Change Barong to Legong

Tappi Tikarrass

Well my dark mood of yesterday did not last as the reason for it evaporated as I said it would. Feel papery today though as if nothing is quite right but without being able to decided exactly what the problem is. I made a stupid mistake this morning and though it is resolved, I still feel odd about it.

Music is (and this is from the media player and not the CD) Drumming by Evelyn Glennie - A percussive tour de Force according to the review which I also can get ffrom this new-fangled invention. Certainly is. Drums connect with deeper areas of our brains than normal music. The poem I wrote this morning - Barong Dance is about the link between the music and the dance in Balinese Dance dramas. Each movement of the dancers' bodies reflects an element of the music. The fingers move like leaves and match the high sounds of the little cymbals - Ceng-Ceng I think they are called. (When I bought my Balinese metalphone, I bargained badly and should have said that the agreed price had to include some Ceng-Ceng as well. ) The arms (and I suppose legs as well though I don't remember them moving except to move the dancers across the floor) reflect the middle registers while the boom of the gongs and other lower range instruments correspond to the movement of the whole body. All this analysis seems silly after having written a poem which describes it exactly as far as I am concerned.

Legong Dance 31/10/2003

The forest, a density of jewelled leaves
and fingers is salt-lit, crusted soundlessly,
by high-tide in the swift grey evening.

And fingers twitch,
at first it seems in sickness,
like the end of creatures,
shot for fun and sport,
but in the lantern light,
the lizard shadowed walls,
show elegance in speed,
a nervousness they turn
to grace and piety,
to celebrate a Pantheon.

I was tripped by dogs,
sleeping in the street,
seeming dead and dusty,
ignoring dance and sound.

But these women,
soundless, soft-shoed,
have walked like gods,
two inches over ground,
and turned to music.
Their fingers, leaves,
are stereo, repeating,
alternate, doubled
in the eyes like jade,
and cracking gems.


Their arms become
a deeper melody,
the rolling couplets
of the beating bronze,
detuned from each
to wow and flutter
with the sea-breeze;
the kite-laden wind
of every island.

Kotekan and kebyar,
make bodies abstract,
disconnected
from the world.
They fly like bats,
link bass metal
to the spirits,
make payments
to the earth,
insurance,
fire-damp,
banished,
ended.

Alternative Universes

I have a theory (which is always code for I have thought that something might me true but deep down I really know it is just rubbish) that everyone has a recurring ideal of what life is like from what they consider their peak time in life. I have this strange image of the beer garden in a canal-side pub somewhere in Birmingham in the late 70s. I don’t actually think that I am there amongst the long hairs and the real ale which they are downing with relish. A whole lifestyle is suggested by this, home to tastefully decorated flats and progressive rock music. To me now, this sounds really boring and in the late 70s I was 14 rather than 20 so this cannot be my ideal view of life but it always makes me think on what my ideal lifestyle would be. This is rather like wishing that things had been different in the past so that the present was better. Wishing for things to have been different is never a good idea because removing one bad thing from the past could easily open up the possibility of many other bad things, like in Stephen Fry's Making History. The world is safe when it is not played about with. You can influence the future but you should only celebrate or grieve for the past.

I do have another image that appeals to me much more. It is sort of a mixture of my Primary School in Malvern and a 1960s library of art. The school had a wonderful rose garden where we were not allowed to run or shout so that people could sit and read and talk quietly. I wonder if they still have it or whether it has been sold to turn into executive housing. Anyway, the library in my image has sort of taken the place of the school buildings that ran along one side of the garden. I can wander in and out of the library with any book I want. It is always sunny in a sort of faded 1960s photographic way, as if the film for the image has been left out in the sun that it portrays. All very comforting. This library only deals with the past and the positive past at that. There is no access to news or the realities of life. Obviously it is an escape from things that were going on then both in the world and in my life. That sounds like there were some really bad things happening to me but I must stress that this is not some sort of coded revelation of arrestable offences against me. My childhood was mostly of the sunny summers and picnics variety at this time. So don't go phoning any psycho-analysts please. It is back to my idea that everyone has this ideal image. Of course none of these images involves having to work for a living.

All this has been sparked by my finding an old tape of what I considered to be the best pieces of pop-music. These are always responsible for an association with happy images. So we have I could be Happy by Altered Images, Airlane by Gary Numan, Ever So Lonely by Sheila Chandra and Northern Lights by Renaissance. It was this last one which set me off but they are all excellent.

Untitled

There is a surfeit of mouses on this desk which is making it difficult to work as well as normal. We are trying to put a new image from a USB drive to my new PC - only a work one unfortunately but it does have XP so that is something. The desk looks like something on Uncle Wiggily's airship. I have no idea what Uncle Wiggily's airship actually was but I once read one of the Skylab astronauts describing the remedial work they had to do to fix the damage which occurred when Skylab took off as being so and I have used it ever since.

So I posted the black blog from earlier.

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.

Short Ride in a Fast Poem

Two songs about the same person

I return to old themes and images,
the sounds of blackness and of rainy nights
when dreams set madness back
and all the air seems lit with misery.
And in this night, we two leave the crowd
and walk the broken roads
to a bright lighted café where all men smile
and talk happily about their countries.

In this happy, stark reminder, we stay,
conspirators, picked up by agencies
and spat out laughing into rain and light.

The echoed whistles of the ships
call to their crews and strange, dark overseers.
A captain leans against the door, white smile
against the sooty face of engineers behind him,
while we stand by and understand his weird language,
his pleas to crewmen for their boarding.

We are the city crew, the pilots of this dockland
to its end, the phonemes of desire,
in empty streets and customs zones.
Our pens betray our presence here,
with cleaner clothes and faces,
as we take tea with sailors.
We are observers, mass observers,
brought back from nineteen-thirty-four,
to note for other travellers, the end of race,
the death of history.

The music fades, an inverse of the dawn,
one over sunrise, long division synchronised
with gentle calls to arms and revolution,
coded, ciphered in the news and gossip,
an empty call for things to change.
Wind lacerates, a word stolen from the Bible,
its meaning lost on powerful men.

Recorded live in twenty minutes and doesn't it show?

Sticks and Tricks

Music is :- Gala by Lush

Interesting artwork here in the same vein as The Great Bear though they did do something similar on the Look Around You website.

I have just found a picture of the office where I used to work. I used to work for The Bristol and West Building Society on the second floor of the octagonal building on the left of this picture. This is right in the centre of Bristol, at the bottom of the hill which leads up to University. One of my colleagues has Webshots as his screen saver. It changes every few seconds and the shots are mostly of various jaw-dropping locations that look like they should be in holiday brochures. I was wondering how many shots you would have to view to have seen the whole world. I know you could calculate it but what if there was a defined set of images that described the whole world. One day there will be a virtual real-time copy of the world, the ultimate tool of big brother. I have been thinking about the following idea for some time but I cannot remember whether I have put it up here before. I was going to create a virtual local model of the world I know and then gradually expand it. There is a photo tour of Wales here which seems to have expanded from the bits I knew around Harlech.

High Thoughts in the Attic Forests

All those whirling thoughts lost in the bed sits and garrets, clichés of existence in the modern, academic world. They have their lists and their ideas of who really means something in this world. It rains against their windows and they lie back in the warmth and ingrained scents of their pretty beds, dead to the world outside. They live only inside their heads, with no sense of tense; everything is in the present except that day sometime in the future when they might end it all in some pretty way and start a book about how mad they are. They like pink but wear black to fit in with their empty-skulled boyfriends and try to talk about the right things. Dancing is not for them. They like passion but going to bed with someone is so mechanical, not like their idea of gentle scents and caresses. The boys never feel guilty; I feel guilty for them but can do nothing to make it better. One of them is writing on the Industrial Novel, bashing away night after night, creating the ultimate comment on a thing gone by and irrelevant to her existence.

Up the stairs come the ghosts of her past. She likes to think that she has been affected by her mother, beaten into depression by not being understood. In reality she is understood too well. "We have spoiled that child.,” her parents might say privately but only to each other. “She is at college, she has passed exams and now she is well on the way to being a Doctor of something. We would prefer it to be medicine but you can't have everything." She hates bodies so there is no way she could have been a medical doctor. Real doctors have a light behind their eyes; they have seen how fragile we are and how wonderful we are as machines. They divorce the mechanical study of bodies from the passion and the love they have for everyone. That is the way it is. They love everybody in some way, except the gutted bodies they slice into to learn how much they love everybody. They smell of chemicals, yellow fluids in jars. They are not real.

