there was not a single egg in the aisle
Once, there was a poetry competition at school
We were about eleven
The topic was “nature,” or, perhaps, “the environment”
Even, or especially, then, although it is hard to imagine these ideas being more dominant than they are now, we must have understood that we were supposed to express our guilt, not our gratitude, for everything that is not us but that we are also a part of
CFCs the greenhouse effect global warming acid rain the polar caps were melting the amazon was being shredded. We rounded on a girl in the changing room because her deodorant was too cheap to have an environmentally-friendly logo. Later she fell off stage during a performance and no one could decide if she had done it on purpose
There was the planet, or the globe, and there were people, or was it “universal humanity”. And there was democracy, and the end of history, and freedom fighters were being freed and there were concerts, and charity and horror images all day, and telephone banks and people not knowing what time of year it was
And these images and these concepts are all-powerful
And as you know, if you say “Nature” or “the Environment” or “the climate” or “the Earth” or “the planet” or “Commonwealth” these have extraordinary implications for what follows
So anyway, we had this competition and everyone dutifully wrote their little poems about how awful it was that human beings - we, we, we - were destroying the earth and polar bears weeping how we were all going to die in an inferno of our own making and somehow we were responsible for all the decisions of everyone who had ever lived and died and into whose planet we had been born and all this
Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
I wrote a poem about how beautiful nature was and I like to imagine that I won the competition but in reality I think we all got a prize
No frog
No princess
Sometimes I come home and marvel at the diminishing capacity of rooms,
Calling your name
And on the way to church, a woman, distressed, saying over and over “no one speaks to me”
And the two parrots have learned to live together on the nut hanger
One up one down
“You have a beautiful body”
“You’re a very attractive woman”
And you listen to “secular music” and it blows your mind
What the hell are we doing
Wasn’t there enough already
Why do anything at all
We have never recovered from polyphony
All the excruciating moments
Insist on trying to teach you a lesson you can’t learn
And all art is Christian
The dialectic of the icon
How to balance the love of the thing with the thing with the non-thing