Perspectives, those safety targets of the now so fabulously valued paintings
of the Renaissance: they collide, collude, connect, conflict. Something I
keep on hammering away at is that I, we, you, do not necessarily know where
the other is coming from at any given moment: in 'real life', and this
cyber-world is not that, all the nuances of vis-a-vis being are missed out
in it, while at the same time it has the style of the written, with all its
graven authority, so in e-mail you have a headwringer of a mix of the spoken
and the written, while actually being neither. Where is David coming from
right now? Well, his Christmas and New Year has both been quite good and
also a mess, as both he and others were going down and recovering from colds
and other lergys during the year's turning in dear old dismal Britain, while
he is frantic about bureaucratic matters in respect of having worked
formally for a few weeks, work which was brutal in its physical nature and a
reminder of just what underlies all the comforts and securities of the lucky
in our societies, if anyone doubts just try working from ten on the night
till six in the morning in an unheated warehouse under a small taskmaster's
eye. Meantime too his head is brimming with poems and thoughts about poetry,
which latter can range from waking up in the morning hating the fact that he
ever had anything to do with that art to absolute absorption in matters of
line, rhythm, metaphor and voice. While as he writes he is freezing cold, in
the small hours, agoggle at what is going on in his neighbourhood: someone
was murdered, a knifing, outside the nightclub directly opposite where he
lives at 2.30 a.m on New Years Day, the police have been camped out ever
since, David was at the shop over the road this afternoon and got talking to
one of the policewomen involved, a seemingly really nice person who,
alongside with the others, was whiling away the hours of boredom on forensic
backup by drinking white cider in the vans, 'paintstripper' we call it here.
Huh? So that is just a tiny picture, a smidgen of the reality, of just
David's, multiply that by the reality of all others on this list and you
have a very fuzzy picture, compounded of inaccurate numbers, of the
realities of all here. All here in cyberspace and attention spans are
diminishing by the minute, where even a distinguished poet can, as recently
elsewhere, leave one in astonishment that he only reads one book a year.
Gawd bless you everyone.
Love
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
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