With a wrench she is free
Free to float down river, a year gone by, past and we are left, shivering on the treacherous sands, sinking, we mustn’t stay. Move, I say, as we peer at, face, hide from this prospect of what we optimistically refer to as the new year.
Yes – I can say it to you with whole-hearted pretence: happy new year. Friends and, well, I don’t wish to say enemies, would non-friends be a way of referring to those who appear on the edges, out of the misty entrails like some incomprehensible and strange set of distorted beings, who seem set on pushing us back into some, it feels like back, to a time that never existed anyway. Surely! Where did you come from? What have you done with your life?
There’s a flash of memory. Only two or three years ago. There’s me crossing a road and the car advancing on me is apparently ambivalent about slowing down for me. There are two trussed up ducks in the front. In their sixties I estimate. Their faces settled into florid sourness. Does their beloved car give them the only sense of power they have in their lives? They begin their (well practised?) patter of abuse. Of course, you might say, I should have shown respect and bent at the knee in obeisance to their god. It’s possible, unlikely you’ll admit, that I indicated to the male of the couple, the one behind the wheel, that he learn to drive. His female look-alike, not having the steering wheel pressing against her belly, was opening the door, ready to give me a bashing of some sort. And was it possible that I stopped, turned and laughed? They were a pair of hobbits out of some sub-Tolkienian dream. But their dreams had turned bad a long time ago. Were they locals, noses out of joint at us incomers, pushing them to the margins. The least they would want to do would be to run me down, swear at me, flatten me.
What do you do when you can’t get rid of those uninvited guests. No, not even guests, intruders. Send them back where they came from.
In this womb of the New Year we wait in the dark. The habitual blindness of our looking, intensified. Is it a vast cavern or a tiny cell? Are there others in here with me? Of course, it’s likely that the old habits will take over. But, maybe, there’s the possibility of a bit of crowbar work to open some space in my mind, to take out energy from the old habits.
New Year resolutions! Right! I remember those. Do we still talk about them?
Can you imagine how Barack Obama feels when he has to attempt to deal with the lunatic tea party echelons within the Republican Party. Not that our own lamented ukip Conservative Party is too far from the tea party faction.
The thing is you have to have some sort of thoughts in your mind. You need some sort of enemy to bash up, you need the poison of envy, of your life having been spoiled by God knows who or what.
And we have to act as though we know what we are doing.
I’m in the dark here. No strategy yet, but I do have the crowbar to hand. No – that’s right I’m not actually grasping it (nor the nettle) but I am almost ready to grasp this crowbar. It’s weight is rather satisfying. Like the word heft.
And maybe I can sense, almost see, my fellow travellers grouped around.
We are getting ready to move.
There’s an excitement in the air.
Crowbar in hand, I shoulder my pack in readiness.
Good luck you guys.