November 2018

I have started to re-post the poems of my 2014/15 poetry project “A Prompt A Day For Bee” earlier this year. Had to stop because I got a little confused with working through 3000 old blog posts. In the end, I decided to just go through all of them from the beginning and post each when they come along. So here we go on…

July 2014

I actually really managed to get away today from writing and was reading the whole day long. Not only “Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide” as planned, but also a little more of “1984” by George Orwell. Good grief, what a dreadful story. No, no the story is written brilliantly, but the society it depicts is dreadful.

I have never read the book at school. Not sure if they just stopped it in Germany when I was a teenager because it was around 1984 :-). Or my teachers just decided on another book. Who knows. The only thing I ever knew about 1984 was “Big Brother is watching you” which is as far as I can see not a sentence from the book but a description of what is happening in the story.

I was 13 most of 1984 and was wondering a lot then how much of the book will become a reality. And living in Great Britain today I am watched a lot not by big brother, but by those many employees of the so-called security firms which operate CCTV cameras.

And it is funny how easily you get used to it. In the beginning, in 2007 it made me extremely uncomfortable to think that I can go nowhere without being watched by a faceless operator. Today I do not care anymore. It is not that I am willing to change anything or to fight against it. So I decided to ignore the fact most of the time.

Thank goodness there is no dictatorship of one party in Great Britain, but looking at the hypocrisy in the party in the book and the hypocrisy in today’s politicians there is not much difference. Today’s politicians all over the world seem to be as keen on making us believe one thing, but are after something totally different like the party in the book. I think it is scary how close Orwell came to depict reality, even though only in fragments and in how some people react. Well, it is a classic and that is worth to be a prompt for “A Prompt A Day For Bee”, don’t you agree?

1984

The year Winston met Julia

and

rats over a shop of curiosities

were not safe.

 

No Romeo

but

tragic after all

when love again

was an act of rebellion.

 

Life had already ended

for me in 1984.

No Winston

or Romeo

needed.

 

Doublethink and

~

life lived

without even

knowing the book.

 

My predators

only

vaporised my sanity,

nothing more.