We walk a tightrope between madness and catatonia. We like to think we are the sane ones, the ones who understand everything and know how to react whatever we are presented with. The truth is we are all mad in some way; we have our own ways of existing, of handling the world. Our successful friends have worked out how to gloss over the complexities and to ignore the 'right' ways of doing things. We would be shocked to know everything that a politician does to get his position. They take in what they need to know as we all do. I want to understand everything and the world whistles by me as I stop to smell the flowers and define their colours and understand how they make new flowers. Flowers are irrelevant and I will never know all there is to know.

These mad girls in their attics know everything. This knowledge is a gift from God. They do not need to study. This girl got 21 out of twenty for her English essay and all the mathematicians protested. She kept her extra point and we saw capitalism and blues walk hand-in-hand. I dreamed she kissed me and gave me diphtheria, passing it through until my throat swelled. I loved her at the time and suddenly, growing up made me hate her. The dream seemed so real for I had kissed her once, a short adolescent, meaningless kiss and now she was back to haunt me. I see her now and wonder if she asks herself whether the extra point was worth it. Is she publishing those stories, those potboilers about her love and madness? She is silent in the world now. I am the noise in my life. Turning my head, I hear music louder, as if some mechanism in my ear was loose. It is a legacy of that sore throat. She would tell me it is the loud music I have listened to. She is lying.

Up in the sky, the attic forests stretch to the horizon, a city without staff, without shops, sustained by the odd cigarette and convenience food left on dirty corners. There is poverty in knowledge. I could not live without understanding but I could live enough with warmth and food. Poverty has shifted from its base to the empty-headedness we are fed. The music ends in my ear and I return to skyheight, a repeat of yesterday's happy dreams. The rain beats on the window still and I have become one of those ingenue professors, happy with my knowledge of the world. I love everybody. One day I will look out of the window, across those roofs to the hills and moors and trees and sky but for now, it is enough to write and think about those flowery gardens where I grew up.

The Alice Springs Platypus Appreciation Society

All that stuff about rainy streets by the docks cam true yesterday as I drove home. Seemed apt, as if I had written the evening out before it happened.

We watched the last part of Channel 4's 100 scariest moments on tape last night. It was odd that of all of the 'moments', the most scary were from old black and white movies and TV shows without any gore at all. The Evil Dead was just silly. I suppose if I was on my own at night and watching it I might be a bit scared but there was a ghost story on the list called Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You starring Michael Hordern and though the ghost was a sheet it was far scarier than someone gouging out eyes. By the way - the link is to the text of the original story by MR James. The story is now on the Palm pilot for reading at bus stops and other places with lots of people about. And another thing, in the clip from Jaws when the decaying head falls into view in the hole in the boat, even though I knew exactly when it was coming, I jumped because I remember how high I jumped the first time at the cinema. Forget being worried about getting back in the water, I was scared of sharks all the time full stop. Of course, now I know that far more people are kicked to death by donkeys than are killed by sharks and any shark/human horror stories are actually ones of exploitation of sharks by humans. Give that Great White a name.

Randomness in the Rain and Darkness of a Dockside Cafe

Music is :- doo-bop by Miles davis

Calling the wonderful darkness, shadowed out behind the black buildings, we fell into love of the world, like a walk on a rainy night. We tripped over the ropes and shadows of the fishing quarter until we came across a small late-night cafe for the sailors and truckers from the night boats. They said they would feed anyone who had the money so we sat down between the little groups of languages and stuffed ourselves on fried food until a captain called into us thinking we were late back to his ship. We went on, shaking hands with the captain as he beamed back at us, happy to be about to set sail again. The clubs in town let out their own crews and we moved against them as they fought for cabs. The music came with them, spilling jazz across the town to make our local bit of the world like some hybrid of New Orleans and Chicago, those coolest places. We could be in this early morning everywhere, happy with the darkness and the rain, swelled with the experiences we built up to help us recall these squally nights. The rain came down, cold and intelligent, able to work its way into our clothes until we had to make our way back to the hotel. It loomed above us and for a minute I thought the city was empty, that we were the only people here, able to take what we wanted until between us we used up everything. Would all the cities in the world have enough provisions to keep us two alive? I imagine the world empty of all people but us and think about how we might live here. How would we travel? It would be so lonely in that world. Bring on the end of the world and let us survive the Armageddon.

Not with a bang the world will end and we will live in our tiny house, in the sunshine under the northern hills. A happy doom, a doom without end. This powerful poetry has no story and no beginning. When was the first human born and is the last human already here? Boot up the world again and I could die here on this day with this weather and with these people round me.

We are back to the world as it is. The rain is still here. In a bleak and grey foyer, the freshers stand open mouthed at what they have come to. In the autumn murk, they have burnt bridges and turned up in a place where no one takes care of them. They feel lonely, only sustained by the thoughts of friends so far away, new lovers recently disheartened by the distance. In this emptiness, they find new friends, new lovers. You can see the sparks of little affairs beginning, the tugs of guilt and attraction as between the old and new, they find ways to convince themselves that this is nothing wrong. Two hundred miles away, the absence in the hearts of those who are lonely and left behind begins to darken. The Marine Girls hear their name over the tannoy and a long-term love affair begins. He meets her by the doors to the grey world and you just know they will have kissed before the lights come on this evening. This is Jazz begun by randomness and empty meaning in the universe of particles.

What does the universe make of us? Does our existence mean any part of the universe knows about us? Of course unless it is alive or sentient through other means, it cannot know about anything, even itself. The rock in a field has no idea it is a rock, indeed has nothing other than a few physical parameters that distinguish it from a non-rock or any other rock. It does not know anything and yet you could say that we know no more than the rock because although we can think back to our beginning and the beginning of the universe, we cannot know beyond it. The mechanisms beyond the boundaries are not knows to us and never can be. You cannot know what brought the universe about AND know the universe itself. The knowledge of both is mutually exclusive.

Back in the rainy city, our lovers have met and married. The old boyfriends and girlfriends have moved on themselves, taught themselves deep and meaningful sciences and can spin the microscopic and the cosmic together like gold thread in woollen jackets. They have an understanding of the irony that pervades life and everything, the complexity of any statement rendered uncool by saying it at the wrong time or to the wrong person. Sometimes I will not say anything for fear of being wrong. Take this to extremes and you would vegetate, maybe just about being able to buy food and water. What is the meaning of skyheight? I should know but I don't. One day I will know all these things I should know and I will become like everyone else. We miss out on the world because we are naive, ingenues who need to be taught everything. Do I see the world like you? A circle is always a circle, a square a square. In the breezes off this hill, I will lie back and read, the sun lighting me and you until the day ends and we stumble back to the house, randomly amused and using language less and less until we know everything and there is no more to say. What will we do for kicks then? Yes I could die on a day like this when dying meant nothing because we have not been taught about it. We should not be sad for everyone lives forever. Time is only a direction for us and when we get to Heaven, Valhalla, Nirvana, we can be anywhere in space and time, be with anyone we choose. Heaven is being able to go anywhere; Hell is being nowhere and at no time with no one to tell you what is happening. We walk these rainy streets with hope and love. We are where we want to be. This music is so beautiful.

Official Photographer

Music is Up - Peter Gabriel

I love the autumn. Driving home last night was wonderful. It was not quite dark and the lights looked really cool against the dark blue. My daughter and I looked out of the bedroom window at the sky where there seemed to be searchlights scouring the clouds. My wife said later that she thought it was a gathering in a nearby garden who were playing with torches but of course I like to think that it was some more interesting reason like searching for aliens or a stolen military aircraft. As kids we always think War is exciting. Even the geeky boys who read books and don't like football will watch a war film. It takes a lot of growing up to realise that warfare means injury and death in the most horrible ways. This is growing up that not everyone does. In fact I would think that all small boys grow up retaining a small part of their fascination with weapons and fighting. I am not sure whether you would classify me as pacifist but I generally don't like the idea of bombing as a solution. Despite this, I still get a buzz out of reading about military aircraft and even from playing with military flight simulators on the PC. Is this dangerous. I would like to think that I have enough nouse to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I sometimes think that the most dangerously violent TV programmes are the ones where nobody ever gets injured like the A-Team. It seems that there is a lack of horror at what happens in the world. Why does the news never show the dead bodies? We always see a few bloodied but living people carried away from the scene but the severed limbs and scraps of flesh have always either been cleaned up or edited out. I would guess that most people watching this sort of news item do not sit there and imagine the real horror. Instead they thank a deity that it is not them and go back to their meals. Then again, I am assuming that they even bother to watch the news.

