We still don't do God

A humble college lecturer by the name of Dave Brat has just made big political news in America by defeating House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, in a Republican primary. Brat took an extreme line on immigration and rode a wave of tea-party anger against the Washington establishment.

  

We know Dave Brat is humble because he said so. Asked what he attributed his success to, he replied, 'What do I attribute it to? I attribute it to God. I am utterly humbled and thankful. I’m a believer. So I’m humbled that God gave us this win… God acts through people, and God acted through the people on my behalf.'

This kind of religious talk apparently goes down well in conservative circles in Virginia. But even in more northern, more coastal, and more cosmopolitan regions of America, some level of religious faith seems to be a basic requirement for political life, whereas here in Britain the leaders of two of our three major parties currently call themselves atheists, and members of parliament can survive whole careers without having to commit themselves one way or another.

It was Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell who famously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ Far from being a statement of unbelief, this was an attempt to establish a kind of religious ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. If people felt Blair might be dodgy on religion, the fear was that he had too much of it rather than too little. When he was interviewed at length by Jeremy Paxman during the build-up to the Iraq war, one of Blair's most uncomfortable moments was when Paxman asked him whether he and Bush prayed together.

BLAIR: No, we don't pray together Jeremy, no.

PAXMAN: Why do you smile?

BLAIR: Because – why do you ask me the question?

Imagine an American president acting so coy and being made to look so shifty in response to a simple question about religious practice! What Paxman had done, of course, was to evoke an image of inappropriate intimacy between our Prime Minister and the American President, while implying that Blair’s determination to invade Iraq might be based on something other than a rational calculation of costs and benefits. These were the subtexts that made Blair squirm. We really don’t do God.   

Blair’s predecessor, John Major, once went so far as to speak nostalgically of an England of warm beer and village cricket and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist,’ but he was only quoting Orwell. In one of her more grotesquely unctuous moments, Margaret Thatcher recited a 1912 prayer, which she inaccurately attributed to St Francis of Assisi, about replacing doubt with faith and despair with hope, but she was more in her element berating Anglican bishops for being soft on the poor and praying for the souls of dead Argentinian soldiers. No one really thought she’d got religion.

And no one really thinks David Cameron has got it either, even though he announced over Easter that 'we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people's lives.’

Is it just me, or does that ‘frankly’ sound like an awkward clearing of the throat before the scary reference to evangelism? And isn’t there just a hint of embarrassment in the way the indefinite article holds ‘faith’ at arm’s length? And what’s the sentence really about anyway, but getting Tory-like stuff done in the world and having a presence on the international stage, with some vague nod to religion in the middle? But in this country, where we don’t do God, it’s as close to a ringing declaration of belief as a Prime Minister can get.  

And who can doubt that Cameron’s religious revival has been inspired by the surge of support for the UK Independence Party? For the benefit of American readers, I should explain that UKIP is a bit like the tea party, though there are fewer cattle-ranchers armed with assault weapons among its members and more old maids bicycling through the morning mist.

Their leader Nigel Farage has called for a ‘more muscular defence of our Judaeo-Christian heritage’. I’m not sure bluff, beer-soaked Nige would spot a Judaeo-Christian if it bit him in the leg, but I think he might recognise Dave Brat as the kind of bloke he could have a pint with – as long as Dave stuck to the immigration issue and didn’t go on about God. 

Still armed, still dangerous

Expressing shock at the killing of six UCSB students in Isla Vista last week, a journalist on MSNBC said, ‘What a combination of anger, firepower and delusion.’

If firepower is only part of the problem it’s clearly the most urgent part, and the part most responsive to public policy. What can you do about an angry deluded man-child with a gun? Take his gun away for a start. Then you might think about diagnosing his psychological condition or exploring how his misogyny and sense of entitlement  may have been fuelled by cultural forces.

But what seems like common sense to most people is heresy to some. 

I’ve posted about the gun lobby before (Armed and dangerous, January 2013). There’s a new device, worn on the wrist like a watch, that allows a weapon to be fired only by its owner, so that a loaded gun found in the house by a child or snatched by an intruder becomes harmless. The people at the National Rifle Association are working hard to keep it off the market. They also object to new technology that could print every bullet, at the moment of firing, with a code unique to the gun that fired it, which would help police to solve violent crimes. 

