I
Did Mignon’s cry have to come to this:
A perpetual adolescence
Without the bedrock of grief
A pandarus world of procurement
Procreated on desire for ‘everything’
Without sorrow
Without talent
Without enduring work?
Not her stoicism
But the childish urge
At 46
To drown in a sea of cultural excess
And wonder at the consuming space
That drains the last dregs of sustainable happiness.
Brecht was right
Unto the point of saturation
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral”
But plenty parses into ennui.
The ‘old saws’
Presented a sharper moral stance
Foursquare against the rippling relativity
Of our postmodern delight:
Trouble rides a fast horse
Anger can be an expensive luxury
The tongue like a sharp knife...Kills without drawing blood
Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet:
Proverb and fable – the old saws
Tested the shape of our emergent being.
II
So here, now
In this penultimate maze
Of 21 thousand years
Where is wonder
Where is craft
Now the first world seeks to escape
Its lack of meaning?
When all imagery is manipulable
Within the web of a mobile device
Where is the human voice
The story telling world
That creates a moral fable of consequences
Instilling deep caution and respect?
Do you know the land?
Mignon’s quest for happiness
Took us through fable and time
The dragon’s howl
The orphaned girls bitter sighs
And stripped of its pretense
The open arms of human love.
Now, where goes the satiated boy
Dripping excess
The bleached hair
The tagged jeans
The precocious ride
In elevator asides
Loud and ready for a fight?
Do you know the land?
Has parenting dissolved into jousting within juvenile friendships
Has the difference and continuity of the generations
Met its match in shared consumptive behaviour
Where purchase becomes the only transaction
Incestuous and consuming the life force dry?
Are we analysed beyond redemption
Drugged in prescriptive psychosis:
Definable emblematic difference
Worn as designer accessory
Unable to salvage the wide-eyed joy
That underpins the lark of children’s games
Where the energy of the lion cub
Slowly imports the senses of survival?
Do you know the land?
III
Love and its pain
Toughens the sinews
And makes us wonder anew.
We learn the course of bittersweet tears
Of betrayal and forgiveness
And how such tears dry
As the radiant energy of a single smile
Creates an enduring connection
Soul unto soul
And memory’s house – homewards
A human to human blessing
That we might sometimes wear with pride.
Mignon’s cry vaunts across the centuries
We are ancient, vain and stupid
But in our fumbling quest to live a life
We share across race, colour and creed
The elemental wish
To be loved and cherished
To hold our family and friends
Near at hand.
Yet the marketers dream
The neoliberal desire
For ‘my world’ against ‘the other’
Has so seamlessly snipped
At the palpable threads that connect us all
That our envy and despair
Has smashed against the jagged rocks
Washed ashore on a tide of contempt.
IV
Shall we ever grow up
To recover the bedrock of community
Or will the fire storms and holocaust
Find us wanting
In the terrible hours before dawn
When loneliness stalks the land
And braces for its morbid feast.
Do you know the land?
Must we turn ever inwards
Reflecting in the mirror
The tiresome excess that
Cripples our bloated bodies
And the steel trap that snaps its slogans
Across the path of others
Who no longer have home, family or friends.
Do you know the land?
When did we become so unforgiving
So bitter?
Has stoicism left the land
Beamed away by satellite?
Does perpetual youth
Incline us to savage incitement
Deranged across a breadth of dislikes
Forever against the other?
Mignon felt unbearably old
Rootless
Unfathomable
Terrified, alone
And cried for the wonder of childhood
For friendship
For peace
For a deliberative world of compassion and care.
In search of lost happiness.
We all bear the mark of refugee.
Shall we share this land
And age with deep respect
Or forever young must soon expire
In the one bright bonfire of vanities?
Forever lost, forever young
Do you know the land?
Gar Jones: June 2011/ October 2016