In my head are many theories of existence, quite a few still at odds with the stuff and doings of my day-to-day life. Ghost of a past self has me on a diet nursing my hunger. Others, and many a time, have me attempting to reconcile my duplicitous body/mind. One regret still is that when young I was never fully occupied with the present. Always a role to be embraced, or a sideways suspicion that another scene was playing itself out on the background of now. My growing up, driven at times by an internalised machismo, turned out to be one long process of corruption. Learning from some mistakes yes, but then making different ones. And always finding out too late, after the decisions had been made. The late Michael Hamburger and I once fell out over my insisting that dissonance could be an integral part of a poem. Only wish that I had back then been able to quote Franz Marc: 'a so-called dissonance is simply a consonance apart.' How many learning mistakes can one make in a life? Is writing this another? How to know? Now? Every one of day's events, as before, seem to make sense. Although, taken all together, not where they have been leading. Has mine now become the self-seen theatrical life of a shut-away writer? Including this reflecting on other unwise escapades? Habit of a lifetime still has me waiting for my fortune to come through the letterbox. Soon I will have been an old man for far longer than I was a young man. Here I am in my young old age; and I never did find my Madame von Meck.
© Sam Smith 5th September 2023
© Sam Smith 5th September 2023