On the other hand, they have a history of defending plastic assault rifles that could be smuggled past metal detectors, and bullets designed to pierce body armour, and they have no problem with child-friendly weapons made for small hands.  

The NRA is an industry lobby masquerading as a grassroots organisation and too many politicians are scared of it. But big money is only part of its power. You don’t have to dig very deep into online conversations about the Isla Vista shooting to find people who think guns are not the problem but the solution, and who blame California’s gun laws, which are marginally more restrictive than most, for the failure of anyone to gun down the killer. In internet forums the opposing sides face each across a chasm, shouting, ‘Look what your policies have brought us to!’

According to opinion polls, most Americans are persuaded that some minimal measures, such as requiring background checks for all weapon sales, would be a good thing. The gun advocates are not impressed by the evidence for this, or for anything else, because they are not focused on a pragmatic reduction of harm. 

There are two kinds of fundamentalism behind this attitude, each with its sacred text. There’s an apocalyptic kind of Christianity that encourages hostility to social progress, while emphasising personal salvation and self-reliance. And there’s a form of libertarianism that treats the Constitution as Holy Writ, especially the Second Amendment, which the true believers misread to suit their prejudices, being resolutely opposed to anything that would weaken the ability of the private citizen to defend himself against his neighbour or the federal government. 

If unregulated gun ownership is an inalienable right, any inquiry into what happened at Isla Vista must begin and end in Elliot Rodger’s soul, about which nothing can ever be done.

Work in progress

It’s been a while since I posted. But silence doesn’t mean I’ve been doing nothing. Among other things, I’ve been working on a novel. I’ve got about 35,000 words and have reached the stage where I begin to wonder if it’s going where I expected it to, whether the conclusion I vaguely envisaged when I started out is strong enough, and whether I’m giving my protagonist a hard enough time, or giving him sufficient scope to transgress, along the way.

I also face more profound doubts. How can I hope to find another 50,000 words to fulfil the promise of what I’ve done so far? And how much of a promise is that anyway? Is it even a premise? And does anyone apart from me really care whether I finish the book or not?

I read and re-read, trying to be open to the story that’s struggling to emerge. I prune ruthlessly, eradicating jokes, random surprises and other local effects that draw attention to themselves and stall the momentum. I delete modifiers and metaphors, simplify complex sentences, remove words that might send an averagely intelligent reader to the dictionary. I lose half a dozen pages.

I read aloud, listening for an authentic voice (I’ve come to feel more comfortable with first-person narrators who will talk like real people if I can get out of their way). I challenge the other characters to work harder for the space they’re taking up. I interrogate moments of drama and expressions of emotion. Is this the way it would happen? Is this what it would feel like? Is it believable? Is it true? More pages go.

Resisting the temptation to entertain, I push myself to engage readers at a deeper level. My draft begins to grow again.

In the middle of this process I get an email from the literary editor of the Bangladesh Daily Star, who has been given my name by a friend. Would I be willing to write a monthly column of 500 words on any literary topic of my choice? I learn that The Daily Star is Bangladesh’s largest English language newspaper, with a print circulation of 40,000 and a considerably larger reach. I don’t hesitate.  The greatest anxiety for a writer is whether the words will come. The second greatest is whether anyone will read them. The email offers me a potential readership – not for a novel, but for something.

I’ll be posting those pieces here, once they’ve appeared in print– along with other non-literary pieces if I find myself drawn back into the blogging habit. Meanwhile I’ll be pushing forward with the book, submitting myself to the long silence.    

The Life, the Heart, the Elephant

In his 1967 novel, Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn describes the house-hunting strategy (hopelessly optimistic, as it turns out) of John and Jannie Dyson:

They decided to find a cheap Georgian or Regency house in some down-at-heel district near the centre. However depressed the district, if it was Georgian or Regency and reasonably central, it would soon be colonized by the middles classes. In this way they would secure an attractive and potentially fashionable house in the heart of London, at a price they could afford; be given credit by their friends for going to live among the working classes; acquire very shortly congenial middle-class neighbours of a similarly adventurous and intellectual outlook; and see their investment undergo a satisfactory and reassuring rise in value in the process. 

