How quietly she moves, the old one, scarcely disturbing the floorboards way above my head.
Such a light touch as she tip-toes from room to room, her floor my ceiling.
Not at all like the young one with her two left feet, both flat, and her elephantine shaking the floor overhead.
We often wondered if the earth was quaking, the house shaking, with the ceiling about to come tumbling down upon our waiting heads.
Comment:
How silent, the house, with the visitors gone and me and my beloved back together, alone, as we have been for so many years. The silence is broken only by the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, an occasional creak from a floorboard expanding in the sun, or creaking in the shade, the hiss of the kettle … a silence so deep that sometimes we gesture to each other or whisper low.
Don Ryan came over to visit and joy and noise returned. I made him coffee and he brought us a fudge delight. My beloved took refuge in the silence of the front porch and Don Ryan and Don Roger planned their future adventures. We will be working again together soon. Our first task – to finish reading Don Quixote and to complete our notes on our readings, suspended, alas, during the summer work season, but soon to return when university goes through its September Rebirth.
After Don Quixote, we will probably explore two picaresque novels, Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler. That will be great fun for both of us, and I look forward to preparing the readings and their annotations.
When Don Ryan left, our table top noise melted away, silence returned, and Clare with it. Other friends will be visiting soon. They will break the silence with a soft tap on the door and a gentle voice calling “Hello!” We look forward to that. Meanwhile all is quiet and silence is golden.
Until the arrival of Moo. “Hello,” he bellows. “Writing again? Have I got a painting for you. You thought the little ones were noisy… well, speak for your self. Here’s your painting, Et Tu, Mu. It comes from Julius Caesar, the play. And remember, when you and Don Ryan get together you’re just as noisy as the little ones. And I am too, when I’m with you. That’s why the painting’s called Et tu, Mu. Time to go.”
Out he went, thumping and clumping, and left me to the tap of the computer keys and the ticking of the grandfather clock.
My creativity lay crippled. I picked up two fountain pens, held one in each hand, a pair of walking sticks or crutches, but nothing happened.
My mind did not pick up its bed and walk. My tongue tripped between my teeth and refused to move, let alone to talk the talk.
Reason and rhyme fled from my head, and walked a cross between a plank and a frost crossed midnight road of petty, lisping syllables that struggled and limped and lost themselves as they wandered the labyrinth that wrapped and mapped my empty head.
Comment:
Moo and I have both been on walkabout, absent without leave, wandering a deserted desert road filled with rocks and sand and not a glimpse of grass or a flower. Hour after hour, day after day, not a singe inspiring thought or brush stroke coming our way. We sat at the table, looking at an empty page of snow, with not a footprint upon it.
Why do these things happen? I don’t know. I have never worried about writer’s block, and Moo has never worried, to my knowledge, about painter’s block. The shock of the shadow of nothingness lay upon us both and even the coffee tasted differently.
Then, suddenly the dam broke. Moo painted five paintings in two days. I wrote four poems in that same time period. Suddenly, the silence lay broken, the plank had been walked, and we found ourselves safe on the other side of whatever it was that had come between us and our respective joys.
A dark night of the creative soul, perhaps. Luckily it was followed by a creative dawn. Light broke where no sun shone and suddenly those minds of our sparkled with creative gems once again. I reached out to Moo and we hugged each other. “It’s over,” we said. Then we changed ends and life and the grass was so much greener on the other side.
May it never happen again, we sighed. But I am sure it will. And I hope it never happens to one of you. If it does, just breathe deep, believe, examine the joys of that silent midnight, and wait for the dawn.
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.
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.
It’s so easy to lose our true selves or to be carried along by the flow of another’s rhetoric because we no longer possess (or never had) that inner conviction that makes us different.
That’s why we must join hands and link together: a chain of bridged and ferried islands to insulate us against our loneliness.
Comment:
I first published this in 2017 with the title Islands – I have changed the title, very slightly, to move closer to John Donne’s No Man is an Island. What I have noticed more and more recently is how we tend to isolate ourselves. Birds of a feather flock together – true – and nowhere truer than in this bloated Soccer World Cup with its 48 teams to be expanded next time, 2030, to 64 teams, unless we have 64 teams in 2028, because this circus demands to be offered more frequently so it can make even more money … or is so that more teams can compete in the final stages. Remember – the finals are meant to be the ultimate challenge – the best 32 teams in the world – until Quatar (2022) 42 teams and now USA (2026) 48 teams.
Il gruppo della morte – remember that? It’s when three top teams were drawn together in a group of four – and one of them was doomed not to get out. Didn’t happen this time. No gruppo della morte this time – 24 top teams all got through, and the next eight third best place finishes. There were some very one-sided games. And there were many games in which one team parked the bus – all ten players inside their own penalty area and no way to get through. This led to some very negative defensive football. And don’t forget that terrible off-side law – no portion, not a hair or a fingernail of the attacking player could be seen on the – bow your heads in submission – Video Assisted Referee’s screen. And how far back do you go when searching for that minor infringement that will disallow whatever happened to whomsoever it happened to?
