Connecticut school shootings: the moral void

 

Christie Blatchford, a tough and venerable print reporter who exposes truth far more powerfully than I ever could, had some choice things to say about the horrors that happened this morning in Newtown. Some of it touched on social media and the bizarre, faceless way we communicate in this stranger-than-strange time:

The wisest story I’ve ever read about a mass school shooting is a work of fiction – no accident, I suspect, for it takes distance to see past the horror of such things, not to mention get around the makeshift shrines and the spoken and printed equivalents of the teddy bears which adorn them.

Social media and Twitter, it is certain, will make that latter task ever more difficult.

As mainstream newsrooms around the world geared up the sombre music and reporters lowered voices and dumbed down their language (yes, it is hard to imagine) in order to interview eight-year-olds, so did cyberspace fill up with omgs, fake sites, expressions of sorrow, rumours and ghastly bleatings.

To quote a young man named Ryan Lanza, who may be someone with the bad luck to have the same name as the Ryan Lanza who was first wrongly identified as the latest shooter or who may be the actual brother of gunman Adam Lanza, who complained on Facebook Friday, “So aperently I’m getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl..wtf?”

Either way, this is what passes for social commentary in 2012 — illiterate, petulant, self-referential sludge.

I think this is what I was trying to get at - not nearly as effectively - in my tirade against the cult of narcissism that drives texts, tweets and other bleeding chunks of damaged language. It astounds me that up until the past few months, this cacophany of chirping and blathering has been seen as nothing but positive: isn't it marvelous we can connect like this,  that everyone's the same, all of us equal in the great wide sea of cyberspace, so that we can freely propagate lies, scams, gooey badly-spelled sentiment (soon to become standardized, no doubt, in the form of "Twitter English") and other verbal effluvia, all in the name of instant communication!

A few years after the initial bird-brained euphoria, the rotten underside of this whole ill-planned enterprise is beginning to stink big-time. The fact that it has fewer rules governing it than the Wild West is only just now beginning to make itself felt in bullying and cyberscams and other forms of human hatefulness. Old people are being bled dry and have nothing left to live on, teenagers are killing themselves due to relentless organized persecution (after which we get all sentimental and fix things by designing a tshirt). Even the shocking suicide of that poor blameless nurse after the Duchess prank may have been driven by a barrage of cyberabuse.

Blatchford speaks of a novel called We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which a budding Adam Lanza-type begins to emit those eerie waves of incipient violence that everyone is so good at ignoring.  This bit of dialogue is both hair-raising and wrenchingly accurate:

The dad once asked Kevin, “Do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or like violent movies? Do you think something like this could happen at your school? Are there at least counselors there?”

“All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad,” the son replied. “They play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies. You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock."

Blatchford touches on the new industry of trauma therapy that always leaves me feeling as if something had been stuffed down my gullet:

I was in Littleton, Colo., 13 years ago. What was almost as horrifying as the carnage — 14 students and a teacher dead, the killers having shot themselves — was the theatre that followed. Students were able to grieve only in public, preferably for the cameras; professionals descended in swarms to help the town mourn; people urged each other to hug their children, as though without the reminder, no one would have thought of it.

Tonight I listened to countless reporters say things like "experts claim that -" and "let's talk to an expert on this subject", after which a psychologist would come on camera and spout truisms that any grandmother would know. Not one person had the guts to say, "My God, I don't know! I don't know what to do about  any of this. I feel like there's nowhere left on earth that's safe." Not one of them admitted that there is NO WAY to "safely" let your children know about all this hideous carnage in a way that will spare their feelings and leave them emotionally unscarred.

Don't lie to them, we were told, but don't say too much.  Don't disclose, but don't withhold either, and make sure you give them a big hug (because otherwise, we might forget).
 
But even that convoluted mobius of non-advice wan't the worst.  Every single "expert" I heard tonight told us that we should reassure our children that it "won't happen to them".  Oh? Do we know that for sure? Did Newtown know that for sure when it woke up this morning? If a place that looks like a Norman Rockwell painting could bury twenty small children just a few days before Christmas, we should not be so sure it "won't happen" in our town, that it won't start to happen in escalating waves as more and more people go crazy from alienation and meaninglessness and fall into the moral void that breeds pure evil.