In the end they settle for a Victorian house in an unfashionable district, which remains, to their disappointment, stubbornly ungentrified. 

Kingsley Amis takes a sharper crack at the self-congratulatory attitudes of the Dyson class in his 1971 novel, Girl, 20, when his narrator, Douglas Yandell, visits Islington:

I had been rather expecting to find the streets deserted, the buildings uninhabited, having been quite recently told by a left-wing bassoonist friend and his left-wing harpist wife that they were among the first people to have moved into the area. 

It was in Islington that my parents began their married life and had their first five children (I came along later). But they left in the 50s before it was smartened up. Forty years on, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made their alleged pact in an Islington restaurant to take turns at being Prime Minister, Islington was already well established as a yuppie enclave. The descendants of Amis’s left-wing musicians had shifted their attention to Notting Hill and the East End.

Among ‘down-at-heel districts’ near the heart of London, our own neighbourhood, the Elephant and Castle, has been relatively neglected by the colonizing middle classes. In contrast with Islington, where old buildings cluster around a village green, the heart of our neighbourhood is a frenetic figure-of-eight road junction, and a shopping centre whose main floor, both inside and out, is at a subterranean level to allow convenient access through concrete underpasses. This probably looked stylish in an architecture’s drawing in 1960. Now its Bladerunner grimness is redeemed only by the people who inhabit it – market traders, shoppers, commuters, mothers with pushchairs, old people sitting on the bench outside the hardware shop as though this really was a village green – as cheerfully diverse a crowd as you could hope to meet anywhere on the planet.

In the immediate vicinity, the kind of terraced housing the Dysons were looking at is in short supply. This was always an ill-favoured area. In Shakespeare’s day, the suburbs south of the river had more than their share of prisons, brothels and slums, and were a natural home for the disreputable theatre business, beyond the puritanical jurisdiction of the City of London.  In George Gissing’s 1894 novel, In the Year of the Jubilee, Nancy Lord is overwhelmed by the place. ‘It was a district unfamiliar to her, and repulsive. By the Elephant and Castle she stood watching the tumultuous traffic which whirls and roars at this confluence of six highways.’

After the war, an extensive area of Victorian back-to-back housing, of the kind that now – damp-proofed and fixed up with indoor plumbing – would change hands for upward of half a million, was marked for slum clearance. The houses were demolished in the 60s to make way for the massive council blocks of the Heygate estate. The nearby Pullens estate, an area of tenement flats named after their enterprising Victorian builder, narrowly escaped demolition in the 70s and is now a local landmark, with its cobbled yards leading to purpose-built workshops that are still rented by the council to jewellery makers, potters, photographers, architects, web-designers and other creative types.

With terraced housing now out of the reach of most first-time London buyers – even reasonably affluent professionals – the new trend is for apartment-living. Recent private developments, each with its allocation of social and affordable housing, have filled industrial spaces on either side of the railway line that runs southward from Elephant and Castle station. Not far away, our own new building stands on the site of the Victorian workhouse that was, some believe, Charlie Chaplin’s childhood home.

Such developments offer rich pickings, for the developers themselves and for global investors seeking trouble-free rentable units. The 22 acres of the Heygate estate, whose unfashionably Corbusian buildings have been allowed to fall into neglect, has proved irresistibly attractive. And in the current political climate, which favours economic brutalism over the architectural kind, requirements for affordable homes are being squeezed. After a war of attrition between Southwark Council and the remaining lease-holders, the whole estate is ready for demolition. Like Islington before it, the Elephant and Castle seems destined to go up in the world.

