Diary of an unborn writer #23

He fell in love this man, to wit: discarded piles of poetry some of which made it to the Bush.

A delicate thing a poem, sometimes too precious to greet the air, you've verbalised something but is it robust enough to take another's breath?

But it's good the poetry flow and the writing flow, though apologies for not typing so much onto here. I've written half a book since the last entry with lines like:

Living is pain

But you're a dream I'm willing to follow

and folk songs too:

Could you glow again, lady

Like the time you did before

When it was just us and the universe

Lying on the bedroom floor?

I tried to say something

I just remembered what it is

You took me away babe

Never to return

...and so on. As I say there's a pretty pile of it and some it may make it on here if I find the time and attention to type.

~

The world's been good to me these last months. Slightly more in debt than I'd like to be, a little more exhausted than I'd like to be and if I'd paint the perfect picture a certain half Filipina/half Irish Californian lass would be in slightly closer company: this heavenly being not seeing fit to be seduced by poetry. Funny how the failed embrace leaves a feeling of guilt, as if trespassed uncalled for. A pity in any case because she'll leave the town soon and advances could well have ruined the friendship. dwell dwell dwell.

Lifting eyes above the tarmac, to the unfolding spring, it sings of luxurious nothing much to do but walk around and soak it up. I've had a few visitors which leads me nicely to the next, never-typed-before text.

~

Alex has been here, the wide-eyed wonder boy with a line in delight like no one else; a line in depression also, but now lying more easy - allows it to permeate rather than overwhelm.

We spent the weekend drinking, entertaining ladies with stories of time misspent together in university's final year. It was the two of us and Herman - three romantic idealists fending off with fantasy all claims from the world.

It was a crazy beautiful year about which much could (and has!) been written, laughed at, cried over and appalled by. Alex and I did just this, mostly in a haze of drink and dazed by Amster's fertile spring: women, blossom ad brotherhood shining as it should: uncomplicated, free with the odd squeak of philosophy.

In a busy, busy bar early summer evening:

"Look here, Simon" (he calls me by my former name) "This table is true. I mean it's not about to turn into a cat"

He's spent the weekend having me believe he's dropped all philosophical inquiry ("So self-indulgent") but now he's let some slip and I've got him on the ropes. Hid voice rises above the hum as he slaps his palm onto the dappled red formica table to confirm its ontology, rattling our colony of beer bottles, glasses, candle stick in centre complete with unlit candle.

"Depends how you define about, a certain interval of time that could stretch for aeons. If the table were be burned, the ash used to fertilise a tree, the tree were to grow acorns which were eaten by a squirrel, itself devoured by a cat, then in a sense the table has become a cat."

"But right now the table is true"

"Not if it's subject to change"

It's Plato v. Aristotle, Hume v. Kant in an inconsequential bar on a young summer night

"I admit nothing is absolutely certain..."

"Which is to say it's infinitely uncertain"

"That's not the same"

"Simple swap of logical operators"

"You can't bring logic into it - logic doesn't make it true"

"But if we were to use it you can see how you've admitted that everything is infinitely uncertain - straight equivalence"

"Simon!" (my old name again). He's on his feet now glaring his Marty Feldman eyes and roars a final palm down onto the table like a baptist screeching Hell Fire "THIS. TABLE. IS NOT. A CAT!"

The bar falls silent, I hit the floor laughing, we learn nothing and the evening moves on.

~

The power is in man, and his forgetting is his greatest fear. That he could inflict in his forgetting so much pain torments him until all pain and all suffering forces him to remember:

that he has never been forgotten not in the face of his wildest protestations - not that others could ever be forgot.

Sitting in this happy forum, time melts, and he sees. Like a November morning, spring but for the chill. Skin prickling against the cold and sun tentatively warming the face. The winter's just a passing, masking the eternal spring.

These thoughts and others comfort him in depression or otherwise turn into oppressors themselves. The comfort lost, he journeys on in pain and darkness - forgetting that he even breathes - that his very cells love with their easy function and eyes turned inward perceive only the divine. In him, in all.

And so the journey begins again.

Tomorrow is the full moon and I wish upon her majestic beauty that I'll find full comfort and rest this night, and full comfort and rest in whatever the day may bring.


~~~

Full blog archive at The Never Ending Teacup.