A little optimism around here

Uncharitable thoughts. My love-hate affair with WordPress as a blog host is veering towards hate because the spacing regulator has gone awry and squeezes text up close and personal when I want an airy page with plenty of  white space between paragraphs.

Is there life after Proust? I am completely ensnared. The  multiplicity of  Proust, the luminous  sentences that go on forever.

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”

 

The Great Dane is sitting in front of the gate waiting for  someone, anyone, to come down the road. Nothing moves in the neighbourhood, the silence of noon holds the fields and  ditches and trees in perfect stillness. Poor  bored dog.

Things I can’t write  about here preoccupy my mind. Thorny relationships. Drafts of writing that look unpublishable. The political murkiness in which I live. Injustice. Hardship. The despair of the  poor, the homeless, the unloved. Violence lurking like a stranger behind the next corner.

Skewered through the heart, to quote Margaret Atwood:

 

February

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,   

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries   

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am   

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,   

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,   

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,   

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here   

should snip a few testicles. If we wise   

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,   

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over   

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing   

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits   

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries   

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.