Before the days of the electronic spy in the sky, the rules of rugby were fairly straightforward. “The referee is the sole judge of fact and of law.” In addition, in those days, the advantage needed to be immediate. No five minute wait while the players bang away at the goal line from the one yard until an infringement takes place, the attacking team fails to score, and we all go back to the original infringement. And no five minute wait while all the moves leading up to the try are checked and double checked so that there are no imperfections. For those without memories – check the Barbarians versus New Zealand in Cardiff, way back when, in 1972 or 73. Look at those high and dangerous tackles leading up to that wonderful Gareth Edwards try. Guess what? That try would never have taken place with a VAR check for dangerous play.
Writing these words, I feel myself to be isolated. A man with a memory who has been left out in the cold by a world that has moved on and left him behind – with all his beautiful memories. “See that house?” My grandfather asked me, when I was an avid collector of autographs. “Knock on the door and ask for the autograph of the man who lives there.” I did. He was old. He was asleep. Leave the book. He’ll sign it when he wakes up. And he did. I have the book here in the house and the autograph standing in isolated glory in the middle of a page. W. J. Bancroft – aka Billy Bancroft. “Who’s he?” you ask. Well, just go and look him up. You may be surprised at what you find down memory’s lane where my grandfather and I wandered hand in hand all those many years ago.
As for Moo’s painting, he calls it Craters with Creatures. But I call it In search of times past. Look closely. You can see many of them within the picture’s frame and they are all searching for something they have lost and would desperately love to cling on to.
To him I was the Other, yet he fed me when I hungered, gave water when I ran dry.
I fell ill and he cared for me, nursed me back to health.
He taught me his language, culture, history, and skills.
He loved me, never forced me to forget myself and become something I could never be.
He made me what I am today: a believer in humanity, not man’s inhumanity to man.
Commentary:
Words for a divided world where man’s inhumanity to man sometimes seems to over-ride man’s humanity. Sometimes I am afraid to publish poems like these. Self-censorship is the worst form of censorship because it bottles things up until they rot inside you. Somebody has to speak out. Somebody has to stand up. So many, myself included, are afraid to do so.
Moo asked me to use his painting for this one. “Yours,” he told me, “is a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. It must be heard. I’ll stand by you, side by side, and support you with this painting. It’s a Golden Oldie, but it’s good.”
I turned to thank Moo, but when I looked, he had gone. So much for shoulder to shoulder and side by side. Never mind. The poem’s not mine really. It belongs to others, many others. The start is from the Bible – The Good Samaritan. The ending is from Robbie Burns, changed slightly. There – now I have people who will stand beside me and echo my cri de coeur. And wow, look, here’s Moo, back again.
Wonderful. Now we can stand together. Should to shoulder. Side by Side. With no walls to divide us (Billy Bragg).
No, Moo. Sorry. I don’t have twenty dollars to lend you. Oh dear. There he goes again. Once more I am the monarch of all I survey and shoulder to shoulder with Alexander Selkirk I ask that other question – “Oh solitude, where are thy charms?” He ought to know if anyone did for he too made his cri de coeur from another horrible place.
What does the kettle whistle to the grandfather clock and why does its pendulum call the kettle black?
A chime in time saves the cuckoo just before it flies before our eyes … and in August, fly it must.
Does anyone know how thyme tells the time and whether or not the dandelion clock will learn how and when to chime?
Deep in a Gower Cave, a woolly rhinoceros weaves a web of time on his mother’s knitting needles.
Beside him, in the rock, a neolithic clock is fast asleep. Was it Bill Haley put that rock around the clock?
“You’ll never know,” rings the sea-bell tolling on its tidal surge, “and I don’t have the urge to tell.”
Commentary:
Moo loves a riddle – that is why he fills his paintings with some many strange half people and animals that look out and King Lear at you. Mad as a hatter, is our Moo, especially when he’s feeling Moo-dy Blue. Moo is visually strange and now he is encouraging me to be verbally strange. So I took up the gauntlet, accepted the challenge, and road Nexus, my old dobbin, down to the end of the jousting lists, up with my lance and shield, and off I go.
Luckily Moo doesn’t know what I am talking about and he doesn’t have a dobbin anyway, let alone a lance. So, there he is, sitting on the sidelines, flicking paint at me with his paint brush. “The brush is mightier than the last,” he said. “Here’s mud in your eye!” And he must have been to PEI, because the mud was all red.
Alas, the Field Marshal thought I was bleeding, so he waved the white handkerchief and told me to leave the field of combat before PEI was swept away and vanished under a tide of big red mud along with Bud the Spud. And that made Stompin’ Tom stomping mad. “He might at least have used ketchup,” he cried, “because ketchup loves potatoes.” I found out, a lot later, that he had actually betted some money on me and was furious because he lost it.
“Never mind, Tom,” I told him. “Jousting isn’t the best game out there, and not every day does the best knight win.” “Hmmm,” said the Man from Skinner’s Pond. “I guess I could write a song about that. I think I’ll call it The Good Old Nexus Game. Nope. Doesn’t sound write. Jousting game? Nope. Hockey – that’s it – I’ll just go off, get my guitar, and tune up the old stompin’ bored.”
rogermoorepoet 