Stoned.

I remember lying on a pebbly beach somewhere, and they were throwing rocks at me.  And I didn’t move, but I could hear them calling things like: ‘Can he hear us?’ and  ‘He isn’t moving.’

Is that a memory of how a previous life ended?  Perhaps that is why it has stuck so clearly in my memory.  Perhaps that is why, at the time, it seemed frighteningly familiar.  Perhaps that was why I was unable to move or speak, but just lie there while they threw rocks, till they stopped.

The way I now remember it, I was with some other Boy Scouts.  I guess we were a Patrol.  I wasn’t particularly friendly with anyone.  I participated in everything without additional conversation with anyone.  We were on a beach somewhere.  In bathing suits.  For years afterwards I was haunted by the sight of one of the guys in black speedos.  I wanted to look like that, and tried for years, but never succeeded.  Anyhow, at the moment of my memory, like a snapshot in time, they were sitting together a short distance away, while I was lying on the sand that was mostly rocks, facing away and trying to ignore them and hoping they would all go away.  They eventually did, but not before doing everything to arouse me from apparent slumber.

Death of a Poet

He used to think of himself as a Poet, in the Ancient, Romantic tradition, and he did write poems, dozens of them.  But they were not very good poems, things like: ‘The cat is on the mat, it has a hat. That’s That!’ That sort of thing.

He did attempt to read his poems to people a few times.

Once, he was camped by a billabong, as one does, and found himself not surrounded by local people who had all gone visiting relatives but by City Hippies having a festival.  Invited to sit by a campfire by a group and asked what he did, when he said he was a poet he was adked to recite a poem.  Sadly, just before the end a lot of new people arrived suddenly and un-announced.  My poem was abandoned and forgotten and eventually the billabong dried up, as they do.

Another time he summoned sufficient courage to go to an advertised Public House where an open Poetry reading was occurring.  However, once inside the door, there were two further doors on either side, each with people, and either being the Poetry Reading.  In a desperate act of Free Will, he chose one side, which turned out to be a play, but he was ‘seduced’ into staying and watching the play, which was a good play that creatively used the confined performance space of a front bar.  He never went back.

The last time was after befriending some people who ran a café that had Jazz Music (He wondered later if he had remembered correctly what they called it) and also had Poetry Reading.  He went there with his folder of poems, and sat in the back room and promised he would return.  Some time later the folder had ceased to exist, as things sometimes do.  He wondered if he had left it in that Café.  He always intended to return, till the years turned to decades.

Then in a scenario that is yet to happen, it turns out the poems were found and read and admired and kept, till eventually someone decided to publish them ‘by the hand of an unknown poet’.  And then, as Fate would have it, as it often does, he was collecting up old newspapers to put under himself as he lay in a forgotten corner, and saw by the light of a fleeting moon one of his poems with an account of the fame of this ‘unknown poet'.

That night was particularly cold, and he froze to death, but he died blissfully knowing he had been discovered and was acknowledged as a true poet and was now one of the Immortals.

About Wool.

I am not a Vegan.  I drink milk and consume the products of the Cow.  I eat honey and wear woollen clothes.  I like to think that only contented cows give milk, ensuring that my cows’ lives are not unduly unpleasant on my account.  I like to remember that they would not be alive at all if it were not for my milk consumption, and surely any life is better than no life.  If all the World became Vegan, then our Domesticated Cattle species would be reduced to a few examples in zoos and eventually become totally extinct – after millennia of a symbiotic, ecological relationship.

However, there are ways of the world that I wish were different, and wool is one.  My personal experiences ‘in the bush’ have been minimal and long, long ago, but I did go out one day in the rain and help ‘mark’ the lambs, as I recall the name for putting a tight rubber band on all their tails and round all the baby rams’ balls, so they would all fall off and avoid ‘dags and create weathers.  At least they were not using the traditional method of two bricks.  On another occasion, I saw a paddock full of rams and I understand why farms do what they do and why most people are better off remaining ignorant, unlike myself with my single day’s experience.

One hopes that even lambs being led to be slaughtered have at least had a few happy moments experiencing maternal love of the sort that was a popular topic for artists through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.  Surely those few moments of transcendent bliss are sufficient to make their short lives worthwhile.  As a species, we like to imagine ourselves outside the Natural Order, but it is the nature inherent in each living being that comes into life to ultimately be food for some other, larger creature: Nature is constantly consuming itself.  Only our species, at the pinnacle of the food-chain die uneaten, only to eventually be consumed by worms or bacteria.

While I feel that being Vegetarian is right for me, I cannot bring myself to become a Vegan, because the products of the animals are different from the animals themselves.  However, I recognise that the industries that make these products available, derived from ancient cottage-industries, have a negative side that is best kept out of sight.  Instead of campaigning for the world to become Vegan, activists would have more chance of meaningful results by campaigning for better rights for the animals that give their products instead of ignoring them in the wider claim to end all animal farming.