Connecticut school shootings: not again, not again

 

 

First there was that groan, the sound that has become almost involuntary of late:  oh, no. Not again. That sense of headshaking disbelief and dismay, and horror. Another mass shooting, this time in an elementary school, and right before Christmas! And then the words echoing in my ears, something my 7-year-old granddaughter had said to me earlier in the week: “My school was in lockdown yesterday.”

 

WHAT?

It turns out that “lockdown” in elementary schools has become as routine as fire drill. This is a word I never heard in my childhood, or in my children’s. In fact, I never even heard it 20 years ago. So what in hell is going on here?

I could go on and on – I have a tendency to go on and on when I am confused, frightened and angry, whipping up my adrenaline against the awful sinking depression and despair that is surely to follow. I could go on and on about gun culture, about how Americans seem to think that the solution to guns is “more guns”. It has been a contentious point between Canadians and Americans for as long as I can remember, and has now become inflamed as never before.
 

 

Here is my point. If you have a deadly weapon in your hands, you don’t have to think. All you have to do is make your way to a promising venue, a mall, a movie theatre or an elementary school, and squeeze the trigger. Pop, pop, pop, the sound registering as “firecrackers” to people who are used to hearing the phony “BLAAMMM” of TV shows and movies so that they don’t even know enough to respond.

As a matter of fact, almost everyone involved in these horrors says something like, “I thought I was in a movie”. Oh, how distanced we have all become from what is real.

My feelings are like a dark kaleidoscope, all broken up and shifting and moving. Pieces jump out at me, jagged as glass, and I don’t want to look at them.

I like to watch a very lightweight entertainment/news program called Inside Edition, the kind of show that usually has a funny animal video at the end (though, come to think of it, almost every TV station in the world showed the Ikea Monkey the other day). A cop or some other security guy – who pays attention to these things? – was demonstrating to the host what to do “when the guy opens fire” (not if!). This was in a mall, and the security person said, “The last thing you should do is run.” This reminded me of nothing so much as the instructions for dealing with an enraged bear or a cougar or some other predatory animal.

 

No, if you run you’re a moving target – prey. You’re supposed to crouch down, take cover - preferably behind one of those big metal garbage cans with the bars on it. Bulletproof, unless (he said) a bullet accidentally ricochets off the wall and gets you in the back of the head.

I almost can’t write about the kids right now, but I will, a little bit at least, because writing is the only way I can even begin to get my mind around it. One thing I notice about mass shootings that affect children:  right away the grief counsellors pounce on them and insist they talk it all out, tell them everything that happened to them, every horrific detail, preferably over and over again. Lately some of these counsellors have come under fire (sorry) for squeezing memories out of kids who might be “processing” them a different way, who might not be ready to say anything, or (amazingly!) might prefer to talk to their Mum or Dad or their grandparents.

There is a grief industry now. I don’t remember anything like that when I grew up because there was no need.  I also don’t remember one single shooting in a school, not even of one child. Nor do I remember any of this happening with my own children.

 

The game has changed, obviously, dramatically, irrevocably. How are we to raise a generation of kids who are anxiety-free? All right, no one is anxiety-free, but how are we supposed to take them to the mall – or the movies – or even drop them off at school without a horrible fear of chaos and screams and blood on the floor?

I could say it’s the boom in technology, and I think it’s a factor. I realize that this is a highly unpopular, even taboo and stigmatized thing to think or say, but I will say it.  No one has a conversation any more: they text, phone, “tweet” or go on Facebook, an ironic name for something with no face.  Sociologically, we just haven’t had time to catch up with this explosion, this game-changer that everyone assumes is an unalloyed good.

 Who questions technology, for God’s sake? You’ll sound like an old fuddy-duddy, a party pooper, a Luddite. You’ll sound like me.
 

 

We can’t see each other’s facial expressions any more (and Skype doesn’t count because, in my opinion, it’s theatre). It’s all “lol” and “wtf” and poorly spelled messages that don’t really mean much of anything.

