Call me sentimental, but I miss door knockers,
Bakelite phones, and oak rocking chairs, let alone
tapping out a stanza on a Remington to the sound
of a valve radio tuned to the BBC Third Programme
in the hope of making a few guineas for another stack
of cloth-bound volumes, forever destined to gather
saudade.
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For about a year now, Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher has been sitting on my nightstand, and I find myself wondering why I stopped reading roughly halfway through the penultimate chapter back then—though a more fitting question would be: why did I pick it up in the first place? What’s more, my shelves are lined with plenty of books that I’ve never even touched since I unearthed them in a secondhand bookshop—dust-gathering victims of my pretensions. Yet I remember a time when I used to devour books like madeleines on a porcelain plate (not literally, of course). I suppose, with age, I somewhat lost my sweet tooth. At least the dentist ought to be pleased.
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Every time I pass the red pillar box,
a peculiar fettle comes over me
(I wonder what went wrong; after all,
I’ve never been to Camden Town
or Botchergate in Carlisle)—
I’d like a cup of tea. The thing is,
I only drink herbal infusions—
not very British, if I may say so.
Who would have thought I’d break
over Earl Grey?
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Captured on Polaroid shots,
we’re reselling green-screened déjà vus,
just to keep an old promise, ever afraid
that in the end we would have nothing
to say.
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Caught in ungraceful ageing,
like the past imperfect
clinging to a collection of grainy photographs,
Mr Honk felt tangential
every time he was greeted by a neighbour
with the unfamiliar ‘Ay ay, fit like?’
or ‘Foos yer doos?’,
unable to muster the expected
‘Nae bad, chavin’ awa’ in response,
not because of the vernacular barrier
but for the simple fact that he’d answer the hum
of a foghorn or oystercatcher’s cry
rather than admitting that he longed for a touch
of unadulterated soma.
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‘There is something about adjectives
that makes one feel rather peckish’
was an opening line for a casual conversation
whose consequences, like death by misadventure
as a raree-show, lay between two words,
whispered at midnight with Nina Simone,
when you weren’t sure
if you were greeting a new day
or mourning the past one.
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No one writes anymore
to Poste Restante
that the billowing gloom
of fluff and puff
says more about longing
than the pristine sky—
unfortunately relaxing—
like when a handful of pages
proves more than a thousand,
whether one follows Norval
or his father on the Grampian Hills.
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I can’t remember if I ever wanted to say something in particular, if my words had any intended purpose, at least not since the very beginning, when the first verse coincided with the end of puberty and was meant to impress a girl. It did not. I wonder what she’d say now—not that it would matter, and her face has been lost to the mists of time anyway. Perhaps that’s what always drew me to what Socrates said about poets in the ‘Apology’. At least, after more than three decades, my writing—although not a perpetuum mobile—is as close to self-perpetuating as one gets.
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I find reading The Letters of Lytton Strachey a great deal of pleasure, and yet it is like listening to a telephone conversation where all you can hear is the man standing in front of you with the receiver in his hand. For that reason, I look back on reading the correspondence between Stanisław Lem and Sławomir Mrożek with all the more nostalgia. It has been a solid ten years since I last held this voluminous tome in my hands. Perhaps it’s time to return once again to their wit and wisdom.
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hidden pilcrow 