The Oneday Cafe

with my left hand I raise the dead

2011-09-12T00:26:00.006Z

Here's the thing, little candle-maker: my belief in second chances is unswerving.

Look. Even if you refuse to see what I see, look. You know what this is, don't you? This is every wretched failure, every moment of choking desperation. We have been here before, haven't we? This is all the abandoned drafts, this is all the crumpled pieces of staff paper. It's all so very familiar, isn't it? This is each bitter, ceaseless argument - it is each and every word, shaped as if to cut. Look. It is all around us, this cloud of witnesses to our worthlessness. Look. This is the moment you can't remember, when you ceased to feel it without realising, and it is the last time I ever saw him, and knew grief like a shroud. It is the fear that lurks in every future you imagine for yourself, and it is the eerie ache I feel in the hollowness below my ribs. This is the moment you saw them together for the first time, the moment when you knew, and it is the smile that holds my face together as I watch her with someone else. Look. It is the ghost. It is the ogre. It is the thief. Look. It is your tear-stained face, it is my trembling hands. Look. Even if you won't see what I see, look. This is the candle, and the storm, and the pane of glass that lets them speak.

But, here's the thing, little lighthouse-keeper: what you are is not that which they have made you.

Sit still, and silently. Feel, for only a second, every piece of your body's infinite jigsaw puzzle: the breath that sits in your lungs; the dull, perennial throbbing at your temples; the gentle tremor escaping through your fingertips. This is your cage - it is your release. Be still, silent, attentive. If they were trying to remind you of something you have forgotten, what do you imagine it would be?
Sometimes, life doesn't work. Sometimes we twist and turn in our own skin without a hope of escape. Sometimes nothing will work out, and everything we create is an ugliness. Sometimes these things happen, and when they do the most impossible thing in the world is to remember ourselves when we were otherwise: when our existence wrapped itself around us like a warm blanket, when every breath was an experience and every moment was a possibility, when our voices wrote poems of passion with a lifespan of seconds, and our nimble fingers painted until the cold, dead ivory became music.

Because, here's the thing, little lantern-bearer: we are an impossible dream.

Maybe this is it. Maybe nothing changes. The sky will rain or shine, as it always has. The Atlantic remains as wide and uncaring as ever it was. The stars are as dull or bright when we look on them in despair as when we looked on them in hope and, admitting nothing to be impossible, wished. A hundred-thousand banks of cloud have scudded between the stars and you since the last time your eyes saw anything but old, dead light. Maybe this is it. Maybe nothing changes. Maybe this is all you were ever meant to be.
Except for this one little thing: no. No. No f***ing way. I refuse to accept it. Not if it was tried, tested and proven. Not if it was prophesied, predicted, foretold, recorded, notarised, signed, sealed & delivered, no. Not if every doctor on earth diagnosed it, not if governments made it into law, and not if all the preachers in the world thundered it from their pulpits. Not if they tattooed it onto my eyeballs and carved it backwards into my chest would I believe that this is all there is - not if every voice in all of creation told me it was so would I believe that this is all you will be. Not even if one of those voices is yours.
I know things can be bad. I know that when they get this way, it can be so hard to remember how things were before - to imagine how they could be yet. But here's the deal: for every time it seems like something can't be done, I will remind you of all the times when we did the impossible; when light and life and hope seem like a half-forgotten dream, I will remind you of all the times our dreams came true; and when your body feels like a disjointed cage for holding a wild beast, I will remind you, one-by-one, of every moment of utter genius, every movement of pure grace, and every single expression of unmatchable beauty I have seen in you. It doesn't fix things, I know, but perhaps it's a start: a break in the scudding drifts of clouds so that we can see the stars again. Perhaps, a long time from now, in a future beyond our imagining, we might lie on our backs somewhere amid the deepening dark and in hope, admitting nothing to be impossible, wish.

Here's the thing, little phoenix: if you were waiting for a sign, this is it.

this house has been far out at sea all night

2010-10-10T03:55:00.003Z

May god guard the ghostly ones,
the five-fingered fragment
that slipped in amongst us
and held my hand tonight:
sweet and disembodied,
warm and so inviting;
ever and only empty,
empty gesture and young,
younger even than such
uncalculated whim
should have a right to be.
Do not be born at night,
if they give you the choice:
start as you mean to go on,
believing, as we did,
you have the right to light.

Prose Extract 2.0 - 'Morality for Beautiful Girls.'

2009-08-25T19:06:00.007Z

"The ground is hard
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness--

The beauty of
The bone. Tall God
Must see our souls
This way, and nod."
-- John Updike, "November"

I've been thinking a bit about beauty lately, primarily because it seems to want to throw itself in my face a little bit at the moment. That is, I read everywhere people trying to judge and figure out what it beautiful and what isn't, advising on how to make yourself more beautiful [I haven't seen anywhere yet advice on how to make yourself less beautiful - perhaps there's an opening in the market?] and pretty much selling beauty in a can. Most worryingly, however, I see a constant stream of comments from people, including people I care about very much, to the effect that they don't find any beauty in themselves, and doubt they ever will.

This is particularly worrying for two reasons: firstly, I think I'd be with the majority when I say to these people, "what do you mean you're think you're ugly? I think you're stunning!", and it always hurts me to see people I love with low self-esteem; and secondly, if we were to admit that you lovely people aren't beautiful, what on earth does that say about people like me? I realise I'm not quite hideous, but I'm certainly no Robert Pattinson, and if all of you look as bad as you think, I haven't got a hope!

The particular piece of work this comes from will probably never be completed enough for me to actually use this scene, but after one especially self-deprecating set of thoughts from someone whose beauty really isn't in question whatsoever, I felt like sitting down and putting some propaganda into my character's mouths.

So yes. Something like that.

Extract 2.0 - Morality for Beautiful Girls

When he came into the room, he could see she had been crying. Not a great deal, but enough to have two dark smudges of makeup down the corners of her eyes, and one murky mascara teardrop rolling down toward the end of her nose. He loosened the knot on his tie with a slight feeling of guilt, trying to make it look as if he had not been waiting.

Looking up full into the mirror, she caught sight of his lean frame propped against the doorjamb, and swore with surprising violence. For a moment she looked truly ferocious - then the fire fizzled and she put her head back in her hands. Leaving his tie hanging on the door handle, he sat down on the bed behind her, blinking in some surprise at the wealth of cosmetics spread out on the dressing table.

"I didn't know you owned this much makeup. I didn't know anyone owned this much makeup!"

She tried to snorted indignantly: what came out sounded more like a wet snuffle. "Typical boy. We all have this stuff, you just don't get to see it. You just see a pretty girl and imagine it happens all by itself. Poof! Magic."

The last word was unbearably bitter: he felt something twist in his heart. Not fair.

"Ah, but of course, how silly of me," he said, the gentle sarcasm softened by a smile. "What, after all, is the joy in seeing magic done if you already know the trick, right?" He fell silent for a moment: she, head still lowered protectively, said nothing.

"Let me take a look," he said finally, moving around to perch on the edge of the table. "Whatever disaster you're imagining, I guarantee it's not even half as bad as you think. If that."

"Or you could go away for five minutes while I dispose of the evidence." Her voice was brittle and hard. "Or the bodies. Phone the restaurant, cancel the reservations, order us a chinese or a pizza, something I can eat in jeans and a t-shirt and not feel like a child playing with her mother's makeup." She swore again, with some feeling. "This was such a stupid idea."

"It was a great idea, and it's going to be a great night," he said mildly, resisting the impulse to pat her on the shoulder. "It just needs a little fine-tuning, that's all. Let me take a look. Please?"

The gentle plea in the final word was like a key in a lock. With a sigh of frustration, she took her hands away and turned to face him, wiping a black tear-smudge across her nose in an endearingly childlike gesture. He smiled, remembering his sister again, and thought he caught the barest hint of a reflexive response, quickly stifled.

Her only sin, he thought to himself as he examined the source of her anguish, was trying too hard. Which, his inner companion commented drily, was really more of an inexperienced virtue. He felt, not for the first time, a real surge of anger against the people who should have been there for her, who should have given her more support and self-confidence. Not fair.

"Well, this is barely a problem at all," was all he said aloud. "Nothing that a minute or two won't solve. May I?" he asked, picking up the box of wipes - she nodded meekly, suddenly stuck shy.

"Your problem," he said slowly, gently wiping away some of the dark streaks, "is that you're trying to do a bit too much. You're starting off by assuming you don't look good, and that you're going to need a lot of work to cover that up, when in fact the opposite is true."

"Oh yes, I'm a beautiful butterfly and a unique snowflake," she retorted caustically, turning slightly so he could wipe some of the blush from her cheek. "A fairytale princess who can rise stunning straight from bed and into the world. Not all of us were born to be film stars, you know."

"Being a film star has nothing to do with it." She closed her eyes so he could clean her eyelashes off. "They need just as much work as anyone else, and twice as much upkeep." The wipe was added to the growing pile in the rubbish bin: he selected a fresh one. "They just have more time and money to spend on it than everyone else, that's all."

Finishing up, he examined her face, his head tilted slightly to one side, exactly as he'd watched his brother do a hundred times. The image of the solid and serious young man muttering furiously to himself as he went about his job, younger siblings looking on in wonder brought the smile back to his face, and he was rewarded with the slightest of conspiratorial grins in return. Taking advantage of her momentary attention and good-humour, he sorted through the products on the table, picking a few here and there and arranging them neatly next to him. Finally, with a brief apologetic glance at her apprehensive expression, he started with the lightest layer of the most sheer foundation he could find: she flinched slightly every time the sponge neared her face, finally opting to keep her eyes shut and her hands clenched around the arms of her chair, knuckles whitening as if she expected a slap. He kept up the commentary as he worked his way across her face by gentle degrees, trying to draw the tension out of her spring-loaded frame with the conversation.

"I mean it when I say that you're doing too much. Steven used to say it was the most beautiful models who were the hardest to prepare: at some point there's a limit to what you can do with cosmetics, and while you can slap a whole new face on an average-looking person, with someone naturally pretty you have to be much more selective."

He made a moue of disapproval and rifled through the boxes on the table, looking for a much lighter eyeshadow than the one she had out.

"Society tells you that you have to have makeup on to look your best, and if you want to go along with that, fine: there is a lot you can do with cosmetics, but it's not always a case of 'more-is-better'. That's not society trying to help you look beautiful, it's society trying to get you to buy more crap."

She smiled weakly, but kept her eyes firmly closed. "Why do I get the feeling this isn't the first time you've used this speech - oops, I'm sorry!"

He wiped away the liberal smear she'd inadvertently caused, laughing. "It's not my speech, really, it's more Steven's: he taught my sister everything she needed to know, with Mum not being around." He refused to let his voice shake. Not what I need now, God damn it. "I think it's what got him interested in the beauty industry in the first place."

"Was she a lot like me?" The question was out before she had thought it through. "I mean - " she hesitated. "Did she have the same problems, like this, sometimes?"

He was very still. She desperately wanted to open her eyes. Several long seconds ticked past: his fingers tickled her cheek where he had paused.

"Yes," he replied finally, "yes, she was quite a lot like you, actually." She didn't have to ask which question he had really answered. A gift, of sorts.

He resumed working; she let out a long breath.

"Steven used to tell her," he went on, surprising her, a odd note of affectionate laughter in his voice, "that women were just like food: there is no bad food, just different tastes; if they were bland, they could stand a lot of spicing up to make them appear more appetizing; but if they had enough beauty and character to them already - " he turned her gently in the chair to face the mirror, " - all they needed was the lightest of seasonings. Open your eyes."

It wasn't really a suggestion. Feeling afraid, confused and horribly bare, she complied.

What greeted her was unexpected. Instead of the stranger she hoped to see every time she finished this particular part of getting ready for the day, the face in the mirror was decidedly her own. And yet -

"What did you do?"

The pale arching eyebrows, the dark eyes, the strong nose and firm chin: everything was where it ought to be, but around them was the delicate emphasised line of a jaw and cheekbone leading up into the very faintest hint of red blush and the vague, almost non-existent shadow around her eyes. Her lips were a gentle pink against white, white china skin - why, she wondered suddenly, did I ever wanted to cover that up? - and her eyelashes seemed full and healthy below the barest hint of colour on her eyelids. I look beautiful, she realised very suddenly and, again, I look strong.

"How did you - "

She discovered he had moved: he was by the door, retrieving his tie from the handle. It seemed like a long time ago he had come in without knocking.

"I used a bit of makeup to help you remember how incredibly beautiful you are," he said with a smile, a full-blooded smile that lit up his face and rolled back, for a moment, the years of pain in a life too young to hold them in. "To everything there is a season, right? Just a hint of seasoning - magic."

He finished knotting the tie with a flourish and held out his hand. "Let's go. If we hurry, we can still make those dinner reservations. Between good looks, good food and good company, I think you might just make an evening of it."

She smiled back, a beautiful girl with a beautiful smile and a heart and soul worthy of both, and rose to join him.

Smirisary

2009-08-23T13:32:00.003Z

There is such power in this place. I had all but forgotten. Whenever I am here, I understand what people mean when they talk about 'the old places of the earth.' It isn't so much defined by absolute age in years or era, it's the knowledge of being in the presence of a power very much other than the ones that govern our everyday lives and set the rules we play by at work, at home, at school: there are times when I feel as if nature is becoming one of these powers, a force we can all but avoid in our normal existence; a beast we have found a way to trammel in and hem about, except for those rare occasions it escapes and wrecks havoc, and we are left picking up the pieces when we should have been better prepared. Here, though, on the edge of reality, nature is very much alive, very much free, and it is fey. It is extraordinary.

