Slip Sliding Away...

A note just in from my Australian actress chum asking if I am still feeling "...lower than a snake's pudenda". She does, indeed, have, as befitting her type - Antipodean and thespian with it - a certain sharp and direct way with words. Sets one thinking of course. Why is one so glum and for so long? How does a snake cope with the whole genitalia close to the ground thing? Along those lines - bit, though, like the old poet Donne: "parallel, Though infinite, can never meet..." I mean you can't really afford to mix the two can you: the puzzles of serpentine anatomy and the mystery of man's moods? That way would indeed madness quite lie.

You could, of course, merely take it for what it is - exempla of Divine Providence at work. On the one hand a snake's burden is - in part - to preserve what dignity and comfort it may whilst on the slither; on the other a man wrestles with the glums as best he can. The serpent, being but sentient not sensible, does not brood; the man though - through, dare one call it the curse of consciousness - does.

Pre-lapsarian, of course, one might say the boots were on other feet - the man a simple, happy-go-lucky gardener and all round help-meet; the wily serpent all dastardly plotting and scheming. (See Holy Writ - or Milton according to taste - passim.) Not that there were any boots way back then, not even Wellingtons - though presumably it must have rained in Eden, so they would have come in handy. And did the serpent ever have feet, even before being struck and stripped down by the Almighty as an eternal slider not stroller? That's the trouble with questions - one merely leading to another. Bit like a good beer then. But not such fun.

Setting, then, aside the whole serpent conundrum, how goeth the man? That the sufficient unto the day challenge set from Down Under. In short and simple, the resounding answer would be a 'yes', one is still bloody - or perhaps far worse bloodless - blue. Could one go that bit further and give any account why so if so? Perhaps, though to list the reasonable and proximate causes would be both lengthy and lowering. Reasons to be cheerful - as the song goes - would be a better bet; quite as taxing but surely elevating not enervating?

Might even give a go, one guesses. First off then, health? Check. Actually, no, that's where, at once, the whole enterprise begins to fall apart. By and large one as much doesn't as does have it and what one does have is less than either it once was or, indeed, what, other circs. prevailing, it could have yet been. Drawn a bit of a blank there then. Best left alone, in truth, that one.

Then again, why is this being mentioned at all, why not preserve the long held silence? It has just come to me - because the very notion of being dragged across the dirt like an adder's fanny has made me chuckle. I am amused. The rest can go hang. For now.