It’s so easy to cast the tiniest pebble into the tranquil pond.
Sit and watch the ripples spreading, flowing outwards, touching unknown shores with a smidgen of warmth, a lapping of love.
Reaching out, from the center to the periphery, not knowing where the outreach is going, but knowing that the effort is never in vain if it helps someone’s suffering, reduces their loneliness, brings light to their lives, and relieves their pain.
Bread cast upon the waters, returned in great store, three, five, seven, ten times more than what you cast.
Your spider-web lines thrown inwards and outwards in a gesture of faith, hope, and a charity chest of tenderness to lighten a burden, to remove the dark from another’s heart.
It’s so easy to select a pebble, but who will throw that first stone?
Sometimes we twist ourselves into knots. We double-think our thoughts, put our feet in the wrong hole in our jeans, slide our socks on backwards, put our shirts on inside -out.
Poor twisted mortals, we have made up our minds that all is well, that everything is for the best in the best of all worlds, but we are not candid with each other and sometimes we are so twisted we cannot see the truth even when it is staring at us from the mirror.
Alas, my front tooth is chipped. My hairline is receding. My whiskers are turning as grey as my thinning hair that has already lost its curl and now falls straight forward in the Julius Caesar cut that belies the closeness of the Ides of March.
On being Welsh in a land ruled by the English Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus
I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head. I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili. I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool when the sea-swells suck the stranger in and out, sanding his bones.
Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung, I am the memories of Silure and beast mingled in a Gower Cave.
Tamer of aurox, hunter of deer, caretaker of coracle, fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide, I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.
I am the minority, persecuted for my faith, for my language, for my sex, for the coal-dark of my thoughts.
I am the bard whose harp, strung like a bow, will sing your death with music of arrows unleashed from the wet Welsh woods.
I am the barb that sticks in your throat from the dark worded ambush of my song.
Striving onwards to the light I don’t need a ladder nor an Aladdin’s Lamp to transport me upwards, not to stardom but to the sun and stars that wait, day and night, outside my window.
Prince of Mirth, soon to be Lord of Light, I will wear my hibiscus crown for a short time, but with joy and pleasure, a treasure I will treasure until the natural end when stars, sun, and crown come tumbling down, leaving me alone, naked, yet clothed in, and surrounded by, light.
Paintings: doors you can walk through, windows that open onto visions of another, more beautiful life. Deeper than the paint, the thoughts and words that formed them, brushed them into life, an ephemeral life, so brief that butterflies seem to last longer and flowers live for all eternity.
Transience and insubstantiality. Change is all around us, we are surrounded by change. But the deepest changes, the ones that affect us most are internal, set deep within us, death’s eggs hatching slowly since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures. Carved five thousand years ago, in stone, this magnificent henge, first Wood-henge, then Stonehenge, majestic at the dawn of time, with its sarsen stones, pillars, post-holes, and labyrinths, circling within circles, a frail spider-web of sunlit brilliance.
Lost now, the message, as my own message is lost, covered by paint, though words emerge in the strangest places, allowing us to peer in through windows as long-lost words and worlds whirl out through carved and painted windows and everlasting doors.
Doors First version
Paintings are doors you can walk through, windows that open onto visions of another, sometimes better, life. Deeper than the paint are the thoughts and words that formed them, brushed them into life, an ephemeral life, so brief that butterflies last longer and flowers live for all eternity, or so it seems.
Transience and insubstantiality. Change is all around us, we are surrounded by change. But the deepest changes, the ones that affect us most are internal, set deep within us, death’s eggs hatching slowly since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures. Carved five thousand years ago, in stone, this Towie ball with its labyrinths and circles. Lost now, the message, as my own message is lost, covered by paint, though words emerge in the strangest places, allowing us to peer in through windows as long lost words and worlds walk out through carved and painted doors.
My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Supplication
I raise my hand to heaven in fervent supplication: you sever it at the wrist.
I spread out my arms in despair: you take out a tape and measure me for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.
I step on my bathroom scales only to find that they have become the scales of your justice: I mourn every pound I have put on.
Where can I turn for solace when all around I see nothing but sorrow and tears?
Covid bears us all down. An albatross, it hangs around our necks and when we raise a hand, your knife is there to cut it off.
Who are you? What are you? Where are you when we need you? Why are you there judging us like this?
I look up at the sky. By day, a great cyclopean eye winks and blinks and tells me nothing. I look at the sky at night: a silver moon slides silently by.
Orion stalks away to the west. He leaves me restless, breathless, agape at all this beauty that I dare not reach out and grasp.
