Urgent Warning for All

POLAROID OF A PARTY

There is a looming shadow
on the edge
of this Polaroid
It has pale hair and a dirty dress.
It is present in the half moon void
around the flame tips – it
sits at the end of the table
in a burning party hat –
throwing hard bright confetti,
scattering mirror shards
around the room.
It is peering round
the photograph edges,

the horror of it
arrived
wrapped in a blanket
of brown paper,
left with no note,
after this flimsy portal
was thoughtlessly conjured
from a push and a spasm.

It is not enveloping,
it is not welcoming,
not like the light
on this crowned face.
It is spiked and bony.
It curls around
half open doors and it
breaks its waxed fingers
crawling across the lawn,
climbing through cracks in walls
and slithering through vents.

A postcard from the suburbs of Hell.
A headshot for a failed audition.
A play watched by only one reviewer.

Elizabeth Ridout

They enjoy each other’s company so much –

The memories that come back to me

I am an old man now, but then I was already past my prime when Arthur was crowned King. The years since then seem to me now more dim and faded than the earlier years, as if my life were a growing tree which burst to flower and leaf with him, and now has nothing more to do than yellow to the grave.

This is true of all old men, that the recent past is misted, while distant scenes of memory are clear and brightly coloured. Even the scenes of my far childhood come back to me now sharp and high-coloured and edged with brightness, like the pattern of a fruit tree against a white wall, or banners in sunlight against a sky of storm.

The colours are brighter than they were, of that I are sure. The memories that come back to me here in the dark are seen with the new young eyes of childhood; they are so far gone from me, with their pain no longer present, that they unroll like pictures of something that happened, not to me, not to the bubble of bone that this memory used to inhabit, but to another Merlin as young and light and free of the air and spring winds as the bird she named me for.

With the later memories it is different; they come back, some of them, hot and shadowed, things seen in the fire. For this is where I gather them. This is one of the few trivial tricks – I cannot call it power–left to me now that I am old and stripped at last down to man. I can see still. . . not clearly or with the call of trumpets as I once did, but in the child’s way of dreams and pictures in the fire. I can still make the flames burn up or die; it is one of the simplest of magics, the most easily learned, the last forgotten. What I cannot recall in dream I see in the flames, the red heart of the fire or the countless mirrors of the crystal cave.

The first memory of all is dark and fireshot. It is not my own memory, but later you will understand how I know these things. You would call it not memory so much as a dream of the past, something in the blood, something recalled from him, it may be, while he still bore me in his body. I believe that such things can be. So it seems to me right that I should start with him who was before me, and who will be again when I am gone.

This is what happened that night. I saw it, and it is a true tale.

Mary Stewart
The Crystal Cave

why I never prayed

The first time we made love I realized why I never prayed. One human can only say Oh God! so many times.

Megan Falley
The Atheist

free from their darkness

I wake each morning knowing who I am down to the depths of my soul. I soak in my darkest corners, and realize that what lies there beneath the surface is just as valuable as the smile that plays upon my lips. I understand that no one is free from their darkness, and that it is sometimes a daily struggle not to let it take over.

Kate Rose
I never said I was an angel

religion without God

Looking at Western societies I think that if we have religion, we shall have to have religion without God, because belief in a personal God is becoming increasingly impossible for many people. It’s a difficult question actually to know what believing in a personal God is. I know that I don’t believe in one. I don’t want to use the word god in any other sense. I think it’s a proper name. I don’t believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t believe in life after death. My beliefs really are Buddhist in style. I’ve been very attached to Buddhism. Buddhism makes it plain that you can have religion without God, that religion is in fact better off without God. It has to do with now, with every moment of one’s life, how one thinks, what one is and does,   about love and compassion and the overcoming of self, the difference between illusion and reality.

Iris Murdoch
Interviewed by Jeffrey Meyers
The Paris Review – ISSUE 115, SUMMER 1990

an afterlife

Some people believe in an afterlife. I do not; what I say will be based on the assumption that death is nothing, and final. I believe there is little to be said for it: it is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent an even greater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.

Thomas Nagel
The View from Nowhere