Far From The Madding Crowd

I am reading Emily Dickinson's biography and her loneliness (for although she chose to be a recluse, she was very lonely) has affected me strangely. She felt so much and her feelings were neither guarded nor polite enough for public consumption. She loved so much that the people she loved moved away from her; shunned her.

Her heart was broken over and over again. She was rejected and ignored over and over again.

Nice New England girls are supposed to feel just so much and no more. Everything nicely bounded with a border of daffodils, perhaps.

Until, rejected and misunderstood, she shut herself off from the world. Better voluntary exile than to keep being rejected.

And need I say I understood how she felt?

And I wonder if I should shut myself away next year and work and write and read, far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife?

Driftwood

I don't belong anywhere. I don't belong to anybody. I am part of nothing. Always alone, even when with people.

Alone.

Always.

There is a pageant before me, shifting faces, places and I look on, sometimes slightly intrigued, most times indifferent. Time passes, people pass, places wobble and shift and reform into something else.

I meet someone on the lift and we chat and exchange stories.

I meet someone at a gift shop and she tells me her name.

I meet someone for dinner who smiles and asks me if this could ever be home.

I say no. Not for me. I don't have a home. I drift, like some piece of wood, forever searching, never finding, buffeted by the waves.

Never finding.

Alone.

Forever.

The House Specialty

The dark, cavernous space, the bar that went on and on for years, is thick with ghosts. Sometimes, she throws them into oil, has a big fry-up.

Some taste like meringues, slightly burned around the edges. Others taste as bland as despair, a taste that is no taste, except that it sinks deep inside you and goes on forever. And some taste sour, like the breath of a drunk, the sweat of a drunk.

She moves through the space with a butterfly net, a cloth tea strainer, anything she has on hand, and traps the wisps, throws them in.

They look better fried. Corporeal is a good thing to be, when you haven't been for so long.

And when the others start to shuffle in, the dead ones still on this side of the veil, she offers them her fried ghosts, the house specialty. Take your pick, she says, luck of the draw, she says.

You never know what you're gonna get, Forrest Gump's mama says.

Sometimes she melts chocolate over them. Sometimes she flavours them with beer. Sometimes she serves them up with a side of chips.

No two quite the same. Saunter up, take your pick, ghost to taste, ghost of a taste, ghostly aftertaste, and whathaveyou.

They file in, weary, dead-eyed, chew the treats mechanically, and breathe.

Still breathing.

That's something.

And sometimes this world makes sense and they matter and have a reason for being.

But if they did, they wouldn't be here.

Anywhere but here.

These are for the deadends, the no-hopers, the ones who have just a little way to go.

These are the ones you hear about, read about, but never see.

And so they shuffle into this halfway house, poised between living and the opposite of it, coming from nowhere, going nowhere.

Nothing

Crystal vessel full of nothing
Emptiness carefully carved from air
So delicate, so precarious
I stand beside the gaping hole
and smile sweetly.

Because nothing fills me
Nothing answers me
Nothing is warm and comforting
I put my arms around nothing
and pull it to my chest...

And there we are
Nothing and I
We have each other
And there we are
Nothing and I
We fall asleep.

Coherence

Yes, I will gather up these daisies
and put them together
So they cohere and make sense
Not petals, but flowers,
Not flowers, but bouquets
Not parts but a whole
Not parts, but a hole.

Ah me, there it is
Waiting at the fringes
As I strive to cohere,
To cohere.

Even if everything crumbles
in my fingers
And faces fail to coalesce
A nose, some teeth, is that hair?
Pieces of people,
People in pieces
I don't recognise anyone.

Shifting features,
Nothing stops for an instant
To let me fix an image.
No images,
Just colours, shapes, ghosts?
All wispy strands around me
Struggling to coalesce
I don't see them
They don't see me.

But it's perfect, a pageant
unending.

And I'm sad because
I tried to hold on
to a moment
and the moment
slipped away.

A Perfect Day

I would like to take off on the beaten highway and write a Road story.

So what if it's been done too many times? All stories are old. But new all the same. Every line is cliched. But fresh all the same. And what fun a journey into nowhere would be, melting into strangers  and moving on.

How impeturbable the traveler who carries little and takes away less.

Ah me.

It's always a perfect day.

Other Broken People

His long white hair is caught up in an untidy ponytail. He is sitting hunched at the bar, radiating his rage. I'm too drunk to notice so when Marcel leaves I move over and invite him to join me at my table. Mistake.

He begins by criticising the musicians in tones, increasingly strident, increasingly indignant. "Copies! Copies of American music. Why can't they sing their own? Where is the Asianess in all this."

