Viva Obscurity. Of the people who set the world the light, half are arsonists.

A Brief, that is to say unfinished, Parable

A man was desired by all except one: all except one lavished on him confessions of their desire.  Then the day came when the man met the one, and was told the bad news. Well, for him dissent was revelation: thereafter, no matter how the others continued to flatter him, he believed himself desirable to none.

But you’re gorgeous, they repeated – a reassurance as true as it was toothless. Look at the statistics, they said: he did, and the errant one glittered out malignantly from the pile.

Various

The rules religions hand down to us, here is 2008. Are they absolute moral precepts, timeless countermeasures to perennial human failings? Or are they conspicuously parochial pronouncements, the nasty strictures of bygone peoples and places, conceived in utter ignorance of how wide the world was and of what it would become – and worst of all, still revered as infallible?

And is there any ring of prescience in them? Any deference to the expanse of futures and throngs of unborn they aim to govern? Did they, in fact, so aim to govern? Or did the mindsets that created them lack the faintest apprehension – or even concern – for the alien millennia ahead? If these rules truly came from God, then why did he so specifically address himself to the lives and the psyches of those who happened to be around at the time, snubbing posterity a mere few hundred generations on – a shocking oversight for an eternal being? How are we who know of supernovae to be awed by a burning bush?

There are several lifts to choose from: the moth lift; the pitch black lift; the lift with the disfigured drummer; the meat locker lift (which you share with coldly swaying and buffeting cow carcasses); the upside down lift; the lift that only opens if you’re naked; the rain lift; the tentacle lift, and countless others.

It is churlish, with all of these options, to take the stairs.

Something occurred. What was it? No – worse – several things occurred. And I’m not talking your everyday, run-of-the garden, common or mill strains of occurrence: they occurred as a firework occurs in a dour sky, as a plop of rain in scorching desert sand. Where did they occur? - In my mind. They occurred to me alone. Alas, I didn’t write them down, didn’t grab a net to scoop the bright coruscations from the heights before they faded; didn’t pick up the wet sand before it dried. All I remember of them now is that they were worth remembering, which is nothing but a torment to recall.

Those same stalks jut from the pond/the prose of them, the thin wind-buffeted essences/tapering, going nowhere/only accidentally pointing out the Sun or Moon/ until the pond murk disgorges a larva/ that seizes this opportune ladder to the sky/shuffles up to the treasure chest/ of its chrysalis/removes its own gossamer wings.

Ode to a Toad//to flies, Hell’s mouth is cracked, clammy skin folds/unlatching with a croak and sending up/the flying flesh-pink road to collect their soul.

Scalpel Vs. Binoculars

I don’t understand my feelings for you. But then why would I want to cut into them with understanding? They are living, breathing feelings, and you only perform autopsies on dead things. My feelings for you soar – why are you insisting I scoop them from the air, strap them down onto the mortuary slab and open them up, live and struggling, to see what’s inside? Will you be happy only when they’ve taken to the skies again, studied and stitched, bearing the scars of this urge to know? Being feelings for you, they will fly again after the ordeal; being feelings for you, they will heal, but maybe I will not.

Besides, all their secrets are in the way they fly, they way they alternately swoop and settle. Nothing will yield to the scalpel: use the binoculars.

Bad Writers, And How We Should Explain Ourselves

There are those who write well: may the gods preserve them and their writing. Then there's us lot, those who merely think they write well: may the gods preserve us too, but not our writing. May, the gods, in fact, demonstrate a rare moment of foreign policy when it comes to that, and send some emissary down from their shrouded celestial ranches to confiscate our pens.

Writing's not like singing: there's no X-Factor which rehabilitates the duff wordsmith as entertainment, as laughing stock. The general public can all have a good laugh at tone-deaf nobodies who think they sound like Pavarotti: but we who write poorly do it alone, without an audience, laughing or otherwise, and there's nobody to rescue us from our fantasy, which goes on.

The peculiar thing is the temporary suspension of critical faculties that permits this "I can write I can" nonsense. Today, for instance, I read back over the justly obscure blogs I'd posted to this site so far, and marked what a gap there was between how they sounded now and how they seemed as I was actually typing them, the same difference you might observe in a nice new juicy cut of meat on the day the butcher trimmed and wrapped it and how it looks, and smells, two weeks later, when you come back off holiday to find your fridge has broken. The trouble is that as I write I feel like the butcher, revelling in the gleam and sharpness of the cleaver I appear to be wielding, sure of my deft and fearless skill.

And nothing can stop it. Indeed, here I am, butchering again, slicing up the rank meat of my literary offerings into paragraphs, none of them fit for human consumption, all of them tough and leathery and tasteless. Come, maggots. Perhaps one day you'll put me off.

Caution: these seats fold back up when vacated

Caution: these seats fold back up when vacated

Caution: these days fold back up when vacated.

Although you’ll never sit in them again

just maybe someone else will: the next shift

arriving in the just-vacated coach

and ready for their own day trip,

perhaps among them a replacement you,

a doppelganger, who’d call you the same,

then some you else, a day behind, again.

Caution: these bodies fold back up

when vacated. The gravestones rows

seats in a bombed out theatre.

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.