Lucky Dip
Lost
and all at sea,
I reach for a life raft
and
find only an apple
bobbing in the waves.
Now
I must grasp it firmly,
like a stinging nettle,
not with my hands,
but blindfold,
and
with my teeth.
Lucky Dip
Blues
Modern Society
What would you change about modern society?
Good question – what indeed? First, define society. It’s not as if a single society dominated the world. Do we then distinguish between the world, this geoidal planet on which we live, and the multiple societies that inhabit this world? If we do, then what right do you, or I, or any other individual have to change any or all of the world’s cultures and societies? And how do we change them?
Many ways have been tried in the past, very few successfully. The Spanish Inquisition burned many books and censored others. Other book burnings and spurnings have taken place, and in some places, they are still happening. But are they effective in the long term? Good question. Short term, maybe. Long term, I am not so sure.
Do we limit education, and by extension, knowledge, to a few , limited people, who believe what we believe, and do what we want them to do? That has been tried as well. Short-term successes, but long term disasters. As well as depriving people of education and books, we can also enslave them. This is still happening in many places.
So, another definition: what do we mean by change? Change for the better? Change for the worse? Change for change’s sake? Change for the betterment of our own selves and the devil take the hindmost? And what do we mean by modern? So many questions – so few answers.
Albert Camus once wrote that he was ‘optimiste, quant au monde, pessimiste quant a l’homme‘ – an optimist where the world is concerned, a pessimist where humankind is concerned. Personally, I am not sure that this particular thought stands up any longer. Is it still possible to be optimistic about a planet that we are capable of blowing to smithereens, a planet, moreover, that is currently suffering from wind and rain, fire and flood, famine and war, pandemic and a pollution like none we have ever seen before?
How can I change the world? I am just a single human being. Well, I am a married one, actually. But I only have one vote. I rather fear that single vote (votes don’t marry and produce offspring) will have little effect on my ability to make any change at all to modern society.
Pass the soap and a towel, please, as a certain person said a long time ago. I want to cleanse my hands and purge my soul. I am too old a dog to try and learn new tricks.
Which activities make you lose track of time?
Which activities make you lose track of time?
I guess it depends on how you define activities. Sleeping certainly makes me lose track of time. But sleeping is not an activity, you say. So I say, what about sleep walking? A track to walk on, and sometimes sleep walkers lose track of themselves, and hands of the clock lost in the dark ahead of them, on they go, tick-tock, little clockwork soldiers marching until someone or something wakes them up. Where am I? They ask. And what time is it?
Watching my fox terrier chasing his tail as he runs round and round in circles, never quite catching it, but never giving up his high hopes of catching that little rat-tail of a tail that dangles there behind. And round about and out and in all day that silly dog did spin, spinning in prose and spinning in rhyme, until I lost all track of time.
Same thing happens with that little electric railway that ran on a single loop around the kitchen table. Diddle-da-diddly-da, just like a real train, except no smoke, no puff the magic dragon, no sense of a schedule or arriving and departing on time, when circular time is meaningless, as are the numbers on the sundial when the sun isn’t shining, or the hands on the clock when the numbers are missing, and you don’t know whether you are looking in time’s mirror or are standing on your head in the Antipodes and all the while the clock hands are marching round and round, tick-tock, and there is no track by which time can be tracked. And the runaway hands went round the track and the ghost train hooted whoo-hooo, as it vanished into the timeless tunnel of darkest night, and then exited. like Rip Van Winkle, the engine driver with a huge beard, and the carriages all covered with cobwebs and skeletons peeping out of the compartments and sitting beside some of the travellers as they snore on their seats.
And wow, the activity, if it be an activity, of walking my fingers over the keys has just made me lose track of the last ten minutes. And now it is time for me to drive to hospital, have a needle stuck in my arm, and allow a nurse to draw my blood. And the moment from the first sight of the needle to the moment it is withdrawn from the end is e-n-d-l-e-s-s and takes an eternity.
What Bothers You and Why?
What bothers you and why?
I went to the pharmacy today for my regular shots, booster and upgrade. The pharmacist asked me if I was allergic to anything. “Yes,” I replied. “I am allergic to stupidity.”
Stupidity is a singular thing, but it comes in many forms. The car driver who weaves his car through thick traffic, breaking the speed limit, threading a narrow pathway, overtaking on the inside, the outside, turning a two way street into a three way street by adding a third lane, even though there is oncoming traffic in the new lane he has built for himself. Such people rely on the charity of others to give way and make space.
