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The Unexamined Life 1

The Unexamined Life 1

“The unexamined life
is not worth living.”
Socrates.

A philosopher’s life’s based on thinking,
and drinking, and thinking, and drinking,
and thinking and drinking,
and thinking and drinking,
and thinking about thinking and drinking.

He gazes and gazes at his navel,
every day for as long as he is able,
and talks to his wife
about trouble and strife
and the problems they have to unravel

But all is not doom and gloom
when a philosopher enters the room,
tho none can debunk
the size of the trunk
of the elephant stuck in the room.

As for me, I am caring and giving,
and although I work hard for my living,
I’d willingly share
with a friend in despair
half my cloak and a third of my living.

“Join the army,” the philosopher said.
“There’s no life like it,” he said.
“You get very few thanks
when you’re in the front ranks,
but it’s better than walking round dead.”

(To be continued … )

“The unlived life
is not worth examining.”
Pseudo-Socrates.

Needles

Needles

You won’t come
to very much harm
when nurse sticks a needle
in your arm.

The nurse is nice,
the needle’s bright
and you know things
will turn out right.

Sometimes, things go
a little bit wrong,
but side effects
don’t last too long.

You needn’t fret,
you needn’t frown
until they ask you
to lie down.

If nurse’s eyes
light up with glee,
if she strops the needle
on her knee,

if she sneaks up to you
from behind,
the needle’s blunt
but never mind.

You’ll be out of there
before you can squawk
and a walking stick
will help you walk.

M. T. Kettle

M. T. Kettle

I had a friend called M. T. Kettle
and he was one of those boys
who thought they were very,very clever
and always made a lot of noise.

Alas, he had an empty head
but the teachers set him right.
They drilled a hole in his empty head
and filled it with homework every night.

Each day in class when they tested him
hot tears fell from his eye.
It was such a shame
when they called out his name
to watch that young boy cry.

In our school, education
was like filling M. T.’s head.
The masters took notebooks filled with ideas
from white males (mainly dead),
and told us stories of their own past glories,
We would have liked fresh thoughts instead.

We sat in a classroom, row upon row,
our pencils in our hands,
and took dictation about every nation
that had passed through colonial hands.

“Now knowledge, boys, is in your notes,”
that’s what one master said.
“I read them out, you write them down,
they never pass through anyone’s head.”

Doldrums

Colloquially:
a state of inactivity, mild depression, listlessness, or stagnation.
Dold (stupid) plus –rums (a suffix as in tant-rums).
Wikipedia

All at sea
in a pea green boat:
let’s just hope
it’ll stay afloat.

When winds don’t blow
and Doll Drums roll,
pray sea-urchins
won’t devour your soul.

If you feel some wind
but the flags won’t fly
watch Admiral Brown
as he passes by.

Take this friendly
advice from me:
“Sit at your desk
and never go to sea.”

And if you really
want to see the sea,
just watch it on a movie
on your home TV.

“As idle as a painted ship
upon a painted ocean.”

The Ancient Mariner
S. T. Coleridge.

The Happy Hours

The Happy Hours

In my garden are many birds,
some with pretty looks.
Alas, so many of my birds
are never found in birding books.

Here’s the Oinky Boing-Boing Bird,
a veritable sign of spring.
When he appears, get out the spade:
it’s time for gardening.

His legs are yellow, his face is blue,
but he’ll bring good luck to you.

When Mrs. Flowerhat comes along
the neighbors greet her with a song.
They cluster on branches in the tree
and chat together merrily.

No matter whether it’s rain or sun,
they tell tall tales about everyone.

Occasionally, it looks like rain
and then the birds don’t fly.
They vanish or they hang around
with a tear drop in their eye.

The sundial sleeps in the falling rain
and I find it really funny:
he only wants to tell the time
when the world is bright and sunny.

Horas non numero nisi serenas.
I count only the happy hours.

Li-(n)-es

Li-(n)-es
. ________________________ .