I recently asked my husband in exasperation, “What do these people talk about on their Smart Phones all day?”

He looked at me. “Nothing,” he said.

Tacking away with your thumbs like some self-obsessed crustacean does not make you more human, does not help you communicate anything of importance. It only feeds your vanity and narcissism and  helps you shut off your feelings so that nothing is quite real. So when the awful time comes, you’ll think you’re in a movie, playing the role of the hunter, or – even more tragically – the hunted.

 
(This is a sidebar. In catching up with the latest news developments, I came across an article that said it has become increasingly popular for women to text while - prepare yourself - giving birth. Next they'll be reporting on the quality and intensity of their orgasms, or perhaps the success or failure of their bowel movements. Or how about blowing your nose? As with photographing the Grand Canyon but never actually looking at it, texting ensures you will never really experience anything in your life.)

 

We can’t take it all back, turn back the clock, and I’m not saying we should, but someone HAS to respond to this escalating nightmare with something that actually makes a difference. Alienation and unaddressed rage have become a huge problem in contemporary culture, leading to widespread bullying and other forms of sadism. How easy is it to bully and threaten and mock and shame vulnerable children when you’re not even in the same room with them?

But unfortunately, to kill them, you have to be there.

Doesn’t anyone make any connections any more, or are they afraid they will express an opinion that’s unpopular?  Do these problems have no roots in personal alienation and the dizzying rate of social change, or is each shooter “just some nut with a gun”?

 

I think we need to go back to the very beginning and learn how to be human again. How to put down the devices and stop the madly clawing thumbs and look at each other, really look. And talk.

And figure out what’s wrong with everything now, and what’s right with it, and how to deal with things as they go faster and faster without our conscious awareness because we have all become so terrifyingly numb.

 

 

Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

 

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

A spider went up my nose (a Festive Tale)

 

 

 

 

 

 

All I wuz trying to do, see, was get out some Xmas wrap on those long tubes, I mean really really long ones so I had them in the corner of the closet all kind-of standing up on their ends sort-of? and took a lint roller - never mind why a lint roller, OK, because I took out pompoms I'd made last year, Xmas pompoms because I'm too cheap and lazy to make MORE pompoms to put on my Xmas presents as decorations insteada bows, like? I don't use bows. So I take out the old pompoms and shake them and a whole buncha stuff comes out so's I have to get out the lint roller which goes "zzzzzzzzzzzzt!" when I try to pull off the old stickamy-thingie, you know, so 97 pieces of stickamy come off of the roll and I have to try to put them all back on. But that is the unimportant part.  When I began to try to find the rolls of Xmas wrap - God - God - So I see this - GOD its legs were so long it just - . I screamed and started fencing with it and jabbing it with the lint roller which was all covered with lint from the pompoms? so nothing would stick to it anyway so I jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and after a while it started to become clear that the spider wouldn't die cuzzadafact it was GONE somewhere in some freaking CRACK or crevice or maybe up inside my favorite sweater where it would just hunker down and lie in wait. Its legs were At Least 4 Inches Long or More, and they wiggled around because it sort of clambered except real fast like a hundredyard dash inside my closet. And I could not BELIEVE I could have a huge spider inside my very own closet which I share with no one, no not even a fucking arachnid from hell, because about a week and a half ago we took everything out of that closet to paint inside it and lay new carpet, and I'd thrown away all my gross old sweaters and old boxes of stuff and everything, yet still, here was this HONKIN' HUGE thing like from some rainforest, and to be perfectly honest I DO live in a rainforest which is part of Vancouver. Oh god but at least it didn't have any egg sacs throbbing on its body, its body was really teeny but its LEGS were like half a mile long and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! My husband heard me screaming my guts out and came in with a good-natured look on his face and said, "What?" and I asked him HOW a spider cudda got into my newly-painted, freshly-carpeted wonderfully clean bedroom closet, and he says "hmmm, what about that cardboard box?" and I say "WHAT about that cardboard box?" and he says "that cardboard box you brought in" and I say "WHAT cardboard box I brought in?" and he says "that cardboard box you brought in from the garage" and I say, "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." THAT cardboard box. That. I Brought. In. From. The. Garage, to put some sort-of-a gift in, in fact I think it was a snowman or some-such thing that I made for my grandgirl, she likes snowmen and I almost SEALED A SPIDER INSIDE THE BOX with the little cute little snowman in it so that when she opened it up on Xmas morning, all excited about what could be inside, an EVIL poisonous multi-legged throbbing iggidy-wiggidy-piggly-wiggly-legged spider would've popped out at her and ruined her Christmas, so maybe things weren't so bad after all except I still haven't stopped screaming and feeling cold waves of shuddering all over my skin, involuntary shudders of disgust and revulsion at the sight of that MONSTER spider just scurrying along, just scurrying along the wall of my freshly-painted, newly-carpeted closet, hunkering down in the corner where all my neat little rolls of gift wrap are stored, not even in the plastic but already OUT OF THE PLASTIC so the spider could easily just zip down inside any of the rolls he wanted so that when I finally do wrap my presents, SURPRISE, out will pop the Spider from Hell to terrorize me and ruin my Xmas, except that at this very moment I think that the spider must be crawling around my scalp inside my hair which is why it is now standing on end and which is now why I cannot stop screaming and perhaps will never stop screaming until the life cycle of this particular spider finally ends.

