Reflect

Reflect is one of those odd words in English that can have completely opposite meanings. Reflect as in a mirror which is instantaneous or Reflect as thinking about a subject deeply. I wondered whether there is a word which describes this state of affairs and lo and behold there is.

The dictionary meaning of the word contronym is ‘a word having two meanings that contradict one another.’ A contronym is also called a ‘Janus word’ or auto-antonym. It's a word that has contradictory (or reverse) meanings depending on the context.

For example, the word ‘transparent’ can mean either something that is invisible or obvious. Or ‘dust’ which can mean to remove as in dusting a shelf or to add as in dusting a cake.

My new printed Oxford English and my old Chambers dictionaries do not have definitions but the online Oxford does. OED's earliest evidence for contronym is from 1962 in the writing of J. Herring.

I’m going to have to choose which Reflect to look at and it’s going to be this one.

Whenever I think of poems or literature about looking back to reflect on things done or not done, then the following poem by William Wordsworth usually comes to mind. It’s generally known as 'Tintern Abbey' but I prefer the full title. This is the extract that does it for me.

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not jotting down so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion.

Well, considering the poem is 160 lines (give or take) that’s pretty good going and I do wonder if anyone challenged him on this. Not to mention the fact that his rather talented sister, Dorothy, was walking with him.

I’ve just given myself 5 minutes to have a Reflect on times past. I don’t think that reflections such as these need to melancholic, indeed as Wordsworth says ‘sensations sweet’ can be the order of the day.

So, in my 5 minutes of time present there were memories of a phone call I didn’t make, the sheer joy of vomiting after a hard training run over sand dunes in Great Yarmouth, a railway journey along the west coast of Wales to Pwllheli, getting rid of my mortgage, a poetry event, friends.

I had to drag myself away from all that looking back to think about a poem to go with the thoughts. I think this will do the job and it sort of covers the same concerns as Tintern.

Maritime Museum, St Helier

I didn’t know that fathom
came from faedm,
a measure of outstretched arms
no longer than the arrow
which had stopped me
on a hot March day
as I wandered on my own
following signs
in a museum sort of way.
An arrow,
a wordvane dipped
in terms of the sea
and its turning turned
my day around
as back to the start
and a boy again
I mixed up sand and water
and launched my boat on the pond,
pushed on buttons I shouldn’t
and ran round corners to hide,
let fingers brush the rich black tar
in timbers
that shivered my soul,
made up yarns for pictures
that soon became a scene
where a father
taught his son the knots
and splices of his skills,
around the tree and down the hole
the rabbit had tried and tried
but here,
I can’t believe it,
the bowline came first time
and for a time
I felt a smile but with
Force 2, precipitation,
that brought me back
to the forenoon watch
and ready to run ashore
not sure
I’d play the boy again
the hours for that have passed
but glad of a place
where the sea’s embrace
can be measured
in outstretched arms.

First published in Iota, March 2003.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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My Bedside Table - My Space

A mock Tiffany lamp with a dimmer feature sits on top of my bedside table, which is a fitted unit matching the headboard. A Mr and Mrs pair of teddy bears from the Outer Hebrides and dressed in authentic Harris tweed occupy the remaining space.

Below this, my bedside table is a work of art in the style of Tracey Emin’s unmade bed. The clutter is contained within the small area, and I know where everything is. It’s functional and how I like it. A biography of Agatha Christie, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, a couple of poetry collections and a fantasy/horror novel make a tower of books topped with a notebook, a journal and a box of tissues. It never looks balanced or neat. Hand cream, an assortment of pens, a bookmark made by a child and another with ‘Desiderata’ on it, a straw coaster, plastic water bottle and just enough room for my phone which I rely on for an alarm. Don’t mention the dust.

Half a dozen perfumes, mainly Christian Dior are grouped together on an internal shelf. I have no sense of smell anymore, but I remember my favourites and still use them. Also on the shelf is a small torch, just in case. A jewellery box which belonged to my late mother and contains some of her things, special to me, takes up the rest of the shelf.

I keep my glasses in the drawer, with several spare pairs, a few charging cables for various devices and an iPod Shuffle music thingy full of Moody Blues albums which I take on holidays.

