The Watchful Pelican

What follows is a somewhat tipsy train of thought. I apologise.

We are not the night. We were built for the day. I saw the sun; bright and cold. It gazed, indifferent, like shimmering waste on the lake, so envious, yet looked on still.

We believe in the moon, pray to the satellites that were once gods. Can we keep praying? Only the dregs remain of a paranoid past which screams at the banshees beyond the haunting. Why? We don’t know, only continue the petty provenances of our creed. Perhaps, when the papers finish at last, and all news is good news, we will stop; let the moon on its way. But blood demands we let it sink, and we shall revel as the dusk turns to ruin on the vast sands of our inadequacy.

I am rambling. I can tell, for the shrill keeening in my memory serves as little tonic to the alternative. If the cries continue, maybe your relationship will heal. But you just keep talking and talking without a horizon to climb, only the echoes to keep the whale company. Did you know it was mourning, or did you carry on spouting your clairvoyant thoughts and leave us normal folk to rot? I know it hurts, like the red hot nail in the palm of my saviour. But he is not my saviour, nor is he yours, but a simple blot without meaning. Take him in your palm and crush.

But my time is ending. Only the fish in times gone past now wait for dawn, The night is young and old and beautiful and terrible, and we are but the serpent in the vine, whispering to the world. Welcome to your life; bitterness incarnate, with an acid tongue reflexively curled around the hand. I am sorry, truly, but the way it must be is curved, not narrow. Life is twisted, but the clouds are shining tonight. My day is here at last.

Well, for those who don’t know, I’m currently doing History and English at Oxford University. I have just finished an essay on Marx and, frankly, I couldn’t be happier that I got it out of the way. No matter what subject your doing, no matter what uni you attend, I suspect we all view essays in the same way.

However, I was very interested in precisely what Marx had to say. I already had a pretty detailed inkling of his theories, but after having read several more of his texts apart from the Manifesto, I feel I now have a very solid grounding. I disagree somewhat with his solution, but his description of the problem is extremely compelling.

Middle-class culture is like a disease. I don’t mean that in a derogatory fashion (well, maybe a little), more in a biological sense. Anything it touches, it makes into a carbon copy of itself. By using cheap commodities and the power of globalisation to create “markets” all over the world, it spreads its view of the society, establishing itself as the superior system. The problem is, one major feature of our culture is the idea of absolutes; we have left and right, public and private, communism and capitalism and that is how it ingratiates itself; it cries out to those who want a middle way, saying it contains the best of both worlds.

But the fact is, there are not two worlds. There are not two options but many. Hell, even within those options, there are more options, all just waiting to be understood and tried. But that’s not what we are taught, because that would be too complicated. Humanity comprehends reality through binaries i.e. opposites as clear as day and night. Its how we best understand the world and we find ourselves shaken to the core if we cannot place things into, say, right and wrong (that would be the biggy.) What Marx suggests is not one of two choices, it is a system of government that has its own rules, its own ways for promoting freedom and justice and all those other things that we believe are purely the provision of democracy.

But as long as the current system prevails, then it is the middle that will survive. The middle route, the fence, the least of how many evils you care to name. We fear extremes; quite literally, we attribute the word “extremism” to terrorism, fascism and a whole host of other evils in the world we wish rid of. I’m not suggesting we go to the extreme of the scale we have at the moment. Just think outside the scales. Once again, I cite Donnie Darko (man I love that film) - “You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!”

But hey, what do i know? Either my opinions good, or its worthless. My essay will be good, or it will be bad. I’m either leading a successful life, or wasting it.

Then again, maybe I don’t want to make the decision.

Once again, I find myself up at three in the morning. It would appear now that my sleeping patterns are now completely rewritten. I am quite literally becoming nocturnal. Who knows what might happen?

When in doubt, submit poetry!

What ancient, hallowed earth took you these minds,

Formed from the twisted root and verdant loam?

What distant garden, that man in madness finds,

Did these dwellers call sanctuary or home?

Do they hear the forest’s weeping

As they lie in foregin keeping

Apparent dead, yet softly sleeping.

Did they once hold the pillars of the sky,

Or grip the shifting earth against the ground?

Did they hear man’s long, primordial cry

And guard their babes with shadows all around?

No more the vangards of the wild,

Instead they stay in climates mild

And home, by its own sons, reviled.

As rain comes on, this strong and steadfast soul

Will sprout anew to leave its weathered shell,

Though bark and branch mean little on this gnoll

The seed shall always find where once it fell,

For within the heart of every tree

Regardless of humanity

Lie the ghosts of forests free.

Had some pretty poor essay results to day, so I stuck this together to try and make myself pull the proverbial finger out. Why have I put it up here? So the good people of the internet can remind me to stick to it.

Oxford Manifesto (kind of… you’ve made one for films, why not here?)

• FFS, focus! Don’t keep looking at Cracked.com articles, stop re-watching YouTube videos you’ve watched a hundred times, stop staring at your Steam list not playing any game just because they don’t work the way they do on the adverts or you didn’t make them. Distractions are all well and good, but only when there’s nothing for them to distract you from.

• Less thinking. Remember at the beginning of your year, when you never jumped around simply because you weren’t sure what other people would think when they heard you? You got quite a serious amount of reading done then, even went to the library to work a couple of times. Getting back to that is no bad thing; thinking distracts you from actually writing the essay. If you have a good idea for the essay through thinking, write it bloody down, don’t just keep skipping about.

• Get into the reading. Face it, you actually like the subject you do, as evidenced by the fact you chose it. When you actually pick up the texts you’re supposed to read, you find them enlightening and thought-provoking. Its only getting into them where you have the problem. Once you’re there, you’re fine.

• Stop boasting about procrastination. The aim is not to reach a certain word limit, nor is it to do as much as possible with as little effort as possible. Its a stupid policy, especially if you get this worked up about a mark that is basically average. If you want to do well, read widely, read thoroughly, and then transfer that to your essay in good time to get it in. Just because everyone else goes on about doing their essay at one in the morning. You’re not them.

• Talk to people a bit more. You are at your most relaxed when your not talking to yourself in your head. Social interaction helps you get your thoughts out in the open, and what’s more, it creates friends. Half of university is about doing stuff, not staring at the laptop and moping.

• Get a schedule and stick closely to it. That’s what you were going to do, until you couldn’t be bothered to make writing a schedule part of your schedule. It never got done. What about all those minor things? Student loan details, bass practice, tidying the place, getting yourself a relationship? Whilst these vary in amounts of effort, and some take a bit of time, you’ll greatly increase the chance of getting them done if you actually plan when to do them. Outline which hours in the day are available and which would be most productive for essay writing, or chores or whatever, and then follow it. You’ll find you might have far more free time than you think.

• And finally; if you put “Consider” in your essay one more time, I will shoot you in the leg.