At last from battle, I escaped and made my way to safer ground
To rows of houses standing still under the southern downs.
With radical thoughts I tried to change the world, I tried to wash myself and others clean of sins.
But I didn't try too hard, because I'd had a bad time in the war and now it was over I figured I deserved a rest.
I joined societies, parties and spoke and listened. And of my glee did many have a giggle.
l’ve tramped the streets, I’ve read our book, skimping the lines occasionally.
I’ve made alliances with our mates, and children gave us cause to wonder.
Out of the trenches, I hurried myself into the comfortable house, under the downs.
There were nooks and crannies where we nestled with our thoughts,
Our friends, in winter we stayed within, warmed by fires, our imaginations alight
in summer, on with our boots and we marched the Downs from end to end.
The invigorating exercise and country air keeping us fit and healthy.
Some bohemians lived in seedy areas of Brighton. In vast buildings amazingly cut up into flats... Little cliques of like-
minded friends met separately within and from there agreed to be godparents to the other’s children. The children gave us cause to wonder.
News from other lands arrived, socialism arrived, and hard times arrived. I could have wept for leadership or to be a leader.
To step out of my ordinary life.
Reading books written to make Kant and Descartes accessible to such as me, and not even understanding them.
Ideas however coming to mind,
Dignifying small events with portentous meaning, so as to hide one’s insignificance.
Believing in some providence after all.
Hope rose from the chimneys, burnt in the grate incompletely, and dissipated over the landscape to give a lovely wood smoke smell even if only for a while.
Jack owned a car -
Mary became pregnant by another, but her husband was advanced and didn't mind Richard’s younger brother was at Cambridge and was tutored by T.E.Hulme.
Harold had a hand in making radar and Jerzy arrived from Poland and married Lilly, with three children and another on the way Emma had to get some domestic help.
Cotton from the empire made its nappies
It wouldn't be long now before Mary's husband became an MP and influenced the whole country
BLAND
To be an observer in such an intellectual life - over in Sussex further east, an artistic colony centered on Eric Gill flourished.
He wrote that he admired my words, I went to visit and found an impassioned man almost blind except to his immediate visions. (Which were admittedly intense )
I WAS THE BLAND OBSERVER
look at it this way...
"The universe is there - a series of simple facts - and in it, us - approaching cognizance - and building fuss and frenzy as we come to terms with our existence."
We are here and perhaps attempt to act, but in the end, all we can do is observe for a limited time, "Our brains absorbing the world and weaving us out of it and into it"
I'm deliberately ignoring signs of the next war.
I haven't heard of many new ideas and don't understand many others. I've not tried to teach the world much.
It is the same as in those bloody trenches and I'm encumbered by more now, I'm wallowing in ideas half conceived now, not mud.
The Downs above my house have been here so long, so bloody long. I know they have risen out of seas and are made of millions of little creature's shells.
I've seen some under Harold’s microscope.
I walk along the tops on a freezing winter’s night, down below I see the stark beauty of hangers of gaunt bare trees growing there. I see the melted patches in the snow where laying sheep have warmed the whiteness away.
The sun is so red. The clouds are so vastly tinted with red.
Enough to make one want to believe in some higher purpose.
But my mind drifts to that point of light near the village.
To Emmas hired nanny behind those windows.
Young
Terribly innocent.
She is so beautiful and distracts me into a morbid fantasy.
Not for the first time, I wonder about sex.
I don’t realise the future, the coming of the plow to these ancient meadows.
I don’t think that the plants so copious under this snow, will one day soon be rare,
And if I did, and got involved, and met people like George Stapledon ...
How could I not fail to be impressed with his genius and
and be yet another hooping in the ether.
But surprisingly it later turns out that at that very moment, it had been Harold behind the window with Emma’s nanny.
And quite a story he makes of it. I chide him for the story, for his thoughts,
not the sex. What a horrible way to use one's mind.
Occasionally the big band sounds on the radio strike home and I feel transported,
occasionally words strike home too. and once or twice I feel loved for myself.
V Like the world has spun round so many times, another war is coming.
The beer tastes better in the local pub.
I join others in putting the world to rights, but underneath I know what I'm saying is wrong.
I never lied enough...
I didn't say enough... understand enough - I didn't try hard enough
and whatever I did wouldn’t have made any odds anyway.
I see others going off to "war" and try to impart advice. It’s a toy war to my eyes,
the little planes toys, the tanks, and guns are toys.
Harold sits in Dover and watches these toys with the aid of electricity
and probably does more to win the war in every ten minutes than I did in the whole of the last war.
I sit in the local hall and fill in forms and for those eager to get into the fray.
How can a sensitive person feel so little?
The soldiers from whatever class seem to me so similar.
I hate some at first for their bravado but realise it is just a bland cover for their similar poverty of spirit.
I find the women more and more skilled - beautiful, self-assured in their war work.
They seem only fit for heroes, and unfortunately, there are no heroes about.
They seem to go for surface gloss, but perhaps they see and love the blandness underneath.
It’s then I realise that somethings wrong, for I couldn't see their blandness,
they live exciting lives and I'm amazed how many affairs seem to be going on.
I wonder about Harold and the nanny... was it Nanny and the Harold,
My Wife seems very alien to me now, but she and I are loyal, at least I have no reason to doubt her fidelity
but I've no reason to want it either,
We made it long ago not knowing what it was and havent bothered to change things. Its such an effort, particularly as I'm older now •
One of Emma's lads is home on leave, almost deranged his mother thinks ... But I think not.
He was involved in some big push against the Germans and was driven along narrow roads full of the horrors of death.
A retreating army caught in a whirlwind of bullets and bombs.
Hundreds of people bulldozed to the sides of the road possibly even more potent horrors the smashed and knarled lorries and tanks still smoking - and also dead horses their guts untangled and steaming by the road.
Eric told me he realised this horror would all eventually be buried ...
In a longer time the lorries the trucks would rust or more likely have the metal salvaged.
What he realised, what hurt most was that beside this road no ideas died, no ideologies.
The warring multiplicity of half-truths still drove through, cutting a swath between their dead cousins, in its own trucks.
Looking for gruesome souvenir sights, to make an easy meaning from the scene.
"poets and politicians will use this", Eric said "religion", Eric said.
I looked at my poor little budgie, paralysed and dropped dead to the floor of its cage,
I saw true life there and I saw true death.
It had no theories, it seemed to love me
I was aghast, and wept for humanity?
No comments:
Post a Comment