Archaeobotany Forever

I would like to say that I have learnt to let the bad things wash over me. But that would be a lie. Sometimes, they hit me out of the blue with a depression that makes Quattara look like high ground. I am not sure what today's is caused by but it may be some weird juxtaposition of some beautiful music I heard on the TV yesterday with yet more bombs going off. I often let the dark side worm its way into some bunker in my brain so that everything but me is the problem. I can sit there with this irrational self-righteousness in control while the rational bit left stands at the roadside shrugging its shoulders and thinking of ineffectual solutions. Today I have the idea that the bombers are little more than thugs who if they did not have their causes and their own self-righteousness, would be hanging around street corners, kicking dogs and shouting at the suits going by. Whenever I see the perpetrator of some atrocious crime being driven to or from court with the van running the gauntlet of a mob, I see the breeding ground for just such crimes. Abuse begets abuse. You don't need a study to tell you that. For all the papers running their campaigns to name such criminals, they are the breeding ground for the attitudes that are the base for the creation of such perversions. They are basically hypocritical, relying on our delight in horror and our lusts to sell papers. Yes, the dark side has me today. Time to find some Cocteau Twins for diversion.

The poems seem to have dried up recently. I can't work out what the trigger for the periods of creativity is. I have been feeling quite good for some time, which may explain why I don't need to write poems to cover that. Maybe some more will come out of this current time. Having told you that I am bluer than ever, that rational homunculus is sitting there still and seems to have actual control while the saliva-dripping one is just bouncing about causing no real damage. I have to find a visualization to get rid of it. I like Spring woods; they do it. I have a lavishly illustrated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that depicts the forest scenes in a beautiful way. Remember all those walks in the woods as a kid? Or the bit in AMSND when Bottom wakes up deep in the woods with Titania in love with him and all the fairies carrying out his every wish? Think of this, lie back and listen to something like Victorialand. There goes the madman! Out into his mad world with his mad friends, off to bomb something. Perhaps this should all be in the private diary, which I may or may not be writing. The problem now is that the lazy calm has emptied my head of any worthwhile ideas. I see the autumn corm, gold in the fields around our house, the sea waves blowing lazily across them, the catalogue of greens that forms the hills to the west and feel the heat built up over many summer months, promising to leave in deference to the early mornings of early autumn but not yet doing so. This was as I would want it to have been. Rural life is never quite so idyllic but there you go. Maybe someone envied us but all that would evaporate in the terrible cold and damp of the winter. Sometimes it went well below freezing, down into those depths of temperature which freeze the blood in the extremities and leave you wondering if you will ever be warm again. I see the autumn harvests, frozen into black knots in the trees, the berries and fruit, left rotting on the floor and then all mush turned to ice on hard ground. The mists flow through the valleys, like sleeping gas on some battlefield, a transmission of cold from the solid earth to the fragile bodies of all who walk through here. I would be back there in a second, made real again, but knowing all I know now. I said yesterday that I still felt like a kid; this is when I meant. What would you change about this? You have your own ideas I am sure so I do not need to tell you how to live your life differently. Time is over in this particular strand of existence, but all times exists in one universe. The me then is still real to me because I exist in memory and yet science might say that the me then is really real because time, although it cannot go backwards or move at a different rate from that which we experience psychologically, still exists, complete and with all its ethereal and momentary events. They will happen or have happened or are happening. That roadside bomb is just a tiny spark on this giant timeline. When the sun goes nova and humans have created themselves as pure thought floating in the nebula of the cosmos, that tiny release of energy will be nothing, a frozen ball of plasma in the great book that they mention in the Requiem.