I'm a little ahead of myself. The Gortien can do that.

We are on holiday, my family and I, in a little crofting cottage on the west coast of Scotland, about an hour's drive to the coast from Fort William, by the town of Glenuig [for those of you who know your local geography!]. The Gortien is one cottage in what used to be a subsistence farming community called Smirisary - that is, a scattered collection of tiny homesteads that grew enough food to survive and perhaps trade for tools and other supplies, and nothing extra - an isolated existence virtually without money or governance, until the great and savage Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries wiped out and relocated vast swathes of the indigenous Scottish population. Since then the vast majority of such communities have remained abandoned, but Smirisary gained some minor recognition in the '50s when one woman in particular braved the harsh living conditions to document her attempts at an alternative, subsistence lifestyle. Since then, many of the old cottages in the area have been renovated to varying degrees as holiday cottages or private getaways.

The Gortien, my family's particular haunt, sits nestled in a fold in the hills just under ten minutes walk from the rocky coastline. It remains essentially the same building as when it was an isolated homestead a hundred years ago: a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen build out of rough, now white-washed stone and fronted by a simple wooden conservatory erected several years back. There is a tank on the hill collecting rainwater and an enormous Rayburn stove in the kitchen to complement the fireplace in the bedroom for providing central heating, but there is no electricity, no gas or phone lines, no drinkable water - everything you need must be carried the half-mile or so from the nearest road - litres of water, kilograms of coal and bottles of propane, all your food supplies and [of course!] piles of reading material. It is almost barbaric in its simplicity - it is bliss.

I honestly can't describe the experience properly: a failure of vocabulary. Tramping over the hills and through the ferns laden with stuffed backpacks and arms full; sitting out on top of the hill watching the sun set over the sea and ignite the Scottish islands perched on the edge of the horizon; reading by a hot, roaring peat fire smelling of bog and freshly-turned earth, safe in four solid walls of stone as the storms come raging in and as quickly are swept out again; playing cards on the old, scarred kitchen table while my father hums busily at the gigantic coal-fired oven, creating stew or baking bread; chasing sheep off the porch with a clattering of hooves and a chorus of indignant bleating ... so many utterly unique experiences rolled into one unassuming cottage by the sea.

This place brings the world back to life, for me. I could spend an age ranting about the depravities of my concrete mecca of a city, but sat here listening to the short-wave radio murmuring about the weather and the shipping forecast, writing the letters I can't write in the midst of the rattle and hum of reality, writing by candle-light and oil lamp and saying things that matter to the people whom I love and cherish - sitting here watching the red fade to blue to grey to black, I cannot care too much about the place I've come from. That I'll be going back there in a few too-short days is the least meaningful fact I am aware of at this moment: how is it meant to compare to the vital, immediate fact that there is a herd of wild highland cattle and one of deer that will come right up to the house to nibble the long weeds around the window, or the unbelievable truth of precisely how many different shades of blue and white can be seen in one split-second curve of a breaker before it crashes to the shore, or the way that even now the flickering lamp light makes strange, surreal hieroglyphs out of my writing, slanting upward away from the dancing glow of flame on steel nib, up the page and into the gloom. These are facts, essential and incontrovertible, they are everything that defines this moment. On Thursday I will be back at work, listening to the slack-jawed nonentities mumbling damp, meaningless sentences, and while my head nods and my voice makes empty noises of approval, my heart will say, "there is a place - you know it, because you have been there - where your hands and your voice, your eyes and your mind and every other fibre of your being act in concert, and what they do has a meaning that will no wash away in an instant, one that sits untouchable above the floods that wash away the revolting, soulless gestures of these cardboard people and stands exulting in the tumult and storm that rages around their clapboard lives, pulling them to pieces. It is a place of high walls, of deep harbours, of firm foundations in the midst of hurricane and warmth in the midst of gale and rain. It is a knowledge of real beauty, and real fury, and real danger such as we have almost forgotten, a knowledge that sees our pale imitations of these things standing naked before it and accepts that they are not worth the effort of contempt. Out here, beyond the electrical hum pervading our lives, beyond the simpering moral and intellectual rot gnawing at the root of our existence, beyond frightened people locked inside their own skins [and believe me, I know all about that], there is a moment upon cresting the hill and seeing the sun breaking up the rain clouds like fingers of fire shining on the sea, a moment as if coming suddenly to the edge of a thick bank of fog and pulling free of formless grey to see the entire wealth of creation spread out before you. There is that one moment with the sea air in your face like the very breath of God saying, 'here - now - you must understand that you are more real than that which you will return to - never be afraid of what you shall pass through like the fog.'

Well. Too deep for a little stone cottage on the Scottish coast? Then you've never been there. All I can say is that it doesn't matter what god, if any, you believe in, or what version of reality you subscribe to: there is power in this place, out sojourning amidst the very edges of the world. I could write another gospel without ever beginning to crack the secrets of what this place does, and I think that is how it was meant to be: this wild world sends you back a little cleansed, and a little less respectful of the snivelling demons waiting for your return. Come and try it out yourself sometime, would be my only advice: experience what it feels like, even for a second, to approach this mess of a world with the spark of the divine written in thunder and air across your face. I recommend it.

The Bridges of Manchester County

2009-08-08T22:48:00.005Z

"She always expects
surprise, even here, in the
rows of corn and wheat"
-- Cade, "City of Bridges: A Postcard from Saskatoon"

I have a thing for bridges. I'm not entirely sure why - somehow they have the suggestion of power about them, of standing against something [who knows what? gravity, perhaps, or the elements], of being tall and proud and indomitable. One of the images from Atlas Shrugged that moved me most was the picture of Nat Taggart standing alone and abandonned at sunset, still building his bridge - bridge-builders are great people, I think. There is something rooted in defiance at the core of people like that, people doing the impossible for the ungrateful and the unknowing, people who make connections and forge links. Craftsmen and visionaries share much the same set of tools, I think.
I came across the haiku at the beginning of the entry a couple of years ago, and was immensely moved. My mother comes from Saskatoon, and everything about our holiday visits leads me to agree with the writer wholeheartedly: it is a simple, unassuming prairie city after the old fashion of small, remote Canadian frontier towns, and yet - and yet, you can never be quite sure what you will find. She's quite correct in calling it the 'City of Bridges', too - seven major crossings in a city of just over 200,000 is impressive, and a little bizarre. There is one in particular that holds a place in my heart, the Grand Trunk Bridge on the corner of Sapadina and Power - built in 1907/8, it's a grand old steel-trestled train bridge that straddles the river at its widest point, just south of the city proper. Let me tell you: there is very little better than sitting out on a hot Canadian summer day above the river, legs swinging into space, with a notebook and a pen, completely lost to the world. It is [something I have yet to use it for - oneday!] the perfect spot for a romantic post-dinner evening, sat watching the sun go down over the river, talking about everything and nothing. It is inseperably entwined in my head with perfect hot summers and the endless sweep of the prairies, golden and dusty and beautifully simple. Some things never leave you.

Manchester isn't particularly famous for its bridges - no Golden Gate, no Grand Trunk - just a few functional stone and brick pieces here and there. There's still a certain mystique to some of them, however, as I discovered last night.
Stag parties are not my natural habitat, I'll be honest. I am bad at partying: I have a low tolerance for alcohol, no 'and-then-she-took-it-off-and-she-was-a-MAN!' stories to tell, and roughly zero desire to bring anyone [male or female] from Manchester town home with me. As depressingly cliched as it is, I am far more comfortable curled up with a good book, or at the very least drinking whiskey with a few people I actually know. Crowds of strangers don't scare me like they would have done a few years ago, but they don't excite me either - they just make me feel old and cynical.
As I made my excuses for the second half of the night's revelries and started the hour-long walk home [because the only thing worse than the city centre on a saturday night is the bus leaving it] I did what I do as a defence against the crowds of people hell-bent on seduction and sex, the desperate and the unthinking and the unstable and the whole unpalatable explosion of people's hopelessness and willful ignorance - I set out walking in one direction, any direction, and I kept going until I felt like I could think straight again.

A few miles out of the town centre, down Deansgate and nearly to the motorway, there's a quiet stretch of road the branches out over one of Manchester's innumerable tiny rivers - the bridge that holds it up is fairly recent, probably only a couple of decades old, a classic '80s brick ediface, solid and squat and unimposing. The guardwall is about seven feet high and a foot or two thick, all solid, slightly blackened bricks. Sitting on the top of it, staring out over the sluggish riverlet and the Saturday night revelries going on behind it, I sat there and tried to figure out how I feel about my city. And it is my city, as these things go: thirteen years of my life this summer I will have lived here, including the year I was born; as much as I might identify very strongly with wide-open prairies and the Rocky Mountains [and I do - they are a part of my bones and my blood and if I am away from them too long, those deep and tightly-knit features make themselves known, to my immense spiritual discomfort] there is nowhere else that I can call home in quite the same way I call Manchester home. Let me be very clear: there are plenty of times I wish it wasn't so, but I'm not one of those people who believes you can change where home is just by moving - if you run away, you will have to deal with that struggle sooner or later.
What I thought, looking out on the explosion of blue neon and breathing in the strong, heady smell from the profusion of honeysuckle growing wild all along the banks, was that I hate this place with a passion. It feels like such a natural reaction. Every morning I catch the bus into the centre of town to work, and it strikes me over and over again: the hundredweight of bitter, angry people covering every inch of pavement, snapping into mobile phones with their cigarettes dangling unsmoked, burning their fingers; people's faces are twisted into their public face, their city face, eyes downcast and features set in a neutral, formless expression that says don't notice me, don't talk to me, don't hurt me, don't make my day and more stressful and painful than it already is; the tramps who swear at you when you tell them you don't have any change, the mobile phone salesman and charity workers and public survey monkeys out in droves for your time, your money, your opinion, things they seem to believe inexplicably that they have a right to - when I want to give you my point-of-view, lady, you'll know it, believe me. And coming home at night, exhausted and bone-weary from eight or nine hours of dealing with the whole coffee-drinking, sugar-eating, hyped-up and downtrodden mass of English humanity, it's all the same: middle-aged women with so many shopping bags I'm surprised they don't have a little hired slave to carry it all around with them; teenage girls in layers of makeup shrieking aimless words across the city's squares, boys who don't know what it means to grow-up trying to hard to be men, laughing too quickly and too loudly, instantly in your face and up close and looking for trouble - I've broken a man's skull with a baseball bat, I said to one punk, quietly and with the perfect East-coast accent, I've put a bowie knife through a man's wrist and skewered it to the wall, stood there and laughed while he ripped one of his fingers off trying to get it free. I've put a bullet through a man's eye and felt his blood on my face. What do you want? He must have seen something he didn't like. He left without laughing. Afterward, sitting on the bus and shaking slightly, I thought, "what on earth possesses a sane person to say a thing like that?" I was a little younger then, than I am now. Perhaps that contributed, in some way, to my growing up.

There is a place out on the edge of Northenden, along the Mersey close to where I used to go to school, called Simon's Bridge. It's a little footpath that runs along by the water, little more than a glorified stream at that point, and over an old cast-iron trestle, rusting and slightly green with age. People walk their dogs down through the nearby fields - kids go to make out or smoke weed, whichever vice is more attractive at the time. But at dusk, just before dark and with what little sun the clouds have allowed in lighting up the river, it is quiet and usually abandonned. If you have someone with you, you can play Pooh Sticks, dropping twigs and branches over the one side and spinning around quickly to see which makes it out of sight first - if you are alone, the top of the old, worn abundments makes for a good place to sit and think for a while. I used to go there very occasionally when I lived closer, if I needed some time to myself and my feet happened to take me that way. Now, I'm further away. Things are a little less peaceful out here: the constant wailing of police sirens, the rough barking of stray dogs out in the alleyway, the roars and howls of the lower-middle class creating drama to make their lives interesting. I ought not to complain, of all the ills in the world, of not having a bridge nearby to sit on. But if I am to hate this city a little less, it is important to focus less on its faults, and more on its... inconsistancies. Little victories.

Really, what I think of this place matters very little in the grand scheme of things, or in any smaller schemes for that matter. Manchester will take no note of the boy who dreams of Saskatoon's railway bridge. I live here because there are things and people that I love and because [as much as a rail against the fact sometimes] if I am ever to escape this place - and that is an if - I have some reconciling to do.
The nature of a city is tied to the nature of its people, past and present, and also vice-versa. I can only imagine as much as we try to change this place, hopefully for the better, that as Nietzsche put it, he who battles with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster; when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. It is a quote that applies to a lot of situations. Who am I to tell people how to live?

"Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it's all present tense

It's my beat
In my new town

Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
On to the bike path
where it's something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must

It's my beat
In my new town

Ancient and always
The wheel's ever whirling
Today I'm riding
Tomorrow I walk
Step through forever
into this very moment
The heart is pumping
and the heart rocks

It's my beat
In my new town."
-- Bruce Cockburn, "My Beat"

Switzerland [1]

2009-06-30T13:45:00.007Z

[Oh my.]

