LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 3

OK, I admit it.  It only took me until Day 2 of the Lockdown to binge watch episodes of The Good Place on Netflix.  So much for strength of character and finding more culturally respectable resources to keep me occupied.  I have, however, given myself a little cultural leeway in my watching by asserting that the whole series is predicated on John Paul Sartre’s observation that “Hell is other people” and therefore I feel morally justified in watching.

     For those of you who don’t know about this series (even though I am now on Season 4!), it stars Ted Hanson and its central idea is that four people die and go to what they assumed is Heaven, but in fact it is a truly devilish new torment where they have actually been chosen to inflict torment on each other in what they think are perfect surroundings, their own discomfort at not being entirely satisfied in what they believe is heaven is another part of their torture.  It is a comedy and it ranges from slapstick to fairly sophisticated verbal humour, and I am slightly addicted.  Ever so slightly.  I wonder what other well established series I will ‘discover’ during this immolation!

I very much appreciate the messages from friends and relatives who have responded to the international news of the Catalan lockdown by sending us their concern.  I think that it will not be long before we in Catalonia are sending similar messages of support to those countries that are just starting the process that will inevitably lead to their own particular lockdowns. 

     Who really knows how effective the measure put in place are actually going to be?  We really are in a situation where we in the so-called developed world have not been since the Spanish Flu of just over a century ago.  That pandemic was characterised by lies and disinformation – how unlike our present times, and yes, I am being ironic, and yes, I am looking at you Trump!  Spain was one of the few countries to be open about the infection and consequently got the country labelled with the virus, though it is certain that Spain was not the country in which the virus originated.  Well, it is still relatively early days; we wait to see how the situation will develop.

I wrote another poem yesterday and I must start putting my new poems on my other blog [smrnewpoems.blogspot.com] together with a commentary about their genesis – I do, after all, have time to do it!

     After a moment of brief panic this morning, I found the notes that I had made for the poem on memory that has taken so much time.  There have been a few false starts with this one and one major re-think, but I am still convinced that there is a central idea worth working on and so I will continue to scribble my way through a few more sheets before I let the concept go.  When I have a draft approaching reasonableness, I will put it on the smrnewpoems site as well.  If nothing else, I intend to make this enforced isolation an opportunity for as much writing as possible!

     With other chapbooks that I have produced, I have always tried to add illustrations to them.  Sometimes this has been via the kind collaboration of friends and sometimes alone.  I enjoy photography and I have sometimes added photos to the poetic mix.  Being confined to a single house poses its own challenges when considering illustration, but it is one that I hope I can rise to.  I think this is a time to find those telling details to be the subject matter of my lens – there isn’t another option, so again it will be interesting to see how that idea develops through the weeks.

I’ve now watched the whole of The Good Place, some 40 episodes, but without advertising intervals and the introductions you get through then fairly quickly.  I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed them, though the concept was getting a little thin by the end and the eventual conclusion was welcome.

SM el Rey was making a speech to the nation in response to the allegations of financial corruption by his father and himself regarding illegal kickbacks and the foundation of offshore accounts.  At 9 pm when the Bourbon was making his statement people around Spain, and certainly here in Catalonia opened their windows and banged wooden spoons against saucepans as a (traditional) noisy sign of their disgust at the grubby machinations of the royal family.  It will be interesting to the see the response of our attenuated government and the usually slavishly loyal press in Spain.

Viva la Republica!

Is faith dead?

Some people think that the title is merely rhetorical, as the answer is most obviously and resoundingly, “Yes!”  But that ignores the evidence of simple, everyday observation.

Admittedly, in this Roman priest ridden, yet strangely non-church going country, faith in a caring (or indeed malign) divinity is largely absent, yet simple acts of faith are plain to see.

Especially where zebra crossings are involved.

I am constantly amazed, as a driver, at what blind belief pedestrians display in the power of painted black and white lines on a road.  They stride onto the crossing as if there were adamantine walls along the edges of the passing to save them from the most determined of massive lorries – of course without looking to see if any juggernaut is coming their way.  They know, in a way which demonstrates their complete belief, that as soon, nay! before their foot has touched the black or white, they are protected from anything up to and including tactical nuclear weapons.

We may not see the devout walking across roads telling the beads of their rosaries nowadays, but we certainly see the modern equivalent which is the ‘telling’ of the elements of social media interactions on their mobile phones, with their eyes glued to the small glowing rectangles (in portrait mode) and their ears plugged in (wirelessly or otherwise) to the relentless musification of Spotify.  Completely involved in the mobile word they have, they believe, complete immunity from the slings and arrows of outrageous driving that as a pedestrian terrifies me on a

daily basis too.

It is a known fact (that I once looked up on the Internet and so it must be true and not fake news) that Spanish drivers are more dangerous than the French.  OK, we are not talking about the suicidal/homicidal driving of nations like the Greek or Turkish (I am still having counselling to mitigate the deleterious effects of a traumatic taxi trip from the centre of Istanbul to the Airport many years ago) but the standard of driving here is abysmally low.  And since most pedestrians are drivers, they know how little concern those drivers have for those not in cars when they are in them – so to speak.  And yes, the transcendental equanimity, or crass stupidity, with which they stride onto a busy road putting their trust in fading paint is astonishing.

And strangely humbling, of course.

Would that I had could share their faith in anything to the same degree of absolute trust that those walkers display each time they ignore the possible (fatal) consequences of uniting for a brief moment with a fast-moving large metal ram on wheels secure in the fact that they are protected by a painted series of road mounted post-modernist glyphs at their feet!

How wonderful to live in a world in which opportunities for the affirmation of faith are to be found along every road, where devotion is as painless as a few seconds of walking.  No need for the Camino de Santiago with its length and privations to show belief, all you have to do is cross the road: if you survive you will have demonstrated the Truth of your Faith; if you do not, then you will have been taken in an Act of Faith and will therefore, assuredly, go to your reward.

However, belief does not equal truth, and in the reasonable world it would be more advantageous for everyone if crossings were not regarded as challenges.  If zebra crossings could be regarded as courteous requests for passage rather than opportunities to exercise unalienable rights; where stopped cars could be invariably thanked for their allowing passage, I can’t help thinking that we would live in a happier, safer and richer world.

I should be congratulated by not using the dreaded word that haunts my waking hours and depletes my pound-paid pension – but it is not difficult to see the approach to the zebra crossing (albeit via a non-British population) as a clear metaphor for the March-approaching act of self-harm that my ‘government’ seems hell-bent (sic.) on inflicting on us in another act of unreasonable ‘faith’.

I enter 2019 with no great feelings of positive progression on a national scale, but I reassure myself that the personal possibility is always hopeful.   

Please!