On The Chin

I feel like Coleridge after he was interrupted by the person from Porlock. What would help is if I could get myself in to a similar state to how he was before the knock on the door, but that's so not a good look right now, and I need to rescue my weekend rather than condemn it to 48 hours of getting to know my couch. A poet's calling is to lay down his most earnest of thoughts on paper. A poet I am not, and I feel unable to convey those jumbled up electrical impulses that are chasing one another around in the space between my ears. A poet must also endure the idea of people reading those thoughts, the verbal manifestations of the workings of a soul, with a critical eye: if that soul you lay bare is anything but untainted, you'll be made aware of it.

I feel like I'm dancing around the subject a little. With thought, comparing myself to Sammy T and my naval to the moon might be hasty. The moment when Lisa Simpson makes to denounce Jebediah Springfield in front of the whole town, but backtracks for the right reasons is perhaps a more accurately comparable scenario. But are my reasons the right ones? Do I even have reasons? I'm not sure. The only thing I can get clear in my head is how blind I act sometimes. In the short amount of time that Saturday afternoon has existed, I have reached a conclusion on myself that is deeply unsettling and will have an effect on me similar to the time time I had a broken coccyx. It smacks of inconsistency, my behaviour. Not in any single incident but in a more general sense.

I watched the George Harrison documentaries last weekend and I, like all else who saw them was deeply moved. Everyone I've talked to who saw the epic two-parter has agreed, to a lesser or greater extent, that it's changed them as a person. He was an enlightened character, and it is something that we all must strive for. His profound and lasting effect on those who knew him stirred in me an enthusiasm to aim to be a better person; I was discussing as much with a friend last night. All the while, in how I was acting, or, moreover, not acting, I was in a position of complete contradiction to this new (maybe not new, but revised) philosophy I peddle. The more I think about it the more blind I see myself. Not like Blunkett the Sun columnist but like Januarie the Merchant. I've riled myself and I should probably get a pair of sunnies and a stick ready in anticipation.

The Romantics preached real life experience rather than experience through education. Education has its worth, a given, but it is nothing when not in the context of seeing and understanding the mechanisms of the world first hand. Coleridge's good friend and collaborator Wordsworth talked alot about it. And even with all this in mind, I have failed to recognise my own over-absorption, blinkered by ego in to paying too little attention to those that deserve it the most. We all have our faults, but when you recognise them and do nothing to improve on them you've got to consider your position. And that was this. Gig Tuesday.