Uncategorized

Satisfying Encounters from an Underworld of Goodness.

Uncategorized

 If it wasn’t so alarming it would be comical. In the already emerged nations, warning bells on newsdesks everywhere chime with the moral mood of the beleaguered middle-classes. Western media outlets thrash out their tune off-key – from revelations involving a dragnet of massive wealth mismanagement in tiny Panama, to other anonymous offshore havens offering divine return for an extremely homicidal form of investment (read DAESH). The age of oil is ending and the age of roil well underway. Climate changes on two fronts, and I don’t mean the Al Nusra front, which is changing relatively little of Syria’s misfortunes.

As well as coral shoals being so offended by the state of tropical brine that entire ecosystems have been spitting out en masse the algae that gives them vividness and life and us a reason to spend heavily obtaining our PADIs, the climate of post war peace and prosperity is being blown out by a climate of fear, suspicion and sanctimony. Porn lovers of the world unite in condemning the moral turpitude that tax dodgers have fallen into, realising little that both camps get a kick out of stashing things in holes that nature told them they shouldn’t really be. The man next door, the one you never see or bother talking to anymore, wears a surgical gown of blamelessness while you die of terminal consumption. Yet he is the one with the IKEA boxes stashed behind the shed. Greed is a dirty word, oft mentioned with a contemptuous roll of the R these days, yet with everyone’s hands caked with contaminated soil no one knows what clean is anymore. The world is a basketcase, so let’s fill it while we can, down hypermarket aisles that are somehow magically restocked for unquestioning customers who haven’t the faintest idea how the global supply chain works. Never has a system operated so seamlessly as to make its eventual collapse feel both so catastrophic and inevitable, as if every single living soul is experiencing this mass Cassandra Complex that we see disaster in the offing yet no one is empowered to prevent it.

As for politics – the travelling tedium circus of the 21st century – never have the lion tamers put in such a lame performance. The big cats were declawed into indifference a long time ago, and the bullwhip held in complex derivatives that no one but the alchemists in pinstripe shirts and share options can fathom. Man, even The Simpsons saw it coming sixteen years ago in a episode where President Donald’s incumbency epitomises an America that has gone from Stonewall but democratic to completely off the wall and autocratic. King George W. might have been dangerous but he wasn’t mad and dangerous, which never stopped The Simpsons’ creators from pillorying him anyway as a feckless moron.

But the icing on the cake, or in the parlay of les Français, la cerise sur la gateaux, as if either icing or cherries is going to save our lazy, lardy arses, has to be the existential threat to the EU. Tell me, where did we go from simple resuscitation to declaring the body politic dead on arrival? All we had to do was shift a bit of weight, cut down the cholestoral and relieve high blood pressure. So where does amputation come into it? Risking life and limb so that we can either drift off into mid-Atlantic isolation or descend into cross-border bickering, eventuating in open conflict? Little Napoleons everywhere, you have been mobilised. Little Francos, Hitlers, and Mussolinis, too.

Therefore, in spite of this litany of woe, it comes as some surprise that there is still good in this world; that yes, you may absolutely ignore the cynical broadsides firing grapeshot and splintering wood into the poor iPhone where your heart used to be. There is, contrary to popular belief, hope for us all yet. Well, those of us not implicated in either the Panama papers or a paedophile ring, anyway.

 

Here’s why there is hope: despair, hopelessness and revulsion bask in the media limelight, but that light is trained only on a small, concentrated area. Little, cumulative acts of good occupy everywhere which is not the headline-grabbing limelight, in effect an immense area. Hands down, the digital mediascape likes its monuments big and ugly. But that is not the half of it. There’s beauty in the detail. Lifetimes worth of the stuff.

Not only are there infinitely more instances of virtue than vice prevalent on Earth every minute of every day, each act is more than a mere instance. Taken individually, acts of good matter. Taken together, they matter more. Still, the small, consequential things do not earn ratings or sales. It’s the paradox of good people doing malicious things or shady individuals seeing the light that makes the narrative a narrative worth hounding after. The media has gone into hyper-drive concocting a campaign of fear and paranoia, feeding our anguish and our loneliness. But it’s no more than stay-at-homers deserve.

