Pond Man: 'He is sitting on a flint wall, my character.'
The Beginning of a Myth
He is sitting on a flint wall, my character. He is sitting on a flint wall feeling quite steady although the world around him is not. She is tipping, Poor World, because she is not clear what she is about. Poor World, she is much perplexed. Still, Pond Man stares straight out at her or from her —they are the same thing in the end —worldliness, and she is lovely; she is green and made of furze.
That roundabout straight ahead of him in the centre of the road. Filled with pansies, he says, because it is Pond Man speaking, his voice plumbs straight down. I say straight but really there is nothing straight going on here. Pond Man is sitting on the edge of a rather bumpy wall looking out towards —- he hasn’t decided but certainly not the end point, not quite, for he does not know yet what he will see — but today there is that green circle and those small neat flowers trying to turn themselves into buttonholes.
He will never pick them; and Pond Man adjusts himself at the horror of this thought. DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS. This is his mantra - it always was - and this is why he has been popular with the ladies. They hire him, they like him, because he never picks their flowers unless they ask him to — but that is not what I meant, the innuendo.
Pond Man is an innocent; we just don’t believe in innocence any more. ‘And I do not mean being childish,’ Pond Man chimes in. ‘No, I do not mean that. I am an adult man with certain ways of seeing. They may not be your ways because you have forgotten what it is to see.’ See what is around you. Take this wall I sit upon. She is crude and made of flint; she is filled with stones. Encrusted. And yet she has entrusted me to sit here, fair and square, upon her rough shanks. They gleam in the sun, her polished stones, her gems, for there is nothing straight about her.
Wall is bent and crooked. More like a hunch back, which she takes as a compliment so you must not feel sorry for her. No one should feel sorry for Wall. She has been sitting here leisurely for 200 years or more. It might be quite a bit more.
And so Pond Man stares straight out from her at the wide, wide world. Today she is green and made of a single circle filled with pansy flowers. Heart’s ease. Purple and orange button holes lying low to the ground. He watches them lift and shudder upon the rifling breeze. Nothing is ever straight, he thinks: that breeze certainly is not. She comes in way off a 90 degree angle to trifle with the affections of those flowers. He feels quite protective all of a sudden. Such flowers are fragile and to steal their affection is miscreant. Unsteady. Dorothy would not like it — Mrs. Fortescue — it is her wall he sits upon as he muses upon leaving.
Haven’t we done with that already? Goodbye. Nobody likes to do that so why repeat it all? I agree. Let’s skip straight to the aftermath. To Pond Man sitting on his flint wall, which technically speaking is hers, the wide, wide world.
For Dylan