The Moth and the Candle

Journey time has shortened, have you noticed? Of course you have. The distances which were formerly daunting and adventurous are now routine and tedious. Communications have ceased to be of the importance they once were. Time was, see, people were careful in how they communicated with one another. Not any longer. The composition of letters and billets doux was painstaking. Now the nature of communications is instantaneous and this means that these formerly crafted communications have descended into a half literate melange, inhabited by puerile and boring fuckwits whose enjoinders and entreaties to one another possess the skill and artifice of a drunken bar stool expert found in bars the world over. We are finding increasingly less to say to each other. Chit chat rules supreme.
Elongated glances at sideways strangers full of suspicion and hostility. Perhaps the time has gone or will come when we greet one another with a nod and a smile. Toughness has replaced amity in the terror-filled postures of people unfamiliar to each other. I reach for the sumptuous, lusty flesh of billboard babes piling on top of one another in a clear cut cacophony of prurient advertising. I see their faux friendly faces wreathed in the smug smiles of the commercially confident, conscious of crafting, conserving and creating conspicuous consumption.
We are too many really. Even in the differential application of enclosed social circles. The memories of times past are kept in the heads of the middle aged and the elderly whose imperfect recollections allow re-interpretative histories to be formulated and drawn upon. The battle cries of those who are now long dead rise again in slick new forms re-packaged and re-presented. They taint and pollute, colour and interfere. What was clear, was never clear, is no longer clear. Huge crimes hide the little ones which allow for grandiose comment and further crimes.
The cacophonous crash of a thousand broken bottles rings through the other sounds which make up ambient suburbia. Rattle, roil, rattle, the passing beat of trains drowns in with the hydraulic sighs and squeals emanating from the bright green truck. It moves off quietly having drunk in its monthly fill of the discarded wine bottles from dinner parties, the broken beer bottles from indignant screams at the referee on the telly and the furtively dumped gin and vodka containers of the secret alcoholics. Our waste and our problems murmuring off into the distance, dealt with by shunting them off to be someone else’s concern. Not a trace of difficulty left.
And now for the pain of ages to be recorded. The trees have fallen in clumps along a pattern of no particular interest. Green bushes, with their leaves semi-intact, populate ragged surfaces around the fringes of the village and are strewn with the detritus of urban living. Coke cans, plastic bags, cigarette butts, sweet wrappers, car tyres, all evidence of people and their ignorant stupidity.
Aged grips of patience and loyalty fumble for each other in comfort and fear. Two elderly people walking slowly. True affection grown old in a time of the all new and vacuous. Pitied by the young for being so old, they traverse on and happily accept that which no one can change. This, I recognise, is growing old with grace. Entire industries of lies and outright brainlessness have profited from this fear of adjoining wrinkles, of lacking the ungrateful energy of those juvenile idiots who hope to die before they get old but yet don’t clip themselves out of bravery but out of deep-seated personal problems such as not being famous.
Disuniting elements punctuate the periods of sorrow by reminding you of happier times. Small pieces of long forgotten Christmas decorations are visible still taped to the aero boards of the ceiling. What party did they see in their heyday? Or were they merely hung up there to alleviate the stress? Saint Vincent’s Hospital Accident and Emergency department. Not a good place to be at one o’clock in the morning. Places of time more than space as they are only utilised at certain points of the day. I hear the voices cry and scream silently of defeat and victory, the relieved laughter and terrible grief of small knots of gatherings long since gone. Where are they now?
Who knows or who cares, right? The pain of ages is still hidden, enmeshed in complex of the everyday, the mystic, the suspension of belief and the wishful. The evidence is behind me, before me and all around me but still the acceptance of it is suffocating in the extreme. Sometimes it is a vicarious pain, on the behalf of those whose loss you now mourn. It is they who suffered, suffered as well the ultimate price, they who have paid with their lives. In the throes and tumults of war a life seems like a very small thing, a very small thing indeed to waste or to take. But it is not war and the life was not a small thing. Its personal, concentrated nature underlines the beauty and brevity of sinking flesh. When it is blood of your blood it is a terrible thing. All has changed for you whilst the big wheel turns evermore, without noticing or caring.