MORNING SERIAL

ONLY, in the end of it, and for sure the end of what was, here and then, particular and specific, has come and gone, that it did, all of it together, amount to a defence of hard-won things and to their shoring-up against inevitable loss.

Small victories were, most of the time and amidst the social carnage of greater defeats, the only next steps to take. That there was no overwhelming, unalterable change for the better.

That what had been painstakingly gained could be taken away, piece by piece. It is what I would tell Tony and Gloria if I could.

That just the fact of their survival, generation by generation, is both the most vital story to tell, and the most difficult since it runs so against the tides of public history. It does not happen, this survival, to everyone everywhere.

And it only happens when there is a chance to hold on and take things forward by re-invention.

Nor do I mean by any of this, the satisfactions of just being fed and kept warm and almost made secure against poverty and wars. Miseries are visited upon all people everywhere.

So, what I am reaching for is some revelation of the meaning of love and how to tell of it so that it remains central in focus even when it diminishes, becomes momentarily peripheral when the glare of brute necessity blinds us with its harsh illumination of our pettiness.

But I cannot tell that story whole because I have scarcely lived it myself. I cannot tell that story because I would be required to show it.

I cannot show it unless I make it up so as to pretend that telling about it, how it was all framed, is the secondary not the primary means of grasping what happened, so as to understand it.

And I do not believe that, nor in the consolation of re-ordering life which it might afford for others.

I, too, once longed for the undeniable beat of the heart. But I was constrained, as we all were from our place in time, by the silted layers of confusion deposited in the mind.

CONTINUES TOMORROW