What is Your Mission?
Antidotes to the Hubriscene, pt11
I-thou
This ‘you’ I am writing to, it’s really ‘thou’ or ‘ye’ or ‘thee’.
I tried ‘I’ and ‘my’ for this piece but that’s not it, and using ‘we’ would assume far too much. So, rather than affect an archaic pronoun that would get in the way of communication, I must address ‘you’, but not in an accusatory way. This ‘you’ includes the part of me to which I write when I also write to you.
English is a strange and speckled beast and when not quick to heel, turns to sniff old walls and piss on them. But it is my beast and I must walk with it. I won’t use a choke chain, and besides, it wouldn’t help. Disciplining English only makes it howl.
So, this week I have questions and a poem. The questions are mine and the great poem is by a friend and fellow ‘what is this I am doing today, is it writing / music / poetry / art?’ person
. I asked him if I could read you one of his poems, of the several that jumped out during his performance two weeks ago. His words reached into my glassware cupboard, pulled out a goblet and filled it with good wine, which I have been drinking all week.He said yes.
Waves
I approached the sea on Wednesday but before I could make my customary bow and dip my finger into the brine, to drip forehead and nape blessings, I was caught as though from behind in a breaking wave of questions. Consider this piece the backwash to that swash, an attempt to return the words from whence they came. Although some of the questions were already washed away that day, as it rained later.
Questions are the fresh sweat of the dreaming body.
Licked immediately, the taste is sea salt and wild honey.
Leave questions to fester and they go stale. This is the base note scent of politics.
What is your mission?
What is it, that if you do not see it through, that no matter how great a success you are at anything else, you would feel that you had somehow failed?
No, you tell everyone you don’t think like that.
Ok, again. What is your mission?
What is it that animates you from the moment you wake, and sometimes even before?
As when you enter again in a dream the House of the Keeper of Antiquities after many years and find that she is now gone and that you yourself long to inhabit the gardens and rooms of her horseshoe-shaped domain. That her home is not of ‘Empire’, as you feared, but is the bare minimum of stone that keeps the shining crone who holds the whole bloody thing together safely hidden. A widow, whose huge heart contains not just all her love for her late husband, but all the love he had for her, too, and she glows with it, pretending to watch TV so that no one notices her peerless alchemy.
Hide the world within the world
You don’t have to tell people your mission, but you do have to live it.
When you don’t, your chest clenches and you visit the doctor with palpitations, as though sickness of the heart were a matter of chemistry alone.
On those days you can’t hear the chestnut leaves’ questions: ‘When will you truly be moved by life?’ ‘Why do you hold yourself still?’ ‘What are you scared of?’
Pulled out of your trance by a naked man impersonating a machine, you say, ‘Enough is enough!’
But what is enough? Happiness? A safe place to sleep? Tens of thousands of people are being systematically killed and starved, ignored by your government, who now deem questions on this matter to be ‘violence’.
Who is worthy of dignity and freedom? If not everyone, then why not?
You see the acceleration of doublethink and groupthink and quietly leave that simulation. Luckily the Real is still the Real and nettles still sting.
Gathering
How many more years can you glean fallen fruit and store it?
When is the right time to bring people together? Is it now?
When will others notice that insurers already have odds and cover for ‘large-scale disaster caused by AI’? Insurers, famously, do not want to pay out, so their livelihood is pure, (pure in the manner of chlorine gas, say, rather than water), but nonetheless such motives can be trusted. Some people still ask certain zombie questions. Is the world flat? No, no insurer offers a product protecting you from falling off the Earth’s edge, if it were, they would. Do viruses exist? Yes, you can buy cover from illness caused by several of them, including the famous one we have all tried to forget.
You have kept abreast of the headlines, somehow, without video, newspapers or television for years, as you are swimming in the same waters as all those who have not yet built their bunkers and put armed security on a retainer. The 1% who do not keep faith with life and mistake li, the Great Pattern visible everywhere in the unmade, as something their petty left hemispheres could somehow improve upon, and in attempting to do so founded the Hubriscene Age.
‘We’, the actual people, do not have that choice and are kept busy swallowing excuses for hating each other so that we don’t organise coherently for the good of 99% of the world’s population.
Communion
You laugh and shake your head to clear it of statistics and find a tender song looping, generatively:
‘All flowers in time bend towards the sun…’
Two of the greatest voices of the era caught off-guard in a wild embrace.
When will you sing again in harmony with others? The question thumps so hard it hurts. Like your niece, who doesn’t mean to leave a bruise, but is secretly proud of her youthful speed and strength.
Which is exactly how it felt to be playing with the band, alive in the centre of the sound, Bigsby tremolo helping the old red Gibson to wail, the front row all eyes closed and completely with you.
Which cathedrals have choral evensong and are accessible by train? When is the next folk night in York? Has your man chosen a tune to learn together?
Why are you writing and not singing?
Essence
How can you hide your mission within everything you do without burning out, without selling out, without giving up?
How can you flavour the jam with it, sweep the floor with it, get the shopping with it?
Is it flexible enough to roll up small and be carried everywhere?
Is it big enough to contain a life? What about two lives? What about grief?
When is the everyday only everyday and when is it the essential?
What then, is this essence? Can a glance that way be chanced?
How can it slip your mind that there is no insurance against the risks of life, nor any pay out equal to the loss of not living it fully?
How long will it take to remember the huge gnarled old tree?
What connects you most deeply to the Great Mystery?
Now that you’ve stopped trying to ignore it, solve it, or explain it away, will you behold it?
Just how long have you yearned for this?
This week’s good thing: See The Lines by , a beautiful slim volume of poetry that you could send to someone you love for just £5. The path is polyphonic! Here is Tables from the book, read by me.
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It's right at the bottom. Scroll down to 'This week's good thing', and the audio is right there. I'll ask David if it's ok to add the text too.
I was introduced to that old yew tree back in 97. The lady who did the introduction for us advised a certain caution with that personage. I guess so.
(And I have briefly tacked over to David Benjamin.)
"... A safe place to sleep? Tens of thousands of people are being systematically killed and starved, ignored by your government, who now deem questions on this matter to be ‘violence’.
Thank you for that.
Yes ... and not for the first time. Now we witness the retun of 'total war'. I remember, I am old enough, when the world got badly frightened. The two atom bombs had ended a war with yet more ghastly totals.
What to do? I turned up at a hastily prepared vigil on a beach a fortnight or so ago after the holiday people had gone home for tea, and watched the waves wash onto the childrens' sandcastles. We were on a 'heritage coast' littered with fortifications old and new. A mixed bunch of heritages among us it turned out, and the rain just beginning off the sea.