Welcome to my blog
which is listening to cricket from India. It is a game which sane people would
find hard to understand. They are on Day Four of a very slow match, possibly
one of the slowest ever, and yet, for all the apparent stagnation, there is a subtle
and important ‘great game’ being played.
Recently cricket has devised a new form of
itself with a game that lasts three hours rather than five days. This new form has become very popular and
threatens to become the dominant form, reflecting as it does a modern world
where time seems to be limited. For some this is the Americanization of
cricket, going for show rather than subtlety. In today’s game England and India
are both doing very little for in the context of a twenty day series, of which
today is the nineteenth, today is, as the commentator just said, ‘a test of
patience’. Patience, in the western world, is not the virtue it once was. Everything
has to be done quickly, even therapy which has to be either ‘brief’ or
medically assisted for fast results. This short-termism, which no doubt has its
virtues, goes against the grain of history as seen from the eastern perspective
where time is endless. This perspective allows the recent victims of western
military intervention, such as Afghanis, Iraqis, Libyans et cetera, absorb and
respond to the brief efforts ‘to sort things out’ by hunkering down and waiting
for us to lose interest. Once we’ve gone, they get back to the great game –
unless we’ve killed them all first.
---
I am writing this on a
borrowed computer. I killed mine yesterday morning. The day before I had put my
back out when I leaned over to bleed a radiator. It has been, and is, very
painful. (Very painful in my scheme of things; there’s no telling how anyone
else would describe it. My guess is that I have a low pain threshold.) The
bleeding of the radiator resulted in the heating failing altogether and the
subsequent summoning of a plumber. By time he arrived, I was virtually
immobile. Fortunately he fixed the heating so at least I was warm when, after
an uncomfortable night, I sat in my room at 4 in the morning to watch the
cricket. At approximately 4.01 I lifted a cup of coffee to my lips. This
movement triggered a back spasm which threw the cup from my hand to the
computer keyboard. The result was fatal. Luckily I’ve always backed up my
files…NO I HAVEN’T… So, all the work I’ve done for two years, gone.
---
The umpire has just
made a decision, a wrong decision that may decide the result of twenty days
cricket.
So it goes. Life, eh?
Why?
--
Of late, I’ve been
reading or rereading some classics. Graham Green’s Burnt Out Case was one,
Steinbeck’s Sweet Tuesday (Thursday?) another, both of which were obvious in
their class. When I was a teenager, I was really impressed by James Hogg’s ‘The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,’ so coming back to it
was intriguing. In fact I enjoyed is less this time but mainly because it was
familiar and therefore less shocking in its radicalism. Nevertheless, it is a
remarkable book. The quote below is from the author, not the book.
The one great error in life is to overrate our
talents. When a man is astonished at what he knows, it may be a proof that he
has stood on the brink of science; but it is also a proof that he has not
discovered it to be boundless and unfathomable. The ignorance of such a person
makes him loquacious and opinionative, because he has never known what it is to
be beyond his depth.
---
Ravi Shankar claimed that he needed
relationships with different women to feed his creativity. Well, of course. I
suppose your art has to be recognized for this story to work.
…
With just two weeks to
go even my most superstitious magical-thinking self has had to admit that it
really would be a miracle for anything to happen in that time that could make
this last year anything other than a fuck-up. Killing my computer accidentally
with a back spasm just adds to the problems, financial and practical. My
partner has just become unemployed, as I am now following the unfortunate
collapse of my business. We are flummoxed. In fact not only have I failed to
move towards my goal, I’ve gone backwards. This in the year of the
Water-Dragon, the year of belief, my crowning sixtieth, the last make or break.
So it goes, so it goes.
Luckily, none of it matters
---
The next ten days will be family focused. On
Wednesday I will be sixty. I guess the Day of the Dead has interfered with my
enthusiasm for celebration, perhaps because I wanted to show what I could do,
and what I could do didn’t seem to be up to much. Hopefully by then I’ll have
sorted my thoughts out and remembered to notice and appreciate the many
goodnesses, such as my health and sanity, and the thriving of my children and
grandchildren. I could also remember forty-five years ago when I was a rather
miserable teenager who used to go to sleep at night imagining I was randomly
massacring passers-by with a rifle. So lucky I lived in a society where I would
never come across a gun. I don’t know how anyone could forgive their child being
murdered whether by a lunatic or by a government dropping bombs from drones.
---
This morning the test cricket series in India
comes to an end with England the victors. Instead of listening to the familiar
voices bringing me warmth and entertainment from India, I’ll have to return to
my meditation and listen out for a different type of sound, that of the
universe unfolding.
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