This is the first time I have managed to listen to the latest Peter Gabriel album. I don't seem to be able to get the time required to sit down and listen to something straight through. I always get distracted. That hour at night needs to involve sitting down at the table, writing, listening to something on the CD rather than sitting in front of the TV. Anyway, the Peter Gabriel album. Album? That is so 1970's but saying CD seems wrong and 'cut' or 'disc' sounds like Alan Freeman. I always get slightly disappointed when he sings for the first time on an album but within a few minutes the timbre of his voice becomes quite special, almost an instrument. I have always worried deep down that singing is not quite real. Writing a song about anything is an artificial comment on it, which gets in the way of what you are trying to say. This does not stop me feeling elation, sadness and admiration when a really good song delivers its emotional payload. (yuk!) It's a bit like computer games. I like them to be as real as possible, not some symbolic representation of the world but a film of the world - as close as you can get. Italian Plumbers in some sad second-rate copy of Wonderland - Hedgehogs. They might be OK for kids but I am sure they are really aimed at adults.

Great! Twangly guitar. I love twangly guitar - those loose bass strings rattling against the body. I wanted to be a rock star. Everyone does at some point. I took some pictures for a band called Fergus about ten years ago. They were playing at The Flying Picket and I got some great photos which I may be able to dig out sometime. I tried to duplicate each photo - once with the flash on and once off; it was too loud and flashy to try and use any settings on the camera so I just pointed and shot. I got one excellent photo of the singer with a spot behind him and the rays coming forward like the sun. Their manager told me we shouldn't show that one to him as he might get a bit to bigheaded. I think I have their tape somewhere. They were typical of the time, very loud indie rock but hey they were a band and I knew them. Their bass player went on to be in Electrafixion for a time. I saw him play with them in Liverpool before Echo and the Bunnymen reformed. Very loud. That and Lush are responsible for my tinnitus.

Making money from the sick. The season drags us down to cool and calm reflection in the depths of the varnished woods, the green and gummy clearings where the world goes on without us, like an unwatched TV. In their hovels, their spiritless boxes, the baby thieves wake and make their first million before breakfast. Wait for years until they get sick and then we will steal everything back from them. One Million, Two Million. Money makes you blind to the past. In those woods, those natural screens and factories, we hide, lie dormant for millennia as the world goes on around us. We write to the rhythm of the fall of leaves, the percussion of the fall of rotten trees to fall apart, decay and make food for their own offspring. The seasons' lights become our days, our clocks, the tick of centuries that pass until we rise up from the loam and litter, a hand to the sky to find the sun, the moon and stars. And then we turn on the thieves. Their remedy remains in these trees and plants. A cure for cancer, a dead stop to the common cold, the last equation and unified field falls like just one building coming down to help explain the world for all of us. We have turned ourselves around and now we look to the next destination, the stars above us. We will spread this plan, this spiral, through the universe and fill space with living things.

Blankness Abounds

Two pints of lager and a packet of ...

Sorry! Something else abounds that was. That last poem was not from ten years ago. It was probably more like two but it is the first on the pile. I have loads of others but you will be glad to hear that I have decided that the effort of posting them is too great. I may put up some of the short ones later.

This sentence had been started many times but never finished. It feels like I have the biggest discrepancy between what I want to write and what I can write. I could carry on like this, writing a series of seemingly unconnected sentences with no flow and no meaning like typing a long set of words to test an input field. But that would be pointless. It seems that finding all that poetry has made me think that I will never be able to write anything more that I consider as good as this. If just once I could finish off a poem idea and not get distracted along the way I would be happy. It is sometimes as if I knew exactly what to say but somewhere in my head, a little demon, had got in between the thought apparatus and the control of writing implement apparatus. One of the tracks on the Manhattan research CD, is a little tour through the brain of Raymond Scott and it is quite scary what images it brings to mind. I am beginning to feel anxious that this time has been wasted that I should not write anything at all unless it has some form of meaning. The clocks went back this weekend and that has added to the unreality of this time. We should be halfway through the afternoon by now and yet it is still lunchtime.

These sentences should be finished and balanced, as long or as short as they need to be to convey the meaning required. Prose can be poetry. Where is the dividing line? The line between comedy and tragedy is blurred as much. We are back to the fading in of musical technique, the changes from cacophony to euphonium that turn horror into love. My thoughts are turning to treacle, like the mind of that boy with the wine and the shed in the garden. It is difficult to keep going, to even put finger to keypad. The effort of pressing the keys is physically more difficult and with this problems of lack of strength, there is the problem of dexterity. The more I think about what I am doing here, the less accurate is my typing. The world outside the little bubble that encompasses this keyboard, this screen and this body is swimming in my eyes and there is no cure, just a descent into a black and senseless void.

A few deep breaths and the oxygen revives me. I want to collect everything I have ever written and turn it into pulp. How much clean, new paper would all that make? I have so much of it here in my hands. It would be as difficult to destroy as it would be to jump off a bridge. Throw nothing away and you will never be disappointed.

High Posts From the Low Countries

When Princess

Your courtly, gifted, heavy intellect
has brought me to my knees.
In space defined by colour
all your artifice has flown
like tower guardians in visions
of the damdedest castle fall.

Plaintains scent the spirit's air
with envy from another conflict
and doctrine fails its aims
against your father's wish,
the sweet device of
Catholic Honesty.

The broken palace falls in shade
at your captivity;
The politics of sisterhood
have broken in the face
of all ancestral blindness
and these gentle cousin's wars.

And to your book, we fall;
what tiny scrap marks interest?
and how the early details fire
some deep, deep ranging thought,
some European image
of familial religion.

Almost Full Moon. The Luxurious Voice of the Answering Machine

I finally located the Manhattan Research CDs along with the CD version of Metal Box. Pity I can't find the best of Bert Kaempfert cd anywhere but there you go.

I also found a large pile of poems from about ten years ago. Small sample follows :-

Arctic Logician

I am the ice-cold calculation,
the algebra of seeking out
pursuit,

possession of the complement,
a face to echo and remark on
such as this.

I am the pad of the lordly paw,
the fur that ruffles in your breath
and gaze,

gradual slice of animal intent
from speech that comes so slowly
now in grace.

I am the chase in the Autumn cold,
the kill of the innocent of wood
and field,

fear of the cut of crystal teeth
of me, the civilising influence
I have caught.

I am the wound in your routine,
ill logic in your engineering
fear of flight,

phagic darkness in the circulation,
chemicals to turn the mind;
desire lightened.

I just typed that while listening to Sprite "Melonball Bounce" on the Manhattan Research CD which was about as incongruous as you can get. Anyway, if you know my obsessions, you may be able to work out what this poem is based on or at least influenced by. I have also found a set of poems I wrote during the 1991 Gulf War one of which is a mini-play consisting of conversations between the various missiles in the news at that time. I am trying to decide whether to post it.

I hate the weekend when the clocks go back. It seems to throw my idea of time right out. Humans seem to have a great ability to estimate time passing but that maybe because we have had a lot of practice. What about absolute direction? I once read a novel called "The boy who span" about the first child conceived in space who grew up to have an inbuilt sense of the universe. he always tried to orient himself with some reference line so that he was continually spinning and turning somersaults. I cannot find any reference to this book but it was in our school library. If anyone knows of it then please write to me. I think eventually he was chosen to meet Aliens who had contacted earth. It was probably really naff but I only remember it being far more realistic than normal Sci-Fi.

I was thinking of OCRing all the poems I found but the thought of re-typing them seems better. I suppose then I would be tempted to revise them which is probably not a good idea. All I did when I typed Arctic Logician was take out a few semi-colons and replace them with commas. Anyway, poetry is what you decide it is going to be. Poetic Licence is just that. Then again, that leads to ee cummings doesn't it?

