Rising Sap

10^th February 2008

So on the first day the sun has shone at a level that strikes the crystal hanging in the kitchen window, and bounces rainbows to dance around the walls like demented fairies, Lisa reminds me of Victor Jara and a time when life was for living, when life was about caring and fighting for what was right. Of course we were limited as to how we could do that, and our sincerity questioned and often ridiculed. Nonetheless, even with the hindsight of 30 or so years, we did what we could even if it was pathetic and futile.

It was all there, then, stretching forward and all we had to do was open our minds, our hands, our mouths and possibly our legs. We were young and ruled a future that would be well on the way to Socialist Utopia, because, well, we held the key to the book of knowledge as if it were a five year diary in a girl’s bedside locker in the fifth form dorm. To know was to effect. To think was to do. It was all so simple. No, it was not simple at all. It was horribly angst ridden, cold and painful, and in many ways being on the fringes that were not ‘cool’ fringes then has left huge cultural and intellectual gaps in the scrapbook that is my life.

It is hard to find something new to say about Spring, rebirth, renewal, all that cliché shit that never gets expressed well enough, except by Shakespeare, Marlowe and T.S.Eliot, maybe. Musically , certainly Debussy captured it uniquely . Chaucer had it , but then he was there pretty much first and the rest of us poor wretched wannabe writers, poets and artists have to scratch about in urban parks and pseudo bucolic mud ruts for contemporary explanations and descriptions of something that never changes; viz: Rising Sap.

It doesn’t stop me needing to try, though, because although it happens every year, it still comes as a surprise, a revelation almost. The sudden realisation that my eyes function as if cataracts have been removed, (or with less a hyperbolic metaphor, as if the very grimy lenses of my spectacles have been rinsed and polished) or no, not my eyes, I have far too much sophistry to see anything other than through a cynical filter that is nicotine or jaundice yellow, it is the sun itself, the sky, the very air that one day appears to have been scraped clean of grey scum and smut and grease to sparkle like dew on daisies on a merrie morninge in May.

There were more daisies mingled with the crocuses than the prescribed 13 that you need to step on to know it is Spring. There were pansies and primula, campanula and pinks in showy gardens. On the Swathe, snowdrops ghosted in shady places and daffodil spears poised to unsheath golden flames like a Jaffa weapon through the Stargate, defying physical time. It has been like this before, I remember it in my shaky greenstick legs, but not this century. People walking around in shirtsleeves in February, compelled to clean things in public, to open windows, fling bedding and blankets over railings to soak up the sunshine, polish windows to let it into winter -shabby rooms. Lovers kissing on park benches; holding hands as they walk slowly through cherry tree avenues heavily pregnant with blossom buds waiting for the splitting day. Scented air recalls rarefied sex and purified principles.

I remember days of demonstrations, posters, graffiti, slogans, clenched fists ; days numbered and punctuated by spray cans, of art of the Revolution, the colours of the Revolution; the Revolution that was in the heads of the young and hopeful, the Revolution that is always in the heads of the young and hopeful. Pogo-ing to Rock Against Racism, eating ethnic foods from Cuba, Chile, Africa; wearing ethnic clothing batiq and tie dye, hairy , embroidered half-cured skins with suspect smells, talking talking talking planning planning planning to the music of the people in a polyglot of languages no one understood anymore than they understood (fully) the issue but they understood the message. They understood this was right and this was wrong and that it must be protested by anyone who could protest in any way they could protest. Preferably actively. It must be supported in any way they could support it. Preferably actively. Even better direct action.

How we wanted to be heroes in those Seasons of the Sun, among the nodding daffs of Hyde Park, the dusty plastic orchids on the windowsills of Kilburn, the Morris Dancers of Rotting Dean, the Folk Singers of Camden Crypt, the fund raisers of King Street and Cotton Gardens. How can the privileged be working class heroes, how can the unoppressed be martyrs? How can you show solidarity with the tortured, the censored, the murdered? Those who take up arms against the oppressors, those who are imprisoned, those whose lives are broken and whose blood runs in the sand and street dust, that stains the rivers and the snow?

We marched, we wrote, we talked, we sang until we only knew the world music. We painted and we covered our walls with poster art from every country, and our furniture with cloths of every ethnic pattern and fabric. We rejected contemporary consumerism, We lived in collectives, Kibbutzim. We tried to know what it was to suffer. We failed.

And all of this, looking back, on such a day rare in middle age, that whips the blood into an effervescence of longing and enthusiasm to grab life by the balls and twist in until it howls, happened not in an aura of grey skies and rain, although that is how it probably was in reality, but in the white gold aura of perpetual Spring, throbbing guitars; throbbing, pulsating sap ready to explode and wash away the tyrants and the running dogs of capitalism. The sun through the window, the name of a man brave and broken that echoes from 30 years ago, with songs that will never die.

The sap rises but leaks away through my (metaphorical) broken bones and severed arteries, pools in the pit of my stomach. I am blinded by the sun and the music, the songs of dead men and by useless tears.