Death” as the old adage goes, “is Nature’s way of telling you to slow down!” It doesn’t quite work as well when you are dealing with the fear of death. Perhaps another old adage that a next day hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully comes into play? But what about the Pandemic and the problematic threat of death?
For someone living in a fairly wealthy western European country, the threat of death is a little more distant than for some others. Yes, the vaccine roll-out here in Spain has been mystifyingly chaotic, slow and counter intuitive, but with reasonable precautions I can “reasonably” expect to survive. The threat is there and not there at the same time – it’s that Bloody Cat in the Paradox again.
To accommodate survival, we have had to adopt and have been forced to obey a series of restrictive rules that are supposed to lessen risk. Our lives have been circumscribed, our freedoms have been curtailed – not that I object, I welcome sensible precautions – but it is how we adapt to our new way of living that gives me pause for thought.
During the strictest phase of lockdown, when Hesse-like I wandered round and round our communal pool in a semi-legal attempt to get outdoor exercise without breaking the Covid rules, we were confined to our houses. I couldn’t swim, or go for a walk on the beach, stroll to the shops, go for a bike ride: home meant home – and the walls started to press in!
The question we were asking ourselves was what, productively we were doing with the extra time that we had, to do something, anything!
The ‘Soft dust’ of the title of the poem is literal. For reasons for which I am not quite sure, dust began accumulating in my house. This is not reasonable. Not, I hasten to add because I rejoice in housework, indeed the exact opposite is true and for most of my life I have paid for a cleaner to keep squalor at bay. But not in Spain, not in Catalonia.
I have, of course, indulged my penchant for gadgets and bought a robot cleaner, which is quite happy enough to trundle its way around the living room softly bumping into things and cleaning as it goes. Indeed, a mere robot hoover type thing was quite inadequate to my perceived needs and so I upgraded and bought something that hoovers and mops!
But the dust accumulated. We didn’t turn the machine on. Why?
I think that there was an element of the importance of using Time (with a capital ‘T’) in a way that reflected the seriousness of the situation in which we found ourselves. We were (and indeed still are) confronted by an existential threat to our way of life, so every second was to be valued and, somehow, judged. How is what you are doing justifying the ‘gained’ time you have? How is what you are doing now, making up for what you would have done in normal times.
Given that way of thinking, housework, simply doesn’t cut it, when the memories of what used to be become overwhelming. It didn’t take long for memory to become problematic. Pictures of overflowing football stadiums, packed theatres, busy shops seemed to be from another world of long, long ago rather than a few months distance. Life seemed to be defined by not being able to do something of banal unimportance, with the resentment of inability jostled by empty familiarity!
The poem uses the memory of childhood sweets as a way of emphasising the strength of recall, while at the same time one wouldn’t actually want to eat those sweets now. At least, I wouldn’t! That time has well and truly gone. But the easy dip to the distant personal past that the mere names of sweets give is rather like the resentment that walking down an empty street, with closed shops and reduced seating in restaurants, obeying structured rules for swimming and all the other restraints changing the familiar to the strange in Covid life offers: a constant remembering that this is not normal.
One of my Family Sayings is, “Anything is better than nothing”. But sometimes when approaching a task there is a sense that you could be doing better than starting where you have decided and that can all too often lead to indecision and indolence - and ‘soft dust’.
This poem is the first of my ‘traditional’ Poems in Holy Week writing effort, this year entitled A slur of tense.
Day 1 Palm Sunday
Soft dust
Soft dust accumulates in crevices
where tread meets riser bound by wall.
The evidence of slothfulness is clear,
and little effort’s needed to make clean.
But, mundane jobs (so doable) when done,
are merely done to do again.
The year that’s gone
is best defined by absences;
the gaps where something other previously took place;
where things, important things, demanded
time, attention, movement, thought -
but that is for a life on hold,
priorities are different now;
now, and all those months of then,
that time of palimpsests,
where what was done was overwriting
that which used to be
and ghosting memory, a surface scratch away.
Pettimenti of the past
make for strange, uneasy, days,
when, “Did we do that!”
is accusation, disbelief, for time
so close and yet so far away.
Like memories of childhood sweets,
for decades spurned, but just by name
(Black Jacks, Spangles, Trebor Chews)
taste and place immediately recalled,
with sense of loss of something gone.
Blank pages broken routines gift
don’t fill themselves,
but action’s often compromised
if-this-then-why-not-that?
and thus, the easy pabulum
of Netflix, Tik Toc, You Tube, Zoom.
There should, you tell yourself,
be something more to show
for that time past. And gone.
It’s just a year.
A year that was the end for many,
so, the simple tasks can never fill
lacunae lives-deep sad.
And faced with matching seriousness and grief,
inadequacy will let dust settle just a little more.
This QR Code, when scanned, will take you to a reading of the poem on smr Writing on YouTube
No comments:
Post a Comment