I have all this time to write and nothing in my head to writer about save these ancient poems. There appears to be no 'missing link'; the stuff I talked about a few weeks ago which is absolute rubbish seems to have no segue into the stuff I have just found. The only difference between this 1991 collection and the stuff I do now is the length of the lines. I was very into short punchy lines which conveyed short images and memories but now I seem to have gone a bit 'corporate'. Maybe I should try and return to the half-length lines. There is something that does strike me; that I never complete the image because I run out of specifics to do so. I want to go back to all these poems and re-do them but I am sure that would be a mistake. I am talking about these poems so much; I should really put down another one.

The Quantel Darlings

Bury them!,
Those with their black shirts
and black doors shadowing
the moon-sprung ideologues
with Brno dead.
They are elite
and vanishing,
following the moon to victory
in sulphurous skies.

Where the black and white
have spun together,
in sequel,
lost and planetary,
irrelevant to urban things;
this doggerel.

The rhythm of the high
had broken them;
the spiteful sparks of truth
we had.
They've cut their hair,
reduced to parody
and lied and spent their way
through lightness to destruction.

The city falls,
crushed with the weight of recall.
to a bankrupt palace,
with infantile angelics,
the Quantel darlings.
Quantel equals GOD.

I have been choosing short poems; some of them are three, four or even five pages long. Aren't you glad that I can't get it together to type any of those?

Orreryery Schismism

Just what is so funny about the phrase "I have everything that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ever did"?

Synecdoche and Metonymy

I wanted to write a really angry piece about someone but I cannot be bothered as his or her misdemeanour is so low-life that reacting to it in any specific way is pointless. I know the anger inside my head and where it is directed and that is enough.

I used to think that my being insulted at school for being the kid who wanted to read a book rather than play football was because I was in the wrong and I should be more like the rest of the kids. But it is a sudden realisation that this attitude is the mild end of the dislike of difference that this country still seems to be ingrained. The difference between the attitude of kids at school and that of the people I went to college with was marked. I may have been lucky iin that I went straight from school to college and into a course where most of the other students were significantly older than me (at least three of them should have retired by now). I am right and all those anti-intellectual morons are wrong. Still they are happy with the level of stimulation that goes into their heads so why should I worry. This force-feeding of popular culture is like the novel-writing machines of nineteen-eighty-four. Why bother to convince someone that there is a whole world - many worlds - within books? Keep it elitist I say. It is a pity that there is no 'Ironic' setting for the font, a sledgehammer signifier for which I apologise.

Anyway, no irony here; I am right and they are wrong.

Music is - A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe by John Surman

Tell me about your chldhood. No!

All that sounds so pompous. Why should I bother about anyone else? The world goes on without me worrying about it. The tree in the quad is still there.

I am still in the middle of The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. I know I am not supposed to talk about it but I have found myself so emotionally detached from the story as to be relatively comfortable about it. I cried at the end of Laurie Lee's biography but no Sylvia Plath book ever made me any more than slightly unhappy. Thinking about it, they actually made me quite chirpy trying to unravel the attitudes of the main character. For instance, the current chapter is simply called 'Boys' and that is what it is about. The book does not run chronologically and each chapter is about a single aspect of Plath's life. It is true that apart from the first chapter which describes her death, the subjects have been chosen so that they take us through her life in the general direction which lives play out in but there is a great overlap between them. The concept of each major event fades in and out as the chapters progress but you don't feel any more than a general sense of time. Occasionally I feel that the author is simply lifting analyses from other biographies and especially from The Bell Jar - which he always indicates. You can always sense the Author pussyfooting around the 'fair-use' clause about copying poetry.

How on earth is the film going to be meaningful without lots of the poetry? Maybe they have poetry wranglers like the music composers who write songs in the style of popular music to get the exact mood of a piece without falling foul of the copyright. I read somewhere recently that it is often not the exact order of notes which defines the real essence of a piece of music but the feel of the sound. It is possible for someone to be convinced that a piece in a style is the original on which it is based. "Give me ten lines of Plath style poetry about .. er ... death and stuff, by tomorrow."

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose.

This is Not a Dream

Music is - She Hangs Brightly by Mazzy Star.

I leave here feeling slightly chilled. The atmosphere is heavy with the scents of a dark corner of the garden or even of the inside of one of the sheds, all damp wood and dried flower heads. On a rough table there is a tub of Nasturtium seeds drying for planting next year. The tools lie haphazardly, unused for years, peeling red and green and still with the dirt of the last dug potatoes stuck to the blades. This is a birthday I think. Somewhere close by, someone is smiling at their cards, regretting the continuing absence of the senders. I love this quite. It is just warm enough in here to sit back and close my eyes. It is a womblike existence, the light diffused through the walls is sufficient to see by and maybe I can find a horticultural book of some sort close by. Looking round further, I can see a few bottles of dark coloured liquid stacked under a wooden tressle. They look like wine. They may be wine. I hope they are wine. I shuffle over to them, take one bottle and uncork it. It smells like deep red wine and I glug it down. It has not travelled far for it tastes of local vegetables. I have found the absent gardener's homemade wine. I cannot tell how strong it is and will have to wait for sleep to tell me. Next to the wine, I find the books I knew must be here. There are indeed books about plants and gardens but there are others as well. There are books about travel and winemaking, some engineering, some novels and some of what a colleague of mine might call 'artistic magazines'. I light the oil lamp and begin to read a book about Scottish Islands, comfortable that I will not have to leave for days. Do you believe I did not look at the magazines? The old fellow must have kept them in here so his wife did not find them.

I know he did not leave the house for years and for the last few months did not even leave his bed. He sailed the world in the mad destructions of his mind but they found him out and started booting his door in at night. We never knew who he killed. I suppose we could find out but I know that nobody left alive cares much about it now anyway. Lord I though I heard him then, shouting down the garden because he could see the oil light. But I don't believe in ghosts, even this late and in this darkness. He was the madman at the bottom of the garden. Those beat up old trousers and that threadbare cardigan. He was so abnormal. It may be the difference in ages but I cannot get on with that sort of person. They are the ones responsible for the mess we are in. Vote them out.

Nobody votes anymore. They made it so easy for us didn't they? Online voting, swipe cards, even used the lottery machines and still we don't vote. Things happen with or without a Government. He would have died with or without a trial. Either at the hands of the crowd like he did or in the white room where they pumped him full of drugs. We watched that crowd the day he died. They simply rolled over him and he died somewhere in there but we never saw him afterwards. My mother said we were too young to look at such stuff but there were plenty of mothers with their kids screaming like the rest of them. You can see why can't you but people dying is so common now that we don't bother to note it anymore. They used to have an offence called murder. That is what they killed him for. It is not on the statute books anymore. I think it isn't. There are so many more serious crimes aren't there? My friend was caught for saying something nasty about his teacher. She nearly hit him but that is worse isn't it. I don't hate anyone any more. It is too much effort. Don't love anyone either for the same reason.

Maybe I still love my mother. She was warm and nice like this shed. I would follow her anywhere. My brother and I got separated from her one-day at a big agricultural show and I spent the hour it took to find her with my heart in my mouth. It felt like that anyway. I couldn't even drink because of that. And when we found her I couldn't speak. All that and then a few years later she died and I cannot remember how I felt then. I didn't cry then though my dad tells me I went mad a few months later; smashed up all the toys I still had. I only wanted books after that. You can create a whole world in your head that any number of toys will never match. He has loads of books. Sorry - had loads of books. Who owns this house now? I don't know. There isn't a sign to say keep out. We just do. Until now. Daft dare really. Spend a night in his old shed and what do I get for doing it? Nothing. I should have brought my Walkman. No! I would not have been able to hear those ghosts I don't believe in.

It was a sultry day when they executed him I think. The locals all called it an execution but it looked like a pack of hounds to me. I saw some on an old film once, tearing a fox to shreds. Far worse than the dead cat we found this morning. At least that was still in the form of a cat and not in small red shreds. The dogs just spat them out because of course you cannot eat a fox. What I meant was, the dogs cannot eat a fox. Of course we cannot eat a fox though I seem to just know that without knowing why. Why can't you eat a fox? I suppose you can eat anything. Is there anything to eat in here? Nothing at all. Still I have his wine. Not made me sleepy yet. Did you know that there are no trees on Shetland? Well not many anyway. It says here that the best Lobsters are found at Scalloway. I always thought Lobsters were red but apparently they only go that colour when you boil them. I have never had Lobster. Is it one of those if-it-costs-a-fortune-I-must-pretend-that-it-is-delicious foods, like caviar? Had that at my Grandparents Golden Wedding. Just a lot of fishy salt if you ask me. Preferred the toast that came with it. Dead toast. All toast must be dead. I think the wine has got to my brain.

