Coming down the mountain.

Though not wearing pink pajamas we were coming down the mountain in a downpour, going the long way round to avoid the rising creeks which were red brown and frothing at the bottom of the bridges on the way up the hill three hours earlier. The mist came down, the wipers twitching helplessly under the flood, the headlights smudged and useless.
Following the curve of the central white line, thanking someone for the indicators on the sharp bends.
"Where the creeks run dry or ten feet high/and it's either drought or plenty".

So this morning for the first time, driving to the offices of SURG. Odd not to walk in. So very un Bloom like.
Realising the question, as we follow Bloom in his search for lunch, though one of the best and ugliest descriptions of the uglyness of people eating, through my own memories of trying to feed the sea gulls on the bridge and eating in Davy Byrne's, how much of literature is about aberrations and marginal activity? How much of it is a willful playing with and pandering to the perverse?

How much of it is playing the game so that someone else can tell you how well you did it? (so you can do them the favour in return.)

Beyond the fog the road open outs into familiar landscapes. We have escaped the flooded roads, the possibility of swift water ruin the fog distorted views. The world is clean and cold and the pure view is clear from here to the coast.

A cleared head. A renewal of conviction. The destination suddenly obvious after a long time waiting for the view to clear.

The dedication

Ok, so Lady G is dedicated to the Coventry City Library Service.

A bit odd?

I work in an educational system that regards literature as an unexploded bomb. I’m supposed to teach students how to recognise and defuse the text’s invidious and insidious ideology. Always the text, never the poem, or the play, or the novel

Reading as a kind of safe sex. In which nothing is risked and nothing created. Self defeating and pointless. Less than sex. At best a Rubik’s cube or cross word puzzle, a time filler. At worst, something to be avoided at all costs unless sanitized.

Don’t read writers that don’t agree with you.

Why we take readers and teach them to resist what they are reluctant to read in the first place is beyond me. It’s not just that I know the theory behind the methodology is flawed, it’s far more personal. I owe too much to books and libraries.

When I was very young, my father took me to the Central Library in Coventry. Having left school at twelve, he was determined we would read and write, swim dance and make music.

I still think four out of five wasn’t bad.

The Central Library in Coventry was a special place, right in the heart of the city. It was by the cathedrals and one bright day we were early enough to stop off on the way to look at the sunlight coming though the glass in the new cathedral.

The library itself was in an old building. The poetry was kept on an upper balcony you reached by climbing a spiral stone staircase. At the far end of the veranda, in an alcove, they kept the poetry books. There was room for one chair.

Browsing the library’s small collection I had myself a fine if erratic education. There were school book poets, and poets my parents knew, and the poets I discovered for myself. I can still remember reading Lawrence’s Pansies and thinking I had stumbled over something illegal.

Downstairs, in the fiction and history sections, there were worlds I could enter that were immeasurable distances from the one I lived in. Ways of thinking that I would never have encountered in my own life.

The record library was a later but an equal revelation. Alain Stival, the Bothy Band, Planxty, coming out of the speakers. Music I could have heard nowhere else because no one I knew, knew anything about them. Or if they did disparaged it as diddly dee music.

No one said; you’re the son of a migrant factory worker! These books and ideas can’t be yours. Literature is an elitist activity carrying the ideology of the ruling patriarchy. And thank God no one said, beware, you will encounter events, ideas, attitudes that will make you feel uncomfortable, make you think, may challenge your own assumptions.

So a thank you to the city libraries. For the education I got in them and the dreams they started.