Cave Canem: Beware of the Dog

 

In the forest where my mind resides there is a crystal-clear stream, whose sound is that of glass, broken glass, with the wind playing over it. Green, white, brown. The green, a middle note, the white, a top note, and the brown, a dull, flat note. An improvised melody, dependent on the mood of the stream and the environment it's reliant on and surrounded by. The strength of winds, the closeness of the trees and whether the forest is in a period of new growth or conservation. The composition will vary according to the conditions: more white notes in spring, more green in summer, and more brown through autumn to winter. It is similar to the outside world but independent from it, for sometimes the notes will be decidedly brown when it is a golden day, when nobody it is said should be grey or blue.
It is unthinkable to some that this should be the case, but it can be so. And there might not be any conceivable reason for it. Though it must be said that yellow for some is not the colour of sunny, of unmitigated happiness, but of melancholy. So bright it hurts the eyes; so forceful with its hot fingers into and over everything that a person can feel, at times, violated. Yellow is not always kind; yellow can be the colour of cruelty.
Blue, too, is not for all the colour of cheerlessness, nor thought as gloomy, dispiriting, no matter the shade. Blue uplifts them, and makes them feel dynamic and purposeful. The crystal-clear stream likes a blue sky, a blank blue or studded with clouds, and filled with song, song of the wind, song of the trees, song of the birds and the chatter or the patter of squirrels. More often, however, it receives the song of sirens, that of emergency vehicles, not that of mythical creatures who are part-woman, part bird.
Grey is safe, grey is reassuring. Grey is not dull. A light tone brings relief, a respite from heat, a gradual, natural decline over time, whilst mid to dark tones suggest a seriousness, an introspectiveness – doors and windows have been shut – a going into oneself, though not necessarily to brood but to learn, to give oneself to something. Grey focuses the will. Grey is anything but glum. Through grey gleams silver, suggesting hope, a new beginning, a fresh start.
Black is the one, the colour to be cautious of. The black dog, Churchill's dog, a best friend. A friend he didn't want but a friend that was there. Good or evil. Good and evil. An all-black dog, the colour of night, which could be a mere trick of the light, a mere trick of the eye. But no, there it laps, a huge black dog with a broken chain round its neck, at the crystal-clear stream. Lap, lap, lap with its enormous pink tongue. Thirsty. The stream likes the dog, for the dog has its own knowledge of the world. A deeper, darker knowledge, it is true, but a knowledge, too, that happiness lies in satisfying needs through the most basic and natural means. The law of the dog. How you have to live like a dog to know it.
Therefore, the dog drinks. Drinks deep of the stream as the stream tastes of it, having chosen not to evade its lips but to give of itself freely.
What do the crystal-clear waters that tinkle like glass gain from their encounters with the huge black dog? They learn what it is to be the hound and be hounded, to be the protector of a house and household, and to feel devoted to the master, so devoted it might snap and snarl and bark unpleasantly at strangers, or excitedly wag its tail at family members and known friends of. And learn, too, what it is like to be told off, for reasons it can't comprehend, sent to its bed or sent outside, forced to leave its master's side. No creature knows both abuse and faithfulness like a dog. Or abandonment, forced to fend for itself and to rely on the kindness of humans, unknowing whether they might mean it harm or good, and having to trust always it will be the latter. For black is its colour but not its heart.
The stream evokes, in all that drink from it, hard realities and fond memories, but the dog is its second-most loyal patron. Its first-most is a wood nymph who, like Narcissus, uses it as a mirror, though not to admire herself but to gaze into the outside world, to literally see through the blue-grey and blue-green eyes of her captor and, possibly one day, liberator; and who if she were freed could then teach not to be beware of the dog, but to be dog-like.

Picture credit: Cave Canem: Beware of the Dog Mosiac at Pompeii (source: Wikipedia.org).

Written March 2020.

Some Are Born Posthumously

I have written much that nobody will get to read; I've had heaps of thoughts that though recorded won't be shared, unless somebody – somebody connected to me or somebody with no connection at all – stumbles upon them and decides they are of interest if not to them then to another somebody somewhere and for that obscure reason worth publishing, disseminating, to the masses that exist, or to the few survivors of a catastrophe.

My words will not bring hope, they will tell of a time gone. There will be many, many testaments (my own amongst them) in that vein, telling of a time, of a place, of a country; or telling not of time or place at all, but of self and the sphere that self moved in. For the age lived in then was Vanity. Whatever was going on, Vanity came through. The Me was the story, not the events, the fates and fortunes of the larger world. Vanity had been nourished and now it bloomed, profusely. Blooms of every type: in image, in prose, in poetry, in opinion and critique. Some of it honest, some of it made-up. Some of it half and half. It was all there, including the lies one tells oneself and the truths one doesn't want to see. And there too, the inner journeys from the old to the new, from saying no to saying yes to life, and vice versa. Of the out-there, of the closed-in. Everyone had something to say and a creative way in which they might express it. Art for art's sake. Art as therapy. Art as a vanity project.

A spilling. A wound opened, which keeps re-opening, and so continues to weep.

An all-consuming need to explain you and who you know or think that person to be.

A self-promoting urge to communicate in word or images, still and moving. We are the beautiful. We are the damaged. We are the motivated. We are the disenfranchised. We are living life! And sharing all that we do, which by the way may not be true. We are the socially awkward, the socially lonely. We are not loving life! We are the shamed and the ashamed. We are the ugly. We are the noughts, the nobodies. We are the ghosts.

