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JJRau

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Joined: 12-Dec-2004
Birthday: 23-Nov-1961
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writing, reading, music
  
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Journal Entries
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Tired or not
Posted by JJRau on Jan 25th, 2005 4:30 PM
It's been a while since the last entry. Sigh. Not much happened in those days, at least I didn't do much of what I would have liked to do. I tried to keep up to those things that had to be done und postponed working on the novel until those task are fulfilled. But in the last days there were a few things that made me feel better.

Volker has visited a few flats and some seem quite interesting. Maybe a little house will be to rent as well. Things settle in. I'm going to live in the Stuttgart area within the next months. I finally will be moving. I finally will be leaving here. Not as far as I always dreamed of, but there will be pasture and meadows only a few stepps out of smallish towns, villages to visit, new people to meet, most hopefully an office to work in for both of us.

Strange. This really proves that we grew up, at least a little. We can work within one room without difficulties now. It took us years, but we finally can, now that we maybe will even have an option of two offices in our home. I think we'll rather have a dining room or a library instead of a second study. Who knows? This is so thrilling. A new life to plan, new places to seek and love, new bars or cafés to write in. People will be more disturbed at the beginning, maybe. I don't know. I do know that there is one place I'm really going to miss, around here. The Swan.

Met Max there today. A new friend, not quiet as slender as he should be for so huge a dog, but still such a sweetheart of a Spanish mastiff. Never met one so calm and curious in a friendly way. When a small mogrel with a lot of terrier in his blood entered, Max could have wolfed it down in one big swallow, instead when the little brat growled Max flinched and moved on to have himself a little stroke from everybody. Somehow I felt peace and comfort emanating from this enormous animal. But as I sat there, reading texts that sometimes came as instruments of torture rather than pieces of literature, texts I would have returned uncommented within textkraft, I saw him standing there, in the late afternoon sun and wondered if he is going to limp within a year or two. Too huge even for his frame of bones. Such a beautiful animal and still, maybe we should stopp breeding them, just because they are so short lived. I don't know, I only know I adored Max. Today. I will do so tomorrow, but if I am to have a dog someday, it won't be a mastiff. I'd rather have my dog twelve or more years.

Maybe I'm going to get some sleep tonight. I'll ty.


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Home again, or kind of, that is
Posted by JJRau on Jan 10th, 2005 7:12 PM
I'm really tired, so this will be a short entry. Returning from Schwieberdingen left me happy and sad. It is strange how you look at all those things you took for granted for such a long time, knowing it will be only months, before you'll leave them, most probably for ever.

Don't get me wrong. I really love the place were I'm going to live, quiet and solemn as it is. I like the people even now, feeling strangly at home when the waitress of a diner asked us, if we were new to the little town, for she had seen us twice passing by the window. I know how small communities work for both my parents are from even smaller villages. Still, I#m kind of used to the anonymous behavior of people living in big cities.

It took me weeks to be recognized in the bar I usually start writing for a day. It will be over all too soon and I'm not sure whether there will be anythin near as feeling as home as the Swan is in Duesseldorf, at least to me. MOre then half of my recent novel has been written there and if it will sell, the Swan has to be mentioned as will be Highlander Radio, if you grant me the honour, that is, and a lot of really nice people who are my writing collegues and friends - err, friends to be put first, of course. Writers' brains sometimes work in a weird way, aren't they?

Coming back to feeling home. There had only been one place, I really felt at home at once and the people living there wouldn't know at all. It's one of the small channel islands, Sark. I still dream of living there, but that going to be a livelong dream with little chance to come true. Now, I'm dreaming of the nice flat with a balcony or a small garden to tend. Lots of visits to museeums and the Wilhelma, which is the zoo of Stuttgart, one of the most beautiful in Germany.

And if I look around in my flat right now, I'm already planning what to take and what to deposit of. That really is a weird feeling, although I've started today by taking a rucksack full of old paper to the dumpster. All our books. My that's going to be a lot of parcels, not to talk of the other stuff. But first of all, we'll need a flat down there. And quickly.

Still, I'm at home feeling homeless, not so much because all is going to be packed and shipped but because Volker isn't around and he, of all people and places, is what I call home.

Good night for now
JJ


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Counting the days
Posted by JJRau on Dec 29th, 2004 6:59 PM
Only four days, before Volker will leave to work in Stuttgart, over 2,5 hours away, if you go by train. We haven't been separated for longer than a few days for over 20 years, now. My, does this feel strange. I'm happy, I'm so grateful he will have the job he longed for so much, but still it feels strange to be alone at nights after all those years that I felt nothing can happen to me, because he is there, right next to me, or trying to hush me to bed when I'm writing at night.

