Acknowledgements

Masochistically, I’d planned to spend much time and ink writing a structured essay on literacy; covering texting, graffiti, tweeting, Facebook, Wikipedia, hyperlinking, spellcheck, online thesaurus, apostrophe confusion, grammatical mangling, metaphor insensitivity, the history of books from Gilgamesh to Kindle, the National Novel-Writing Month, the demise of the typewriter, my mania for fountain pens, registrar’s ink, and buying secondhand hardbacks through Amazon for less than the postage cost. It was going to be a tedious essay, but never mind, join the dots if you will and consider it done.

I’d like to thank a few people and things in no particular order.

To Paula for her apostasy. I see it as like the end of Apartheid, on a smaller scale: dramatic but (in my imagination) to be followed in due course by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission worthy of Bishop Desmond Tutu.

To CIngram for pointing out the classes of people to whom the world does not belong, “because it has no need of them”; yet agreeing that nevertheless we all, regardless of class, do absolutely belong to the world.

To Ghetu, for always seeing clearly.

To Bryan, for being reasonable; Davo, for keeping his corner sunny; Rev, for being an industrious bee, making literary honey from an unlikely source—the Department of Corrections, in some corner of the USA; to Rebb, for writing, and influencing me to join a Writers’ Group. To Joanne Rose, for many years of blogging contact.

To Morgan McFinn, for his use of metaphor, and especially for “the barnacles of disappointment”.

To James Lovelock, for writing (in his nineties) The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a final warning.

To Martin Amis, for Lionel Asbo: the state of England, for revealing in satire a universal monster within his Cockney particularity, an atavistic Caliban from that part of London which currently holds the Olympic Stadium; not Shakespeare’s Caliban as evoked in Danny Boyle’s “Isles of Wonder”, but a British archetype all the same.

To my beloved K for much more than is relevant here but for showing me day by day in her own person the genius for living engendered by that small island Jamaica, which celebrates this very day 50 years independence from Britain. Thank God for the mutual respect between our islands. We gave you slavery, you taught us how to live more joyfully—much more than the reggae, curry goat, ackee and saltfish, hurricane survival, the lightning Bolt.

To this day so fresh, the rain which hasn’t spoilt the Games, though it hasn’t stopped sending flash floods to parts of these islands; and has allowed me to hang out washing for a while before the threatened thunderstorm.

To this pocket-handkerchief-sized backyard, scene of clothes-peg epiphanies for five years, shared with the slugs and clouds and stray cats and rats and pigeons and overhead seagulls and kites.

To the morning blackbird which stands on the acacia tree in the children’s playground beyond the backyard fence, and outsings Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

To space, for granting distance and solitude. To technology, for jumping across space.

To time, for granting room to take birth, grow and die.

To memory, for preserving selected traces, after Time, the great declutterer, has swept and garnished.

To history, for letting us glimpse beyond memory’s horizon.

To writing, for bridging gaps made by time and space, and making civilization possible.

To oral cultures which have survived the ravages of civilization to show us we can lower our bucket into the well of inner knowledge.

To Fernando Pessoa.

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Notes

Paula’s House of Toast: blog, especially her series of posts starting June 18th, 2012.

CIngram: blog, especially this post.

Morgan McFinn: the blog of an expatriate from Chicago living on a Siamese island. Joanne Rose had posted a photo of a scallop-shell with other shells attached. I couldn’t remember what they were called so I googled “hull encrusted with”, so as to recall the word “barnacles”. For the barnacles of disappointment, see his post here. Surprisingly the epithet is not original, as you will see from Google. Perhaps on his desert island, McFinn had been reading Day by Day with Charles Swindoll.

James Lovelock: see also my post of 31st March 2010.

Ghetu: via friendship, stories, and comment on my last post.

Bach, blackbirds: see also this post.

Swept and garnished: “Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.” Matthew 12:44. Also title of a short story about dying, by Rudyard Kipling.

Writing and oral cultures: The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, David Abram, 1996.

Other bloggers mentioned above: see links below.