Disembodied Sensation

I wrote a poem a couple of weekends back. It's a pretty odd poem, and every time I read it, I think: - yes, new for me, but very odd. I wrote it in the middle of the night after Yom Kippur. The disembodied sensation induced by neither eating nor drinking for 26 hours lingered in my mind.

At the same time, during the day - while I was out at synagogue with my dad - I'd left Emily at home. I didn't realise she was getting sick from not drinking enough water or caffeine, and felt half like I'd abandoned her. And I'd also intended to write a blog about our walks on the Isle of Wight for some time. I still want to write one or two on that - something pretty special happened there - although unlike the poem to follow, in a comic rather than tragic vein. Somehow all this hazily mingled together to produce something not entirely about any of that.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The sea is green because I want to kiss you.
She takes it out on me physically.

Her ceaseless waves casually erase your feet
After mine were split to ocean from air.

Split by your lips' quiver, at sea's say
How I no more am your amour than a dream.

Touch me: I do not shimmer like water
Though my feet are fled beneath shoreline forever.

And when I clutch your hands, mine seem no less wind
Than sand fumbling at a romance that never was.


.

The Trial: Law v. Poetry

George Bernard Shaw said 'All professions are conspiracies against the laity.' In my darker moods, I sometimes think that the entire legal and economic system is a civilised fraud imposed upon people. It makes civilisation seem real - even though held together by rules, procedures and mechanisms that exist entirely in people's minds. In its favour, it displaces the madness of nature with the happy fiction of decency and self-respect. On an existential level, it clothes the rude purposelessness that bleakly surrounds us all.

By contrast, Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." While most people associate poetry with fancy and fantasy, throughout English literature there has been a vital strand that disenchants: from Chaucer's Wife of Bath through Skelton, Swift, Pope, Byron, Auden and now poets like Geoffrey Hill (e.g. 'To the High Court of Parliament November 1994'). Don Paterson would be another good choice, with his richly sardonic meditations on the transacting darkness (note the economic pun). 

In certain directions, my understanding of poetry and law pull me in exactly opposite ways. And I rather like this sensation - this vertigo-like sense of freefall. On the one hand, I'm utterly compelled by the need to maintain what people have, to prevent all human societies going to pot; on the other, when you look at our relationship to nature, you realise a lot of our human arrangements are all nonsense.

The final line of Paterson's most recent volume 'Rain' have little or no rational justification, and yet they sum up this position well:

"and none of this, none of this matters."

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/26/080526po_poem_paterson

Before and After

1995 http://yfrog.com/mebsdyj
2011  http://yfrog.com/h8bsl5j

Dollsing 2: Expiry Date

Shortbread 2003
Matzah meal 2003
Scampi + Prawns 2007
Custard 2007
Spinach, Asparagus, Ricotta Pasta Sauce 2008

These were some of the things we are considering keeping. Keep - you read that right.

This house has a personality of its own - a pathological personality, some might say, but one I am affectionate toward.

Today, Emily and I waged war on the kitchen. The trigger for this conflict was the discovery, by our cleaning lady, of some maggots residing in the doormats by our backdoors. The cause of the maggots? A dead green mouse. The cause of the dead green mouse? Poison - but when living, he ate a sizable chunk of matzah. Here: http://yfrog.com/nw21qtj .

We began with the freezer - beef bourgignon from 2005? chuck it; lamb so old the label can no longer be read? chuck it. Plastic bag with little dribble of ice cream???!!! Why is that still there? I think my elder brother Max made it. Nostalgia purposes? Who has nostalgia over frozen ice cream? Jam jars maybe. All we can say is goodbye to our over full freezer.

Then we went through the canned goods, the bottled sauces and jars of spreads/jams. Our findings were farcical, and yet nostalgic. The oldest find was lemon juice from 1990. Some real classics included sun lollies, yellow food colouring and jelly packets from 2001. The most curious was mushroom ketchup. http://yfrog.com/mg95qmj . On the way, we also discovered Swiss vegetable bouillon from 1997, beef stock from Jackson's of Piccadilly and emulsified cranberry sauce. There were many other interesting things.

This is what happens when consumerists forget to be consumerists, and fail to get rid of stuff that has a consume-by date. By our reckoning, we got rid of over £200 worth of goods. Although its value now is probably less than £20, or possibly even £10.

