Friday, November 21, 2003

Pliny the Elder was an Idiot

Music is :- Happiness by Lisa Germano.

What do the bombers want? There is no point in dialogue because there is no demand. Any number of words regarding the horror of such events is just wasted because somewhere deep within either the minds of the bombers themselves or those of the men with the strings, there is a fault line beyond which reason does not go. You cannot even use the phrase "They need their heads knocking together". Tell us what you want and what we have to do to make it stop. Another waste of words there. Why is the world so mad? What goes through the mind of a man about to blow himself up at the command of some idiot in a cave? What in the next world can persuade someone to do that? I hope by now that you know my views on the causes in the name of 'the next world' but I am afraid that the promise of marriage to 75 virgins is not enough. And I am not sure I would be swayed by the statement that a suicide bomber suffers no more pain than that of a pinch. If conciousness lasts long enough in the event of such a catastrophic demise, I am sure that discussions of the pain are irrelevant anyway. I recall with horror the story of the passer-by who comforted a dying soldier who had been blown in two by the Hyde Park bomb all those years ago. There is no logic to confront this type of brainwashing. Power is the only driving force of the bomb-masters. They cannot claim any compassion. It is not worth talking about any more. Peace only ever comes through dialogue. No exceptions!

Of course one of the participants in a dialogue has to be able to string more than a few single syllable words together.

Thinking about thinking again. Think of all levels of consciousness from you right now reading this to just before you go to sleep and all those hypnagogic dreams kick in. How do you think? I want to know if I use words or images or some sort of melding of both. However, as soon as I try to think about it, my mind flips into word mode or picture mode and I cannot decide what is the real deal. I am trying it now - the music is creating some images but they are just grey clouds with no representation of reality but behind it all there are the words which I am having to think about in order to write this down. There is no more than Zellaby's brick wall but the clouds are swirling like in Mrs Dai Bread's crystal ball (I cannot remember if she was one or two).

And now the return of Random Friday.

A prose poem for two violins and large milk float - no milk-bottle I meant. The mountains have come down to the sea here, like two sunbathers on a beach, the waves break against them, eroding the rock away over the millennia. We do not live on the same time scale. Their minds do not work like ours and passion is nothing to them. Our lives begin and end in a single cycle of the mind of every rock. So he gets himself up onto one elbow and regards the innocents with derision. How can they live and experience the whole world if they were not here at the world's start and end? We are insects living just a day before we are swallowed back into the ground and broken down to make a new flower or a field of corn for the next ones, the ones who follow us.

The summer has returned, to burn the city to whiteness and hot concrete. Under the steel and cement, the derelicts lie happy and drunk, their gaze set on the future. The fog of heat has shortened our world to a few blocks and a desire for rain. Please let it rain tonight. I want to walk the streets tonight, see the world in a rain puddle. I want to count the lights in the world. All the lights in the whole world. Every candle in a window in a remote house up a mountain to the great lights of Kiev and Moscow, the Russian Capitals, the capitals of the whole world. I can feel the rain now. It cools and steams on the road and gets into the drinks, made intelligent by association with human beings, super-intelligent colours built on computers and sold to us as NEW THINGS. It crawls inside our buildings, led by warmth and light until it evaporates and fills our rooms. The bright, bare lights of this kitchen tell of a just-missed argument. The light is in our eyes but cannot escape. No more to eat in this room, we leave like thieves just as the shouting starts again. It is love and passion; too much of this around. We would die before we fall in love and submit to this. They tell us we are mad and ironically we are. Mad or angry? We cannot tell. They don't come in white coats any more. The blades are taken just before impact and we are saved, made garbage in the fringes of this madness.

The priest sits at his desk, Sunday beckoning his thoughts to the page. They fall out of him like water, and how sick does he feel at this. He knows that he is right and that he must tell everyone that he is right. The directives come like ticker tape - do this, do that. Don't do this. Complete sentences - well formed English, French and Latin to detail one persons idea of how things could be made better. I slp nt txt md bt jst rmvng th vwls ds nthng fr thr rdblty. I bury my best cheeses in the garden and the fire saves my house, eats my cheese and runs away. By the dockside, I step over coiled ropes and bargain with the trawlermen. They have not lost a man for years but now they don't go out that often. The drums and cymbals of the parade have been made random. The sea is glassy, frozen into blurry fuzz by time. I want to leave all this and play drums for some semi-famous group.

There is no purple in disguise. The monsters proceeded dutifully down the beach from the caves, stopped at the edge of the sea and launched an artillery barrage of high intensity. The sea was destroyed in seconds and the ocean bed became a new playground for men. Solutions to old mysteries were found overnight. Here is a plane caught by bombs and a holed submarine that vanished sometime ago in some old war. We walk the mud flats dodging the old sea-cables stretched miles across the canyons of the old sea level. The weather is changed and all that space swallows up our air; makes it less dense and so we all wander around like athletes in Mexico. The sound of everything gets fainter. In the clocks, the mechanisms slow either by relativity or the gravity of the earth. How much water do we need to lose to see a difference? Time is not a definite anymore. We are flung relatively into space where our clocks speed up and our minds lengthen like evening shadows. Thinking becomes a chore - a troubling effort - even the act of breathing takes thought and we may never sleep. The sky falls away and we become gasses in between stars. We have returned to our beginnings. We are not even parts of stars, just the great mix of matter that entropy returns us to. The stars are going out one-by-one. We do not feel hungry or thirsty but we live forever.

Sit down and I will tell you a tale of magic and faeries, of foes and heroes in the heavens. They have been made into stars, pasted to the sky like tissue paper. I stick pins in paper to make shadow constellations. The stars made real, given their true magnitudes with just a piece of sharp metal. I have made the universe out of paper and pencil and pins. IN my brain, the power runs out; I am running against a brick wall, battered and tired with no end in sight. No code word saves me from this.

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