Fascism?
Religion?
Mobile phones?
Communism?
Social Media?
Slavery?
War?
Reflections from a ditch – A novel
This novel is part biographical. It is based around a journey I used to make every day as I went into work. I used to drive down country lanes. The sights and events all happened. The crash didn’t – at least not that one!
I wanted a framework to hang a lot of thoughts around. My protagonist is basically me. He/Me is trapped in an upside down car in a ditch, badly injured and slowly dying. His/My head is full of random thoughts and memories as consciousness ebbs.
Reflections from a ditch – the blurb.
Sex, death, awe, wonder, fury, birth, life, beauty, politics, religion, anger, nature, love, questions, stories and thoughts are all words. I had to rearrange their meanings.
You live your life and then you die. You start a journey that will not end as you expect. From a childhood spent in ditches to a lonesome wait in a ditch. You think you understand. You have relationships with people, animals, possessions and places but you can only guess at the other side. You are aware. You have a moral code you live by. You see how good things could be and, when you wear your Sunday best, you do your bit to make it happen. Your life is measured in seconds but how much of it has significance? You laugh and enjoy. You think and wonder. You create and destroy. Sometimes you are fulfilled and often you are frustrated; most of the time you are simply bored or engaged in the mundane. The things that stand out are oases in a desert of forgotten ordinariness.
This is a story of a crash.
Reflections from a ditch eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
53 and imploding – an antinovel – Paperback/Kindle
I wrote this twenty-two years ago – one man struggling to find purpose in a meaningless universe, to find sanity in the midst of human insanity. A mosaic of thoughts, actions and words as I wrest substance from the jaws of absurdity.
The older I get the more I come to realise that humans are psychotic apes. We foolishly believe we can live forever and our lives have some intrinsic worth.
53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
We are not forever. We are only a brief second in forever, a blink, a swearword, a gasp and ….. gone. We may only ever see a few of the countless zillions of stars blink out. In time they all will run down like drained batteries and the lights will slowly fade into darkness. There will be no one around to pull the cord or flick the switch or ponder the eternal stillness.
Ha. Ha. Ha. I laugh at your vanity of forever. What a fool it makes of you. Genuflection to your gods – it takes seconds. Seconds that could have been full of life.
Sex and death. That’s all there is. A bit too simplistic? It’s the things you do with your seconds that makes the difference. Do you live your life with merit? Is each second of choice well decided? Is there purpose in your existence or do you drool and stagger round like cattle? ‘Pretty cool here. Get pissed, get stoned, fuck and dress to impress.’
Fine lines – there’s only fine lines between cool and fool, smart and fart, bright and shite.
Fun comes before the fall. Fuck your mind and fuck your heart. Yet it matters not. Pleasures taken carelessly or considered; excess or moderation; purpose and pomposity – it’s all the same. It is all the same worms, same stars blinking, same journey, same end.
No. It is not where you are going that matters. Religion has really fucked up there. Our imagination likes to create tidy purpose. Life is not sufficient. There has to be more. I am no good at endings – neither is reality. It’s the journey. It’s the way you travel that matters. It’s what you do with all those seconds you are busy squandering. Now don’t get me wrong. At the end of a story who is to say if it was the hero, villain or bit player who had the most worthy part to play? Who is to judge the value of a few seconds spend watching football on the telly, reading a novel or writing? Who indeed?
I choose to write. I pluck these words from the holes in my brain.
The novel is dead. There are no stories. There are no beginnings and ends. Reality is continuous.
These words are my reality.
Poetry – A repository
A repository
Containing all our wisdom,
The full gamut of emotion,
Every tale we’ve told,
Love, hate and intrigue,
Why not take a look?
It can make you laugh
It can make you cry
Or simply stop and wonder why.
It catches you with its hook.
All of life, all of death,
Every thought and dream,
Knowledge and act
Captured within a book.
Opher – 21.10.2019
Those who do not read live only one life but for those of us who do we live thousands.
Imagination is released. The mind is freed. We experience emotions of people we have come to know but have never met. Our empathy soars.
We travel to the future, the past and places we could never go.
Without books we languish in poverty. Our minds are stunted. Our lives are without colour.
I pity those who do not read. Their lives are pale shadows.
I have all of humanity at my fingertips.
Poetry – It’s what I do
It’s what I do
I reach down inside
To find what I believe
To put into the words
My lungs can breathe.
When I get it right
The emotions well inside
Give it everything
With nothing denied.
I don’t care if you get it
It’s not about you.
It’s about what I think
About what I do.
It might be pointless,
Useless, completely askew
As long as it’s me
It’s absolutely true.
