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30.12.14

Be still sometimes!


Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year!

Success to your work in 2015!

3.12.14

Isaiah Berlin

'Why live thus and not otherwise? Why should one obey this authority rather than some other, or none? Once the intellect is permitted to raise these disturbing issues there is no holding it; once the first move has been made there is no help, the rot has set in for good.'

The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin

18.10.14

THE HORN-CALL OF THE ALL ENCIRCLING FEMININE!

THOUGHTS UPON ENCOUNTERING THE RECLINING NUDE BY HENRY MOORE AT UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA WHILE OUT WALKING WITH MY SON


Of all the songs held in the hearts of men,
There’s one that goes down deeper than the rest.
The song that fills their mouths and ears.  Oh how
They stumble with its harmonies and chords!

Mischievous boys cavorting in the choir.
Men follow its tunes like stubborn, burdened mules
Led by the halter to the sacred pools
Where flow the words that form the song of LOVE


The horn-call of the all-encircling feminine.
First taught them by their mother’s long ago-
Clamped like limpets on her milky breasts
Man and boy have sucked from those sacred jugs

All the dark and bright they’ll ever know.


17.8.14

POEM-MAD MUCOID MONSTER


Some of the best advice for writers I've ever seen! (From the theguardian.com)

Ten rules for writing fiction 
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts Read the second part of the article here
Illustration: Andrzej Krauze
Elmore Leonard : Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction . A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Diana Athill
1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).
2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)
Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Roddy Doyle
1 Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph ­–
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.
Helen Dunmore
1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3 Read Keats's letters.
4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
5 Learn poems by heart.
6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".
Geoff Dyer
1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."
2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.
3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes  ­"photography" and so on. ­Genius!
5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
8 Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.
9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.
10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to per­severance. But writing is all about ­perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of ­going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of ­postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
2 Don't have children.
3 Don't read your reviews.
4 Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)
5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don't drink and write at the same time.
7 Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don't take any shit if you can ­possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Esther Freud
1 Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn't use any and I slipped up ­during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
2 A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.
3 Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
4 Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.
Neil Gaiman
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
David Hare
1 Write only when you have something to say.
2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.
9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".
PD James
1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
AL Kennedy
1 Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. ­Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
2 Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.
3 Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.
4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.
5 Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
7 Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones ­until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.
9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.
Read the second part of the article here

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9.8.14

Is this the most dangerous man in the World, or a jingling Crow strutting his brief moment on the stage?


Illustration by Barry Blitt (from the New Yorker)


…deep within the caverns underground
Or in the stars of death, spinning in space;
War is woven in the dreams of hollow men.
Iliads spill out of crooked looms.

Putinista’s seek the sons of Omeros
Who sing of warriors as idiots and fools.
They hate the fact
Their fearful verses drown their battle-crys,
Make burning pyres of all their vacant flags,

And tear their uniforms to tumbling rags.

1.6.14

Three poems


 STARLIT NIGHT

One starlit night our love-song slipped
Out an open window [that
I had forgotten to make tight]

Slipped out to frolic beneath the moon
And danced all wild till dawn slipped jewels
Like wedding rings on fronds of grass

And back she came-a homing bird
A swallow cross a mighty sea
Back home safe and secret-safe


Clothed in glittering memories


THE SONGS IN MEN’S HEARTS

These are the songs that live in the hearts of men:
First there is the song of WAR that rises,
Boils, and gurgles in the pumping blood.
Sing O warriors cross the dusty plains
Of Troy a shout of joy-To kill!  To kill!
Such glorious joy the blood to spill.
To read the fear in enemies eyes
As entrails spill like treasure in the trench.

Sing the songs of bloody ecstasy.
Those razored words will cut the hardest steel.
Let the axe sing in the morning bright
And swords ring out like bells against  the shields.
The words are hacked into the hearts of youth:
It is a fine day on which to die,
And anyway who wants to live forever?
Ride her hard: Remember to die young!
Go see the world, and blow the fucker up!

Fear is for the others:  Fear is bad!
Hear them screaming for their mother’s arms,
And take joy in the tears of cursed foes.
We are over here, and they are over
There.  C’mon boys let’s do the bastards!
Rape as an act of war is not so bad,
And bashing out those babies brains was good!
Now we rain down arrows from the moon;
We have contracted Death himself to our clan,
Though it must be said he’s mercenary;
He’ll do both sides business for a song.

And deep within the caverns underground
Or in the stars of death, spinning in space;
War is woven in the dreams of hollow men.
Iliads spill out of crooked looms.
Assassins seek the sons of Omeros
Who sing of warriors as idiots and fools.
Their fearful verses drown their battle-crys.
Make burning pyres of all their vacant flags,
And tear their uniforms to tumbling rags.

