before you read that Saturday travel section
"It is too easy to dwell on the contradictions of our concern for things that, in our well-meaning way, we nevertheless conspire to destroy. A more constructive solution might be to take steps not to find out about things like the Sentinelese in the first place, or failing that, to wipe them from our memory. The Iberian lynx. A dying Aboriginal Australian language. Choose something endangered every day and purge it from the servitude of our impotent concern. Forget to visit the fragile Alaskan ecosystem. Forget to visit the zoo to ponder the fate of the caged Siberian tiger. Let us ignore the world into a state of wellbeing. Ignorance has brought us to this and only ignorance will set us free."
This is learned and always-delightful fellow poet-blogger Puthwuth, making a point I made recently myself - with a vehemence unexpected even by me - when I was asked why I don't read the travel section. Only he says it better, as I helplessly veered into a rant about SND and the smug bourgeois with their three-wheel off-road buggies in Fresh & Wild... mind you they are ignorant enough already. Oops! I did it again. I do have to go down to Church St later but I can rest easy: as one of the endangered species, I may be a blot on the new order down there but I'm not exactly endangering any fragile ecosystem.
PS - Editing in: I've just remembered - last night I dreamed I was in Woodstock... shome coincidence shurely...
1 comment:
That's very kind of you. I'm currently rethinking my position, however, as my concern about the run-down state of the footpaths between here and the Co-op recently led me to stop leaving the house altogether, but I'm now down to my last tin of beans.
If things don't work out for me, I leave my spleen and pancreas to Trinity College, Dublin.
On the subject of punctuation marks, spare a thought for the narrator of Samuel Beckett's Watt: 'How hideous is the semi-colon'.
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