A straight line:
the shortest distant between two points,
as the crow flies, but what if it’s spring and the crows
loop the loop and fly claw to claw and wingtip to wingtip
tumbling up and down in an aerial game of snakes and ladders
with wind-thrown dice
—un coup de dès n’abolira jamais le hasard —
and a throw of the dice will never abolish chance
and is it by chance that their wingtips whistle in the wind
as they somersault over the house and tumble down
the tiles never touching anything, but carving
and painting the air with broad, feathery strokes
and oh the power in those oh so gentle wings …
… floating, flaunting their shiny blackness
like kites held back by the colored
li-(n)-es and strings that restrain them
even when released to their elemental sky-
-dance among cloud and wind

And what is drawing except taking a line for a walk
–and I don’t know who said it, but he’s probably
dead, so I can’t give him the credit he deserves —
but the pencil point, pen point, is a dog on a leash
sniffing the ground and following its nose,
here, there, anywhere the wind blows its magic
sense of scents and the pooch-world reduced
to a nose like a pencil point that draws the dog on …

And
“My ambition,” said Henri Matisse,
as he wielded his scissors,
“is to liberate color, to make it serve
both as form and content.”
I too am content with colors and a line
attached to a wandering dog
and my spirit unleashed
to make colors flourish and flow
wherever they want my mind to go.

Rapping the Blues

Rapping the Blues
(for Julie G.)

Have you ever felt blue?
Blue like a Smurf,
I mean totally blue,
so blue that the blues
were all made for you?

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Wittgenstein
that wise old man
gives the blues a rap.
He says anyone can
change his point of view
and stop feeling blue.
It all depends
on your point of view.

He says “face the music,
take a chance,
teach yourself
to sing and dance.”

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“Don’t look in the mirror,
don’t look inside:
the things in there
are why you cried.
Take a look at life
from another side.”

IMG_0178 3.JPG

“Talk to yourself,
make the point:
don’t let your nose
get out of joint.”

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“Inside us all
there’s a trinity:
a you and a me
and a he and a she.
But three’s a crowd
when they shout out loud
even when they say
‘No Blues allowed.'”

But I’m telling you
what he said to me
and that’s the way
it’s gonna be.

There’s a silver lining
to every cloud,
and when the sun shines
we sing out loud.

So dance in the rain
when you’re feeling blue
and make that sun
come shining through.

W5 Identity Crisis

The EGO Searches for its ID

W5: Identity Crisis

W5: who, what, where, when, why am I? It happens to all of us and sometimes it’s overwhelming: a tidal wave of doubt that sweeps us off our feet and we ask but we have no answers.

Who am I? I know my name and I repeat it to myself like a mantra but I still don’t know who I am. Know thyself: easily said, but not so easily done and sometimes the mantra is a praying mantis that tries to bite off my head.

What am I? Good question: locked in the White Tower of the Academy, I knew who I was and what I did. But what happens when the White Tower crumbles around you and you are left picketing the sidewalk: no classroom, no students, no lecture hall, no lectures, no timetable, no marking, no nothing to tell you who and what you are?

Where am I? In retirement, of course, locked in a landscape of weeds and gardens, of growing grass that encroaches on the house and rises like the tide that threatens to surge into a tidal wave of sharp green blades. Death by mowing: and a still body lying out by the mower, waiting to be visited by crows.

When am I? Chained to the here and now and locked to my computer in a voiceless monologue with a faceless, dialogic screen that mirrors each word and moves a relentless line of print across a virtual page. The grandfather clock chimes the half hour and, for a moment or two, I break from computer face time to enter the circular space time of the clock’s repetition. “See you tomorrow, sir, same time, same place,” the clock speaks out and, hopeful, I nod in response.

Why am I? Sometimes I think I am here just to give the grandfather clock someone to speak too. If I were to go, the clock would cease to exist, for me, but others would hear its chime. Is there no rhyme nor reason to my existence other than to sit here typing and listening to the Westminster Chimes and me so far from Westminster that my mind must travel three thousand miles east just to imagine it. And what does Westminster now mean? To you, to me, to the clock in the hall that endlessly repeats its Westminster Chime?

On Re-reading Quevedo’s Poetry

Was that where my life went,
a spent candle trailing dark studies
among the packed lines of your poems?

And you, was your life gutted by that
same guttering candle by whose light you
scrawled your tight black spider rhymes?

Were they all meaningless, your insights
and my words? So few now know who
you were and what you represented
and I, your scholar, a mere shadow of your
shadow struggling in the straggling
light of a far-off continent, far from content
at knowing so much about you. Intent
I was on spreading light and the word
to a world that thinks the two of us absurd.

Our world is spinning on its edge, placed
on the perimeter of space, and going nowhere.
Specks of dust we sit and contemplate
the vastness of what exactly: our fortunes,
our spirits, our houses, our power, our lands?
Out there, in the vastness that surrounds us,
worlds without end will never know we existed.

