Words pander to the literate. In doing this weblog I do not want it to become a kind of psychoanalysis, something to which I am not much given. Many years ago my mother told me that Ted Hughes used words as a form of therapy for some darkness within him. The reason why he is not a true poet. But in a way everything we write, do and say demonstrates our psychology even if as observers of the world our art is to imbibe the psychology of our fellow human beings and reflect it back to them with mirror-like perfection.
When I was growing up I used to have this terrible feeling that if I concentrated on someone giving a recital too much, I would become that person, and make an awful mess of things because I did not possess the skill to do what they were doing…be it talking in a foreign language or playing the piano. I was in my thirties before I learned from my mother that she also had that exact same idea when she was a teenager. There it was. Whatever synapse or connection my brain had made the thought was as much inherited as the capacity to have it.
And that is why I know sixty thousand years ago on a warm, mild day in a different Africa a man was walking with a burden on his necessarily naked shoulders when he saw a fruit tree. Apple, pear or some other known or unknown fruit. Putting down his burden he went to the tree and touched its bark with his splayed hand, watching the skin under the fingernails change colour with the pressure and stroking the bark with his thumb he felt connected,
“Thank you for your fruit, ” he said ,”I will be coming this way again and before I ate I wanted you to know my name is Daniel…”