Then, there is the quiet song of EARTH;
Almost the steady beating of a drum.
A song that drives men home-an odyssey.
A song that sings of warmth and nourishment;
Whispers in the ripples on the rivers,
Echoes in the shimmer of the leaves.
The poetry of forest’s boundless trees;
The murmur of the worker bees;
The stop and chuckle of the bouncing streams
Decanting into endless seas.
The stopped-up silence of ice-age valleys;
The stacked-up mossy grooves of silent peaks
Riven with sheep-tracks and booted trails.
Fuller’s spaceship-earth hanging like a blue
Eye in the immensity of space.
The breathing land-the earth beneath;
The dark and fecund soil that rustles
With the promise of new life.
The patient song that drove Odysseus home
To Ithaki.
To slaughter the suitors of Penelope
And then sit down to home-made cakes and tea.
We climb into her caves to be renewed.
We cross her seven seas to be revealed.
We climb her sacred mountains to be healed.

Then the song that rides men all their lives
When they have reached the right weight of years.
The song of WORK springs into their bright souls
To punch the broken clock of all their days.
To labour for some bastard in a tower
Who leaks their light with every passing hour.
Those corporate donkeys snuffling in their trough
Are fearful of that thing that sets men free.
The endless driving of the gritted wheel
Grinds the gilded amber of their dreams
And hollows out their core.  Their souls
Are frozen like some fearful glacier;
Or river silted with limitless greed,
Grabbing in its gaping maw all
that is wild and mad and on the budding
Spur.  Those that love their work are few,
Perhaps one or two, while millions slave
Like cattle, herded to an early grave.
They work; they save; they work; they save; they work.

Of all the songs held in the hearts of men,
There’s one that goes down deeper than the rest.
The song that fills their mouths and ears.  Oh how
They stumble with its harmonies and chords!
Mischievous boys cavorting in the choir.
Men follow its tunes like stubborn, burdened mules
Led by the halter to the sacred pools
Where flow the words that form the song of LOVE-
The horn-call of the all-encircling feminine.
First taught them by their mother’s long ago-
Clamped like limpets on her milky breasts
Man and boy have sucked from those sacred jugs
All the dark and bright they’ll ever know.

Now a different woman blows his horn.
And tempts him with a bud of sweet red fruit,
Wrapped within her naked turning curve.
She grunts him in his pits and he minds
To mischief in her gently yielding zawns .
White horses crash and the dragon-fires blaze.
Kaleidoscopes of light; cock-thundered.
His fire is  stirred to waking, roaring riot!
The blinding need to scatter-scatter seed!
Then a fork of lightning splits the sky!
A shout spins out! Then turns into a sigh.
Her head lies in the hollow of his hand-
he gently lets her fall into the night.
Out in the rain, his steel has turned to rust.
His eyes weave webs out of the dust for
As we know and trust: all men philo-
Sophise in the embers of their glutted lust!


Now he dreams that it will be just right
And she dreams she’s found her one true mate.
As if they’re stamped with some magnetic charge
That calls each to each across an ocean.
But the world holds all within its halls.
The world is full of hollow men and girls
Who love their toys and bags more than their mate.
From what cold milky flows did they
imbibe such greed? What withered claw planted
Such vain seeds in sterile fields? (As if
Narcissus took up farming for a joke!-
though now he writes the daily news and runs
The BBC!)

ASIDE TO READER: SHIT!  SHIT!  SHIT! I’LL JUST GIVE IN!
THE POET HURLS HIS QUILL DOWN TO THE FLOOR.
LOVE SIMPLY CANNOT BE DEFINED IN WORDS!
THE MELODY IS TOO COMPLEX AND STRANGE.
I’M TRYING TO PULL DOWN ULTIMATE MYSTERIES!
TRYING TO RING SOME ‘MANY-SPLENDOURED’ BELL!
TRYING TO READ THE CODED CLUES, LOCKED
WITHIN THE KERNEL OF A RIDDLES SEED!
BUT COME! LETS ALL TAKE A BREATH AND CARRY ON.


The warriors of love are the singers of this song
And so we gift them this:  A wedding vow:

I stand here in your fire and in your ice.
Treat equally as gifts; your pain and joy.
Witness here the weaving of my word and will
That, in our very essence we’re conjoined.
In the centre of our Selves, we’re One.

As you see:
The song of love sucks in all the rest.
The fact is:  It’s the one men love the best.
Even if the one, that wounds them most.
Fact is:  It’s the song that makes men blessed.


WHO KNOWS HOW LOVES NETS ARE CAST UPON THE SHAPE-SHIFTING SEA? 

Love has garrotted me-
Crept into my room
and, sleeping, slipped the wire
round my neck and pulled,
until my eyes ballooned.
Love is a mafia assassin!

Love slaps my arse;
gives me pointy ears and
a shrill, shrieking bray.
Has he bid Ariel
anoint my sleeping eyes?
Love is that devious Oberon!

Love is a game with balls;
A game of win and lose-
But this is a threadbare ball:
A pig’s wind-charged bladder
Is bejewelled against the sun.
Love is that penalty shoot-out!

Love seems to be my mission
behind the enemy lines.
Special forces or special needs?
These dark mountainous regions
magnetise the needle.
Love is a broken compass!

Who knows what love is all about?
Who knows how deep her nets go down?
Or who casts them out
On the shape-shifting sea?