Virtue exists as the least visible of visible acts. Never mind God as the big man, if it is to be found anywhere then the metaphysical must live in the smallest, indivisible quanta. Ubiquitous in the dark shadow, that cognizant force/energy that buzzes everywhere never misses a trick in spite of its diminutive size.

 

Case in point: a man listens to his conscience. It tells him,

‘You need to give something back for all the good fortune life throws your way.’

Prone to talking to himself, he replies,

‘That’s a fair kop, God of conscience.’

Knowing deep in himself while God (if anything) is pure energy and energy cares not for morality, there is nevertheless something akin to a cosmic ledger that requires balancing. Dutifully he succumbs to altruism, rises from his lazy arse, fills his bag with food and water, opens his gilded cage and prowls out into the night. Finding himself at the usual spot, that pile of rubble behind the local supermarket, the object(s) of his altruism is/are strangely absent tonight.

He waits, cupping an ear to the inevitable clarion of night which will guide his way to stilling the clamour of his conscience. Hearing it, he walks over to find a small stray puppy emerge from under the perimeter fencing of a nearby building site. Beside itself with joy, evinced in both the excited slinking of its not too emaciated body and its tendency of entangling moving legs by darting in and out with its jig of expectation, the man walks it back to the plastic dishes he has laid down. Two security men look on with mild interest. In the semi-darkness he does not know if theirs is a look of scorn, pity or admiration. Experienced by now in such matters, he adjudges indifference to be the mood that sets their countenance.

A minute later he sits contentedly looking on as the ten week-old stray, born in a pipe that is now built into the new complex of apartments across the road, wolfs back tender chunks of meat and laps clean, clear water. From nowhere a car approaches and slows to a stop. A window rolls down to reveal the glint of blackness on the face of the driver. Half-expecting to be met with the puzzlement of a white leper dying in a Calcutta colony, the man quickly loses interest in the car, in whose presence he feels a bearing down, but not necessarily a good one. Casting his eyes up again, the glint of streetlamp that catches the black visage catches more the white of a smile creeping across the driver’s face.

The man can see that the driver is most happy at the scene before him. Perhaps, though, it is surprise at seeing this act here in this place that provokes the driver’s interest more.

‘This is a very kind thing you are doing,’ he says to the man.

Bashful, the man smiles and shrugs.

‘What is your good name?’ he continues.

‘X’.

‘And where are you from?’

‘From Britain.’

‘But where in Britain?’

The man replies he is from Scotland originally.

‘Where exactly?’

So the man tells him.

‘Edinburgh? I too was born there,’ says the black man whose accent is a amalgam of Africa, America and somewhere yet to be discovered.

Slightly startled by this, the man in turn poses the question.

‘What is your name?’

The black man replies warmly, but the name is too indecipherable to make out in full, other than that he is a Dr. and the last two syllables are Y-Z.

‘Did your father study in Edinburgh?’

The driver replies that his father was a South African diplomat, that the diplomatic life followed him into later life, as he now works for the US department of State, coming home this way but seldom on his long way back from his job in Abu Dhabi.

The man and the driver exchange dialogue for some minutes before the driver reiterates his reason for stopping in the first place.

‘I knew you couldn’t be local. They wouldn’t do this for a dog, least of all those on the street. This is a wonderful thing you do.’

The man ponders a minute before answering.

‘We all need to give something back in life, even if it doesn’t amount to much.’

Nodding effusively, the South African son of a diplomat answers,

‘Oh, but it does. It means the world to that little dog. And to me.’

‘May God be with you,’ he says as he drives off into the night. As the black driver appeared from nowhere, the man notices that he too has disappeared into nowhere.

The man looks around, seeing that the dog has gone, presumably to sleep off his dinner. On his way back to his hotel across a busy highway, the man wonders if traffic lights can feel and judge. He decides that if the lights turn red for traffic just as he is crossing then yes, they too would approve of virtue in the smallest of things.

