now that i am about to leave the factory there is a bubbling sensation inside me. it is like bubbling boiling water, so full of energy that it cannot stay still.
i did not know what to expect when i went into the factory. i wanted to always keep my heart held high. often it was a baffling place to be. billy shouted across to me one day "cheer up min, its nae that bad!" part of me smiled at the appropriateness of the gregariousness of that comment coming from a glaswegian, but another part of me had to give a forced smile. i could not give a fully natural smile because i was too baffled inside.
the bafflement arose from spending six hours each day with people i had never spent time with before, getting to know what it felt like to be with them and realising the limitations of communication between us.
my vision of humanity changed, became larger, more aligned with a certain portion of reality, less only focused on the positive exchanges of travelling always looking for friendliness.
before i thought: "we humans can share quite a lot of things"
or at least: "we can share a few things",
or "at the very least we can share a smile"
a smile can communicate all that is most worthwhile communicating between people.
also eyes,
eyes can communicate all that is most worthwhile communicating between people.
it made me think of the essential inscrutability of people.
i thought: this person would smile if they were able to...
something is preventing them from smiling
i cannot understand what that something is
but i must accept it.
i must accept that there are forces operating among people which take away their smiles.
a smile is a symbol.
being happy may be the goal here on this planet among all people,
but it is not the reality.
reality: i must accept you, confounding though you are.
at break time i love to go to the shower room and there have a shower in the dark. away from the bright factory lights. the water becomes hot and flows over my body. i do not know where the water comes from because it is dark. it is so eager to splash all over me. pure refreshing water. away from the hundreds of eyes of the factoy, surveying eyes, shooting darting flashing glances.
afterwards i can go back into the factory with my heart held high.
in the factory, the white coats we wear are like straight jackets; we are not free.
we are humans - nothing can stop us being humans; but part of our humanness has been taken away - we are not free. the blue headnets we wear are symbols of our anonymousness, the protective gloves are to make us aseptic - we do not have real contact with the world.
we are humans, but we pretend that we are not humans by behaving like cogs in a machine.
in the canteen, before the shift begins, i sit and read a book.
andrew the pole always comes with a coffee and sits at my table and we always nod and say hello to each other.
one day i look up from my book and find him looking at me with a steady calm gaze. i return the same gaze for several seconds i say to myself i will not be the one to look away. then he looks away and i return to my book with a smile.
one day he asks what i am reading. it is anna karenina. he tells me he studied it at school. i love to read. he says so does he.
another day he tells me that three times he has seen the rolling stones play live, and once the kinks, but never pink floyd.
the next day i tell him i ask him what his favourite rolling stone song is. i tell him i was trying to play "you can't always get what you want" on the guitar. i hum the refrain in case his memory needs jogged:
you can't always get what you want....
but if you try sometimes
you might find
you get what you need.... ahhhhh, yeah
it is difficult to hum those words dispassionately, with mick jagger's passion in my head.
one day i ask him how long he has been away from poland. he outlines his life to me. he was a farmer for ten years. he says he had to return to the city or his house would be reposessed by the government. he builds momentum and tells me that for many years there was no freedom in poland. he expands and talks about russia, about poland being the buffer between europe and sovietic russia. he talks about the past and about napoleon. occasionally i say something, even if it is only to comment that i know very little about history, but i realise that he is not curious about whatever i might say, he wants to tell me things; it is my role is to listen. all the time his faded old blue eyes fix me directly, but however directly he fixes them, there is a distance, a distance of old age, of time, a lifetime, which veils over his desire to say things in this anonymous factory place.
anna karenina engrossed me and made the fifty minute bus journey fly by. i did not know that a novel could be so well written. the whole imaginative eight hundred pages flow like real life - one event arising spontaneously and flowing into the next, not like a lot of fiction where you know that the events did not really happen but are the product of the author's imagination. it is a human novel. events in the world are described, but the central theme is the human experience. the personal psychological experience of each person, and also interactions between people. a great deal of interaction is wordless. one may think certain things have been communicated by reviewing the sum of the words spoken, but underpinning them, undergirding them, the solid base of every act of communication upon which an embellishment of words is constructed, is a feeling. a shared feeling. a pure, profound wordless interaction of presences.
