Song at the start of a century

wordsout by godfrey rust
Welcome To The Real World < 14 of 59 >

Song at the start of a century
(Have a nice day, Walt Whitman)

Now that the calendar has granted us this
opportunity for celebration
which is several years late according to the
best estimates
and carries all the significance of a car’s odometer
clicking over to a particular string of zeroes,
let us embrace the accident of convenient
numbers and sing at the start of a century!

My song has a target audience.
It is for not the family which smilingly eats the
latest breakfast cereal together
and for whom the choice of a new brand of
dishwasher powder is a significant
and life-enhancing decision,
for I say unto you, they have their reward.

Just when you thought no soap powder could
wash any whiter,
when your woollens have so much bounce you
have to strap them down in the chest
of drawers,
around the lid of your shaving foam its says
Good Morning to you in four different
languages—

And it is not for the young man driving a fast car
with an open roof
whose companion’s long hair will later be rinsed
clean of atmospheric pollution by a widely
advertised type of conditioning shampoo,
for I say unto you, they have their reward.

Just when your dog's favourite food is the first
choice of eleven out of ten breeders,
when you thought no biscuit could give you
another crumb of comfort,
then we bring you one more flavour to savour,
turning towards the camera, our smiles, like our
snacks, now even cheesier—

It is for the small and ordinary and bewildered.
It is the voice of one crying in a maisonette:

Where are you, Katie of the Oxo ads,
shaking your head indulgently at Philip,
whose pains could all be cured by Anadin?
Our souls cry out for you!

The blueprint of the last century was drawn
in the one before.
Darwin selected it from disconnected bones.
Babbage computed its parameters.
Daguerre snapped its image on his
photographic plate.
Bell rang it up demanding Come here I need you.
Freud placed it on his couch and checked its
bank balance.
As an infant, Wilbur and Orville flew it in the rain
at Kitty Hawk.

So many of the children died young.
Only the lucky survive—
little Josef, little Adolf, little Vladimir Ilyich.
Benito is a darling, but so bossy!
He'll be a leader one day, you'll see!

It was shaped by those who dreamed of a
new order
and by those who saw that such a thing must
be opposed,
who guessed that a change of heart was easier
in a medical than a spiritual operation,
that we could split matter in two leaving the
mess all over the Pacific,
and that finally we would sit at our
private screens,
staring at our most intimate reflections,
secure at last in the anonymity of total revelation.

We worship daily at the shrine of our one-eyed
household god.
We pray by phone or postcard, though seldom
get an answer.
The chosen ones win holidays or seats at
football matches.
It is encouraging how readily our children have
taken to this religion.

Of course we ration what the children watch.
No sex or violence or mindless rubbish
only positive things like nature programmes,
where animals mate and kill and eat each
other up.

Have your credit card ready and call toll free!
Now back to New York and here's Matt!
Missing you already!

And all new knowledge breaks existing laws,
and later everyone will say they knew it all
the time.

Confucius he say
the superior man understands what is right,
the inferior man understands what will sell.

The Iron Curtain has been torn down and
replaced with one bought from Ikea,
where at least former communists will find the
length of queues reassuring,
and everyone is famous now for less than
fifteen minutes.

Phil Spector he say
Da doo ron ron ron,
da doo ron ron.

The European Community has been lost
in translation,
standing in line at Brussels airport as taxis stream
past the hoardings of its endless construction.
A Dane remonstrates with a Spanish colleague
about the actions of the Nomination
Committee
while the cold wind jumps the long queue and
combs out his thinning hair.

Joni Mitchell she say
it's just a borderline,
another borderline.

America eats a glazed donut in Penn Station,
waits for a taxi outside Madison Square Gardens,
is taken by a turban’d driver across
Brooklyn Bridge,
beneath which Walt Whitman’s ghost rides
the ferry, his crocodile eyes twinkling.

In the land of the free, community is defined
by byelaws;
we take an interest in you only if you do not
have the necessary paperwork,
or if you will help us stop people doing
something,
otherwise in every possible respect you are on
your own.

And every screw-up is a commercial opportunity,
and every bankruptcy an incentive.
The great high priest of the market will give
you absolution,
and every bagel vendor will have his IPO.

All you need is money.
All you need is money.
All you need is money.
All you need is money.

The average income of the world’s poorest fifty
countries is a dollar a day;
entire nations inhabit the tiny margins of
currency fluctuations,
breathing in shallow fractions of a euro, dollar
or yen.

Forgive us our debts,
as we forgive those
who forgive our debts.