The phrase "sweet Molly" just popped into my head for no reason. You know when you go to sleep and you hear someone say something to you and you cannot work out whether it was real or just a Hypnagogic dream? I hear my dad sometimes but I always know it isn't really him. Why "sweet Molly"? Who is Molly? I hope she is nice. I just heard her surname in the dark and that is quite spooky. Molly Spender I think she said. Oh now I have decided in here (Taps head with finger) that it was Molly herself speaking. She sounds nice. No accent. Like a newsreader. Must be sleep that does this. I dream of newsreaders sometimes. Not just the girls, but they come to me and tell me what happened during the day and then when I wake up I don't have to worry about what happened because it is just news and gone and I cannot do anything about it. Of course I cannot do anything about it before it happens. I can only do things about the time right now. The present they call it. Yes I know I am being silly but it is the only real thing in the whole world and the only point in time that you can affect. Molly is calling again. Molly Spender is the author of the book about islands. I knew she was not real. Well she is real but not here and not in the present. There is no dust jacket on the book so I don't know what she looks like. I will find out when I get home. Tomorrow.

A Common-sense Thumbs-Down

Music is - The Grotto - Kristin Hersh

I remember reading somewhere that Adam Hart-Davis has refused to dress up for any more of his history programmes. Now I wonder if this is the reason why Dan Cruickshank has taken over from AHD on What the Industrial Revolution Did for Us. Mr Cruickshank doesn't dress up either but everyone he talks to does. It is almost as if he has found a time machine and is talking to the actual characters involved which in some way makes the whole thing a bit more interesting. It was all very civilised and gave a slightly weird sense of time to the programme. I have written in my notebook 'What social changes would time-travel bring about?" I had this idea that Dan Cruickshank was not the in vanguard of time-travel and had arrived when it was already becoming commonplace, a matter-of-fact experience. Of course there are all the paradoxes of time travel where you have to allow for alternative universes created if you affect the present by mucking around with the past but it seems commonsense that if you go back in time you always reach the 'seed' universe for the present you depart from. But then again, this also suggests that it is impossible to get back to the present you left either. Maybe you would have a sort of bookmark. All academic in this present I know, but is it any more far-fetched than things which happen in our current world? Implications are massive.

Spelling is Bnuk. I have removed a few commas after reading this article and I don't mean chasing the butterflies off the rosemary in the garden. (My daughter apparently has a pet butterfly called Pepé though she insists Pepé is a girl. )

Dead Cat Bouncing.

A cat at the lights this morning made me change lanes,
a flat-headed corpse of a cat, Schroedinger's detritus,
blown apart in that box, or poisoned but very dead
and left as landfill garbage
And then in another world, a dead cat walks and talks,
and knows its fate in this universe. A coupled particle
has joined this cat to that; sold it tales of LD-50 and
yields of cyanide, shampoo and bullet brains.

There really was a dead cat at the lights this morning. Not sure if it actually has a copy in any alternative universe but this is what it made me think of. Isn't the world exciting? Blocked now so maybe time to go.

Quiet Americans

Taking care of business. A slow walk in the sunshine and a denial of the future.

Can you see why people turn to religion? The black clouds come down like ink and I want to get out of here; to live in a small corner of the church where people will feed me and bring me clothes. Think of the whole range of things you could be experiencing and compare this to how you really live. Are you not better off in most of them?

I am afraid I have been busy writing poetry so you are not getting many posts of quality here.

Your Television is now a Radio

The Christmas book is decided. It is Ted Hughes' collected poems which as a bonus includes the privately printed extra poems from Birthday Letters. I had it in my hands yesterday but as the RRP is £40 and it is £28 on Amazon, I can wait. If it had been £28 yesterday it would now be in the house. The picture of Mr Hughes on the front is strange. At first I thought it was a powerful and contended image but the more I look at it, the more it seems that he is in the depths of despair, almost rendered static by the thought of something really bad. There is of course the question of when to get Three Tales by Steve Reich but the Ted Hughes is the focus at the moment, if you can possibly focus on 1300 pages.

It took me years to realise the author of that favourite Jackanory book - The Iron man - was also Ted Hughes. Bring back Jackanory I say. There is no programme on TV these days, which encourages children to tune in again to hear the end of a story. There has been a trend towards single one-offs where it does not matter if one episode is missed. Careful there Bob - sounding very middle-aged there. Time to go and do something else.

Thanks to the Spanish Air Force

Two great British institutions combined in one programme yesterday. Oliver Postgate narrating the story of the BBC radiophonic Workshop on BBC4. There wasn't much I didn’t know already but it was put together in the same string-and-sealing-wax way that the early RW tapes were done and so became a very powerful set of images to go with the sound. The crew behind Look Around You were also on commenting on how the workshop's music was exactly what they wanted for their spoof.

Are you the right age to remember the BBC's schools' programmes from the late sixties and early seventies.? Does that clock send you back to sitting cross-legged in the hall while waiting for some 15-minute gem on The Water Cycle. There was always one on the Water Cycle, using any number of stock shots of clouds, rain, rivers and sun. Quite powerful really.

Apologies for the lack of Friday Lunchtime blog. We were, almost to a man, trying to complete the minipops quiz. Do not start it during work or you are in danger of not doing any. It can be hacked without any password or special software but where is the joy in that?

Yossarian Lives

Music is Substance 1987 - New Order

(not quite Joy Division but read this)

All names in the following piece have been changed.

I should stop reading the comments regarding the Israeli/Palestinian 'problem'. It seems that no one wants to stand up and say that both parties need to have there heads knocked together and told to stop it. There are plenty of complexities in the situation and I know if I add my comments on the situation, someone will have a return comment on why I am wrong so I will not bother. This sounds like fence sitting I know but anything that saves the life of one person is worth doing. I am afraid this gets us into net lives lost/saved, which seems a terrible way to determine the success or failure of any plan for peace. It seems to common these days for success to be defined in easily measurable terms like lives saved or hours waiting in casualty but this ignores the complexity of the situations being measured. The terms of measurement should be a general perception that things are getting better though these criteria seem to be more and more defined by the media. I know I rage against the huge amount of money wasted in the health service on management and empty initiatives designed to have a positive affect on the numbers, but the breakthrough will never come while people's idea of casualty is 3 hour waiting time.

I wasn't much of a fan of my sociology lectures at college but there is one phrase that I have always remembered - that problems occur when people begin to see their own role in a system as an end in itself rather than the means to an end. Does the Health Service Manager who decides that all wards should write a mission statement believe that this makes the nurses and doctors who write the statement any better at giving the care they were trained to give? I bet in a lot of cases he or she just sees the goal as being to get every ward to write one and when the last tick is in the box, the job is done. Something as complex as our health service cannot run on boxes ticked. I am sure you are aware that in most cases an illness does not end at a specific moment - break an arm and it heals gradually maybe leaving residual pain for years. Even a simple cold doesn't go away in the night; there is no point when it can be said to be over. There is no bottom line. The running of a system designed to cope with such fuzzy edged concepts needs to be fuzzy itself. Lists, targets, mission statements etc are just an insult to the complexity and judgement of the people responsible for delivery of the basic service. I did read that there is one manager (however that is defined is .. er .. undefined) for every bed in the Health service. There is that old office-wall staple about the loss of a seemingly important person in an organisation, is like removing your arm from a tub of water; the gap is instantly filled. I am sure you have seen cases where a 'manager' is absent from your organisation and things run just as smoothly (sometimes better but that may just be specific cases). I am not saying we don't need managers, but after all, who are responsible for appointing the managers in the first place? Yes! Managers!

I could go into specifics of the ridiculous systems in place in order to facilitate management but they wind me up too much. There is a lot of self-justification going on.

Blank Stares and end-of-the-pier Humour

Just accidentally read some really reactionary stuff about the situation in the occupied territories. I will not link because I do not want even my meagre bandwidth to link to theirs. The authors (I struggle to work out how people with that attitude actually managed to learn to write) seemed to think that the only solution involved napalm, rat-poison and ploughing the ground with salt. The expletive count was way to high for comfort as well. Hooray for reasoned argument.

