Generally, Davie, I would just keep shtumm in such circumstances, and would
be fully glad of Alison's supportive reply; but this is so (softly)
outrageous and any making of poetry in my text so unintentional, I am going
to relax my own casual rules and respond
I don't think I mentioned anything about vistas of calm sea, illusory or
otherwise. I did mention _cold and wet_. I'm talking about very cold and
fully wet. People drown here - and not just the indigines of Leicester,
Burnley and Bradford taking their airbeds into the ocean, but experienced
fishermen who in some places don't even have a quai - and the place is
prickly with life boats and rescue helicopters. I am somewhat surprised,
after seeing your posts over a considerable period, to see you _fixing_ it,
in this way, responding to a post of your invention
I do not believe that it is the norm in Bradford Leicester and Burnley that
one has no family and friends. I am sorry if that's your condition; but what
has it got to do with my conditions and experience or the discussion a huge
variety of people have been having about religion? I think you overegg it
with a chicken farm and some.
Nice dinners? Had a good one yesterday, yes. What has that got to do with
anything? I did something for someone and they fed me. My
not-sure-what-sort-of-fish-this-is-but-I-going-to-eat-it-anyway fish supper
charred on a driftwood fire leaves a little to be desired.
I don't enjoy these occasional survival forays. I feel a need to do them and
take the rare opportunities that I have
I was not making any tribute to life under the open sky as you seem to
think; but merely indicating that I wanted to make an extra effort to hear
particular sounds over a long period. Walls of houses deaden sounds.
I wouldn't think of sleeping rough in Bradford Leicester and Burnley because
it would not achieve my aim, which is not to sleep rough - and I don't do it
*that rough anyway...
I don't see how conditions in the megalopolis invalidate conditions on the
almost island of west penwith and on scilly - and you wouldnt find the
locals in a tent once they've reached teenage. The guy whose field I sleep
in on Scilly thinks I'm crackers; but then he is a farmer on a small island
in the ocean and if I were him any chance I got NOT to be open to the wind
and water I'd take, especially in the three months of the year when even the
ferry doesn't run for the inclemency of the weather but he still has to tend
his animals and crops
& when I become rich as Seamus Famous I shall live alongside him in a warm
house and talk my friends (no family, does that mean I am authentic?)
So, Dave, *very interesting but well over the top e.g. "No coasts"? That's
geography! No deprivation or exploitation and all the other things
justifiably hinted at. Of course there are no coasts in those towns -
they're inland
& if you look at a poem I posted here a few days ago, I describe towns as
cancers which cease to be benign, referring back over a thousand years so I
mean what are now thought of as quaint etc
pastoral / anti pastoral, i dunno... at the moment I have the wherewithal to
be in this area and some energy to go other than the tourist spots; but
don't assume too much
L
-----Original Message-----
From: david.bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 08 March 2004 00:15
Subject: Re: god, religion etc.
>>i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
>wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up<
>
>Interesting, Lawrence, but pastoral. Sleeping rough, as it were, in say
>Bradford or Leicester or Burnley, would not be a matter of free running
>water, except in that one might want to throw oneself into it for
>termination. No coasts, no illusory vistas of calm sea, no comforts of
>family, or friends, no nice dinners, no anything at all, except blank
>mindlost despair, speechtornaway.
>
>
>Best
>
>Dave
>
>
>
>
>David Bircumshaw
>
>Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
>& Painting Without Numbers
>
>http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 6:59 PM
>Subject: Re: god, religion etc.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jennifer Compton <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 07 March 2004 17:05
> Subject: god, religion etc.
>
>> I do not feel the living presence of God, god, or gods or anything
like
>that.
>> I do not live in that country.
>
>Well, I doubt that anyone does. Those who think they do feel it, would tell
>you that it is unmistakeable once you hear it, but so do those who hear
>voices telling them to do this and that.
>
>At lunch today friends and I fell to speaking of E M Forster - it started
>badly enough with Kenneth Graham and Pan appearing near the end of the wind
>in the willows and went on to _the story of a panic_ and _the road from
>colonus_
>
>in the latter the character whose name I have forgotten again has a pretty
>overpowering experience in a plane tree and then meets people who forster
>tells us were _ecstatic_, but finds their state merely _commonplace_
>
>and though the stories are a little contrived and certainly now of another
>country in the sense of unavailable as dead, they still speak to me in a
way
>which makes the graham drab and contrived and worse -
>
> or there's the unbeliever who goes to heaven in the celestial omnibus and
>panics and leaps out on the bridge shouting _i see london_ and falls
through
>it to his death
>
>all this by a doubter
>
>sometimes, often, i stand in front of the sea and i feel something i dont
>feel elsewhere apart from cold and wet
>
>it is outside the window now and i am glad it's there
>
>i miss it elsewhere
>
>in the years when i didnt go near it i missed it
>
>i'm sure if i got my wordsworth out i'd find words for it
>
>not coleridge, i think; not clare, not dh lawrence or thoreau
>
>i could sit and watch the architecture of a bird for hours, nasty seagulls
>being things of great beauty
>
>i do not for a moment say i feel any sense of presence when i look at the
>intricacy evolution has produced - i'll take the blind watchmaker whole
>
>but trying, only ever trying, to look out of the human and into the avian
or
>whatever, then sometimes, illusory as I am sure it is, I have an experience
>of seeing myself in a space with a dimension i do not normally perceive
>
>i am not sure what that dimension is but it's to do with where i might
>stand, an awareness that there is a depth which is not to do with distance
>but only to do with accepting that it is possible to see from somewhere
that
>isnt mine; and therefore from before me and from after me
>
>i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
>wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up
>
>and i will not say that there are spirits in them; i dont feel that; but i
>listen to their utterance and the sound sustains me and reorients me so
that
>i know where some things are better than i did before... until the memory
of
>the sounds fades
>
>L
>
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