Blossom

So what’s to report today? Well, blossom is slowly giving way to the first light green leaves, which are more or less ousting the flowers on the blackthorns at the bottom of the road, pushing through the white like green beaks through shell. The cherry blossom in the car park at work hasn’t lasted long. There are shallow drifts of it here and there on the concrete that remind me of sand on a promenade. Pink sand, of course.

These are observations enough for a day, aren’t they? Isn’t looking out of the window as worthwhile as turning on the news? Could wars and disasters elsewhere in the world leave blossom gaudy? Is peering into life’s safe and uneventful corners, when so much else of it is scorched and pummelled, simply crass? Not at all: these moments of quiet beauty are what’s at stake. Wars should be fought for cherry trees – and you might climb one to escape a tsunami, where the blossoming boughs may just comfort you while you await rescue. Or is that crass? Would you hate the sight of cherry blossom for as long as you lived after you eventually climbed down, shivering and exhausted? Well, no-one could argue that it would be a loss to you if you did. So these are the things that above all we should fight not to lose, for ourselves and our fellow men and women. I think. Anyway, I’m off to grow a long beard and put flowers in my hair.

Smalus

Well, here I am again, at it again, posting from me to me. I guess talking to yourself online is the first sign of fashionable madness.

Anyway, me, I thought you might want to consider the following piece of prophecy, culled from a four hundred year-old text:

“from Libya, where the warlike Smalus…. is feared and loved”

Warlike Smalus? Feared and loved? Libya? Surely this Smalus is the very image and portend of Gaddafi, swimming into the ken of a seer centuries ago?

And can it be any coincidence that I came across this piece of text now, just as the good Colonel tumbles off the wagon (or should that be oil tanker) into slaughter, international pariah-hood and a rain of Western bombs? It must be clairvoyance, providence, any damned –nce except coincidence.

But it wasn’t Nostradamus, as you might have thought.  Nope. Of course, had this been one of Nostradamus’s writings, its Google-hits might currently be exploding into the millions. But these are the words of a poet, not a prognosticator: they’re from The Winter’s Tale.  And wherever Shakespeare’s inspiration came from (wouldn’t we all like to know), I doubt any was from a scrying pool.

The only crystal ball here is the Bard’s brain, tuned unerringly as it was to human nature. It seems that Shakespeare has something to tell me about the inane titillations of superstition, even when he wasn’t trying to.

The winner of the National Poetry Competition was announced today. Naturally, my name didn't trouble the list of prize-getters. I did enter one called "Pomegranate", which is an angram of "Great Poem? N/A". Nuff said, really.
Still, I'm trying to absorb all of the proper literature that I failed to bother reading years ago, when it might have made a difference. Who knows, my thirtysomething nervous system might not be closed to inspiration just yet. And supposedly writing is one of those rare skills that does tend to improve with age - unlike maths, where apparently you go alarmingly off the boil even as your twenties run out, and the ability to form completely new concepts in general, which declines on the same abrupt timescale. At thirty three, I should have increasing difficulty appreciating the importance of new ideas, and linking them to existing knowledge. I suppose I can see evidence of this in my blindness to that masterstroke of fashion that is wearing your jeans somewhere roughly above the knees, as the kids seem to now. So I'm not one of the kids, but maybe there's hope yet.
Speaking of ageing: King Lear. To date I only know the Shakespeare lays I did at school, and Hamlet from the David Tennant version that was on last Christmas, so given the reputation Lear has I thought i'd give it a try. Well, now i've almost certainly lost you, so you won't even notice that i've run out of time and been forced to wrap it up wuickly by saying: rule of three! Just as in fairytales: the bed that's too, hard, then too soft, then just right, so Goneril, Regan, Cordelia. Only this is, masterfully, a realist fairytale, so the one who's just right - Cordelia - is perceived as quite the opposite and rejected, with disastrous consequences. Well, that's it I think.

Jelly Babies

So, when does a human being first become that? When does mere organic matter coalesce into something sacrosanct, something to which inalienable rights and protections apply? For want of a better and less misquotable term  (not that anyone is ever going to quote from this obscure little piece) when do all those amino acids join hands and weld indelibly to the transcendent  - when does a human acquire a soul?

This is at the point of conception, is it not? Surely not. If we say that it is the presence of intact human DNA, fresh minted as it may be, makes an entity a person with rights, then this goes for a hair on my head as much as for me. Should our statute books ever support such reasoning, it would be very bad news for hairdressers. And what happens if I wake in the morning to find a hair or two staying behind on the pillow? Now they are not just hairs, but miscarried clone children. If I want to pluck out my nostril hairs, then I am aborting their still-gestating siblings. It’s pointless to say that hairs do not have the potential to become people as zygotes do: this is merely a technical difficulty. Find the right Petri dish or test tube and they have chance the same chance as any recently fertilised egg in utero.  Who are we to deny my twins, triplets, quadruplets and all who follow ad absurdum their chance at life?

