Pipes and principles

"We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

John W. Gardner, author (1912-2002)
 

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)

"I'm sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots."

George T. Angell, reformer (5 Jun 1823-1909)
 

Inconvenience store

"If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."

Robert Fulghum, author (b. 4 Jun 1937)
  

Forest fire

Today, another forest was burnt down.

It's the third or fourth this month.

I've often wondered that if you were to catch

All this smoke and recuperate those ashes,

Would they account for all of the matter

This forest once boasted of? Or would some matter

Be utterly lost, as the shape and name are lost?

Nothing can be whole again once it's rent, or burnt.

Though some folk say all the particles are still there,

Hovering, going somewhere to find a fuller end,

Though to where or for which purpose no one said.

As if every particle ought to be accounted for.

My hunch is that though the entity be gone,

With the memories of the place and its components,

The shadow of it lies still in the memories of men,

Till this too is gone. And that long after its departure

Something other will be here, city, wasteland, forest perchance.

Make room for the new, kill the splendour,

Perhaps these were the thoughts of this pyromaniac.

Whatever crossed his mind, like that of the others,

Whole valleys grey with ash and rank with smoke

run the eye as far as the sunset and its black cloak.

Who said the mind was like a forest? I can't remember.

But I now say that the mind is like a forest on fire,

And the best trees are spent on some mad altar,

and their ashes fuel the sombreness inside.

Perhaps forests are meant to burn, like the mind.

But I might be wrong. All I know is that there are holes,

holes the size of forests, now, where those minds were.

Loss

Never have I seen such a lost generation.

Never a generation so lost.

With all the means to know,

where they are, why they are, when they are.

They don't know who they are,

where they are, why they are.

Such an absence of care for what's to come.

Such an absence of care for who's to become.

Such is the way of the teens I've taught this year.

Apathy meaning an absence of path,

reluctance an absence of luck.

Following whoever's footsteps are doomed.

Following whatever's the least useful to them.

Smiling wryly at their own purposelessness.

Smiling earnestly at others' failures.

Allurement of easy money and easy pleasures

blinds them, leads them to restlessness.

Never sadder nor happier than ever before.

Never had so little interest in themselves,

never had been so focused on their selves.

So lost to reality and its codes.

Coding their own ethereal kingdoms.

So hopeful, so hopeless.

No dreams, no boundaries

in a world which forsook and strengthened its frontiers.

Both prisoners and wardens of society.

Escapist strategies of the dominator

landing off-target rockets in the landscape –

none ever beheld such avoided butchery.

But the worst, warded off by school walls,

is yet to come.

When they will realise what's to come

when they will realise what's in for them

when they will compute time and money

and add two and two and marvel

that it makes three, and not four,

never again, and smile wryly,

the unfairness of the world suddenly made visible,

suddenly a constant, an exact exfoliator of rest.

Yes, they will think back, and smile –

even then they knew, had feigned ignorance,

had trudged on, secretly hoping for the best.

 

Restlessness

Whenever I get some good news
I always feel this restlessness
This unfulfillable envy that I lose
Only when I realise it's just mum's absence.

The Soothsayer

Others buried their gaze in the constellations,

Others, again, looked into alignments,

Others still, wondered at numbers and sums,

Other eventually stared at cloud patterns,

Others' devotion lay in the paths of the palm.

He, on the other hand, looked into streams,

under the bark of the willow trees,

snapping twigs, uprooting lilacs for inspection,

tasted and observed the water in the ponds,

pried into the entrails of dead cattle.

He would often lie down on the ground

and examine what his hands raked in,

would ruffle dry leaves at his ears.

He, spurned, would stand atop coombs

and listen to the variations in the wind

for portents of war, peace, happenstance.

The Stragglers

Stragglers waited along the bend

like swept-in-heap leaves

bundled closely because of the wind

and the late, off-season cold.

We had seen such drama before,

but the trees' roots seemed to rake in

something other than dust.

Wild calla would have to be in bloom soon,

and snowbells promised a heady fragrance.

Outside these, nature seemed bland,

controlled, safely harboured in man's lap,

spring fuelling the sap leafwards.

An odd zeitgeist wafted from wide-open windows

along whirls of the burnt fat of bacon,

(every day felt like a Sunday morning)

elderberry wine and fresh toasts.

Great puddles of sunlight bathed the kitchen tiles

and bounced on glasses and glasses,

revelling in a high-flown morris.

The swish-swish of the sweeper grated the hours

which the town clock failed to strike,

infuriating the pell-mell stragglers.

Some were content with just staying put,

and silence had been requested a long time hence.

Rigor mortis wasn't such a bad bargain, after all,

though the wind made them more alive

than necessary, while the trees seemed unaffected,

albeit slanting slightly to the south.

Over a year ago, the last of the stragglers had smiled.

Unimportant as it appeared to the-then onlookers,

this never happened again, and things which happen

only once are worth jotting down,

both philosopher and carpenter say so.

So he had smiled and had fallen to the ground,

in an exact similitude of death.

There he lay still, covered in leaves,

unheeded by the other stragglers

who went on waiting along the bend.

They thought they were quite happy there,

and one of them had declared, one day:

“This is a good enough place to straggle.”

The tree under which they had settled

shaded them from the sun come Summer,

shielded them from the wind come Autumn.

Ravished their eyes in Spring.

Only in Winter would they truly be miserable.

They had been there so long

that they had quite forgotten

who it was they had walked behind,

and for what particular reason.

The leaders had long been gone

out of their sight, out of their mind.

Oddly, and by the same token,

was also put out of their mind

the very reason why they had halted –

probably somebody had wanted

to relieve their bladder against the aspen.

For all they knew, here was as good a spot as any.

But – and this was uncanny –

nobody had sent for them

nor had their number dwindled.

Odder still was that ensued no mayhem,

nor any resentment was kindled.

They had passed from walking to waiting

faster than can strike a bolt of lightning.

And it was generally considered no fault

of any who had left nor of any who was present.

Even though the situation had precipitated

a whole set of problems, from losing track of time

to hunger, to stiffness in the limbs,

to quick fits of boredom and hatred.

But they could rest, chat with the locals,

behold life answer about its many calls.

Yet they flickered like the leaves of the aspen

in the faintest of breezes ever,

their own breath seemingly shortened –

menaced by the slightest sweeper –

covered in dust, shame and light.

Under cover of language

Under cover of language

words lurk, in cobwebbed

nooks and dusty crannies

in the dark pits of the mind

like throbbing guts

munching, mulching,

digesting, breaking down

the amino-acids of concepts

the red cells of the consonants

and the tissues of the vowels

the blood in the syntagmatic veins

waiting for the faintest cut

to spill their dyscontent on the tiled floor

vomiting tropes

expelling unspelt words

sickness of the language which snaps, cracks,

malfunctions, disrupts and blocks

and – sometimes – wrecks

when it should plant – and hacks

when it ought to tend –

and what it doesn't make it mars,

what it doesn't build it ruins –

In every body in wait lie

apocalyptic words.