Oh bring me string and sealing wax and other fancy stuff!
No doubt somewhere over the rainbow way up high there are things of which we have never dreamed, not even in our deepest sleeps. And there are wonders and visions and things to which we should aspire if only we knew they were there, and voices so beautiful that we would weep if we could hear them.
Tattered clothing on your chair,
Sticking plaster in your hair
Futile gestures, pointless acts
Fastened down with sealing wax.
Let's all give a big hand for the holy monkey.
Joys delivered this evening - the deaf man's fourth and the Bruch Violin concerto.
From this shabby port boats are being sent on their dread voyages across seas and oceans in search of treasures beyond our wildest dreams. Who will bring home the golden statue, the diamond ring, the parakeet? ("Why have you brought me childrens' toys?")
The alabastar vase is cracked now and the marble halls in which we would play unhindered are ruins, photographed a thousand times a day by those who cannot understand and cannot understand why they should not be there.
My home is the sea shore, the shifting sands where the women used to play and where I longed, upon the shifting sands, for stone which would not shift:
"I was born in water, and so, from my first stroke
Set out towards the shelter of the greenest shore."
So still from this dread port boats are sailing. Will they bring me treasures? Of course they will not: those days are gone.
Last train to San Fernando - if you miss this one, you'll never get another one. (Bidi bidi bum bum, to San Fernando)
When I was young and scarce eighteen I drove a roaring trade and many's the sly trick I played on many a pretty maid. But my parents saw this would not do for I'd soon have spent their store, so they resolved that I should go on board a man o' war. The bold press gang surrounded me, the warrant they did show and they declared that I should go to fight a daring foe. So to the port they dragged me off and then I cursed my fate - for there I found that I should float on board a ninety-eight!
She was not there tonight. I had not thought I should care, but I do. Things have accelerated, the slow stroll has become something rather more hurried, the casual glance, something more penetrating, the children's game, something rather more serious with real loss and the vain promise of real gain. What was fantasy is become real and this is rarely for the good.
They have shown her wonders and now they would lead her down strange paths and give her to those in whose hands she will be unsafe, and she will go, willingly because she does not know.
There is nothing I can do.
So, with only the slightest provocation the connection is broken: a surge, a slight raising of the temperature, something unexpected or maybe expected but something for which the necessary preparation was not done, and something gives, one tiny wire overloads, the weakest wire in the circuit and the connection is lost.
Thus we are dependent upon the weakest I suppose. This whole wonderful edifice is dependent upon that one tiny, slender weakest link whose power is grown so great as to threaten all our lives.
So how should we proceed?
Should we seek to strengthen him, to reward this slender, weakest link, or tear him from our system and replace him with something of a higher calibre, something more suited to the heavy responsibility we have placed upon those who lie at the bottom of our society.
There are things which move in strange ways, things with many legs and more eyes, and parts for which we have no need.
