I seem to be engaged in a perpetual interior monologue these days. Maybe it’s the limited number of possible people with whom I can have a conversation or maybe it’s this self-imposed challenge of posting a blog every day. At least it’s still an interior monologue rather than talking to myself out loud. This way I can be assured of an audience which listens. This morning I explained to myself that yesterday I had forgotten to include in the significant events of May 12th that, according to the gardening manuals, no frost should be expected in this part of the Midlands after that day. Frost is forecast for the 13th and the 14th this week.
Today I woke up to a low grey sky and as a result I felt low and grey. Last week the words that described spring for me were words like tingling and tinkling. Now underlying the tingle and tinkle is the long uniform grey stretch of indistinct days. I’ve said this before and that’s the point – they keep repeating. And the ambivalence of my reaction is like a Boris directive, one of his stream of consciousness speeches to the nation: we want this lockdown to end we don’t want this lockdown to end in certain circumstances this lockdown will end and those circumstances will be clearly hinted at later before the lockdown ends which will happen but it might not and if it doesn’t I will stop it stopping and start it again. In a similar vein of decisiveness and clarity I started writing about what I couldn’t think to write about.
I began by putting into words what I was feeling about this succession of identical days and it reminded me of ants. I then wrote down some things I’ve noted over the last couple of days and joined them up with ‘and’. Remembering Mollie’s homework the other day I called it ‘Trivia with co-ordinated conjunctions’. I then pondered whether I could call this a poem because there was no ‘art’ or ‘craft’ involved. If something is natural nothing ‘artificial’ has been done to it. It’s the difference between a tumbling stream and the beautifully constructed cascade at Chatsworth. So then I deliberately altered the order of some sentences and put some full stops in and realised it was now being crafted, so I added the word ‘crafted’ to the title and decided it was now a poem. You might consider how productive a use of time this was compared with someone like Keith Fretwell shaping some pieces of oak into a beautiful garden feature, or someone else transforming some pots of paint into a picture or newly decorated room. Or for that matter someone mixing some ingredients into a tasty meal or someone arranging some flowers or notes into a symphony.
Only God ever created from nothing, the rest of us have to be content with re-shaping or recombining some pre-existing raw material, whether wood, notes or spices. I have to exempt parenthood which is the most creative and highest form of art from this definition, but here, thankfully, the artwork is never quite finished and is never what the parent set out to create anyway. Out of all the art forms I always feel a bit apologetic about poetry being my choice – it always seems a bit effete and lacking in muscle compared with restoring a vintage car or chiselling stone or composing an opera. Maybe it’s because scrawling some observations on the back of a till receipt is not governed by any specific rules, skills or knowledge of technique.
TRIVIA CRAFTED WITH CO-ORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
A mottled grey sky just teased by sunshine
And another day in the unremitting convoy of days
Like one of those crawling lines of ants
With no discernible purpose
Crawling irresistibly across their ant continent
Towards their far off ant horizon
And disappearing into the damp shreds of bark and fungi
For some reason.
Today a dandelion seed floated on a breeze
And one snapped twig lay on the path.
A petal of white hawthorn fell
And a pine cone dropped and rolled.
The long grass creased where the wind gusted
And a dewdrop hung caught in a cobweb.
A baby blackbird lost and bewildered
Got itself trapped in the corner of a wall.
A trickle of water seeped between pebbles
And the scent of garlic rode the air
And ambushed us in the chill of the woodlands.
As usual someone got there before me. Dylan Thomas described it as:
“In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages”.
In the picture he looks how I feel.