home


Stroking the cats

As I walked through a landscaped housing estate, I thought "grassy knoll", unconnected with anything else. Kennedy's assassination has the same presence in my consciousness as the crucifixion of Christ, Santa Claus and Elvis Presley. I believe all the Kennedy stories; I believe none...

I think there is nothing that I can do about "the state of the world". Perhaps there is nothing to be done; because whatever we do, "they" send in a gunship; and the people united will only happen at random, requiring a larger probability than that required for chimpanzees to type out the collected Shakespeare, with or without variant readings, before they become extinct.

Therefore, the only thing to be done that I can think of is either to charge a tank like a Pole or a Cossack, and let the surviving laugh at me; or to see what can be done for myself and those few I care about a lot subjectively...

That is, I am not in an Auschwitz and may well be able to stay out of one; one up for me and those I love. I may be old enough to die before the gulf stream stops flowing or someone assured of certain certainties, perhaps someone from my country, explodes a big one over my country; one up for me and those I love...

Were I a praying man, I might thank the vacuums...

I persist with my poetry and try to improve it; and I persist in telling those who will listen about the poetry I admire; I maintain the courtesies with as many as possible, and intimacy in a handful of friendships...

If an acquaintance becomes tiresome, I can tell the other party with all the persuasiveness I can summon, how I see the world and what needs to be done to save it from the culpable destruction we impose upon it; and they go away.

It becomes psychologically necessary to look away for as long as possible from the horizon, where the fighting can be seen against thick smoggy light. I look into the nearer distance, tell others who are trying to keep warm towards the ongoing end of things how to get a bully off their back at work etc; and sometimes, by accident, there is a bit of peace and quiet or something worth looking at which hasn't been trampled into the mud...

Pills help in moderation, but talking to the medics who control them is a waste of time. Walking helps. If I acted as if everything nasty I can imagine and more is happening and will happen again with greater intensity, which is the way it is, then I would not keep going. I don't know what the point of keeping going is beyond my observation that sometimes I enjoy it a bit, and sometimes others seem to enjoy my company or my poetry, though I know that if I were dead I wouldn't be here or anywhere to remember it so why bother?

There comes into my mind, and stays, despite its sentimentality, the last frames of Joe Hill (a Bo Wideberg film, I believe), where he's strapped into a chair, blindfold, in front of a firing squad; and, while they're going through their ceremony, which they think turns murder into something other than murder, he shouts out with some pleasure "I can hear a bird".

I recall the tone of Harold Pinter's voice at the end of a production of Sartre's In Camera: Let's get on with it.

& that, to put it another way, is why I stroke cats; but I know, in general and in some detail, what is going on. I'm not asleep. On the contrary, I wish I could sleep more.


June, 2001