belief without gods

the greater scheme, the big picture
nothing we do matters
there's no grand plan, no big win

if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.
now.
today.

if there's no bigger meaning then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world

- Angel, Series II, 'Epiphany'

I come quite often now upon a sort of ecstasy, a rag of light blowing among the things I know, making me feel I am not the one for whom it was intended, that I have inadvertently been looking through another's eyes and have seen what I cannot receive.

I want to believe I live in a single world. That is why I am keeping my eyes at home while I can. The light keeps on separating the world like a table knife: it sweeps across what I see and suggests what I do not. The imaginary comes to me with as much force as the real, the remembered with as much force as the immediate. The countries on the map divide and pile up like ice-floes: what is strange is that I feel no stress, no grating discomfort among the confusion, no loss; only a belief that I should not be here. I see the iron fences and the shallow ditches of the countryside the mild wind has travelled over. I cannot enter that countryside; nor can I escape it. I cannot join together the mild wind and the shallow ditches, I cannot lay the light across the world and then watch it slide away. Each thought is at once translucent and icily capricious. A polytheism without gods.

-Roy Fisher, 'The Wind at Night' (1961)

24 Jan

Winter sun is my surprise
is blinding drivers
shooting between

flaps down hands up
shielded careering
to the block

The idea that oppression doesn't exist anymore, or at least not here in Britain, not here in the University, has insinuated itself. As if just being aware that there is such a thing as oppression is enough. Sexism, oppression, racism, feminism, protest, seem words to flinch from, they shouldn't happen here so they don't happen here. I'm tired & I can't get my head around the tangles of this. Rich could make connections between Vietnam and sexuality through the Civil Rights movement. But in 2003 I don't know where to begin. It feels as if there is more work to do than there was in the 60s and 70s, not less. And that in itself isn't such a big deal but not knowing how to get started, how to say these things, is. If I can't express these things and deal with them and get stuck into them with all my privilege, education, words, then something must be badly wrong. But the idea that things are wrong is both anathema and a faded cliche to my generation. An idea to escape from, recover from, be therapised or prosaced out of, troubles are for other generations & other places. Feminists did suffrage and now we can vote. Done. Ireland and Palestine. Elsewhere. Oldham and Brixton. Another city. Not here. When and where does it reach me in this bubble of mine? Therapy and SSRs separate personal issues from political ones. But they pretend not to, they pretend to have all the force of enlightened empowerment behind them. Insinuous liberalism. It is part of my bones! Vaguely apologetic white middle class insecurity, strengthened by positive thinking and yoga and meditation and newspapers and Radio 4 and therapy and global awareness and organic food and shopping local and fairly traded chocolate. It is huge, it pervades every corner of my mind and my life. The strategies I employ for survival and happiness and confidence are part of this insinuous beast that in the end will leave me stuck like birdlime. Fold your flapping wings - they won't get you anywhere. I can say all this and start to see how it is working but it's like looking into a mirror and not being able to touch anything there or move anything there. Or being in a benign dream, monsters kept out by taking anti-nightmare drugs.

Don' t have the time for sustained blogging at the moment, but the wibble doesn't stop. This from Adrienne Rich, in an interview from 1991:

At the same time, I was thinking a lot about something that wasn’t being talked about at the time very much. I was thinking about where sexuality belonged in all this. What is the connection between Vietnam and the lovers’ bed? If this insane violence is being waged against a very small country by this large and powerful country in which I live, what does that have to do with sexuality and with what’s going on between men and women, which I felt also as a struggle even then? I was married. I was trying to define myself in a number of ways. […] I couldn’t find a model for the way I wanted to be, either in a relationship with a man or as a woman in the world. So when the women’s movement began to crystallize from the Left and the Civil Rights movement, that was another and certainly one of the most powerful connections for me.

Aerodrome, a field or place set apart for the practice of flight.