What launch pad lifts us to our fate? What makes us climb above the beach, above the gardens, above the trees? Why are we striving for that pot of gold that always seems out of reach?
Why is what we have achieved never enough? Why must our eyes be fixed on stars beyond the stars when lesser, earthbound men are bound by lowly wars?
Are we giants then, to aspire not to be like other men, clad in grey suits and suitable shirts and ties. Working from nine to five, five days a week, and sometimes six. Fixed hours, yet our hours are ours and never fixed.
Ambition, for us, the coming word, the oncoming stroke of paint, the incomplete picture, much better than the ones we have done of late. No artistic battle is ever won when we sit back and say and now my creative work is done.
Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?
Does the pencil know where the artist’s hand is going?
Does the artist know the point of arrival before he even sets out and takes his first step on that life-long journey?
Or does he play the music by ear, the paint by eye, the pencil and brush by the deftest of touches that follow a path set long ago in the summer stars and the winter nights of longing and strife?
Only the artist knows: and he might not be telling.
The artist scales Jacob’s ladder, per ardua ad astra, through hardship to the stars.
He discovers a jigsaw puzzle of shattered color and shape, a serpent’s shed skin of paint, battered patterns broken, stripped, dangling, swayed by the wind that washes and renews the world.
What world you ask? The painter’s world. The world that dwells within the meditating mind. The creation that awaits the artist’s touch in order to come alive and beckon us. The secret, sacred world of the artist’s hidden garden, soon to be revealed.
Here there is no in media res. We must begin at the beginning: the inspection, the realization, the determination to ensure that all will be restored and the Garden of Eden rebuilt, here, where it stood before.
The feet that hold no defeat, the hands that will reconstruct the image growing within the artist’s mind, the mind that will determine how the brush will guide, the bright paint slither.
But first the damage must be repaired, the surface cleaned, fresh straw in the manger to signify a readiness for renewal, rebirth, and the continuing cycle.
Shall we begin at the beginning at the water tower’s foot where the itch of dried flaking skin is unbearable?
The earth worm coiled around the tower opens his mouth to devour his tail and the movement of his scales scours old paint in an effort to remove all traces of the former painter’s footprints.
Oh, the defiance of wind, rain, snow, ice, the hot summer sun, and the tower sweating year after year, erasing man’s efforts to control time and space with created beauty.
But now is the time of endless renewal, the sun’s return to renew the infinite cycle of death and rebirth.
It’s always great when a friend actually reads one of my books and then writes to me to say how much he (in this case) enjoyed it. I quote: “I really enjoyed the concept of the image and writing. I’ve attached my favourite of the bunch. Audibly said “wow” when I read it.” It really makes my day (week, month, journey) worthwhile when someone reaches out and says ‘Wow!” Thank you, that certain someone. You shall remain anonymous for now, but your words will live on!
I took the e-file to Covey’s, the Printer on Prospect Street, Fredericton, on Monday. On Tuesday, Jared set up the files for printing, and I received the book on Thursday morning – nice and early. What an incredible turn around. The writing time-frame is interesting too. Geoff painted and posted. I wrote. The whole thing came together in less than a month. It just shows what inspiration, collaboration, and hard work can do. Here is a poem (# 17) from the book.
17
This year’s snow is not last year’s snow. Tell me, if you know, where did last year’s snowfall go?
These flowers you paint, they are not last year’s flowers.
Time flows and the world renews itself. It may seem the same, but it’s not. Nor are you the same. How could you be?
You too have renewed yourself, grown, like these flowers you paint, these flowers that will wither and perish to lie buried beneath fresh snow.
You cannot walk in the same river twice. Nor can you paint the same flower once it has withered and gone. The flowers you paint can never be the ones you painted before.
“I work in a match factory.” “Do you put the heads on?” “No. I put the gloves on. They’re boxing matches.”
A golden oldie, still vibrant, from the Goon Show, BBC, 1950’s.
Your gloves are off now and they lie on the table where you work. How long have you had them? Fifteen, twenty years? Like good wine, carefully stored, old friends are better with age.
A second chestnut from the Goon Show: “Have you put the cat out?” “No, dear. It wasn’t on fire.”
And that’s another good reason why the water tower, and its full renovation, is so very, very important.
Bible and Water Tower, hand in glove: “And Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any of these.”
Comment: A gorgeous photo, colors and textures, light and dark, from my friend, Geoff Slater, the line painter and muralist. He is working on restoring the mural on the water tower in St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada.
Septets for the End of Time ~ Why do the people? by Roger Moore
1
Divide and Conquer
They divided us into houses, Spartans and Trojans, and encouraged us to compete with each other, single combat, and then team against team, house against house, eternal, internal civil war.
We divided ourselves into Cavaliers and Roundheads, Monarchists and Parliamentarians, Protestants and Catholics, and we continued those uncivil wars that marred the monarchy, brought down the crown, and executed the Lord’s anointed.
We fought bitterly, tribe against tribe, religion against religion, circumcised against uncircumcised, dorm against dorm, class against class, territorial warfare. We defended our bounds, bonding against all outsiders to guard each chosen ground.
With it came the denigration of the other. Not our class. Scholarship boy. Wrong end of town. Wrong accent. We don’t talk like that here. Speak the Queen’s English, you… and here … we inserted the appropriate word of vilification.
Our wars never ended. We carried them from prep school to junior school, to senior school, sometimes changing sides as we changed schools or houses, always clinging grimly to our best friends, protectors, and those we knew best.
After school, all those prejudices continued to hold us down, haunted us through university, red-brick or inspired spires, Trinity Oxford, Trinity Cambridge, or Trinity Dublin, each gilded with the white sniff of snobbery that gelded us.
Alas, we carried them, piled in our intellectual rucksacks, through university, into grad school, out into the wide world, infinitely small minds based on prejudice and pride, continuing our tribal warfare, unable to understand anything at all, other than us or them, shoulder to shoulder, divide and conquer.
2
Rage, rage …
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. What is it about family split-ups, the ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and impoverishes both sides of a divide?
And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, leaving permanent scars that will never heal over, no matter how hard one tries?
And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts leaving nothing but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more.
3
Reconciliation
Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Roger Moore is an award-winning poet and short-story writer. Born in the same town as Dylan Thomas, he emigrated from Wales to Canada in 1966. An award-winning author, CBC short story finalist (1987 and 2010), WFNB Bailey award (poetry, 1989 & 1993), WFNB Richards award (prose, 2020), he has published 5 books of prose and 25 books and chapbooks of poetry.
Over 150 of his poems and short stories have appeared in 30 Canadian magazines and literary reviews, including Arc, Ariel, The Antigonish Review, theFiddlehead, the Nashwaak Review, Poetry Toronto, Poetry Canada Review, the Pottersfield Portfolio and The Wild East. He and his beloved, Clare, live in Island View, New Brunswick, with their cat, Princess Squiffy, but they live on the far side of the hill from the St. John River, with the result that there is not an island in view from their windows in Island View. Visit Roger’s website here.