And as in Islington, there will be winners and losers. The winners in Islington included existing home-owners who lived through a boom in house prices, those who had the good luck to move in early, and the estate agents who rode the wave. Losers included the renting class, people living in bedsits and boarding houses who had to make other arrangements when their private landlords sold to owner-occupiers. The story at the Elephant is more stark: a community of 3,000 people broken up, council tenants dispersed to outlying areas, lease-holders bought out, some with compulsory purchase orders, at prices equivalent to a one-third down-payment on a new apartment on the same site.

Southwark council looks like a loser too, having spent almost as much money emptying the flats as it got for the land. Truth also loses out. Along the way, Heygate acquired an undeserved reputation for crime, partly because, in its neglected condition, it became a popular location for TV series, including Luther and Top Boy, and for films such as Harry Brown. After filming there, Michael Caine called for its demolition, describing it as a place where children ‘grew into animals’. The crime figures for the estate, which were, in fact, relatively low, suggest that he was mistaking fiction for reality.

Winners include the developers, a global corporation based in Australia, who have no investment in the social fabric of the neighbourhood, only in its property values. The change to Islington was made up of thousands of private decisions. Here the whole thing is being managed on a monolithic scale and proclaimed on hoardings and banners like a new gospel.

Change is here.

Transformation starts now.

Be a part of it.

The Life. The Heart. The Elephant

Kingsley Amis generally reserved his scorn for left-wing pieties, but I like to think these exhortations from the Church of Capitalism would have provoked him to comic paroxysms of rage. 

So where do we stand, Leni and I? Are we, like the Dysons, roughing it in the hope of future profit? Hardly. Our motive for living here is probably typical of most home buyers: we found the best compromise we could between location and living space, and settled for what we could afford. And what are our hopes for the neighbourhood? Mainly this: that the developers don’t go bankrupt before they’ve finished the job and that, for as long as there’s profit in it, they take good care of the goose that’s laying their golden egg. 

Syria – special case or old compulsion?

One of the challenges for the recovering alcoholic, I assume, is to resist the special circumstance, the one-off occasion. It’s my daughter’s wedding, my best friend died, my wife just gave birth. Surely one drink will be okay. I’m entitled to that at least. In fact, it would unconscionable not to toast her future happiness, not to see the old boy off, not to wet the baby’s head. It won’t be like last time, I promise. No more benders. This time I’ll know when to stop.

I think of this whenever I see America gearing up for another war. Just one little drink. One little surgically targeted strike. It won’t be like Iraq – which wasn’t going to be like Vietnam. This time it’s different.

And it is different. For one thing, the internal political scene in America has changed radically since the invasion of Iraq. Then there was Bush and his cabal of hawks, for whom the non-Islamist world was divided into the willing and the weasels. Now there’s Obama with his professorial tendency to mull things over and seek consensus. Bush had the Democrats backed into a corner and, in Blair, had a sidekick with the messianic self-belief and the political authority to drag Britain unwillingly into war. Obama won’t be helped by our own faltering coalition government and faces such visceral opposition from many in the Republican party that their desire to humiliate him might yet trump every other consideration.

And the external prompt is different. Saddam Hussein was a horrible tyrant, but his infamous attack on the Kurds with poison gas was already old news, and one could legitimately ask, why the sudden urgency? Assad’s chemical weapons attack is part of an unfolding humanitarian disaster. Bush’s audacious ambition for Iraq was to overthrow the regime and build a democracy in its place. Obama promises a highly curtailed aerial action – no boots, as they say, on the ground, and no decisive interference in the civil war.

Different and yet strangely the same. First in the tendency for reasons to proliferate: we must punish Assad, we must send a message to Iran, we must prevent chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorists….

Secondly, in the way these multiplying reasons circle round to create a new meta-reason: America can’t be seen to back down. Which is another way of saying that once the President has officially raised the question of whether to attack, the only possible answer is yes. In America they don’t call this saving face – the sort of private concern that afflicts elderly Chinese leaders – but maintaining US credibility, a phrase which elevates pride to a level of strategic importance.

Thirdly, in that very claim of difference: this time it’s special – but isn’t it always? And one effect of that emphasis on the uniqueness of this case is to keep everyone myopically focused, once again, on the ad hoc question – to go in or not to go in – and to distract from any analysis of principles: on what grounds may one country legitimately launch a one-sided attack on another, and is the USA alone entitled to take such unilateral action? And I know it’s a long time ago now but should America have been punished for napalm and agent orange, and in what form, and by whom, and would that have helped?  

