“Morning, noon & bloody night, Seven sodding days a week, I slave at filthy WORK, that might Be done by any book-drunk freak. This goes on until I kick the bucket. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT” ― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

I can write

You can write. But do you? And if you do What do you write about? Not business, work or success. How about loss, grief, endings and what makes us human. But that doesn't scale sale or fill your pockets. And so you might ask if you're not disconnected connected to nothing more than playing an arid moribund game dressed up as life what then what then?

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And other man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Another day of Teams calls -- six or seven I think. I will if it kills me start at least one of them with a poem. I'm thinking of this one by William Ayot

____

In My Fiftieth Year

October had me thinking about dying. The specialist had dropped a few new words into my humdrum, day-to-day vocabulary, sharp, angular words like prostate, blood test and tumour. I waited as the days grew shorter, burned faster, turning for consolation to Alden Nowlan and Raymond Carver, poets who both died conscious at fifty, facing the implacable mugger that is cancer.

Alden got there by main strength and character, eyeball to eyeball with the merciless thug, managing to raise a modicum of grace at each new threat and ugly demand. Ray was something else. He’d made the journey, had travelled to despair and way beyond. He knew that his life, or what he had left of it, was a gift over which he had neither right nor dominion. In fact he renounced all pretence to control and settled for the astonishing beauty of the moment.

Having seen the mugger’s shadow in the alleyway, having heard the click of his approaching heels, I’ve seen him, in his irrational way move on, seeking someone else to terrorise. Whatever comes now, I think I’m ready. My life, like Carver’s, has become a boon. For me, each day’s an unexpected benison, a deepening I never thought to witness. I’m privileged to see beauty and to know what I’m seeing, to recognise love in its glory and variety. I have a place where my heart can gather itself, I have friends, and the goodwill of my dead. In my fiftieth year I have come in to land. Rich in love and in beauty I am truly blessed.

Photo by Leighann Blackwood on Unsplash

A few books on the go!

How long do we have?

I'm sat here. Wine poured. Music playing. And I can't help but wonder: how long have I got? To live and die. To live and die.

But of course no one wants to invite a question that might command their demise. Me, I'm not waiting or avoiding: I'm here now waiting for my beloved. She'll come for me and she's blessed of spirit of holiness.

But we don't want it that way. We want to stay alive alive to everything awash with our greatness. But it never plays out that way.

I'll come for you death. You'll come for me; and we'll all be blessed touched by the hand of god.

Photo by Tom Allport on Unsplash

Work language

I'm on another Teams call.

It's BAU all the way.

My head isn't it. I'm thinking about loss, grief and limits mixed in with the mythos of poetry.

Perhaps this is the reason, apart from many others, for abandoning ship.

A lunchtime stroll around South Brent.

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

Here now.

Sleep

I welcomed sleep gratefully. Can you imagine losing it? Sure, I’d miss the dreams it brings, but even more the sense of buoyancy. Of a body adrift at medium depth. For the few seconds you notice that sleep has found you—on your way down to it, or on your way up—that’s when the world can almost fit. Chaos, horror, the great unspooling—all suspended. How long could anyone last without such rest?

— Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel (Grove Press, April 2, 2024)

Thanks, Leslie.

(via Way too deep)

This week’s blog post.

Here now.

“You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)” ― Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last