Then there are incompetent teachers. Not all teachers are incompetent. Some are wonderful, kind, friendly, and comforting. Others are martinets, escaped from the army cage, and strutting the classroom, using the ruler to beat the students into submission. ‘My way or the highway,’ they claim, and what they say goes, even if it climbs to the height of stupidity or falls to the bottom of the well of incompetence.
Goya illustrated the nature of various kinds of stupidity in his wonderful etchings. Witches flying, donkeys braying, simple people worshipping the expensive clothing but never seeing the corruption it covers. So, turn to the Caprichos and the Proverbios, or, if you want to receive a real lesson in man’s inhumanity to man, look at the Desastres de la Guerra, the disasters of war.
Stupidity – a simple word – but with multiple meanings. What bothers me, and why? Stupidity, plain and simple, in its multitudinous forms.
Window Pain
Window Pain
I live in a world beyond the material world.
At night, I swim, a silver fish, among the stars.
Constellations net me in their glistening hair.
By day I wander along a piano’s keys.
I replay life’s golden dreams again and again,
its quartets, concertos, and its symphonies.
A harmonious blacksmith, I no longer know
who, or what, I am. I only know I exist right here,
at my desk, looking out through my window,
a window in my mind, that serves as a mirror,
reflecting all I was, and am, and ever will be.
Sometimes, the sun shines. Often the rain
falls cold against that window pane, and I press
my nose against cold glass, and feel again the pain.
Wash Day Blues
Wash-Day Blues
“Out, out, foul spot.” Yet,
however much I scrub them,
those blood spots on my clothes
will not disappear. No seas
incarnadine for me. Picking
at scabs, my fingernails draw blood.
with so many ragged edges.
The old, stale liquid flows
fresh again from once-healed wounds.
Why made me open them up?
Was it just boredom? Or that itch
ever nibbling at the mind’s edge?
Tell me, how do we walk away?
How do we heal ourselves?
How do we forgive and forget?
Does the fresh blood wash away
the dirt I feel crusted round me?
Will I ever be clean again?
Wednesday is wash-day.
I scrub again and again
at all my dirty linen. Then I watch
as my wrinkled skin grows damp, scabs
soften, and I open them once more.
Lost
Lost
Where can it be? I put it
somewhere safe, but I
can’t remember where.
So many things grow legs,
go absent without leave,
walk out of my world.
I am slowly losing control.
My life will soon be left
in somebody else’s hands.
They will control my wants
needs, and necessities.
Then I too will be lost.
Placed somewhere safe,
perhaps, there to lie forgotten,
abandoned, secure, perhaps,
but who knows at what cost.
A Darker Mist
A Darker Mist
Sometimes a dark mist marches over
the sea-salt marsh flats and, a sea-bird
come to land, nests in my heart. This lone
bird brings others and soon a colony sings
its chorus in time with the incoming tide
that threatens to overwhelm me.
My body’s weak clay responds to this
darkness and slips into the chaotic
cacophony of multiple voices
raised to shut me off from the light.
My soul, a seagull seeking the sun,
rises upwards, ever upwards,
in search of the sunshine, that silver
lining that redeems every cloud, belying
the darkness of this gathering gloom.
“You will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over landscape.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 94.
Swings
Swings
They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.
A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.
Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.
There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back to whatever reality I left.
But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?
Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.
Wish it or not, my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.
The Appointment
The Appointment
“We have room tomorrow,” she said.
“But only between 7 and 9 am.
Shall I book you in for 8:15?”
“Sure,” I replied, not realizing
that I had forgotten to remember
the joys of rush hour traffic,
and the crush of crossing
the only bridge downtown.
I left home early only to find
chaos at the end of my road.
School busses, cars nose to tail,
trucks, cyclists, you name it,
it was all there, flowing, slow
but steady, with scarcely room
to insert a razor blade between
bumper and bumper. But that
was only the beginning.
The bridge downtown: it was
like threading a four wheeled camel
through the eye of a very small needle.
Crawlers, creepers, slugs and snails,
racing demons, speedsters, all of them
hustling, impatient, bustling, yielding
not an inch of space. My car became
a shuttle, weaving a thread of progress,
inch by inch, through the maze
that confronted and confounded.
I got to my journey’s end at last.
“You’re late,” said the girl at reception.
“You’ve missed your appointment.
Shall I book you in again?
Tomorrow at the same time?”
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