1. What can be articulated

As I sit by my window, flipping through my notebooks and letting the gentle rain-cooled breeze soothe my red-tinged arms and shoulders, I'm uncertain where to begin. Although it was barely a week ago that I left, it feels as though I have been gone for months. The continent has worked its way under my skin quickly and completely, and it itches - I feel tired and tender, as if my flesh were trying to shed one reality and embark on another. It's a learning curve, too: every time I make the journey across the Channel I'm drawn a little further into the understanding that, despite the fact that Britain is only a few miles away from France, it is really far more like the USA - Europe-proper is a whole other world. There are different games and dances to navigate [metaphorically, thankfully, though potentially the literal danger lurks out there too], different sets of rules and, of course, different languages, even - especially? - when both parties are speaking English. Jumbled communication fosters surprising tolerance and patience - we slow down, we repeat, we rephrase and we listen much more carefully. As we are likely only marginally understood in any case, we are less afraid of seeming foolish.

Zurich feels like most older European cities - that is, as if it were populated mostly by benevolent ghosts of some kind. In the late evening, the winding streets are quiet and solemn, very still and leafy, as if they were waiting for something. We walked on and on down one such for an age, surrounded by beautifully-crafted architecture and well-kept greenery, utterly silent save for a single admonishing hush from a balcony high above us, aimed at our unEuropean exuberance of exploration. Even in daylight there is an unreal quality to the place, as if people who make so little fuss about their existence must only have one foot in it at most - calmly competant, calmly amused, efficient and good-natured by turns. There must be genetics for this kind of thing.

2. What can only be felt

The smell of the tiny tea-shop perched on the edge of the river, hundreds upon hundreds of tins and boxes and the smell like mother nature making spiced honey and wine; the unbelievable clearness of the water, spreading out from under the bridges and humming gently and tunefully, the backing score to these incredible people's lives; the incomprehensible vastness of the Alps at first sight, tall beyond reality - too big to exist, they can only have been painted on to the sky by some creative god; the taste of iced coffee and chocolate, nestled away from the sun under a simple striped canopy, listening to the low laughter and foreign conversation of friends, lovers, waiters moving deftly between the tables, and

I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato. I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him...

There is so much more. I get lose just remembering.

3. The curious dream I had of you

"
Zurich Dream

We found your name in purple ink
the day we stole God's bedroom key,
and left him watching thunderstorms,
his feet up on the mantelpiece.
He'd written, "don't forget to pray
for this one, keep her in your mind"
and doodled with his fountain pen
beside the name he'd underlined.
We read through pages laced with awe
and journal entries filled with doubt:
we saw the angry scribblings
of helpless God, his written shouts
of old and tired disbelief
obscured by pages written and torn,
the spiky, childlike handwriting
all blurred by tracks his tears had worn.

We didn't hear the still, small voice
that echoed on the radio,
announcing tracks at 3am
while we were being bulletproof:
amidst the thunder of our dreams
we stood together back-to-back,
a pair of islands edges with reefs
and joined by a bridge of rock -
a danger in the going back,
a danger in the stepping out -
we sit alone on different shores
and wake alone to self-same doubts.
Remember when we fell asleep?
The radio was playing hope,
and warming rain had washed the sky.
But it was colder when we woke.

The night is old, but far away
the Alps are shining, cool and green:
our moonlit dreamscape rolls away
to greet the dawn, and in the east
and pale and white-haired morning star
is lighting up the Zurich streets.
We sit together on the bridge
across the Rhine and share a drink:
"remember that it's just a dream"
you say, and as I reach to take your hand
I feel the soft Swiss sun against my cheek,
and wish that you were waiting here
to greet me as I wake.
"

4. βλεπομεν γαρ αρτι δι εσοπτρου εν αινιγματι

R.I.P. Revd Dr. Hugh Rae [1921-2009]

2009-06-01T23:45:00.012Z

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day."
-- Isaac Watts, O God Our Help in Ages Past

Here's a funny thing - the world is still turning. It was turning at 5am on the 1st of June as I lay unblinking on my bed, wide awake and knowing with cold, distant exactness why the phone was ringing; I would guess it will still be turning tonight. I'm uncertain whether tonight's turning will find me asleep - one thing is certain, it finds my grandfather finally asleep, quickly and peacefully and with less time than it takes to say a prayer.

The primary feeling is one of disbelief, of the unreality of the thing. Up until two weeks ago he was, with the exception of a little tiredness and occasional aches, in good health - barely a week ago my father flew to Japan for a busines trip, secure in the knowledge that when he returned the doctors would have a diagnosis and we could figure out which treatment options were the best. My grandpa barely held on [and it was holding on - I will never forget the pain twisting in my heart, watching him lie in bed, concentrating fiercely, conserving his strength so that he might see his son again before he died] long enough for him to make it back. I know my father well enough to see, with perfect clarity, him sitting on the aeroplane, head in hands, trying to figure out how to forgive himself if he was too late. The speed of it all verges on the absurd - what can you do?

The week of his illness and death was one of brilliant sun. Driving back through the city with my mother in the early evening, window down, there was a incredible softness to the light, the trees and buildings bathed in the kind of effusive glow that makes you want to take photograph after photograph. It has an interesting isolating quality, that light - other people seem to fade into the background, become very much part of the scenery, as if the two of us could have been the only actors onscreen in a film of our own. Chronic sleep deprivation has much to do with this, I know, but the circumstances also tend to relegate anyone beyond close friends and family into nonperson; my eyes have been gritty and tired lately, and I've taken to walking around without my glasses on when I'm in familiar territory, turning anyone outside the metre mark into nothing but a rough person-shaped blur. Distance is a curious and relative thing at times like these.

Recent memories are fragmented and unconcentrated: some important events, conversations are fuzzy and surreal, as if I had forgotten them and been reminded a long time afterwards; the minutae of the day, however, stand out sharply, like a solitary lit window in a long, dark street. The group of us standing around the bed, temporarily lost for words until someone starting singing one of many, many of his favourite old hymns and we discovered something special - our family falls naturally into four part harmonies. The district nurse, standing by the door waiting to give him his check-up, had tears in his eyes - "you all love him so much," he said. "Not many people I see have that. So many people are alone." Or the explosion of laughter as he woke from his fitful dozing to find himself surrounded, murmured amusedly, "eeney-meeney-miney-mo" to the various figures around him and drifted back off.
Other things, too, of a different timbre: the look in my father's eyes coming in the door, almost straight off the plane home, a look that went directly past everyone and took him straight into my grandpa's room before he had time to get his coat off; him knelt by the bed, head bowed, my grandpa's hand in his hair, saying, "I'm back, Dad, it's OK - I'm back"; the aching realisation, watching these things, of what it means to be a son. I'm a Christian, fatherhood and sonship are incredibly important parts of how I see the world: what does it mean when those things are taken away? "I'm an orphan," he said afterwards, with an almost-smile. A joke; a painful truth. We are who we are in relation to those around us, especially those we love - when we are reduced to the elemental core that is at the root of 'I' - what then?

The funeral was staggering. We couldn't fit everyone inside the college's church - they spilled out onto the grass, into the classrooms and under the hastily errected marquee, linked by audio cables zigzagging through doors and windows to bring our voices out to the throng of people that had gathered to pay their last respects, all 350+ of them. There are no words to properly desribe the incredible flood of emotions washing over me, standing there all of a foot from his coffin: sadness, anger, despair, rage, panic, grief, exhaustion, disbelief, but over and above all a tremendous, powerful sense of pride to have been a part of his life. And as the tributes and testimonies were given from family, friends, colleagues, fellow pastors and educators and churchmen of all generations and walks of life, I felt again the incredible, unburdened lightness that I associate so much with sitting in his living room, trading stories and advice and being taught more than I will ever even realise I have learned; I felt the fierce, explosive joy that is our only defence against death, the joy that knows without question that there is more to come. We mourn, yes, but! we do not mourn as those who have no hope.
There are no applause at funerals, though the speeches, especially my fathers, were well worth it. But there is singing. And as the hundreds of voices matched the old pipe organ, note for note, swelling up like light and life and love into the grey Manchester sky, I understood properly what the hymn-writer had been trying to say, and why my grandpa had picked this song for his funeral. And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, W.W. How writes, Steals on the ear the distant triumph song; and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong; Hallelujah! Hallelujah! This life is a struggle, a truly terrible battle, but - we do not fight as those who have no hope. He never did, and even after his death he continues to inspire it in those of us who knew him, because he has shown us that we do have a choice, and that we do have a chance. Not as those who have no hope.

I have had, since I was quite young, an image in my head of what my death feels like, as if that one moment were a summation of my life. In it I am sat on the edge of a cliff looking over a broad, sweeping expanse of red-grey desert, watching a storm thunder and flicker round and about me as the sun sets in a blaze of blood and gold on the horizon; someone I love is sat beside me, stretched out on their back watching the first stars begin to flicker into existence above us, singing gently to themselves. It's not that I think this is how I will die, but if I could paint a picture of the many divergant lines of my life coming together to finish, that is what it would show. And standing in that chapel, feeling a solid wall of the love and respect of three hundred people behind us and several thousand more who sent letters, emails, phonecalls of apology for their absence, as I stood beside his still body I could almost hear him whispering some of his final words to my mother as she sat beside him, leaning in to catch the faint, fading sound of his voice: never be afraid to love, he said to her. You knew, didn't you? We are all of us so very afraid to love, sometimes, but as I stood there hearing the crowd of people whom you loved, and who loved you greatly in return, sing out strong and true in your memory - But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day; the saints triumphant rise in bright array! - I reaffirmed that vow: never to be afraid to love; never to give up hope.

I am exhausted and - as long as I have gone on here - my brain is as yet unable to fully process what has happened. It's not something I'm looking forward to. Unfortunately right at this moment I have no lighthouse to keep, no cottage to retreat to, no great adventure to occupy my thoughts. All I have - enough for now, surely? - is the feeling and memory of the man the last time I saw him, as I said goodnight and he gently pulled me in to kiss me on the forehead. You have been very much loved, were his words. Well, so have you, I said, to which he replied only, oh, I know. Tonight I will fall asleep reading Konrad and Tennyson, and when I wake - who knows? We read Corinthians 15:50, the one we used to joke had been written about us: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed! Things have moved on too fast for me, I am afraid - I have given up believing the world will still be the same place when I awake. But - and here's the thing, I think - it will still be turning.

At first I thought the world would stop. Then, later, I was angry that it refused to. Now, finally, I understand that it matters very little - the pain, the anguish, the despair, these things will pass away; love does not. He is dead, there is nothing that can change that now. But he was an incredible person, and he loved me, and love? Love endures. So must I.

Extract

2009-05-04T13:41:00.000Z

Extracted from an odd little unfinished story, 01.05.09

"You've come a long way, haven't you?"

"A long way, yes. Miles and miles: oceans, borders, deserts, mountains; a hundred towns, a thousand roads; countries, continents. Generations. A long way."

"What are you looking for?"

"A way to go home, I suppose, or a reason. Or the courage to." A wry smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. "A heart, brains - so many possibilities."

The captain chuckles and leans out along the porch rail, tracing aeroplane trails in the darkening sky.

"Well, there's good news and bad news, as always. I assume you'll be wanting the sucker-punch first?"

"Of course. Why put off pain you can enjoy right away?"

"Mhm. Well, let me tell you then, kid: I've seen an awful lot of people running one way or the other over the years, and there's only one thing that ever holds true. Nobody ever goes home."

The boy nods, unworried, rolling the old silver coin over in his fingers.

"So I'm beginning to find out - not that much of a kick in the teeth anymore, I'm afraid. What's the good news?"

The boy loses his rhythm suddenly: the coin jarrs awkwardly in his hand and falls, spinning gently. He stoops to catch it, but the old man is faster, he plucks it out of the air and holds it out in his palm, face up: the worn Indian head catches the sun and gleams, bright and sudden. Truth unlooked-for, honesty unexpected; their eyes meet and hold.

"The good news? There is none. But oneday soon you'll wake up, and realise you never left at all."

in which our protagonist finds himself staring sadly at his body from above, wondering how he could have left it this way

2009-04-25T00:05:00.004Z

"Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death."
-- Psalm 22

I awake with a start every time, with the taste of hot grey dust still lingering in my mouth. Before I can even lift my head to face the day the feeling fades, and I would give anything to have it back. I dream about the desert less and less these days, as if I am losing it, and it frightens me. It was a risk to take, I know: not just the three-thousand mile trip, the people I'd never met, the carnival madness of the festival, the city on the plateau; these things were all dangerous in their own right, but far worse is the giving of yourself, investing a piece of your soul in something you must leave behind. I have been given something in exchange, a glimpse of the divine and a memory of myself in the company of incredible beings, and every day I use it as a shield against the dead hands that grasp at me as I walk through this city and this life - I hold it crumpled tight in my fist like a love note. Like a promise of hope.

