Hove Again

India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are truly impressive from the air. Viewing conditions were close to perfect but almost all the window shades in the jumbo were pulled down. What is endlessly newsworthy is apparently completely uninteresting in the flesh.

A landscape viewed from ten kilometers altitude lacks the fine detail of vehicles, people etc. but patterns of agriculture, spaceing of populations and the integration of these with landscape and climate are all clear.

From rainforest via all that and then to the sluggish traffic of the M25 ring motorway in London. Culture-shock lent heavily on my left shoulder, pushing so hard that my old lonesome heart became arhythmic. The next mornings dawn sunlight on the greasy old English channel put me back to rights.

Rights, what are they, where do they come from, why can we not accept them for ourselves, for others. How do i find and face the obligations that come with attempting to be a compassionate person, a righteous person. How can i be a whole person when i fail to understand humanity, fail to help it.

By spending enough to rescue a family from malnutrition, on another meander across the home planet, i know myself to be doing wrong. I look out from our helpless spin into the endless universe and know myself to be a traveler through space already.

The only point of researching space propulsion is to expediate the provision of insurance on our survival by scrambling to build craft which can diversify our location. Do any of my old dreams still apply, am i really silly enough to expect them to. Now i know that there are many Indians who share these concerns but i doubt that there are any Afghanies who do.

KL Airport, dawn

So, now that i have safely escaped the country I can now profusely appologise to those readers of mine in Adelaide who are overdue for personal snail mail, excepting GN who has one on trhe way. Problem is that the , aussie airports please note, completly free connection outside C25 will not actually show me what i am writing so please excuse it if it is a little rough…

Nice night flight this far, and subjected to my first remote temperature test upon landing… passed, thank the universe!

Folks are so lovely don’t you think, now that i am on the move again i see folks in all conditions traveling with complete confidence. 2009 may yet herald the 2010 we were expectiog in the ’60s. Fingers crossed what!

Brisbane Airport

Rain, rain, rain again

do not stop, i’ve never been so happy to be wet

overflow my gutters, flood my driveway with a

million tonnes of water

soak my feet in mud, i love it

run into ditch and drain, then to river full

overflow into yards and school fields

rush accros the roads, i don’t care

soak me through with your preshious drops

more, more, more  drown me in your

everlasting satisfaction sublime

Well, maybe just one more trip!

Hang on to your hats blogsurfers i’m going to try this one more time, hopefuly with better net acsess this time.

Shal not be editing my spelling any more, or anything else for that matter. Time too short, brain to wobbly.

Adventure is in the eye of the beholder after all, the only real caveat is to stop when you feel you have reached your own personal limits, as i did before bailing out of Argentina. Sometimes it makes an unromantic sort of sense which can not even be explained properly.

If it comes to an abrupt end it will be none too soon. Big love to anyone still reading. Remember, keep moveing or your ass will get big ;-) (which is all good of course)

Sent in by a reader…

WARNING !
 
When I am old I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.
 
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
 
I shall go out in my slippers and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go.
Live on only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats
And things in boxes.
 
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry.
And pay our rent and not swear in the street.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
 
But maybe I ought to practice a little now ?
 
So people who know me are not shocked and surprised,
 
When suddenly I am old,
 
And start to wear purple.
 
by Jenny Joseph

An African Elegy by Ben Okri

We are the miracles that God made

To taste the bitter fruit of Time

We are precious

And one day our suffering

Will turn into the wonders of the earth

There are things that burn me now

Which turn golden when I am happy

Do you see the mystery of our pain

That we bear poverty

And are able to sing and dream sweet things

And that we never curse the air when it is warm

Or the fruit when it tastes so good

Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters

We bless things even in our pain

We bless them in silence

That is why our music is so sweet

It makes the air remember

There are secret miracles at work

That only Time will bring forth

I too have heard the dead singing

And they tell me that

This life is good

They tell me to live it gently

With fire, and always with hope

There is wonder here

And there is surprise

In everything the unseen moves

The ocean is full of songs

The sky is not our enemy

Destiny is our friend

February 1990

Rebirth (anon)

AND DOES THE BUTTERFLY

AS HE SPREADS HIS WINGS FOR THE FIRST FLUTTERING BEAT

IN HER NEW SUNBLESSED LIFE

LAUGH

AT THE FEARS OF THE CATERPILLAR ?

Festination

For the uninitiated, this is a condition of the functional brain, frustrated by long periods of forced rest due to parkinsonism, becomes overly liberated as mobility returns.

With this comes a moreish joy in the sensation of motion which then floods the whole system with an insatiable, adrenalin fueled imperative for maximum velocity.

Oh dear! Dear Reader…

This is the point at which it all gets really boring, tres droll, for you i think.

The subtext to all of the above, or below depending where you reside, is the ridiculously slow onset of some outlandish form of parkinsonism.

In the early days of this blog, not saved for the sake of the SAAS, i was hopeful of finding work in an ambulance service somewhere and i had a young family about me who i thought would be a permanent part of my life. The few years so sparsely recorded here have been my time of coming to terms, making accommodations, as Sacks would put it, with an advancing disability which is now bringing to an end my ability to work or travel.

My dreams of repeating Roger Shawyers electromagnetic drive experiment is still alive despite all apparent absurdity. Stranger things very rarely happen at sea but…

So beneath this studiously cheerful handful of strange memories lies the last ‘Hurragh!’ of one completely spent poet now doubled with anxiety and pain, barely in control of his own flailing limbs.

The beta blockers are proving to be a blessing, bringing the shakes to a tolerable level. The downside is that in easing the shakes the drug has revealed how still i am underneath. Meditation overcomes me against my will. The world has become sticky to me so that i am caught amongst an action of domesticity but not clearly enough located in its progression to be able to complete it.

Can still ride the scooter well enough to provision my temporary home in the forest but the truth is that most of my mobility is now a process of expensively controlled festination.The fragility of my independence presses on me as it does with people a generation older than me.

Played a bit part in a short film once, about an old man unable to communicate with the world. He wakes to find himself back home sitting on the veranda next to his wife.

My vision is clouding now, to survive my own deranged neurology i must shrink my dreams to the feasible, tether my expectations to the radius of my mobility, and above all i must forgive the world for not having time for me, it is not their fault.

So apologies dear reader, thanking you for your encouragement but giving you warning that it will probably be a downhill run from here. The frustration of loosing my abilities will make me bitter and cynical, it already has, so there being no positive message any more this blog should have died a natural death, but no, it endures because no matter how poor or devoid of style it is, it does have the slapstick moments of watching a man come apart at the seams, slowly, horribly turning from a handsome ambitious youth into a dribbling old derelict.

Hope i have succeeded in making you all feel at least a little better about your own lives but imploring you for the sake of your own sanity to now and forever STOP READING THIS BLOG….

by Guillane Apollinare

(Original en Francais)

come to the edge

no, we will fall

 

come to the edge

no, we will fall

 

they came to the edge

he pushed them-

and they flew…