WHAAATTT??
A drama,
A comedy,
A tragedy,
Full of bad actors
Who don’t know their parts,
Ad libbing
Their way
Through the roles.
A childhood,
A career,
A death,
While pretending to understand
Thinking it’s reality.
Opher – 11.12.2024
There are no rules.
There are no reasons.
We cannot create a narrative.
We are going nowhere.
It’s just a 4000 week holiday from eternity.
We call it life.
It has no purpose, no meaning; it just is.
Meaning?
On a distant tropical island,
Beneath a palm tree,
Caressing a cool drink,
Sipping contentment.
Within the words inside a book;
The wisdom of a master,
The voice of much experience.
In the depth of love’s pupils;
In the throes of flesh.
Embedded in the skills of arts,
The thrill of speed,
The precision of a single stroke.
The caress of a lover,
The hugs of family,
The joy of togetherness.
Encapsulated in the beauty of a sunset
Of a sensuous arc of a hand.
Radiating from the flames of an open fire,
Singing from the branches of an empty tree.
Howling in desolation,
Alone in a throng.
Shining from the depths of space.
Surging through injected blood.
Illustrated in the stories from the past.
Wandering through deserts.
Meandering through fertile valleys.
Evolving through a trillion organisms.
Intoxicated in narcotic dreams.
Thrilling in the adrenaline of fear,
Challenging death.
Dispensing death.
Reaching through a mystical connection,
Through space and time,
Through ugliness and wonder,
Through wealth,
Through fame,
Through power,
Through control.
We search for meaning.
Opher – 30.11.2024
I was in a whimsical mood as I contemplated the many ways that we humans seek meaning and contentment in our live. A multitude of ways.
From assassins to mystics, thrill-seekers to hammocks, solitude and mass gatherings, we try to fill our lives with purpose.
For some religion provides purpose, for others it is power.
For some life is a mystical experience, others a mundane existence.
Some delight in family and others escape.
Sport, art, dance and music all lend purpose to the minutes.
We seek a legacy.
Yet who can say which, if any, is more valid? We live. We die.
I thought a further extract was in order to show that the book was not all about morbid death; there is morbid life too!
All the characters have different lives, different voices and different stories. There are young and old, sex, madness and fun and a range of different perspectives.
Extract:
I don’t understand it at all. The whole world has gone nuts. I can’t comprehend what has happened to young people. They don’t have any values. They are rude, scruffy and ungrateful. We fought a war, two wars, so that they could have everything we didn’t and they throw it back in your face. It makes me bewildered. Sometimes it makes me angry and sometimes it makes me sad but mostly it leaves me in despair. I just don’t understand – still, never mind, best to get on with it. The whole world has gone to pot. Put it to one side and forget about it. That’s the way.
Best listen to the telly and forget it.
I could feel Tom settling his head on my lap. I ruffled his head and he settled contentedly on the settee with his head in my lap – his favourite position. Margaret would never have stood for it – him being up on the furniture – unhygienic and dirty – not the done thing. She was house-proud. She wouldn’t have had him in up on the settee – not a chance in hell. Makes me chuckle to think about it. He most likely wouldn’t have ever been allowed in the front room. She’d probably have railed against him being in the house at all, but she would have eventually compromised and allowed him a bed in the corner of the kitchen.
I miss Margaret. She had standards. We didn’t use the front room at all when she was alive. She had the furniture covered and put newspaper down on the floor for us to walk on. You should have seen the caper when someone called unexpectedly; all that crumpling it up and shoving it in the cupboard. The sitting room was for guests. She kept it pristine. We lived in the kitchen. The rest of the house was done to a turn as well. She polished the doorstep every morning, dusted, swept, cleaned and washed until everything was shiny and spotless. Even when she was really ill she kept up the same routine. Nothing stopped her. She had principles. It is sad that I’ve let it go like I have, but I was never like that, really. Besides, I’m past caring.
I wasn’t like that back then. She used to nag me rotten. But I’ve let things slip. I know it. She’d be horrified if she came back now. She’d probably have a fit. But Margaret has been gone these last twenty years. She is not coming back. I’m on my own. Well, apart from Tom that is. Tom is my only companion now.
It will be Coronation Street soon. I like Coronation Street. Ena’s got herself in a right strop with Minnie. I can’t wait to see how that one is going to turn out. Then I might watch Harry Worth and call it a night. I’ll take a hot cocoa up to bed with me. I used to like to read but my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. My reading days are over. I even have trouble watching the telly now. I have to watch it out of the corner of my eye. It’s an effort. Everything’s a bloody effort these days.
