“I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.” - Muriel Rukeyser from I lived in the first century of these wars
Hello.
Perhaps it’s because I’m preoccupied with editing my next book. Or perhaps it’s because I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the continually ugly news of the state of the world, but I couldn’t construct either a cheery or gently neat little creative prompt for you today. I just couldn’t. So, what I’ve decided to do is to share some stuff that I keep thinking about at the moment. It’s a short stream of conciousness.
My starting point is war.
“A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars. Stories are at the heart of what’s happening… we must work to overturn the false narrative of tyrants by telling better stories.” – Salman Rushdie, thanks to the Inter-Narratives substack for sharing this.
I always wonder about the stories of ordinary people caught up in wars. The ‘unimportant’ people, the victims, with their ‘little’ stories which, to them, were The Story. How many of those stories get cut short, or sent spiralling off into some epic tragedy that that person never asked to cope with; one day you’re studying accountancy at university and the next you’re in a refugee camp.
“In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.” - Eavan Boland from Quarantine.
Quarantine is a starkly beautiful and devastating poem. Read it. It’s about two lives subsumed by history.
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;” - WH Auden from Musee des Beaux Arts
I love this poem by Auden, and I love the painting that inspired it:
Brueghel, one of my favourite subversives, takes the myth of Icarus - falling from the sky after flying to close to the sun and melting the wax that kept his wings intact - and flips it to show how, according to other people, This Great Tragedy is barely noticed because, hey, the ploughing has to be done. Awful things happen. Life goes on.
And one final one:
"The antithesis of beauty is not ugliness, it’s carelessness” – Stefan Sagmeister
So take exquisite care of the things that deserve it.
Feeling depressed yet? Sorry about that. I will be in a much better mood the next time I send something out, I promise. In fact, I am planning to put together some nice content for the holiday season, so stay tuned.
I’ve come back to say I’ve read this again. And I’m not depressed by this at all. I feel inspired.
After reading this, I don’t want to say anything. I only want to sit and listen to my thoughts.