My audience two obedient teddy bears a technicolor cow and an obsidian frog from the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacán
Outside my window the listening trees clap their leaves beating the wind with their branches
Flowers lend deaf ears for they are dead dried and broken by this deathly drought
In the next room TV ads blare in an effort to silence my voice
Absence and presence of water the garden dry fall foliage crisp and complaining useless tears flowing down my cheeks
Audience
So important, the audience. But is what the poet writes what the audience hears? With an audience like mine, who knows? What does a teddy bear know about tears, drought, or doubt? Does a multi-colored cow suffer, like I do, when he hears the adverts on the television set? What does an obsidian frog, from the Temple of the Moon know about life in Island View? Carved in a desert, surrounded by volcanoes, some dormant, some liable to break into activity, does he understand the morse code words tapped out by the branches of trees?
How do we understand the pathetic fallacy in terms of the inanimate stuffed animals that sit upon my table? I talk to my teddy, the one that sleeps beside me in my bed upstairs. I talk to him, but he never replies. Opposite me, at my desk, sits Hairy Fred, my favorite teddy bear. He used to be an overcoat, until his creator bought the coat, cut it into fifty pieces and grew fifty teddies from the wreckage.
I guess he should know more about humans than most teddy bears, having wrapped them and kept them warm in a previous life. Alas, he too is silent. As in reality are the trees, the leaves, and the flowers. Silent, in the human sense, but full of a different sort of life that overflows with another set of languages, that creative people can hear, but seldom speak.
A weathered canister releases galaxies, gears, symbols, and handwritten notes into a star-filled universe.
Original Question –
Roger I have a question for you. Recently I purchased a book by Forrester- The African Queen. I enjoyed the movie years ago and thought I would like to read the story. The main actors were great. The book highlighted that it showed what it was like being a female during the war, (1) which when I look back on now is one of its main points.
My question or thought on this book is tied around the library system. When I lived in Fredericton I wanted to give a bunch of books to the library, their first question to me was, “How old are the books? I told her and she said anything over five years in not being accepted. (2)
I wondered about this and the fact that many books in school are being removed, (3) how can we tell how much we have progressed? (4)
I don’t like predjudice but it seems we are throwing out too much. (5) Any thoughts on this. I don’t mind some of the history being trashed (6) because for Canada the consentation is for Quebec and Ontario.
Roger’s Response
(1) It’s also about the role of the nun in society. How do ‘holy women’ function in a male society? It sets the questions but doesn’t really give the answers. It’s a long time since I saw the film. I don’t think I ever read the book – the themes might well change in print. They are present (some of them) in The Handmaid’s Tale.
(2) The library system seems to have rules and an etiquette all its own. When I donated books to the library, they accepted some for their collections, but set others up for sale on the book tables by the door. My guess is that certain books are ‘best sellers’ and will be read, others are ‘dust gatherers’ and won’t be. They want the former, not the latter. They also have specialized collections. If the books fit the specialized collections, great. If they don’t, then they hit the unwanted category and are moved on. This is particularly true of the UNB Library System.
(3) This is an entirely different question, and one with very deep roots. It deals, in part, with the question of control – quis custodiet ipsos custodies – who shall guard the guards, who shall program the programmers? By controlling what people read, you control their thoughts. One of the worst signs of this was the book burnings of the Spanish Inquisition (16th – 17th centuries). The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. (And the Arabs / Moors, in 1609). Prior to that, they were ‘processed’ by the Inquisition. The original Inquisition was Papal, and was aimed at instructing the priesthood in Rome. It was corrupted in Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, a sort of secret police, which worked rather like the Gestapo in WWII. One of their jobs was to ensure that people who had converted, stayed converted and didn’t revert to their old religion, even in secret. Another was to ensure that reading material, religious material, and cultural material, particularly after 1527 (Martin Luther and his 97 theses) when the Reformation started, were all in line with the accepted thoughts of the time. All books were sent to the Censor who vetted them and either approved them or asked for changes, if he (they were all men) saw the slightest sign of dissent or heresy. Don Quixote, Book One, Chapter Six (DQ,I,6), deals with the book burnings of DQ’s personal library. In certain of the States (down south) books are already being banned. One that touches us closely is the banning of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
(4) “There is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place and that nonetheless I perceive these things and they seem good to me. And this is the most harrowing possibility of all, that our world is commanded by a deity who deceives humanity and we cannot avoid being misled for there may be systematic deception and then all is lost. And even the most reliable information is dubious, for we may be faced with an evil genius who is deceiving us and then there can be no reassurance in the foundations of our knowledge.” René Descartes (1635)
Descartes expresses this much better than I can. It is one of the major dangers of the age in which we live. How do we distinguish between reality and alternate realities? Which reality is the real reality? What is or isn’t fake news? How do we tell? Who do we believe, and why?