And every day it seems that a piece of it slips away quietly, and I feel as though one more section of my armour has been stripped away, and oneday soon I will have nothing left to ward off the blows of this place. It is a terrible thing to have walked with angels, to have even walked where angels might fear to tread and demons hush their voices to a whisper, and now? Now I lay broken against this dark city wall, struggling to keep my face turned away from these dead eyes in cold white faces, from clammy hands and grasping, bony fingers. When I look around, I wonder what on earth these unliving things would take from me: surely I have nothing they could possibly want? If I was rich, perhaps: if I was famous or beautiful or talented, but I have nothing these dead want to own; my head and my heart and my hands deal in a light that is worth nothing to them, my tongue speaks words that are ugly and meaningless to their ears. No, they would reach into my chest and pull out my fainting heart only to have taken it - they would eat every part of me just for the joy of consuming, until there is nothing left to recognise.

When the sky comes tumbling down around me, when I have sat slumped with my back to the locked door, sobbing raggedly for fear and hatred of all that waits outside it, this is when I wake with the taste of the hot, grey dust in my mouth and the lingering pressure of a friend's hand on my shoulder. And it is in these brief moments, lying with my eyes still closed and the memory of grit in my mouth and nostrils, that I can feel my frenetic heartrate slow and my aching muscles unknot. The dream breathes in my ear, and I can still feel the hard-packed earth stretching out for miles under my back; the cloudless sky punctuated by a hundred thousand galaxies, somehow combining utter blackness and the deep, soulful cry of blues and reds; the bitter lime taste of the alkaline dust on my skin and tongue. Even the fire on the horizon, the madness and joy a half-mile away only contributes to the sense of a totality of peace: when I desire lights and laughter and the sweeping exuberance of life, it is there for me; for now I choose to be alone, and no-one will force me to do otherwise. The chaos and the peace, the angels and the demons, the fire and the sparkling blue-black darkness, we all know how to communicate - how to interact, but when to leave well enough alone. Despite the divisions in my nature, despite my fractured beliefs and the confusion in my mind, I dream myself back to this primitive, mysterious peace: once sensed and never forgotten; once experienced and never yet repeated.

This is the dream that lingers as hot, grey dust in my mouth, that struggles to wrap its fragile skein around my aching and battered body and smooth over the armour chinks in my tired soul. It surrounds me and fills me and makes me promise one thing over and over again: that I will not give up hope. No matter what happens, no matter how far down they drag me or how many pieces of me they try to call their own, there is always this dream of how things were in the simplicity of the desert, and how things will be again. Maybe not there, not in that place or in that way, but I have hope that oneday I will feel clean air envelop me again, and know the clean, open lines of simplicity.

I know that I am not alone. When I feel my father's strong arms around me, when I hear my grandpa's wry chuckle as he jokes with his students, I know what it is to love and be loved unconditionally; when I catch my sister's eye across the room and only we know the joke, when I can almost feel my mother's fingers loosen and flow out across the piano keys and I want to sing and sing and to have a voice good enough to add to the beauty that spreads out through the house - I still remember the early days in this country, an alien lost and uncertain, but being gently rocked to sleep every night by her music from downstairs working its way into my dreams, and waking to his fingers tip-tapping gently at the computer down the hall, weaving a tune of his own in the cold English pre-dawn. Who says he knows love? I know love, says the littlest one.

My head aches as I write this, and I run my hand through my hair as if I could pull it out by the roots, and the dull pounding with it. Eventually I will crawl into bed and lay, no more or less alone than any other night, until the world's lights come back on again and I can pretend that the bleak, ugly dawn that rises over concrete and plastic is the fierce, singleminded heat of the desert, rising in triumph to blaze for one more day, at least - battles won, at cost, in the night. Dawn is no victory, here, it is only a sign of the times: time to get up, time to stop dreaming, time to face reality.

Everyday that I am awake with the dawn, ready and willing to let another piece of me die, I pray, and I promise myself this: oneday.

Oneday, I will see the sun again.

... and your young man shall dream dreams ...

2009-04-14T13:45:00.004Z

"The heart cannot say, sometimes, but the hand and eye - if steady enough and clear enough - may shape a window for those who come after. Someone might look up one day, when all those awake or asleep in Sarantium tonight are long dead, and know that this woman was fair, and very greatly loved by the unknown man who placed her overhead, the way the ancient Trakesian gods were said to have set their mortal loves in the sky, as stars.

Eventually, morning came. Morning always comes. There are always losses in the night, a price paid for light."
-- Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors

EASTER MORNING GHOST

You see this rough and ready frame?
It's walked the world, my silent friend:
I've tasted blood and grit between my teeth
and fought the desert, had it fight me back;
I've felt the Scottish sunsets take my hand
and lived to see the sunrise bear me home,
all weak and bloodied from that other world -
the battles won, at cost, against the night.
This body has its breaks and scars:
the cold white iron of demon claws,
the fiery lines they branded in my side,
my wrists, because I would not let them win.
I've held those demons on a leash,
I've held them by the throat and felt them beg
to be released - I've held them till they died.
This is the man I am, my silent friend,
but who are you?

I sensed you laughing gently in the dark
and knew despair - not mine, but yours,
as if you'd left it far too late to scream,
had swallowed up the sound and choked it down
until it grew and grew, took root and thrived
and wrapped its clinging vines around your spine.
I hear your bitter laughter edged with hope
and cry to see that long-forgotten scream
tear free and blossom into life,
in beauty and in solace and in pain,
like Eden bursting from your troubled breast.
I dreamt you thus - but when I woke
you were a fleeting flash of green
I couldn't place: who were you, silent friend?

I face the morning old, and so alone:
the wanderer and warrior confined;
the old man's eyes within a young man's face.
I put my back against these books
and face the wall, as if my longing stare
could pierce these bricks and gloomy city streets,
could travel on these Easter eagle's wings
and rise, unfettered, to the place you wait.
Who are you, Easter morning ghost?
Your presence fled before I learned your name,
but I can say with certainty and faith -
the faith of old men dreaming dreams
and young men's visions springing into life
- that I shall see you long before we meet.
And so, despite these walls I yet remain
two parts uncertainty, but one part hope.

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August 29th, 2007

2009-02-24T19:42:00.002Z

Taken from my travel diary, 29.08.07, having just left our mysterious San Francisco hotel for the desert and Burning Man.

We escape the Hotel California with ease, tailgating our escaping stories out into the desert. Should it be so easy? The twisting corridors that echo with jazz and swearing children, the locked doors, the strange surreal once-seen-never-believed lodgers - will they stay forever, once we are gone? Our stories compel us onward and outward, springing the trap behind as we walk on, unknowning. How easy it is for other people to stop, to live: how simple for their aspirations to stretch out, to gobble out a year, five, twenty, flowing forward like water through a breach in the dam.

In the desert, there is no water. Time sits in the sun, writhing until it boils over, saturating each second with paths, possibilities, exploding moments and laughter, laughter, always the smile of a friend along for the ride. Did we die in some forgotten second, lonely and seeking, only to search each other out to live again? Our spirits dance with the contact, our reality misses a step and falls, flailing into the space where our bodies should be. When did we mislay them, these anchors of need and desire? When did we pass so near to each other that space became a dream, that time became the past we left behind? This is where we wander, four creatures of the now and then and yet to be, released into the world together to spread vital discontent like a balm over the trapped, static lives we pass.

The desert grabs hold and refuses to let go, playing God with our expectations, playing with our souls like a juggler plays with fire: we are the flying ones, we are the hypnotic, dangerous, oxygen-consuming flaming brands that linger behind your closed eyes. What will you do with us? We are the vision sent blazing from God, the fiery vision of change. Touch us, and you may burn; ignore us, and you may die of cold. Tonight we are your fire, tonight we are the air, tonight we are the coals you walk upon. What will you take of us?

Tonight we are the desert.

Electric President - "Grand Machine No.12"

2009-01-16T15:05:00.005Z

I've been trying to listen to more new music lately, partly because there's a lot of great stuff out there, and partly because I caught up with an old friend on MSN a while ago - one I hadn't talked to properly for a long time - and she took a look at what I was listening to and said, "you really DO listen to things over and over again, don't you?"
This is true, I tend to slowly build up a list of my favourites and then listen to them for aeons - sometimes it works, but sometimes [like now] I feel the urge to see what's out there.

I appreciate the quirky, and this song by Electric President fits that inch-perfectly. It's also very subtle, intelligent and subversive, which is never bad. The video is so excellent that if you're not careful you can find yourself missing the music, which though understated is really very good. Yes, it panders to all those post-hippie era indie kids out there, but I feel I can let them have their fun as long as their putting out pieces like this one.

Pictures of You

2009-01-08T14:43:00.005Z

Ω.

2009-01-05T12:37:00.005Z

"They walked through the sunset and into the start of the night, with despair and horror and depravity licking every footfall. They walked without looking over their shoulders at the city they left behind, until the tall buildings molded into spiny lumps over the surface of the earth, until the highway curved and that little spine sunk down to a small dark patch in the blood red of the sunset, until the patch turned to a spot and the spot turned into a dot and the dot shrank into a point so small you had to squint to see it, if you could notice it at all. They walked until the sun fell into the place where the city had vanished. They walked until the streetlights came on and they could cry again."
-- Sam Virzi, Vanishing

With a little more experience as I've gotten a little older, I find it pretty easy to judge a bad week: it's one where there's more days without a shred of hope than there is with. On the surface, it's quite a positive outlook - just one unexpected phonecall from a friend, one random act of kindness by a stranger or a ray of sunshine where it has no right to be... easy, neh?
If only. More and more at the moment I find myself sitting at my desk, wondering what the hell I'm doing here. This used to be where I felt the most at home: connected to the world, reading and writing and listening, throwing ideas back and forth between people whose opinions mattered to me; this is where I stamped myself upon the world when I couldn't actually be out there walking in it. Now it feels like I'm stuck in a maze of backroads and can't find my way out to get anywhere. Or rather, it's the opposite - that's where I want to be, wandering the interesting less-travelled paths, but I'm stuck on this accursed highway with people I don't know [and don't want to] going nowhere. I can't even wrench my hands off the wheel to crash the car.

[When Ecclesiastes begins to make good sense, you know you are in trouble.]

That's how I feel here. I read and nothing clicks, I listen and nothing means what it should. I barely even bother writing any more - my prose stumbles to a halt scant pages in, the lines in my poetry bump up awkwardly against each other and jar painfully out of rhythm, even my theology just spirals downward out of control into some bleak, Godless inconclusiveness. I read back some of my older pieces, so full of expectation and confidence in what waits in the unexplored, and I cannot remember how it felt to write them. For the first time in my life yesterday I closed Tennyson's Ulysses without finishing it; I took my copy of The Transient Manifesto down off the wall, I actually couldn't bear to fully understand how badly I measure up to my own creed.

I am very, very tired, and I'm running out of lifelines. Tennyson makes me cry, Guy Gavriel Kay feels too much like hopeful lies, Gaarder like it comes from a whole other world; I get frustrated with the impossibility of Eternal Sunshine [as if that was what I should focus on, urgh], Garden State and Big Fish ring beautifully hollow; even Iron & Wine, the Lucksmiths, Amy Correia - all of them feel too attached to a time [a then], possibilities and chances and people I've missed, and that is not what I need right now. I continue to read John Buchan and Wendell Berry in the hope that the simplest cure is the most effective, but... I just don't know. I want to sleep for ever. I could sleep for an age and wake to find the world utterly changed, and I still don't know if I would have the energy to raise myself above this. I'm tired.

Glare

2008-12-23T14:06:00.007Z

"Grace is a gift for the fallen, dear:
you're an angry blade and you're brave,
but you're all alone."
-- Iron & Wine, An Angry Blade

GLARE

We are the grateful lost:
like ivory we lie
amidst the faded bone;
we teach the wind to sing it's name,
a keening twist of ancient song.
No footprints stir the dusty ground,
no eyes to see us faintly gleam:
beneath the racing skies we shoot
like burning stars,
     and westerning, are gone.

We are the grateful lost:
like ivory our lies
were strewn amidst our bones;
we whispered down the wind our names,
a twisted song of ancient pain.
No footsteps near our dusty graves,
no eyes to see our final grins:
beneath the burning skies we ran
like dying stars,
     and westerning, were gone.

We are the grateful lost:
with lies they'll throw our bones
amidst the barren stones;
we'll wend upon the western wind
a painful song that can't be heard.
No hands will tend our empty graves,
no eyes will see our resting place:
beneath the skies we'll run like fire
that takes to flight,
     and westerning, is gone.

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A walk to remember

2008-11-17T17:20:00.004Z

"i walked home today, the smell of snow melting
and i figure that god lays out thoughts for you to find, along your walk home,
if he has a spare moment.
it's all he can find time to do, drop little crumbs of reminders
for you to trip against,
causing you to remember why you were ever happy."

-- wickedwitch, "apicomplexans, ears"

Mmm, the things you learn when you're walking. I wish I had words as poetic as Rachel here to explain something of what I feel when God is a-whispering through all the background noise of the city - how much joy there is to have something to listen to, and how much frustration that you can't hear it better. I'm not sure I'd accuse God of throwing us the crumbs, but maybe just of giving us portion sizes we can deal with.

I should like to direct your attention to the Nazarene Roundtable, because it is worth far more than a look, it's worth actually gearing your brain up to engage with. And if you're the kind of person whose brain is constantly churning anyway, excellent - here's some top-quality grist for your mental mill. Enjoy.

