DICK JONES - WHO HE?
Born in Horton Kirby, Kent, UK, during a V2 raid on the night of December 25th 1944. Thus 58 years old. Divorced, two grown-up offspring, living with partner (younger) & 5-month-old son. Teacher of Drama in a progressive school, facing retirement in 2.5 years time after 36 years in the profession.
Thus my identity - 58 years consigned to an 8-line paragraph. By the time I retire 2/3 of my life will have been given over to the business of being a teacher. So being a teacher has over the years come to define as much what I am as what I do. That which provides my salary has come to define my identity outside & beyond the workplace.
A sobering thought. Is an actor an actor when s/he isn't on stage? Is a politician a politician when s/he is standing in a supermarket checkout queue? What will being a retired teacher do to my sense of my own identity? What will I have become? A retired teacher is a ghost teacher, a yesterday teacher, a theoretical entity whose skills are dormant. They will be active only in memories - mine & those of any ex-students who may recall the lambent wisdoms or stupifying boredom of my lessons.
So where shall I locate my identity when the bell goes one morning & I stay at home? I believe that it will reside in three distinct places:
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partnership
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fatherhood
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poetry
And I guess beneath them all in a fourth - the Child Within who never dies; who defies age & withering experience; who retains a capacity for wonder, surprise & hope; the child who, my mother tells me at age 88, survives the mortification of the flesh & waits for a new dawn every night...
What of the first three?
- Partnership because I'm lucky beyond deserving & reasonable chance to have met E.
- Fatherhood because now that I'm free of many of the vanities & stultifying certainties of youth I have an opportunity to get parenting more right than wrong this time.
- Poetry because the writing of it - that most solitary & internalised of processes - enables me to continue to have a rich & sustaining inner life & gets me closer sometimes to knowing - or thinking I know - who I really am.
THE BLOG - WHY & WHITHER?
WHY?
How can it be about anything but vanity? Or, if that's too cynical, maybe it's about verifying, confirming, validating one's existence in a public place. Who is really going to give a damn about what makes my world real? Who out there is going to log on &, without even checking their email first, rush to my blog to catch the latest shimmering perception?
Well, I shall. I shall be my own best audience; I shall read each paragraph & stanza, enthralled & lost in the wonder of it all. And if that sets me alongside Robbie Williams in the conceit & self-regard stakes, all that separates us - & you too if you're a blogger - is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
WHITHER?
This blog will log random thoughts & notions, sparked off as the world goes by. And I shall use it too as a little roadside stall for the poems as they get sparked off too as the world goes by.
When external 5-month-old R. was internal 5-month-old...
BIRTHQUAKE
He is hypothesis,
an act of faith, a theory.
He's rumour without
a name. What's the evidence?
Radar graffiti - a splash of
chalk dust in the dark.
"Look, you can see his hand!"
No, it's just a phantom
caught on polaroid, foam
blown off water, thistledown,
thistledown.
And yet we watch,
the two of us, solemnly,
breathing through our mouths,
seismologists on stakeout, waiting
for the independent pulse.
And there, and there again:
a ripple in the skin, miniature
techtonics; something stirring
at the core. He is on his way
from a dark place to break
the surface of the world.
7:31:26 PM 
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