A great big thank you to Allan Hudson, editor of the South Branch Scribbler Blog. He e-mailed me on my birthday, last Sunday, and asked me if I had a story that he could use on his new blog page Short Stories from Around the World. These will be published every other Wednesday, starting today. I am very honoured and proud to be the author of the first story, One Goldfish, third place in the WFNB non-fiction award (2020), that opens the series. It was revised and reworked in the Advanced Writing Course, run by Brian Henry of Quick Brown Fox fame. I would like to thank Brian and all my fellow participants who helped me rework the story. On Allan’s blog you will find links to other contributions from me. You will also find a series of featured authors, from New Brunswick, the Maritimes, Canada, and all around the world. Allan does a great job for us minor, struggling literary figures, not just for the greats. I encourage you to follow his blog and support him.
Ephemera
My painting (above) is entitled Ephemera. It shows a literary text semi-obliterated by various colors and devices. If we have learned anything from Covid it should be the fragility of life, the insubstantiality of existence, and the enormous powers of the natural world that surrounds us. My friends: take nothing for granted. Carpe Diem – seize the day – and “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may – for time it is a’flyin – and that poor flower blooming today – tomorrow may be dying.” This is Robert Herrick, of course. Here is my own version of the theme from The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature.
Daffodils
Winter’s chill lingers well into spring. I buy daffodils to encourage the sun to return and shine in the kitchen. Tight-clenched fists their buds, they sit on the table and I wait for them to open.
Grey clouds fill the sky. A distant sun lights up the land but doesn’t warm the earth nor melt the snow. The north wind chills body and soul, driving dry snow across our drive to settle in the garden.
The daffodils promise warmth, foretell the sun, predicting bright days to come. When they do, red squirrels spark at the feeder.
For ten long days the daffodils endure, bringing to vase and breakfast-table stored up sunshine and the silky softness of their golden gift.
Their scent grows stronger as they gather strength from sugared water. But now they begin to wither, their day almost done.
Dry and shriveled they stand this morning, paper-thin, brown, crisp to the touch, hanging their heads as oncoming death weighs them down.
And this has been a dialog with my time and my place. But what is time? A river flowing? A long line leading from my beginning to my end? Alpha and Omega? An instant held between finger and thumb and so swiftly forgotten? A dream I dream when I am awake or asleep? And which is my real dream, waking or sleeping, sleeping or lying awake?
And what is my place? This house in which I now live? The garden I watch from my kitchen window? My town? This forested area where I think I belong? My county? My province? My region? And how do I relate to my “time” or my “place” to this being called “Roger”, this dream-Roger who dreams this post-amniotic ocean of life in which he now drifts? I dream I am male yet when I read Carl Jung I learn that a large part of me is female. I always thought I was masculine / macho / male, yet when a large part of me is feminine / hembra / female, I am no longer sure what I am. And how much does it matter?
I have ten fingers yet I use only two to type. Two fingers manipulate twenty-six letters, selecting some, rejecting others, making careless mistakes, organizing and reorganizing, shuffling all those verbal cards. I turn this black-and-white keyboard world upside down when I think my subversive thoughts and type them onto the computer screen and then print them out on what starts as a snow-white page that slowly fills with ant-size letters. Time and place, male and female: I lay on my side in hospital and the young urologist shot me full of female hormones so my prostrate cancer would not take over my inner organs and destroy my life. Place and time: I lie awake at night and shape disturbing dreams, dreams I have never before dreamed of dreaming.
Some nights I sense the end is drawing near. I fear it. In my beginning is my end. Beginning and end: both belong to me as do time and space, so central to the story of my life. For life will continue with or without me even if I am not there to bear witness. But I have been here, and parts of my story will remain embedded in the mind of each and every one of those who knew me and heard me speak.
Beethoven took the Fifth and rewrote it in his own image. I want to rewrite my life. I want my youth to return. I want to be young and athletic and lithe … I do not want to be this old man with a stick who bends double when he walks and sticks a blue sticker in the windscreen of his car.
I want to refuse to open the door when the postman knocks to deliver my mail. I know that soon he will bring me that registered letter, for which I must sign, with that last fatal message, the subpoena from which there is no appeal. I guess that like the snow and the wild geese, he’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day, in spite of those voices telling me that tomorrow never comes. And so, on an unusually Odd Sunday in a bar they once called Corked, or at another table in another wine bar with a different name, raise a glass to me when I am gone and leave an empty glass on the table for me. If you do, I promise I’ll be there.
Comments: This, as promised, is the final chapter from On Being Welsh. Chronotopos is Bakhtin’s theory that all our writing is a dialog with our time (chronos) and our place (topos). “Know me, know my time and place.” When we discover and explore our time and place we begin to understand ourselves and our roles in life. Then we can start rethinking who and what we are, what we have been, what we want to be, what we need to do in order to change. But first, we must know ourselves, for without self-knowledge, we are ships adrift, floating rudderless on a rising sea, or driven by the forceful wind of others into places where we may not wish to go. My friends, I raise a glass to you, filled, alas, with orange juice, because it is breakfast time, here in Island View, on the first Sunday, damp and cold and wet of 2022.
