the other side of silence

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity”  George Eliot. ‘Middlemarch’

Working in various warehouses I always liked a tidy-up, a bit of stocktaking, giving a bit of shape and order to the accumulated muddle and inconvenience of things. Or, at least, the illusion of order and meaning. And even though I always think that the Sunday Supplement and TV reviews of the the year that’s about to end smack of lazy journalism, and easy programming, I realise that this is exactly what I’m heading into. Starting with a poem that’s now over a year old, and which seems like someone else’s. As they do.