Do you find, as I do, that as time passes you accommodate a vast sludge of useless information which remains stored in the brain for no purpose whatsoever? Year by year one’s brain becomes a giant land-fill site where the equivalent of rubbish, street garbage, tinsel from a celebration, egg-shells and oranges sucked dry, a multitude of empty plastic containers and disposable detritus and throw-away stuff of every imaginable sort is deposited.
At the same time, there is such an infinite variety of marvelous and valuable knowledge about which I remain, often willfully or at least lazily, unaware. I regret, now that it is too late, that I never stirred a muscle of the mind to learn about a score of things which would have been more fascinating and useful to know than the hundreds of inconsequential tidbits which seep and dribble into the mind daily.
Why, for instance, have I never learnt to understand and speak and write any language other than English? Is that not a sort of illiteracy? Why have I been so lazy? I love books and reading and poetry – think, therefore, what treasures I have deprived myself of by not becoming fluent in one other language, or even more.
Is there perhaps still a chance that I might repair this deficiency at least? I.F. Stone, celebrated journalist and founder of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, who clinically dissected attempts to hide corrupt and shabby official behaviour, at the age of 75 decided that he had to learn Greek in order to write his book on the Trial and Death of Socrates. Before he died the old man learnt the language and wrote his great book.
Regrettably, I am no I.F. Stone and the mere thought of the time and effort and trouble which would have to go into learning any language makes me unutterably weary and anxious to get back to my reclining arm-chair and the reading of Oliver Sacks’s fascinating memoir of his life, On the Move, written in good plain English.
No, there is no hope now that I can or will change. As long as I live the infinite accumulation of absolutely useless knowledge will continue to grow and disperse through the brain’s astonishing but haphazard universe. There, jostling in a marvelous and disorderly throng, are Vigdis Finnbogadottir, president of Finland in the 1980s, the first woman in world history to be elected head of state. There is the word oenomel which in ancient Greece was a drink made of wine and honey but in language means a thought which combines strength and sweetness. There is the extraordinarily beautiful ending of James Joyce’s story “The Dead” with the snow falling over all of Ireland. There is also the fact I didn’t know until the other day that Gary Sobers, the greatest cricketer of them all, was born with six fingers on each hand. There too are the words from a poem by Les Murray, the Australian poet, entitled “Airscapes” which are colourfully stuck in my mind: ”water dusts/that take colour from the Sun: gold cobble,/diaphanous frolic, optical liqueur./A Thailand of cloud-dance,/cobalt gold-cracked cyclone Rumba/that raised half a province down its river,” there is Zeno’s Paradox proving that the hare can never overtake the tortoise. There too is the analemma, the tracing as the days pass of marks recorded by a sundial at noon which keeps track of the passing of the seasons and the years. And on and on in an unorganized mish-mash of numberless brain-encounters which fill my days and dreams. Useless, yes, but how I would miss them if they disappeared, or did not increase in number, this indiscriminate bright rain of comets astray in the limitless cosmos of the brain.
Why write further? C.K. Williams says it better in his poem “Doves”
DOVES
So much crap in my head,
so many rubbishy facts,
so many half-baked
theories and opinions,
so many public figures
I care nothing about
but who stick like pitch;
so much political swill.
So much crap, yet
so much I don’t know
and would dearly like to:
I recognize nearly none
of the birdsongs of dawn——
all I’m sure of is
the maddeningly vapid who,
who-who of the doves.
And I don’t have half
the names of flowers
and trees, and still less
of humankind’s myths,
the benevolent ones,
from the days before ours;
water-plashed wastes,
radiant intercessions.
So few poems entire,
such a meager handful
of precise recollections of paintings:
detritus instead, junk,
numbers I should long ago
have erased, inane
“information” I’ll doubtlessly
take with me to the grave.
So much crap, and yet,
now, morning, that first
sapphire dome of glow,
the glow! The first sounds
of being awake, the sounds!——-
a wind whispering, but even
trucks clanking past,
even the idiot doves.
And within me, along
with the garbage, faces, faces
and voices, so many
lives woven into mine,
such improbable quantities
of memory: so much already
forgotten, lost, pruned away——-
yet the doves, the doves!
As I was concluding this column, I was delighted to read the following written by George Orwell at the close of his life: “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information”.