These products of our contemporary wasteland are the equivalent of the dolls from the Isle of Wight house, shocking and hidden but with less charm. They take us back to an era of innocence, when freezing lollies was SO exciting and making cakes with food colouring was radical. I wonder what our digestive systems would have been like in the age these foods were created. If only I'd been advanced enough to see this happening and prevented it...oh the waste that piles up through our modern lives!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfLER3Z0-Q&ob=av2n (not that we think much of this song, but scrubbing up afterwards, it feels right)

Robbery and Reenactment

Most of our lives we sally through, immune to everyday risks because we’ve thought of our response to them long ago. Every so often, dreams conjure threats to our habituated experiences, but we wake to find them unreal, inconceivable.

On the particular day I want to talk about, my best friend Ollie had dreamt that the council were lopping off the trees of Ruskin Park. The residents were up in arms at the outrage. Anyone reading this must realise that this action would be such a public nightmare that it could only exist in the night.

The particular day was the 26^th August. If you look back to my blog on that day, I wrote something in the morning anticipating how hot the day would be. Ollie called me up to ask if I wanted to have a few drinks at the Fox and Hound (Champion Hill, Southwark), play a few games of chess. What better way to spend a day?

I began the day with £15, and ended it with £0. We alternated buying jugs of Pimms, and maybe a packet of crisps. From the amount I spent, I’m pretty sure we drank two jugs each, and I also bought a packet of Cheese and Onion. I thrashed him at chess: he made the same mistake each time – he’d start from a strong position, initially appear to win and then allow a key piece to become vulnerable and me to swipe it. From there on, I just overwhelmed him with superior pieces. Later in the day, I would become the key piece.

So on the bus home, I was feeling pretty good about myself, not least because of the Pimms and good times with my best mate. I took out a volume of Peter Mcdonald’s Pastorals and opened it at the delightful sonnet ‘At Castlereagh Castle.’ An archetypal couple wander down a country lane; in the last six lines, we discover it’s the poet’s parents, poor but happy.

Got off the bus, went home. Paused in front of my house. I wanted to write a note about the poem, and it would never get written if I went inside with the stilted muggy air in my house from that 27-degree day. Go to the park. Find a bench in the half-light. Write note (slashes represent line-breaks) :

25^th?            11:55pm At Castlereagh Castle: / with the second stanza, you realize / not generic couple     his parents   /   walking from their wedding.

When Burnside talks of   /  stepping aside  / or Paterson, of poetry beginning / at the point of self abandonment / Walcott          of self-forgetting.

You’d forgotten you are / a minor force on a massive earth / not much of an I, against / the tremendous accretions, the sustained / language games in which every / man woman + child participate + / negotiates their own contribution / every day.  a generic self existing in a / language covenanted by others to you, which / you share with them.

So far / your parents have hosted you long, / your bed you take for granted / spend too long there, hide behind it / as you stare at the elegant outer construction / of your house and realise you paid and / have no equity towards the house.

And each scenario is different / but with practice, experience, the forces / within it can be weighted / Just as legal language alters with / judgments, incrementally, molecule by molecule.

After finals, you could see yourself / as a generic, as a spectator of your / own times and were not scared to / gain some vantage on your I. / You will need money/ you will need advice / then maybe you can act on I, as well as think it. /

the presumption of ‘we’ / they tried that where my grandparents came from / I cannot begin to evoke the horror of presuming a ‘we’ cohere / the personality becomes a proxy of / the state’s wishes. Not really a / proxy, but repressed   + encouraged to think not of its own force, but some / abstract faceless corrective / non-entities.

At this point, I decided I’d written enough and should go back. Exit down the ramp between the tennis court and the basketball court. A shadowy figure, shouting. Walk on – you walk straight on. Four of them. Older teenagers, 17-18, South American descent I’d say.

Another shout, this time closer – I can make out the word “want.” The shouting figure is behind me – fool I turn the slightest bit – can’t run, my white shorts are too full of stuff. His hand grabs me.

“Give me your phone.”

“No.

“Give me your phone” “ NO”

“Come on, man – just give us your phone.” I clasp my iPhone desperately.

Before I can stop them, they’ve taken my wallet and my oyster card. Hands clutching inside my pockets – eugh.

-GIVE ME YOUR PHONE.

-The police can find you if you take it.

Desperate hands clasping at my pockets. My shirt with a leaping rockstar shreds as they tug at it. Three of them - Punches – I fall on the ground. Punches on my back.

-The police can find you if you take the phone.

After at least a minute – the shorts have torn – ‘take his watch’ – the watch strap, already hanging by a thread, is broken in two and taken – finally after several punches, I’ve relinquished the phone. My arm now looks like this:

 yfrog.com/kl94k6j 

and my back is similarly scraped.