Notes on a Plane Crash

2008-10-14T20:45:00.005Z

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[the man in the window seat]

We saw the sun come up beneath our wings
and heard the mourning stars, the fading lights
that trickle gently into dark.
Our head against the window-pane
we saw those sighing lights sink down,
extinguish all their fury and their fight,
for what? "They burn their lives away at night,"
he said, "they set themselves on fire for love
and dwindle, grey and widow-old
and trickle gently into dark."

We see the sea stretch out beneath our feet
and tread its carefree paths, the running waves
that stream from portside into night.
Our trembling wingtips dipping low
we feel the water's grave, it calls
like lonely sirens by their wave-washed hearths.
"Their only husbands are the dead," he says,
"they sing their salt-songs choked with guilt
and dwindling, grey and widow-old
they stream with sadness into night."

We will be rushing winds, be streaming skies
who tumble down to meet the arms of land,
the all-embracing arms of God.
The man in seat 11b,
his aching fingers holding tight with hope
will be at peace, to smell the ocean air,
to dance beneath the waves to no-one's tune.
His seatbelt chain will slip from 'round his waist,
and in face they'll say they saw
a transformation of such grace:
a freedom born of loneliness,
the knowledge of new birth.

2008-04-27T02:30:00.014Z

xenith.net

Omissional, Commissional... Original?

2008-03-19T02:11:00.006Z

"Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a "tendency" to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love —he was not man.

Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man."

-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

LEAVING HOME

This is where the cordon ends:
the gates are down, the open space
is spreading out across the streets,
the buildings lie in spent disgrace.
This is why our questions ache:
we take the risk, we breathe the thoughts
that spread like dust through eyes and ears
and settle in our brain and lungs.
This is how we crashed the car:
we left the road, we blurred the lines
and shifting up from gear to gear
we raced your gods across the sky
        past heaven, through the pearly gates,
        past aged Peter in his chair;
        past Michael with his saxophone,
        past Jesus and his dead-eyed stare.

This is where the doorways stop:
the boxed-in thoughts, the dogma queue
with bouncers all in coloured robes
on undermanding mind-control.
This is why you burnt the books:
you crossed yourself, your conscience wracked
with television interludes,
you took your car and left the facts
        in no-man's land, beyond the pale;
        on Nietzsche's chessboard, rife with lies;
        on river beds, in concrete shoes;
        encoded in a lover's smile.

This is why we took the step:
the hidden path, the Holy Ghost
erasing footsteps in the snow
his breath like forced forgetfulness
        all hanging frozen in the air,
        encasing men in dreamless sleep
        but we?
                       we dreamt of being there,
        and when we woke its silver thread
        was leading back, and taught us how
        to take one step beyond the plan:
        we walked the way behind the worlds
        and softly, sailing ships of reeds,
        we left the Lord's familiar strands.

Seal Five; Seal One

2007-11-26T00:58:00.000Z

"... an army of pure desperation and hate. Young Stanleyville boys and old village men, anyone who can find a gun or a machete, all banded together. They tie nkisis of leaves around their wrists and declare themselves impermeable to bullets, immune to death. And so they are, Anatole says, 'For how can you kill what is already dead?'"
-- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

In some ways I find it very sad that the great tiring of the age is coming upon much of society. It manifests itself as decadence, as senseless violence, as crimes against humanity so great as to completely defy understanding. It is present in the binge culture, in the drug culture, in the weekend culture; it rules the arms trade, and the corporate hand, and the casual destruction of community. It eats relationships and attacks commitment. It is the great feeling of hopelessness and despair and inevitability that sweeps inexorably through society again and again.

And yet for all this there is hope. Even in the midst of it, perhaps even because of it, comes something new. For in the destruction of bonds comes freedom; in the destruction of community comes independence. Before the storm comes a restlessness, a looking to the red sky that foreshadows change. And change is coming: a time when those who should despair from their lonliness will walk the world in solitude and leave it changed; a time when those who should lay down and die from their hopelessness will enter the battle unafraid and emerge unscathed as conquerers - more than conquerers. A time is coming when the broken ones, those from broken homes in broken communities in broken nations will rise up with undivided hearts to change the face of the world forever. For when we are without bonds we are without hope; when we are without hope we are without fear; and when we are without fear we will pass untouched through the ranks of an an enemy that cowers in terror. Make no mistake: there will be none who stand before the eyes of those who come in the surety of their hopelessness to the gates of the enemy.

Once again, I am left looking to the red skies.

The Rain

2007-11-25T01:52:00.000Z

"While I sat there a ragged man came --
Bummed a coffee, talked awhile
Told me stories full of wonder --
Left me laughing like a well-loved child."
-- Bruce Cockburn, A Montreal Song

He wasn't ragged as such, but today I met a man on the train who made my day. It wasn't anything particularly special - he was singing this song to himself as we trundled home through the dark, just watching the rain scudding past the city lights, and he must have noticed me watching him in the reflection, because he turned and smiled a little self-consciously. Normally I would probably just smile and look away, but something about rain and music and trains brings out the best (or at least the Touchstone, as it were) in me: so I commented on his good voice and his good choice of song, and we talked about nothing for two or three minutes until he got off, a stop before me.

So, despite the fact that we probably live within a few miles of one another, listen to the same music, recognise the same self-deprecating mannerisms, I doubt we'll ever see or hear from one another again. But it got me thinking a little bit, as chance encounters usually do - maybe there's more to praying for rain than just water.

Poetry resurrects me

2007-06-09T01:23:00.000Z

"I tried to take the train today.
Stepped into a vacuum full of
shadows, old romances
And completely missed the station
All together.

You sang Lou Reed into my ear
Until laughing, you forgot the words
And I had turned away.
Five minutes later,
‘Sunday Morning’ started up again.

I told you that if I died I could only be revived
by poetry, so

You used to carry a crumpled, faded
Postcard of Keats ‘Faery Song’
In your left back pocket;
‘In case of an emergency,’
You said.

The world was never big enough and

Sun dripped afternoons went by unnoticed
As we poured over maps and glossy pictures,
Planning dreams and fancies: London for the Sex Pistols,
New York for the Velvet Underground and
Norway for no reason at all.

We were the Sid and Nancy until

One day, on the corner of Redfern and Glen where
You turned to me and asked me
If I’d ever loved:
For some reason I just shook my head.
I couldn’t catch your eye.

Now I sit on those single seats on trains
With no whispered song to soothe me,
Nor poetry to revive me should I fall.
I’ve been to Norway and saw nothing there
At all.

On the solitary linoleum that is one stop too far,
I see you, fleeting, and then you’re gone and I am all alone.
Let’s go back to that corner, on Redfern
And in the twilight
Question me again."
-- 'Moth,' Between Currambine and Perth

There are certain people whose vision takes my breath away: one is Tennyson, one is Guy Gavriel Kay, and one is a girl I know only as 'Moth.' There are more, but these are the ones I have up on my wall - they are the ones that inspire me daily. It is very important, I think, to have inspiration that lasts. Fortunately, they are there.

FAITH
Chapter -

Her name was not Faith.

Theresa Michaela Farrier was born on the Ides of March to an English father and French mother, and – in her mind, at least – she should have been called Faith.

In all fairness, she was probably right: her elder sisters, twins, were named Hope and Charity by their father on a pious whim. With him dead, three months before his third daughter’s appointed arrival date, his wife had decided to bury his traditions with him. That he had crashed his car into an overpass in Paris at 120mph, stone drunk and high as a kite while on ‘jury duty’ only made things that little bit easier. His sixteen-year-old lover had escaped the passenger door with a few cuts and bruises.

Given that his business trips over the years had been lengthy and frequent, ‘Faith’ would probably not have been the most appropriate of names for the child he had never known. The Virgin Saint, Theresa would comment dryly, was not exactly the most inspired namesake either.

Whether she felt some connection with her absent father, or just found it easier to love an imaginary character than the mother she had, Faith embraced her misplaced name with an almost religious fervour. It made her mother cringe, but she simply would not answer to any other name; probably the pained look its mention caused was more than any other the reason she kept it up.

“I may have been born and named in bitterness,” she would say, stretched out among the wild weeds in the French countryside, “but I was conceived in faith. That’s all sex is, isn’t it? Faith, hope and charity.”

I was still young enough to be uncomfortable talking about sex with anyone, let alone someone I could almost – almost! – imagine trying it out with. She was never uncomfortable about anything: she just had faith in herself and whomever else she was with. She was Faith; she took her name and nature very seriously.

If I had got my way, I think I might have just about been able to walk out of Dr. Isaakson’s office and never see her again. She frightened me: not only did I feel guilty for hurting her, as if I owed her something, but then there were her eyes, her face, her voice. In all of ten seconds of knowing her she had felt too serious, too intense, and the same voice that was telling me to find her and spend every last second with her was screaming in the other ear as well. Get out! it yelled. I have never yet figured out which piece of advice would have been best. It is not surprising: when it comes to Faith, I have only ever received conflicting advice, even from myself. Especially from myself, I should say.

Which side I would have followed was never to be known: I was not given a choice. The moment she had recovered enough to walk, Faith set about finding out who I was, where I lived and anything else she could learn about Patrick Kilgallen. You probably don’t recognise the name. It’s not the one I wear nowadays.

I still believe that it was what she didn’t learn, rather than what she did that piqued her curiosity. Not that it ever needed a great deal of piquing. What she found was that I was fifteen, and living with my great aunt and uncle on the edge of town, every summer since I had been a baby. What she could not find for the life of her – and what must have driven her inquiring soul absolutely wild – was anything else. I had no close friends, no confidents; no-one knew my history, parentage, even where I had been born. The only piece of information she got was from the good Doctor, who betrayed what he knew without the faintest qualm.

“Irish by birth,” he told her when she accosted him outside his house. “I looked him over before he was even a year old, the first summer he was here. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to get from him – not even you will get into his medical records!”

To be honest, I was surprised he held back on that: she had ways of making a person do things, not all of them particularly conventional. Or nice.

My address, however, would have been enough for her; the twinkle in my uncle’s eye was rather more amused than usual the day he told me what he had never had to in fifteen years of having me in his house. Strange to think: he never would again, save once.

“You have a visitor,” he said.

The names in which we hide

2007-06-07T22:40:00.000Z

"Sometimes it seems that I don't have the skills to recollect,
the twists and turns of plots that took us from lovers to friends,
I'm thinking I should take that volume back up off the shelf,
and crack it's weary spine and read to help remind myself.

I am waiting for something to wrong,
I am waiting for familiar resolve;
I am waiting for another repeat,
another diet fed by crippling defeat;
and I am waiting for that sense of relief,
I am waiting for you to flee the scene,
as if you held in your hand the smoking gun,
and on the floor lay the one you said you loved.

And it's strange:
they are basically the same,
so I don't ask names anymore."
-- Death Cab for Cutie, Expo '86

I write in pencil, but will never erase words; do I need to remember things that are wrong so much? They feel like the most important ones, sometimes - there must be a reason they are wrong. These days, no-one needs a reason to be right.

FAITH
Chapter -

When they are nervous, most boys will fidget incessantly, driving everyone around them into a state of complete distraction; I was the opposite. I sat stone still and silent in Dr. Isaakson’s waiting room, my eyes reading the pattern on the carpet again and again. Deep wine red, square then line then curve then square then line then curve – I still remember that carpet. It felt, not surprisingly, like there was blood everywhere. I was fifteen, had spent every summer of my young life in the French countryside, and I had never seen an animal – not even a chicken! – killed; it strikes me that my great uncle (or more likely my great aunt) understood a little more about me than I ever realised.

Whatever the reason, I felt sick to my stomach as I sat alone in the big front hall of 22 rue d’Alimonde, waiting for something bad to happen. I was convinced I had killed her, or that at the very least they would amputate the leg; I suppose it must have been the stricken expression on my face that helped the good doctor to take pity on me; short of the poor thing lying on his couch, I don’t believe there was a more wretched-looking child in the whole district.

“You’re Mme. De Francois’ nephew, aren’t you?” he said with a sigh – I think it must have been something of a trademark – lowering himself slowly to sit beside me. His English was flawless; I could only nod dumbly.

“You look absolutely terrified, lad! Don’t worry yourself so much – your young lady-friend will be just fine.” His bluntness was a tonic; long into my adult life I would appreciate this man for his ability to offer the truth, unadorned by never cruelly.

“The gash on her leg was deep, but not particularly dangerous.” He spoke to me softly, but as though I was an adult. “No major arteries, no big muscles: with some rest and a little, she will soon be as good as new. Would you like to see her?”

Of course I did not; his tone did not ask the same question his words did, however. With his arm around my shoulders, I ventured into the room, feeling guilty and several years younger than I was. I was entirely unprepared.

When I struggled to explain the moment to my mother, a long time later during one of her lucid periods, she offered me the only decent explanation I have ever been given.

“Guilt and love are emotions that stay with us longer than any others. When you are young, they burn themselves into you even more than normal. Mix the two, suffer them when you are most vulnerable, and who is to say it will not snare you for the rest of your life?”

I stood staring at her for a long time in silence, the darkened room shaping itself around the two of us, intimate and stifling.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked drowsily, and I could tell her grasp of the present was already slipping. I did not have an answer.

“Why,” the girl repeated, sounding more curious than in pain, “are you staring at me?”

I did not have an answer.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. It didn’t even register that she was speaking English. “I’m sorry about your leg. I was just…” I couldn’t think of what I had ‘just’ been doing; I went back to staring.

