To British and Irish Poets List
Saturday, 06 September 1997
about 11.20
Ric's news that the list would remain open is welcome, especially as the
list is automatic; it would have been a bad decision had it been closed
down as means of communication. I have decided, therefore, to use it. I
have tried elsewhere to say what I want to say and been threatened
physically. I hope for better here.
I write as a non-believer and as a non-participant. I am taking what is, I
believe, my liberty and freedom to make a small attempt to balance all that
has been said elsewhere as if it is incontrovertible when it is really
largely fallacious.
I have felt no great grief this week beyond that general sense of the waste
and sadness of things, from our subjective point of view, which any of us
can feel if we concentrate on how individual lives end. A lot of individual
lives have ended this week, many of them as a result of neglect and
violence rather than accident.
In the last week I have felt a sense of hopelessness to match the sense of
helplessness which I have heard expressed again and again from every
quarter. Landmines and homelessness and lack of care for the sick could be
solved, if we wanted it to; if so many millions really want to deal with
these things, if they can get themselves to London and camp out - many of
them - for a couple of nights, then they could create the necessary
pressure. It wouldn't take much.
Many of the causes that Diana Spencer supported could achieve their aims
with an input of much money. Many extremely rich people are at the heart of
today's ceremonies; but it is the ordinary people who are being encouraged
to contribute. Charity is taken as self-evidently good rather than the aims
of the charity, an acceptance of ongoing injustice.
The events of this week *are* remarkable. The mundane unthinking wandering
around the field till the slaughterer arrives has been somewhat halted and
slightly questioned. I have heard it compared to V.E. day. Perhaps it could
also be compared to that moment in the First World War when soldiers played
a game of football rather than fighting. And that stopped and the
destruction continued. The younger Steptoe said to the elder "And then you
shot 'im". "That's right," replied his father; "and 'is mate". After V.E.
day the British public soon returned to the masochistic and deferential
pattern of voting more suited to its mentality; and a few years after the
war to end war our taxes were helping to fund war in other people's
countries.
Opportunities to change the way of the world arise and would arise more
often if we sought to take them; but the oddity of our make up is that the
majority prefer princesses and stars and heaven and grace to things that
function for our general pleasure.
The day after the last election, there was a degree of rejoicing on this
list at the result; I remember expressing doubt; I still believe the
rejoicing was misplaced. If the destructiveness of the previous government
has been halted, almost nothing has been reversed; only this week I was
sending faxes to the department for education asking them to intervene with
a college ignoring its own articles of government to persecute one of its
own employees i.e. the policy of the previous government continues. The
point is not to blame the government, but to change it. We could change it.
I am not pleased that Diana Spencer is dead, but it is nothing to me beyond
anyone else's death; and, it seems to me, that the expression of grief at
the loss of her as icon-leader is an expression of a refusal by the people
to help itself. The people, united in grief, will always be defeated.
Back to gardening and poetry
Lawrence Upton
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