Huang Loushi, would you send me the Hugh’s Arial poems. And if any of you guys from back home feel an altruistic gesture coming on, we’d welcome any book that you would like to send to us in Suzhou. I’ll send you a present in return because we need the ever rewarding, picture painting, all encompassing possibility of words and stories - their meanings and expressions fulfilling us from inside out.

I suppose, if we can't get an interesting life of our own at the moment, we need to live through someone elses world; through their stories and words. On that note, we need to return to Guangzhou today for two reasons, one because we have to collect and enormous suitcase of hiking gear that we stored because we sadly have not had the opportunity to use it then we need to post it onto Suzhou. And, secondly, to breath fresh air into our lives after four weeks of feeling that we’ve gradually dropped off the end of the earth and into a bleak landscape of apartment blocks, swirling rubbish and uninspiring days.

We return back to Zhuhai tomorrow for the last week of teaching practice - then we're off to Suzhou. oooh, can't wait because I have been reminded what it is like to feel as a result of environment from just 24 hours in Guangzhou which is full of life.




A friend has reminded me why I carry 'The Four Quartets' - Eliot

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desiring;
Love itself is unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

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