No matter what he did,
where he went
for all the beer he drunk
the people he upset
for all the stupid things he did,
He could at least say to himself in the end:
‘I once had this thing that enabled me to stand up tall and give meaning to my life’.
But tonight like a lost tribe they dance without him.
Gone. he let it slip this thing he had
it fell apart, rather.
it could never come back together again.
he found out, when people walk away they do so forever.
I was watching CNN International news awaiting the start of the Masters golf on ESPN and up popped the message below about nature. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Just a wonderful and powerful info-message which pertains to us, THE HUMAN SPECIES. You will see a whole series of these Nature is Speaking ads with famous actors narrating on behalf of nature including Kevin Spacey, Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts. Edward Norton is the soil is a great one too.
Nature doesn’t need people, people need nature
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You give it all day long and it’s a real grind,
and don’t get paid diddly,
struggling to just to make ends meet,
you also try to keep your colleagues level headed,
just so they don’t leave us,
sometimes they make the cut,
other times they miss out,
‘I plan on getting this one right’, one guy said
‘We are with you on this’, we bellow
but he flunks it and drops out,
it’s the hardest grind of all,
what fortitude does it take
to endure so much failure and tincy success?
‘It’s just a game’ one fella professed
‘A game’!? I protested, what a sick prick
‘Yeh its called virtual WGT golf’.
I have an appointment with the computer. Every night nearly. It is waiting. My chair. A one man seat. My accustomed place that allows me to view everything that I feel needs viewing. Once again there is music in my ears. Songs which I downloaded are now playing on my crummy speakers. Some go in one ear and out the other. Some stay and keep nagging me because they come attached to some memories. Some so strong they nearly bear a family resemblance. They don’t come out until I’ve hummed them out of my system. The online chat and beer flow in equal quantities.
Then MSN went quiet; it may as well have thrown me away. I was overtaken by a feeling of frustration. I had to wonder what was happening to me. I stared at the live camera image of myself and saw reflections of my own dull torn life. Every night meeting cautious people making me squirm in my seat. When I sat down before my computer I was gone in my seat, like a bum fumbling his tickets at the TAB – gone for all money.
You can find the whole speech here at Dangerous ideas festival in Sydney.
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I’m licking my chops waiting for the Masters to finally arrive on Thursday.
I read this article from the BBC News about Tiger’s comeback woes since his back surgery last year. It made for interesting reading. Then there were the plethora of comments about the endless debate of whether he is the best ever, and/or if he could ever get back to the top of his game. Amongst the relative angry and over-sensitive comments about ‘was he, will he be the best’, one comment stood out and I would like to share it with you here. It’s by a relative modest chap called ‘PS’ noting Tiger’s recent worst professional round with an 82 when he missed the cut at Phoenix.:
Personally I’d be rather pleased with an 11 over par. It would equal my best ever round and make me and Tiger kinda kindred spirits, with this in common. Alas, whilst I do have a blonde wife, he doesn’t anymore, and he has a little more money than me, and a jet, and several homes, and a management company, and new clubs and better cars, but at least we share the score……..
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A Christian man once said: ‘The stories of Jesus’ birth—including his miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit, the Star of Bethlehem that led the wise men to where he was found, angels singing in the night sky—we now generally understand those as symbolic narratives or metaphorical narratives.’
The same man continued, ‘When I use the word metaphor, I want to underline that, for me, the word metaphor points to the more than literal, more than factual meaning of language,….I emphasise that because, for many people in the modern world, metaphor is sometimes seen as inferior to the language of factuality.’
And he plodded on, ‘I would say metaphorical language is actually more important than literal language, because metaphor is about meaning. Pretty much every story is in the Bible because our ancestors found meaning in them.’
These are actually the words of a man called Marcus Borg; a most influential New Testament scholar the ABC news tells us. See the whole story from ABC here.
My mother told me Santa Claus was real too. Only later to retract her 10 years of storytelling to clarify that he, Santa was really just a metaphor. Maybe she also meant to say ‘metaphor is not inferior to the language of factuality’ like scholar Borg.
I think we have moved on thanks to science (kudos to Darwin) and those marvelous inventors and technicians, modern civil society, respect of diversity and tolerance of different religious beliefs, modern technology, human rights, and lets not forget the development of the brain including our very own bullshit detection tools. By golly it’s taken a while.
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For the school social I gargled Listerine. The pain felt reassuring. I sprayed my hair with Mum’s hairspray, “Taft”.
In the school hall, we shuffled to Toto’s “Africa”. Girls on the other side, giggled about stuff we’ll never be privy to. They did, however, have pert adolescent tits. We puffed out our chests, bobbing over exaggeratedly to the beat.
The girl of my dreams, South African-born Cheryl V hardly notices me as I do everything in my power just to meet her eyes. The next day she went steady with an acquaintance of mine.
He later told me, “Sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it.”
I replied, ‘Did you just buy a fucking zoo’?
Inflatable pool, sipping’ Dad’s ice cold beer
kissed my Godmother’s daughter
‘How cute!’, Dad took a photo
Later on, my best friend snatched it
and it would do the school rounds
I’ve had better days, lets leave it at that
Another girl, frizzy- haired Cathy told me
‘This Gold nugget is yours’
‘But you have to kiss me’
We smooched behind the decrepit toilet block
She tossed me my beautiful reward
I wish I had kept that gold-painted bitumen.
Virginia Woolf’s final letter was found by her husband Leonard on the day she disappeared in 1941. Her body was found some weeks later in the River Ouse, dressed in an overcoat with pockets filled with stones.
In August last year, I described my reaction to just having read To The Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf .
‘It’s as though someone with an advanced intellect from another world has written something totally impartial, yet supremely intuitive about how the human mind processes experiences. It’s just so superior to anything else written.’
As this Virginia Wolf documentary explains ‘Virginia had undoubtedly drawn a lot upon her annual family pilgrimages to St Ives in Cornwell from her early childhood to when she was fourteen. They had given her it seems, her happiest moments. Virginia’s sister Vanessa, recognised in To The Lighthouse an almost perfect recreation of their parents. Her father dominant, but insecure. The mother extraordinarily good and almost too accepting of him’.
Good Reads reviewer Stephen M described the experience of reading this classic better than I could ever hope to:
I’ve never dwelt over a set of 200 bound pages with as much joy and relish as I have with To the Lighthouse. I can say without reservation, that this is some of the most incredible writing I’ve ever come across and I’m absolutely baffled as to how Woolf pulled it off. So much of the prose was redolent of an abstract surrealist film, such were the clarity and preciseness of its images. At a certain point Woolf describes an idea entering a character’s mind as a drop of ink diffusing in a beaker of water. I left several exclamation points and expressions of pure joy among the marginalia of my copy. I have never experienced such a strange brew of images and ideas that whirl around mere words of a novel, all of which has incited such excitement in me, as if some beautiful and aching aspect of human experience has been solidified on paper that will never be as perfect as it is here.
Let’s read some excerpts from To the Lighthouse, which helps illustrate Stephen M’s review:
“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
“Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?–startling, unexpected, unknown?”
You can read more quotes from Viginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse at the Goodreads web site. Also you can listen to this, the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. This recording comes from an essay published in a collection—The Death of the Moth and Other Essays—the year after Woolf’s death. The talk was called “Craftsmanship,” part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937.
“[words are] the wildest, freest most irresponsible most unteachable of all. Of course you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries but words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind…” – Virginia Woolf
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