Month: November 2018
Book 17
It’s as cold as it looks
19.11.18 Cheltenham
I may have only been awake from 1300 yesterday after a night shift but it felt like it was dusk from when I first stepped outside the house with the dog until I returned in the dark. I suppose when the sun sets before it hits 1630 it may well be right to stretch dusk back to the early afternoon.
I don’t think I’d used the word ‘DUSK’ in my head when i’d been thinking about the colours the light was creating through that part of the day. It felt more like osmosis when the lyrics to DUSK by REUBEN passed into my mind and out of my mouth as I walked the dog and wandered through the town to an appointment and back again.
A friend introduced me to REUBEN in 2006 I think. There are whispered words at the end of this track and I’d turn it up and push my headphones hard over my ears to hear it clearly.
My friend printed out the words spoken there really big on a piece of A4 and until recently they’ve been bluetacked to whatever wall I’ve slept beside, tattered by moves and being tucked away and brushed past.
The words aren’t happy – I think DUSK refers more to the darkening late hours in a life rather than in a day, but the whispered words seems to be about resting after a long push of hard work, and were an odd comfort to me throughout a few darker years of my own life.
They’re in a box in our basement now, which feels like the right place for them. They’ll be with me but I’m lucky and I don’t want to feel close to them again.
My belief is that I got off lightly with a couple of years of deep unhappiness when I was young and at times i felt most supported by the music and the associated world i was a part of, and at others the music reinforced the darkness.
But when I speak to people at work who are struggling with what’s going on in their mind, I try to remind myself how patronizing and undermining I sometimes found someone telling me ‘it might get better’, that ‘now is not forever’, and ‘isn’t it worth seeing if another year or so doesn’t change how you experience this life…?’
I always wish I had the answers, that I was a therapist as well as an emergency response to these times.
One day this will all stop, and I won’t have to run and rush or push and try. I will give back everything I took and I will kiss everyone I love and I will fall asleep and I won’t wake up for weeks and weeks.
09.11.18
Book 16
Waffling based around a wartime poem.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
This is one my favourite poems for it’s lyricism.
It might be hard to read it now without some dark tinge from the current view of the use of the word ‘England’. The way it is reguarly used in 2018 has connotations of a narrow, unwelcoming ethos of those who hold it in someway superior to anything seen as ‘foreign.’ I imagine this poem could be adopted as patriotism or nationalism.
All analysis of this poem plots it as a patriotic poem and I don’t doubt it takes that form in a lot of minds.
I might be naïve but I don’t read it like that. England can be replaced by any homeland. It is not about superiority or exclusivity. It reads to me like a welcome.
It seems more about the loss of a valuable, engaged, thoughtful human being lying underneath an earth fought for that he may believe equals that loss of life.
It reads like an appreciation of all of the things of the land that shaped a man and the seasons he’s passed through. I read it as grateful to nature and it just so happens it was the natural world in England that Brooke was grateful for.
I would not describe myself as patriotic or nationalist. But the antonyms to such words are unfaithful and treacherous, which i also would not describe myself as. I am a citizen of this earth and i care about every other creature. i do not believe human beings need to die in order for any of it to remain.
I don’t hold the wellbeing of a human being born in the UK over that of a human being born elsewhere and I certainly don’t want to deny anyone their fundamental human rights. I believe wholly in equality and that stretches across and between nations.
I sense this should all mean that I do not like this poem. But it sings with the fields I walk my dog in and the butterflies in the hedges and the wildflowers and pied wagtails we meet on the way. I know the intention is probably important but isn’t art in the eye of the beholder?
I like the UK, I want to see other places then i want to live here in the most raw places untouched by the hate and bigotry of so many humans, but I want here to be a wholly global community engaging with the earth under our feet and grateful for everything it gives to us. A mistake was made thousands of years ago with a move away from communal living and into a hierarchical market based society.
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
Meadowland – John Lewis-Stempel
I sent my copy of MeadowLand to my old friend Jules when I finished it today.
On page 266 there’s a line that certain nature books “inspired me with a spiritual respect for nature, as opposed to simple admiration or sentimental regard”.
They are very similar. My dad and Jules.
My dad taught me to really appreciate nature, to understand and respect it and try to live without impacting it too much but save whatever you can without messing with the order of things.
He seems to me to be a proponent of physically being amongst it; getting dirty, falling in rivers, running down hills, climbing trees.
But Jules taught me more about how she connects with it, how much it brings to her, how there’s a place for us all within that world and how we can always be there in some ways. I rarely use the word spiritual, but I think it’s that which has caught my attention and made me think of Jules.
She showed me how you can find so much even in a semi rural or suburban area and how you can choose to focus your days on looking for that elusive cuckoo rather than any other current nonsense, and how what might seem like time spent alone, doesn’t feel like that at all when there’re creatures there with you or along the way.
Today, feeling like I should trust my instincts and the animals I’m sharing my day with, the dog and I walked into a group of cows around a gate I needed to pass through. I was very tentative initially then pulled my self together and we were all fine. Aloud, I told the cows I was a bit worried about them and they seemed to look at me with pity and, I’d like to think, a touch of kindness.
A man was watching me talk to the cows. He seemed kind and I was glad of some silent human company within a few metres.
Earlier I’d shed a tear reading about the death of one of Lewis-Stempel’s old gentle cows and how her body couldn’t stay in the land she lived on.
Dogs ears were flattened
But tips flicked and fluttered
In great oppressive wind
turn the season 