And what about approaching the question from the other end? American leaders are concerned about tyranny and human suffering. They have these billions to spend. So how might they spend them most effectively – in offering additional help to refugees, for example, or in boosting global programmes of education and healthcare? Or to a man with a cruise missile must everything look like a target?

What’s happening in Syria is horrific. The handwashing of the isolationist right, in America or Britain, is not attractive. Liberal handwringing isn’t much to look at either. But it isn’t really about how we look or how we feel. It isn’t really about us at all. A century of meddling in the Middle East might encourage us to take the long view and hold back from one more violent intervention. Because a desire to fix something doesn’t equate to a power to fix it.

As the American commentator Chris Hayes has put it, the enthusiasts for war present us with a syllogism: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done. The logic is not very convincing.  

Singing in Lithuanian? It's all Greek to me

My eye was caught recently by a headline in the Daily Mail: UK pupils of 8 forced to sing in Lithuanian [Thursday 11 July 2013]. Apparently parents have petitioned the Cambridgeshire primary school after their children came home in tears ‘because they were being forced to learn songs in Lithuanian and Polish.’ Naturally I thought of my own primary school days when I was forced to sing in Latin. I was forced to do a lot of other things too – run around a muddy field shivering in rugby shorts, learn large chunks of the catechism, eat liver and onions. When it came to classes, I was so mentally absent that most of what we studied might as well have been in Lithuanian.

In education, as in most things, I have liberal inclinations. I wouldn’t go as far as Summerhill School in Suffolk, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neil, where children are free to attend classes or not as they choose and where, in the words of their website, ‘you can play all day if you want to’.  For eight-year-olds some element of compulsion might be necessary, though I tend to be in favour, where possible, of inducing children to learn by making it interesting, rather than forcing them, whatever form that forcing may take. This may sound idealistic, but it’s an ideal based on experience, first as a disaffected pupil, irrationally resistant to fear-based forms of compulsion, and later as a teacher.

The Daily Mail takes a surprisingly progressive line on this Lithuanian singing question, seeming to support the rights of eight-year-olds to opt out of uncongenial school activities. The word ‘force’ seems somewhat strident, hysterical even, in this context. Had I refused to sing in Latin at the age of eight, play rugby, or eat liver and onions, I might have incurred the ultimate sanction of corporal punishment, which is now happily against the law.  

Over the centuries, children have been forced to sing in languages not their own, under threat of even greater penalties. No doubt some of my own Irish ancestors were forced to sing in English. I don’t know how education was conducted in Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, but I suppose it’s possible that my wife’s grandparents were forced to sing in Lithuanian and Polish (paternal and maternal respectively) rather than in the Yiddish of their homes. In this context, the Cambridgeshire children haven't much to complain about.

On the question of compulsion and how children are to be encouraged to tackle difficult tasks, the Mail story has nothing to say. Neither does it shed any light on the question of what, exactly, our children should be learning, though this is a question of topical concern in the light of Michael Gove’s radical shake-up of the National Curriculum. Since the British government decided to involve itself in setting the curriculum twenty-five years ago, modern languages have been argued over – from what age, to what level, by what means, and for what purpose should they be taught?

When I was a teacher in Wales, for a while there was debate over which language should be offered in addition to French, Spanish and Russian. Should it be German, the language of Goethe and our largest European competitor, or Welsh, the ancestral language of a sizeable proportion of our students? Ancient Greek was constantly under threat, mainly from the encroachments on the timetable of newer forms of learning, such as Information Technology. When I taught in California, French seemed to have higher status in the school than Spanish, though Spanish was clearly the more useful locally and internationally.  In such choices, utility confronts culture, and the meaning of culture itself is disputed.

Should we be learning the language of our ancestors, of our neighbours, of our trading partners, of our enemies, of our nannies and construction workers, or the ones with the best books? And if learning languages is principally about mental development, does the choice matter that much anyway?

