Thinking about Billy Bragg and the sad, youthful illusion of hope. Thanks for that ear worm at 11.30 at night, Billy.
‘I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
It’s wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care.’
A New England
Even better:
‘He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in.’
And cynicism at its sublime best:
‘Revolution is just a t shirt away.’
Thanks, dear friend, for your talent, your insights, and your boundless fucking tenacity. I wish I had half as much.
Ezra Pound describes your importance to our world as ‘poets are the antennae of the race’. That’s you, dear man. That’s you. Wilde talks of the downside of being people like us (we see it as an incendiary positive need) when he wrote ‘a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world’. He was one. You are one. And, when at my best, I am one, too. A dreamer. And yes, it’s torture. Much of the time. The rest of the time we make art. Joyous art. With all the pain and schadenfreude that goes with that.
Hegel adds a full stop to who we are as we, in our final throes, reach for the equally illusory notion of ‘Enlightenment’ when he observes that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ And, as Hamlet concludes – Shakespeare always has the last word no matter how much I try to out-Scrabble him – ‘the rest is silence’.
Aldous Huxley, in language you would best understand, wrote ‘from pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death – all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’
As artists, part of our job is to articulate the concept of hope, to ‘give’ hope, but in so doing we are much less likely to experience it ourselves. We’re too busy making essential noise.
My tuppence worth. And so to sleep, ‘perchance to dream.’
Now put a bear in your window and wash your paws!
Namaste. 
dykiegirl 