A Poetic Note on the Pronoun Division.

I’m not even an occasional reader of poetry, much less an avid one, and yet I do respond strongly to the power and richness of words. And sometimes a particular line from a poem strikes me as having a quality of subtle but profound knowing wrapped up in a few brief, perfectly chosen words (which I suppose is what good poetry is all about.) Such a one is Emily Dickinson’s

 

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me

I think about it often, and it struck me recently that the line might be frowned upon these days by those who regard the recognition of gender as a sure and certain ticket to perdition’s flame. They would insist that it must be:

Because I could not stop for Death

They kindly stopped for me

It doesn’t take much poetic nous – nor even recognition of the power and richness of words – to know what dreadful carnage the use of the plural pronoun would wreak upon such a notable creation.

Celebrity and Armageddon.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I think it reasonable that the BBC World News front page should lead with a subject which intelligent consensus would agree as being of reasonable magnitude. So what did the BBC World News lead with today?

The wedding of Taylor Swift.

I think I’m right in presuming that Taylor Swift is some kind of celebrity, and that’s my point. No intelligent consensus regards celebrities as being of any greater importance than the rest of us; they just happen to be watched by a lot of people when they’re doing their job.

And so today’s headline gave a further boost to my increasing conviction that the world really is growing dumber and dumber (as do a lot of people, it seems). A sense is growing in me that in the not-too-distant future, the mass of humanity will shrink like the big bang going backwards and result in a takeover by more intelligent robots, or expand with irresistible force as several billion people suddenly wake up.

A Wordsmith's Concerns.

I was walking through Ashbourne last Wednesday when a sudden thought entered my head. It ran: ‘The prim young girls in pretty clothes (and not so very much of those…)

Aha, I thought, a new ditty is offering itself for an airing on my blog. But then I realised that ‘much’ should be ‘many’ which ruined the metre, and so fearing for my reputation as a competent user of words I consigned the fledgling ditty to the gutter in close proximity to a discarded coke can. I think it might have been the close proximity of the town library which influenced my decision.

Cryptid Imagination.

Sometimes when look out of my bathroom window at the rising field beyond my garden hedge, I see a humanoid shape striding along the ridge from left to right. I can tell from the height of the tree branches, the hedgerows, and my occasional sightings of dog walkers tracing the same route, that the figure is around 8ft tall. And its appearance is fuzzy as though its body is covered in dense brown hair.

I have no doubt that it’s a sasquatch, and that pleases me because I like sasquatches. I even leave an apple in the wood at the top of the lane sometimes, just in case there’s one keeping itself carefully hidden up there. I’ve heard they have a fondness for apples.

And I suspect that the various chemicals to which the bathroom plays host combine to cause the mind to see favoured pictures where there are none.

Too Tired to Think of a Title.

This was Zoe’s song back in those distant days when she still thought me worthy of a few sparkler showers:

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves

Among the fields of barley.

~ Sting. Fields of Barley

And so I thought about the phrase ‘west wind’ and naturally wondered – as is my wont – why that wind and not another. It didn’t take long to come up with a reason.

We recognise four cardinal winds and each of them is imbued with its own reputation. The south wind represents heat; the north wind is associated with frigidity; the east wind we think of as sharp and unfriendly; the west wind, however, says ‘mellow.’ This is not always true because it depends on the position of the weather system and other considerations, but as a generalisation it’s what we’ve got. And so the west wind is the least likely to be threatening and also has the benefit of alliteration to commend it to the lyrical mindset.

*  *  *

Talking of words, I sometimes watch a YouTube channel by a woman called Hilary Layne. She’s a writer who uses a simple ‘talking heads’ approach and covers notable literary works and their relevance to modern culture. Last night’s offering took what she considers the three primary works which most describe the causes and effects which produce a move towards dystopia: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Brave New World, and 1984.

She suggested that modern societies – at least those which follow the ‘western’ model – are becoming so replete with bland conformity to the exclusion of higher values that an increasing number of people are blind to anything which is bigger than them. It caused me to think seriously about the assertion, which very few YouTube channels do. But then I decided that I’m more interested in a different scale of things. My main preoccupation now is not to look for things which are bigger than me, but levels of reality which are bigger than the one in which my mortal body functions. So I decided that dystopia probably doesn’t matter very much after all.

Dreaming of the Priestesss and Other Bits.

I had a rare dream about the priestess two nights ago. Remember her? I do, but then I suppose I would. I went to visit her in Australia, even though she doesn’t live in Australia as far as I know.

I was nervous at first, but she was friendly enough and smiled a lot. She even kissed me briefly on the lips which I assumed to have been a contrived device to make me feel a little less ugly and shambolic than I naturally would feel in the presence of an attractive 32-year-old Chinese lady. I accepted the kind thought with gratitude.

And then she sent me to a shop down the hill and around a corner to buy some drugs. The dream ended before I returned and no attempt at interpretation was made.