I can't count the times he stirred me out of my worlds just by poking me into my sides and having me hover over the chair, because I never heard him coming into the room, even without headphones on. I'm going to miss that, as much as I'm going to miss a reason to restrickt my delta time habits without him. Night is the time I love most. Night is the time I write best. It used to be that way, even when I was a child. Night is my world, my mother, maybe, and when my love won't guide me, it will have me back most probably.

We bought a trolley, yesterday. A huge one with stars and planets on it. Somehow we both never lost that love for outer space and astronomy. Now they are painted on a suitecase to remind him of me. One of many things to do that.

I do know this is only for a few month, before I'll go down there as well, still it scares me to death to be alone with my words all day. I've never felt this way before. I know of the opportunity, of the wonderful telephone calls we will have, of the joy when we meet again, still, there is a big lump in my tummy and it won't go away just by nights on the phone.

I do know this will enhance my writing. Grieve - any form of it - ever has deepened my writing because I pour it there, before it can hurt me too much, but it has already started. Writing Chapter 30 found me wading through fears of loneliness and loss, which came quite handy, because that is exactly what the main character is suffering from.

I do know there will be a lot of poetry written in those month to come and I'm going to close this night with the one I wrote for a performance a few yeras ago, when a drawing containing a reminscence of the last photo taken of Scott's expedition to the pole inspired me

You can hear the rest of it on www.lena-kuntze.de/news/lesung.html (click on the red arrows in the intro and then look for Judith Rau on the next page), yet it will be in German as well. The art that inspired my words, however, will convey in any language, thus I really recomment you to take some time to look around the site. To find the picture that set on my poems please click "opticks/Terra Nova"):

JENSEITS DER WEITE (hasty translation just below the German text)

warten die Geier
auf den Moment des Du
zerfetzen ihn
in Flocken.

Es schneit aufs Ich.

BEYOND THE OPEN SPACE

vultures are waiting
for a moment of
thyself to lacerate
into crystal flakes.

Snow falls upon coenaesthesia.


Funny how difficult it is to translate one's own poetry. I'm not really satisfied, because what is said in simple words in German was transmuted into big words in English. I'm going to think about this for a while. See, words are teasing me even now.

Good night to ye all, a chapter is waiting to be written.


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Words will not come today
Posted by JJRau on Dec 28th, 2004 5:12 PM
Some things are not to be written about in a fluffy little thingy like this diary. Listen to the news, than listen to your heart, and than decide what you can do for those who survived, however little that may be.

Still, in my own little world, there are some thoughts I do have to put down to get back to work. Starting with books. I found one I reall wished to have on my shelves for years. Yesterday, I found it on www.zvab.com from a used book shop right around my corner, or so it said there. Thus, so it snowed nearly all day and everybody on the streets near right panicked, I marched to the cityhall and asked for the bool. And sold it was, as Murphy would have predicted. I went home, just to find the same book for less on another market. Small sadness comfort with even smaller joy, but I'll have my History of the City of Hamburg at least. And with the end of the recent book closing in with every word I write, if I don't write here - darn, I'm evading getting the thing finished, am I not?, I'll have the last bits of info for the next.

I'm off to writing now.

Sleep well.


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Nearly Xmas Eve
Posted by JJRau on Dec 23rd, 2004 5:16 PM
Well, actually the clock just switch to Dezember 24th while I'm writing and I do feel strange with the new tradition of with my inlaws. No parcels. Sigh.

I lived 42 years looking forward to unwrapping things - on Xmas eve as you do in Germany, and today, there will be nothing to unwrap. Weird. Really. I'll do something about it, enhancing the Tepesch.com maybe, something to show we care. A lot.

My parents will have a dinner cooked by Volker an me, just a vaucher to open, but still a valid gift. Maybe it will be photos for the inlaws as we move so far away this next year. And Oskar the folkmanis bat. I'd like to see their faces, when they find it under the tree. Don't know. Would break the tradition before it come to life, wouldn't it?

The book is in good progress again. I still fell uncomfortable closing in on the dreaded four letter word ... no, not these, I dread ending a book, because as soon, as "Ende" is put down under something that was a world to me for so many months, I feel lonely und desperate. Not that there are no other projects to write, there are more than I can do in the next decade or so, still, its like losing someone very dear. Each book is like a friend to me, ending it means this friends becomes something like a ghost.

Uups. Rambling. I should be writing instead, shouldn't I.

Thus, merry Christmas to ye all. All the best and a lovely time, parcels or no.


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My Signature:

Seaweed

Vraic smells the sea
into my mind;
leaves the fading colors
of autumn's dawn.

Boats tossing about while
swell is branding moorings
into abysmal ditches.

Heaven wallows in gullies
and caves so deep,
the tides will catch me.

Waving insignia of October's Moon.

Judith Rau, 1998
 







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