By the time I'd hopped into the outdoor pool, wearing my Merfin, it was as much about allowing the water to sweep me up meditatively, a slow, languid reflection on the events of late, as it was about physical exercise. Up and down I paced, reviewing the events of the last few days (despite interludes of humour,e.g., my parody of Billy Field's song Bad Habits). The things that are going on politically in this country have really ruffled my scales and had me puffing furiously about the gills.
Beant Kaur, a friend and mother at my son's school, who is a devoted yogi, put it eloquently in her Facebook post to friends all over the world:
"Dear friends around the globe. We in Australia currently have a government which represents and has introduced policies on very many things that I and thousands of others find intolerable. These are far ranging - from dumping waste onto the Great Barrier Reef, removing ancient forests from the protection of national parks, committing human rights abuses in relation to asylum seekers interned indefinitely in "processing units", to cutting funding for all levels of education, introducing internet censorship, denying climate change and cancelling the carbon tax and giving corporations new levels of power even over government. And there is much more. Many people are very upset and on the weekend THOUSANDS marched on the streets all around the country and have today delivered a vote of no confidence document to the government in Canberra. Most alarmingly, this government, under the leadership of Tony Abbott, is introducing legislation which makes it illegal to protest!! Whats more, the prime minister has so far not commented on the protests and the media is monopolised by sympathisers of the ruling Liberal Party and is not reporting it either! In West Australia we have one newspaper which is essentially like a tabloid and not real reporting and in this newspaper there will be nothing. It's a strange and repressive land in which we now live at a time when the world needs progress. One last detail: the future is feminine, meaning the intuitive, community-minded feminine principle in ALL of us, man and woman, and the PM Tony Abbott has appointed himself, wait for it.. Minister for Women. Thanks if you read to the bottom of this. I am feeling disturbed by the turns being taken in my country, a supposedly developed country being extremely underdeveloped on the scale of human maturity. Apparently impossible things are happening and it's being glossed over. May truth and sanity guide and protect us. Even this is all part of the plan. Wahe Guru."
I started to write a poem, or maybe even a song, of despair and compassion for our current crop of hapless 'leaders', so sure of themselves, yet so far off the mark.
This is the second song I have penned, that is inspired by the poetry of T. S Elliott. The first, written many years ago in the days of Ocean choir, was based on a poem from The Love Songs of J. Alfred Prufrock: " I have heard the mermaids singing each to each, I do not think they will sing to me". This one is based on the famous Hollow Men:
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multi-foliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
While swimming, I moved through my frustration towards a place of grief, and an acute awareness of how empty and desperate the lives of despotic politicians must be, because they are cut off from parts of themselves that they don't even know exist. It is up to every mermaid and merman to reveal these things, these places, these hidden treasures.
A Mermaid's Song for Hollow Men copyright Ginny Webb March 2014
How sad I am for them
These severed-headed men
Who crave, but never find
The treasure deep inside of them
The treasure that is born of diving deep,
Of facing fears,
And so their armour hardens,
Fortress built of unshed tears.
They splutter and they flounder
And they thrash their land-locked tails,
For they do not know the joy that’s born
Of swimming with the whales.
Headpieces truly full of straw-
Now is the time to show them
What becomes of dinosaurs.
Now is the time to tell them
We are more, oh so much more…
They are the heartsick men
Stuck in barren lands of old
If they would only follow mermaids
To the shore, to find the gold...
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