expressed and manifested much better through eyes or smiles or lack of smiles or half-smiles or an infinity of different types of half-smiles than by words.
tolstoy drew my attention to all this. he wrote a sweeping novel which is a reflection of real life in all its majesty and absurdity, in all the little obsessions and worries and joys of all the characters. most people see the world with a certain particular personalised worldview, and most authors communicate their worldview through what they write. tolstoy struck me with his ability to enter fully into each character and describe the widely varying worldviews of each one.
he seems to have no overarching message beyond simply presenting the reality of humanity, in the form of a novel. he documents our great capacity to love, the greatness of our capacity to love, as well as unapologetically documenting our capacity for cruelty; the poverty of the human condition, the poor, misguided, unaware souls that we are.
jack works taking the loaded crates out of the factory and one day he walked past me and said: life doesn't get any better than this.
i liked his comment that the central theme of life is its goodness and i liked his irony in suggesting that working in the factory was the pinnacle of the goodness of life.
i said cheerfully to him: it is good to see someone cheerful
and he replied: well, its either that or greet
and i liked to hear the local dialect word greet, which means cry
one day i find myself sitting next to a young woman on the bus and before i open my book she asks me "are you not going to read your book today?" i say "i like to look at the sea here before we turn inland at portgordon" she says yes i like to look at the sea too.
the conversation never flags until the factory and i realise that reading a book is only one way of losing track of time on a bus.
conversing with a person is like reading a book.
one learns things.
her name is stella which means star in italian she is from bulgaria. she says that she would love to work with children one day. children are so honest. they mostly do not dissimulate. they mostly do not hide things. i say "it would be good if that openness and honesty was maintained all the way through adulthood"
communication is good when it is honest and an attempt is not made to hide things.
one day i am working next to antonio and i tell him that i learned a bit of portuguese when i was in brazil. another day i am working next to him and i say "how do you say ..... in portuguese?" and "how do you say that in portuguese?" and antonio becomes animated and ends up talking away talking away to me in portuguese. gradually the words start coming back and it feels so good, so empowering to have the ability to communicate through knowledge of such words.
the portuguese are among the friendliest factory staff. anna maria works for quality control and when she learns that i speak some portuguese she encourages me, each day coming to me and saying bom dia carson como estas?
one day she described me one day as timid and i asked her: do you think i am timid? she said: .....introspective. most young men your age are loud and want to show off; you are quiet and content to observe everyone.
it is true, the air in the factory is thick with egos.
the air buzzes with machinery, each person is a buzzing ego.
when it is time to clock off, everyone crowds round watching the clock.
suddenly everyone writhes into action, pushing and shoving, trying to be first to clock off and get out of the factory, like some sort of frolicksome wild stampede, bubbling like boiling water.
one can't take this world too seriously
but at the same time
you can take this world too seriously.
being alive is a poetic experience.
working at that factory has cast my hours of non-working freedom into sharp relief. being a free agent in the world is replete with possibilities. i realise the significance of everything. even the significance of the action of a drop of water falling into a puddle of water in the garden,
especially a drop of water falling into water.
first the droplet forms on the edge of the gutter.
it morphs
and becomes detached it is momentarily airborne, travelling downwards through space, pulled down by an invisible force, travelling through time or with time or accompanied by time. enveloped in time, everything is enveloped in time
the drop
and the plop
a glutinous, ponderous, joyous plop. joyful because of its richness and fullness.
a symbol of life
water
movement
a plop
there were lots of apples and bars of chocolate and it was a little sore on my belly to lean inside and grab them. my headtorch illuminated the inside of the bin.
when i cycled off i realised there was a girl standing behind a car who had probably seen me and there was a young man who probably hadn't seen me because he seemed surprised to see me.
he responded to my grunted greeting and then shouted after me: "far are you gan?"