Beneath the drawer is an open space where keepsakes and bits and pieces are safe in a perfectly fitting box.

I would love a tidy, minimalistic bedside table. It will never be, not in my busy house.

My Haiku,

I do not lose things
They’re on my bedside table
With everything else.

It’s only some keys,
They will be under something
Not exactly lost.

A crumpled tissue,
Used for cleaning my glasses
Had covered them up.

PMW 2025

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Dust Jackets

It’s one of those memories from school age that I’m fairly sure happened but not totally. The memory I have is of school books taken home at the beginning of the term and then wrapped in brown paper to protect the cover. Did I put my name or the name of the book on the brown paper. Were they hardbacks? Was cellotape used?

Anyway, that got me to be thinking of Dust Jackets. Before the 1820s, most books were published unbound and were generally sold to customers either in this form, or in simple bindings executed for the bookseller, or in bespoke bindings commissioned by the customer. At this date, publishers did not have their books bound in uniform ‘house’ bindings, so there was no reason for them to issue dust jackets. Book owners did occasionally fashion their own jackets out of leather, wallpaper, fur, or other material, and many other types of detachable protective covers were made for codices, manuscripts, and scrolls from ancient times through the Middle Ages and into the modern period.

The oldest publishers' dust jacket now on record was issued in 1829 on an English annual, Friendship's Offering for 1830. It was discovered at the Bodleian Library in Oxford by Michael Turner, a former curator and Head of Conservation at the Library. Its existence was announced by Oxford in 2009. It is three years older than the previous oldest known jacket, which was discovered in 1934 by the English bookman John Carter on another English annual, The Keepsake for 1833 (issued in 1832).

The earliest known dust jackets of the modern style, with flaps, which covered just the binding and left the text block exposed, date from the 1850s, although this type of jacket was likely in at least limited use some years earlier. This is the jacket that became standard in the publishing industry and is still in use today. Throughout the nineteenth century, nearly all dust jackets were discarded at or soon after purchase. This was a golden age for publishers' decorative bookbinding, and most dust jackets were much plainer than the books.

After 1900, fashion and the economics of publishing caused book bindings to become less decorative, and it was cheaper for publishers to make the jackets more attractive. By around 1920, most of the artwork and decoration had gone from the binding to the dust jacket, and jackets were routinely printed with multiple colours, extensive advertising and blurbs, even the underside of the jacket was now sometimes used for advertising.

As dust jackets became more attractive than the bindings, more people began to keep the jackets on their books, at least until they became soiled, torn, or worn out. One bit of evidence that indicates when jackets became saved objects is the movement of the printed price from the spine of the jacket to a corner of one of the flaps. This also occurred in the 1910s and early 1920s. When jackets were routinely discarded at point of purchase, it did not matter where the price was printed (and many early jackets were not printed with any price), but now if book buyers of the 1910s and 1920s wanted to save the jacket and give a book as a gift, they could clip off the price without ruining the jacket.

Dust jackets from this time were often decorated in art deco styles which are highly prized by collectors. Some of them are worth far more than the books they cover. The most famous example is the jacket on the first edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. Without jacket, the book brings $1,000 or so. With the dust jacket it can bring $20,000 or $30,000 or more, depending on its condition. Other examples of highly prized jackets include those on most of Ernest Hemingway's titles, and the first editions of books such as Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

I’m off now to check my book shelves. I know that I still have this book there from my school days.

The Coral Island

Somewhere in the Java Sea
roughly the size of Sark
with a Lookout Hill
views of smooth beaches
falls of fresh water
forests and pineapples
a call to adventure

Ballantyne’s book
unfurled after fifty years
the dust jacket flagging
but ready aye ready

were there coves
was the temperature
a steady twenty three degrees

no snakes (touch wood)
no sea creatures that sting
which is a reminder
to check for a medicine chest
with plasters and Ventolin

reading glasses
wide brimmed hat
a sort of large cushion
that could double as a mattress
and talking of doubling up

but that’s getting ahead
let’s get past the colour plate
to the first chapter

Roving has always been
and still is my ruling passion

First published in ‘To Have to Follow ’ by Julie Maclean and Terry Quinn. (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2016).