(5) Part of the problem is that ‘certain people’ – who don’t believe in science and who exploit people’s ignorance to their own advantage – are willing to destroy the foundations of our knowledge. Burn everything down. And start again. And the new starting point is to impose what they believe upon everybody around them. This is a huge and crucial question that threatens us, as individuals. It also threatens the foundations of our knowledge, as well as the very world in which we live – climate change vs denial of climate change – profits over people. Once one starts looking at the AI systems with their immense persuasive powers and their seemingly uncontrollable spread of Mis-information and Dis-information, then we start to realize how serious the problem is.
(6) Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it – Santana (I think). However, we must, in certain circumstances, adjust our current beliefs to current realities. Immigration is a major issue – as is how we deal with people, like me, of different cultures and beliefs? Not everything written in the past suits our current world view. I have been looking at old Westerns – “The only good injun is a dead one” (John Wayne). Really? I know some wonderful people in our first nations communities and I have taught them and worked with them and been taught by them. “Shoot first and ask questions afterwards.” Really? I won’t comment further on that one… and there are so many others.
All of this comes down to the big question – freedom of information or the release of just enough information to persuade other people of what we believe and what we want them to believe. Power and Control. Knowledge is Power – Michael Foucault. Control that knowledge and you have power over the people. Noam Chomsky has written widely on this – and his books have been banned in the USA. Bertrand Russell too – The Meaning of Meaning, for example, and his establishing – along with A. J. Ayer – of the doctrine of logical positivism – the removal by means of mathematics of all the emotional content of words.
My friend, you have opened a can of worms.
Long may they wriggle.
Comment:
A series of questions that have recurred throughout the centuries. Well worth re-asking them and rethinking them. Times change and the answers often change with them. The image, incidentally, is AI generated, based on an examination of my written words.
A meaningless collection of notes swarms into my empty head swimming round and round like clustering tadpoles.
The ebb and flow of that mysterious music clumps on and on, tight in my mind and will not let me go.
Earwigs, some call them, those senseless repetitions, day after day, night after night, awake and asleep, old tv adverts, short clips of classical music or popular songs.
They are wheelbarrow songs, hedge clippings, dead flowers, crass grass, broken branches, weeds, repetitive memes of meaning, a syndrome of stuck songs destined for the garbage dump and ritual burning in the hell of an eternal turntable turning.
Comment:
Word magic from the Mikado – “My object all sublime I shall achieve in time, to make the punishment fit the crime” … And in this case I would tie the criminals who invented these ‘ballads, songs, and snatches’ to the stake, with earphones that endlessly repeated all the nonsense we hear day and night, so much of which sticks in the turntables of our brains turning round and round as we toss and turn in our beds at night. Just a case, I suppose, of hearing music while there’s no one there.
And how many earworms did you pluck out of that first paragraph? I can count six, maybe seven. Then, my mind may be very different from yours. Perhaps your mind isn’t in the outrageous Wilfred that mine is. Don’t get that joke, do you? And why should you? I guess you don’t remember Ray’s a Laugh, Round the Horne, Mr. Dimwitty, or Wilfred Pickles – and why should you.
Passent les jours et passent les semaines / ni temps passés ni les amours reviennent / sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine– click on the link for the English version (my translation) and click on this linkfor a slightly improved revised version.
Yes, as Apollinaire says time flows on and by – or, after Heraclitus – you can never step in the same river twice. More important, perhaps, for those who worry about their past thoughts, words, and deeds – you can throw the stone into the pond, but you can’t control the ripples.
We need to see each person as an individual needing exclusive care, a unique style.
We must let them know that they are not lost and alone, that they will be approached individually, each and every one.
Treated equally, yes, but each in his or her particular case and cultural situation.
A dream? Perhaps. But the alternative is a nightmare.
Comment:
An interesting chat over the dinner table – de sobremesa – led us to the meaning of equality and treating people equally. The kernel of the discussion – I said I believed in treating all people equally, Moo’s guest for the evening, his Plus One, said that treating people equally was no longer right. It was necessary to treat each person as an individual, with different needs, and we must therefore go beyond equal treatment to individual treatment. A word to the wise from the wiser.