i said: "i'm awa oot"
and then i said: "i'm awa oot on a spin"
"you're crazy", he rejoined
and it felt good to be free
i did not know what to expect when i went into the factory. i wanted to always keep my heart held high. often it was a baffling place to be. billy shouted across to me one day "cheer up min, its nae that bad!" part of me smiled at the appropriateness of the gregariousness of that comment coming from a glaswegian, but another part of me had to give a forced smile. i could not give a fully natural smile because i was too baffled inside.
the bafflement arose from spending six hours each day with people i had never spent time with before, getting to know what it felt like to be with them and realising the limitations of communication between us.
my vision of humanity changed, became larger, more aligned with a certain portion of reality, less only focused on the positive exchanges of travelling always looking for friendliness.
before i thought: "we humans can share quite a lot of things"
or at least: "we can share a few things",
or "at the very least we can share a smile"
a smile can communicate all that is most worthwhile communicating between people.
also eyes,
eyes can communicate all that is most worthwhile communicating between people.
it made me think of the essential inscrutability of people.
i thought: this person would smile if they were able to...
something is preventing them from smiling
i cannot understand what that something is
but i must accept it.
i must accept that there are forces operating among people which take away their smiles.
a smile is a symbol.
being happy may be the goal here on this planet among all people,
but it is not the reality.
reality: i must accept you, confounding though you are.
at break time i love to go to the shower room and there have a shower in the dark. away from the bright factory lights. the water becomes hot and flows over my body. i do not know where the water comes from because it is dark. it is so eager to splash all over me. pure refreshing water. away from the hundreds of eyes of the factoy, surveying eyes, shooting darting flashing glances.
afterwards i can go back into the factory with my heart held high.
in the factory, the white coats we wear are like straight jackets; we are not free.
we are humans - nothing can stop us being humans; but part of our humanness has been taken away - we are not free. the blue headnets we wear are symbols of our anonymousness, the protective gloves are to make us aseptic - we do not have real contact with the world.
we are humans, but we pretend that we are not humans by behaving like cogs in a machine.
in the canteen, before the shift begins, i sit and read a book.
andrew the pole always comes with a coffee and sits at my table and we always nod and say hello to each other.
one day i look up from my book and find him looking at me with a steady calm gaze. i return the same gaze for several seconds i say to myself i will not be the one to look away. then he looks away and i return to my book with a smile.
one day he asks what i am reading. it is anna karenina. he tells me he studied it at school. i love to read. he says so does he.
another day he tells me that three times he has seen the rolling stones play live, and once the kinks, but never pink floyd.
the next day i tell him i ask him what his favourite rolling stone song is. i tell him i was trying to play "you can't always get what you want" on the guitar. i hum the refrain in case his memory needs jogged:
you can't always get what you want....
but if you try sometimes
you might find
you get what you need.... ahhhhh, yeah
it is difficult to hum those words dispassionately, with mick jagger's passion in my head.
one day i ask him how long he has been away from poland. he outlines his life to me. he was a farmer for ten years. he says he had to return to the city or his house would be reposessed by the government. he builds momentum and tells me that for many years there was no freedom in poland. he expands and talks about russia, about poland being the buffer between europe and sovietic russia. he talks about the past and about napoleon. occasionally i say something, even if it is only to comment that i know very little about history, but i realise that he is not curious about whatever i might say, he wants to tell me things; it is my role is to listen. all the time his faded old blue eyes fix me directly, but however directly he fixes them, there is a distance, a distance of old age, of time, a lifetime, which veils over his desire to say things in this anonymous factory place.
anna karenina engrossed me and made the fifty minute bus journey fly by. i did not know that a novel could be so well written. the whole imaginative eight hundred pages flow like real life - one event arising spontaneously and flowing into the next, not like a lot of fiction where you know that the events did not really happen but are the product of the author's imagination. it is a human novel. events in the world are described, but the central theme is the human experience. the personal psychological experience of each person, and also interactions between people. a great deal of interaction is wordless. one may think certain things have been communicated by reviewing the sum of the words spoken, but underpinning them, undergirding them, the solid base of every act of communication upon which an embellishment of words is constructed, is a feeling. a shared feeling. a pure, profound wordless interaction of presences.
