Oscar Wilde

Things

 

Things

I fumble in my mind for things
long lost in an upper attic.
I can no longer read the words
I wrote. What does this mean?

At night I dream of things
beyond my reach. My fingers
clutch but cannot clasp
those clouds that clutter.

Who, oh who, the owl cries,
can free the mice that nibble
through my mind and set me
gnawing at my own soul?

Once upon a time, a long
time ago, I thought I saw light
at the end of the tunnel.
I travelled on a ghost train.

The light I saw was a gaslight
ghosting my mind with fictional
fantasies of an illusive kingdom
that would never be mine.

Elusive, these memories of things
that never were, but might have been.
Will o’ the wisps dancing shadows
on the salt-marsh of my unknown life.

Commentary:
Memory loss. I guess it happens to all of us at one time or another. One of my long-lost friends visited yesterday and between us we could hardly put two consecutive memories together. Every other sentence was punctuated with a pause – ‘Now, when did that happen?’ ‘What was his name? I can’t remember now.’ ‘Me neither.’

I am not particularly worried by such happenings. I am a poet and a story-teller. Sometimes, I forget the truth – so what? – I just go ahead and reinvent it, tickling it here, sticking a spot of paint there, adding a word or two, or a magic moment. I often remind myself of Oscar Wilde when he created a magic moment of verbal ingenuity – “I wish I had said that, Oscar.” “You will, Roger, you will.”

Best of all, even in those moments when personal memories fail me, literary magic returns. I think of Dylan Thomas and his words spring to my mind – ‘time has ticked a heaven round the stars’. Wonderful. Or Francisco de Quevedo ‘soy un fué, y un será, y un es cansado.’ / ‘Tired I was, tired I am, tired I always will be.’ My own translation from the summer of 1963 when José Manuel Blecua introduced me to the poem, or rather Blecua introduced the poem to me, in that summer’s courses of the UIMP.

So, according to this theory, even when you feel lost, you are never really lost, because there are an enormous number of people living inside your head, who who will step out from the shadows, when needed, and give your memory a little boost. But don’t get too carried away. Think too of José María Valverde and his poetic premonition: ‘Pobres poetas de hoy, destinados a ser polvo seco de tesis doctoral.’ / ‘Poor poets of today, destined to be the dry dust of doctoral theses.’ (My translation).

Dust to dust and ashes to ashes – ‘Serán ceniza, pero tendrá sentido. Polvo serán, pero polvo enamorado.’ Quevedo, of course. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. You might need me to help you with the translation, though – ‘Ashes they’ll be, but ashes with feeling. They will be dust, but dust that burns with love.’ (My translation, with a little bit of exaggeration [sorry, don Francisco!] just at the end.)

What are three objects you couldn’t live without?

Daily writing prompt
What are three objects you couldn’t live without?
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What are three objects you couldn’t live without?

Oh this is so easy and so obvious. Every verb needs a subject and most verbs need an object. Can you imagine living a life in which no verb has an object? Indescribable. And how about an indirect object? Or a direct or indirect object pronoun? And now let us move on to the object of a preposition…

Wow! And now I must choose three out of those five? What are you trying to do to me? This is so cruel. It’s why I always fail IQ tests – there are so many answers that do not fit the desired paradigm of the programmers who set the questions and the appropriate answers. Are we all to be programmed then? And who shall program the programmers?

Or do you wish me to choose three inanimate things? If you did, you should say so in a clear and understandable fashion. An inkwell? A quill? A piece of paper? Salt or sand to scatter on wet ink? How many people out there remember post office pens, also called scratch pens, also called dip pens? There was a time when life without such objects was unthinkable.

And why stop at objects? What would life be without subjects?

Oscar Wilde once stated he could make a pun about any subject. A voice came out from the audience “Queen Victoria”. “The Queen, sir,” bellowed Oscar, “is not a subject.”

“Oh, Oscar,” I said to him, “I wish I had said that.” “You will, Roger,” he replied. “You will.”

And I just did.

Flowers

Flowers

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?” Oscar Wilde

Yesterday I bought my beloved some flowers. I searched among the bunches in the supermarket to find some that were not full blown but ready to spring from bud to blossom. I had the freedom to buy and with it the freedom that comes from having a little bit of money to spare for those frivolities that keep love alive at any age.

As for books, I read them and I write them, and sometimes they write me, and sometimes I can tell the difference, and some times I can’t. “What is this life, if full of greed we have no time to sit and read. Or when we lay awake at night, we don’t have time to think or write.”

Then there is the moon. “Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love.” An old sea-farers’ song also sung by the beloved left behind on the home shore. There are few things as fascinating as a garden in the moonlight. Delightful too are night flowers blossoming beneath a full moon. “Boys and girls come out to play, the moon is shining as bright as day. Leave your pillows and leave your sheets and join your playfellows in the streets.”

So there you have a recipe for perfect happiness. Freedom from need, cash for frivolities and flowers, moonlight in which to serenade one’s beloved, and a book in which to record the recipe and keep it fresh in mind – add them one by one, stir them gently, plant them – and may perfect happiness blossom for you, too.

Dreamers

Dreamers

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde.

“The dreamers by day are dangerous people, for they are the ones who make their dreams come true.” T. E. Lawrence.

Two interesting and contrasting quotes on dreamers. They seem to contradict each other – but do they? How do we dream? What do we dream of when we dream? What does the word ‘dream’ really mean? How can it change, that meaning when a person announces in a sharp, sarcastic voice: “In your dreams.”? Were the Everly Brothers right when they sang their version of dream, dream, dream?

There is no right and wrong with dreams. Some dreams come at night. They rise from deep within our resting – restless minds, asking questions, answering questions, doubling down on what we did, or didn’t do. Some dreams are obsessive and occur again and again. These are individual to each sleeper and cannot be interpreted, en masse, by a dictionary of dreams. Other night dreams creep in through the bedroom window. These may not be our dreams – they may be the dreams of other people, come to disturb us as we sleep. These can be dangerous dreams, disturbing moments, and that’s why the indigenous have created dream-catchers that will snare those dreams and prevent them from entering.

Other dreams come by day. Day-dreaming is a rite of passage for many young children, trapped in boring school rooms with an ageing teacher droning on and on. “Knowledge is that which passes from my notes to your notes without going through anyone’s head.” I woke up enough from my day dream during that particular first-year lecture to note those words in my notebook. They were the only notes I took in that class and I day dreamed my way though a year of that man’s pseudo-lectures.

But the dreams we dream by day – yes, they can indeed be dangerous – because we can make them happen. One person dreams of being a doctor and, against all the odds, that person becomes one. Another visualizes – another form of day-dreaming – breaking a world record. And does so – such people fulfill their day-dream. Some, like Don Quixote, dream the impossible dream. These are fantasists whose dreams will never come true, for they are based on unrealities, and not founded on the essential truths of real life.

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.” Much as I love this quote, I am disturbed by the adverb ‘only’. It is so limiting. Dreamers, as I have tried to show, can find their way by day as well. “His punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” This, too, I find enigmatic and disturbing. Why should dreamers be punished when they can also be rewarded? Why is seeing the dawn a punishment? Why is seeing the dawn before the rest of the world a sort of double punishment? And why does the dawn punish people? In order to answer that question, we must define the dawn! Maybe we’ll do that in another post.