Sometimes I feel like a little child, who has not yet learned to walk, sitting in between two armies situated about a mile apart. There is no one else, just all these soldiers and little me in the dust. That seems to be the level of extremism. Democracy was invented two and a half thousand years ago and sometimes it just appears to be a sop to justify the building of weapons. You know when they start towards each other, exactly what is going to happen to me. Count my atoms on the wind.

Sorry! I have been keeping the dark stuff at bay; it was just the extremism of those sites that got to me. It was a 'what's the bloody point' moment. No more today I promise.

Did I ever tell you I was friendly with Trainspotters? Gricers I think they like to be known as these days though maybe that’s just one of the sub-divisions like in Bird-Watching, where true devotees are birders, Scalp collectors are Twitchers and those who only go out when it is not raining are dudes. My dad will insist he is a birder and I would have to agree with him. Back to the rail-freaks. At least two of my classmates were heavily into train spotting and I actually accompanied them on a rail-tour up to the North Yorkshire railway (that of heartbeat and numerous other period pieces).

Well now I have god rid of 90% of the few readers I have, can I start being depressed again? No? Oh well! Just a thought. Actually talking of trainspotting made me depressed anyway so I had to stop. It has reminded me of an idea I had yesterday. This blog is basically everything I can remember, interesting or otherwise so why not start at the beginning and write down everything? Of course it would not be complete and you might go back and update it. It would be a sort of fractal like this :- you would write down the main events like birth and marriage and then maybe fill in an event or memory for each year. You could keep breaking it down until everything you could possibly remember was in there. I am not saying that the following is the starting point for this idea as I am sure it should be done off line but I am going to start with what I can remember.

Early memories are not really of events; they are of places. I could say what my first memory was but I would still have earlier ones of place and people. I used to take 5 years of age as the boundary between the fuzzy memories of early childhood and the more definite ones that come with school. Of course the boundary is fuzzy in the extreme. My first definite memory that I can associate with an age is of running unfettered in a grass field by the sea. I have no idea where this was though I seem to remember being 4. Anyway before this there was the first house I can remember. It was a mock-Tudor detached house in Beeston, Nottingham. It had a piece of lawn off to one side with a tree stump in the middle. Sometimes I was placed on this tree-stump but it was too high for me to get down from. I seem to remember being able to climb it later but I think I was too small for that when we left that house. At the back, the house was pebble-dashed or had concrete over the wall. One year, this collapsed and killed our tortoise who was called slowcoach (after the one in Bill and Ben no doubt.

I can remember a Christmas morning when I woke up very early to open my stocking. Christmas day was not a big thing as far as I recall but I got a small blue torch and used it to read under the bedclothes. It had a tiny little bulb and was flat like a modern stick of deodorant. I think it may have been that year that I got a bike for the first time because I remember the kitchen of the house and going out of the door. I was allowed to cycle round the block on my own. This links me to the memory of a woman we knew round the corner. Her name was cybil and she had a house with lots of windows that probably meant it had a conservatory. There were certainly plenty of plants. No idea what happened to her. Down the road, either next door or a couple of houses down, there lived two girls, older than me, Amanda and Angela or 'Manda n' Angela' as I called them. I remember pretending to be a fish in their front room while they stood on the furniture and tried to catch me. An early crush was present at this point.

There was another 'girlfriend' who lived a couple of roads away. I think her name was Laura but I do remember that she lived in Devonshire Avenue (there direct clues to the location). I cannot remember who started the joke but we had a saying - "you've been down Devonshire Avenue 'avenue?" Somewhere close to Laura's house there was a nursery school. Now I cannot work out if this one is the same as the one I really recall. On one day, I was so sad at being left at nursery, that I threatened to walk home. It wasn't far and I think I may have tried to go. The nursery I do remember well was run by a Miss (or Mrs) Depechetoi (doesn't that mean hurry up?). It was a great place, a building on one side of a huge lawn with the owner's house on the other side where you might get invited if you were good. I don't think I ever went so I must have been really bad all the time. The school had a tree house and lots of toys and rope ladders and bikes and potted meat - er - no - that's in Ratty's basket in The Wind in the Willows.

Rubbish hey?

Music for Supermarkets

In a pram on the step outside a terraced house in a medium sized north-west Satellite town, a baby gurgles comfortably as the signature hum of his town goes on. This hum is his whole universe for he cannot see over the edge of the pram and even if he could, his eyes do not yet focus. Inside the house, his mother gets on with things she needs to do. This is a safe world, come rain or sun, the baby hides under the cover, counting his toes and other general baby things. Occasionally a neighbour will walk past him and maybe smile or even tickle him. At this he smiles back and gurgles more for this is his world. High above the pavement, warm and happy until teatime of nappy time or any of the other times known only to babies which make them grizzle and complain. Sometimes they do it because they can and sometimes us adults do things for the same reason - simply because we can. We are here to enjoy ourselves; there is no purpose. The despair we may have is irrelevant for it makes no difference to how the world runs. The narrative describes the simple life we lead without analysis. I would sit and watch the world for half an hour and have enough thoughts to fill half a year. The mind is like a Tardis, far bigger on the inside that it appears on the outside. Think about thinking and you will know this to be true.

How to write so much that the world is described? I know this is impossible. Think of a museum display, lit by ultra violet to make white clothes show up bright and leave everything else in darkness. Add music and create an installation, a version of the world with one real factor changed or removed. Just one thing different about the way physics works in your personal universe and you have changed the world. Change one thing in the way you write and the world is changed again. This is nice music. It makes me think of places far away and calm. We are insects of some sort, a mess of robotics. Maybe we are the nanotechnology of some bigger race and we have lost our interaction with our creators. We have developed our own minds but deep down we stick to the collective mess that we have called society or culture.

Stick to your little views of the world. Learn to add up the columns of figures as Alice says and learn to read the approved texts. Do not step outside the box for that way lies madness and shame. I would lie down and die if I had to accept everything they throw at us. There is nothing real in most of what we are required to do to stay within the accepted boundaries. It sounds dangerously like an anti-war sentiment. You could define the acceptability of a war using some sort of scale - possibly the Kitchener scale so that World War II might score 8 with hindsight because of the discovery of how evil the enemy (The scale is always defined by the victorious) actually were but at the time would only struggle to get to 4 or 5. Poor taste? Maybe but no worse than sitting and comparing how bad various recent atrocities wth reference to others. The worst thing that happened since WWII? Are you sure?

Budget Discussions

Music - Homrong - Musicians of the National Dance Company of Cambodia

Some tortuous conversation got me thinking about how The Thunderbirds crew got all that stuff built on the island without the rest of the world finding out. I am sure there are many discussion threads about this on various fan sites so I will not contaminate this discussion by trying to find out. My views are either that a huge construction crew of loyal builders was ferried out there on smallish boats and then paid to keep the secret or that Brains started small and worked his way up using machines. It would be like firing a thread across a ravine and then dragging a piece of string followed by a rope until you have enough structure to make a bridge. Brains would have started with a little caterpillar machine that could build bigger machines and in turn they could build the huge things required to build the whole thing. Of course he would have to have had some sort of Santa-Claus machine to turn the rock into metal. I think I had better end this now before I invent so much "outside the text" that I create the whole world.

That is an interesting thought. If you try to define how something from narrative media (thanks for the term Alice) could have been achieved, you could end up having to define the real world. One thing means another has to happen and before you know it you have required everybody in the world to eat nothing but rice pudding to sustain your creation. There is never anything outside the text. You can make it up but try and sustain it. I want to say something about how you can create a whole world in a book with very little effort. It is a bit like the discovery that the brain "fills in the blanks" in its sensory input rather than trying to make sense of a full set of information. You don't need to fill out a book with heavy detail like Dickens, you can create a very real-seeming world just with a few 'hooks'. Isabel Allende does this. I have not read enough Magic Realism to know if this is a trait of this particular genre but I suspect it is so maybe there is already enough discussion about it.

I am afraid I did the normal thing when confronted with the Robert McCrum's list of top 100 books in the Observer and counted how many I had actually read rather than looking for ones I had not read and should. (I got 7 and my wife got 9). So many of them are copyright free that I have no excuse not to download them and read them on the Palm Pilot.