Meanwhile, I might remark that 22 posts in June is the most I’ve made in one month all year. Is there something afoot, I wonder?

And my newly converted – analogue to digital – computer set-up does not get on at all well with YouTube. The technological age is proving troublesome.

Auntie Beeb's Exciting News.

One of today’s exciting features on the BBC News website is the incidence of tonight’s strawberry moon. Being possessed of some little interest in the moon and its moods, I read it. It contained two facts of real significance:

1. The moon won’t be pink, but just the usual moon colour. The term ‘strawberry moon’ is simply the nickname given to the full moon which happens to occur in June. (Remember my post a few months ago about the blue moon which wasn’t going to be blue? ‘Blue moon’ is the nickname given to the second of two full moons which happen to occur in the same month. They’re never blue.)

2. The only notable feature of tonight’s moon is the mildly interesting fact that it will be very low in the sky, almost on the horizon, and so will appear slightly larger than usual. It happens every year.

So there we have it: a full page feature giving we lucky mortals forewarning of tonight’s big celestial event – a full moon which will look no different than all the other dozen full moons throughout the year apart from the fact that it will look slightly bigger (which is really thrilling, isn’t it!?)

So I returned to the top of the page to look again at the banner pic which introduced this exciting event and first piqued my interest. It showed a cityscape at night, and bestowing its beauty on the lucky inhabitants is a glorious, cerise pink moon hanging high in the sky. Can anybody tell me what the point of all this is?

This is modern journalism. This is modern times.

The Lure of Ladies in Boats.

I sometimes used to watch a YouTube video in which a French string orchestra played an abridged version of Ravel’s Bolero on a pontoon moored on the River Seine. The director used several tracking shots which included some overhead footage of young women rowers (French presumably) powering their way along the same river in competition.

Last night I watched a British cop drama which began with the discovery of a man’s body in the River Tyne in North East England. The discovery was preceded by tracking shots of young women in two racing boats powering their way along the same river.

I soon realised that the shots of the women rowers were my favourite parts of both films, and so I naturally fell to wondering why. Why am I so in thrall to young women rowers?

I decided it was down to the coordination of legs, arms, shoulders, and torso working in concert to achieve a desired end. But that wasn’t all of it, naturally. It was also about a small band of attractive, nubile women confined in a narrow space casting vital feminine energy into the lively air above a body of water. Put the two together and you have my definition of sexy.

Attractive young women have always been one of my greatest narcotics, you know; possibly the greatest of all (and I do include tobacco and good whisky in the list). I put it down to the thread of Irish ancestry in my lineage (pretty colleens are God’s compensation for a life spent on an imperfect planet) because I gather my father was just the same. My mother said so once: ‘Just like your bloody father! I saw how you looked at those girls in…’ My own addiction started, as far as I can remember, when I was twelve and hasn’t relinquished its hold yet.

There was one young woman who didn’t quite fit the profile, though. My feelings for her went much deeper into realms previously unknown to me and never sank further to the level of the libidinous. I won’t say who it was because she just might read this one day and feel ill. I wouldn’t like that.

A Little Moth Mystery.

A couple of nights ago I was sitting at my desk idly contemplating the advanced gibbous moon. It was holding station in a clear southern sky beyond the un-curtained window, and a thought occurred to me. Where are the moths?

Moths are attracted to light, are they not? If you leave a window open in a lighted room in the summer, your living space soon plays host to a bevy of lepidopteran visitors dancing around the bulb and tapping against the light shade. And if the window’s closed, the same dancers flit desperately hither and thither banging into the glass.

So why in the summer don’t we see countless moths heading off in the direction of the moon? Could it be that they have sufficient sentience to realise that the moon is a little beyond their flying range?

Growls and Gratitude.

I had a falling out with several shop assistants in Sainsbury’s today, so they don’t like me now. It was all to do with their practice of covering the chiller cabinets with screens ‘to keep them from becoming too warm in the present hot weather.’ I pointed out why it was unnecessary in the circumstances, why it couldn’t work anyway because the management clearly don’t understand the simplest basics of heat transfer, and that its only achievement was to cause inconvenience to their customers. One of my antagonists was a supervisor who tried to give me some irrelevant guff about lorries, and when I put her on the right track she declined to speak to me again. (And I never raised my voice or used a swear word. Honestly I didn’t.) Maybe they’ll accuse me of being abusive and refuse me entry next week. It’s that kind of world now.

This afternoon I rang BT (again) to point out that they still have a wrong address on my file. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told them this, but as I said, it’s that kind of world now.

But I did get a welcome smile from a young woman when I told her I wouldn’t light a cigarette while she was downwind of me, and so I didn’t. And when she left to catch her lift I was treated to another smile and a wave. That was today’s treat. (Unfortunately, Sainsbury’s came next.)