Review of "Journal of Katherine Mansfield" by Ana Bowlova
Non-fiction
Publisher: Constable & Co., London 1927
Spanish Version by Ediciones del Cotal, S.A. Barcelona 1978
That's a diary written by the New Zealander author between the years 1914-1922 with the introduction made by her husband, Mr. John Middleton Murry.
Some months after she left her last written sentences upon her journal, she died, at a Spiritual Rest House in Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France. There she spelled her final eerie words addressed to her husband who declared her astonishment in the book as he noticed this amazing woman completed taken by divine perfection:
"The last atom of sediments, the last traces of earthly degradation disappeared."
It seems that her life was in a way quite dull. Katherine had a sense of her female attractiveness, but someway she neglected it or refused to take advantage of her attributes. She found ridicule the French women's attitudes towards men. In her diary she expressed herself in a tone way too spontaneous and with all her sincerity, something she always tried to sustain in her writings. At the same time, she was too hard to her own feelings and emotions blocking her self and her sense of creation. Not as feminist as her counterparts for a female figure from the beginning of the last century such as Virginia Wolf, otherwise her basic fascination was to write about her own suffering and how much her pain froze her instincts. Sometimes it even seemed to be a self-inflicted punishment, a way of taking herself from the "normal", the civilized society to insert her in the obscure cave of negligence, much for her own "dis-use" and dense satisfaction: "Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction."
But her mind was another story. She seemed to place herself in a parallel world where she could float and live drifted from all that surrounded her daily errands: "The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."
Along the years, her pain, passed, presented, and projected, seemed to increase, for more and more she wrote about being taken by the disease, in spite of all the good signs that her doctor prescribed, which she did take for granted for she claimed him of having a fake personality towards her.
Her mention of her disease was treated into the form of a clutch, for she convinced herself that she would always suffer from terrible pains. She wrote (not with the same words, for the version I had from her diary was written in Spanish), "The sooner I write these books, the faster I will recover my health, and I will accomplish my aspirations. That's the pure truth.I consider it a gift: this forced captivity from which I have to take the best profit possible."
Her inherent pessimism was a constant presence in her life though. She became so very depressed in her final years, feeling desperate from not belonging to nowhere on earth, a syndrome of those who live their birth place and keep being so displaced that soon they feel they belong to no place at all. Although for a while it seemed to appear a tiny little light consumed by her frustrations, it was quite weak and fragile to be able to entertain her solitary days.
"Lord, make me clear again so that Your light may shine through me!" She exclaimed as she tried to write another story, which always seemed undeliverable or unfinished. Her life seemed to be a leaf floating over a gray river: always in deliver. Her religion was her writing but her faith was Universal. "I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face" were one of her last words. How much had she desired to be a simple leaf!
Some Notes made by K.M. while reading Shakespeare, Hamlet (On my own words):
Coleridge said about Hamlet: "Do this subtle trick of pretending to represent a role in the exact moment when you are almost the character you are representing. This way we all start to have a role. And the more we get closer to that role, to what we want to be, the more perfect is our masquerade. At the end, it arrives the moment when we are not representing a role anymore and in that moment we may even surprise ourselves. Like a peacock, we may then contemplate the feather that we once borrowed. Both works join together: the one that we borrowed mixes with the one that we already have. To represent and to act now are both the same task. Your soul accepts as yours this script. After you proved it to be good for you, you are satisfied enough to represent that role, which give us faith to go on and do what is necessary."
In the very end she said, "I would have a book in my hands, but I wouldn't understanding the meaning of it. It would be the same as if I had read it backwards." It seems that K.M. lived in a type of Palindrome World, as her own name would say if read forward or backwards, "The leaf's naMe inherent aChe: Katherine Mansfield."
Another Palindrom Wor(l)d here:
http://www.cafepress.com/wintershangrila.13425970
"My mother took me to the Official School of Ballet when I was eight. They had auditions for beginners every year. The first attempt to enter that major Ballet Institute was vainand in vain. I looked at everything there and it all looked so sumptuous, so big, so formal, so unattainable, and so adultand the girls there had a very snobbish flair. I was so scared of the whole atmosphere that I didnt take my hands off my mothers skirt. I didnt enter there.