Music has changed to Happiness by Lisa Germano. I have been warned (probably correctly) that my blogs are tending towards the dark side and this confirms this. Don't read anything into this. I just like them and I do have to add that I have had to turn off some of the sadder records because I just couldn't listen to them. Which leads me to this question; why is Shiny Happy People not included on the REM Best of? Do they want to be seen as 'not too upbeat'? Maybe Shiny Happy people is a really depressing song - I don't know what it is actually about but it sounds happy and has happy in the title so it is a happy song. Maybe they just forgot. Michael Stipe maybe standing right now with his palm on his temple saying 'Doh'.

No poetry today. I seem to have a minor burnout. I didn't have to get the bus home yesterday so I didn't have any composing time. Still need that hour a night.

Just a Note about Alice Bachini

I read Alice's blog daily and sometimes she makes me mad and sometimes I just nod my head and say Alice knows everything. I cannot remember why I started reading Alice's blog but I am glad that I do. She would probably lump me in as an idiotarian but the bit recently about the kids sitting in rows adding up and learning to read Government approved drivel hit a switch. A colleague of mine from way back had the idea that the standardisation of education was a plot (either by Government or some mysterious cabal of business men who he thought really ran the country) to make everyone stupid so they couldn't question the god awful leaders they have. A sort of extension to Newspeak. Those of you who have not gone off to quote me out of context should remember that I do not agree with this. We look for conspiracies to explain such things when in actual fact they are really the result of pure incompetence.

Keep it up Alice - I won't agree with you all of the time (or even much of it) but you are more intelligent than I am and maybe you are right and I am wrong.

The Bass String Snaps.

The Angles were a complex race when they first got to Britain. Some of them were very attractive and were of course known as cute Angles but then again some were a bit slow and naturally were called obtuse Angles. Then there were the twins who were congruent Angles. I don't think I need to tell you what the outdoor-living or home-loving Angles were called. Extend this pathetic attempt at humour until it becomes boring or did that happen at about the word 'Britain' way back there Barbie. Sorry! Thought I was Perry Cox from Scrubs for a minute.

Apologies for that. It could come straight out of Horrible History book and probably did. Click the Picture for some more on these.



You can get this picture on a baseball cap by the way which might go well with the Hogwarts cap my daughter bought me.

I found a loose-leaf folder of really old poems in the garage at the weekend. Almost made myself reading the really early ones but there was no transition from the sugary rhyming rubbish to ones in the current style. Maybe the transitional ones are elsewhere. Needless to say, I will not be posting any of them. They are probably the reason most people seem to think that poetry is a weedy art - hullo clouds, hullo sky - rather than one of the easiest ways to make a point if of course you don't become an obtuse Angle.

Music is Fossil by Melanie Garside. Her sister Katie was the singer in Daisy Chainsaw. Never heard of them? Could never get their vinyl to play? I bet you don't dare tell them.

Very bitty this morning. Maybe lunchtime will be more productive and consistent.

Rising Above the Fuzziness

Take a random fraction of an existing piece of writing and try to use it for something else. This sounds a bit like an oblique strategy and indeed it is an attempt to spark something for this entry. However, it has all lost itself in a fuzz of uncertainty and I can't really decide where I want this entry to go. At this point maybe I should give up and go and fly a kite or something. There is a mind map far away which describes this exact state of mind; it is the prettiest thing I have ever seen on paper. It is my own mind described and coloured into something lacking any meaning whatsoever. Each sentence here is a fragment of that map, a tiny sliver broken from the main flint, a stand-alone artwork describing some memory of mine from long ago but which cannot be re-constructed. Its existence is a link to its source but cannot be used to find the starting conditions.

I look back through the lifetime of memories, searching for something to record in another medium, but there is no signpost, and no lighthouse to flag up the special places. Everything sinks back sown into the fuzzy mist and links with general hum of this society and culture.

I remember some really empty days when the build-up of expectation on what I should become in the world was overwhelming. It seemed that all the people I knew just accepted the flow of their lives without any plan but that was not enough. But now, I cannot see any plan; I have become like all those dark rumbling shapes in the fuzzy mist, a reactor and not a catalyst. There is no defined interaction between me and anyone else. It all just happens. The routines change gradually but never in ways that make me feel disjointed or disconnected from the rest of the world. It seems like you are born on a pedestal, seeing the whole world and you at the centre. But as you see further, the whole patchwork of the fields close to you joins up with the darker cities and then the seas and other countries until you see the whole world. The light that travels from the far places, bounces like radio waves to make a planet sized mirage, all places as one and joined up on the other side. If you get a powerful enough telescope you could see the back of your own head.

I was sitting waiting for the train this morning, just staring at the platform, thinking when this act of staring made me think of where I was actually looking. Sometimes, at night I think of the whole world below me; I travel in my mind through the bed and the floor and our sitting room, under the house through the Earth until I emerge in the ocean at the Antipodes. I only assume that it is ocean; I have no globe and no way of calculating. Maybe there is a small island directly underneath our house. I think of the fish that I might pass in that ocean as I travel to the surface. How many have not been seen by humans. Anyway, on the station platform, I tried to work out where I would have to look to emerge from the line of travel in various places around the world. Moscow would just be a quite shallow glance while Bali would be a deep oblique stare, off to the South West somewhere. And then those bomb-test Atolls, as fragile a piece of land as can exist and still be called an island. The most beautiful places on earth, one of the few places where we have a chance to keep it like it should be and we fracture it with our obscene weapons until this, a whole island, a home for birds and fish, cracks in two and sinks.

The dark cracking sounds of some speaker have interrupted this, like the Nuclear bombs almost. I have lost a thought I had which is worse that losing the paper on which that thought is written. There is a chance that the paper may be found but a thought gone from the mind is gone forever. But then again, we are not supposed to forget anything are we? All the weird ideas I have had over the years are still floating around in that mush, being shuffled and amended until I can no longer be as sure of the past as I am of the future. Now is the only definite thing. The instant I press the 'a' key is the only thing you can be sure of at the time you read it. The rest is a fuzziness, of things you would swear had happened but of which you have no proof and the mist of things that you are sure will happen but again must do so before anyone will believe you.

Someone may be feeding this pile of senses to me. I may be just lying while some machine conditions my brain to accept the sensory stimulus it is creating. I may be the only mind and some tinkerer has created my mind to see how it reacts to his gameplay. It would not be difficult to do. The state of my mind is determined by a few thousand external factors and the way my mind reacts to them. But if my mind has been created how has the "program" of my reactions to the stimulus been created? If I create a game and design in the reactions of the artificial players, are they not just extensions of me? You may then take a further step and let the entities learn; you are performing a type of mete-teaching, which hopefully removes your own personality. Every muppet was left handed because Jim Henson was.


That sounds like paranoia. I know it is not true. Occam's Razor would suggest that the simplest solution to what we feel is the best. Simple and elegant solutions are always the answer and the answer here is the one to which science has always worked towards with a few backward steps. This does not remove the fantastic from the universe but it does lead us to accept rationality as a source for our own stability. It would be sad to remove all the spiritual side. You can accept certain levels of belief and still be totally rational. A deep understanding of the cutting edge ideas on cosmology actually opens up the universe to time and space outside the universe, before the big bang. But are these dimensions the same as ours. They cannot be. We could not take a spacesuit and travel to these regions. They would probably not be understandable in terms of our interaction with them. Know the tricky maths and you might understand them intellectually but never become connected or you not only die, your atoms will end up transformed into something altogether different from the matter here. Time will not run. There will be nowhere to send the wreath. Worse still, a single particle interacting with this "other space" may indeed bring about at the very least, the transformation of both spaces into something different from either. At worst it may result in the destruction of both.

I know I promised but ...

I dreamed I could not write this morning. I could see myself trying to write my name and it was as if the image was out of sync with what my brain was trying to tell my hand to do. This of course was like a stutter in that I could not keep the writing going even by concentrating where my hand should be in the future; I just stopped. Strangely I was in my old office and my daughter was there handing out the post (Bring your daughter to work day perhaps). I only pass this on because of the problem with the writing; it worries me that I may be worrying about writing.

I have no music today; I had to get the bus in to work today rather than getting a lift which means there is no room in my bag for CDs. Let us see what this brings to the lunchtime blog. The blue mood of yesterday seems to have lifted a little. Sometimes it just happens without any stimulus - no worry about things going on. In fact it sometimes seems that a major worry keeps the depression at bay. I worked for a well-known telecoms company until a few months ago and for a time they faced serious problems. Well through all that worrisome time, I felt less down than I sometimes do now when things are quite stable.

