An old friend shuffles into sight, an ancient vagabond, watery blue eyes set in a wasted face, grimed in dirt, his breath little gasping explosions, bundled in layers of discarded clothing. He wheels a bicycle festooned with plastic bags stuffed with who knows what – his life I suppose – but look at that bag suspended from the left hand end of the handlebars; it’s full of paper, sheets of paper, bundled, held by those red elastic bands abandoned on doorsteps by hurrying postmen. And another thing I’ve just spotted, that rope around his waist; it has a noose at one end. To look at him you wouldn’t imagine that his mind holds much in the way of memory – he’s made extensive use of our alcoholic culture but he does carry his memory with him in bundles of paper and cloth and he only has to touch the rope around his waist to remember that he can always catch the night train out of here.
News comes bundled in an e-mail from the Guardian:
Chilean miners are rescued
The West is using the earth’s resources faster than they can be replaced
The pornography industry is in crisis
7/7 bombers celebrate
and more and more . . .
Reading a review (Guardian again, I’m afraid) by Andrew Motion of Richard Mabey’s Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We think About Nature – what a wonderful title! – he quotes Mabey’s imagining the transition from a hunter/gatherer economy to agriculture: “what is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture . . . For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds as a punishment . . . and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer’s life.”
Is our old friend a weed to be thrown out, composted, rejected or the bringer of good news. Who amongst will take the time to examine his mobile archive, to go through the bundles, to translate his texts that I imagine are full of archaisms, scrawled Latin, disrespectful jokes in Greek. If I approach him will he only spit at me, hurl abuse, and demand more money than I have.
I see the tyre on your rear wheel has a puncture, can I help you with that?
I’m not even sure he sees me – he’s flying in mid-thought, held in bondage to vagrancy, his precious bundles, thoughts, papyri, codices, lost philosophical treatises, a few relics of long dead saints and buddhas. Come let me push your load for a while and you can tell me your holy dreams.
Our breath visible in the night.