sarah murphy
inventory i. ii. iii. iv v. vi.
nice hat tabernacle white elephants elevenses (Theo) a brief history of dressing a correspondence
all design and words Copyright Š Sarah Rose Murphy 2015
author’s note
part one nice hat
Eve bumps into a girl she hates at the patisserie and she feels giant and useless, and (the other girl’s name is Caitlin), when Caitlin says something of petty and cruel design, Eve can only smile.
Once upon a time people never got sad because the angels just carried all the sadness around on their backs poor angels, the weight hurt them so much and bore holes into their shoulders out of which feathers grew beautifully and finally. So the angels dropped it.
“Once upon a time there were four little rabbits,” reads Lydia without the slightest hint of irony. “Flopsy,” “Well,” he says, hands full of fruit – “Mopsy” “everything’s a metaphor” “Cottontail” “and it doesn’t seem to matter.” “and Peter.”
If you cut pretty cloth into triangles you have made half a garden fĂŞte story. If people throw rice over you then lie down and cross your thumbs over your heart. If your white elephant inevitably runs off into a palace plot, have your sleep grow hanging firs.
There is a common trope in children’s books known as the gentle giant, a big-hearted oaf whose hands and feet are too big for the world. In this way, there are giant people just trying to boil their porridge for breakfast who leave the stove for a second to go to the records room because they want to play some Schubert, because why do we do anything for God’s sake - and porridge is such a lovely thing with so much potential for disaster, sticky floors, fires, but this isn’t a metaphor for Eve.
part two
tabernacle
(bits from my travel diary)
Tabernacle is a word meaning a temporary place of dwelling or worship in the middle of the desert. I want to write stuff down about travelling, like why do I get a mad rush of joy looking at the itinerary and seeing that we can stop at Westbanhof instead of Meidling to get to Vienna sooner? That knowledge-before-knowledge whilst in suspense of a place you haven’t been yet. (Roland Barthes: It is the lover who waits). I think it’s for the same reason I got chills when Tilda sent word of the name of her street Paris - a signifier naming a place which is not committed yet to my mind, nor even my imagination.
Vienna report September 6-7
These are the principles of the balcony we found: the colour of the end-of-the-world and cake hunger. By balcony, I mean a kiss, or someone flying a wooden craft with a gold brooch pinned against their heart. The city is dollhouse and regal at once. It seems to operate in nutshells. The view into other people’s windows across the road comes in squares rather than queenly French rectangles like other places in Europe, and through it you can see more yellow things with their perfect edges, bedsheets being lakes, movies moving on the wall.
Vienna feels like a pastry maker has piped its every line and edge with sugar icing. Beds beautifully precise, the sheets the shade of pink that clouds turn in early summer. Outside I see deliciously short houses, after the rest of Europe which seems to tower. the yellow of the buildings doesn’t seem real (art decor effect). I love these constant wires crossed over everything the sky touches, it gives the feel of some embroidered hemline or like everything is being sweetly firmly measured and compressed like a string tied twice around a warm pile of brown envelopes.
the rain ringing heavy like a vow “i stamp thee” how lustrous a scrap of red lipstick can be!
buda
pest
hanging like bees, we saw golden towers (n.b. find a new expression, everything is a golden tower to me) against the black harvest of Budapest city. Walking past palaces of rubbish, old arm chairs and pill boxes.
is writing just saying what things are? Choosing your experiences like cherry bonbons, okay Prague is just a city borne on a white horse’s back, here in Hungary we are urgent, the marble held between the empress’s big and little toe.
You know i am not capturing my own ‘experience’ because that would be scroungy, I am just looking for a good view.
3 MOMENTS ON EUROPEAN trains 1. Dog-tired on the way back from Belleville, everyone sleepfully conscious of everyone else, Tilda with stolen rotting flowers tucked in her backpack.
“...and European trains are real trains, with all the mechanical drama and the black magic of waiting under a ceiling of twisted glass for uncomfortable sleep in a night carriage”
2. The metro: a hot scrum of everyone who went to the opera like the chocolatiness a huge cafe leaves behind “train carriage smelt of Mozart” etc. Someone who must have been touched by it, still whistling a snatch of The Magic Flute (So if there are tired has-been actors then once you’ve left the theatre what does that make you, an ex-audience?). Those five whistled notes, like seeing one of those (“The French long lost figures with the eye at the back underground of your head but everyone else’s elbows is loveliest being too crammed for you to properly with its white turn around and touch them (between the walls and the shoulders). little flash of music as the 3. Don’t want to say solidarity but there doors open”) is a solidsomething between us train hoppers crouched on the carriage floor, reading and eating and listening to music, feels like we’re all asleep at the same time and have fallen into each others’ night times, night time of solid blues like cotton in the cold with things hanging down that you have to wade through, a stranger’s suspenders, the paperclipped pages of an airport novel, a cherry tree.