Treat other people as you would have them treat you. The phrase goes back a long, long way to Socrates, Seneca, and maybe beyond. It ties in with the ideals of Buddhism and also of early Chinese philosophers.
It centers on the meaning of ‘equally’ and is a wonderful topic for discourse analysis. If by ‘equally’ we mean one size fits all, then we merely drop the grid down upon the targeted individual and tick the boxes where the pieces fit. However, if we agree that such ‘equal treatment’ is in fact potentially discriminatory, then we must break ‘equally’ down and give it the extended meaning of ‘with equal care and attention‘ according to their individual needs and cultural, social, medical, educational, or religious beliefs.
So, here am I, sitting over the dinner table, musing with my family and friends on the meaning of meaning and learning that old ideas can be renewed and that yes, even an old dog like me, eighty plus years old and still counting, can learn a new trick or two [or several], from those who are brought up in a different, younger, more diverse world, and whom are consequently more habituated to this world than I am. It’s a good lesson – and I hope, well-learned.
“And that,” said Moo, “is why I painted Who’s Who Zoo. Look carefully before you label who is who and where they stand in the Who’s Who Zoo.”
Bakhtin’s Carnival – the world turned upside down and inside out. And here it is. Moo has painted an upside down world. From the above angle, the world is full of birds and is “as crazy as the birds“. Lovely image. There they go, birds of a feather, flocking together, soaring, sinking, doing what birds do when they are as crazy as bat shit – and Moo told me, he nearly gave his painting that name – Crazy as Bat Shit.
But hang on a moment – if the world is upside down, what happens when you turn Moo’s painting upside down? Let’s try it and see.
Would you believe it – the birds are no longer birds, they have turned into animals. From this point of view, we have Animal Farm. Moo thinks he can sell this painting for double the price now he has discovered it means something different the other way up. Now – what if …. Nope. Let’s leave it there. We are not going to turn it sideways, nor inside out. That’s asking too much of Moo and his painting skills.
But we have a tiny little lesson, and with no poem attached to it. Perspectivism – the same object seen from two different points of view by two different people can elicit different functions and different interpretations.
Think of the Barber’s Basin in Don Quixote. One group of people see it as a barber’s basin. A second group see it as Mambrino’s Helmet, missing a visor. Cervantes resolves the problem by adding yelmo to bacía to give a new word – a baciyelmo. A helmet that serves as a basin and vice-versa. Does such a combination exist in English? Whyever not! We can call it a bassinet, as in a pig-faced bassinet. That is to say, a helmet with a snout that ends in a bassin – well, we can forgive the -ss- if we are generous.
And now we come to the important part of our lesson. Most things can be changed from one meaning to another, if we change our position and our point of view. Birds can become animals. Animals can turn into birds. A good mood can be turned into a bad mood. A bad mood can be turned into a good one.
There is so much depression around us at the current time. “Turn that frown upside down” – and turn the world on its head and inside out. I bet you can do it if you really try. After all, Moo has shown you how and I assure you that Moo – and I know him well – is no genius. However, in spite of that, every so often he stumbles on a tiny truth, just like he has in this painting.
So – don’t get frightened and depressed by the black dog when he leaps out at you from the grandmother clock. Turn him from a dog into a bird and let him fly away into the blue, taking the black dog’s blues along with him. And remember – if Moo can do it, so can you. So “turn that frown upside down” and remake your world in the shape you would like it to be. And remember – if Moo can do it, so can you.
each time you see a shooting star a child is born or an angel falls swarms of them in certain seasons when our planet sails through the meteor belt and rocks burn up as they fall to earth through air and fire
written in the stars they say and everyday I read my horoscope to see what lies in stall or rather what fate will me befall
warmth and love perhaps yet what do cold unconscious planets know about this life that people lead below
Eros Agape Philia Jupiter Mercury Venus Mars who knows what ancient Greek and Roman gods still play at being gods among so many drifting shifting shooting stars
Comment:
So, Moo is back to painting, at long last. Last night he painted two paintings to celebrate his return to a lovely clean, neat, washed, rearranged workshop desk that a certain KTJ tidied up for him. He was so happy. I could see him bouncing up and down on tip-toe, trying not to fall over with excitement. He even got to wash his brushes and ensure that all the remaining ones were solid and good.
“Back again,” he sighed. And that’s exactly what he painted. Of course, in the course of time some of his paints have dried up and a brush or two needed careful separation, fine squirrel hairs from dried paint. But with a little elbow grease and a lot of luck everything came together.
