Category: March 2018

Positive Poison

There’s a new church in town…the holy church of positive thinking.  The crux of its belief system is that we can control material reality merely by the way we think….a bit like magic.  It’s a dogma which has evolved from the all pervasive Cognitive Behaviour Therapy which underpins our mental health services, the cheap skate version of real psychotherapy.  It’s a belief system that blames the victim for all her problems.  If we get sick, get raped or mugged or burgled or abandoned or our home is flooded, we are somehow to blame because we have ‘too much negative energy’.  If we are poor or weak it is our own fault.  We should try harder.  Apparently, according to nit-wit pundits like Nigel Schofield we could all be rich and famous if we were only more positive.

While I wholeheartedly agree that taking a positive attitude when dealing with the many problems that challenge us through life is always to be encouraged and can make a huge difference in recovery from illness, this ideology has gone to a ridiculous extreme.  It’s mind over matter gone mad.  All the positive thinking in the world will make no difference when you watch your home burn to the ground or your child die of a terminal illness.  Is the child to blame for getting cancer? Did his five year old mind generate too many negative thoughts? Did you invite faulty wiring into your house through the faulty wiring of your mind? Are the desperate victims of wars in the Middle East to blame for their own suffering?  Perhaps if they improved their attitude the barrel bombs and drones would vanish in a puff of smoke.

The other nonsense people tend to spout is ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and ‘Everything happens for the best’.  Really?  Say that to someone watching their loved one disintegrate through Alzheimer’s Disease. They will not welcome your comment.

All this positive thinking crap just puts extra pressure and guilt on people who are already suffering  misfortune.  It is insinuated that their bad luck is their own fault and they need to try harder.  It’s a good excuse to run down our health service even further.  Why not just send people away from ER with a button badge telling them to always look on the bright side?

Here are the facts:-  1. We are mortal creatures who begin to die from the moment we are born.  2. There is a very concrete material reality underpinning our lives.  It will not shape shift to suit our desires.  We are living in a material world and we are made of flesh and blood.  3. We are not to blame for our own problems. Bad things happen to good people.  4.  Shit happens for no reason at all.  Life is chaos and the most important things are beyond our control.

So all you woolly minded purveyors of positive nonsense need to grow up and have the guts to confront the world the way it really is, warts and all.  Life is not perfect.  We all suffer and that suffering is unavoidable.  What happens is not all down to us but that doesn’t mean life can’t be beautiful.  Make the very best of what you’ve got and be grateful for every precious moment.

 

2DDA6695-80B9-43A7-B2D9-D68C14311016
Photo by the author

Spot the Difference

Here are some beautiful words penned by a charismatic young man named Hamish Hawk from Edinburgh.  Is this a poem or the lyrics of a song?  What do you think?

Catherine Opens a Window

So you turn over,
Whisper into my shoulder
That you’re not clever enough to be sleeping with me.
But it’s not about schooling.
It’s more about using what you’ve been given, what you’ve got
And what you’ve got is more than enough.
I remember when cancer was just a constellation,
A starry-eyed crustacean with nothing to say of whether you and I live or die.
I don’t remember Glasgow until I was fourteen.
It’s where people I know tend to let themselves go when they’ve got something to bring to an end.

Well, it’s one, two, three
Steps in the cul-de-sac
You and me,
Your feet on the ground, mine hitting your back.
We’re running so fast that we smash into the bins
And we tumble over.
Catherine opens a window,
‘Now boys, that’s not how you play’.
Catherine, just wait,
What a peculiar thing to say.

I remember Maxwell.
I remember his mum too.
Her hands in the cool drawer of the fridge and her man’s fists on the window ledge.
I remember Michaela.
I remember her last name.
I know she could dance, I know she could hide, and that she won a netball game.
But she’s gone now,
Sticks in the corner.
There’s a bus ticket in the breast pocket of her green blazer.

Her mum has hung it up to dry in the airing cupboard
In the hope that she might need it the morning after.
Just once, maybe forever, again.

Well, it’s one, two, three
Steps in the cul-de-sac.
You and me,
Your feet on the ground, mine hitting your back.
We’re running so fast that we smash into the bins.
And we tumble over,
Catherine opens a window,
‘Now boys, that’s not how you play.
Catherine, just wait,
Well, you know
You’ll both have jobs one day.’

 

D4CF3764-5B28-4DB6-B239-15B453103A71
Photographic image created by the author

 

So have you decided? Is this a poem or a song?

Song lyrics and poetry have much in common.  They both use rhythm, rhyme, repetition, refrain.  They both work through the building up of images and utilize metaphor.  But song lyrics have the advantage of music to help communicate emotion, atmosphere and meaning.  Poetry has to work that much harder because it exists in an empty space either as typed words on a white page or spoken aloud in a silent room.  Poetry has to look good on the page, it has a visual element as well as aural. This is particularly the case in concrete poetry.  Line endings are more important and can make all the difference to interpretation, to create pauses, to aid the flow of words.  In song, music takes care of these things.

There used to be a lot of snobbery about poetry.  It was seen as the superior, intellectual cousin to song lyrics.  Fortunately, this ridiculous distinction is fading and song is now considered just as worthy an art form.  Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, an event that officially gave lyrics the same status and gravitas as poetry.

Well, did you guess right? ‘Catherine Opens a Window’ is actually a song from Hamish Hawk and the New Outfit’s latest album called From Zero to One.  It’s a terrific album with a full band sound and every track is special.  Hamish is a young musician who reminds me of early David Bowie crossed with Morrissey from The Smiths  with a touch of Ray Davies.  Here is a YouTube link of Hamish singing the song solo in his living room.  Listen carefully, does hearing the words set to music alter your understanding….?

