Aging

Waist Land

Wind-sculpted tree on rocky coastline with turbulent ocean and cloudy sky
A lone, wind-shaped tree stands on rugged coastal rocks under a cloudy sky

Image generated
not by Big Brother
but by Little Brother
who left the Frying Squad
to become a painter
and mind-reader

Waist Land

Jack Pine Sonnet

living in a waste land
surrounded by books
he writes in his journal
things false and true
in memory of the old days
when the world seemed so new

a life built on sand
slips through his fingers
wouldn’t it be grand
if the sand stays and lingers
refusing to pass through
the hour glass’ waist
so time stops to flow

then he could say no
leave me alone
there’s more sand to fall
I don’t want to go

Comment:

It’s a bit like a cliff-hanger, isn’t it? Hanging on by our fingertips and not daring to look at the depths down below. We know they are there, but look, there’s a tiny fossil in the fissure in the rock, so much older than us, we’ve got a long time to go to catch that up. And remember – 80 is not old, if you are a stone!

Treading air – great fun. Not as good as treading warm water in the local YMCA. Just a lovely sense of balance, floating there in the warmth, no weight on arthritic joints, and the world around us amniotic, as it was in the beginning. Ah, those original waters, we have all swum in them, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, and all shades in between. Even King Charles and the late Queen. And remember, they may speak of blue bloods, but all blood is red -and, if you cut us, do we not bleed.

Speaking of bleeding – blood-thinners – my favorite doctor’s latest joke. I cut my arm the other night, getting into bed. Didn’t even notice. Pillows and sheets soaked in blood when I woke up and my scalloped arm, stuck to the sheet, opened itself up and started to bleed again. Feels like seventeenth century Spain, the wounds of the dead man re-open and start to bleed when the assassin appears before him. Certain truth. Obviously 100% guilty.

And they tell me that in South Wales people are adding cooking oil to gasoline to make the petrol go further. Scotland Yard sent the Flying Squad to South Wales to sniff people’s exhaust pipes to see if they were cheating the tax man. I asked my friend – “Is this true?” “Ah, yes,” he said in his lovely Welsh lilt, “and we call them the Frying Squad!”

Follicle Folly

Pink rosebuds hanging with water droplets on green leaves background
Close-up of pink rosebuds adorned with glistening water droplets

Photo AI generated
Big Brother was watching
and listening

Follicle Folly

Jack Pine Sonnet

I am happy with smaller things
the buds just budding on the ash
grass just being grass and green
beneath drizzle and mizzle and
the lightest showers of spring rain

grey / gray I don’t know nor care
clouds descend dampen spring air
dampness curls my remaining hair
some gone but not as much as I see
lost hairs missing from my friends

I traveled with a friend who counted
every hair he lost but couldn’t count
the cost of the weight of his worrying
about every forlorn follicle he lost

Comment:

No comment. That’s what politicians say, and people taken into custardy. What’s yellow and deadly? Shark infested custard, of course. There’s no flies on me said the Portuguese Custard tart as I brushed the ants off it prior to devouring it. Try the Garibaldi cookie aka the dead flies grave yard. The body count of a Garibaldi should be high. You’d be raisin the roof, if the count wasn’t as high as the Count of Monte Cristo. Take off that Iron Mask when you’re talking to me. Who was that masked man? I don’t know. Ask Tonto, stupid.

Warning – these comments were artificially generated by a lost intelligence that is only just coming of age in a time of jerry attic semi-conductor memory loss with everything under lock and key in a small room upstairs under the roof where the thatch used to grow. Even worse than losing your follicles is losing your ….. add your own ending. Don’t make me pull out my remaining hair and waste my time by searching for a word to rhyme. And remember the village church’s limerick competition – the only clean one won it.

Orality and Literacy – Words – Spoken or written?

Ryan and Don Roger

13

Orality and Literacy
Words
Spoken or Written?

            We asked our AI friends what the rate of illiteracy was in Spain in 1605, the date of publication of DQI. According to them – Based on historical trends, the illiteracy rate in Spain in 1605 was extremely high, likely exceeding 90% to 95% of the general population. While exact nationwide surveys did not exist in 1605, historical insights from the period indicate that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the ability to read and write was generally restricted to elites, clergy, and urban professionals. Furthermore, female illiteracy was significantly higher, with hardly any women possessing writing skills during this era. And, in addition, literacy was slightly higher in major cities like Madrid or in northern Spain, while the rural south suffered from much higher illiteracy rates. Based on these insights it is easy conclude that well under 10% of the population in Cervantes’s time knew how to read and write.