September 1-4 prague
This Chantilly cream rush of water, this city which loves stone like a lover’s tightly woven waist you tie a ribbon round while telling her breathe in like a tree lined avenue which leads to your favourite animal like yellow being holy in the afternoon light rather than cheerful like a Sunday at some ever-renewing czech tradition where we eat our peace in the palace kitchen with almonds and bread and throw ourselves off the monastery railing at night
part three
white elephants
A handkerchief which I discovered in the pocket of a second-hand Italian cape, folded in six squares. There were also two migraine pills, spilled brown sugar, and a shopping list for an evening party.
Things I learned in the Natural History Museum 1) The bluefin must continuously keep swimming to stop sinking 2) Harold Thomas disappeared 3) Sphinxilis + pnadenusilius (!) 4) There are only two things that can be used to cut a diamond: a lazer, and another diamond 5) The great black leatherback turtle has the same look in his eye as poor Duchess Sisi’s ermine coats hanging duchessless in the Sisi Museum 6) Starfish = asteroidas 7) Chatoyancy 8) The diamond process is called ‘bruting’ 9) The albatross (no explanation)
a true and sad story: I went to the museum and... / everything forgotten is always perfect, everything perfect always trying to forget itsef At the museum there was a collection about an 18th century explorer, his name doesn’t matter, who had voyaged to another continent and whose camera was broken and most of his documents destroyed but his drawings were salvaged. They made 3-d reproductions of these pastel watercolours that looked like clouds frozen and remade as sweets. there was an anonymous box you could write comments or questions and put them into it, so naturally i wrote a bad three-line poem that didn’t rhyme and slipped it in the box, folded three times. When i googled the collection, nothing came up, so i emailed the artist to find out more. I said Dear Harriet I was very inspired by your collection and would like to know more about the expedition, in particular the damaged letter and she didn’t reply for three months and three months later i received a message which i am reproducing here: “Dear Sarah,
I was touched by your email and your genuine interest in the Collection. I apologize for not being able to answer you earlier but I am sure you will understand once I explain my reasons. I’m a visual artist and the Collection was an experimental project I did to see how people view contemporary art when it’s not presented as art. The taxonomy of the salt crystals (undiscovered parasitic plants) was based on Bernee de Candice and scientifically sound. However, the explorer is a fictional character and I produced the story with fact woven in to make it more credible. I did the drawings. Best wishes, Harriet” And to think, I had put such a dreadful scrap of paper into the comment box at the museum. About my blue salad heart or something. all names of real (and fictional) people in this piece have been changed
(ancient)
YOUR BODY’S CONSTANTLY MAKING SILK IN ITS FACTORIES TO THROW AT YOUR EYES SOME DAY
(curtains) next up, a concerningly long interlude
elevenses
theo
It was some time after dinner and the sky was golden. I had a mango that I was slowly peeling and eating with my barest hands, and my crush on you was ending. I know this because I was in the coffee shop watching trailers for American rom coms circa 1999-2005 on my laptop and I realised a really depressing but accurate thing, that I don’t get that yummy wistful heart-being-lazered feeling I used to get when Love Interest #1 enters diner car and uplifting violin music gets turned up like a skirt on a steeple. Instead of the hopeless romantic tremor, I just feel unconquerably sad – and also really wise. I still like string music though. I told Hannah about me feeling wise and she said: “That’s ridiculous, you’re nothing but a root vegetable.” When Hannah’s feeling like I am, she’ll have a great lunch and make a long list of everything she ate. The afternoon after we watched Cedric play his cello in front of one hundred people, Hannah ordered a Marmite sandwich. There were one hundred people at the concert and not all of them had a loudly emptying swimming pool in their chest. In the coffee shop a man came back to his baby in a pram and his golden-neck wife and said “Is all well with the world now?” to either of them. I go to the counter and order another croissant, soon the lining of my stomach will probably be ¼ almond pastry. The wife with the golden neck is saying something with her lips. I open my laptop again and watch National Geographic footage of volcanoes.
Afterwards in the cloakroom, Hannah was talking to Moira and I was being fascinated with my coat pocket. “Blue snow milkshake,” is all I heard from Han. “They do that, too,” Moira was saying. “They shake you up till your soul is so smoothied.”