expressed and manifested much better through eyes or smiles or lack of smiles or half-smiles or an infinity of different types of half-smiles than by words.
tolstoy drew my attention to all this. he wrote a sweeping novel which is a reflection of real life in all its majesty and absurdity, in all the little obsessions and worries and joys of all the characters. most people see the world with a certain particular personalised worldview, and most authors communicate their worldview through what they write. tolstoy struck me with his ability to enter fully into each character and describe the widely varying worldviews of each one.
he seems to have no overarching message beyond simply presenting the reality of humanity, in the form of a novel. he documents our great capacity to love, the greatness of our capacity to love, as well as unapologetically documenting our capacity for cruelty; the poverty of the human condition, the poor, misguided, unaware souls that we are.
jack works taking the loaded crates out of the factory and one day he walked past me and said: life doesn't get any better than this.
i liked his comment that the central theme of life is its goodness and i liked his irony in suggesting that working in the factory was the pinnacle of the goodness of life.
i said cheerfully to him: it is good to see someone cheerful
and he replied: well, its either that or greet
and i liked to hear the local dialect word greet, which means cry
one day i find myself sitting next to a young woman on the bus and before i open my book she asks me "are you not going to read your book today?" i say "i like to look at the sea here before we turn inland at portgordon" she says yes i like to look at the sea too.
the conversation never flags until the factory and i realise that reading a book is only one way of losing track of time on a bus.
conversing with a person is like reading a book.
one learns things.
her name is stella which means star in italian she is from bulgaria. she says that she would love to work with children one day. children are so honest. they mostly do not dissimulate. they mostly do not hide things. i say "it would be good if that openness and honesty was maintained all the way through adulthood"
communication is good when it is honest and an attempt is not made to hide things.
one day i am working next to antonio and i tell him that i learned a bit of portuguese when i was in brazil. another day i am working next to him and i say "how do you say ..... in portuguese?" and "how do you say that in portuguese?" and antonio becomes animated and ends up talking away talking away to me in portuguese. gradually the words start coming back and it feels so good, so empowering to have the ability to communicate through knowledge of such words.
the portuguese are among the friendliest factory staff. anna maria works for quality control and when she learns that i speak some portuguese she encourages me, each day coming to me and saying bom dia carson como estas?
one day she described me one day as timid and i asked her: do you think i am timid? she said: .....introspective. most young men your age are loud and want to show off; you are quiet and content to observe everyone.
it is true, the air in the factory is thick with egos.
the air buzzes with machinery, each person is a buzzing ego.
when it is time to clock off, everyone crowds round watching the clock.
suddenly everyone writhes into action, pushing and shoving, trying to be first to clock off and get out of the factory, like some sort of frolicksome wild stampede, bubbling like boiling water.
one can't take this world too seriously
but at the same time
you can take this world too seriously.
being alive is a poetic experience.
working at that factory has cast my hours of non-working freedom into sharp relief. being a free agent in the world is replete with possibilities. i realise the significance of everything. even the significance of the action of a drop of water falling into a puddle of water in the garden,
especially a drop of water falling into water.
first the droplet forms on the edge of the gutter.
it morphs
and becomes detached it is momentarily airborne, travelling downwards through space, pulled down by an invisible force, travelling through time or with time or accompanied by time. enveloped in time, everything is enveloped in time
the drop
and the plop
a glutinous, ponderous, joyous plop. joyful because of its richness and fullness.
a symbol of life
water
movement
a plop
there were lots of apples and bars of chocolate and it was a little sore on my belly to lean inside and grab them. my headtorch illuminated the inside of the bin.
when i cycled off i realised there was a girl standing behind a car who had probably seen me and there was a young man who probably hadn't seen me because he seemed surprised to see me.
he responded to my grunted greeting and then shouted after me: "far are you gan?"
i said: "i'm awa oot"
and then i said: "i'm awa oot on a spin"
"you're crazy", he rejoined
and it felt good to be free
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