Status Report

Laptop bought - but it's too damn big
Flat rented - nice enough, I suppose. Located in what I can only term Aberdeen's 'dockyard' district
Various compositions in varying states of completion
And nary a positive thought.

(Leave it to me to bitch and moan about hating London, and avoiding it with a ten-foot pole, only to pine for the experience after experiencing Aberdeen's particular charms for a weekend)

Old Favorites

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--W.H. Auden