“blue snow milkshake” What I feel for you is the feeling I got when my foot went dead (I was sitting on my legs and trying to remember the news) and then woke up, at the time I was in a room where the only other person was a woman grieving her Irish Labrador poodle and I wanted to wail because a dead foot waking up hurts like death, but sometimes your tears don’t help anyone. That is a funny thing about the Land of Heartbreak: no sums. I’m reading a book of poems right now about someone who was alive during a war in Europe, or maybe that’s a metaphor, the part about the war. The line I just read says, “What is it about the bright long summer nights – that they keep our pain suspended in sagging jade balloons?” My hot lava lake erupting over all the Hawaiian lunches and making the endangered sea turtle even lonelier, you’re my evening that won’t end, just save that portside seat at supper for me, will you?
part four a correspondence
dear theo, it has snowed!!!!!!!!!!! we fell through the ceiling to get coffee and breakfast and now i am taking the day off, in memory of my mind being a pantry of wish-fulfilling pies as it once was. because i never did hold a proper funeral for that baker who made iced sugar place cards for every Monday until it was too late and everything i had once written about began to happen itself out of words. do you know what i mean when i say i feel like the outlines of my body have become so soft that you can’t see them, only hear them, like the very lowest piano notes someone plays in secret inside a bread baked into the centre of february? flour everywhere.
yours sincerely
Z
nostalgia as bright as birthday cake STOP
things in the present arranging their hands identically to things from a decade ago STOP
through with all onto
and
i the the
just wanted to the jewelled art other
fall
out hedge students side
a brief anatomy
of dressing
dressing and friends
I keep seeing an intimate connection between friendship and motherhood everywhere. After going abroad broke me like an oil lamp (instead of burning you end up weeping everywhere is the point of this simile) the sight of a woman in green corduroy, how she’d invited it onto her skin, was enough to make me peach out. This has less to do with fashion than the idea of wearing or being worn. Your friends dress you in a way, do you know what I mean? To explain, let me cut out the mood for you like a paper hat:
are you alright, Sarah? You, my friend, flinched as my evening dress tore like it was a ligament torn in your own body and said are you alright sarah which I want to keep on repeat like a mother on cassette tape. Like the blue veiled Magdalene lady, taking me in out of the wet and putting my soaked silk jacket on the dryer.
DRESSING FOR THE OPERA That young lady in her white dress who you will notice all through the opera, she looks like a plump prince with her owl glasses and hair braided down her back, you both leave at the same time and you want to pledge her something undying and French, let me follow you home to your apartment so I can look at your bookshelves.
DRESSING THE PART
You don’t sit in a red dress; you sit in a burgundy velvet dress like a chair in a train carriage.
DRESSING FOR THE MUSEUM
We lost eachother in the Sisi Museum. Thought of E. all the way through. Seeing all the duchess dresses - someone gets stabbed in the heart with a needle file and then all her ermine cloaks get hung in a marble room like polar bears in a rut. Please just don’t imagine. And they carried her on a stretcher improvised from oars, a sail, two cushions.
DRESSING in tents
“Even the weather here is remarkably frank. Such a soft hilliness of a waiter with his black leather money bag strapped over his body. That turquoise-shawled woman looking tired and dignified the way that only a woman in a shawl can look.”
she collected stares the way some people collect jewels, nose pressed up against the windows and through
glass of hotel thick, black
fringes
Stares
WANTED WANTED
Wanted: girls with an interest in swordfighting, sleep, and/or sitting in the pantry reading books about desecrated houses to join our super secret club/book society/pure sacred circle of flame and safety. activities include homemade haircuts and stealing turkish rugs, swashbuckling guaranteed & bring doughnuts. direct all enquiries to pleasefoldhere@yahoo.com
*
e. violet for chopin in the kitchen + o.l.c. for ‘the sea of the sky’ + e.b., with your painfully lovely penmanship and always knowing just when to write me + that woman i saw walking home like a white piano stool owned by a light footed earl or a Sunday morning junkyard sale of white china elephants muddling my similes + roland barthes for the buttonhole + fiona for the flower in it
--> www.pleasefoldhere.wordpress.com
She went to the dance class and they all laughed at her but she kept dancing, even when the music had stopped, she danced all the way down the polished hall with their laughter in the background like empty tins and she danced past the auditorium past Monsieur Chapeau’s two pm. class with the four year olds and past the strong angry looking ones with white dresses in the rehearsal hall, she danced past the forest of pink and blue and white taffeta and paper masks for swans to wear in Act 5 and out of the dressing room onto the street. A newspaper man from a little newspaper so little it could hardly afford to pay him so he had to write his notes on a napkin with gold writing on it saying Cafe de Flore, a very famous cafe where he had bought a croissant with jam and black coffee which he could not afford well he walked after the elephant and tried to ask her questions – ‘where do you get your hair done?’ and ‘how does one account for that peculiar whisk of your big toe’ but she didn’t reply, whether she was too happy to hear or didn’t want to is her secret. Other people cottoned onto the newspaper man and began following and asking questions and the line became so long that not all of them were in earshot of the elephant so they had to pass her answers back down the queue like a huge game of Chinese whispers where the message can get changed, but here there wasn’t any message to begin with as the elephant wasn’t saying a word, so the lady with the purple hat from the Sunday Pigeon reported that the dancer is 5 ft 2 and wearing the latest Coco Chanel, and Marley from the Village Review described her as a long-haired performer, similar in shape to a Kangaroo – and Mr Rose whose magazine wasn’t to do with dancing or cheese happily reported the elephant had strung round her neck a half-pot of camembert which she often dips into between arabesques..........