Dr. Isaakson laughed quietly, and I realised his hands were still on my shoulders. “I would guess,” he offered, amused, “that you were just turning a corner at the wrong time. I would imagine you both were. It is an explanation,” he continued thoughtfully, “that applies to a great many things in life.”

It would take me a great many years to remember those words, to recall what he said in those moments; for the longest time all my memory contained was a pair of brilliant, aggressive grey-green eyes framed by a tangle of insanely thick chestnut hair. When, however many decades later, I remembered his voice in that scene, I was perversely sad: it feels to this day as if I have let go of something very important by doing so, instead of gaining it.

“I’ll take her home,” Isaakson said kindly, filling the silence. “She’ll be perfectly fine with me. You run along: I’ll phone your aunt and explain everything, not to worry.”

Maybe misunderstanding the awkwardness, he steered me deftly out of the room, but was forced to pause on the threshold when she said, “boy! What’s your name?”

“Patrick,” I said, and – because fate or God or whichever demon attends me has never, ever given me a choice when it comes to her – “what’s yours?”

In that moment she smiled, and somewhere too deep to put it into words I understood that there are corners and then there are corners, and from this one there would never be a turning back.

“Faith.” The smile never left her lips. “Je m’appelle Faith.”

Fever Dream

2007-06-06T14:50:00.000Z

"Some days, like rain on the doorstep,
she’ll cover me with grace in all she offers.
Sometimes, I'd like just to ask her,
what honest words she can’t afford to say, like:
I want your flowers like babies want God’s love,
or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come."
-- Iron & Wine, Fever Dream

I write
like,
like,
a hamster on a wheel:
weary-never-souldestroying-ending;
all heart - till it bursts - and no
resolution

?

FAITH
Chapter -

A life is – if one is foolish enough to begin making sweeping statements about ‘lives’ – only truly exotic to those who have not lived it. I have no doubt that, as fascinated as we are by the noble savage in his wilderness paradise, or the dark and earthy Feudal English peon in his hut, each of our varied and colourful subjects would wonder just what all the fuss was about. Perhaps it is their ignorance that is part of our wonder, for who can comprehend a life so removed from the normal seeing itself as just that – the norm.

I was an ordinary boy from the east coast of Ireland, spending his life between strangers in a London boarding school and foreigners abroad, alternating between lonely and lonely and never once feeling that loss. An unremarkable boy turned into an unremarkable teenager and should have turned into a wholly unnoticeable man. But, as all remarkable people do, I turned one unremarkable corner on one unremarkable day, and met the people who would turn the boy into the man into the legend.

It was not a corner I meant to turn; maybe it was not even a corner that, given the choice, I would turn again. But I am a remarkable man, a man who stands out in the company of remarkable men, and before they entirely butcher my history, I should like to have a stab at butchering it myself. The grubby fingers of historians and – worse! – biographers leave dirty stains of genius and nobility over the story of the boy who became the man who became so many things. But we are not born, not truly: we become.

Before you let them convince you that I was born of some modern-day miracle, then, before you let them tell you that I sprang fully-formed and divinely inspired from the mouth of God, let me tell you how an unremarkable boy turned a corner he had not intended to, and a wholly unremarkable life unravelled in an instant.

This is the story of the boy who became the tapestry of a legend; it is the story of the weavers; it is the story of Faith.

It is my firm belief – though she tells me it’s nonsense, she blushes when she thinks about it too long – that she was daydreaming about a boy. God knows there were enough to be thinking about, even in a sleepy little place like Bezons: Michael with his flashing white teeth and relentless French charm; Jean-Paul with his startlingly long, raven-black mane of hair; a tall, forgettably handsome young man whose name – predictably enough – eludes me. This was France! If a girl could not find a trim, dashing young Gallic stud to occupy her thoughts, well – she must not have been trying very hard.

Be that as it may, she obviously was not expecting a tall, sandy-haired Irish boy to walk around the corner and stab her with a pitchfork; as she joked later, always with with a slightly pained expression, “so few people ever are.”

There is very little defence for carrying a pitchfork like a jousting lance; I never attempted one. When my great uncle, amused and exasperated, asked how a simple delivery for his garden could go so badly wrong, daydreams of being a knight on horseback carving his way through enemy legions did not seem particularly… helpful. We were connected by an errant pitchfork and by our daydreams: one day, when she is not expecting it, I will ask her whether her daydream came true or not. For her, it should be a fairly easy answer; that mine did, and how – those are slightly more complicated.

At the time, however, all thoughts of knights and lances vanished remarkably quickly, as can happen when you are faced with a screaming girl, bleeding heavily from a hole in her thigh where you have just stabbed her. I caught her – more out of luck than skill – as she sank to the ground, sobbing and swearing violently in turn. Had she been entirely clear of what was going on, I think she would have punched me in the face; as it was, she accepted by guiltily solicitous arm while she held her leg and cursed magnificently.

By now a crowd has gathered, which in England would have terrified me. Here in the small and slightly more understanding world of Bezons, however, it was a gentle crowd, the kind that sent for doctors and parents and sympathised with good-natured clucks of worry. “Did you hear about Canon Richard’s daughter?” they would say later, the right notes of concern and laughter in their voices. “It looked painful, poor lamb; the boy’s face was a prize, though, he looked more afraid than she did!” It is not to say that small-town people are naturally kinder, but maybe that, away from the dull grind of the city, they have less demands on their kindness. Whatever the reason, I felt slightly calmed and enveloped by the ring of watchers, as if knowing that ugliness was as foreign to their spirits as snow to their gentle, rain-cleaned land.

The doctor, his practice only a few houses down, was on the scene shortly, muttering with worry and binding up the impressive gash on her leg with cloth and bandages.

“What,” he said sternly when the bleeding had slowed, “what exactly were you doing impaling yourself on a pitchfork?” The crowd laughed and began to disperse slowly, the show over; with a sigh, as if such children taxed his Hippocratic patience severely, the Doctor motioned me to follow. He was a very tall man, with enormous hands, but when he picked her up carefully to carry her back to his surgery, it seemed somehow to be the most consummately caring and gentle action I had ever seen. Much later, looking back on her petit body relaxing slowly into the broad expanse of his chest, it occurred to me that anyone, with enough study, can become a doctor, but being a physician, being a healer is a gift from God given only to a few; not all of them are doctors.

The world according to...

2007-06-06T02:13:00.000Z

"Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig."
-- Leon Bloy

I read A Prayer for Owen Meany again today, something that just seems to happen every now and then.

It always feels like it's pulling my thoughts apart, conclusion by conclusion. I just can't win against myself when I'm reading that book.

LOSING THE SIGHT

In the blue-gray hour just before sunrise,
I am standing here beneath a lamppost
with an umbrella and a gray trenchcoat,
wishing I had some sort of cigarette.

god dammit, man, it's only
a fucking
lamppost.

Go to bed.

Faith

2007-06-03T00:30:00.000Z

"I miss you;
I miss being overwhelmed by you,
and I need rescue.
I think I'm fading away,
but I keep thinking that you'll wake me up with a whisper in my ear,
I keep hoping that you'll sneak in my room.

I miss you;
I miss talking all night long with you,
and I need this to find a way to your home.
My love can you hear me?
Have I been hoping loud enough, wishing hard enough,
can you see me when I'm asleep all alone - alone.

So I wait and I wait,
and I run myself in the same old circles,
and I sit and I stare,
and I run old scenes through my tired head,
of the days that we laid on our backs and said 'forever';
Was that the best I'll ever be?"
-- Sister Hazel, Best I'll Ever Be

A time ago, I promised a friend that oneday I would write a relaxed story; that is, one that I didn't push or struggle to write, one I didn't agonize over or worry about, but just let flow if and when it felt like being written. No pressure, no stress, just the pure joy of creating.
I promised a very, very large amount of things at that time, virtually all of which I have broken; this is something to do with the desire to fix that. And, yes, I realise that you can never really fix that past, that isn't the point - it's more to do with fixing the balance of things. I think perhaps that when you break a promise, you're forced to carry it with you until you deal with it, redress the wrong. Not that leaves much room for grace, of course; do I believe in grace?

I suppose I write to find out.

FAITH
Chapter -

I broke faith on a grey and gold Tuesday night at the end of June; despite my best efforts, I have never quite been able to fix it.

My great uncle, quiet and kind with a stump where one leg used to be, had a saying: just because it ain’t broke doesn’t mean it’s working, he would say, clumping his thick wooden leg through meticulous rows of cabbages and sprouts. We would meander on our way with destructive joy, knocking poles and cold frames over at random down to where the garden met the road, and more slowly back up to the house, straightening and tidying as we went. Only once did he elaborate: when a person’s too happy with what they’ve got, they’re apt to let it alone until it rots, he said slowly, as I lay on my back under the enormous sunflowers and thought of ice-cream; how it dripped down you hands and onto your shoes unless you ate it as quickly as possible. There’s a time for enjoying, and a time for tearing down, just so things are better. I took it to heart, and it never failed me, save once – as always, it is the exception that haunts you.

The French countryside filled my summers with spiders and earthworms and sun on sun on sun; I was a little brown savage, to be found running along dried-out ditch beds and through the June-tall field of wheat and barley, if I was to be found at all. Bezons-sur-Beuvron was like the playhouse of a very strange child, stuffed to the top with the wonderful and the strange and miracles to marvel and disgust and lead a teenage boy a long, long way from home. It’s a dangerous business, going out your garden gate, the old patriarchs sitting by the square would tell me, laughing at their own wit. Take the road one way and you’ll be home for dinner; take it the other, and you’ll dine with strange folk among columns and fountains and music. I spent weeks and months in the furthest nooks and crannies of the abandoned quarries and ghost-ridden old castle ruins further and further from home, but I never did find them; later, much later, when I finally got around to reading Tolkien, I was surprised that I still had enough innocence to feel cheated. There are ghosts of comfortable old men in the square now too, still chattering amiably, their aimless talk and wheezing laughter stirring up dust on the war memorial. I might consider going back and challenging them, demanding answers and reasons; thinking about it, they’d probably just tell me I haven’t been looking hard enough.

Thinking about it, they’d probably be right.

There were no elves or faeries in my story then, but by the time I was fourteen I could walk to the next town and make it down the garden path with the sinking sun at my back; before my fifteenth birthday I had ranged all the countryside for miles and miles, often wandering back in just as the birds were waking up. It was the idyll, the life that people write books about, the one they spend all their lives wishing they could get back to. For me, the spell was much more distant; twenty, fifty, a hundred years on there are no sun-drenched afternoons or green and gold sunsets down country lanes the haunt my memories – only people have that right, and they have made sure they exercised it to the full.

Solitude in those days was a habit and a joy. I was not a lonely child, but the French of a adolescent English boy was never going to help me make friends; every summer for years I was someone to play football with in the street, someone that girls giggled at behind their hands and boys clapped on the back every now and again. How can I describe the infinite pleasure of not being forced to socialise? Nowadays the langauage barrier is a weapon, a tool I can use to distract, attract, tantalise, but even then it was my crutch, my excuse and my refuge. How many times during the school year in the rainy suburbs of south London I wished I could merely shrug blankly and let smalltalk and pleasantries slide over me like the sun or the rain; only background noise. Je ne pas parle beaucoup de Francais became my anthem of self-reliance; they say that a person, especially a young child, needs as much social activity as possible to keep them healthy, but to this day I wish I had kept my anthem closer to my heart. Perhaps the two are linked; perhaps they have always been linked.

Friday Morning, 3a.m.

2007-05-18T01:42:00.000Z

"Your voice is small and fading,
and you hide in here unknown,
and your mother loves your father,
'cause she's got nowhere to go.

And she wonders where these dreams go,
'cause the world got in her way;
what's the point in ever trying,
nothing's changing anyway.

And I wonder where these dreams go,
when the world gets in your way;
what's the point in all this screaming,
no-one's listening anyway."
-- Goo Goo Dolls, Acoustic #3

A wise man once said that, "God is everywhere and always, except with you at three in the morning." At the time I disagreed; it is telling that now, I can't remember why.

NUNC DIMITTIS

Yesterday on Heaven's stair
we met a God who wasn't there;
He wasn't there for us today
I wish, I wish, He'd go away.

What is life but a string of accidents
in the history of an accidental race,
two opposing thumbs that set us apart
so we can brag of love, morality,
a blip on the lifeline of existence
that justifies itself with insane gods.
To love and let love becomes criminal,
a sin against the nature of ourselves,
whose petty fears we mingle into God:
belief in Life when life is all we get,
the clinging straws of mankind's final clutch.

And when the best of us is proven not enough,
when all we are is witness to a crime
we perpetrate by giving less and less
to generations written off as lost
by sad-faced men in well lit rooms of prayer,
then shall the German's Psalm be echoed out as true
and God is Dead perfume the halls of atheists
with books like 'Jesus Christ: a sinner's life'
and questions like a world of dead-eyed sons
who beat their crosses back to swords and say,
"perhaps, perhaps, He wasn't there at all."

Letters that you never meant to send

2007-04-03T18:14:00.000Z

"You grew up way too fast
and now there's nothing to believe,
and reruns all become our history;
a tired song keeps playing on a tired radio,
and I won't tell no one your name.
I won't tell your name."
-- Goo Goo Dolls, Name

Does anyone else write letters they don't send, just to have them written? I do, but then I also write poetry, which is pretty much an open letter to anyone and anything that's ever passed through my hands. Doesn't say a lot more about me, then.