            In Don Quixote, Cervantes reveals to us a rural society which is basically illiterate. Most of the multitude of characters can neither read nor write. Throughout the woven interplay of the novel, Cervantes juxtaposes the illusion of the literate nymphs and shepherds who come into the woods to dance and play with the reality of the goatherds, shepherds, and horse wranglers, like the Yanguesans (DQI, XV / 15) who, totally illiterate, work the woods for a living. This contrast is a theme of the times and can be clearly seen in the paintings of Velásquez. One has only to think of The Water Seller, The Old Lady Frying Eggs, The Topers, The Court Dwarves, and Vulcan’s Forge, to name a few paintings that illustrate the clash of youth, age, class.

            The question of learning is an interesting one, explored in depth by Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy (1982). Learning in an oral society is done by word of mouth. One method of handing down knowledge is the proverb, its wisdom passed down from generation to generation. Sancho Panza, totally illiterate, is famous for his stringing together of proverb after proverb. He is the prime example of what one might call oral sagacity. Don Quixote, on the other hand, amazes us at first with his mastery of the ballads and the major exploits of knights errant in the novels of chivalry that he recites and imitates at will, and later with his mastery of such themes as the Golden Age and Arms and Letters. 

As Ong points out, the presence of writing changes totally the ways in which people think and learn. The word, once spoken, can never be recalled. But, when the word is written down it can be redacted, erased, changed, crossed out. More, the immediate transference of ideas from person to person in the oral exchange of conversation is totally different from the thoughtful exchange of written letters and ideas. In the latter, one trains oneself to think before you ink. That thought process can then be transferred back to the thinking process, both by literate and illiterate people. In this way, the processing of thought changes. And that is what happens to Sancho Panza in DQII.

The question of authority arises here. In an oral society, authority rests with the older members, who have lived long, and understand much, and a great deal of it preserved in proverbs. In a literate society, the authority resides in the written word, especially when it is tested and approved by the Inquisition (in the case of Spain) and royal permission. In a literate society, those who have studied a subject become the authority in that subject. I know professors who never again took a course or opened their books after they attained their doctorates. The PhD gave them the right to be an authority and to know it all. I also know professors who never stopped learning, who continued reading, and publishing, and taking courses, and building their initial knowledge base into a life long learning process.

Is knowledge static? I certainly hope not. As T. S. Eliot writes in Burnt Norton, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still.” The lapidarian truth of the folkloric proverb softens as change surges around us. The authorities of the sixties, when I was in graduate school, faded gradually, and new names, new theories, new doctrines replaced them. We started to explore these ideas in 5 – Book Burnings and 6 – Censorship. With the proliferation of knowledge via the internet and the intrusion of an abundance of AI into our lives, this question of authority – what is true and what is false – must form a part of our current thought and teaching and learning methodology. How do we distinguish truth from fiction, real news from fake news?

In an oral society, with no writing, your word is your bond. Think of the cowboy movies – “White man speak with forked tongue.” Now make the appropriate gesture from the many Cowboy and Indian movies you have seen. White man wants it in writing. For the red man, his word is his bond, sealed maybe, with a slash of the knife across the wrist – blood brothers. We have entered a world with different cultures and expectations. Now ask yourself, how many written treaties has the white man broken across the centuries. Is his word, written or spoken, truly his bond? I guess it depends upon the courts and the lawyers.

            “My word is as good as my bond,” 007 aka James Bond aka Sean Connery aka Daniel Craig aka Pierce Brosnan aka Roger Moore aka 3M-007. How many levels of different linguistic reality, at the intertextual level, can you count in that delightful sentence? Just think about it. And tell me, if you are an authority on the subject, who is the real James Bond! Meanwhile, remember that The Olde Order Changeth Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt The World. Now, could that be Tennyson, Idylls of the King, or is it a quote from The Wycliffe Star? You are the authority. You choose!

Rage, Rage 59

Rage, Rage
59

You cannot hide
when the black angel comes
and knocks on your door.

“Wait a minute,” you say,
“While I change my clothes
and comb my hair.”

But he is there before you,
in the clothes closet,
pulling your arm.
You move to the bathroom
to brush your teeth.