The second attempt and my eyes were so full of tears that I couldn't see a palm in front of my face. And I should not even have to mention (but I will anyway, for this is part of the story, with recurrences) that I didnt take the test.
Two girls were indeed very nice to me, or perhaps they just had pity over me. As oddly as it appeared in a cut throat atmosphere which is the world of Ballet, to name one of the most competitive arts in the world, from some very few coorporations, you still can get some co-operation. So they took me inside the dressing room; they washed my face and they returned me to my mothers arms.
The third attempt, I was so scared of people in there, all girls running on the hall, that I was about to finish the test when I decided to go back to my mother.
Now I was nine years old and I was still fascinated, and yet scared, in the middle of those angels there, who seemed to float by the impulse of their long necks, running gracefully towards the novices as they called us. One of them, with long legs like a heron and arms balancing in a vigorous way like a potter playing on a clay, kept pointing at each one of us, while she passed rapidly through the ball of characters displayed there, as if in a hurried expedient in the middle of the huge line that we made on the hall. Later on I would find out that this quick steps were quite a normal pace, a typical walk from a body inhabited by repetitive but gracious dancing movements. I can still remember my number: 1447; meaning that there were just some more 1446 girls on the way. The girl then pointed ramdomly to some of us, saying:
Good Luck, good luck, good luck!
I observed her as if she was not made of flesh and blood; as she stretched her neck more and more to reach out to each one of us like a swan, she looked towards my direction and said:
"Good Luck".
Instead of saying, Thank you! I just thought to myself that i had to keep as much energy as I possibly could, so I just declared our commom wish mentally Amem!
I started to appreciate and understand more about the m鵩er and then I even got some ideas to do in my audition. I observed how they dressed, how they talked, how they walked and ran. I was definitely ready. I was doing so well, that I could see the faces of the examiners in their old fashioned wooden table, looking at me and smiling, while stretching their necks to observe my dancing, tiptoeing in a flat shoe, as soon as they allowed the competitors to create. I was irradiant, completly thrilled and fulfilled! Came to my mother with a smile:
I am sure this time I made it, mom! I am going to become a ballerina.
I had to overcome many phases yet, many tests, much of my crying over rejections and fearfulness, to really be able to discern that I was on my right track, I mean, on my writing task.
Thanks to my mother's efforts and aspirations, and her precious patience and encouraging help I did become everything I wished for. So much so that now I wish most of everything else to become a mother.
Because there is something that burns as a ceaseless fire, something that only when given can make it greater. There is this passion which dances inside and out, that forever stays no matter what. And thats what my mother gave to me, the most precious gift of all: Life!
There is this air that I breathe in and out my whole life through. Once I realized that this air is life itself, filled with love, I could finally see that we are all immortal souls, radiant beings, a beam of light dancing among thousands of billions of other shinning stars, from a constellation that reaches out to eternity, a life that forever grows."
Desperately struggling to keep in this twenty-one century life, 
To-Two-Tutors
(A Tutorial Poetry
by Ana Bowlova)
The other night I had a dream
where my sister invited me so beam
to be part of another show casting
where she would perform as a singer.
The first two tests I had to linger
for I wanted so much to perform again.
I acted and sang and I danced with my finger.
I gave my best but my best didn't suffice then.
They didn't choose me and I didn't know why.
I was so sad that I started to cry.
I thought my career as a dancer was gone.
In spite of all the efforts that I just had done.
But all that anxiety fell down
from what I saw next to the ground:
There was a man bending over his knee
He was looking at me!
There was this man that meant no harm.
With a little boy all around his arm.
He was holding the baby in such a lovely embrace
that all that I wanted was to make part of that lace.
I ran passionately toward them so certain
that I could turn my back to all those people.
Like a refugee I insered myself on that circle.
I cried and the baby boy started to cry in pain.
I said, "Don't cry, my baby, mom is here.
And she loves you, and she's very much alive!
Please, know that I will love you always, dear,
no matter what happens in our lives."
Then I stopped crying and I said, "I didn't get it."
And the man said, "but you got so much more indeed.
What a wonderful job you are doing as a mother."
We all three cracked on a resonating laughter.
This is the reality that I am aiming for.
How could I have ever asked for more?
Having such a beautiful family supporting all my dreams
that is the most wonderful dream that I could have seen.
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