Nastiness has become endemic to the people I
once respected, to the ideas I once found interesting, to the values we
shared. Have I matured or they regressed
to savagery?
The heavier and blacker the clouds, the
brighter the candle seems.
Weeks go by with nothing but requests from
charities for donations, bills to be paid, and advertisements for dubious
products. On days when it rains and the
mailbox floods in come real letters and packets of new books. Mere chance or a message from the gods?
When cars stopped having rumble-seats and
running boards, all the romance disappeared, along with parking spaces.
As soon as it is light, the bread is thrown
under the plum tree. Before I scurry
back inside, the first sparrows fly down, then the blackbirds and sometimes
other exotic fowl, to contest the treasures.
If I oversleep or get caught up in the newspaper, they hop indignantly
on the patio. If I try some variation in
the offerings of the day, flap their wings against the windows. Put in my place, I recognize the natural
pecking order and try to do better.
Boethius’s consolation came when Philosophy
told him she had lied and used poetic figures in place of rational discourses. It is too hard to face up to the truth. Yet one is relieved to know the past is all a
pack of lies.
Everywhere you go the signs say Gluten Free. But not only do you have to
pay for it, but when you ask for gluten or speculate where they put it when it has
been removed, the waitress doesn’t understand.
Where there is clutter, there is clatter.
It is more than a quarter of a century since I
first heard of a child being named Jaden.
Now there are dozens of ways to spell the name and no one seems surprised.
Deceit, deception and denial, there you have
it: modern politics.
Consciousness tends to fragment in scattered
moments of sleep and waking: when we try to put the particles together and fill
in the gaps by imagination, we call it poetry.
Unconsciousness is always there below the surface, not a coherent whole
or a continuous narrative, but the substance of reality. At best, we sense that it is present in
others, never ourselves.
Old travellers to the South Seas sailed from
dream to dream, and sometimes encountered distorted mirrors of themselves or of
their own inner demons. People on the
islands were surprised to see their gods, dreams and ancestors arrive and
speaking in high-pitched squeaks and able to put their white hair off and
on. How could anyone be so stupid?
In the midst of war, there is no time for the
niceties of civil behaviour. When they
stop killing us, we can sit down and work out all these other little problems.
The naïve see only what they want to see. The cynics see what others don’t want to
see. The ancient rabbis saw what nobody
can see. History is a see-saw of
reflections.
If I can’t step into the river twice is it
because the river is not the same or because I have changed by the first
action? The snake swimming towards me
does he know the reality of the water has shifted from the time he set out from
the other side and that he is no longer what he started out to be, as though
the skin of the world had been sloughed off and revealed something looking
exactly the same? Whoever and whatever,
I am not sticking around to find out, though I am already older and wiser than
I was a moment ago.
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