The bus I get to work passes through the Liverpool University Campus (not where I went by the way) and one of the Medical School/Biology buildings is close to the road. Through the window of the second floor you can see rows and rows of specimens in formaldehyde. They are just too far away to enable you to identify the browny-yellow lumps but I can almost smell the pickle. I think I mentioned this in some previous entry but this reminds me of the prep-room between the two labs at my middle school. It was really the teachers' tea and coffee space but it was lined with shelves of pickled things - octopuses, rats and many unidentifiable things. There were also loads of bits of funny kit that we never got to use. One of these was a diamond crusted circular saw for cutting rocks. You could put your finger on the spinning blade edge without injury and yet it would slice a pebble in two in seconds.

Whistling and Banging in the Dark

It went from bad - Tigerlilly to worse The soundtrack to The Last of England. Now we are on Passion by Peter Gabriel.

I hope I can be included in the 50,000 blogs that are updated every day despite the fact that I don't write anything at weekends. This makes me feel slightly happier. It must be the weather that makes me feel so bad. It usually is. I have tried pulling my eyelid down and blowing my nose but that does not work. Too much poetry has made me sad and too much music in minor keys has only re-enforced that.

Off for some more poetry and a descent in to a circle of hell. Grant me strength to stay with this towering idea until the spring is over and the trees have won the battle with the winter.

Praying for Deep Water.

Life is pain. Get used to it! Sad songs are the only ones that matter. How do we build bridges and skyscrapers when we are all so mired in such depression? Maybe I should not be listening to this music :-

Tigerlilly - Natalie Merchant

Look deep in this sadness for the meaning and the key. I cannot argue with the idiots who write such drivel about the world. How can I be right and they be wrong? How can anyone be entirely right when the world is so complex. I am back to the idea of the general lack of understanding on how big the world actually is. There are people in high places with their big cars and their invisible jobs who don't get anything outside their own heads. There are 6 billion people on the planet and most of us don't act as though there are more than 6 million. You are a factor of 1000 out. Understand the solution is never going to be found while this is the case. We all bounce along as if the world is a happy place. I sound like I should be walking around with a sandwich board on proclaiming that the end is nigh. Wealth and Poverty! You've not been born 'til you get out of town.

I dreamed of being forced to work in air-traffic control. I could not handle the responsibility; looking after more than one aircraft was too much for me though my friends would say that all the planes have their own flight paths and would look after themselves. Does this smack of control freakery? I could not do this job. In waking life I worry about planes crashing which is an extension of my fear of flying. The police helicopter flies over our house regularly, so low that the whole building shakes and the air is compressed by the downdraft. That frightens me.

So many times today I have started sentences and deleted them simply because they do not fit or sound stupid. I cannot seem to find any thread, not that I do anyway. I will give up for this morning and maybe there will be some more at Lunchtime.

The Dresden Codex

How do you write words which describe the weird lispy noise that a vocoder makes? Better not think about it too much.

Did you write a poem yesterday. I wrote lots. No you can't read them yet. I also started reading Ariel's Gift seeing as I have managed to finish Birthday Letters. I read some real bombshells though many of them are from books I should have read already - The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez being one of them. I do not have the book here to paraphrase anything but I can remember Alvarez's analysis of the use of occult stuff - OuiJa etc - by Hughes and Plath. He said that Hughes had the emotional stability to handle the possible demons which might be released but that Plath, while intellectually stronger, was at huge risk of being deeply affected emotionally by her own revelations. This dabbling released a flood of issues - often related to the death of her father - which basically destroyed both her marriage and ultimately her life. Not sure I believe this totally but Alvarez knew them both and I did not. Not sure I would have wanted to know either of them to be honest. I have my own issues behind my interest in Plath and I am grateful that a side affect of this is further interest in Hughes. While you can appreciate Plath's poetry on a deep intellectual level, they rarely create what I could call emotional moments. Birthday Letters was so poignant and so tied up with both Plath's poetry and her life, that the emotional element becomes somehow personal and necessary.

Something I was going to look up regarding the photos on the cover of Ariel's Gift. They were taken by David Bailey, he of the Birth of the Cool. I was surprised that he was taking photographs of the great and the good in 1962 or even before. While looking for them, I came across this page of Plath's paintings.

This is called Dresden Codex because I once did a collage of the picture of Sylvia Plath on the front of Collected Poems (itself a drawing based on the photograph on Letters Home) stuck onto a page of the Dresden Codex cut out of Scientific American (Stopped buying that years ago - once cried desperately while in a pub in Chester reading in it about the effects on mines on children - Support the ICBL). I hope I have recovered.

I forgive you but I have to tell you a story.

Music is - None Too Soon - Allan Holdsworth

Call me fickle, but I skipped Seven Industrial Wonders to watch the BBCs updated version of The Pardoner's Tale. For some reason, a review of this made me watch and although lacking in any real character, the story bounced along begging resolution. The lack of character is actually something from the original anyway. Not a nice ending and I sometimes feel that there have been too many dramas with missing children or teenagers; this just raises every parent's fear when the risk of children being killed on the roads is far higher. We are back to our reverse obsession with the news. A parent who loses a child in a road accident is as devastated at the loss just as anyone would be. I never see the papers starting huge front-page campaigns to Name and Shame bad drivers when they kill far more children than any low-life. In fact some of the papers seem to spend as much energy on criticising police traffic campaigns as they do on screaming headlines about missing children. Drunk driving, Bad driving, Phone use while driving are all bad and they all kill people but somehow people think that because the culprits don't mean to kill, it is somehow less of a crime. Dead is dead!

Bus drivers! They are the worst. How can you control a bus and use a mobile phone? They not only want to kill themselves, they want to kill me and the 30 or so other poor creatures crammed into the seats with just about a Femur's length between them.

Obviously in best Nick Ross fashion, none of this is terribly likely. Don't have nightmares but then again the screaming headlines raise fear levels anyway. I admit that I spend a good percentage of the time worrying about my daughter and I will carry on worrying until she starts having to shout at me to overcome my deafness as I sit groaning and complaining about daytime TV not being as good as it was when that Young Richard and Judy started out.

I was really depressed when I heard the BJR Bloomer Personal Injury Solicitors radio ad for about the 90th time this week. I am loath to link to them as it gives them free advertising but hopefully reading the page will give you some idea of the yucky "I am here for you" style of their radio adverts. My wife tells me that daytime TV is infected with this sort of advert along with the "get out of debt free" ones. You do not get something for free despite what BJR Bloomer say. You may not pay them anything but Insurance rates go up so you pay more. And companies cannot afford the insurance and go out of business or start trading illegally so the economy suffers. Yes I do sound like I walked out of "Brief Encounter" but I really do hate the way society is all down to money and not general awareness of what is right and what makes people feel happy. I used to see the odd blank-eyed manager who made me think there is a person with no character but now they are everywhere, mind on money-making mode and with no account taken of people's feelings. It infects everyone. "Good morning. How can I help you? Glad to be of service" (© Douglas Adams). I am annoyed about it. I love everybody. Goodnight!

Oh dear! Ranty Friday. I do have a Clash CD in today but I think I ought to listen to Jah Wobble's The Inspiration of William Blake instead. Poetry and Bass lines. Wonderful indeed.

Unversed extra

Music - Permanent - Joy Division

Not helpful for a "hello clouds - hello sky" type of poem .. or "peom" while we are making Molesworth references. "Chiz" says Nigel.


I am afraid I have been away writing more poetry though I started before the music was Joy Division.

In the best tradition of "teaser" releases, here is one part of what I have been working at.

2. The Elastic Band 7/10/2003

A wife somewhere down the line,
became a revolutionary scholar and
played hooky without a net.
She wore an elastic band
to keep her pretty hair in check,
to tell of her devotion
to the Diesel world of flags
and militants.
This brick building brought crowds
from their firesides and
proof against the weather
to the rainy streets and cold cities.
It broke them,
made them smaller,
shrunk in their own worlds,
eccentrics, spun off centre
by the dark and lack of mothers.

One poem down the line
and into blue reality,
the world revolves around
irrelevant men and popsicle.
The words of raving strangers
make us ache like refugees
for counsel of their homeland.

This of course lets you know that there is at least one other part. The tragedy is that there are actually another four parts with a view to there being at least seven all together.

Exodus!