I also tend to play the 'what if' game with life; it's quite fun to try it with the smaller moments - I guess probably everyone goes over the big choices now and then, but sometimes it's those split-second choices that are the most interesting to follow through if you'd taken the other path.

Actually, right now most people are probably thinking, "why is he doing that? Is that normal, should I do that?" Figures.

FORTUNE'S FOOL

She called me from a bedsit in London,
begging for child support or some love,
whatever I could spare: five minutes, I said.

We talked for hours about the weather,
self-published poetry and paperbacks,
dime-a-dozen comics from rundown shops,
the latest Turner Prize: edgy, she said,
very edgy.

What do you remember most? she asked. Sex,
I said, and doughnuts on the Brighton beach;
magicians on the streets of Slough, clowns,
the greasy frying smell of Reading Fair.

What do you remember? I asked.
Memories, she said.

We read Wordsworth like a body in the morgue;
silent hours with Auden, Dostoevsky,
carrying suspended conversations
to our doubled single beds: deep, useless.

I call her from a bedsit in Paris:
five minutes, I say, anything you've got.
For you -- she smiles -- all the time in the world.

She hangs up.

ἀγάπῃ?

2007-03-30T21:18:00.000Z

"Samson went back to bed,
not much hair left on his head;
he ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed.
And history books forgot about us,
and the Bible didn't mention us;
and the Bible didn't mention us,
not even once."
--Regina Spektor, Samson

It occurred to me the other day that people say so often that the Bible is a love story above anything else. This interested me.

Philosophers may sit down and write about life when they have not stood up to experience it, but I think my own subject should have a greater criticism levelled at it: I don't think that Theologians really understand the concept of love they feel the need to talk about so much.

I occurred to me at the same time as the above that it seems less and less likely those who wrote the Bible did, either.

THE THEOLOGY OF SLEEP

It seems like we were always asleep, love,
and in our bed the ages passed us by;
perhaps I was God and you were Mary
and our flock turned to Plato and Nietzsche,
left us curled and childlike: the peaceful dead.

Reading stories with your head in my lap,
amused and angry: "if I was their God,
they'd have left the Bible as it was!"
You laugh when you hear I sold the rights,
so desperate to be a starving artist;
"they should have stopped at the King James," you say,
but your hand is on my throat: I cannot speak.
Perhaps I am asleep.

I held you while you screamed into my chest,
helpless rage at news of Samson dead,
of David's child burning in his arms.
We had Bathsheba sobbing at our door,
wordless with her hands outstretched, begging,
begging for mercy or care: God has none,
and Delilah mourns her love, never told.

God makes the sun to stream in the windows,
but our eyes are dull with sleep and pain;
"it's so dark outside," you whisper sadly,
"and you never wrote a happy ending."
Your voice fades: "it was a love story, once."

Her son is dead - she will answer no more prayers.

Jesus wept; his Father only smoothes your hair
and whispers, "it was only a dream, love;

go to sleep."

Some thoughts on Heroes, Part 1

2007-03-27T22:09:00.000Z

Introduction and Religion

All the heroes are dead; long live the heroes of the age.

We seek a 'something' or a 'someone' in life to follow; if not to follow then at least to believe in; if not to believe in then at least to identify with. Where does it come from, this need to follow, to have faith, to be like? Why is so difficult to believe man to be 'the measure of all things?' Somewhere along the line mankind, ανθρωπος, 'He Who Looks Up' has lost the ability to gaze skyward and see only the sky; today there must be something there to fix their eyes on. Why?

The religious disposition (if so general a term can be said to exist) is very much concerned with such philosophical finding of objects in the sky. Christians march under their banners with their eyes 'fixed firmly on the Cross of Jesus'; Muslims try to live as exactly as possible in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad; Buddhists live the slow turning of the wheel, life into life into life with their hopes on far-off Nirvana. For all of them, the aim is something ahead, something only perhaps and possibly attainable, something - and this is vitally important - too big for the human mind to grasp unaided. Perhaps the luckiest are granted slight revelation, maybe a saint will strive a whole life for one crumb of uncertain wisdom, but why? What is it that makes people follow a star that they cannot see into a land that they cannot call home? For when people ask why religion has so little changing effect on the world, the answer is in how people follow: with their eyes fixed firmly on the cloudy part of the sky where they believe their star may be hid. How can a hidden star shine on the world; how can it affect change? In all the long history of belief in God, how many times could on possibly say God himself has intervened to change things? Miracles remain sparse and unverified, and if God is willing to show himself to the world, then he is doing it slowly and through his sad, fallible human vessels. How sad it is that so many religious people fix their lives on the unknown eternal when it is their God, if he exists, that has given them the potential to show himself to this world; to choose our own star to follow, different to the rest of the teeming masses of humanity. Though perhaps we all go by the grace of God and strive by his strength, nevertheless it is given to us to choose our path and venerate our creator by a life well lived. No 'certainty of heaven' for the truly righteous, no 'eternally elect' of God, no fundamentalist absolutes, for to the truly righteous comes the uncertainty of having to draw the map as they go. "I love those who do not know how to live," Nietzsche writes, "for they are the ones that cross over." If God truly loves anyone, how could it be those who put stock in eternity and so fail to affect change in their world? No, it is not them who are truly Christlike, trying Islamic, truly heightening their status in life, it is those whose constant devotion to the life that they live proves them to be wonderfully, awefully and perfectly human, on the road to becoming everything humanity was and should be again. It is these.

?

2007-03-23T22:01:00.000Z

When I went to bed last night, most of the way to sleep already, I left myself the cryptic message "Bones, like bones." written on my computer screen. I have absolutely no idea why. Which probably means it was something really cool.

Drat.

What They Don't Want You to Know

2007-03-21T00:47:00.000Z

In order to understand Scoobydoobydooism you need to realize that everything is controlled by a synod made up of invisible undead Popes with help from the riders of the Apocolypse.
The conspiracy first started during the Battle of Hastings in Oolan Baator. They have been responsible for many events throughout history, including the French Revolution (it didn't really happen! All lies!).
Today, members of the conspiracy are everywhere. They can be identified by whistling through your teeth; they want to upholster MENSA and imprison resisters in France using Jimmy Swaggart's spare underwear.
In order to prepare for this, we all must undergo ritual Jewish cleansing. Since the media is controlled by Luke Skywalker we should get our information from Bush Administration.

Fight the power!

Thank-you, Val! You are as ever, an inspiration :P

'Look upon my works, ye mighty...'

2007-03-10T17:34:00.000Z

This is the third time I've had this poem brought to my attention in as many days. I wonder if someone is trying to tell me something. If so, they've not been watching very carefully: I've already got the point. Or the pointlessness, as the case may be.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Some thoughts on Hope

2007-03-10T00:51:00.000Z

There are no easy answers anymore. As for hope, well: perhaps there was hope in the 70s, when people believed they could change things; perhaps there was hope – at least of a kind – in the 90s, too, when people thought “fuck it,” probably in those words, daring to believe that they didn’t have to care.

Things change.

The grim reality is that the age of freedom is over – the era of heroes is drawing to close – the world is slowly settling into the inevitable downward spiral of the mundane. As the age of Pisces, the age of Spirituality draws to a close, people who believe in such thing rave about the new Age, the age of Peace, of intellectual growth. Fools. The age of the fish was not only an age of religion and monotheism, but of belief; an age of faith. Slowly we strangle our capacity to trust with a noose of logic, and the consequences will be felt for centuries: till the end of the age, as it were, if not beyond. For humanity is slowly beginning to understand – or at least it thinks it understands – that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things,’ and is resolved to engage it as little as possible. Things are not to be believed until first proven, tested beyond doubt, justified ‘a priori’ with as little emotional involvement and possible. There is no room in this new age for instinct, for bias, no room for hoping against the odds or for leaps of faith.

Already the effects are being felt throughout society, though not always in obvious ways. Probably the most obvious sign is the decline of religion, especially those based exclusively on faith; why traditional Christianity has suffered so greatly in comparison to, say, Islam is precisely due to this – where Islam remains firmly rooted in action and consequence and practically. “Do this and be saved!” the Prophet proclaims, where the evangelicals have only “believe and you will live.” What use is it to ask for belief in the age of reason? Mainstream Christianity has become fatally disconnected from everyday cause-and-effect, from the modern predicament of blow and counter-blow, give and take. At the heart of things, this is why we are watching Christianity slowly die: because it is eternally rooted in paradox, Nietzsche’s absurdissimum of God on the cross, and above all the ultimate contradiction of grace. Christianity is based on the idea that God has let us off the hook simply because he desires too, and this is the idea that humanity is quickly going resistant to; God may forgive and forget as is his wont, but the acceptance of grace requires a belief that you are forgiven and a faith in the one forgiving you, two things that people are rapidly losing the capacity for. God may forgive and forget, but humans are slow to do both, and before long the word ‘grace’ will not only be connected inextricably with ‘paradox’ but also with ‘self-delusion.’ It is funny that, while people still seem capable of acts of tremendous grace, their ability to receive it is one of the first spiritual senses to go; perhaps one day we will be able to accept that it is just as blessed to receive as to give. Sadly, not even I am able to have faith in that.

Religion is not the only indicator of the world’s slow shift from the life-affirming to the willing suicide of the spirit, however – many things in life exist only through faith, and they too are feeling their energies wane. The divorce rate in the western world continues to rise, even as the marriage rate falls: not only do people lack the faith in one another – even in the ‘special someone’ or one of the multiple of them as it seems to be becoming – to believe that there will be better days after surviving the hard ones, they lack even the faith to try commitment in the first place. Marriage is just an experiment, a potentially costly flip of the coin that may or may not work out. How long before the casual sexual partner completely replaces the lover? Before the prenup replaces vows, lawyers replace priests, how long before the pragmatist has entirely killed off the lingering spirit of Romanticism? Love survives only in an environment of faith and hope; otherwise it is either lust or despair. How long before we take it for granted that those are all there is to be had?

Though at times it may seem like quite the opposite, the fabric of our society also relies fundamentally on faith and hope; without hope for the future and at least a modicum of faith in those who step up to the task of building it, how will we ever progress? Stagnation, at least socially, is the only outcome for a society that stops believing the future can be better: education, savings and pension plans, political activism, scientific research grants, entrepreneurialism – all these are entirely reliant on the people contributing to them having hope for what they will achieve in the future. If we lose that, or lose faith in the people who make such actions possible, what is the point? Why don’t we all just give up: curl up and die, or lose all now-meaningless restraints and behave exactly as we want to?
And of course, we do. From the alarmingly steep and consistent rise in mental health disorders to the growing weekend culture of binge drinking, drugs, random sex, violence, crime and whatever else appeals to the unrestrained psyche, society gasps out nihilism with every breath. The acts themselves are not the most worrying thing – every society has had its violently non-conformist, after all – but the way in which they are beginning to become the institutions of society, the frame into which people search for where they fit. Identity is no longer based around culture, religion, employment as it once was, but on cheap and transitory values. It may be old-fashioned of me to yearn for the ‘good old days,’ but it is easy to be sick of people whose lives are centred around getting smashed and/or laid at the weekend and talking about nothing else until it all beings the next week. Perhaps this is the origin of the midlife crisis: the slowly dawning realisation that living from day to day only leads to your ‘better tomorrow’ being the day you die, simply because there won’t be another one.

In none of this is there a solution for avoiding such a future. Why? Because there may not be one. There is no law anywhere that proves humanity ‘must’ survive; only our own amazing arrogance in believing our race will endure forever. The only real remaining question is this: will humanity realise before it is too late? It is never too late to begin hoping, certainly, and it is never too late to find something or someone to have faith in, or even become such a person ourselves. Only one thing is certain: humanity stands at a crossroads in history, because humanity is always at a crossroads in history – every day is a step down one road or the other, and every step has the possibility of being the one that takes us that bit too far; makes us that single second too far gone.
Perhaps that saddest thing is this: if today were that day, the first day of the ever-shortening span of our existence, would you even realise it?

Would any of us?

Tales from the Sick

2007-02-22T01:43:00.000Z

"Einstein would turn over in his grave! Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded."
-- Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Looking God in the Eye

In keeping with the beginning of most of my posts, this is written when I should be sleeping. Unfortunately, I seem to have developed something of an insomniac habit, and the vast majority of my time in bed is spent lying awake thinking through the same old patterns again and again. Not, I think, particularly healthy. In any case, it doesn't matter too much; by the looks of things, my body is just hanging around until I snap, at which point I'll either sleep for a whole day or die. I'm not feeling too picky about it right now, to be honest.

Bah.

THE DEVIL'S EYES

The man looked up uncertainly at God
and said,
"I'm sure you're getting too many sixes."

Someone has looted my soul

2007-02-12T02:42:00.000Z

"I heard there was a secret chord
that David played and it pleased the Lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
the minor fall, the major lift,
the baffled king composing hallelujah."
-- Rufus Wainwright: Hallelujah

It's rare I post twice in any kind of rapid succession. I'm sorry; I know I'm spamming your lives, those of you who are reading. The paths of the mind are doubly screwed-up at night time, and goodness knows I don't need any help for that; still, until whichever little demon (metaphorical or literal) is prodding me incessantly decides to leave me alone and let me sleep, these are the kinds of thoughts that happily haunt my head. I wish them luck.