But, if the soul does not arise at conception, then when? Birth seems a little too late: babies come out with brains and sense to relay experiences to them, and although it is at this point that our lungs breath air for the first time, our minds had, it seems, been breathing experience for some time already, suffused with its immutable vapours. Perhaps it is when the brain has developed to a certain point, although when exactly the Rubicon flows into the amniotic fluid is unclear.

This is precisely the problem. The human psyche has to ask the question when and find an exact answer. We simply have to have a divide – and that need to have one, perhaps where none necessarily exists, is what has created the abortion debate in the first place.

For my own money, I don’t see a problem with calling an early-term foetus a blob of jelly, mainly because that’s what it is. If we are to let jelly blobs into the fold of humanity, we have made fools of ourselves, and drastically undervalued the developed central nervous system that bestows the power of sentience upon us. That is us. Of course, our blob-swelled ranks would not be so much of a travesty were it not for the fact that they come to us inside another person, and that the rights of these blob-bearers (pregnant women as we call them) are compromised and even usurped by those of the unfeeling, unthinking, insensible blobs within. It makes women the thrones of blobs, non-sentient entities ruling from sentient seating, ruling our hearts and our minds. Well, not mine. Once the blob develops into something sentient, that is of course entirely different, but it is madness to subjugate our own needs to that of inanimate matter.

As far as i've got. Should I go further?

It had been a dark night, hadn’t it? Yes – the moon away on business, the stars obscured by cloud. He had been alone hadn’t he, and very far from help? Yes again – he was out on the dunes, sea on one side, moorland on the other. Tufts of marram grass scraped his legs as he trudged, wading through endless dry black sand. It had been profoundly dark, come to think of it. The sea was one particular species of murk, a noisy marine variety, while the moors were a silent land cousin. Neither seemed much differentiated from the overcast sky. The variousness of the world was not his eyes to tell anymore.

One thing was certain: something stalked him. Something whose eyesight the dark had not dulled.

            At first, though, he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t even been apprehensive. No primal disquiet troubled him, no dread sense of being something’s quarry. He was actually meditating on the dryness of the sand, which poured smoothly off his feet as he lifted them from it: this dryness, and this feel of flow down his skin, defined it as a phenomenon, now that he could barely see it. And the differential between the silence of the moors, and the low hubbub of the sea: that was how he was orientating himself, how he knew he was walking a straight path along the coast to eventual civilisation. For a non-nocturnal creature, he was adapting nicely. In the care of caretaker senses, he would be –

            He heard it land in the sand behind him. Very definitely land. Did he spin round, or did he break into a run straight away? Because if he’d spun, that would be interesting: a failure of instinct to be informed by circumstance, or a vain hope that scared eyes could pierce the gloom. But he had no chance of discerning the threat; only eluding it. Most probably, he had set off at the sound of something landing, as surely as at a starting gun.

            The next part he remembered well enough. It had been immediately apparent he was not designed to run through sand. It dragged and dragged at his desperate legs; jealous, possessive, spurned now that its attention-grabbing consistency was no longer his thesis. And the marram grass was cutting him. He felt he would be caught in seconds; his back tensing in anticipation of contact with terrible claws and limbs. Even without the sand, had he any hope of getting away?

            It was futile to run, and yet somehow, as a doomed prey animal, he had an absolute obligation to flight. The motions of escape must be the last thing he observed. He crashed on through the sand, wringing what little speed he could from this terrain.

            Seconds passed: he felt himself going downhill, over a dune, and for a moment gravity seemed a feasible rescuer – provided he could keep his balance under its assistance.

            Did he trip? Or was he at that moment brought down?

            He recalled pirouetting at one point. Somewhere in the sequence of events, he had been stranded on one leg and sent through 360 degrees. And the surprising lack of cushioning, as on his back he hit the sand: that wasn’t in doubt. Nor was that breath in his face; the sudden and dreadfully emphatic contribution of the olfactory: salt and ozone and something like being downwind of a washed-up whale. It was coming from the thing’s mouth. It brought an awareness of teeth directly above him: he put his hands over his face, and at the same time, he felt sure, a mass pressed on his chest that was there to restrain him. For the kill. What could he have been feeling? How had his mind prepared for death? He didn’t know. He had pushed his hands up towards those teeth… maybe they’d find an eye they could gouge, a throat they could grip…