MICHAEL Morrison, the main character in my novel The Choreography of Ghosts (update and a publication date coming later this month) tends to lose himself in thought as he walks the streets - and so do I.
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IS a falling leaf just that and no more? Is it perhaps a symbol of death?
As usual, I’m pretentiously over-analysing a simple situation as if I’m some kind of aspiring but failing poet, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe it is even the opposite?
It does annoy me somewhat when my mind goes into overdrive and takes me away from what I should really be thinking about. Again though, it probably saves me.
By the time I’m done with the subject – which obviously isn’t yet as I’ve only just started banging on about it – it has distracted me from potentially damaging thoughts which send my mood plunging and my dissatisfaction with life off whatever scale they apply to such things these days.
After all, distraction is what life is mostly, but not all, about.
Watching TV, sport, reading books and magazines, playing games, putting a film on, meeting mates for a chat down the pub; it all takes your mind off the often disappointing game of life.
Good or bad? It depends.
If it’s numbing your mind and stopping you thinking about what is happening in the world, you may well have achieved your aim but that shouldn’t always be your option number one. If it prevents you dwelling on your own sorry situation and levels out your thought processes, then good.
As usual, I’m not sure where I’m at as I watch the leaf join its thousands of deceased foliage friends.
I wonder, is a tree without leaves still a tree?
I am informed by the Cambridge Dictionary – and no doubt would have been by many other humans of barely average intelligence had I asked them – that a tree is “a tall plant that has a wooden trunk and branches that grow from its upper part”. So the tree lives on, leaves or none. The leaf, however, does not, which I’m sure in some way could be used as a metaphor for life if I tried hard enough, which I will.
Reading on, I discover that dead leaves play a vital role in the cycle of life by returning nutrients and carbon to the soil and atmosphere. The carbon re-emerges as carbon dioxide, which other plants can use again in photosynthesis. The nutrients in dead leaves head back to the soil, where plants can use them to grow new leaves (I would have known this had I paid any attention in O-level biology or whatever subject leaves were covered in).
The trees are the rulers of the land, you leaves its workers, putting in the hard graft for, as far as I can see, very little reward. Unless, that is, you count losing your colour when it gets cold, not living long and crashing to an untimely death only to be delivered another undignified blow as I tread on you and drag you, stuck to my dog shit-covered shoe, for a mile or so before scraping you off and leaving you well away from your loved ones or any familiarity you may have had.
Life imitates art, they say, but I think it’s the other way round, and we all imitate nature while never giving it the credit it deserves.
I’m at my desk now, there is no nature around me, and my computer and what’s on it dominate my thoughts.
That can’t be right, surely? What on earth have we done?