Best listen to the telly and forget it.
The death of a parent is a huge event. Not only the emotional attachment, the awareness that they had cared, provided and sacrificed to bring you up, but the loss of that bulwark. They were a protection against the forces of nature, holding back death. Suddenly death is real. You are exposed. There is nothing between yourself and death. Your protection has evaporated.
This book was not just about death. It was looking out of that window to see life in its normality. Each one of the people passing had important things to be doing, a life to live. Inside the room normality had disappeared. Inside the room was death.
Extract:
I could tell he wasn’t there the minute I walked into the room. There was no presence. I’m not a big believer in all this spiritual stuff. I don’t believe in gods or heaven and all that indoctrinated crap that they force-feed kids. But life has a presence that you can feel with some sense or other. I only reached out and touched his rock-hard face to confirm what I already knew. He was as cold as ice. The bastard was gone. I was alone in an empty hospital ward. I was in the presence of a big absence – a black hole where my dad had been.
It was over.
All the long days of pretence and acting; all the performance; it was finished with. The chapter was well and truly closed.
The tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t hold them back. I missed him. Already I missed him. I could not quite believe that I’d never hear his voice again, never dial that number and hear his voice. The thoughts and emotions tumbled away behind my eyes as I stared vacantly out of the window at the world outside and watched it going about its business. Nothing had changed out there. I watched the people going about their business. How could that be?
I stood silently and stared out with glazed eyes. I watched those people and sought to connect with them. They were just like me, like the people I knew. But they were oblivious to what I was going through.
In my world everything had changed – the ground had shifted. Nothing would ever be the same again. But out there it went on as usual.
Chapter 1 – Perspectives on a Sunny Day
Life goes on.
That’s all I know. As far as I’m concerned, right now, life is trivial, pointless and boring. It’s nothing more than a repetition of the mundane, periodically interspersed with equally nonsensical novelty. Nothing makes sense. Sadly, today, that is exactly how I’m seeing it. There is no purpose to anything. It appears to fall into a reassuring pattern – but I think that is an illusion. Change is all there really is. You can be sure that nothing will last for long. Everything you do is doomed to be destroyed in the vagaries of time. Nothing lasts. It’s a pretty miserable state of affairs when you really get down to thinking about it.
I stood in the sanitised room, breathed the Dettol and allowed my mind to run freewheel. Well, I didn’t really allow it to run free, so much as lose control of it. I’d let go. There was no hand on the rudder. It went where it wanted and that appeared to entail a long string of gloomy observations. Right at this moment in time life was looking pretty miserable to me.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t always been this morbid; my brain has not always flowed in such a melancholy manner. I used to be a happy, easy-going, positive sort of guy. But that seems a long, long time ago now. I’m no longer that person. Life knocked that naïve optimism right out of me a long time before today.
It is days like this that have robbed me of my positive outlook, and I’ve had a few of these kinds of days. Though fortunately not too many on a par with this particular doozy of an example. This was in a category of its own – a kind of one-off. This truth is, for obvious reasons, you can only experience this event once.
Back when I was young ….. I could laugh at my own naivety ….. I used to postulate solutions to the world’s problems. I even used to have faith in the intrinsic goodness of human beings and believed there were things worth striving for. What a fool I was back then. That was before I realised the true nature of all those movers and shakers out there, the wealthy and powerful, greedily clawing in all they can, and willing to carve up their own grannies for self-advancement. They are a bunch of callous self-servers.
The problem is that I woke up to the reality of humankind but probably didn’t really believe. Today brought it all home with a vengeance.
It is strange what pictures play out on your eyeballs as you stand helpless in a situation like this; what horrid thoughts go through your head. I was certainly no longer in control of my own mental processes. My mind was rampaging down an extremely morbid track. A parade of dark thoughts distil out of nothing and chase each other around.
It occurred to me that, when it boils down to it, we are just glutinous sacs of chemistry; bags of minerals dissolved in water and suffused with ionised electricity. Nothing more.
Right now I had a pretty dim view of my species – not surprising, given the circumstances, I suppose.
We’re all to blame. None of us are guiltless.
I had this idea a long while ago about writing a novel around a telephone box. My main character is making an important phone call. As he is on the phone a variety of disparate characters go past, all intent on various aspects of their lives. The only way they touch is in happening to go past as the call was being made. This is not that.
But the idea was similar.
This was a real event. My father had just died. I was in his hospital room with his body looking out the window. Outside people were walking past, going about their business, completely unaware. This is that. All those people have a basis in reality – even the most outrageous ones. All life, sex and death.
