Not ready yet! Not ready yet! The tatters of a dream in gold and silvered shards collapse around me. They fall off tingling, tinkling in ghostly tintinnabulations. The outside rain drips off garden chimes and convolvulus with its own clinking sucking sound, a kind of suppressed sobbing. Last night slips to the floor in a heap of fallen bedclothes. Pools of creamed light gather around the cast off covers, silently curdling.
Outside there is sun today. A weird light flickers over the bog. Whose morning? Is it now or then? Sunflowers of light flap against the curtains and a green rustling wakefulneess begins to fill my bedroom.
Yesterday Schwantz was here. I did not light the fire. A turf fire invites intimacy and confidences. I am in two minds about Schwantz. He is a charlatan. In the Spanish sense utterly for his monologues are endless. And probably in the English sense too, for his very plausibility invites disbelief. In his roughness he is too smooth to be taken seriously. I trust the donkeys more. They have clean souls, in spite of their bad behaviour around food. At least they show what they want. Schwantz always presents himself like a crossword puzzle. He is too much of an effort to do, and full of trick questions. And in the end, what is the point anyway?
He stood first in the doorway wrapped in black oilskins dripping like a newly surfaced walrus while the gale and the wind roared behind him in the garden as if to emphasise his gross importance. I faced him in my pink dressing gown and clogs, still muddy and wet from the concrete path and my first dip into the morning oxygen, tea mug steaming.
- -You should shoot those greenfinches! he said, starting up. -
Get a slug gun! Bad as magpies! Like a load of immigrants! Hang them up as a warning to the others.
I thought of all the immigrants living on the bog. Me. Him. That was about the sum of it. Enough hang-ups between us though. Perhaps we would be a good warning to others, if anyone knew. But even if they knew, would they understand? I grew courgettes the last time the sun passed this way and presented them to all my neighbours with a simple recipe. -Very nice, they said. -But I wouldn’t put them on my shopping list. I suppose there is a lot to be said for cabbage and bacon. It makes you feel as if the world does not need to spin. Like the lilies of the field.
-Tea? I offered.
He pushed into the parlour in affirmation and slumped his dripping bulk into an armchair in front of the empty grate. I would have preferred the kitchen. It is more of a place for boots and prejudice. Flags and bare wood. Better suited than a Persian Carpet. Although once, fifty years ago, on the road between Tabriz and Teheran I observed new hand woven carpets spread out in the middle of the road to age under the wheels of passing traffic. Perhaps he was doing me a favour.
- -Not a bad day after all, he said, taking a deep breath. Water pooled from his boots and trickled into the ashes around the hearthstone. I thought of the fat black leech I had disc
overed on the bóithrín two days before.
Outside there is sun today. A weird light flickers over the bog. Whose morning? Is it now or then? Sunflowers of light flap against the curtains and a green rustling wakefulneess begins to fill my bedroom.
Yesterday Schwantz was here. I did not light the fire. A turf fire invites intimacy and confidences. I am in two minds about Schwantz. He is a charlatan. In the Spanish sense utterly for his monologues are endless. And probably in the English sense too, for his very plausibility invites disbelief. In his roughness he is too smooth to be taken seriously. I trust the donkeys more. They have clean souls, in spite of their bad behaviour around food. At least they show what they want. Schwantz always presents himself like a crossword puzzle. He is too much of an effort to do, and full of trick questions. And in the end, what is the point anyway?
He stood first in the doorway wrapped in black oilskins dripping like a newly surfaced walrus while the gale and the wind roared behind him in the garden as if to emphasise his gross importance. I faced him in my pink dressing gown and clogs, still muddy and wet from the concrete path and my first dip into the morning oxygen, tea mug steaming.
- -You should shoot those greenfinches! he said, starting up. -
Get a slug gun! Bad as magpies! Like a load of immigrants! Hang them up as a warning to the others.I thought of all the immigrants living on the bog. Me. Him. That was about the sum of it. Enough hang-ups between us though. Perhaps we would be a good warning to others, if anyone knew. But even if they knew, would they understand? I grew courgettes the last time the sun passed this way and presented them to all my neighbours with a simple recipe. -Very nice, they said. -But I wouldn’t put them on my shopping list. I suppose there is a lot to be said for cabbage and bacon. It makes you feel as if the world does not need to spin. Like the lilies of the field.
-Tea? I offered.
He pushed into the parlour in affirmation and slumped his dripping bulk into an armchair in front of the empty grate. I would have preferred the kitchen. It is more of a place for boots and prejudice. Flags and bare wood. Better suited than a Persian Carpet. Although once, fifty years ago, on the road between Tabriz and Teheran I observed new hand woven carpets spread out in the middle of the road to age under the wheels of passing traffic. Perhaps he was doing me a favour.
- -Not a bad day after all, he said, taking a deep breath. Water pooled from his boots and trickled into the ashes around the hearthstone. I thought of the fat black leech I had disc
overed on the bóithrín two days before. “Who is that black man moving
like an acquired target
in the heart of Ballyhaunis?
A noonday shadow
standing up
to make itself invisible.”
Professor Schwantz was talking.
-The problem with immigrants is that they are human beings. I have noticed that this is often a characteristic of foreigners, unless they have first been legislated against. Difference is easy to deal with. It is Sameness that causes the difficulties. Many thinking people in the past, even up until my early childhood and beyond if you count the Balkans and the Rub’ al Khali did not feel that there was any problem here at all. Difference was their currency for in a dualistic world everything is itself or its opposite or a part of a camel. This is something that can be reckoned on the fingers of half a hand holding the thumb and two fingers in reserve for other tasks and indeed it creates a powerful legal precedent. After all Duality has been around ever since the left hand side of the brain realised it had and is the upper hand. The solution to this conundrum (no pun included today) is Them and Us and makes a perfectly balanced equation: [Them never equals Us]
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