DARWIN, THE IKEA MONKEY: best cash-grab of the season!

Maybe it's because it's Christmas, with all the feverish fund-raising that goes on. I don't know. But I am plenty pissed by the following story.

A lot of you already know about Darwin, the cute little baby rhesus monkey (or whatever kind he is: it's a little unclear now) found leaping around an Ikea store in Toronto, wearing a baby-sized shearling winter coat.

It was the kind of story that makese a great kicker on the news: "And, finally. . . ", with chuckling anchors making droll little monkey jokes with absolutely no awareness or concern for what is really going on. It's YouTube, folks, so it can't be real and no one can be hurt by it. Harmless entertainment.

That is, until the public was made joltingly aware of the fact that there were more "issues" involved here than a displaced monkey in an adorable coat.

We saw video clips of Yasmin Nakhuda, the kind of person who anthrop - anthropo - oh well, screw it, treats pet monkeys like people, with a human need for close nurture. One of those eccentric people who dress their pets in all the latest styles, haul them around with them, brush their teeth with them, and shit like that.

While Nakhuda was off shopping, presumably in Ikea, the cleverly-named Darwin escaped from her car and - weird or what? - bolted into the store, where it ran around frantically "trying to find the cafeteria" (chortled all the news people) "because it wanted a cheap hot dog or some meat balls." More likely, it wanted to get out of a typical frigid Toronto winter before it froze to death.

One would have thought that would have been the end of the story. The eccentric lady takes her exotic pet home with her to celebrate Christmas. But wait, all of a sudden, unlike in the US where you can own a Bengal tiger or a deadly cobra or whatever-you-fancy and keep it in the back yard while your toddlers roam around and throw stones at it, this monkey has been confiscated. It's been snatched away by a strange-looking "sanctuary" called Story Book Farm.

Just the name is weird. It just doesn't suit a primate sanctuary. There used to be a Story Book Gardens in London, Ontario, a must-see for kids everywhere (and I was dragged there at least 14 times). Did it have animals in it? I think so, in those wretched, suffocating barred cages that reeked of ammonia and dung. As a child, I thought it was natural for animals to pace back and forth all day.

So now little Darwin, obviously capable of making decisions for himself and his own well-being, has finally seen the light.

Though his former owner has been lambasted for the horrible sin of treating him like a human being, suddenly Darwin (renamed like a religious convert, a kid adopted from the Ukraine or someone in the witness protection program) is talking, just like a human!

Yes, talking! And you wouldn't believe the things he is saying. This is a direct quote from the Story Book Farm fundraising web site:

I was found wandering the parking lot scared and confused on Sunday Dec 9th.

I am only a baby and had no idea where I was.

The kind people at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary took me in and are providing me with a permanent, loving home where I can learn from other monkey's and I am told may have a surrogate mother!!!

