![\"hesse\"](\"http:\/\/writer-insighter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/hesse.jpg\")
<\/a>No permanence is ours; we are a wave<\/p>\n
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:<\/p>\n
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave<\/p>\n
We pass forever, craving form that binds.<\/p>\n
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Mould after mould we fill and never rest.<\/p>\n
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.<\/p>\n
We move, we are the everlasting guest.<\/p>\n
No field nor plough is ours, we do not reap.<\/p>\n
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What God would make of us remains unknown.<\/p>\n
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.<\/p>\n
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan,<\/p>\n
He kneeds, but never gives us to the fire.<\/p>\n
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To stiffen into stone, to persevere!<\/p>\n
We long forever for the right to stay.<\/p>\n
But all that ever stays with us is fear,<\/p>\n
And we shall never rest upon our way.<\/p>\n
By Hermann Hesse, from\u00a0Magister Ludi<\/i><\/h3>\n
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I read this a long time ago, in a desert far away. I was about Ben’s age in Not Your Heart Away<\/a>. \u00a0A girl sat on an abandoned tractor one night with the wind blowing her hair while I read the poem aloud from the book she carried. Those sentences tell you probably all you need to know about who we were, then. The feeling\u2019s stayed with me ever since, inside me head. Not that one, the one that took us out to the abandoned tractor to talk, as people used to say (\u2018let\u2019s go somewhere we can talk\u2026\u2019) but the book thing, the stage-prop, the lever, the excuse, the poem, that\u2019s stayed with me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent the day going through old notebooks, trying to write songs, remembering old dreams. And then I found this. It should not have become my song, the song of my life or if it had to not then, when I was nineteen. There might be a time for this in people\u2019s lives, maybe particularly if they\u2019re German. If you\u2019ve lost a world war or two. If you\u2019ve got one too many duelling scars from Heidelberg. If you\u2019re a short dark painter who can\u2019t paint very well and live in a bedsit with people like Christopher Isherwood flitting about. But not when you\u2019re a teenage British kid into Magazine and Kate Bush, wearing black cords and red Kickers, just off to university. What was wrong with me? What, you know, was <\/i>it?<\/p>\n I, like, didn\u2019t know who I was. Well, big news. I still don\u2019t. A bit more, a bit more than then perhaps. But as the other bladerunner said at the end of the film, the one who wasn\u2019t Harrison Ford, the one who hadn\u2019t fallen in love with a mechanical blow-up doll, the one who\u2019d found out they were programmed to fall to bits in a couple of years because it was all too much for them, then again, who does?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never felt I had a home, more than for about an hour or two. People have tried to make me feel that, truly tried, but it didn\u2019t stick. Or maybe I didn\u2019t stick. It\u2019s not a big noble born under a wandering star thing, just this no permanence is mine thing. I\u2019d like it to be. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to happen now.<\/p>\n Years ago there was a film. Bob Hoskins, the Singing Detective, the uber-geezer in The Long Good Friday, the friendly bloke from the BT ads who told us it was good to talk fell into a cartoon as a 1940s gum-shoe, a private eye trying to find-out Who Framed Roger Rabbit<\/a>. Prime suspect was Jessica Rabbit, a smouldering torch singer with a figure to die for and Bob thought Roger probably had. She was trouble. You could see that a mile away. A voice that would smoke tarmac when she said: \u201cI\u2019m not really bad. I\u2019m just \u2026 drawn that way.\u201d That was me.<\/p>\n Not Jessica Rabbit, you understand. I\u2019ve never poured myself into a ball gown. Poured people out of them, but that\u2019s a different thing altogether. (\u201cThat\u2019s a different thing.\u201d Thank-you.)<\/p>\n But that thing, the longing forever for the right to stay. I know that feeling. It has nothing to do with mortgages or arrears or where you live or passports or visas. People like us now, we do so many different things. You can call it a portfolio career if it helps. I\u2019ve cooked crepes, shot things, explained things, found things, made things, written things and yes, I crave a form that binds, a certainty, a constancy. And at the same time I avoid it as if it was contagion incarnate, as if it burned my eyes.<\/p>\n I should never have found this poem. I should never have found this poem again. But it didn\u2019t change my life. It just articulated some of it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nWalking with blue<\/h2>\n
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