This time, I had poem that fitted Moo’s painting. It explores the idea that everything can be found in the heavens. Fray Luis de León phrases it this way –
Es más que un breve punto este bajo y torpe suelo comparado con aquel gran transunto donde vive mejorado todo lo que es, lo que será, lo que ha pasado?
Is it more than a brief speck this low and clumsy earth compared with that huge universe where lives in betterment everything that is, will be, and was?
Well, what a load of questions and all based on 16th Century Spanish Neo-Platonism. Yet old as the system of star reading is, people still read their daily horoscopes. Well, some people do. I guess they think that in the same way that the moon rules the tides and pulls them this way and that way, then the moon and stars rule our bodies – we are, after all, 95% water – and pull us this way and that way.
But hold on a moment. Nature or nurture. And what about free will – libre albedrío? Are we ruled by the stars? Or do we have free will to do as we want in this little world of ours? Good questions. What we do know is that certain people think they can do whatever they want, with no repercussions or consequences whatsoever, while others understand that certain societal norms and rules are there for a purpose. Oh dear – the eternal question. If the stars and planets know what we will do and when we will do it, can we speak of free will or are our lives pre-determined!
I guess Moo’s painting is more than a Who’s Who Zoo and more a who did what and with which and to whom zoo combined with when and why did they do it. “Alas, if thy mother knew it, sadly, sadly would she rue it.” And now’s the time to De La Rue it – so get out those playing cards, shuffle them carefully, read your fortune, and let’s see what is going to happen, and how, and when. Or you could read tea leaves, Viking Runes, or the lines on the palm of your hand. Speaking of which – question – what is the first sign of madness? – answer – hairs on the palm of your hand. Question – what is the second sign of madness? – answer – looking for them. – and you did, go on, admit it, you took a little peek, didn’t you. I know you did – it was written in the stars, and in the Tarot pack, and … and … and …. did you find one?
When the scales fell from my eyes I stood on them and wondered what I weighed on the time’s great scales.
Miniscule. A featherweight. A dandelion seed blown on the wind that whirls the world through space.
Spiritus mundi – the great world spirit inflating my lungs, each breath a glimpse of the infinite combining in my body and soul.
The sails of a windmill, my arms, and the wind turning them, dashing me down into the dust, then raising me rejoicing to the skies.
Comment:
Moo said I needed cheering up, so he painted me a happy painting. “I know it’s not a windmill,” he told me, “but you can pretend it is. The leaves of the clover even look like they might be a windmill, and look, it’s got arms as well.”
“Thank you, Moo,” I said. My poem is a happy poem and it proves that the Black Dog of yesterday had been banished today, not by a happy dog, but by a four leafed clover standing beneath a shower of solver and gold.”
Intertextuality – texts speaking to texts. I wonder how many texts you can spot in this poem. I can count five, at least, and there are probably more. Milton Acorn, Miguel de Cervantes, Northop Frye, the Bible (not y Beibl Cymreig, unfortunately), Edmond Rostand. That’s quite the handful. Well, four fingers and a thumb, at least. Now all you have to do is spot the original sources which, blended, give my poem a saucy sauce of sorts. So, grab your AI and play hide and seek and see what you can find drawn from the dark recesses of my mind. Don’t give in too easily, now.
Mood swings – mood changes – Moody Me – Moody Moo – I’ll bet that you are Moody Too. Good mood, bad mood, who’s to say? We’ll leave that for another day!
The black dog leaps out of the grandmother clock and lands on my back.
His paws grip my shoulders, then rake down my spine.
I try to shake him off, but he growls, bares his teeth, and won’t let go.
I love that clock, its Westminster chimes, the Roman numerals standing guard over the pointed arrows of the hands as they march round and round.
But I hate the hound that makes its kennel in the clock, leaps out, snaps at me, bites and claws, and grinds me down into the ground.
Comment:
The Black Dog was Winston Churchill’s name for the depression that came over him, and overcame him, from time to time. It used to attack me when I was a young boy living in Swansea. My grandfather would point at the clock and say “He’s in there. He’s coming for you. I can see him. It’s the black dog.” Well, that used to drive me crazy and whatever it was that set me off became twice as bad when the black dog arrived. Alas, now I am entering into my dotage and my second childhood, the black dog has re-appeared to trouble my waking hours. I guess it’s the mood swings. Happy one moment, miserable the next. The good dog appears. The black dog drives it away. Then the good dog reappears and all is well again.
Moo understands me and my patterns very well. In fact he painted two paintings for me – Twin – the one above and Niwt – the one below. You can see evidence of the good dog and the black dog in each of them. But which is which?