I am so happy to finally be able to live and act like a real monkey!

Story Book farm did not expect to get me for Christmas and we could desperately use funds to help pay for my care as well as the other amazing monkey friends I have made.

I will eat A LOT of food. I would also love to be able to play with toys and other enrichment items and all of this costs money.

Please consider makng a donation towards my care, this is my Christmas wish.
No donation amount is too small, every little bit helps! :)

Other Ways You Can Help

Even if you can't contribute, you can help me and my other new monkey friends by sharing this campaign with everyone you know.
Thank you for your support, and for helping me have a very well deserved Happy Holiday.

Plese feel free to visit our website to learn more about us:
www.storybookfarmprimatesanctuary.com

Does this somehow speak to you of "cash grab"? It makes me plenty uneasy, along with the pictures and videos of monkeys in Story Book Farm bouncing off the walls of wire mesh cages. This is not my idea of a sanctuary, where animals can roam free in some semblance of the wild. And maybe even interact with each other in some way that's more natural than sticking their fingers through the mesh.

Even the "parking lot" reference is bent to make it all seem more cruel. He was found in the store, not outside. And notice how they've suddenly, magically changed his name back to Darwin for the sake of public recognition (though only for the purposes of the campaign).

Wouldn't Darwin be better off in Yasmin Nakhuda's bathroom brushing his little simian teeth? Maybe not. Lots of people treat their dogs like babies, but that's apparently beside the point. This Storybook shit is deeply suspicious to me. It seems to me it's just another form of abuse, and certainly exploitation.

Do they really think they're going to squeeze money out of people by yanking Darwin's string and making him "talk" so people will feel guilty if they DON'T donate?

I got one of these things in the mail the other day. Don't even remember which charity, but it said something like, "We were about to present our usual gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing end-of-the-year pitch to to help suffering children, but suddenly had to put it all aside when an urgent crisis arose which will result in a horrible, agonizing death if you personally don't do something about it!! Little Hildegard is a sweet innocent toddler who is now suffering from Stage 4 cancer and will surely die in horrible agony if you don't pony up and empty out your wallets NOW. Don't you want to save her? What in hell's name is the matter with you?" (And so on, blah, blah, blah.)

I know charities are suffering. But I also know that you have to pick and choose, you can't give to all of them, and such extreme guilt tactics are inexcusable. It all reeks of manipulation and laying a staggering load of guilt on the public. I can just see their PR people saying, "Well, you know, we could always keep this story until Christmas, that is, if the little girl is still alive. You know how people are at Christmas. They always give more." I happen to know that these people have been hired to do this, to "spin" their issues for maximum manipulative effect, justified by the fact that charities must now be run like businesses, no matter how crooked and mercenary their tactics.

This time it's about a displaced monkey - not just any monkey, but the IKEA MONKEY, now just as famous as Justin Bieber for his cute little YouTube antics. Even better: there's now an "Ikea Monkey Controversy" that will spawn still more news items to tack on to the end of the TV news broadcast, inspiring still more chuckling, bantering and not-very-clever "monkey custody jokes". Or else sober-faced, cheek-biting items while the anchors try to pretend this story means shit.

Meantime, the most important issue has been totally buried in hype. This isn't a "thing", but an alive, sensate being that is more intelligent than your beloved Rover or Hissy the Cat. It's being thrown back and forth like a football in the name of "animal rights", and it is totally disgusting to watch.

Not just thrown back and forth, but shoved into the public's face in a breathtaking campaign known (literally) as Dollars for Darwin (even though his name isn't even Darwin any more! This is nothing but brand recognition served up with a side order of cute alliteration.)

Why do I feel as if my wallet is being forcefully squeezed? Why do I feel that no matter how much I donate to every cause, worthy or not, I will still feel like a guilty wretch for not giving even more? Why do I feel a sort of nausea about this whole story, knowing it can't possibly have a good ending for anyone? For the only thing more heartlessly mercenary than squeezing out donations for the plight of a sick human being is exploiting the innocence of a vulnerable, helpless baby animal.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

NOT a Child's Christmas in Wales: really bad Dylan Thomas

Not too many people know this, but I'll tell you right now: Dylan Thomas was a really bad writer. He crammed adjectives together in a way that made everyone gasp, "Ohhhhh!" and "Wheeeee," as if they were watching fireworks. But that's not good writing. That is what is referred to in literary terms as a "cheap trick".