Now,” says the angel.

Your eyes mist over.
You know you are there,
but you can no longer see
your reflection in the mirror.

Comment:

The last poem in the series and Rage, Rage against the dying of the light is over and done. Many of you will recognize the title from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that dark night. I guess the theme itself has become part of the Welsh culture. And now we have exported it to New Brunswick, Canada, and perhaps beyond.

I bought The Black Angel, pictured above, in Avila, Spain. It is a plaster cast of one of the Angels in Roger Van der Leyden’s paintings, if I remember correctly. Here is the angel’s face in close up.

She or he brings a promise of rest and peace, a freedom from earthbound woes and sorrows. She stands on the shelf above the fireplace insert in our sitting room and brings blessings to the house. I look at her every time I light the fire. And she smiles down and blesses me. I think of her as a lady, but her peace and beauty outweigh any formal signs of sex.

As for that reflection in the mirror, well, I don’t have one of me. But her is a photo to reflect upon:

Raining in Avila and puddles in the street. Now you see me, now you don’t. But I am there, holding the camera, and looking down at the water where —- rain has stopped play. The bails have been removed. Old Father Time has gone back to the Pavilion at Lord’s, and the cricket game is over for the day.

Rage, Rage 58

Rage, Rage
58

“What is this sound?”
It is your own death sighing,
groaning, growing
while you wait for it
to devour you.

“What is this feeling”
It is the itch of your own skin
wrinkling and shrinking,
preparing to wrap you
in the last clothes you’ll wear.

“What is this taste?”
It is the taste of your life,
bottled like summer wine
once sweet tasting,
now turning to vinegar.

“What is this smell?”
It is waste and decay,
the loss of all you knew
and of all that knew you.

“That carriage outside?”
It is the dark hearse
come to carry you
to your everlasting home.

Comment:

Moo thinks that his portrait of me is perfectly good for this poem. He told me not to rage, rage against the accuracy of the portrait, but he did tell me to rage, rage against the lack of paper. Où est le papier, indeed. As for the rest of it, he said it’s the same for everyone, so stop making a fuss about it. “You’ve got one last bottle of mescal on the shelf,” he told me. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just swig it down, worm and all, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

Oh dear. The worm in the bottle. They used to sell the gusanos in Oaxaca’s mescal street at a price of five for ten pesos. I used to buy a two litre coke bottle, filled with mescal from a barrel, and drop ten worms in it. They made yellow streaks as they descended through the liquid. Sweet dreams when you chewed on that lot – and an end to your worries. El brujo, the witch doctor, told me to stick a marijuana plant in the bottle of mescal and when the leaves turned white to rub the liquid into my arthritic knees. “Which doctor was that?” one of the tourists in my apartment block asked me. But I didn’t tell her. Nor did I do it. A waste of good mescal. And to think I now have one last half bottle left. And one little squirmy, crunchy, chewy worm.

Speaking of chewy, crunchy – I had never eaten chapulines, fried grasshoppers, until I went to Oaxaca. I didn’t like the look of them. At the first party I attended was confronted by the host who demanded I eat some. I told him they were taboo, against my religion. He shrugged. When he, and the other guests lost interest in my presence, I tried a couple. They were delicious. A real delicacy. I loved their crunchy little legs.

I guess one is always afraid of the unknown – the gusano in the mescal, the chapulines on the plate, that first plate of calamares en su tinta – squid in its own ink. I love bara lawr – Welsh laver bread – or Welsh caviar, as Richard Burton used to call it. I also know that people who have never eaten bara lawr won’t go near it – it looks like cow pats – but luckily doesn’t taste like them. Don’t ask me how I know. Some people get over their fear of the unknown, others don’t. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Rage, Rage 57

Rage, Rage
57

Time’s oxen
have plowed their furrows
in my face.

A silvery thatch
bears witness
to the winter
of my withering.

My broken body
hangs from the coat hanger
of my shoulders,
its worn-out sack
knitted from skin,
bonded with blood.

I walk with two canes,
not just a sick man,
but a stick man.

When I fall asleep,
my enigmatic body
haunts me with
its death-rattle
of drying bones.

Comment

Sometimes no comments are needed. However, when it comes down to it, I guess it’s worth saying that I am raging, raging against the dying of the light.