Opher 3.12.2012
I was merely musing about the futility of writing poetry.
Poetry – Where?
Where?
Where was time
Before the first second?
Where was matter
Before the first atom?
Where was space
When nothing existed?
Where am I?
Opher 24.8.2019
The philosophy of being never ceases to enthral me.
They say the universe began with a big bang. In that instant all time, matter and energy was created.
That is impossible to comprehend.
We find it easier to create gods.
Where?
Where was time
Before the first second?
Where was matter
Before the first atom?
Where was space
When nothing existed?
Where am I?
Opher 24.8.2019
The philosophy of being never ceases to enthral me.
They say the universe began with a big bang. In that instant all time, matter and energy was created.
That is impossible to comprehend.
We find it easier to create gods.
Poetry – I Was But Now
I Was But Now
I once was an elephant
And kept my dreams in a trunk.
I once was a crocodile
With a tale in my tail.
I once was a giraffe
With my head in the clouds.
I once was a hippo
Wading through the depths.
But now I’m a man
Whose thoughts fill the world.
10.2.2017
I Was But Now
This was nothing but a bit of fun. I was playing with words and ideas – trunks and tails. But then there was the glimmer of some greater depth of meaning.
These days we blog and our thoughts are transmitted to the very ends of the world instantly. Ideas are dangerous. They can catch fire and transform society. They can enrage, calm or excite.
Ideas are the thing that man does best.
We are desperate for some new ideas.
Poetry – Inside my head
Inside my head
I was enjoying myself playing with this idea. This was the second in my tumble drier trilogy. I didn’t quite get the scan quite how I wanted but I found that if you say it in a certain manner you can get it to work. (Thanks to Ian Cropton for getting me to address that last stanza.)
Communication is amazing.
All those neurons firing away in the dark, creating patterns of electricity that somehow have meaning. Evolution is wonderful.
I know that if I really peered inside at an operating brain all I’d see is dull grey blancmange. But I can fantasise.
Inside my head
There’s a hurricane inside my head;
A firework display of sparks.
Ideas spin like electric storm
In crescendo of fits and starts.
A tumble drier churns them round
As around they spin and fall.
A blizzard of electricity
In a scintillating squall.
I round them up like a herd of cats
And try to tie them down;
To translate them into the black and white
Of advective and noun.
This is them upon this page
Frozen as if in blocks of ice
No longer spinning in a rage;
Words will have to suffice.
I hope that when you read these words
The energy cascades.
That you see the colours that were in my head
And you will be amazed.
Opher 5.9.2015
Ron Forsythe Science Fiction – Future Projects
Future Projects
Please check out my Ron Forsythe Science Fiction site:- https://ronforsytheauthor.wordpress.com/
Recently I have been reading a Stephen Hawking book – Brief answers to Big Questions – and I found it extremely thought-provoking.
A lot of science, particularly in the field of astrophysics, is now stranger than Sci-Fi. Who would have imagined the 11 dimensions of M-theory? I find that aspect of science fascinating. The quantum world and time are plain weird and do not seem to make sense in terms of our own reality. But it was the other topics that intrigued me (neither of which are particularly new but both of which are on the verge of becoming real).
There were two main themes that set my mind racing. One was A/I. Stephen found this a threat to humans. He was looking at the huge advances that have been made in computers over recent years, doubling their capacity every two years, and predicted firstly that these machines would soon exceed human intelligence and secondly that they would be conscious. His fear was that their intelligence might far outstrip us and they could consider us superfluous. Now I am aware that this has been a standard theme in Sci-fi for a long time – right back to 2001-A Space Odyssey – but this is real science and it appealed to me.
The second theme of Stephen’s that stimulated my creative juices was the idea that we now had the means to genetically alter organisms easily. Not only can we switch genes from one species to another but we can alter those genes and create entirely new characteristics. So we could take a gene out of a daisy or a jellyfish and put it into a human. We could take a specific gene, involved in our intelligence for instance, and play about with it to see if we can improve on it.
Stephen suggested that there was no way of controlling this. Even if experiments on humans was considered unethical and banned, there would be nations with secret labs who would not be bound by such ethics.
Stephen suggested that we were on the cusp of a revolution. Not only would our crops, farm animals and food be radically altered in the forthcoming years, but we would be too. We are on the verge of identifying the genes involved with intelligence. Once we have achieved that we could optimize them, perfect them and ultimately create humans who were immensely intelligent.
Once again, these ideas are not Science Fiction, they are real science – but my mind is already looking at storylines. Soon real science may become Science Fiction. We’ll see.
What Stephen’s book achieved was to inspire a few storylines. We’ll see if they mature into stories or novels.
Keep watching this space.