Notes From Black Notebook
Robert Golden 27 October 2020 – May 2022
I am publishing these private notes because I believe they may in part resemble other people’s current sense of depression, helplessness and loss. They are not intended to make the reader happy but only to express some solidarity in this period of darkness. The buffoons, clowns and sociopaths we have as leaders, the ever more critical state of the climate crisis, ideologically directed austerity mixed with corporate price gouging, and of course the day-by-day deaths of Ukrainians and Russians is an ongoing horror. I don’t believe turning away helps.
This is set out in a way that some readers may think I’m presenting a poem. But this is not so; it is a short essay but the lines are set for an easier read of the ideas.
But I Love My Earth
I was born on the wrong soil.
Others are born to theirs and bind to it.
It’s always who they are.
For many it’s all they know and all they need possess to feel whole.
They awaken when outsiders cut their water, sever their electricity,
and while their brothers from the same soil pretend to care,
they give their people up for wealth and comfort,
the consequence of their alliance with the big boys,
the consequence of trading their souls for stuff.
I want a land of olive trees and lemons,
not a land of oil, malls and processed foods.
My land is neither a country nor a region,
it is simply my loved ones.
Prophetic Sadness And Quiet Freedom
I’m a carrier, as are we all, of the human plague,
and with it, because of my acute consciousness of other’s fates,
I’m burdened with eternal sadness.
This nightly awakening alerts me to my fate:
living life without meanings embraced by others.
Recognition of this? Devastating.
Afterwards, I continued to live my life and to comment on it.
I found moments of love, beauty, truth and joy.
These were often overwhelming.
So much of the ongoing commentary seems to be another’s,
a storyteller occupying a part of my persona.
It’s as if it’s an outside observer,
continually reminding whatever the other part of me maybe,
of the transient nature from delicious pleasures to the night.
My film would finish; the party would end at dawn,
the birth of a child would occur as a brutal regime fell,
and I would recognise,
for fleeting moments,
a picture of mine had touched someone’s life
even while passing quickly into history.
As a photographer I could apprehend moments,
fix them in some state of permanence
and hold them like a talisman of a life lived,
a proof of my being,
of having been present,
of having existed as did those whom I have documented.
In that, as a partial antidote to my eternal sadness,
was freedom from having my soul plundered by the rich.
I Disturbed No One
Many people wish to lead a quiet life,
to keep their heads down,
to neither notice not to be noticed.
They believe their retiring demeanour will keep them safe.
Within brutal cultures,
whether in kleptocratic dictatorships or amongst city thugs,
they wish to be invisible,
to not be called upon to defend themselves, their families or their beliefs,
nor to claim they have or have not witnessed another’s actions.
But I always wished to disrupt, disturb, upset,
to force both questions and answers
and to assault assumptions,
my own as well as others I’ve seen in the world
which I have borne witness to.
As with a few others,
I somehow survived into adulthood
with my imagination, curiousity and passions still intact,
and I insisted, at first unconsciously,
that I would stand and be counted for what I rationally knew,
that my images would help others admit to the corruption,
and to the evil avarice and violence
surrounding what and how they had made theirs,
but one day they, the broad middle and working classes,
would be forced to stand up and be counted.
Naïve, yes; wishful thinking, yes; necessary, yes.
Weary of Life
Even when evil looses for a moment,
many of us still suffer at the same time
because we are human
and our humanity can only endure for so long,
witnessing or struggling against degenerate evil
which we come to recognise
is of our own making.
Yes, the robber barons, the expropriators, the rentier class,
the lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and police
and anyone who serves their dark orders are of our making –
our not witnessing,
not being noticed,
not wanting to speak up
and not resisting in our callous silence.
We know that all of the perpetrators,
in some guise or costume, are us.
I know I know this and I’m weary.
It is as if falling out of love,
not with a friend or a lover,
but with life.
It is as if I have been mortally exhausted,
all but deadened by the endless erosion of goodness.
Evil does this as often as possible
through the endless abrasions of the bureaucrats
and their computers surrounding us with demands, contacts, taxes,
rules and regulations,
and particularly through their endlessly wearing us down in their schools, churches, media and news
with their hype, assumptions and propaganda.
Yes, I’m tired of witnessing their making what could be free and beautiful
into something banal, venal and brutal.
In the Dungeon of the World I Am Not Alone
Is it melodramatic to claim there has never been a golden age
when human beings of all casts and classes were at peace,
tranquil within themselves and upon this bountiful rock?
Abel will have screamed in his death throws,
“but Cain, you are my blood”.
Thus private property was invented, as were cities by Cain’s seed.
Is it not so that there have always been rulers and the ruled,
and that the lives of the people have always been pressed into the service
of the Pharaohs, Kings, Counts, Generals, Priests, demagogues and Presidents?
They have, throughout history, enforced upon us unending misery.
If we concertina European history from the Renaissance
through the Enlightenment to the Age of the Masses and thus to Age of Democracy,
our lust for personal liberty encircled the rulers.
They recognised that their statutes, laws, corporate structures
could meanwhile encircle our lived lives;
that their fake culture, fake histories and fake news
could control the rest of us,
buying off our dreams of liberty,
and we would be left blathering like idiots
in a dungeon of consumerism and meaningless ideas,
a huge cultural and moral crevasse at the centre of our beings.
Pity the children brought up without heroes,
without the hope of shining tasks
to make life better and more beautiful for others.
This dungeon of the rich, composed of their dead-end ideology
is no less an impediment to a complete life and a pleasurable existence
then preying to bejewelled idols.
They teach us what they wish us to know
from the point of view of what they wish us to accept and purchase.
They buy us off with things we don’t need
but with which they wish to destroy our collective imagination.
By the time we’re 11 or 12 they leave our bodies as empty shells
to become caverns for their larceny, lusts and profits.
When they deem it necessary
they use the force of the state against us
or use our bodies in defence of their realm.
By then we’ve lost our autonomy to their programming;
they have usurped our instincts.
THIS JOURNEY
Perhaps this human project, the one we all journey on,
blinds us to our own individuation, repelled as we may be by others.
As we seek to explain the lonely journey
we may only realise its meaning through an examined life
only discovered when we come to recognise
the broken bonds between ourselves and all living things.
In that context
violence against others and all the jewels of the planet
becomes acceptable, even as it is antithetical to our journeys of discovery.
An unexamined life is an unlived life.
We know this, the Greeks told us this.
Without this, we are more likely to assume a role and characteristics
contrary to our inner needs,
those needs our psyches cry out for.
In the end, those unrecognised, unexamined and unlived needs become a burden.
Through our own fears, laziness or disloyalty to ourselves,
we pass the same stunted journey on to our children.
If we walk away from whom we are,
from our calling,
we survive in an estranged life as we violate our true lives,
as we violate our selves and our souls.
In all of this,I suspect our first question must be,
“what do we expect of love?”, and then “can we love?”
Is that our salvation or our justification?