Unicorn or horse?

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.”

At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… 

“Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

-Tom Stoppard.

If I only had words

After nearly sixty years with words, a competence has developed in providing appropriate sentences, and even paragraphs for birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions. Words for public occasions can be provided in an adequate, if not expert manner.

The most difficult words are those needed for personal moments. Walking to work this morning I remembered a heated conversation with Silke in January and then later on the car radio they played an old Madness song, “My girl’s mad at me:”

My girl’s mad at me

Been on the telephone for an hour

We hardly said a word

I tried and tried but I could not be heard

Why can’t I explain?

Why do I feel this pain?

‘Cause everything I say

She doesn’t understand

She doesn’t realise

She takes it all the wrong way.

From 1980. The passage of nearly four decades has not lessened the sense of being inarticulate in important moments, the sense of not having words that properly express the feelings inside. Sometimes, the words serve only to cause pain. Sometimes, the wrong words are used in the wrong way with the wrong results. Sometimes the words just won’t do.

There is a sense of knowing that this is not how it should be; knowing that it could be done better, knowing that it should be done better. Sorry Silke.

Days

Philip Larkin was afraid of death.  However this did not prevent him from creating poems that are full of Beauty and Truth, and which celebrate the wonder and joy of being alive -- in their own Larkinesque way, of course.  Do not believe those who caricature Larkin as a dour, cranky misanthrope.  Anybody who holds this view has not taken the time to actually read Larkin's poems.

            Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
-Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber 1964).

Larkin being Larkin, the second verse is required.  But consider the first verse. Some may say that the line "They are to be happy in" is intended to be morbid or ironic.  It is not.  Others may say that the entire poem is nothing more than a cliché.  In fact, it is a simple statement of truth.

The modern urge to over-complicate life puzzles me.  "Days are where we live." Look around.  Everything is right there in front of you.

What I am part 2

Back from two weeks holiday in Ireland I realized something this morning, and I don't know why it escaped me for so long, it's one of those things that's just plain obvious, maybe everyone else can see it, but it's about me, so I couldn't.

Here's the thing I realized. No one knows what I do now.

Maybe with one exception, possibly I know what I do. Or perhaps I know what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do since 2013 looks more and more hopeless, I guess. Because a big part of what I do involves other people using what I create. There needs to be a lot of them for it to work.

Here's what I think I am.

I am an old software developer, a programmer.

I make software because it pleases me to do that, the way a potter makes pots, or a gardener tends a garden, or a cook prepares meals, or an architect designs buildings. That's it. That's what I do.

It's not my imagination. There's real software out there that I created that companies and people use.

PS: Of course I also blog, but that's part of being a software developer and a human being.

PPS: Don't cry for me Argentina. I have had it pretty good. I share my observations here. This is just one more.

Continuity

“Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says

Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, ‘I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. If that is true, somewhere a boy sits next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window handle which lowers the wing flaps and makes the car rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world”.
-Garrison Keillor’s fictional world of Lake Wobegon.

There is a continuity in human experience:  are there not countless children who had such thoughts, or similar ones? Their world is a magical place where reality has not yet crushed the power of imagination, where a car can become an airplane soaring through the sky, and where a little girl can walk through a scene of suspended animation. Anything is possible in the realms of the imagination; the unexpected, the unlikely, the absurd, they are all acceptable.

“It’s the same thing I looked at forty years ago”, says Clarence Bunsen. There is a continuity in childhood experience. All around the world there are children whose imaginations can take them on flights, or on walks up beaches like Tramore Bay.

Ray Bradbury's advice

In his lifetime, Ray Bradbury wrote over 400 short stories and 11 novels — including Fahrenheit 451, his most famous work. Ray wasn’t always a good writer. I took him ten years to write his first good story.

To be successfull Ray tells us to make work our partner:

WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects. It won’t be easy, of course. You might get a hundred rejection slips. 

But your failures are not your failures:
So we should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. 

If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.

Do. Learn. Grow.

Lazy but talented

That's most of us.

You can work really hard to get a little more talented.

And you can also work to get a little less lazy.

It turns out that getting less lazy, more brave—more clear about your fears, your work and your mission—are all easier than getting more talented.

That's why I still envy George Best.

"With feet as sensitive as a pickpocket's hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was astonishing. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves... and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple."

— Sports writer Hugh McIlvanney.
In November 2006 for the first anniversary of his death, Ulster Bank issued one million commemorative five pound notes. The notes sold out in five days. The notes sold on the online auction site eBay for up to £30.
I have one, thank you again Peter Geffroy.