Stodgies

Like pudding of plums, or a pie of thumbs; like cold water a hundred years ago, the wailing mist of a Titan's last scream. Cold comfort, cold farms, the cold barrens of the silent moon.

And here I am, waiting for the last train that never comes.

Thunder and the Cat

The cat sleeps outside, in his little home next to the wall, all snug. He's one of those ginger toms, but one who loves human company. And when at night, if there is thunder, he will meow plaintively. He wants a human presence.

I've found that just walking downstairs within six feet of his home is sufficient human presence to quell the meowing. It will keep him calm for at least 30 minutes, maybe an hour. He will hide in his house, and burrow into his catness.

I remember being young and missing human company. It was a lot cooler to pretend to a sort of Gothic aesthetic in which high and lonely was normal, and a jaded affect was a typical response. But sometimes, when the thunder cannonaded off the high places and the abyss opened up, it was nice to know somebody was around.

The right thing for a religious person is to seek comfort in one's religious basis, like a cat in its home. But I've found that most faiths also stress the lateral relationship between a person and his friends and relatives. It is the horizontal net that catches a person more securely and more reassuringly. The vertical rope is the safety of the bungee jumper, and it is a terrifying ride.

The only reason you are reading this is that the cat is meowing again. There is thunder, and the promise of a cold night's rain. I walk downstairs. The cat closes his eyes. He is reassured, and there is peace.

Out in the world, there comes a storm. People are nervous. They meow, or like the pigs, our closest intellectual cousins, they squeal. Imagine: God walks downstairs. The wise human is reassured, and there is peace.

Morning Unbroken

It's in the wee hours of the morning that I find myself most productive, coaxed through the hardest parts of work by cold air and odd scents. I smell the effluvia of a thousand night-venting factories, redolent of spices and yeast, tobacco and faux-chocolate. I feel the silence, like a comfortable cloak. The bond between keyboard, monitor and me is never as close as it is in the early hours.

The dogs scuffle around outside, momentarily dreaming or disturbed by doggy instincts. A distant clatter causes the cat to prick one ear and then subside into the usual lazy slump. Dim throbs of the early roadworks crews resonate faintly almost beyond consciousness, as they unpick the seams of our daily workways.

I feel the tension in my neck subside. There is less stress, less urgency to produce clever work and perfect sentences. I stretch my stiffened neck muscles and make my uneasy head lighter as I breathe a different air. It's easier to hunt and disable the mosquitoes that seek my blood. It is easier to see the things normally unseen – the things that in another age and place would have been called house-gnomes or other odd excrescences of the universal id.

I finish my chapter summaries for the latest book on globalisation and education. I finish another game of Scramble on Facebook. I finish this and that. I finish, I feel like the finisher I was meant to be. If I were any more Finnish, I'd be Nokia. Or Santa Claus.

And I head to bed before the dawn, feeling very satisfied indeed.

Psalm 134: In Darkest Night

There's always something about men in dark times that makes them think of the darkest night, with no sign of dawn, no surcease from pain, no hope for redemption. But the 134th Psalm, the last of the Songs of Ascents, has a subtly different take on this theme:

Behold, bless ye the LORD, all ye servants of the LORD, which by night stand in the house of the LORD.
Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD.
The LORD that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion.

In the night, we stand firm, and we are blessed. Sometimes, I trawl through the oceanic depths of the Old Testament, and I find gems and nuggets of mysterious metal. One of the chapters that seems to tell me what to look for in the midst of chaos casts me as a watchman, and is breathtaking in its oracular scope. In darkest night, the visions are most colourful.

Prometheus (Again)

Today I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes, from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound:

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance--
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!

Of course, these verses describe a peculiar combination of strengths that makes man able to survive the whims of those who would be gods, but are not. They show an optimism that, in its sidelong glance, mocks the powers who would suppress freedom of thought and information. Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, Endurance – seals against Destruction's abyssal power, spells which will create order against the fall of Night.

Tonight, I am weary to the bone. But Shelley's Prometheus inspires me to live another day, perhaps holding on for some long-deferred victory.

One

It is just one of those days.

It is not a very bad day. The humidity is tolerable, the actinic glare refracts slightly. You watch the other farewells. You hope they all fare well. You realise you don't know some of them and it is now too late for that. You realise you never really knew some of them you thought you did. It is too late for regrets. It might even be too late for egrets.

And yet it is a terrible day. You do your work. You realise your work, which you thought was commonplace and somewhat dreary and maybe unintelligent, is still about twice as much as some people's. Yes, but is it better? Unfortunately, it might be. Why should you work, then? You are just being made use of, perhaps? Maybe you are a tooth fairy. People discard their ivory and you reward their toothlessness.

It is just one of those days.

It is not a very bad day. But you find yourself slipping into the morass of malaise. You find yourself as crude and crass as the next man. And maybe as the previous one too. What the hell is wrong with you? There is nothing wrong with you: instead, you are playing out your God-disappointed role as pathetic sinner and perfectly normal lousy human being. What the wrong is hell with you, you ought to ask. Pathetic.

In fact, it is a hateful day. No sooner have you arrived at home, than the dark lord makes his presence felt upon the trembling of the telephone. You burn your candle at both ends, only to find that someone removed the burning cord from the middle and you have less time than you thought you had. Somewhat irrelevantly, all you can think of is crime and punishment: you've been wicked and you will pay the price. And so, your wax wanes and your wane waxes.

It is not just one of those days.

It is also one of those nights.

It is not a very bad night. There are actually some sensible people around to talk to. You love and respect a few of them. You think that some of them ought to just go away and stop consuming the spare oxygen that hasn't already been bonded to carbon and greenhoused. And you realise that that's a cruel and arrogant thing to think. And you want so very much not to care about how stupid and nasty you are being inside your head. But you do care, you ought to be better than that. But you're not.

It then becomes a horrendous night. You waste time, still knowing that you could kill time in worse ways but that this is not a good excuse. You type out a lot of good stuff, but you know it is only good because the rest is crap. You work your ass off, creating a fundamental deficit and a negative customer base. "All your base are belong to us," you remember. You have been debased. And at 1.30 am you realise, you are working this all wrong.

It is one of those nights.

You should be asleep. None of this is worth it. Why should you care if people are getting any sleep when you're not? But you care. It's just that you would be insane to show it. Nobody would understand that underneath it all, you might be better than you have shown so far today, that you might actually be a good person. But it is easy to hide. You can always take comfort in the fact that there is none righteous, no, not one. So you can't actually be a good person anyway.

All flesh is as grass, and the glory of man? It is as the flower of grass. The grass fades and the flower falls away. Oh yes, here you are, suspended, falling away in the very next exudation of the breath of God. Fall away. Fall away. Go to, go to, you have heard enough. Banquo will not come out on his grave. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. There is a fourth. Who is that standing next to you?

It is one. Of those nights, it is one.

Long Black

We scent the essence of the bean
The deep and watered and unseen
The fragrance rises like the light
In space and time and all between

Its bitter memory burns bright
And fades into the west at night
A sunset tingle in the mind
A dancer at the edge of sight

Here rest we from the daily grind
And blessèd solace also find
Before the sweet embrace of sleep
Is mercifully undermined

For we have work that will not keep
And bills to pay which are not cheap
And all these things will yet demean
The mortal coil, the human deep.