He wrote about Wales as if it were the dark side of the moon, some exotic or even erotic place where the sea sang its siren song: but the truth is he hated Wales. Hated its narrow religion and suffocating parochialism and "the museum that should have been in a museum" (and I've seen a few of those). He must have hated where he came from, or he wouldn't have gone to America to read poetry to melting young girls and get so soused his head exploded. He had to have a shtick of some sort, a shtick that other writers hadn't quite thought about, a Yeats-ian, Joyce-ean thing, except not Irish.

You HAVE to love Dylan Thomas. You HAVE to admire the solid blocks of poetry or the yammering sing-songy short stories. The only one I really liked was about the guy in the bar, soused, who meets the love of his life, goes to the men's room and never finds his way back. Ever. Reminds me a bit of This is Spinal Tap and how they can't find the stage. You can't say you hate Dylan Thomas and hold your head up in literary circles. Oh, but look at this image! Oh, but look how he does this, how he does that. Though there are some interesting images in And Death Shall Have No Dominion, it seems to have been written for Richard Burton (soused) to read on the Ed Sullivan Show, which in fact I think he did.

Reading A Child's Christmas in Wales used to be de rigueur in classrooms and around the fireplace on Christmas Eve. Today it all feels dated somehow, dense Christmas pudding or a fruitcake passed back and forth in the family until it turns into the sort of igneous rock that was used to build the ancient Pyramids.

This is only a small fragment of one of Thomas' more interminable short stories, called Quite Early one Morning. It was written to pad out the selections on a Caedmon recording he did in the '40s - I know because I have a copy of it rattling around somewhere. Dylan Thomas was famous for his "Welsh-singing" voice and his magnificent readings. OK, if you like Richard Burton with a headcold and a hangover. There is a definite wobble. And then there was the mess of his personal life, which I will not get into.

This story (the fragment I have shared here: it's about a zillion pages long and I thought you'd get bored) is precious and atrocious at the same time. Pretrocious? It's cute. Those little Welsh people in the town, goddamn! they were funny to write about. It drips with the sort of entitlement that announces to the world, "I have arrived. And you have not." It may or may not be a forerunner of Under Milk Wood: Under Skim Milk Wood, perhaps.

I used to love A Child's Christmas in Wales until I actually read it and saw all sorts of cheap verbal tricks going on. If you really want a good Christmas story, make like Linus in the Peanuts story, hit the lights and open the gospel of Luke. In the meantime, this ISN'T from A Child's Christmas in Wales, so it can't be all bad.

I walked on to the cliff path again, the town behind and below waking up now so very slowly; I stopped and turned and looked. Smoke from one chimney - the cobbler's, I thought, but from that distance it may have been the chimney of the retired male nurse who had come to live in Wales after many years' successful wrestling with the mad rich of Southern England. (He was not liked. He measured you for a strait-jacket carefully with his eye; he saw you bounce from rubber walls like a sorbo ball. No behaviour surprised him. Many people of the town found it hard to resist leering at him suddenly around the corner, or convulsively dancing, or pointing with laughter and devilish good humour at invisible dog-fights merely to prove to him that they were normal.)

Smoke from another chimney now. They were burning their last night's dreams. Up from a chimney came a long-haired wraith like an old politician. Someone had been dreaming of the Liberal Party. But no, the smoky figure wove, attenuated, into a refined and precise grey comma. Someone had been dreaming of reading Charles Morgan. Oh! the town was waking now and I heard distinctly, insistent over the slow-speaking sea, the voices of the town blown up to me. And some of the voices said:

I am Miss May Hughes 'The Cosy', a lonely lady,
Waiting in her house by the nasty sea,
Waiting for her husband and pretty baby
To come home at last from wherever they may be.