I find my wallet (haha, no cash, no point nicking it) and Young Person's Rail Card. I go home, talk to my neighbours (who are outside) to say I’ve been robbed, go inside and wake my mum up. I decide to call the police because I know the iPhone can be recovered with the Find My Iphone. Online, it appears to show the phone at Brandon Street near the Walworth road.

Two police arrive – they are incredibly reassuring. They take evidence and tell me that they’ve got ten police on the ground at the site. “All phones should have this – this is incredible.” Can I make the phone ring?

After fifteen minutes, they’ve had no success – the device must be at least ten metres off and is on the move again. I hear periodic voices from the walkie-talkie system – weird to be in the position of Big Brother, looking down at the phone from the skies.

The descriptions all seem completely wrong – they’ve found some young South Americans, but one’s arm is in a sling. They’ve found the phone, but the thugs have dropped it. They suspect that they may have been checking what I said, and it turns out I was right. Thank god they've found the phone.

They prepare me for doing a line up. We head off in a police car to Camberwell High Street.

Before the line up takes place, we unexpectedly charge through a red light when they see a licensed minicab speeding. They stop him.

“I’d book you if we didn’t have a charge in our care. Your license would be revoked. You should know better as a cabbie. Consider yourself lucky.” Cool. Never deliberately gone through a red light before.

Back to the line-up. None of them are the suspects. We go over the territory but see nothing. Later, all the leads – CCTV tracking the places where the phone went + DNA evidence – run dry.

Later, on the 12^th August, I go to a party at Tatum Street, some 7 or so minutes walk from where the phone lingered so promisingly. I decide not to bring my phone or wallet. No risks this time.

When I get there, I see Tom C – and say hi, give him a hug, catch up.

“Why isn’t Emily here?

“She’s tired. Also when I got robbed, my iPhone was held only five minutes walk away from here – so she was scared of coming with me.

A pause from Tom. I say

-Give my your phone.

-No.

I lean over. –Give me your phone.

-No, Ben, NO.

I reach into his pocket and touch the phone. Then I let him go.

In a program about child psychology I later watch, they say that the child who reacts to injustice by saying “No – don’t do that” gives a somewhat intellectual response. What are we like?

Family History 3: My Mother's Mother's Father

I'll say little on this one, and let the obituary speak for itself:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2122097/?page=1

Two Dreams of Reason: Of Vice and Good

Yesterday, I was part of a jury that unanimously pleaded guilty. The defendant was an 18 year-old accused of wounding with intent to cause GBH ("serious harm" (DPP v Saunders)). It was his "first imprisonment." And until 40 minutes before we reached our verdict, I would have pleaded not guilty.

I don't want give many details of the case (as I don't know if it may affect the victim's reputation), but suffice to say: if you are a homosexual, I don't recommend oral pleasure on a dark, foggy canal in the middle of the night. You may get spotted, then chest-slashed by a cocksure youth out to prove himself the big man.
(The doubt arose as to whether it was him or his small mate who did it; watching the CCTV footage close-up clarified my doubt.

It was my second trial; many of us agreed on our first that though we pleaded the defendant was not guilty on the evidence, our gut instinct was that he was guilty; also that this minor incident didn't deserve to go to trial despite the defendant's potential guilt)

It's the kind of thing you might see on TV. What particularly struck me were the roles of prosecution and defence.

The prosecution must make you sure the defendant did it. For him, the victim is an upstanding citizen and almost always right; the police are heroes and almost always right; and the defendant is a lying cesspool of vice. He argues humans get vicious, and this defendant (in particular) is criminally vicious.

The defence must prove that the victim is lying or mistaken, the police evidence is flawed and the defendant is alright. He sees the good in the accused, and looks out for alternative explanations, minority reports. Here the possibility was of a delayed reaction by the victim, and him being stabbed earlier. But the victim's account was much more convincing when matched with the CCTV.

Though the defence's argument was ultimately unconvincing, I found his Yorkshire flair persuasive. The prosecution was even more of a character, a deep-toned, but incredibly posh-accented black man. He had this cool vehemence that was gripping.

Thinking about these two led me into a discussion with Emily about my aversion to criticising specific people and things in my direct experience. How I've found it leads me to brooding dark visions of humanity, a pessimism that I prefer to do without. I prefer to see the good in people. She claims she can make me see that a sharpened critique of my immediate fellows need not lead to pessimism. I'm intrigued.