Ghosts dance with words, tango with a pen, waltz around lettered keys. Ghosts make money for other people. Ghosts make famous names more famous. Ghosts produce the pages that make a book, a book that they possibly wouldn't want to (if they could) put their own name to. It's not what they would write, in the style they would write it, but what they would write is, so they are told, not marketable; and besides, nobody that writes, excepting ghosts, writes to live.

The noughts, the nobodies don't. They live to write. They live to learn. They seek new ears, new eyes, new consciences for truths. In words they expose and berate themselves, as well as that of others, not to chastise but to recognise all that they are and all that the world contains. There is no wrong or right. There are problems, but they don't have the solutions to these, as they simply make a study of what they see and, in words, whatever tongue they express themselves best in, write how they see it, maybe manipulate it and imbue it with emotion, that of anger or grief or love etc., even neutrality, a dispassionateness, by removing themselves from the condition, so that their eye is cold, their tone practical, and their ear deaf.

Distance is often a necessary measure, for they cannot then be accused of bias-ism, of favouritism, or of being over-invested – the reader is encouraged to make up their own mind - though they will, of course, have an opinion, though perhaps not the view that would be expected from them, from other examples of their craft. Their view may not be appropriate or socially accepted: it needed toning-down or toning-up; it was changed by the edit, by the translator, so that what is attributed to them has been hardened, softened or twisted, and is therefore not what they originally expressed, what they had wanted, or tried, to convey, but had now failed to get across.

The noughts, the nobodies are frustrated by this. Because the simplest language can be misinterpreted and the most convoluted oversimplified. All meaning, all feeling lost. So, they don't share, if they share at all, all they write, since it resists form, a comprehensible form, and its language, too, would, if read, seem foreign, to the present-day ear, the present-day eye.

Tomorrow is their destiny. Some are born posthumously.

Picture credit: Der Weg des Genius (The Path of the Genius), 1918, Wenzel Hablik.

Inspired by Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.

Written March 2020. 

Reduced to Cake

I never eat cake, nor have an occasion to cut into cake, a whole sponge or a tower of sponges plastered together with jam and cream, to deliver a wedge onto somebody else's plate, and even if I had I don't think I would trust myself to make a good job of it, particularly if it was the first deep cut. The cut that renders it imperfect and only desirous of being eaten, for the remaining evidence of its tarnished existence to be destroyed. Perfect layers, perfect marbling or a hidden filling might have been revealed but it has begun to crumb, and crumbs need to be removed, brushed away with the flat of a hand or a damp cloth.
That is how bombed houses appear to me, too: as cake, not that I've had the misfortune to see any with my own eyes. From descriptions, yes. From images, yes, the actual and those of my imagination. But not from first hand experience. I am lucky. Very lucky to have escaped war and living in a war-torn country. I have anecdotes, only.
I experience wars and persecution through word-smiths: from the mouths of those that survive, from the hands of those that left some account of themselves, and from those that weave it into a fictional history. The wars that have been conducted in my time haven't been conducted on the soil I call and make my home. With the exception of the IRA, they've been far away. Even if British troops are deployed, the concept of war is still alien to me. There is compassion but there's distance. My life is unaffected. I am lucky, but my fortunate circumstances make me weaker. To live in, and to have only known, peace does not make you resilient or appreciative.
I do not want wars, I do not support wars, but wars we will have. We should not turn a blind eye to them, but nor should we get involved if we have no understanding of what might be the consequences of our actions. To make a situation worse leads to more unrest. To have no alternative is to cut the head off one monster for another to grow in its place. This we have seen but again been unaffected by. We leave the rubble to others to clear.
We send money. We send clothes. We say: How awful! We have the same response to any crisis that occurs, at home or abroad. Media, in its many forms, has had a numbing effect. It's happening elsewhere, it's not our concern, and the images of war, or flood, of a natural disaster have been seen too many times before, have been repeated too often. Twenty-four hour news on a loop loses the power to shock.
People are carrion. Civilians caught up or public servants sent in. And that's not just true of war, but also of other emergency situations. People are reported as statistics, or, dependent on age, deemed of lesser value. People are people aren't they? no matter how young or how old. That a crisis has involved a certain age group does not make it more or less of a tragedy. But then I think of all life as equal: the natural, the animal, the human. You can infer what you like from me putting the human last. I would deny it, but then we all have unconscious biases: the unconscious leaks out and proclaims your truth; the truth you have absorbed unknowingly. For it's true I do not like what mankind does. But I am no saint either. None of us are all good or all bad.
And none of us are equal, for if we were then wars would be harder to wage, life would be harder to take. That, however, is not human nature. For if it were there would be nothing to master. If there are no wars for us to participate in, we go to war with ourselves or invent new ideas to war against as a collective rabble. We make a noise, cause disruption, which gives us purpose, but delivers nothing.
Wars, of some sort and of our own making, will always be engaged in. Humans make love, humans make war. It's what we do. Although the wars we make will change as will the weaponry and the technology we use to wage them, and so the destruction caused, too, will change. It will still, however, create a divide. And for those of us not involved, a remote place from which to bear witness and shut out, turn off when we've had enough of experiencing, through the screen, the horrors others are living. The mind reduces it all to cake, or sometimes a doll's house with its front torn open.

Picture credit: Coffee Cake, 2003, Janet Fish (source: WikiArt).

Written 2nd March 2020.