I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the 'Kidwelly'
And Mrs Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
'Poor Captain Tiny all alone', the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone, and I hated her.

Clara Tawe Jenkins, 'Madam' they call me,
An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.

Parchedig Thomas Evans making morning tea,
Very weak tea, too, you mustn't waste a leaf,
Every morning making tea in my house by the sea
I am troubled by one thing only, and that, belief.

Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room door;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.

I am only Mr Griffiths, very short-sighted, B.A., Aber.
As soon as I finish my egg I must shuffle off to school.
O patron saint of teachers, teach me to keep order,
And forget those words on the blackboard - 'Griffiths Bat is a fool.'

Do you hear that whistling?- It's me, I am Phoebe,
The maid at the King's Head, and I am whistling like a bird.
Someone spilt a tin of pepper in the tea.
There's twenty for breakfast and I'm not going to say a word.

I can see the Atlantic from my bed where I always lie,
Night and day, night and day, eating my bread and slops.
The quiet cripple staring at the sea and the sky.
I shall lie here till the sky goes out and the sea stops.

Thus some of the voices of a cliff-perched town at the far end of Wales moved out of sleep and darkness into the new-born, ancient and ageless morning, moved and were lost.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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FOUND: a lost masterpiece!

THE ELEPHANT SONG

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong, a-tong!

That is thc rhythm of the elephant song,

As the big grey elephants shuffle along.

To the sing, song, singing of tho old brass bell,

To the shrill, harsh stridence of the mahoot's yell,

To the shuff-shuff-shuffle of the great round feet,

The elephants are swinging down the village street.

A priest peers out from his while-washed cell,

As he hears the ringing of the elephant bell.

A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse,

A baby peers from thc arms of its nurse,

A cobra dances to a charmer's tune,

The incense wavers in the shrine of the moon,

The street dogs scamper, the children scurry,

A woman hum-hums as she fixes curry,

While the bells keep ringing, like a. distant gong,

Tong, tong, tong-a-tong. a-tong,

The swing-along rhythm of the elephant song.
 

This is one of those things with a long story attached to it. I remember this poem from about Grade 3/4 (which I took in one year, with Miss Wray, one of those spinster teachers that used to be so common back then). I remember her reading this out loud, and loving it: the swinging rhythm of it, the vivid imagery.

A couple of lines stayed with me: "The elephants are swinging down the village street," and "A wild-eyed fakir flings a mumbled curse". Typical of the times, nothing was explained to us, so we had no idea what a "fakir" was (our teacher pronounced it "faker"), and none of us asked.

Then the poem simply disappeared.

Over the years, I've done searches, tried to scare it up. A few years would pass, and I would try again. I was beating the bushes and not finding it. I googled the lines I could remember. (For some reason, in my head I heard the poem rhythmically chanted by a choir of people: perhaps a reflection of a 78 rpm Babar recording in which there was a Greek chorus in the background).

I decided it was dead and unreachable, somehow deemed no longer important. I didn't wonder if I had imagined it, because I remembered more than one line. I knew it was real. But I had no idea of the author's name.

I still don't. I finally found it, incredibly, in a newspaper archive from 1946. It had won the Weekly Poetry Prize in The Advocate, a newspaper that appeared to be Australian (I couldn't read the original at all: it was just a distorted jumble of flyspeck type that made no sense no matter how much it was blown up). The headlines mentioned sheepdog contests called "cooees". Strange.

But beside the yellowed archive was a transcript of the poem - or at least I thought it was the poem - though every line had 5 or 6 errors in it, in syntax, spelling. . . so I had to piece it together from the faulty fragments, using my memory and imagination.

I think this is the poem. There are two names after it, all garbled up: Dan Mantlin and Audrey Cullen, but it's not clear if either of them wrote it.

Is it the stereotypical portrayal of India (where I assume it is set)? Surely there are far more racist poems out there that haven't dropped so far out of sight. Personally, I love the imagery, the rhythm, the pounding of the great round feet and the hypnotic tinkling of those bells. It would never be taught to children now, and it's a little too childish for adults to be exposed to. It belongs to another time, which is maybe what I love about it the most.