 

 

 

 

 

The Man Mountain

Uncategorized

 Ennui colours the sky with the blues. Yesterday’s clouds are gone away and in their place are ridges running up to spurs of mountain rock that when you trace your finger over the ridges the lines are so clean this optical illusion cuts to the bone. You watch, perspective screwed up, as your life blood drips down the bare rock mountainside, nourishing nothing because nothing can ever grow from nothing.

It is the survivor who lives to tell the tale, by by the skin of his teeth. Roped to the past, dangling into the future, he is hanging on there by a thread. He sees in the mountain his father and in his father himself. Though he does not yet see himself in the mountain, not until, that is, he has let enough blood on its ridge top blade to call it his own.

Time is a merciless master of us all. It takes the young and frail and makes them old and toughened. To the in-betweeners who kid themselves that the peak never will never end it makes their wait an anxious one. To the newly old it enfeebles them. These old ones, they dream perchance to sleep, caring not for piffling little things like argument’s sake. What might once have been them against the world is now them within it. Now they care not one iota, for they know that iota is merely another letter in a long alphabet. They have had to wait a lifetime to realise that what is for you will not ignore you. The world is old and knowing, almost as old and knowing as the old themselves. The two are a Celtic knot, their fates entwined.

Time is a unforgiving mistress. She bequeaths all the knowledge in the world then delights in humiliating when piece by piece she takes it back. First it’s a minor detail, but it doesn’t stop there. She starts taking back in chunks, chunks of time and place. She carves out Mount Rushmore only to start erasing the faces on it. First a nose, the parts that stick out. Then the face and with it the years it gave to governance. She schedules for remembrance, which only result in meetings of forgetful minds.

I saw in him the face of the mountain, the same but different. Piling up in pillowed lava were the lines under the eyes. Hollowed were the orbitals into a corrie with clear green water. The cheekbones, for so long concealed under layers unless a chuckle forced them up and out, now overhung like a cornice of ice streaked raspberry red. Shrunken with the seasons and tired of lying standing up, while still the mountain of old it was now eroding. I knew, upon seeing it, I had to gather my things and head closer to the mountain before it disappeared altogether. Instinct tells me there is life in the old dear yet. Old hills contain hard plugs and an igneous-hard will to live on, but for how many more seasons? Life’s a bitch and then you become senescent.

Sitting at distance regarding the range, I think of him growing old. Tracing a line along a ridge whetted by the bluestone sky, I let my blood on the mountain. A small sacrifice for those years of shelter, for that solid ground beneath my feet, for that quiet presence we always orientate back to. Seeing the scree glistening in the folds, the metal ore laid bare by the unremitting nature of the elements, noticing the things that age does to a man, feeling the brevity of all life in spite of his long years, I sense a stirring from deep inside telling me I am me only a few seasons shy of becoming him.

 

 

Arresting the Thief of Time

Uncategorized

Time is a volley of arrows, piercing the outer perimeters of creation. Time is a river, flowing into the cosmic ocean, carrying all in its variable current. Time is the fourth dimension, the space within the up, down, and across. Time is an illusion, a conscious burden carried only by humans at the expense of all other animals. Time is passing. It has been eight months since I saw my father and my brother, who are this moment flying in a Qantas Tardis to be reunited with me. In losing three hours of their lives to be three hours ahead, I gain priceless hours with them, hours felled by time’s arrow, drowned by time’s river, or otherwise never existed in the big cosmic cover-up.

Seeing my brother and father again in but a few hours from now has made me reflect on the passing of time. By the time they wheel those trolleys through the arrivals gate tonight it will be eight months since we were last in each other’s presence. That adds up to a lot of water under different bridges. They in their kingdom prone to flooding, their river was a torrent. Me in this sheikhdom of ephemeral rains, mine was nothing followed by a trickle, a torrent, a trickle, then nothing. Time’s perfect bell curve.

