everyday is a holiday
The pier at Clacton-on-Sea, recently
Another beautiful day; almost another country, Absolute stillness in the sky. In the park the crows stand around watching the runners go past. Someone is beating a drum to encourage them (the runners, not the crows). The grass is parched. Everywhere the same yellow, strawlike desert. I want to see the grass come back to life, three days of rain, would it spring back, green. The dry grass makes the rubbish more obvious: empty little plastic bags, bottle-tops, cans, broken glass and the little canisters for gas. Sometimes the big industrial cream spray-cans. Empty rizla packets, fake nails, glue, pools of beer and spit. Exercising outside makes you acutely aware of the night before, of what remains before the men come around with their bags and clasping sticks.
You go to the Dr for a blood test. You fail because your veins hide and you get into such a state that it becomes impossible and the lovely nurse is so nice you feel like a complete, well, prick. There’s no way you can do this again because the precipitous drop in blood pressure makes you feel like you’re on a water-slide to a place where there are just black patches everywhere. You wonder how much it is possible to get a psychological hold on yourself in this situation. You realise how little control you have and that the only way to do this would be to dissociate heavily, and that you would need something that changed your mindset quite substantially to do this.
And there is a confrontation on the top deck of the bus between a young Muslim man and a middle-aged white man, the latter of whom seems drunk or otherwise bewildered. The younger man accuses the older of swearing at him, which the latter doesn’t deny. Nor does he apologise for it, which several people on the bus encourage him to do so, or at the very least they speak on his behalf he didn’t mean it or it’s not worth it. A black woman moves down from the front of the bus the towards the Muslim man and tries to calm him down, which is kind. The general feeling on the bus is, naturally, one of de-escalation. I say something useless like it’s okay. There is a kind of stalemate where the older white man doesn’t really say anything but mumbles slightly, causing the Muslim man to ask him what he’s saying, and repeating the point that he is angry with the older man. No one swears at me he says no man, no woman, no child, no fool. So now there are four categories of human being, and who among us is not the fool, at least sometimes. He gets off the bus with his friend at the next stop.
And the flat is full of these little flies which don’t seem to live on anything.
And you go outside, in a quest for the green, and the grass is still very, very quiet and the green is really only in the trees, or in the parrots, which fight each other for peanuts, mid-air.
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there - W.B. Yeats
This is what the Sovereign Lord says: On the day I cleanse you from all your sins, I will resettle your towns, and the ruins will be rebuilt. The desolate land will be cultivated instead of lying desolate in the sight of all who pass through it. They will say, “This land that was laid waste has become like the garden of Eden; the cities that were lying in ruins, desolate and destroyed, are now fortified and inhabited.” Then the nations around you that remain will know that I the Lord have rebuilt what was destroyed and have replanted what was desolate. I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it. - Ezekiel 36: 33-36
Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature,
spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.