Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun:
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
By W H Auden
If there was anything to be had, anything at all, we would have mustered courage and faced the day. He had been promised everything. He thought he would never die. He thought the magic kingdom would be his and there would be reprieve from the fate of mortals; his fading eyesight was not a sign of age, his lumping body still desired. These were the deepest, most misguided of fantasies. We were crooked, twisted over in hope, looking up at the sky, grimacing at the awkward angle of our bodies, as the light shone between the trees, children played in the forest glens nearby; and all was not lost, not here, not for you.
Such naivety was simply odd in some so battered by life; misfortune; injustice, someone who had made his own life so unbearable it justified almost any behaviour; any excuse to escape the torment. It was a cruel, dark time. Everything became dismembered. The fabric of things was no longer malignant, but even so he could feel his stomach swirling in despair, tightening and dismembering each shallow smile; clawing his way out of the abyss. It had seemed so noble, this struggle to survive. You are only as happy as you make up your mind to be, Abraham Lincoln had famously said, but all of his purpose, his reason for being, was bound up simply in surviving the daily torments. There was no rationality; and no easy escape.
He was trying to reorganise things. There were moments of hope, as he sat listening to the tales of others, but in reality it was pointless. He had created a dark, familiar fantasy and was comfortable to live in the enveloping glue, the daily grind, the misery with which he placed one step in front of the other. Each day became a Mount Everest, to be borne as best it could, each step a hero's journey, each frothing moment something to be endured. He smiled, hoping for some human recognition, but the daisy weights which held him to the surface, the passing of time which allowed him to prosper, it wasn't what he had asked for.
In flinging himself off the cliff, he had made no provision for a return, much less survival. He hadn't expected to live this long. There had been no plans. It was all very well to fight against the hypocritical bastardy which surrounded him, but oh, oh, it wasn't worth it; there couldn't be a solution without a precisely defined problem. And who could define this missing miasma, this vague space, call it conglomeration if you will, which was meant to represent a human; a full blown individual. There was no such thing. He was the victim of a shark attack. He was falling from a plane, the bodies falling through the air as if from a Saul Bellow novel, replete with life stories and intellect.
But when they landed the truth was revealed; lumpen, leaden, malformed weights. The children played outside; but in here he simply tried to understand the terrible things which had happened. Ripped asunder, ripped from his own life, his daily purpose and message from beyond, all of it was hard to understand, or even decipher. And then finally all the angst just splashed into foam and he was completely free, completely at peace. It had all been for nought. The liquid ecstasy which had been each waking day overwhelmed him. The sun glinted off the water. A pretty girl carrying red hibiscus handed one to a stranger, a girl on the corner kissing her boyfriend. The pair laughed; and the girl beamed as she practically skipped down the street. He turned the corner and the bay was set out below him. It was entirely different. It was an entirely new life.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/17/2774855.htm?section=australia
Bushfires are wreaking havoc across New South Wales, with a number of large blazes menacing homes and destroying property.
The Rural Fire Service (RFS) says sheds, crops, cars and at least one house have been destroyed by a large fire at Gerogery, north of Albury, in the south of the state.
A large bushfire has also destroyed a house and sheds and forced the evacuation of some residents in Londonderry, in Sydney's north-west.
Fire crews say strong winds are making it hard to control the Gerogery blaze, which began at a tip near Walla about 1pm AEDT.
RFS spokeswoman, Marg Weyner, says the blaze is now heading towards the Benambra Range, putting other towns at risk.
"Mountain Creek, Table Top North, Mullengandra and Bowna, Wymah areas are likely to come under ember attack and property threat if we cannot contain that fire in the Benambra Range," she said.
"It's high country, it's got a lot of timber in it and we've really been concentrating our efforts on property protection in the townships and the locality around Gerogery West."
Part of the Olympic Highway has been closed because of the fire.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6828035/Copenhagen-climate-conference-260-arrested-at-protests.html
Police in riot gear fired tear gas and used pepper spray to disperse more than 1,000 activists attempting to get into the Bella Centre where the crucial talks are going on. At the same time indigenous people’s groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) carried out a colourful protest inside the conference.
The protests brought the conference to a standstill and Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, was prevented from leaving for important meetings in the town centre.
Activists admitted the aim of the protest was to penetrate the UN Climate Change Conference for a “people’s assembly” but were pushed back by hundreds of police with dogs. More than 250 people were arrested.
Kevin Smith, a Climate Camp activist from England, compared the actions of the police to G20 protests in London. “There was pushing and the police started hitting people indiscriminately with batons. I got hit a couple of times,” he said. “I also saw people with streaming eyes and noses from pepper spray which can be excruciatingly painful.”
Dorothy Guerrero, from the Philippines, was with a group of indigenous people’s groups and NGOs who tried to join the protests happening outside. “I saw people fall to the ground and they were hit by batons,” she said.
The “Reclaim Power” protest was organised by Climate Justice Action, a coalition of groups from around the world. It follows a 40,000-strong protest at the weekend, where more than 1,000 people were arrested.
NGOs, civil society groups and charities, that represent millions of people in Britain, are increasingly angry that they are being left out of the climate change talks and there are expected to be more protests in the coming days.
Andy Atkins, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth, who joined a “sit-in” of more than 50 protesters after being barred from entering the centre, said it was an “affront to democracy”.
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