Randomish Friday

Hello there to the Squid Wrestler! Did you guess it was me?



I don't really feel like a completely random entry today; Blogger is playing up and I have to keep pressing refresh to get anything to work. Where is Adam Hart-Davis when you need him? No updates since November? That's terrible! Too many explanation marks - Plings etc. Shouldn't that be exclamation?

Do you get the feeling that something big is going on? There is so much in the news that it is getting difficult to take it all in. Weddings and funerals and elections. It's all too much in a democracy.

My lauding and then dismissal of Richard Dawkins came in for some criticism from my wife yesterday. She told me I was too much of a scientist which wounds my poet's heart. However, for some years I have carried a thought that I may have been autistic to some extent and that the emotional content of the poems is a learned survival mechanism rather like a psychopath will learn to emote in order to fit in with the fallible and skittish, normal humans who surround them. Oh dear! Bag/Cat/escape scenario there! Back to the music. Where is Six Pianos?

All the way back and that Mary Magdalen sits comfortably, a sister of God in some well-furnished house, something out of history but still of the same time, her back to the dresser and a book - the book in her hands. I want to walk into that picture, out of the doorway and into the garden you see in the distance like Alice looking through that tiny door. The great and good are here to pay tribute - literally - to someone gone. There is always that presence in this picture, a spirit walking and talking as if nothing had happened. This is an intelligent woman supposedly gone bad and walking close to the edge of what her own church would find acceptable. Years later we have a management structure that shades the world's best companies. The business, the business of buying favours in that great ladder of good and bad that has had many names and many parts - limbo, seven circles, hell and heaven. Hell in the same sentence as something holy, a recipe for the duty officer to hand in his notice. I have five minutes more. Out of time. Ping. Like a long poem, she waits, contrite and saved by associations with the good man she left. Some people are saying she didn't leave him; that he married her. Is there any point to all that? We heard it all before in Foucault's Pendulum, and he was a philosopher of high order, a trophy for the Europeans in their war with the west. Choose this and be amazed. No one dies here. We all stop dying. There are no accidents.