Looking back on it, August seemed to evaporate in a blistering heatwave. September melted onto the end, producing two months in a Swedish sauna with the door jammed closed from the outside. October came and went, punctured as it was by a road trip to a baked layer cake of jutting rock called the Musandam Peninsula. While hardly an odyssey of Homeric proportions, that event at least laid down a temporal marker. The flag fluttering at some indeterminate point on life’s course bore a message for posterity. On it was written,

…October 2015, camping in the fjords and on the high plateau of the Musandam, Sultanate of Oman….

While everyone else was wilting on the Arabian Peninsula, we temperate-seeking individuals were shivering cold next to a fire at 5,000 feet above the heat, above the bullshit expat culture, above even the song of the adhan – that quilt of Quranic verse patched together from the voice of more mosques than you can possibly imagine. Jumping from islet to islet with pointed fingers on an archipelago of stars in a night sky of purest black, their names were the only glint of gold of that Islamic age, gone as the time since I last saw my dear father and brother. They were the only reminders that we had cast ourselves out of the lands of our birth. There’s Deneb, the tail, and Aldebaran, the follower of the cluster Pleiades. And there rising on the eastern elliptic, over Jebel Harem (the mountain of the women) Orion the hunter. The rhinestone buckle on his belt, put there by the great astronomers of Abbasid Baghdad, they called Alnitak, the belt. And there above it, just as the donkey starts to bray somewhere far or near – who can tell – the burning coals of Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. Not everyone can claim to have that experience marking time on their short course to oblivion.

Winter eased gently in and before long the temperature was summer everywhere else that was not the Sahara, or the Australian Outback, or Death Valley. While Europe took a drenching and the US got snowed under in more ways than one, we were sitting on the balcony disbelieving ourselves that this was not too bad after all.

December came and with it new horizons. From the yellow to the green. To Angkor, founded into the world’s largest city, then lost into the jungle, then found again by a French archaeologist armed only with a machete and a vague idea, now lost again in a sense to tourist hordes. Eye-popping Pattaya where bottles disappear into the unlikeliest of quarters. Myanmar followed. Last chance to see an old curiosity before globalisation rehashes it into another mass-produced trinket worth hanging a cut-price label on.

January saw a return to the desert. The rains had fallen, the humidity crashed, and suddenly we could all see clearly again. The dust and the grime had been cleansed from the windows of our apartments and our minds. Now we could see just how many tankers lay anchored offshore. The mountains were no longer a mirage, but that was about as far as clarity got. Time continued to obfuscate judgment, to defy youthful hopes. Still the doubts weighed heavily on the lingering notion that though time was passing quicker than ever, our sense of alacrity was not quite up to speed. While it was being stretched and pulled asunder, turning days into weeks, I was feeling as lugubrious as I had ever felt. While it was being compressed and choked, turning months into minutes, I was feeling manic helplessness on a runaway train. I lumbered and lurched like a bi-polar dog on a leash he can’t decide is short or extendable.

The pathos bit hard. Time called time on me for a while. These were what some referred to as the mid-term blues, and others the dog days. I preferred to compare them to neither blue nor dogs. Blue for me is that break in the clouds we from the overcast north consider heaven sent. And dogs are friends you need to consider indispensable when the alternative is talking to the wall.

The mood recession of early 2016 didn’t quite become a full-blown depression. It was salvaged by a stern recovery brought about through a surge in consumer confidence. Once again, investors were willing to risk on return, and time’s borrowers were willing to chance it on a reasonable APR. The confidence came in knowing that all who comprehend the weird passing of time both borrow from it and invest into it. Knowing that made dealing with time’s funny fluid dynamics easier.

When it wasn’t spinning out of control, it was juddering to a halt. Confounding all who try to swim against it, sweeping away those who go with it, time bit me hardest here in a land where there are no seasons, no discernible way of measuring the metrics of time. Yet through it all, I can rise above it here and now and let it be known that you might have placed much temporal distance between my brother, my father and me, but you, Old Father Time, never managed to diminish the love I have for them. You may have even done me a favour by revealing a better, kinder and more gentler version of yourself to us over the coming days.