I’ll leave you to guess which is the good dog and which the bad one. Really and truly, they are two sides of the same coin – heads and tails so to speak. Moo tells me you can think of the paintings as a mirror image, one of the other.
It’s like mood swings – either my mind or my body flips the coin and one of the two dogs jumps out visit me. Luckily, after a bit, the good one chases the bad one away, so it’s all swings and roundabouts and all the fun of the fair. Until I fall off the Ferris Wheel or see my own shadow while riding on the Ghost Train.
Twin, of course, is Niwt backwards. Or is it the other way round. Dylan Thomas, my favorite Welsh poet, set the standard for word reversal. After all, the town of Llareggub is bugger all backwards. What fun we can have when we twist our words, double up on our language, reverse words and their meanings, and generally weave the tangled webs of linguistic double-talk. Oh the mystery of missed and mixed up meanings. But are meanings meaningful or meaningless? Now that is the question. And when you have answered it for meanings, start thinking about double-meanings and their twins – or should that be quadruplets?
belong to another day another experience a different thought set
tomorrow’s words new leaves drifting from the tree bright-faced kites on a wind we have yet to know
mini-kites they fly and our eyes cling on to them while we stand tethered here below
itinerant drifters they will not stay they just fly away notes on a wind words of a song
tomorrow’s words tomorrow’s song yet to be sung
Comment
Some time ago, Moo painted this painting – Ephemera he calls it. He wrote a series of thoughts – in poetic form – then covered them over with paint. “Everything,” he told me, “is transient. Ephemeral. The poems you write. The paintings I paint. All ephemeral.” “What does ephemeral mean?” I asked him. He gave me his Bad Hair Day Moo Grunt – “Go look it up,” he told me. So I did.
Ephemeral means lasting for only a very short time, fleeting or transitory. Derived from the Greek word ephēmeros—which literally translates to “lasting only a day”—it is often used to describe things like a beautiful sunset, a brief childhood emotion, or a flitting dream that fades in the morning light. The true essence of the word highlights the fragile, impermanent nature of life, trends, and experiences, serving as a poetic reminder to appreciate moments while they happen. Thank you AI and Wikipedia and anyone else involved. Alas, some citations are as ephemeral as words.
Moo’s painting links with several themes from antiquity. Carpe diem – seize the day. Make the best use of the time you have, for time flits by in the twinkling of an eye. Ubi sunt – the central theme of time past – ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere – where are they who lived in this world before us -. This is an age old question that returns via Gaudeamus igitur – a song still sung in some European universities at graduation time. It also occurs in Villon – Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are last year’s snows. This is the version sung by Georges Brassens.
While the past slips rapidly away, like scenery viewed in the rear view mirror of a rapidly advancing car, the future is always before us. Yet, in many ways it is as ephemeral as the past and soon fades into that rearview mirror as we drive along our chosen paths. The words of yesterday have gone. The words of tomorrow have not yet arrived. We can only cling to the words that we speak and hear now. Catch them if you can. Savour them. They won’t last long.
alive in the moment a momentary cloud crosses the sun face brings shade to table
soon page and tabletop ripple with light again
the pen’s shadow pushes across the page while the nib weaves its spider fine lines of well webbed words
meaningful mindful each letter a moment caught and held in time
Comments:
I caught myself forcing myself to write a poem – and it just wasn’t working. Meaningless words upon the page, each wound up, struggling like a little black fly in a spider web that promised only oblivion. Then I caught the one sentence that ends the above poem – each letter a moment caught in time. I had found what I was looking for. For the next half hour I played back and forth with a whole sequence of dibbles and dabbles that eventually led to what I have written above.
I showed it to Moo. “Tranquility,” he said. “I have just the painting for you.” Love at first sight – poet and painter, painting and poem, blissful in a true moment of blended tranquility and mindfulness. “Why, thank you, dear Moo,” I said and all our previous squibbling and squabbling was laid aside. We gave each other a big hug – I should add that we don’t often do that, as one or two of you out there might well know. But we did it today.
Meanwhile, I have received another set of fake invitations – oh, I would be so famous in the world of fakery if I gave away what little money I own to make myself truly famous – for my folly in believing the permanence of fakery. Why, only last week, I got an email mistaking me for my namesake and offering to help me publicize his most famous book – My Word is my Bond. The person involved was asking for a cool $250,00 for making the videos.
Oh dear. 007 is one thing. 006.5 is something else and someone else. Never mind – maybe one day someone real will call me and make me a genuine offer that I really can’t refuse. I probably wouldn’t believe that if it happened.
