tidal retreat

at low tide
the sand is swept
with small stones
and shells -
and bits of plastic
dug in like blue whelks -
string fronds emulate
jellyfish tendrils -
trace of memory
of containment -
pressed indents of transit
gather pools from the tabletop -
wet bed of grit
now exposed to other elements -
lapsed transparent canopy
blank now and bare to the sun -
reflecting nothing -
draining slowly dry
aching for the return
of an ocean
that for now
has forgotten.

Because the Internet/do you 'like' me/is sharing caring? Reflections on Social Media

(pictured - 'Really Good' Fourth Plinth - David Shrigley)

A friend of mine started blogging recently and I was advising her slightly on how to reach a larger audience, suggesting she used appropriate hashtags.  While I use hashtags to try and perhaps reach someone who might want to read my writing, I don’t put a lot of thought into digital self marketing or whatever you’d call it, but it’s in your mind when you follow someone on instagram or twitter that they might follow you back.  What is it that we’re working towards with our online output?  She wanted some feedback for her words, which is a reasonable aim, but facebook wasn’t the format for it.  Somehow we can share things with strangers that we perhaps wouldn’t say to our acquaintances.  There is a degree of anonymity and a project of developing an online persona within the framework of whatever field you’re operating in. 

            I still try and write and draw and play music and take photographs for their own sake, but increasingly it has become bait for coaxing likes and followers.  It reminds me of a character in Childish Gambino’s extraordinary screenplay companion to the album of the same name – Because the Internet.  He says his job is twitter and all that sort of thing.  It’s what he puts all his time into.  His friend says he hasn’t got a job, because he doesn’t need one, and this is just what he does with his time.  There is in the proliferation of internet social media output an assumption that this type of output is meaningful, and the feedback and likes we get a valuable and genuine currency rather than a whimsical gesture or cynical attempt to curry favour to reciprocate.

            The internet is an amazing platform for communication.  It connects most of the world.  But it is also as we know a superlative procrastination device.  I wonder how many people are distracted from their life’s work by making work that can be understood in the few seconds that people take to look at an image on their phone.  I wonder what could have been accomplished if the thought put into every facebook status was put into a novel.  What is the best outcome of blogging, or posting songs on soundcloud?  Some sort of internet fame?  Is that even desirable?  Maybe it draws attention to more serious work we produce and helps us reach a wider audience.  I don’t know if these thoughts resolve.  I think I will continue posting stuff online.  When I hear about friends who’ve left facebook I look at them with the same baffled admiration of someone who has quit smoking.  This is the world we live in, posting just about every facet of our lives for encouragement and admiration.  It feels like there’s no escape.  It feels to some extent that real expression is being strangled by an urge towards caricatured versions of ourselves that are more palatable as a product.  Whatever, this is how it is.  Like it or leave.  If this read like a moan, it’s not quite meant to be one.  I’m really asking questions of myself, why I blog, post drawings, poems, songs.  Is anyone really listening?  Does it mean anything?  Who knows.

RIP Leonard Cohen - thank you for the songs that furnish our sorrow

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I awoke this morning to a text from an old friend that started “Sad day.”  He didn’t have to elaborate, I knew what it would be.  I googled the name Leonard Cohen to see that indeed he had died.  While sad, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.  The last three albums have seem to actively anticipate this event, to be a kind of preparation.  I went on and saw the facebook tributes, quoting his lines, sharing his songs.  I thought of what song I would share, what I could say, but felt a more in depth tribute necessary for the artist that has had the most profound and lasting effect on me.

            I bought the Best of Leonard Cohen many winters ago when I was fifteen.  The first obsession was the beautiful evocation of a riverside visit to Suzanne.  The song made life sound like it could be beautiful, that our encounters with other people could have deep and lasting meaning.  I also remember the impact of the Sisters of Mercy, who “have not departed or gone, they await for me til they think that I just can’t go on, and they brought me this comfort and later they brought me this song…” I felt then that comfort only came at the bottom of the well, where the light is barely visible, that when it is almost too late for hope a soft singing comes from the darkest corner of the room.  It wasn’t until a decade later I heard that the benevolent sounding sisters were in fact prostitutes from the Cohen scored western McCabe and Mrs Miller.

            This was around the same time I got hold of a vinyl copy of Leonard Cohen’s debut.  I listened to it in the dark, sprawled out on my sofa in a flat without a bedroom, smoking cigarettes in a mood of utter despondency, but as the smoke turned in the black air and his voice climbed through it seemed to validate and beautify that despair.  I played that record a lot, and still play it sometimes.  I wrote about The Master Song in my essay ‘Is Matter Holy – the Entanglement of Flesh and the Spirit in the writing of Leonard Cohen’ that focused primarily on his novel Beautiful Losers, a transgressive, post-Joycean speed-fuelled eruption of inelegant thoughts expressed with the most perfect eloquence.  It seems madness that his poetic career had come to so little, but if it had flourished, we wouldn’t have had the canon of songs that we have.  Songs of the utmost sincerity, and the most profound poetry.  Songs to shepherd us through the tangled forest of life. 
           I feel lucky to have seen him twice in concert, and been witnessed to the most admirable humbleness, sincerity and grace you could expect to see in a popular performer.  Cohen sets an example for all performers, all people even, who if they ever get any success in life, they maintain their humanity, integrity and sensitivity.  I saw him once at Big Chill with my mum and sister; and another time in Birmingham with my friend Amy.  I was rapt throughout at the timeless music and truth of the performance. 
           Though he has left us now, though there will not be another album, we have a legacy of wonderful music that is more than any human being could hope to produce.  Knowing his music you will probably imagine that despite the spirituality that crystalized and grew later on in his career, life for Leonard was not a picnic by any stretch, that along with moments of great beauty there were times of intense difficulty and serious introspection.  I hope the God he always kept a place for accepts his ‘cold and broken hallelujah’.