I seem to be missing everything right now. First up, my girlfriend has flown off to Hungary for a week. She’s going with one of our ministers to meet one of their ministers. She’ll have one day free to explore the delights of Budapest as temperatures plunge to twenty below. I got back, had some breakfast, watched a bit of the history channel, and bang, I started missing her. Not only that, I seemed to sink into a strange melancholy where I missed pretty much everything that wasn’t currently in my life.
It could’ve been the piano sonata playing on the radio or the residue of some poet I read the night before. I even missed my old job. As the sun rose outside and the urban landscape outside my window gleamed, I could see myself stood in a shrub bed in the middle of a housing estate, digging the frozen ground. I used to enjoy that. When you left your spade wedged in the ground and took a step back, a robin would always land on the handle. And there was something about the light, the kind of light you only get on a crisp clear winter morning, made the world look like it was born that morning, that everything was fresh and clean, even the old beer cans and rusting abandoned cars.
In a Zen koan, a teacher talks about how he has his morning tea in a certain room in the monastery at a certain time because the light that shines in is so strange it makes the tea utensils seem unreal. In another story Master Suzuki is on his death bed and his students are weeping. One of them asks When will we see you again? Suzuki holds out a finger and draws a circle in the air. The students fall silent and bow.
I think nostalgia, especially melancholic nostalgia, hits when the world seems less real and a memory of the past becomes more real. It’s a terrible feeling of disconnection, knowing that your body exists in an uncertain world but your mind is snug and at home in a place that no longer exists. Of course this, like everything is an illusion, more a way of seeing something rather than the totality of the thing itself. Well, that helps me as far as missing the old job, but I still miss my girl. It makes me want to drink all the beer in the fridge before going out and starting on the bin men.
Anyway, I’m a disciplined soul really, never touch a drink in the AM, haven’t been in a fight for at least five years. I especially need to keep my shit together because I’ve just been accepted onto a course that will end with me going into schools and prisons to do poetry workshops. I’ll be trying out all forms of education, but I really want to work with prisoners and excluded pupils. A few friends of mine have already done this and have had some fantastic experiences. One of my favourite stories was when a mate of mine worked with some excluded boys. He started by telling them they were allowed to express whatever they wanted, how there wasn’t a right or wrong way of seeing the world. After a brief silence one of the boys piped up and said, “Does that mean we can say…fuck?”
Anyway, my apologies to any readers of this blog for my lack of entries in the last week, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry and everything I tried writing on this felt a little precious, and the whole point of me starting this was to write with scant regard for anything or anyone. Fuck.