The dying of the light – in the evening, when the sun goes down, the house grows silent and cools around me. Some nights, when the news is bad or depressing, I feel we are entering another dark age. Luckily, spring is on its way, with summer not far behind. But what will spring and summer bring?

I fear the heat, the gathering of muttering trees, the ambush nature is setting up for humanity. We live among trees. Trees, all around the house. Trees, climbing the hills into the distance. I loved them when I came here first. The maples, the paper birches, the mountain ashes with their spring finery and the light green fuzz of forming leaves. Winter – the firs and pines dressed in their winter coats.

Last summer, fires broke out all over the province. The closest was a mere 30 kms down the road from us. We could smell the fire, see the smoke, and sense the discomfort of the proximity of possible outbreaks closer to home.

As I grow older, I become more fearful. Walking downstairs in the morning – cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipico / each badly placed foot is a fall, each fall is down a precipice. Luis de Gongora. ( d. 1627). Alas, it’s that time of life, and it comes to anybody who, like me, has walked this far.

It’s the animals that I pity. The birds who move on and away and no longer stay with us. The deer who also have nowhere to go when their habitat is destroyed. The moose, the bears, the coyotes, the foxes, the jack rabbits and yes, they have all been visitors to our backyard.

Last summer, the local council circulated some ideas on how to prepare for immediate evacuation of our property- what to pack with a day’s notice, three hours’ warning, two hours’ warning, one hour’s warning. I hope it never comes to that. But now, I no longer know, and so I rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Rage, Rage 55

Rage, Rage
55

I walk on thin ice
at the frayed edge
of my life.

I search for the key
that will re-wind me,
but I fail to find it.

Who will winch up
the pendulums on
my grandfather clock,
resetting it
in spring and fall?

Who will watch
time’s sharp black arrows
as they point the path
of moon change
and the fleeting hours?

Each hour wounds,
or so they say.
Who will tend me
when that last one kills?

Comment:

Omnia vulnerant, ultima necat. / Each one wounds, the last one kills. That’s how the Romans thought about the collection of hours that make up a day. An interesting way of putting it. In lapidarian fashion. Four words that are worth a whole book of philosophical thought.

What is this thing called time? Good question, and one which is being asked more and more. Clearly time does not flow evenly within the human mind, though it is remarkably regular on the clocks we have invented to mark time for us. And remember, there are many types of time – seasonal time – spring time, summer time, autumn time, winter time. Strange that autumn – or fall as I have now learned to call it – is the only one that doesn’t have the word time attached to it.

And what about time changes – spring forward, fall back – when we change our clocks in order to make the most of daylight hours. A tedious process for many of us. I see some provinces are rejecting those changes and sticking to the same time, all the year round, from season to season. Personally, I would prefer life without those time changes, as would many of my friends.

Celestial time also known as sidereal time – the time as showed by the planets as they seem to march around the earth in the terra-centric universe. Rephrased, the positions of the planets as the earth turns slowly round the sun in the helio-centric universe.

Then there is the personal time of individual experience. An hour watching football or rugby on the tv set passes much more quickly than an hour passed in the doctor’s waiting room or the dentist’s chair. Of course, an hour watching a five day cricket test can also be a slow process, unless England are playing Australia in the Ashes. As one friend of mine commented, a long time ago, “I thought those English cricketers were unfit. But I’ve never seen anyone go out to bat and come back to the pavilion so quickly. They must be super-fit.” Alas, their cricketing problem, as usual, was centered on the three cants – can’t bowl, can’t bat, can’t catch.

En fuga irrevocable huye la hora.
La que el mejor cálculo cuenta
en lectura y lección nos mejora.

Irrevocable is the hour’s flight.
The one that counts the most
in learning or reading improves us.

Francisco de Quevedo
(1580-1645)

And remember – the hours fly by and your time is limited – spend it wisely and enjoy each and every day to the full limits of your abilities.

Rage, Rage 54

Rage, Rage
54

Terminal and terminus,
they both mean nec plus ultra:
the Pillars of Hercules,
the end of the known world,
and my own world’s end.

I throw my hands skywards
in desperation:
“Is anybody up there?”
There’s no reply,
and I see no ladder
for angels to descend
or ascend.

Only the crows,
those black-winged
monarchs
destined to wear
the survivor’s crown,
cry out their anguish
as they wait for the day
when they’ll pick clean
my unburied bones and
rule this sickening world,
an earthly paradise no more.