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Dust - If You Must

 

Dust if you Must by Rose Milligan Next

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better To paint a picture, or write a letter, Bake a cake, or plant a seed; Ponder the difference between want and need? Dust if you must, but there's not much time, With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb; Music to hear, and books to read; Friends to cherish, and life to lead. Dust if you must, but the world's out there With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair; A flutter of snow, a shower of rain, This day will not come around again. Dust if you must, but bear in mind, Old age will come and it's not kind. And when you go (and go you must) You, yourself, will make more dust.

 

That poem sums me up. I don’t live in a messy muddle, but I won’t lose any sleep over dusty shelves that can wait until tomorrow, or the next day. There is more to life. There’s a saying about ‘boring women have tidy houses’, something like that. It might be on a fridge magnet. I declare, I am not boring.

It is a bit disconcerting to read that household dust is composed of 20 – 50% dead skin cells. The rest is hair, fur, pollen, fibres from fabric and various other materials in the environment. I won’t dash for the anti-bacterial spray and a good cloth just yet. I’ll finish writing first, unless I see a dust mite or start to feel itchy. If it’s true, the layer of house dust doesn’t look any worse after five years. I’m not going to purposely run that experiment. I admit to being a teeny weeny bit embarrassed recently when we needed help to move a large sideboard and hatch style unit. The top surface of the hatch could have been a five year science exercise, but I know it wasn’t as long as that, I promise.

Soon, some remedial building work will create more than the average layer of dust. I’ll wait until it is all complete before I clean up.

Outside, the dry weather has made everywhere dusty. We spent the weekend enjoying some caravan time at one of our favourite places in Garstang. Passing vehicles, as slow as they were on the site, churned up powdery clouds with the dryness of the road tracks. Cars looked like they’d been through a sand storm.

Now, I’d like some help, please. Who wrote the poem ‘Dust if you Must’ credited above to Rose Milligan, but I also have the same poem in a book by Pam Ayres, showing her as having the copyright?

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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A notebook of 'forgotten' ideas.

Like many writers I own a notebook (in fact several notebooks), and it’s between these pages that my ideas our placed, kept and subsequently forgotten about. Blank pages are filled in with thoughts, jottings and initial drafts; causing the ideas I had months ago to creep further into middle page mediocrity. Generally I don’t look back; I don’t revisit ideas unless my mind chooses to remember – which perhaps seems odd as the notebook offers the luxury of an extended memory, preserving what might otherwise slip from mind. However, my ideas are ideas for a reason: they have gaps, missing elements, question marks instead of full stops. They are titles without an ensuing first line. They are a combination of lexemes that seemed (at the time) important enough to write down, but which have since been cast with insignificance. They gather dust; their cursive form is draped with cobwebs and I’m never sure when (or even if) they’ll be picked from the lined page, dusted off and transformed into something more substantial.

Despite the notebook, I still believe memory to be an invaluable tool. It offers a type of filtration system: allowing ideas with potential to pass through the lattice structure – to be recalled, while unpromising ideas fail to be recollected. Personally, I like the ideas that bother me, that won’t leave me alone, that haunt my thoughts, that develop as much off the paper as on it. Therefore, I don’t like looking back. I don’t like looking back at ideas that haven’t been poking, prodding, pestering – refusing to be forgotten. I don’t like looking back at ideas that have allowed themselves to move from an active state to one of dormancy. However, having said this, I’ve decided to look through my recent notebook and list all the ideas that never made it into poetic form; the ideas that have been sitting on the back-burner with the gas turned off.

Provisional Titles (and their missing poems)

Bird nest (?)
Stickmen (?)
Lamb’s wool (?)
Tomato soup (?)
Most wanted (?)
The left behind (?)
Seafood garden (?)
Walking over me (?)
Pensioner’s boots (?)
Seventy one steps (?)
Allotment Etiquette (?)
Curiosity finds water (?)
Sarracenia ‘Johnny Marr’ (?)

Maybe one of these ideas will find the importance that first marked its existence. Maybe one of these ideas will start to harass my thoughts. Maybe one of these dormant ideas will become a poem – or maybe they’ll all be forgotten (again)?

Thank you for reading,
Lar

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