An Empty Island

Music is :- She Moves Through the Fair by Mike Oldfield and it is crushing.

Short-lived depression at the moment. An irrational fear that will be gone before the sun. Should be calmed by visualisation, which is of course what almost all poetry is.

I have found a great distraction. Go to the Corbis website and just use the search facility. The images are professional and therefore usually far better than anything you might get on the Google image search. Try 'Gamelan' for some great pictures.

I want to say something about how yukky the world is but in my head it just sounds pointless as everyone will say "cheer up". It is very easy to say and very difficult to do. I can write poems about it and they seem all right but if I just write down what I feel then it sounds self-indulgent and selfish. I know of course, that the world is not yukky all the time; that I have the promise of a walk in the woods this weekend and that I do not have anything to be really worried about. But when I am like this, there seems to be nothing worth bothering about. I should just close my eyes, lie back and listen to some nice music. But that solves nothing does it. My mind is split between the revelling-in-blackness and the pull-yourself-together mode. Work is a great distraction. Responsibilities are too. Some people need me as much as I need them and it is sad that I do not make that clear enough to them. Some of us British people are still reserved even in our personal relationships. Enough of this. The Pull-yourself-together mode has won for the moment.

Well, I just tried to publish this and Blogger tells me that it is unavailable for a few hours. It is a good job I did it in Word first as the post has gone. So of course when you read this Blogger will have been back up and I will have pasted this back. Not that many people read it. All those automatic Spam Scanners don’t actually bother with the content do they? Yet more things to be depressed about. A world free of spam would be wonderful but we have to get rid of hunger, poverty, easily cured illnesses first.

Something to focus on.

Somewhere in the world, the last stocks of Smallpox are sustained at great expense, in Government laboratories. I would like to see those stocks destroyed and the money saved by not having to keep them, go to be used for something useful. The only Governments who have real Weapons of Mass Destruction (Remember – the most meaningless phrase in history) are the ones who spend most of the time complaining about other Governments trying to possess them. Yes, I know this is obvious to anyone who is not actually sharing a brain cell but I like stating the obvious because so many people seem blinded to the obvious by the forest of obfuscation (lovely self-referential word) which seems to be part of everything humans do today. How stable are these complaining Governments? I would suggest that the mental health of the average westerner is far worse than that of the supposed unstable regimes being complained about. One man – one missile key and what do you get? Worse still, it seems that the only qualification for leadership these days is a willingness to stand on toes and shout loudly rather than to be intelligent and compassionate. Obvious again I know, but those who want power are never suitable to hold it.

All this started in my head because of my fears about the Sylvia Plath film. I saw the trailer and one of the lines was along the lines of Plath saying that she truly believed that her poems came from God. Now you may write to me and say that she actually wrote that but when it was separated from context by being cut to and away from in the trailer, it seemed as naff as a bag of Troll Dolls. I began to wonder if it was possible that someone who made a film about Plath, understood her so little, that they pandered to every cliché just to make a potboiler. Plath herself did this; she wanted to be published in cosy magazines but in the end turned out to be original though obviously dark and depressed. I will never understand her to any great extent. There were things going on in her head which no one will ever know and no one ever had known. Anyway, back to the thread. I began to wonder if it was possible that an amateur admirer of Plath’s work could be better informed than the filmmakers. I have not seen it yet and I hope that it is better than my fears but this led on to me thinking about whether this discrepancy between what the supposed great and good do and what they should do. The worst case for them would be to have a population as educated as them, who can work out when they are being lied to and patronised. All the time is the answer at the moment or so it seems.

Question everything.

Music is now Apocrypha by Marta Sebestyen

People are beginning to drift in to the office now and for some reason that has made me more depressed. I like the darkness of the early morning and the quietness. It seems now that I have to force myself to interact with other people because otherwise my depression would become obvious. Actually, I am not that bad now. Writing about the problem seems to objectify it, make it less important. Maybe I should print this out, screw it up into a small ball and enter it for the Turner Prize. No! Sorry. I meant screw it up and throw it away.

I have ten minutes to sort myself out and then I will be able to sit down all day, with my headphones on and just get on with things. Hopefully Blogger will be back up at lunchtime and I will be able to publish this. Of course it would be ironic if this whole post got lost completely and my sadness was never made public.