Introduction
I had the concept for this novel in 1981. It has been festering annoyingly in the back of my mind for decades until I finally found the way of writing it.
Many of the characters in this book are embellishments and adaptations of real people, even myself. It is the same with the events; they too are based on real situations. But this is a work of fiction. It has come out of my imagination. Nothing is completely true. The characters I have created are often composites and much of what takes place has been altered – having said that there is a strong element of fact in nearly all of it – particularly the more unlikely part.
4.0 out of 5 stars Only Connect!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 July 2018
A very human moment of painful insight and personal crisis launches this intriguing multi-layered story. Several apparently disparate lives are examined through episodic and frankly-confessional first-person accounts which in their very different ways explore the question of how far we are free and how much we are constrained. How are we connected and what if we could see through the eyes of others? The style is fast-flowing, the language direct and uncluttered. As the old 50s cop show proclaimed: All human life is here! In this case, life and death …
I began writing this in February while on the cruise ship Magellan going up the coast of Australia. I completed the first rough draft in March while cruising around Vietnam. Opher Goodwin 25.3.2017
I wrote this book as a homage to my life and adventures with Rock Music. Rock has been an enormous part of my life from the age of ten onwards. I went to my first live gig at the age of fourteen (the British Birds at Walton Palais). It blew my mind.
I was lucky enough to have been exposed to the Rock ‘n’ Roll era of the fifties, to have been in London for the sixties underground scene, to have lived through Punk and am, in my mid-seventies, still going. Gigs are an important part of my life. I’ve been to thousands – always at the front digging the vibe.
I grew up with the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Captain Beefheart, Roy Harper, Neil Young, Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pink Floyd and legions more. I saw them perform in small clubs, met them backstage, regularly went to Abbey Road Studio and had the time of my life!
It was great fun
The sixties raged. I was young, crazy, full of hormones and wanting to snatch life by the balls. There was a life out there for the grabbing and it had to be wrestled into submission. There was a society full of boring amoral crap and a life to be had in the face of the boring, comforting vision of slow death on offer. Rock music vented all that passion.
This book is a memoir of a life spent immersed in Rock Music. I was born in 1949 and so lived through the whole gamut of Rock. Rock music formed the background to momentous world events – the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Iraq war, Watergate, the miners’ strike and Thatcher years, CND, the Green Movement, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Women’s Liberation and the Cold War. I see this as the Rock Era.
I was immersed in Rock music. It was fused into my personality. It informed me, transformed me and inspired me. My heroes were musicians. I am who I am because of them. Without Rock Music I would not have the same sensibilities, optimism or ideals. They woke me up!
This tells that story.
Our Breath
My breath,
Our breath,
The rustle of leaves.
My heartbeat,
Our heartbeat,
Susurrations on the breeze.
My dreams,
Our dreams,
Green splendour of nature.
My life,
Our life,
Defying all nomenclature.
Adrift on a cosmic island,
Wondrously
Alive
Myriads
Interconnected
Wonders.
Opher – 20.11.2024
Sometimes you simply have to stand aside and gasp. Here we are on this tiny rock spinning and spiralling through space at colossal speeds.
Once, just once, the chemicals came together.
Now we have this vast interconnected web of wonder, spawning consciousness, self-awareness and beauty.
So delicate, so unlikely, so marvellous.
Incredible. I am incredulous.
We are part of this. We are all one. My breath; our breath.
Just Once
Just once –
In an instance of amazing, unbelievable, impossibility,
Circumstances conspired.
Just once –
A snowball rolling downhill gathering pace,
Growing constantly.
Just once –
A planetary steamroller taking all before it,
Ever more complex.
Just once –
A cosmic vacuum cleaner sucking everything in,
Imbuing the lifeless with life.
Just once –
Culminating in a spectrum of great wonder
In which I am but a simple ray.
Opher – 4.10.2024
I remain constantly in awe of life, of the wonderful spectrum of organisms on this planet, their incredible forms and immense beauty. I am in awe of how it all came about. I remain in awe of the wonder of consciousness.
After a lifetime contemplating the spectacular inception of life and workings of the human mind I remain as much in awe as ever.
Religious people use words like miracles to describe what they cannot understand. They replace one inexplicable wonder with something even more incredible and impossible. That’s the human mind for you. Things we can’t explain become mystical and we create religions from them.
I remain suspended in awe and wonder.
Life is my religion. I worship it. A sunset is my religion. I soak it in. Answers can blow in a wind of wonder. There are no answers; just wonder.
All life is sacred. All nature wondrous. Who needs more? I am part of something splendid, a small ray in a vast lightshow.