 

Celebrate!

Spring is just around the corner here in the UK and we have Easter this weekend for those who celebrate it.  However,  it’s actually snowing in northern Scotland today and not at all typical weather for the end of March.

I want to wish everyone out there a very happy Spring Holiday.  It’s a good time to look to the future with hope and optimism and to celebrate all the wonderful things that make life worth living.  Spring is a time of renewal, growth and positive change. There’s a different energy abroad, a time to seize each day.

I took this photo at the local pet shop….Easter eggs for cats!  Hope it makes you smile!

 

0409A8FF-43DD-450C-8126-3C844A5F5FB4

 

 

Gifts

The first spilled secrets in filthy school loos.
The second gave ginger cut to the chase.
The third made love, death and crime on Ward 5.
The fourth shared The Sound of Silence.
The fifth fell into a snow drift.
The sixth surrendered beautiful on the banks of the Tyne.
The seventh gave a wedding ring and split lip.
The eighth made excellent chicken soup.
The ninth gave gin massage on hot lawns.
The tenth offered midnight lifts to therapy and falling stars.
The eleventh staged punctures in motorway service stations.
The twelfth gave tarot card readings.
The thirteenth banned the Bomb and taught self-defense with a spanner, sickle and hammer.
He slept with his socks on.
The fifteenth performed impressions of Richard Gere.
The sixteenth gave empty, like Dire Straits.
The seventeenth cracked my zoom lens.
The nineteen rowed my boat to the island of woolly mammoths.
The twenty second shared Victoria Sandwich and arson.
The twenty eighth gave life drawing. He jumped off the High Level Bridge.
The thirty sixth sent crocodiles under my floor.
The one after him played a mean pianissimo and made the top forty.
The last one believed in the theory of reincarnation.

 

CB0212E6-D7AC-4BE0-9A35-11EC6B86B38D
Photograph by the author

Northern Soul

Portrait of a Wicker Man

 

D9A170F5-3C0A-4CFA-9D40-862F085B59D3
Photo by the author

 

Note:- compared to the rest of the UK, the North of Scotland has a high level of social problems particularly affecting men.  Unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression and suicide are on the rise due to the decline of fishing, farming and the oil industries.  Men are feeling increasingly powerless as they lose their traditional roles.  So although it is a beautiful part of the world, the Highland region is a tough place to  survive.

I met the friendly guy in the photo while I was trying to photograph a window display in the tiny shopping precinct in Wick.  He offered to pose alongside the rather creepy mannequins.  He’d just bought cat food as he does voluntary work for a cat rescue charity.

Blue

I am one speck of dust passing through.
I am silk thread unraveling
the caterpillar inside her cocoon.

I am the blood of winter
sun beyond the horizon
and I float a murmur of starlings.

I brood a melancholy song
whispering blue into the wind.
I glide the last seeds from the sycamore.

I hunt the moon with moth-silver wings
and streak midnight skies with electricity.
I skim my love with words touching skin.

I breathe one thought between me and you.
I am one speck of dust passing through.

 

600F4EB8-3779-427C-B392-9F1A528CCCB3
Photograph by the author

Highland River

Everywhere you look in the Highlands there are wild seas, sparkling waterfalls,  crystal rivers and lochs.  Rain falls almost every day.  Northern Scotland is a realm of water.  Perhaps that is why so many people choose to make it their home.  Human beings, like other animals, have an instinct to gather near water.  Water is a source of sustenance, essential to survival.

Many of the novels of acclaimed Scottish novelist Neil M Gunn (born 1891 – died 1973) focus on a watery theme:- Morning Tide, The Silver Darlings, The Grey Coast, The Drinking Well and Highland River which won the 1937 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.  Neil Gunn was born in Dunbeath, a tiny coastal village which is a half hour drive from my home.  His father was the captain of a herring boat and Gunn’s writing explores the harsh lives, isolation and landscapes of Caithness fishing communities.  Gunn was a socialist and a political activist committed to Scottish Nationalism and independence.  His writing has a Zen-like intensity with an underlying mysticism, detailed descriptions of landscape and the slow unfurling of events.

 

49417E1B-E609-46FF-A5DB-BDF02C543F7A
Photo by the author

 

Visitors to Dunbeath harbour today will see a striking bronze statue of a boy wrestling with a huge salmon.  The statue illustrates a dramatic scene from Highland River when nine year old Kenn captures a salmon with his bare hands.  The novel contrasts this childhood struggle for survival and dominance with the brutality of World War 1 when an adult Kenn joins the British army.

Within the first two pages Gunn introduces the novel’s main protagonist, establishes the remote community setting and the landscape whilst building dramatic mood and tension.  It is an example of Neil Gunn’s great skill as a writer.  Here is a short excerpt describing when Kenn on a cold morning, reluctantly goes to the river pool for water for the breakfast tea just before he sees the salmon:-

“Out of that noiseless world in the grey of the morning, all his ancestors came at him. They tapped his breast until the bird inside it fluttered madly; they drew a hand along his hair until the scalp crinkled; they made the blood within him tingle to a dance that had him leaping from boulder to boulder before he rightly knew to what desperate venture he was committed.”

 

99FE5778-9562-4DD8-907D-33194FD018E3
A tangle of creel baskets at Dunbeath harbour where small scale crab and lobster fishing has replaced the thriving herring industry of the early nineteenth century.