Here comes the rain
Friday, 26 September 2008
I was too lazy to write this yesterday, but it was very much on my mind. Never the matter, I'll do it now.... (just pretend you were reading this yesterday)..
Something I noticed on my way walking home in the rain is how much more snails there are when it's raining. Literally, every 2 seconds I would see another snail. It's crazy! Anyway, that got me thinking and considering I had lit today [really yesterday, but remember we're pretending it's yesterday] my mind was still in lit thinking mode, because that's what I do. Considering my dear old friends Coleridge and Wordsworth, I thought about what their take on the rain would be. Let's not even go into what Coleridge would think considering he was a HUGE opium addict, but Wordsworth would offer me a more romantic perspective of rain, a seemingly simple, inevitable thing. The rain seems to make everything so much duller and darker. Which got me thinking about my dear hero Allen Ginsberg. His whole point of writing "Howl" was to do a modernist take on romanticism -- he just didn't know it. However, unlike the real romantics (ie Wordsworth and Coleridge), Ginsberg didn't offer an alternative to the "horrors" of society. Whilst W & C wrote about how wonderful nature is to lure people away from industrialisation, Ginsberg just reminded us of how crap life is and showed the less desirable, and hidden aspects of society which we being hidden by the bourgeious. But anyway, back to the rain. It reminded me of Ginsberg. The rain reminds us of the reality; that not everyday for everyone is going to be sunny (and therefore happy). That there are still a zillion aspects of each and everyone and everything in the whole universe which aren't perfect and are grey. But the rain, like Ginsberg, doesnt offer an alternative to these, she's just here to remind us that not everything is perfect and that not everything is as "cool" or as "good" as we think. It's what's under the covers and what gets pushed aside that is the real show of reality. Just like the jazz musicials, struggling artists, psychiatric patients, homosexual and poets the rain reminds todays society about those of us who might not always feel so sunny.
3:40 pm