The Mail isn’t really interested in any of these questions. As usual, it has smellier fish to fry. This is, of course, a story about immigration. As the article reports, ‘The area has a large population of East Europeans and a third of the school’s pupils are from migrant families’. As a comment on education it exhibits the same kind of thoughtless ignorance that David Cameron revealed when he casually sneered at Indian dance as a form of physical exercise.

In the end it’s just another jab at ‘political correctness’. That tired old phrase isn’t used in the report, but you never have to look far in the Mail to find it. It’s there on the same page, in fact, in a story about a ‘bonny baby contest’ in the Wiltshire town of Devizes that has been cancelled by the carnival organisers as ‘unfair to the children deemed less than bonny’. Political correctness gone mad!

Why T.S. Eliot didn't write poems about buses

‘A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.’ Margaret Thatcher was quoted in a parliamentary debate as having said this, but she probably never did. It’s an old line, more convincingly attributed to Loelia Ponsonby, who married the second Duke of Westminster in 1930 with Winston Churchill as best man, who may have borrowed it from the Old Etonian poet Brian Howard, pal of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Toffs, all of them, who didn’t travel on buses much and so missed out on one of life’s great pleasures. Margaret Thatcher had many faults, but that kind of snobbery wasn’t one of them.

For getting about in London the tube is attractive because of its speed, because of the clarity of the diagrammatic map (for which we have to thank Harry Beck, the London Underground employee who designed it in 1931) and because you never have to wait for a train in a downpour. The bus, in contrast, is an acquired taste. The open platforms that until recent years let passengers jump on and off wherever they liked, dodging through traffic to and from the pavement if they were brave enough, have largely disappeared. Now we have what some call prison buses, because you’re trapped between stops even if the bus is stuck in gridlock. But catching buses remains an active sport and, at times, a health-and-safety nightmare. As for the route maps, they look like nasty accidents with spaghetti.

On the other hand, buses are half the price and reach those less favoured regions that are off the underground network. And the internet has made it easy to research the routes. Once you’ve found one going your way, the bus has two huge advantages over the tube. The stop is where it says it is – no traipsing through subterranean passages – and you can enjoy the view. At their best, buses can be magic.

Coming back from Norfolk last week, we found a magic bus, with the help of a smartphone, that took us from right outside Liverpool Street Station to the end of our road. Among other interesting sights, we passed the church of St Mary Woolnoth, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early eighteenth century. I knew of it, but wasn’t aware of having seen it before, though I must have ridden under these streets hundreds of times on the Northern Line. As we turned along King William Street it wasn’t just the church that began ringing bells. I realised we were about to cross the Thames on London Bridge, and I remembered where I’d first come across this route, though in the other direction:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

By chance, I was travelling with a book by John Carey called The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had just put those lines from Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land in a fresh context for me. The argument of Carey’s book is that intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s were disdainful – and, deep down, terrified – of the encroaching 'masses', particularly the kind of ‘semi-educated’ clerical workers who had been taught to read and write but were incapable, it was assumed, of a true appreciation of literature or art, and were meanwhile destroying the English countryside with their demand for suburban housing. The crowd of dead people observed by Eliot would have been crossing the Thames from South London to work in the City.

‘Largely through Eliot’s influence,’ Carey writes, ‘the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.’ They were mainly toffs, of course – Eliot himself, a middle-class American who was reinventing himself as an English gent, Virginia Woolf, who envisaged ‘the Man in the street’ as ‘a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff’, and E.M. Forster, who, in Howard’s End, is sympathetic to the struggles of the clerk Leonard Bast to better himself by reading and trying to listen to Beethoven, but describes him, even so, as having a ‘cramped little mind’, says that he plays the piano ‘badly and vulgarly’, and has him finally crushed to death under a bookcase.

Not bus enthusiasts, most of those early twentieth century intellectuals, though an attentive reading of this passage from The Four Quartets suggests that Eliot may have lowered himself as far as the tube. He seems not to have enjoyed the experience:

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight…

Nor darkness to purify the soul…

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained, time-ridden faces…

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time…