Today's posts
Today’s poem is ‘The
Painting in Room 23’. Art galleries are
quiet places where we talk in hushed tones and walk reverently from room to
room. Attendants make sure we behave appropriately. How different all this is from
the lives of the men and women who painted the pictures that hang there!
Doesn’t this apply to all culture? Once a poet or actor is safely dead and their
work is accorded a general seal of approval, it assumes a halo of
respectability. We marvel at Versailles and do not think of the starving
Parisians who lived just up the road. We walk round the Colosseum in admiration
and do not think of the barbarism of the spectacles seen there. Anything on the ‘To do’ list of any city in
the world becomes anaesthetized from its original function. It is ‘culture’ and
therefore is beyond criticism.
Today’s letter from my terrace is ‘The toot toot
man’. It is never wise to go back to
places you knew years before.
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