Comment:

When I said “I am looking for a picture of a crow,” Moo went wild. “Me,” he said. “I’ve got one.” And indeed he had. Here it is – two crows perched like vultures over the body of a fast melting snowman. Our current world in miniature – and don’t forget the yellow snow and the doggy doing a dump. “Moo,” I said, “That’s not nice.” “True to nature, though,” he replied. “You want reality – you got it.”

Reality – what a strange word. Who knows nowadays what is real? The barber’s basin in Don Quixote – is it a barber’s basin or is it Mambrino’s Helmet? Good question. Relativism – it depends on your point of view. U a barber’s basin – turn it upside down Ω and it’s a helmet. So how do we deal with an object that has two functions and can be seen both as one thing and then another?

Good question. Cervantes solves the problem in his own unique fashion – U – bacía / basin and Ω – yelmo / helmet. Put them together and you get the neologism [newly invented word] baciyelmo – a basin that serves as a helmet and a helmet that serves as a basin. Wonderful – if it weren’t for the snout, I’d swear that was the origin of the pig-faced bassinet.

Some days, I try to understand all this – but I throw my hands skywards in desperation: “Is anybody up there?” Another good question. I often ask myself that question but I despair of an answer.

My friend Francisco de Quevedo voiced the same question in a dream that came to me last night.

¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?

Life ahoy! Will nobody reply?
Is anybody up there?
Will someone reply?

Blas de Otero once made a similar utterance –

“I raise my hands in supplication
– you cut them off at the wrist.”

Tell me, if you know, – what is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. And look at those crows, standing there, staring, waiting … waiting for their turn to come. Patient, eternally patient. Just standing around. Waiting.

Rage, Rage 52 & 53

Rage, Rage
52

A terminus, this waiting
room in which I sit.

This is the hospital’s
forgetting place,
the left-luggage office
where, a human parcel
wrapped in a blue gown,
I wait to be claimed.

Tagged with a label
on my wrist, I find myself
alone with my fate.

53

All choice disappeared
when I came here
and surrendered myself
to the system.

Now I lack free will
and freedom of choice.

Yet I still dream of choosing
my destination, and the ways
and means of arriving there.

Comment:

A terminus – what an interesting word. Terminus a quo or terminus ad quem? Or just a railway terminus or a bus terminus where we sit and wait to change buses of trains? Or maybe just a terminus in terms of being terminal? Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first start to analyze our words in order to see exactly where we might go and where they might lead us.

And what a journey I was on when I first wrote that poem. Sitting in the waiting room, outside the radiation room, waiting for the lady who would wag her finger and point at the machine’s next victim. Would it be me? The man next to me? That woman over there? Many of us avoided each other’s eyes and just sat there stunned – and now you know the meaning, in context, of ojos de besugo – do you remember that from Rage, Rage, 48?. Others chatted. Some sat there quietly while their teeth chattered. Few of us knew each other, except from the hospice where we stayed if we weren’t day patients travelling in on a daily basis and rushing home afterwards.

Libre albedrío – free will. We can say so much about free will and determinism. But when we enter the system, it’s the system that rules. We have free will to enter – and they [the authorities] say we have free will to exit when we wish – but do we? Good question. A very good question. Once tagged, we are as free as the birds, as free as the salmon, as free as the whales – but within that freedom we are tracked, followed, taken in hand, advised, persuaded, manipulated … and whales have a whale of a time when they’re trapped up in fish netting …

Then there are the follow-ups. The appointments. The emails. The telephone calls. The check-ups. The blood tests. The MRIs. The X-rays. The Holter appointments. The various scans. Who is brave enough to get off the wagon or to open the aircraft’s door half way through its flight over the Atlantic and step out? Would you jump from the save-yourself-train – not at all like the gravy train – and think carefully – are you really saving yourself or are you getting yourself into hotter and deeper water? Come along then, let’s open the aircraft’s door and step out over the Atlantic. And tell me, what exactly are we stepping into?

Stop the world, I want to get off! Not so easy to do, my friends, not so easy to do. Not even when you think the terminus in which you are sitting is taking you to hell in a hand-basket. You start to stand up. And the little lady appears, smiles at you, crooks her finger, nods her head, and – as obedient as one of Pavlov’s well-trained puppy dogs – off you go, following in her footsteps.