THE ART OF LOOTING HEAVEN

I sat down, and the first thing that I thought
was that I think in sparks and moments,
and if I swallowed up a firefly
he'd likely find a friend inside my skull.

Don't you ever wonder how it works?
As if to every man the gods gave but
five words of beauty in their lives,
and deep inside our hearts we scrounge and scape
to try and stretch them out across the years;
as if at 3a.m. Almighty God
is spinning decks and playing tunes,
and artists have a pint of poster paint,
illuminating gospels in the rosy hours -
how shallow they lie, our texts; how heretic-bright.

If only Bibles were a conversation
from a holy Muse that men could love;
monologues lie cruel like dust-shrouds on Simoni,
fig leaves crushing David where he stands,
the Psalter scattered to the earth
like poisoned hallelujahs - we are salt,
and if the salt has lost its saltiness
to whom will academic God cry out?
The Song is like a knell,

for we have stolen unawares the key
from Simon's palsied grasp, and even now
the tree of life is stripped and bare,
her leaves the pages of a million books
of frenzied celebration at our skill;
the trump of God resounds, a slow blues scale
in homage

to the art of looting heaven.

οὔτε ἐνεστῶτα οὔτε μέλλοντα

2007-02-04T18:46:00.000Z

"Maybe the time has drawn the faces I recall,
But things in this life change very slowly,
If they ever change at all.
There’s no use in asking why,
It just turned out that way;
So meet me at midnight baby,
Inside the sad café."
-- The Eagles: The Sad Café

I have been thinking about the past recently, not for any particular reason, but rather because the past is my natural habitat. More specifically I've been living out past mistakes, which are less of a home and more of a... penance. Someone once told me that any memory, all memories are painful in one way or another, because they are just that: only memories. It's a sad thought, but somehow it appeals; if the future is a window on uncertainty, then I suppose the past is a locked door on happiness - both the good times and that bad have that bittersweet edge to them, and both are equally gone. How strange that everything should even out like that, but also how fitting - time does not, as I am learning, heal all things, but it does grind them into dust. It has taken me a long time to understand that all dust tastes the same, whether it comes from the desert, the library, the incense burner, whether it lies thick in the dark or floats serenely on shafts of sun. 'Dust to dust' is not a bad thing, it is merely a thing, an inescapable truth; dust is, in a way that we only manage for so short a time.

Once upon a time, my philosophy on life was a common one: you make mistakes and you learn from them, you move on and live a better life. These days, however, I am struggling to see where that ever happens in life: we had one war to end all wars, then we had another - it doesn't seem that we have ever ended anything; genocide happened and still happens when convienient, for all the horror people view it with; the endless spirals of love/knowledge/hate, ignorance/fear/segregation/ignorance, abuse/trauma/abuse and so many more just continue to happen over and over again, no matter how many times we go through them. 'Live and learn' is only half the story; 'live, learn, forget, live' would probably be more appropriate. "ὅτε ἤμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος: ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου" - perhaps I am slowly being taught that, in the words of the prophet, "If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself."

The roads of this type of philosophical wandering are well trodden by giants like Sartre and Nietzsche, men who could express the truth of things far better than I can, but it doesn't really matter - these are just the outworkings of my own thoughts, and I couldn't lay claim to any kind of truth, personal or eternal. But the more I look at things, the more it feels like learning from the past is both a mistake and an impossibility, so quickly does it ameliorate itself into a void of intention and action, the dust of a person we no longer are. That's not to say that we should somehow live only in the moment, have no care for the consequences of our actions, but rather that (and how ironic, for I have always hated postmodernism) truth is relative: it ebbs and flows with every passing second, and how we act at one moment becomes irrelevent in determining how we act in another. The past is closed to us precisely because it was and no longer is; how can we force our life into a pattern based on what is no longer true? Too many people live with one eye on the past when life today depends at least two on the road in front of you, if not more.

I have enough mistakes in my past for several people but, if I'm honest, I'd have to say that they make for some of the best memories I possess. Whatever turned potential into problems, I can truthfully say that I'd rather have made the wrong choice than refused to choose out of fear or, even worse, 'experience.' Better to have loved and lost...

I am a man of many words, most of them rubbish. This is, I suppose, the primary reason I write poetry; as one of my good friend once said to me, "I can't think of a better way to waste your language." Here are my mistakes, here is my dust;
I make a point of inhaling deeply and moving on. It's an
interesting experience.

FOR YOU, I'LL SPEAK FRENCH

'Meet me under the clock tower at one'
she said, and we laughed because we're poets,
drunk on a success that seals up the lips:
stoppered together, drinking of life's lees,
a bottle brim-full of cliché and pinot.

I'm no Girardot, but as I wait,
trenchcoat-clad and dusted with the clouds,
the mind makes Arcs for us to shelter in:
a man can sit on old stone steps a while,
and shape a Notre Dame from every brick.

Our running sun reflects your ruby eyes,
darkling with the angel-painted mist;
I take you in your lover's arms and say,
"Ce n'est pas Paris, mon amour de dame":
there's no telling where rainclouds will stop.

I think I'm a train wreck.

2006-11-22T02:07:00.000Z

Apparently sleep is not an activity my body is willing to
participate in.

Argh. It's all Job's fault.

Anyway; here's my peace offering to the demons of mental stability.

SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE

Today I am the terrorist of love,
and I wage a war amongst Hallmark cards
and exploding bottles of perfumed scent;
every second toe-to-toe with the enemy,
no man's land left to the scars and shell holes
of week after week huddled in trenches,
spent praying for invisibility,
agonising over the call to charge
which blows a thousand times and never comes.

Do you understand your heroism?
That need for glory burning in your gut
like fire, incense and tracer bullets
unfolding bizarrely against your ribs
and driving you onward, onward, higher
till the rockets leave you shell-shocked and cold,
flat on your back amidst the mud and rain.

Speak no more of fire; O, say you'll speak no more.

We measure out our days in postcard stamps,
sent winging in from Paris or Madrid;
Sealed With A Loving Kiss, sent second class
and spun to make the sentences sound new.
'I miss you, love you, see you soon'; adieu!

With business trips and hotel rooms and guilt
we fight our wars, and timidly appease
our foes from flower stores and chocolate shops;
from every wall and card our Captain stares,
exhorting further misery and light;
good old Saint Valentine, master of spin,
reinvents Goebbels with arrows and wings.

I should be (able to be) asleep...

2006-11-15T01:04:00.000Z

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
-- Demosthenes

Gracious but I am exceedingly tired. And I have a lecture
tomorrow morning at 8.45am . And I'm not really doing anything productive; instead, I'm sitting here typing blankly and realising that the most interesting thing that's in my head is how using a semi-colon instead of a full-stop in the middle of this sentence makes a grammatical broken third. I hate nights like these - not surprisingly, they're when I get most of my work done.

Have you ever sat down and marvelled at just what a ridiculously complicated, amusing and easily manipulated machine the human brain is? Because, to be honest, I never have. Never have, that is, until now! When (of course) the whole problem will no doubt unravel its age-old mysteries merely for the pleasure of my tiredness-tortured brain; that is, after all, why psychologists and philosophers throughout the age have never quite managed to crack such bastions of shadow and ignorance - they haven't been tired enough. I tell ya, it all makes sense right now.
Anyway, I was trying to figure out exactly what facility in the human psyche makes it so susceptible to self-deception. Not so much on a grande mal scale of completely breaking from reality and wandering off into fairy-land or whatever else turns you on, but rather the subtle twisting of what you can be fairly certain is true into what you would like the world to be like. Overconfidence, for example, or even underconfidence: to be unsure of your abilities is one thing, but what possible advantage is there to consciously deluding yourself about what you're capable of doing? It's not like it's something natural selection would have kept going, either - confidence may be attractive, but I'm not sure consistently overstretching yourself is. Or constant self-deprecation, either. Meh.
It's not like I've got any solution, of course, or really any particular idea of why it happens, either: it just amazes me day-in, day-out how American Scientists can convince themselves that global warming really isn't happening, or Comical Ali actually broadcast with a straight face that the Iraqi army is defeating the Americans in the war, or 30 stone men and women claim that they believe they're more beautiful the way they are than if they lost a bit of the ol' poundage. I actually sit with my jaw hanging near to the ground at the media reports at least once everyday, always thinking exactly the same thing: "surely they can't really believe that; surely they're just making it up." Scary thing is, the more times it happens, the less sure of that I get. Is it the new dominant gene, the new natural selection meilleur attribut? Self-hypnosis, self-deception, self-confidence; what's the difference?

And if I didn't believe there's a God hanging around somewhere, would I hate myself for wanting to pray?

Self-deception?

I need to go to bed. All I do past midnight is play Risk, watch films and write bad poetry.

"
CANTILEVER

Life is the place you swing, not looking down,
the earth god's mechanical suspenders,
wrist thick threads on the worldloom's warp and weft.
Love is the music you find in traffic,
our clarion call to the likeminded;
when we fall, we fall together in style -
together they'll hang us high, pretty girl,
and ne'er will wind nor waves nor sky unbolt our lips.
I feel in you the steel spider strands of mercy,
tension and stability in perfect balance;
teach me to spin cables, dangerous girl,
teach me to weave dreamcatchers for skyscraping dreams.

Even when life is a dirty street,
Monday morning on twelves lanes of car fumes
still lift me as only indelicate steel can;
so slender is the span before we're gone
but still you tower through and through my sight.
Bridge the space between romance and reality;
lever and firm ground
from which I move the world.
"

Your urban thought for the day is brought to you by a wall somewhere that might or might not be beautiful. Apparently, it depends who you are.

Life or something.

2006-11-14T22:14:00.000Z

"Summit meetings, bottled water, secret briefings, infant slaughter,
senate hearings, leather folders, absent weapons, brittle soldiers.
Hail the chief of hearts and minds, mortuaries, we draw the blinds,
shaft the poor, steal by stealth, least Judas went and hung himself;
How did we end up here?

We make the enemy confess,
we're Jesus wearing battle dress;
chain 'em up and make 'em crawl,
God bangs his head against the wall;
salute the troops with grave concern,
body bags we never learn,
why interrogate the soul?
Dr. Strangelove's in control!
Woe to us, woe to you,
And think of all the revenue!
How did we end up here?

Hunting, fishing, chopping logs, breeding mad saliva dogs,
planted questions from the floor, it's easy to defile the law;
how did we end up here?
Rigged elections, weapons blast, even Satan's quite impressed!
Palaces and marble halls, every single empire falls;
how did we end up here?

We make the enemy confess,
we're Jesus wearing battle dress;
chain 'em up and make 'em crawl
God bangs his head against the wall;
salute the troops with grave concern,
body bags we never learn,
why interrogate the soul?
Dr. Strangelove's in control!
Woe to us, woe to you,
But think of all the oil revenue!
How did we end up here..."

-- Martyn Joseph: 'How Did We End Up Here'

Just thought you might want to know that.

Digging

2006-10-12T14:26:00.000Z

Today, in true NTC workday fashion, I dug a trench with the inestimable Mr. Jake. It was, as I think we both could agree, an exemplary trench, worthy fruit of our tender attentions: straight, true, regular, and above all done by amatuers with twice the necessary time and attention to detail. Truly, then, a Theologian's work.

For all that, however, there is something beautifully neanderthal about wielding a pickaxe while listening to Guns N' Roses. To find really enjoyable (not just vaguely rewarding, but fun) physical work isn't something exactly common in my experience; probably part of it is the joy of bragging rights - 'never has so much [work] achieved so little', as the saying goes. Or, y'know, could go. All you who cleaned windows or weeded gardens or swept floors take note: we know the value of a real man's job. So far, it's been to mess up the campus ahead of graduation day. And to remind the staff why we like to hire professionals.

God bless us for services rendered.

In other news, loads of people are dying all over the world. Isn't it wonderful? In a stunning and radical turn of events, the Micah Trust have asked everyone to stand up against poverty, at the same time! That way, we can get into the Guiness Book of World Records for 'most people to stand up against poverty at the same time.' I mean, gee whizz!

Isn't it nice to know that you can change the world?

...

Perhaps if we all gaves ourselves a pat on the back as well, we could
eliminate AIDS.

Funny old planet, ain't it? But then, you knew that.

According to ol' Noam, “We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.” But of course, what people (even Christians!) often want more than heroes are to be heroes. Should we be looking to be good ideas instead of good people? When people look at me, do I want them to think 'wow', or do I want their first thought to be 'I want to do what he's doing'.
Odd, perhaps, that so many people respect Chomsky, yet so few do as he does. Is democracy by nature the attempt to let everyone lead? Maybe it's time we stopped leading and started doing the right thing.

Or maybe I just don't have a clue.

When things are out of control and a mess, "you stop still and saw wood", as Abraham Lincoln said. As for me, I stopped still and dug a trench with a friend today; I got to use a pickaxe and listen to rock music. All was [is] right with the world.

Tomorrow is another day, full of movement; today, selfish peace has a certain appeal. Somehow, though, I doubt there are any plans for peace hanging around - not even from the big man upstairs, perhaps.

"the God who lives to disturb us..."

Aye, well. True enough.

INITIAL DISCLAIMER

2006-10-11T22:11:00.000Z

This isn't my fault. They made me do it.

Signed,
Robert