No-one is minding the store.
Not those who sit in panelled board-rooms, or
give instructions to their overworked
assistants.
The brightest minds are forming global strategies
for marketing winsome cuddly toys.
The economies of whole continents survive on
the things that destroy them,
tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and tourists hoovering
up culture;
this is progress and the world into which we
joyfully bring our slippery and wrinkled
newborn babies,
and do so at a rate which is mathematically
unsupportable.

Remember, one thousand million Chinese can be
terribly wrong.

In 99 years a hundred metres will be run in
eight seconds by a woman.
In 99 years a computer the size of a matchbox
will manage Europe.
In 99 years we will take our holidays on the
Norwegian Riviera while our holograms
keep our appointments at virtual business
meetings.
In 99 years we will choose the colours of our
childrens’ eyes and be afraid to look
into them.

The unthinkable becomes thinkable.
The thinkable becomes see-able.
The see-able becomes do-able.
The do-able becomes done.
The done becomes the done thing.

The West’s strategy is to pull the covers over its
head and call for momma,
and momma comes bringing baseball caps and a
hundred kinds of beer.
Entertainment is anaesthetic so we feel no pain
but run on like an athlete with cortisone injected
into each of his rupturing joints.

Church Father Julian he say
The world is at its last gasp,
though to be fair he said this 16 centuries ago.

Those who control people become almost
undetectable.
Networks mate and reproduce and the air chokes
with data.

Paul Simon he say
These are the days of miracles and wonder
and don't cry, baby, don't cry.

The baby lives because of a medical
breakthrough
for the lack of the price of which in another
country a hundred children daily drink a
deadly water cocktail,
and the transplant patient’s doctor calls with
good news:
someone has died, young and healthy in a
road accident!

History in the real world is the history of women
bearing sorrow.
It is passed down in the pain of childbirth from
mothers' mothers' mothers.
The child's body nurtured for two decades then
let go,
to be exploded in a moment or sent home
broken beyond repair.

That was the first century that has been reviewed
in real time,
and this will be the first to be replayed in
real time.
We rebuild the images of our virtual past until we
cannot tell it from the actual,
and everything will be connected to everything else from an infinite number of points of view.

The Julian of Norwich chat room say
All shall be cool,
And all manner of thing shall be cool.

We have unlocked the secrets of the births
of suns,
and plumbed the immensity of space,
but is it greater than the distances travelled
across the cold expanse between the
still-forming stars of the mind’s nebulae?
In these days of limitless technology the artist
still sketches the bird,
and the camera films the artist sketching,
and we look through the camera at the artist
sketching the bird
and we sense the disproportion but do
not laugh.

Rihaku
rendered by Pound
he say
what is the use of talking,
there is no end of talking,
there is no end of things in the heart.

And a place is just a co-ordinate on a map until it
is understood with sorrow:
Aberfan Belsen Chernobyl Dunblane Enniskillen
Galipoli Hiroshima Jonestown Kosovo
Lockerbie MyLai Nagasaki Omagh
Passchendaele Stalingrad Vukovar Waco—
the alphabet is almost complete.

Christ the universal son looks on from the
scaffold of his terrible creation,
while the women bear the pain of the god who
dies of these injustices,
and ambition rattles like dice at the foot of
the cross.

And time is the greatest trick of all.
We think that to name it is to know it and that to
measure it is to master it, and we
are deceived.
It is the unwelcome companion that wakes us
each morning to try out its latest product,
and remains at our heels until we lie down each
night exhausted by its constant opportunities.
We mark its passing with rockets that flare and
glitter amazingly and then are utterly gone.

Michael Leunig he say
Nothing can be loved at speed.

The train from Washington DC runs through
places with long names and short histories,
past the trees in Maryland in late October
with leaves of every possible shade of yellow,
gold, red, orange and vermilion,
which were there the day the motorcade passed
by the grassy knoll,
and on the day when the smoke cleared at
Gettysburg,
and on the day Santa Maria slipped out of the
harbor at Cadiz
on a damn fool’s errand searching for a damn
fool’s dream of gold.

Bono he say
Love is a comprehensive technology.

A gust of wind brings a storm of leaves onto
the garden
and the trees in the park are stripped beneath
an ice-blue sky.
We know the seasons of our life behave no
differently, though we clutch at immortality:
our spring comes in our children, theirs in theirs.

Deliver us from evil.

And the distance between two people is the
space where love flourishes or dies
according to what fills it,
and the price of love is unbearable,
and the world we have seen is an illusion but it is
all that we have

for thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

The section "The unthinkable becomes thinkable..." is quoted from an unknown source.