Moving On

I write some rubbish then I read it and delete it. This is why you've not heard from me for some time. That and a combination of extreme tiredness and maybe some degree of laziness, and also the Edinburgh Festival keeping me busy and leaving me no time to write and not a lot of surplus energy when I do have time. But the thing is that writing is good therapy for me so I do it anyway and some of it you get to read and most you don't.

I hope you liked my poem a few posts back. I'm not expecting a rush of publishers seeking the rights to my completed works, but there are some more poems which I might inflict on you. So if you want to see them you have to ask nicely.

My plan is also to write some little bits of family history before my time runs out. The plan for it is in my head and on various scraps of paper, so all I have to do is get it out of my head and off the scraps of paper and into my blog. I want to do that before it gets too late, and I feel if I say it here it will be some kind of prompt for me to get on with it.

My memory is not serving me well these past few months when it comes to my writing. It gets increasingly difficult to find the right word to use. I know it's there some where but I struggle to bring it forth from the depths. I eventually just have to move on without it or use a word that isn't quite right. Even Roget and my dictionary don't help much, as you really need a word to begin with.

I seem to be rambling as per usual. All I wanted to say was that I've had a very good Edinburgh Festival this year. I've mostly missed the festival for the past two years because of my various cancer treatments, so it was good to be able to go to so many events and exhibitions this year. I won't bore you with the details but I feel I have to mention one show in particular at the main festival and that's The Encounter.

It's a play based on a book called Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu about the American explorer/photographer Loren McIntyre who set out to find the source of the Amazon but got lost and accidentally made contact with the Mayoruna people somewhere on the border of Peru and Brazil. It was the South American/Peru connection that drew me to the show and I am thoroughly delighted to have seen it.

The play was written , directed and performed by Simon McBurney based on his interpretation of Amazon Beaming, with the help of brilliant sound technicians. It's a one man performance lasting for two incredible hours where he takes us right into the Amazon forest and river, and to the village where the Mayoruna live. If you ever get the opportunity you should see this astonishing piece of work. I hope to find the time to read the book and also look at some of McIntyre's publications. He studied ethnology at Universidad San Marcos in Lima. Which is nice. He also did discover the source of the Amazon in Apurimac region of Peru and it's named after him, Laguna McIntyre.

The best way to give a flavour of the play is with a little quote taken from the book:

"There was always the same question when opening the unknown: What to do with it?
    Thoughts, thoughts. Like spaceships, whirling somewhere in a sort of suborbital space. Lying in his hammock, shivering from the cold and hearing the sounds made by the tribespeople who were still awake, McIntyre was aware of a subsphere of his mind in which a different species of mental processes, less explicit and formal, were forever meeting, colliding, mixing. The tribe he had just encountered was part of them."