| Tuesday, November 16, 2004 |
 | Wowser. I'd forgotten how harcore Diwali sweets are. Thank the Heavens they appear to have been tidied away overnight, or I would be buzzing like a horny hummingbird.
As it is, I'm having trouble focusing. Having returned to work after holiday full of bounce and vim, last week efficiently kicked the crap out of my head. As I find myself saying an awful lot about all sorts of things, it's not about the fall but the recovery. Protect the vitals and the rest will follow.
On the platform on Saturday, waiting for the train home, I noticed an elderly man I had exchanged a few pleasantries with at various times, also waiting for the Forest Hill train. What the Hell, thought I, and introduced myself. Fascinating fellow - he made a quibbling point about Alfred North Whitehead which I coudn't quite get hold of until after I had said goodbye (the safest expression! It's the safest expression of Western philosophy, darn it), and argued for rebuilding the Parthenon sculptures (I was dubious) and the neglect of Indian, Egyptian and other cultures in a classical education (I agreed wholeheartedly). On the whole, a very pleasant conversation, and a story the moral of which is that you can generally judge somebody by the quality of their hat (dark green trilby, in this case).
I was going to say that it's odd how unwilling I am to talk to complete strangers while waiting for trains, but then remembered that that's not odd at all.
Meanwhile, I've been looking vaguely for more Alice Oswald, after being a bit short of whelm when I saw her reading at the Purcell Rooms. Try this:
Sonnet
I can't sleep in case a few things you said
no longer apply. The matter's endless,
but definitions alter what's ahead
and you and words are like a hare and tortoise.
Aaaagh there's no description — each a fractal
sectioned by silences, we have our own
skins to feel through and fall back through — awful
to make so much of something so unknown.
But even I — some shower-swift commitments
are all you'll get; I mustn't gauge or give
more than I take — which is a way to balance
between misprision and belief in love
both true and false, because I'm only just
short of a word to be the first to trust.
I like some the choppy rhythm, and the alternating difficult rhymes - endless/tortoise, fractal/awful, commitments/balance. I really like the first sentence - it catches the "fractal fear" very well - that checking whether something is still the case will stop it from being the case. And it uses "misprision", one of my favorite words ever, in a strong ending. But the middle section feels slack, not an unimpressive feat for a sonnet, and although I can see where that "Aargh" is doing, it kills the forward momentum of the poem in the wrong way. Any recommendations?
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