Tag: #indieartist

every act cast’s a vote for your honour and character

aristotle talked of ‘eudaimonia’ in the nichomachean ethics. this was the course of university that i failed to understand. i got a d. by far my worst grade. if only i had got a c, i would have got a first for my degree!

eudamonia is sometimes defined as ‘happiness’ – but that’s not quite right. it’s about living a virtuous life. living moderately. and what is the make of a man or woman?

we are just what we do. every time we act, we vote for the person we are. i actually heard this idea on a zoe nutrition podcast. i teared up a bit. i finally understood aristotle.

love is a feeling, not a decision, surrender to it

i come back to this idea often – we act like the architects of our lives. like we choose to do the things we do. that we engage our reason to work out how to live well. and we can maybe do that a wee bit.

but we don’t decide who to fall in love with, our body tells us it has happened and it is up to us to surrender to our feelings.

likewise, not everyone has to surrender to the life of a poet. but i do.

in scotland, the scotch pie is simply called “a pie”

this was actually based on an old wikipedia vandalism on its page in the scotch pie. if you dig into the history, you can learn a bit more about the claim and the debate. for my money, its a funny line.

how true this it is debatable. but i do remember a good friend in high school who having pie and beans for dinner one night and he definitely didn’t call it a scotch pie.

i have never been a fan of them. i am mostly vegetarian and i believe the pie contains mutton. vegetarian variants can be had these days of course, containing either textured soya protein or macaroni and cheese.

and if you reap the dividends you better keep receipts


(because i do) and i know what’s owed


if your finger’s in the till, be aware the drawer slams closed

fairness and justice are very important to me. we are all responsible as individuals for our decisions. and we have to remember that they affect others as well as us. we do not live in isolation from each other.

if we are lucky enough to be able to pay ourselves a dividend, we have an obligation to share some of our windfall with our fellow citizens by paying our taxes. we should be happy to contribute.

sometimes, i need a reminder for me that some people don’t feel the same way as me. they are just out for themselves! so i keep good records.

in the tempest’s fallout, the provost closed the saunas down

i used to go for a sauna on a monday after work. i’d do maybe 20 minutes in the weight room, then multiple rounds of sauna and ice cold shower. i went to a council run victorian swimming bath in a rougher part of the city to do this. it was only years later i learned that this was the same public baths were my dad had learned to swim many years before.

anyway i had been for a run. it was rainy and windy and crap and january. i wanted a sauna. but it tuns out that the council shut all their saunas down after lockdown. other than the fancy one that isn’t included in your normal gym membership.

so i just had a bath.

on a grey saturday, and made plans to break plans

well it was, like it is today, a grey januarian saturday. i was semi-dry-janning. waiting in for a parcel. cancelled a vague plan to cycle, running out of daylight, rain and wind coming in. so i went climbing with a pal and then we got ‘pan-malaysian’ food and presumably drank soda or water or something else disappointing like that. why am i suddenly hungry?

an old flame left my close fire door ajar

there is a bit of poetic licence going on here… the door was actually jammed wide open. close is a funny word. is it more than one word, or a single word with different pronunciations and meanings? it juxtaposes both with ‘open’ and ‘distant’ and lends a tender ambiguity to the line. and there the repeated idea of flame and fire, doubling down on warmth. i also like the way it feels to say this line, almost mono-sylabbic, little phonetic bubbles.

arranging strange loquacious fragments, enjamb / ment. meant cement, ‘a bag on the heid’, revolt and foment

well this is mostly just playing with the noises that repeat in words. range pops up twice, then variations of ‘meant’ with different meanings.

what am i talking about though? i suppose arranging strange fragments is what i am doing in the poem. taking a load of phrases and sounds and trying to arrange them in an interesting and meaningful way.

the enjambment line is a very stupid joke. i remember the high school english class where i learned about the concept of enjambment and immediately wrote my shortest poem:

enjambment

enjanmb-

ment

by n.n. benn (aged 13 3/4)

and the ‘cement bag on the heid’ is a call back to a band i was in when i was in my early 20s, called the stupid idiots. it was based on a rhyme my collaborator, mahrooq, included in a song called ‘we run the show’. I borrow frequently from earlier works over the course of the poem. this is one of the great advantages an artist gets from being undiscovered – freedom to continually self-plagiarize.

i console myself by thinking humans are but plankton or a moss / coating the globe, turning air from one form to the other

sometimes the self-defeating selfishness of humans really depresses me. the waste, and the mad rush to create waste everything else. i think every privately owned car is a policy failure, never mind every billionaire.

even more stressful now as artificial intelligence promises to press every ounce of precious metal onto silicon chips, burn every drop of oil and gas, and chain-react every uranium atom.

but organisms have always changed the earth’s atmosphere. when the first life formed on the planet, the atmosphere was bountiful… for microbes which lived in scorching acidic springs. we are not the first (and we won’t be the last) species to expand into all the space available to us, using all the resources we can pillage, resulting in our planet becoming inhospitable for our species.

despite being individually conscious, on a species level we are not smarter than trees.