the darkest hour before dawn
around me flits
In Freezing January
words are barely passing
with a 'D' on the scribbled score sheet
they fail me,
nearly tippin over the ledge
from the slippery point
where once, the moss used to rest
on its back, eyes fixed firmly ahead
colder with the breeze
and the river rushing past
over and around the steady black rocks
Oh Peter, you are an image of discomfort
i want the shawl and the welcoming fire
the cosy armchair i still desire
a canvas to paint
a thought to hold
to skip past the post
where thoughts are controlled
Fives miles down and then to the left
leaving all else behind
except that dead phone
a testament,
to the cord of connection snapped
by a once vulnerable
now firm and willing hand.
PEACE
Oh, plus a lil something i once wrote about Woolf. Purely Opinion based.
Out of the possible million things veiled in Woolf’s writing, one fantastic excerpt would be the thoughts of Peter as he walks away from Clarissa thinking “I can’t keep up with them…. Life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline… One had to respect it.”
What I personally penned down (guided by A Ma’am) on a slim purple post-it was “History as exercising control over human beings. Cite tradition. Ironic- mind as controlled by strings. Choices are contained. (we)Assume we have youth and possibility.”
Yes, I can write a 10 mark answer using just that as a base, unfortunately we only have 15 and 20 mark answers… so will have to brush up on the other 155 pages as well. When people wonder what studying literature can possibly help with, I gargle out the possibility that information written centuries ago is not completely obsolete. What I really mean (and rarely articulate, barring class) is that it’s actually universally applicable and hides very current concerns. Through the thoughts of Peter, Woolf manages to talk about the fact that we all remain convinced that with youth and an apparent lack of obvious obstacles…we have, in us, the ability to make a choice and one that is not intruded upon by society. The illusion that we are ‘free’ when the word exists not, for each action that we decide to go forward with is already influenced by centuries of tradition weighing down upon us, so deeply internalized that it convinces one that the choice we finally pick is one that we innately want… not knowing that what we want has already been shaped for us before we could stammer out ‘momma’ aged a few months.
One had to respect it, thinks Peter… whether we think it consciously or not, we end up treading on the same worn out path time and again. Regardless of how many epiphanies we claim to have undergone, the crossroads are really not debatable. Hopelessly fatalistic is it? Or is it simply too uncomfortable a truth to accept immediately?
No one likes the pinch of the inevitable… I no longer wonder why Woolf ultimately killed herself… if the discomfort of acknowledging her thoughts as a possibility is so high… the pain of thinking them up only to write them out to feed to the prowling (ungrateful) masses must have given more strength to her stumbling journey towards that river which gurgled up to claim her.
In a fairly intense (even poetic) conversation with Jean, I happened to mention a dormant thought… one that I apparently felt very strongly for. I said to him, if you look at the essence of a person (their soul probably) as water or a flowing liquid that seems to travel over gravel and soil with experiences acting as the same… with each circumstance we go through being represented as the so called pollutants of the liquid- sand, soil, twigs, leaves. Then, and this is purely my opinion, the essence itself may carry these intruders on in life as the water keeps flowing to places new… however, the essence is not affected permanently by them but what they do manage to maneuver is how the past baggage allows us to stare at the new. Experiences of the essence as eventually affecting the perception of all that is to follow. The thing is, having always considered taking ones life a mortal ‘sin’ if the concept exists, how can I honestly let the word ‘strength’ rub shoulders with one who has willingly taken her own life? It’s possible, keeping in mind a belief of the essence and its journey, that the sheer weight of the discoveries Woolf made, was enough to push her over the edge, literally. Not advocating any form of massacring the self, but perhaps leaving a window open for Woolf and not condemning her totally… for in all fairness… the journey she undertook was littered perhaps with too many heavy branches and piles of mud that most would have crumpled under.
(Current in-mind Quote "a word after a word after a word is power")
No comments:
Post a Comment