When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.
Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt, or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.
Then the mortal coldness of the soul like death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the ice appears.
Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest,
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath -
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.
Oh, could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.
I've been perched above the keyboard for some time, like a kind of domesticated vulture which has been told to write minutes for a business meeting. 'Where the fuck do I begin with this?' it would think in its vulturine tongue, claws lacerating the cheap plastic keys. The Tower of Babel would rise between it and the screen, precluding all expression on this decidedly English keyboard. For how might a vulture express itself if it cannot command a language common with its recipients? Indeed, how might it express itself if it cannot command a language common with its own heart? Words, for all their power, are blunt instruments, representing only vaguely what one might wish to say at any given point. It takes an incredible manipulator of these blunt objects to make something at all incisive. I can't make anything except rock soup at the moment. What I can do is read poems other people have written and hope that they approximate my thoughts. Then I post them on my moaning, anile blog and scavenge from the corpses. In this respect, the vulture is awakened to one of the secrets of life; I think it is important to learn from the lives of dusty, dead people. For one thing, they are usually far more interesting than shiny, non-dead people, who largely seem to lurch through life with their massive, cruciferous skulls filled with quotidian wank. 'Bread,' they say, 'need bread so don't die,' heaving their unwilling cadaver to the local supermarket (a word which warrants neither the root 'super' nor 'market'). All people seem to strive to perfect is the somatic, the material, the pointless. This is the capitalist delusion. But no more talk of capitalism here!
What can I say of this poem? It describes my thoughts at present. In fact, I have always suspected that all people live the double life presented in stanza four, but I of course cannot be certain. It's perfectly possible to be affable and kind when one is flayed inside. Indeed it is not just possible but predictable. Look at people as you walk in public - there is usually something degraded in their aspects, some kernel of woe. I cannot stand this delirious notion that everybody is oh so happy. Of course this cannot be true, but what is so maddening is that people portray themselves as such. Anybody who is truly happy is ignorant to the black truth of the world.
This is why I begrudge animals their passivity, their galvanic responses to all of life's stimuli. By dispensing with this nonsense of rationality, they live in the present. More than this - they can only live in the present. There is nothing to suggest that an earwig has a conception of its mortality, or its ageing, or its evanescence. We live in the past, the present and the future, and thereby do not live at all. The blank walls of infinity which compass our brief spans somehow suffocate what we do have until we have nothing at all. Man treats himself so seriously - I sit here typing at a keyboard, a colossal shrew in a rotating chair. The vulture I discussed earlier, perhaps. What kind of perverse world is this? I'm sat in a library with solemn faces, Easter Island moai, strewn round me at indeterminate points, tapping plastic nodules on a plastic oblong. Their craggy features peer down on the buttons, to make sure order is maintained in the World of the Keys. This is our significance. We are a strange sect of button-tappers, bedizened in the most gaudy, modern clothing imaginable. Our god is Solemnity and our purpose is self-denial to the end. I do hope I'm not going mad. Yet there is something utterly bizarre in this entire experience. The concept of a library is the most ordered, artificial, sterile conceit. What is there here but dullness and waiting? Really, these people look as if they have been exhumed out of formaldehyde. 'The mortal coldness of the soul' descended on these people in the womb, I fear. Conceived in the freezer aisle, perhaps. People are dull and this is all. We should all be either screaming or laughing. Instead, we sit, composed like dead things, propped up with brittle bones through, in many cases, regrettable items of clothing. This is humanity today - domesticated and dull. I cannot bring myself to be excited at humankind - it really does tire me. Yet, like a hopeful fool, I return to it, arms wider, only to be rebuffed with improved vitality. I do wonder sometimes if it is I that is dull, and all the world is riotously interesting.
I don't know what happened in that last paragraph. I feel as if my brain has wept characters onto a page. I didn't even particularly discuss the poem. This is the first time I've ever composed a blog post in a library, and my misanthropic tendencies have made a grand appearance. Yet this is how I feel.
This is why I begrudge animals their passivity, their galvanic responses to all of life's stimuli. By dispensing with this nonsense of rationality, they live in the present. More than this - they can only live in the present. There is nothing to suggest that an earwig has a conception of its mortality, or its ageing, or its evanescence. We live in the past, the present and the future, and thereby do not live at all. The blank walls of infinity which compass our brief spans somehow suffocate what we do have until we have nothing at all. Man treats himself so seriously - I sit here typing at a keyboard, a colossal shrew in a rotating chair. The vulture I discussed earlier, perhaps. What kind of perverse world is this? I'm sat in a library with solemn faces, Easter Island moai, strewn round me at indeterminate points, tapping plastic nodules on a plastic oblong. Their craggy features peer down on the buttons, to make sure order is maintained in the World of the Keys. This is our significance. We are a strange sect of button-tappers, bedizened in the most gaudy, modern clothing imaginable. Our god is Solemnity and our purpose is self-denial to the end. I do hope I'm not going mad. Yet there is something utterly bizarre in this entire experience. The concept of a library is the most ordered, artificial, sterile conceit. What is there here but dullness and waiting? Really, these people look as if they have been exhumed out of formaldehyde. 'The mortal coldness of the soul' descended on these people in the womb, I fear. Conceived in the freezer aisle, perhaps. People are dull and this is all. We should all be either screaming or laughing. Instead, we sit, composed like dead things, propped up with brittle bones through, in many cases, regrettable items of clothing. This is humanity today - domesticated and dull. I cannot bring myself to be excited at humankind - it really does tire me. Yet, like a hopeful fool, I return to it, arms wider, only to be rebuffed with improved vitality. I do wonder sometimes if it is I that is dull, and all the world is riotously interesting.
I don't know what happened in that last paragraph. I feel as if my brain has wept characters onto a page. I didn't even particularly discuss the poem. This is the first time I've ever composed a blog post in a library, and my misanthropic tendencies have made a grand appearance. Yet this is how I feel.
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