Weather Report

an invitation to The Bag of Stars, a quiet writing hour

Sep 21, 2024

This is your invitation - I would love to hear from you

The title, ‘The Bag of Stars’, comes from the final line of Ursula K. Le Guin's wonderful essay / book, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 'Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.'

As Donna Harraway writes in her incisive introduction to the Terra Ignota edition I keep close by on my desk1…

It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with… That’s how worlding gets on with itself in dragon time. A brave student of dragons, Le Guin’s stories are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ p. 10.

The format for The Bag of Stars is simple: we meet online at 7am, take a couple of minutes to greet and settle, when I share a poem, a prose excerpt or sometimes a visual. These can sometimes open an entryway to a piece of writing for participants and there has been more than one delightful incident of synchronicity and serendipity in the group over the past year as a result. Though I mainly view them as something to warm up the creative room, who knows what forces come into play when we come together with generous and playful intentions.

We then mute our devices and we each turn our focus, our playful attention, to our own personal writing project, our own ‘bag of stars’ for the hour. At 7.55 everyone comes back together, one or two may share a little about what they achieved during the hour if they wish, and the session will close at 8am. We each go on into our day feeling more centred, more grounded.

Dates: Monday, 23rd to Friday, 27th September2

Time: 7am to 8am GMT+1, on Zoom

My post from a year ago, on the writer John Berger, makes a good companion here - I particularly love this quote from Berger, ‘the world is doubled by play’. You can take it that this is the intention I set for all sessions at 'The Bag of Stars'. You can read my full post on Berger, from September 2023, below…

On a Zoom call earlier this week3, before the invitation from the host, Helen, to each of us present to offer our check ins, she began by saying that companionable silence was something to be welcomed at this gathering. I felt instantly glad to be reminded of how much I love such silences in this ever more frantic and noisy world, rare though they are. Thank you Helen, I had forgotten.

I would like those who read this newsletter4 to regard the gaps between my posts as those kinds of companionable silences; places where we can allow thoughts and ideas to settle, to compost a little, without the rush to offer something else immediately out of what may be a fear of the silence.

This time I am offering two books by the same author, the wonderful writer and thinker, John Berger. Even dipping into them is like being refreshed by the most life-enhancing drink. (Or the similar effect of beauty described in Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty, in post #1.)5

In my post on Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, (post #14) I mentioned that TLM was one of two books I had carried in my rucksack over the almost 800km of the Camino Frances a few years ago. The second book was, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, by John Berger, a slim book that paradoxically, the more I read the more is revealed. Which reminds me of the ideas in John Briggs’ book, Fractals, the subject of Post #66

Berger is, of course, probably most well-known for his Ways of Seeing7, and in the following from his book, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, in the section titled HERE, he moves from the immediacy of the lilac bush reflected / refracted in the shaving mirror to an examination of what it means to move as a migrant, an emigrant, to dismantle the ‘here’ or have it dismantled. He begins, where else, but here…

On the windowsill is a jug with a flowering branch of lilac, which I cut in a friend’s garden. It is pale purple…
On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores of a skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch, which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun. (p. 54)

Berger asks in the section, ONCE IN A POEM…

How…can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god? (p. 22)

Last weekend I listened, riveted, to an hour of tribute pieces to Seamus Heaney and his work on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany, to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of the poet. For me it illustrated so well Berger’s acknowledgment that yes, a poem ‘may use the same words as a Company Report, but…

everything depends on the relation between the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence. (p. 22)

If ever a poet embodied both principle and presence, in his person and his words, it surely was Seamus Heaney.

Share Weather Report: On Beauty

‘The world is doubled by play’ (p. 69), is a quote from Berger, here used by me to set my intentions as I began a new notebook a year ago. I’m an eldest child, with a consequent lifelong tendency towards a certain earnestness and this is a lovely reminder to me of how we can remake our experiences of the world, be creative, and it implies delight, a lightness of approach, and all the good that can flow from that. A world doubled by play. Just imagine!

In the wonderful Confabulations, Berger writes on the ‘momentary intimacy’ of identifying a live bird… in his case a wagtail.

The satisfaction of identifying a live bird as it flies over, or disappears into a hedgerow, is a strange one, isn’t it? It involves a weird, momentary intimacy, as if at that moment of recognition one addresses the bird - despite the din and confusions of countless other events - one addresses it by its very own particular nickname. Wagtail! Wagtail! (Confabulations p. 17)

This spring and summer we interfered less and allowed our back garden to go a bit wild and hairy. A profusion of dandelions, golden and sunny, scattered themselves across the garden with abandon, including spilling into the spaces between the raised vegetable beds. The surprise to me was that when the dandelions formed those seedhead orbs, those ‘blowy clocks’ of my childhood, in came ‘charms’ of goldfinches to feed. Where were those beautiful birds all along, in the years when we were less tolerant of the wild, the uninvited? How even small inactions by us humans can help to rebalance a tiny corner of the world.

Above I shared briefly Berger’s insights into poetry and in Confabulations, Berger makes ‘notes’ on songs and what they offer:

In every song there is distance. The song is not distant, but distance is one of its ingredients, just as presence is an ingredient of any graphic image. This has been true from the beginning of songs and the beginning of images. All songs are about journeys… songs are sung to an absence… At the same time… in the sharing of the song the absence is also shared and so becomes less acute, less solitary, less silent. (Confabulations, pp 98-99)8

To illustrate these points Berger quotes lines from the song, “Carrickfergus”, sung below by Jim McCann.

‘I could wrap myself,’ said Johnny Cash, ‘in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere; I was invincible.’ (Confabulations, p. 99)

Berger’s writing ranges over a vast landscape of space and time. Deceptively simple language belies the depth of his engagement and thought processes as he gathers in material from across the arts and across life experiences (see for example, the YouTube interview with Michael Silverstein below).

Carrying one of his books in my rucksack across the north of Spain was no burden. Any of Berger’s writings bears regular revisiting and to again quote Elaine Scarry, ‘act like small tears in the surface of the world, that pull us through to some vaster space’. 9

Weather Report: On Beauty

Weather Report

an invitation to The Bag of Stars, a quiet writing hour

Discussion about this post