Day 43 - 12th Feb

CAUTERETS

“You have to wear ze speedos”

What. The actual fuck.

“No shortz - zer is a sign uh?”

The accent is comically heavy,

On purpose perhaps—

Topspin of descent,

A parody of itself.

I buy speedos from the marble foyer,

Sodden boardshorts go back in bag,

And emerge in natural spa—

Cary Grant

in the chocolate box off-season,

La belle époque,

Sulphur and glamour.

Eyes stung by the geothermal

And my caustic brain,

Stretches arms out wide—

And the nape of my neck is on tile.

Looking up from hot pool

To crystalline alpine peaks—

Impossibly perfect.

Simple, pure white,

Cut against synthetic blue.

Tickety rock

Goes brain,

Scheming,

Unable to rest.

The next thought form

"Think me! Me next!"

Lest this absolute blue should fall

And squash us all.

"What do we do now? What next?"

Head turns to the right. On its swivel,

Non-stop drivel is checked—

By a face,

Barely above the surface,

Accepts sun onto itself, and smiles.

It really is that simple.

Niall Campbell.

Because I have been posting daily, I actually don’t know if I have posted this before, but I’m almost sure I haven’t. That’s interesting because, until just a few weeks ago, I could tell you exactly how many poems I had written—probably about four in total. They all existed across numerous books and were elaborate affairs. They weren’t much better than the one I have whipped out in a handful of minutes.

What I’ve realised is that creative output doesn’t follow a steady, even distribution across a lifetime. There’s a pattern to it—a kind of ebb and flow. A small percentage of creative people might produce most of the world’s art, but that same pattern plays out within an individual life as well. You can go through long stretches where you create nothing at all, then suddenly enter a prolific phase where you’re making more in a few months than in the previous decade. In that sense, you are both the numerator and the denominator in the fraction—you can be in the 99 per cent of your own life where you’re doing nothing, and then just as easily be in the one per cent where you’re producing at an incredible rate.

To forget whether or not this poem exists elsewhere is a tiny, tiny win for me. I can fully lose track of my creative output, and that’s not a feeling I could have ever had before.

Anyway, the poem itself is fairly on the nose. It comes from a time when I was in a pretty little alpine town in France, in a thermal spring, and for reasons I still can’t comprehend, you actually had to wear Speedos, not boardies. My wife told me the guy said I had to buy Speedos, and I laughed at her. I was certain she was taking the piss and trying to get me to enquire about budgie smugglers in broken French to a bewildered clerk. But the line he said was pretty much verbatim, and he shouted it across an echoey marble foyer.

So while I was up in my head in an absolutely picture-perfect moment—floating in a thermal spa, looking up at the peaks above the town with that synthetic glow you get when it is sunny in the Alps—I couldn’t be happy. I looked across, and a young man with Down syndrome was smiling, his head tilted back in the water, soaking in the sun.

Wisdom and intellect are not causally related. In that moment, my IQ was undoubtedly higher than his, but I was so much less wise. He was doing the only right thing in such a glorious moment—being fully present, feeling the sun on his face. I felt both inspired and ashamed. I have never, from that moment on, believed that wisdom and intellect are particularly well correlated. That’s been borne out technically, and I’ve seen it play out in my practice—some incredibly intelligent people thinking, speaking, and living in deeply unwise ways, and vice versa. This isn’t about being anti-intellectual—it’s about recognising that human thinking and human doing should always be subordinate to human being. If not, they lose their way entirely.

We recently had our second child, and we did not screen for genetic conditions. We believed we would get what we got. Iona is very healthy, but it was an interesting experience because—she won’t like me saying this—my wife was classified as a geriatric mother (haha!). The risk of syndromes and genetic challenges exponentially increases with every year of the mother’s life, so it was a very small but non-trivial consideration.

People with Down syndrome are some of the happiest and most affectionate people I have ever met. Maximising the quality of your personal relationships is a wise move because the quality of your life is determined by the quality of those bonds.

I don’t know who said this, but the quote I remember is: Happiness is being able to feel the sun on your face. It really is that simple.

You don’t need to go to the Alps to be reminded of that. We have plenty of sunshine here in Perth. So if you’re feeling up in your head, know that the feeling of the sun on your face is a mark of gratitude—for yourself and the environment you are in.