Weaver's Inspiration Meme

My reply, when asked why I write, is usually something like this: "It makes me think, and clarifies what I think about things. It helps me to understand what I feel." So I'm not much of an instant responder, or metaphor-prone describer; I think my work is intimately concerned with what's in my head. I never thought what I wrote could ever be for other people, but a very decent Hugh McMillan has helped me in beginning to see otherwise.

And by golly, don't we think we're the most interesting person ever!

So join me in a journey through the thoughts I carry virtually everyday; in both memory, wishes and dream. I really do. Even Charlton Heston.

Where does it all begin? With parents, of course, and here are mine. My father looms large in a lot of my work, Mum less so. I suspect this is because she's still alive.

The boys next, which is what my three older brothers were collectively known as. The tiniest one in white here is my youngest brother. He was not one of "the boys". They all get in poems.

There's one about Robert here: http://titusthedog.blogspot.com/2009/05/one-where-teddy-gets-it.html

The next image is not pleasant, and I apologise in advance to vegans and vegetarians, but my father's passport said "Wholesale Butcher and Slaughterer", and Oldchurch Road, where I grew up, was the slaughterhouse and the whole of my early childhood was lived in and around it, the ancillary buildings (including our house) and the lairage that serviced it. I can remember it all, and the men who worked there, with terrible clarity. It was a world of itself, and it features a lot in what I write.

Next, my heartland, and ever shall be. We are maids of Essex and not Essex girls. Nemo me impune lacessit. I walked under this bridge every day to and from primary school; and journeyed to Liverpool Street from here every day when I started secondary school. It's in a poem.

Nuns, don'tcha just love 'em! I really do, and it was my chosen career between 5 and 9 years of age. Although Anglican, I went to a convent as my mother thought the Roman Catholics did the best education and they might make a girl out of me (bit of a tomboy). I write about them, if I see any I have to go and speak to them (bit of a nuisance in Rome) and don't get me started on Nun films ... have they ever made a bad one (Black Narcissus, The Sound of Music, In this House of Brede etc., ...)?I would like to think Sister Aiden set my moral compass, but fear that is not the case. We lived near London, Leicester Square half-an-hour away the way my father drove; my father loved epics, so my earliest cinematic memories are of the greatest films ever made being projected onto a screen about 70 feet wide in front of me. All I know of duty, honour, nobility, love and forgiveness I learnt from Ben Hur and El Cid, and you can guess the others. But it was these two films that have stayed with me; that I know every scene, and the dialogue, of from start to finish, and that I could watch on loop and not be able to go and make a cup of tea in case I miss something. And Charlton Heston is The Hur and The Cid, sometimes Judah and Rodrigo, and he is also Charlton Heston; but you don't get bigger or better films than these. They inspire me daily. Really.

We also did museums and galleries a lot with Mum and Dad, and that love of looking at precious things is an integral part of me now. Here are two of my favourite places in the whole world: The British Museum and The National Gallery. There is a prose piece I wrote on one of the artefacts in the British Museum here: http://titusthedog.blogspot.com/2009/05/wandering-in-assyria.html

I would have included The Natural History Museum of My Childhood, but that place has succumbed to the curse of interactivity and I find it a bit of a distressing visit now. Whopping great big Churches naturally come next, so here's my current top 3. There's an Anglican one, Canterbury Cathedral, at number 4, so it's not just the Catholic sort I go for. Wander inside any of these and I feel as if I could write forever.And so to writing, and the two books I would go happily to a desert island with: The Bible (Authorised Version) and Moby-Dick. Read bits of both virtually every day; prose don't get any better than this, in my opinion. Constant sources of inspiration.Much harder to pick the poetry that most inspires me, so I'll go with what I truly love, and that's some Anglo-Saxon, some Middle English and then a Modern. This selection the hardest, but here are three writers I really admire and adore: the Wanderer-poet, the Gawain-poet and Eliot. And if you ever have a go at Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, do try it in the original first with a good prose translation by your side. It's not as hard as it first appears.
Two of the most inspiring geographical locations for me are the run-down bits of cities and those "transitional" spaces - airport terminals, bus and train stations, motorway services. Supreme places to simply observe, I find. Here's a bit of Limehouse in London, which is still just about resisting the march of gentrification from Docklands, and some airport terminal somewhere. Who can ever tell? My life is not complete without a "hard" book on the go that I am never going to understand. I want to be a polymath. The math part still eludes me. I have started the Calculus book below on numerous occasions, to always stumble at the first descriptions of curves. But I still can't believe that I'm not going to understand it. I'm not stupid! It's only maths! So I try, try, try again. Forever, most probably. But science does excite and inspire me. I'm sure I get String Therory, and can imagine pan-dimensional space, but my husband refuses to believe me.My life is also not complete without looking at pictures (or watching the films of) truly glamorous women. Here's four of the best. And I dream. Finally, old things. Really old things, like back when man originated old things. This is one of my favourite books ever, and lies by bed for emergency fact-checking late at night.
And if I go anywhere, I have to go to the oldest sites and they are magic to me. And then I think, constantly, what has made us man, and why language? How language?So I'll finish with a poem about these matters, as this is all about what inspires me to write.

This poem is about a supreme moment in my life, when I walked into the "Africa: The Art of a Continent" exhibition at The Royal Academy. As I entered the first room I saw a glass case in the centre with a rock inside and I knew what it was (from thirty feet away), though I never expected it to be in this exhibition. It was an Olduvai Core, the oldest created artefact. Ever. 2.5 million years old maybe. I think my heart actually did stop.

Moment

for a heartbeat there is no heartbeat
between the hominid and me
she holds it steady hand like mine
I hold it steadfast in my gaze
and will not look away till I can bear the weight
for this is it this rock
the birth of homo habilis who bears me
these two million years past imagine
what happens in her mind that makes her reason
if I hit this with that then other will result
and I can use it glass-cased before me
is the Olduvai Core of Prehistory
and I can’t use language in order to grasp
this the moment of the start of our past

Olduvai Core: Africa: The Art of a Continent, Royal Academy, December 1995