ENGLAND: 4
Attention Span
Anywhere I look, I see things that excite my senses, trees, plants, buildings, sunlight. Small events present themselves, wink at me and give me a little kiss to warm my soul. Yesterday, whilst sitting in the back of a car I saw a flock of about 200 blackbirds feeding in a circle on a playing field. As the feeding on worms finishes on the right hand side of the circle, the birds in that spot would flap out their wings and do a low-fly to the other side of the circle and start on new worm pickings. This is a non-stop rolling Mexican Wave of blackbirds. I wonder what would happen when the black circular flock of dots reaches the brown beech hedge at the end of the field. Would they all fly off and find a new field to repeat this unlikely performance in or would they bounce off the edge and head in a different direction across the grass?
As the car rushes past I only have the briefest of glimpses and never get to find out what they all do next. The unfinished image lodges in my imagination and stays with me all day.
I have been alive for thirty-five years, seen thousands upon thousands of miles of geography, thousands upon thousands of people. I have never seen this before, and I suppose that is a large part of its poetry.
To walk through a wood and sit under a tree or admire the symmetry of a plant is somehow always a unique event.
Even if we are to find ourselves in the most alien of landscapes we can still find something to pin the comfort of familiarity on, even if it’s only a rock.
Even if everything else has gone to hell in a handcart, we still have simple things that offer us no challenge, only that we listen.
Distance.
What compels us to act out our little hobbies? The ones that engage and engross us?
What compels us to watch TV? If you treat TV as a special occasion, it either comes when there is something worth setting aside an otherwise busy life for, or as a gap-filler in a moment of dullness. So what’s going on when a kid watches seven to ten hours of TV every day?
What is the compulsion with computers and computer games, that even when I can feel my eyes bulging out of my head, my back is complaining and my legs want to saw themselves off and go for a good long walk in the woods without the rest of me, what is it that compels me to stay right there stuck in that little room that has become my world?
What is it that compels me to abandon a known world to skim across the surface superficials of another unknown one and call it adventure because that’s what so many others seem to do?
The Gospel According to St. Elsewhere.
About time I did some writing. After getting back from Cuba, I rode the travel trip inside my head some more for about a month, but I have stopped writing, and this is causing a backlog of crap. I’ve done a little bit of work, but not much; I got back from Italy and haven’t done much at all. I’ve got nothing to focus me, and not much to ground me.
Holding onto the notion of New Zealand seems hard to do when I can’t see much truth or reason in it. Funds are down, the air is sweet with Autumn and laden with memory and familiarity. Senses are strong and I am here. My senses are fired-up and fly in the face of my unchannelled and currently confused mind. I’ve got bullshit going on and I know it. So what do I let go of? What do I want to do? What do I need to do? What pulls me the strongest?
Scotland, the States, two countries I’ve never seen, taking some responsibility, putting something back in, being more real.
I spent years wandering, sitting under trees, begging for connection, and now I’ve got it, I feel love in it; people know me and I’m understood and the other way too. I have a fantasy about being in a more beautiful place with an exotic girlfriend. Whatever happened to wanting world peace?
I go to Scotland for an anti-GM demo, and I let my anti-girlfriend guard down. There seems to be a response immediately. I get the feeling there is an interest from an activist called Jenn. Unhugged for a long time, feeling dry as dust in my bubble. Someone to touch please. She’s not the woman I fantasise of, but she’s into travel and she’s very intelligent. She even seems to get my sense of humour, which is a bit blinking unusual (and she’s on a lifestyle wavelength). Maybe there’s some crossover between perfection-fantasy-dreams and ‘doing the right thing’.
Let’s name names here:
The fantasy; a gorgeous girlfriend, maybe Scottish to go to New Zealand with, then New Zealand being too far from my roots, to settle in Scotland and do (whatever – settle down get creative); stay in contact with Norfolk.
There are other fantasies; meet a yummy Scandinavian woman, West Coast US/Canadian.
I can’t say about settling in New Zealand/Australia; I haven’t been there yet, so how can I possibly know (except that it seems too far away).
For some reason I feel fairly set on not settling in Norfolk. I keep telling myself it’s because of the countryside being rubbish, but now (maybe because it’s Autumn) I’m enjoying it. It’s a subtle beauty, very different from the magnificence of Scottish mountains and moorland.
Full Moon Richard Lewis’s house Norwich October 13th 2003
This time one year ago I was in Stephenville hitch-hiking across Newfoundland. Now I’m back at square one in Richard’s house; representing so many things. Untidiness, his bickering, an air of unhealthy inertia. I don’t want to be here for a wide variety of reasons. I love him to bits, but I’m cheese and he’s a grater. Or the other way round.
I buy a plane ticket for Malmo with a view to getting work in Oslo, but freak out about it and decide not to go; too many things pulling me about. I’ve mentally been feeling pretty awful the last two or three weeks. Not doing any writing either, which is usually good medicine. I have been sleeping badly, been feeling run down, not doing any work and getting very muddled whilst waiting for Brett to put some work my way. That’s not working out (only one or two days, not solid employment) and continued sofa-surfing has meant I’m ending up doing WAY too much thinking. It feels like I’m back-tracking heavily emotionally.
In lieu of anything constructive going on, I’m been thinking about Canada, Norwich, Scotland, Sofie, the Belgians generally, Sophie in Victoria all round and round in circles. I miss them all. I’m well aware I have a very un-down to earth outlook on life, which is driving me a little bit crazy. Missing Norwich folks when I was in the jungle paradise of Belize was one thing, but Norwich is somewhere I’m wary of emotionally engaging in too much, and the pulls for elsewhere are huge. At the same time though, I find my senses lapping up the atmosphere of Autumn; the colours, the smells and the sights of nature and old English buildings. It’s as if I’m looking around my world knowing that I might never see it again. There’s a mixture of a deep beauty and a kind of death. There’s something really quite weird about that.
So all that done with; take a deep breath out-of-step with everyone else and make something happen. Helen yesterday said she admires my bravery. I’m never quite sure what the difference between bravery, foolishness and necessity are. State of mind I guess.
For all the emotional anchors of the familiar, I sometimes manage to remember that there’s a whole load of warm funny people ahead of me too. I wonder how I’ll read this when I’m stuck somewhere strange and alien that I want to escape from. Actually I don’t know why I should think that – it never happened on the Canada to Mexico trip. Oh yeah, the Floating Neutrinos…
At some point I have to stop all this and just be where I am; I think I might need a five year plan so that I can decide where the buck stops. So far, my buck stops at New Zealand (it being the centre of all current mental geography chaos). I have to be watchful of that being replaced by some other equally disruptive set of mind-junk when that time comes. It will probably have something to do with relationships.
Richard Terry 