He's probably right. But I don't want to hear it right now. I'm pickled on three glasses of wine and I don't want to hear this. I just want to enjoy the music, watch the guys having fun on stage, that cool vibe which moves through the room.

But the Composer is livid. And he keeps muttering imprecations, reaching out every once in a while to take my hand and kiss it. And then he starts attacking me. "You, what are you doing here? How many nights a week do you come? What is it you are looking for?"

All valid questions, no doubt. But at the same time, none of his damn business. The set finishes and I run up to the stage. Tell Albert that it's a little uncomfortable, there's a feral Frenchman out there and I want to leave. Albert glances over, cool as a chilled pineapple, and suggests that I sit in front with the musicians.

So I do. But my stuff is still at the other table. I wait and talk to the guys. They're having a good time...it's all very quiet. I guess they are the antithesis of rowdy musicians. They're just doing a job and doing it well. I wonder why the Composer has to pick on them. A little later I see a young (French?)man come up and talk to him. And then I glance over and he's not there. I duck in, get my bag and the bottle of wine Marcel brought me as a present, and duck out again.

Yay. Now I can sit and enjoy the rest of the show without anxiety. I don't need anxiety. I have wine. But he hasn't gone. Not by a long shot. And now, he's even angrier. Whatever he had to be aggrieved about earlier, I have now just added to it by abandoning him. I could hit myself for being so stupid as to invite him to join me. You don't do that. Not here. You sit alone and enjoy the music. That's what people like us do. We don't want to deal with other people's pain. We're too busy avoiding our own.

And then the boys invite Rafique up for a song. Rafique demurs at first, then goes up and plays Michelle. In Thai. He's taking the piss. The rest of us laugh. The Composer bristles. And then the comments, which were only audible if you were sitting next to him, get louder. A lot louder.

He says: "Go home! I didn't come here to listen to you."

He says: "Stop! This is not a karaoke. I came hear to listen to real musicians."

He continues to heckle and Rafique sings another song. The heckling gets louder. Rafique, unfazed, gets off the stage smiling broadly. "There's always one," he says cheerfully. The other musicians look at each other.

Azmi, who's sitting nearest to me, shakes his head. "I see him at No Black Tie all the time. But he's never like this."

I say: "Yeah, I think he's a famous composer. At least, Mark says he is."

The Composer had written his name down for me, but I haven't Googled him yet. And nobody here, looking at this tired, dishevelled, angry, heartbroken old man, can believe that he was great. That actually, he still is.

Albert and Badar take the stage and start playing a series of slow numbers. The Composer staggers towards the stage, climbs up and kneels in front of the conga drums. Both Albert and Badar, who are gentle souls, raise their eyebrows in alarm.

Edmund's had it. The guy already irritated him with the earlier heckling. And now this? "Oi!" he calls out. "Get down from there."

"Cakap baik sikit bang," says Azmi, the peacemaker.

"You act like this, you only deserve an oi," insists Edmund. Then he goes up to the stage and orders the Composer to get off. Like, now!

The Composer pauses befuddled. "This is your stage?" he asks, clearly offended.

"Go help him downlar, the man will fall," says Azmi.

And Edmund, irrirated as he is, does. He goes and offers a hand for the Composer to get off the stage. He is an old man. And he could fall. Although he had no business up there disrupting the musicians in the first place.

They play on and finally Rafique goes up and joins Albert - the two start off with House at Pooh Corner and then go into a series of James Taylor numbers. It is truly beautiful.

But the Composer, his dignity ruffled, stalks out of the bar in high dudgeon. He stops by a table, probably to tell them that he is never coming here again. Never has he been so insulted.

I look at Edmund and sigh. I hate confrontations. I hate all this tension. I ask tentatively whether Edmund knows who the guy is. No, he doesn't know. And he doesn't care. Just some drunk. I say, apparently, he's some famous composer....also a musician.

And Edmund shakes his head vigorously. No way. No musician would do what he did. And then today, taking a break from my interminable story on human resources, I Google the guy. And I find...not only is he famous, he's world famous...not well known in the Anglo Saxon world...but in the rest...his fame stretches from Europe to South America to Africa to the Middle East. He has composed ballets, symphonies, experimented...the list goes on and on...I find pictures of him on the net - he looked younger and handsomer...a man confident, secure in himself.

What happened? How did he morph into that broken man at the bar, heckling the musicians and climbing up on stage, unloved, unlwecome, a nuisance?

He told me, actually.

It was love.