Oh oh. That fear that accompanies an indulgence. I just walked into the most expensive jewelers in Edinburgh town and bought a brooch for my mum's birthday. A special birthday. It's antique: gold swallows inlaid with some stones that glister. I saw lots of lovely things that I dismissed with 'well, I'd by that for my girlfriend': fabulous chain-laces in silver-link like scarves of the decadent. Oh my tormentor and luxury VISA: viz: everything. Clearly I can't afford it. So what. I'll collect Tuesday. Back to the notebook, it now being 16:38 in EasyEverything. Stelios, you got a point there. Thing is, one has one's own soul to reckon with at the end of the day. Princes' Street Gardens. 12:14pm on a Saturday. Saturday 6th April 2002. The sun is directly ahead, at about 30degrees to the horizontal. To my left, the Scott Monument (scene of recent sinister meet-ups and a great, spiky soot-covered edifice to boot). Beyond it, a bag-piper plays for visitors to the city. I'm rather enjoying it too, being a fan of solo performances. Oh those lonely hillsides: those reckoning with their lonely selves in battle, between memory and the infinite via blood, guts, mess and tears. And virtuosity: martial arts; aerobics; ballet and fencing. A guy wanders over as I sit on a bench dedicated with a wee plaque to someone as I eat from a clear plastic bowl of strawberry slices, chunks of various melons, mangoes, pineapple and some other soft and sweet fleshy fruit to chomp in the sunshine.
From Hamburg. Homeless, he says in English. No wonder, I think: you're quite far away from it. Then I imagine George Orwell down and out in New York as I give him a quid, which is a desultory sum but sometime, somewhere, someone is going to realise I'm damned destitute myself. I wonder about him, but I didn't and now he's somewhere else.
A pigeon catches my eye and wanders tentatively over the red-chip speckled tarmac, to be interrupted by a mother with her adult daughter. The mother sits down on the far end of this bench whilst the progeny fetches coffee from an octagonal timber pavillion some 50m to the right. Later in the afternoon, at the western end of the gardens, as the sun reaches over to touch De Quincey's grave in St.Cuthbert's, I witness a sight familiar to me there which is 'crazy whirlygig formation flutter'. Allow me to explain. They swoop around in a circle whose plane is at an angle to the planet like the sun's. As they wheel up towards an as yet leafless tree some of them break off for a pit-stop: fat, blobby happy silhouettes on boughs against evening light. The others rise in an arc to pass across guano-streaked black precipices falling from the castle's flanks and over the daft gilded cherubs of a nineteenth century fountain before swinging in a sharp downwards curve towards the centre of their diameter then out again and along and in yer face with flapper and vortex and flapping and, basically, and air-full of fast-passing pigeons. The flags hoisted on rooftops across the old Nor' Loch fly at half-mast because an 'important' granny died. I'm sure it's as sad for her offspring as the deaths of my grannies were to me. However, I got by without special CD and colour supplement merchandise because I knew them and loved them as real people. If one is after metaphor or symbolism there are more potent examples than someone else's granny. Drums sound. A lovely, hypnotic sound. The bagpiper holds a high note: he twiddles down and around a bit before resuming it; wind leaking from an inflated tartan bag as he searches for the next tune. The daughter returns with beakers of coffee. A small, red, cheap second-hand coupe screaches to a halt behind a bus stopped at some temporary traffic lights as policemen and women ride horse-back in the contra-flow. Behind are flags and banners raised high: the Saltire of St.Andrew (a Greek, so I believe) and canvas of black/white/green horizontal stripes intercepted to the pole-end by a red triangle: the flags of Scotland and Palestine. The drums roll on in the echoing valley. Some of them sit down outside Marks & Spencer for some reason. Rest? Sandwiches? Some political intrigue I'm unaware of? Well, I'm not going to be anti-Israel just because I'm pro-Palestine. The angry and de-humanised; the scared and grieving are on both sides and if in searching for emotional parity you find this distasteful it's the only one I have to hand: stopping these folks from feeling war-like is like forcing an alcoholic not to drink. So I have no moral authoruty, but I do sigh. At the far side of the path in front of me is a steep incline ending in a lower terrace of benches. From here, you can see the upper eighth at best of the people standing down there. Someone puts on a jacket, by raising their arms into its sleeves, but all I can see is this disembodied item of animated tailoring with flapping cuffs gradually sinking out of view. The bag-piper starts up again, over now distant drums. He plays "A Scottish Soldier". I think "A Dead Family" (one of them survives and is wandering, dazed, amongst the rubble, wondering if they should extract the other bodies, scream or shoot themselves. Or dedicate themselves to vengeance at all costs. Not exactly a military operation.) An Earthly routine of Apocalypses: One cannot believe that they resolve, Except the feel and all-encompassing rush of happiness, Like spring shoots: Into flowers again and again; ... by the orbiting moon, ... through damp or frosty dirt: What decomposes, Makes music again. I have a letter from my psychiatrist in my ruck-sack. 'I'm sorry we seem to have lost contact' he says. Yeah, I'm real hacked. When I'm up and high I'm enjoying it and when I'm down I'm nowhere but my room and 'discussing it'? Yeah, right. Talk about it my ass. So when I see him I'm perfectly normal so no wonder he thinks I'm normal. I talk about drink so no wonder he thinks I'm an alcoholic. There's more to it than that and if he'd ply me with wine spritzers, paint and a violin then, and only then, would he be in a position to judge whether or not I was crazy, clever, brilliant or deluded. But I wish he wouldn't sit there and try to work me out against a graph when I'm talking through an inherited guise of polite rectitude. Peace is not the answer. War is not the answer. Curious Engagement is the Answer... or, more simply, I don't know. I wish I did. 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