Bleak and blank our names, our deeds, our status,
the statues they raise in our praise. And what of
our thoughts, those sparks of electricity
that link us lip to ear and mind to action
and each of our actions transformed by a dance
performed by circling planets that shape our wills?

Who programs that universe now? Who plays
what trivial games of snakes and ladders
in which we are the dots and dashes, pinballs
among a million trillion strings of flashing lights?

Maybe there is an answer, this maybe:

Within this bookstore are many books, yet none
with my name on the cover or my life blood inside.
Deeper I dig, and deeper. Now here is a name I know,
and there in the bibliography, at last, I find my name:

two books, a score or so articles, a thesis, and I am
vindicated. All that study, that work, has led to this:
my name in a foreign book in a foreign bookstore. Nice
work: now I know that wherever I go, I can establish

my identity, set myself free from anonymity’s pangs.
Plug in the computer, turn it on, and there I am on the web,
smiling back at me. There is no better passport, no better

sense of being, of identity, than that contained in these
images of self, these self-reproductions that I carry with
me, always, in a memory stick looped round my neck.

Or even this, the Teddy Bear planet just off the Red Nose of the Cat Constellation:

The Twain

“And never the twain shall meet.” This was the chorus that my grandparents often chanted at me when family members started rowing with each other over one trivial incident or another.
“But what happens when the twain do meet,” I used to ask.
“Don’t be silly,” they said. “The twain never meet. Ever.”
But I know very well that they do.
I know.
I’ve seen them together.

Funny things, they are, the twain, and opposites in so many ways. But so nice, in spite of what some people, especially my grandparents, used to say about them.

Not only do they meet, but they can be happy together and very, very friendly.
“Long time, no see,” the twain say, and embrace quite warmly with a bunch of flowers held between them.

Mind you, the twain can also be quite awkward and occasionally very abusive towards each other. I remember my mother and father fighting “like cats and dogs” as my grandparents used to say.

Now, my grandparents had a cat. It was black and white and striped like a zebra. They called it Spot. My parents had a dog. It was an English Cocker Spaniel, gold in color, and off-spring to a famous sire. They called it Wimpy but it was by no means a wimp and fought with everything in sight, especially the cat.

So when my father and mother fought and the family cat and dog fought, I thought, quite reasonably in my opinion, that dogs (with their short hair) were male and cats (with their long hair) were female, and that was the reason why they fought like cats and dogs. And “never the twain shall meet” as my grandparents used to say about my mother and father and the cat and the dog.

I guess it was too early to learn about the birds and the bees when, young and all too innocent, I was learning about the cats and the dogs.

And of course it’s only natural that the twain should meet. My mother and my father, the cat and the dog, had to meet somewhere, didn’t they? How else would I be here? We weren’t the sort of family that practiced contraception by throwing stones at the storks to keep the babies away. But I could never work out why the cat always had female kittens while the dog had all-male off-spring. That was a bit too much for me, and nobody ever explained anything in those days.

And look, in spite of the differences between them, even cats and dogs can sometimes live together in peace. And opposites can and do attract, don’t they? Look at these two, coming together like a pair of magnets.

Or, as the King of Rock and Roll might have phrased it:

“I’m so square.”
“Baby, I don’t care.”

Sometimes

Sometimes the road seems uphill all the way. Lungs burn. Breath comes hot and hard and chunky in the throat. Legs hang heavy, muscles will not obey the owner’s instructions.

Consult the operating manual: “Take a break,” it says. “Rest now. Don’t push too hard.” But to rest is to give in, to come to an abrupt halt, or to drift backwards down the hill.

What stubborn streak is painted so deep in us that it shouts ‘never surrender’ when our most urgent need seems to be to throw in the towel? Is it the urge to get to the top, to see the lower lands stretched out below us? Or is it the mantra of fight the good fight?

Many things can drive us on: a need, a desire, a whim, an urge, or merely a refusal to stop fighting. Some of us will never give up. We will never lie down and curl up in a corner, a dead leaf to be blown hither and thither by the cold night wind.

Look carefully: there are no drugs, no needles, in the biker’s uniform. There is no small accessory motor hidden in the back wheel to help when times get hard.

The mouth is open, the eyes are set on the target, the legs still move, the sun still shines, and three smiling heart-shaped faces cheer the cyclist on.

Who can they be, these three angels at the road side, who can they be? Yet they are there and we are here and the bike is there and the hill is there and sometimes … yes, sometimes, the road IS uphill all the way.

But we keep the pedals turning and we don’t get off our bikes … and that’s life.

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