CosmiKnot

  Into the valley by The Skids   Driving past the village pond Perhaps we would have brought you here Though that chapter has ended The one that began with me crouched  In front of the B&W portable tv In your and mum’s bedroom Taping Into the Valley of the Dolls by Generation X Onto my very own radio-cassette The one with a five-pin din for recording LPs The end of an era  Was it on vinyl? Ready steady go - you’re not ready to go you tell us You would like a nice cold beer You want to look at a smiling face I can’t make any more analogies anymore To explain the hard-plastic oxygen mask  Clamped to your face Twisting it out of shape Nippy the friendly CO2 level monitor Bleeping and warning us as you struggle  To be understood through the membrane. The priest with his yellowing well  Thumbed liturgical guidebook Thrown in out of his depth A sage fisherman’s sweater clinging to his paunch Falling with us down the log plume I see your face as we are su...

They are talking about education on the radio. I haven’t really heard enough to workout the specifics but the gist is about how we could change education if we could start again. I think they are saying that social relations ought to be made part of the experience. I just suddenly thought what an insane world we live in that we are able to convince ourselves that an education system based on competition is in any way an evolved way of organising our lives. This tells me that I am not a realist. I mean a realist would say, “that is the way of the world so we must prepare our children for it”. That was in a deep resonant alpha control voice in case you didn’t pick that up. The other thing we’d say is something about human nature and that we can’t change that. This all makes me realise the eternal paradox of being human. The enlightenment tried to help us evolve through the use of reason and higher thinking but that ended in lots of heads being chopped off and scientism trapping us in a ...

You are in the living room of the high ceilinged Edwardian ground floor conversion flat belonging to your girl friend. You are kneeling on the smooth paisley fabric of the luxurious three-seater sofa. This is a sophisticated room, the style of which you had no hand in forming. You are essentially an archetypal musician who moved in with his bread-winning girlfriend. The black plastic hi-fi stack of record player cassette player and radio is tuned to BBC Radio 2. You have been told by your plugger to tune in and are now illegally recording the Simon Mayo show. His producer is talking, telling the disc jockey that he has found the most amazing song, which will surely be Christmas number one this year. Simon Mayo is not convinced and in a sneery voice announces that he finds the song to be similar to “Life is Life” (actually the title of the Laibach cover of “Live is Life”. You inwardly squirm at the absurdity of making a comparison based on the fact that both the Opus song and your own ...