Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane, page 25
You didn’t die then but you knelt as you never knelt before and, alas, have not knelt since nor have you the slightest notion of kneeling. We beg you to do so before a day dawns when infirmity will preclude any possibility of your kneeling and that will be the time you will want to kneel most so that your supplications for salvation will be properly delivered. Tennyson, to whom your father was devoted particularly towards the end of his days, asks:
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
You would do well to utilise us more while we are willing and able to accommodate any prayerful postures you may hopefully adopt before it is too late.
We have been most wrongfully deprived of our right to participate in divine worship. Millions and millions of knees fulfil their proper roles every Sabbath while we languish and pine for our heritage.
I don’t know for sure how medical texts might describe us but more than likely we would be delineated as being joints of the ginglymus type in the middle part of the human leg. We are the articulation between the femur, tibia and the patella. This is what they have to say about us in medical journals but this is a somewhat clinical analysis. There is much more to us that has not been revealed by the followers of Hippocrates.
In all wars from the lowly skirmish to the decisive battle the knees have played vital roles. Without us every rifleman who ever aimed his weapon would be at a disadvantage. Remember the position favoured in extended-order infantry drill in which the soldier kneels on the right knee, rests the left forearm across the left thigh and grasps his rifle in the position of order arms with the right hand above the lower hand. It is we who are at the very nub of this manoeuvre. Upon our mobility depends the very life of every soldier in charge or retreat.
It is we who enable the thirsty traveller to kneel by the roadside spring and it is we who stiffen to attention when the anthem of our country is sounding and yet we cannot recall a poem or song in praise of knees, but then it is also true that the horse which earns the oats rarely receives them. We care not because we know that virtue is its own reward and we are content while we are able to serve.
We had hoped – oh! impossible dream – that one day you would be summoned into a presidential presence and honoured for services to your fellow man. We saw ourselves bending so that you might kneel upon the tasselled mat. For us this truly would have been a moment to cherish. Only a knee can kneel and kneeling is the sine qua non of knighthood. Then would come the laying on of the royal sword followed by the royal command, Arise Sir Knight!
Sir Thomas Scam. It sounds right and proper but alas your activities over a lifetime were more suited to the jailyard than the palace. In fact there are many who would suggest that you should be permanently incarcerated, roundly whipped every day and made to lie on beds of nails at night. We must be thankful that nobody ever suggested you should be made to kneel upon broken glass.
We now feel obliged to conclude, and still we entertain the hope that you will see fit to make more use of us at wayside shrines and ancient oratories, before the sacred tabernacle and representations of the crucifixion, in cemeteries and places of holy pilgrimage, in mosques, synagogues, pagodas and temples of every denomination, in grand cathedral and humble chantry. Avail of us we beseech you so that you might give thanks to your creator for the life He has breathed upon you and for the longevity He has thus far granted you. Weigh upon us in every holy place and make it known to the giver of life that for every breath you are grateful to Him and mindful of His unparalleled munificence, for life is the father and the mother of all gifts and cannot be estimated in human terms. Press upon us then without delay so that we may contribute to your belated atonement and ultimately share in your salvation.
Sincerely
Your Knees
The Tongue Writes
Dear Brain
It was I who was obliged to deliver the utterance which contained the first lie you ever told. It was a deliberate falsehood devised to ingratiate yourself into your mother’s good books after she had chastised you following a fit of petulance.
You had been sent to your room like many a small boy before you. It was a job I detested and as you know by now I can be a very sensitive fellow indeed with the power to react when an injustice is perpetrated against me. As you lay in your room endeavouring to count the myriad patterns of wild oats on the wallpaper you hit upon a plan which very nearly proved to be the death of your mother. You staggered from the bedroom clutching your breast, announcing in tones of agony from the top of the stairs that you were going to die. You blundered unsteadily downwards towards the hallway to where your mother had hastened from the garden where she had been engaged in the pruning of rose bushes. She was at first petrified upon hearing your screams and then spurred into action like all mothers by concern for your safety.
Upon beholding you she instantly fainted but luckily for all concerned her collapse coincided with the visit of an itinerant chimney sweep who ministered successfully to both of you, to your mother by gently slapping her face and to you by stoutly implanting the toe of his wellington fairly and squarely upon your pampered posterior.
How often has it been said that a kick in the right place often put a man on the right road! Certainly it was true of that occasion for you never employed such a dangerous form of deceit on your poor mother again.
You were, however, to dupe her and others in a complexity of ways for the remainder of your life. How frequently have we heard it said of scandalmongers that their tongues should be cut out. I am just another organ and, therefore, for everything I say you must be held responsible. You dictate to me and I articulate. I fulfil my other roles as a matter of course. I concern myself with assisting the teeth and throat in the vital acts of chewing and swallowing. My mucous membrane attaches itself to food, sloshing it through gum-induced saliva, retaining and refining it for the titillation of my tastebuds and at the end of these pleasurable proceedings dispatching it gratefully past the tonsils, my roots and down the deep throat to the receptive stomach.
I am filled with the most sensitive nerve fibres which issue rebukes and warnings to the entire nervous system as well as the mouth. From my fold to my papillae to my apex I am involved in essential activities for the betterment of the body as a whole and while I do not wish to sound boastful I believe it could be argued that I am an organ who bears great responsibilities as a contributor to the well-being of any given human.
I could go on about my physical philanthropy but these functions I have cited are as nothing in comparison to the awesome power which sends millions of words tripping off my apex day after day. Most of these I will concede are meaningless and although packaged in phrases and sentences it can be safely said that were they never uttered there would be no loss whatsoever to the world. There are countless men and women who have utilised me on a round-the-clock basis and who have never issued a word of common sense. There are millions who use me for nothing better than criticising and maligning friends, neighbours and institutions. There are, mercifully, a gracious and godly few who never employ me for the voicing of evil commentary about others and but for these kind-hearted souls the world would be a more damnable place than it already is. Their example stands out like sweet birdsong in a shadowy grove. As for those who employ me for the distribution of the truth they slash through hypocrisy and cant the way a comet sears through the heavens at night, and yet they do not wound or maim nor do they use the truth for their own advancement. Indeed they wound themselves more by adhering to it, cut themselves adrift from the safe anchorage of convention and expose themselves without raft or lifebelt to the hostile seas of suspicion.
I remember a female teacher, one of the few who refused to be taken in by your pretended illnesses. When you blamed another boy for your own piddle-stains on the freshly whitewashed gable of the schoolhouse she requested you to stick out your tongue so that the world might see the black mark on its surface, proof if any was needed that you were already at that tender age an unrepentant liar.
You obdurately refused to exhibit me in public. Now I am an organ which never entertains aspirations towards vanity and thrusting me forth in public, medical examination excepted, is not my idea of fun because I am not in the least pretty or personable. The better organs never are.
However, on that occasion I fervently wished that you would for we tongues have properties with which we suffuse ourselves and were you to make a spectacle of me on that occasion I would have been as black as the bottom sod in a raised peat bank.
Organs are not capable of acting independently of the brain but they are capable of reacting, often with embarrassing consequences.
There are many men who believe that it is both proper and natural to tell lies to women and indeed they believe that those who tell the truth to wives, especially, are leaving the side down, as it were. Fortunately most women do not believe daylight from the opposite sex who would use them for their own ends. I once heard your own wife admonishing your daughter for believing what she had been told by a neighbourhood rapscallion. Said your long-suffering spouse on that memorable occasion:
‘My dear, you are not to believe a word of it and from now until the day you die you are not to believe a single word you are told by a man, especially a married man.’
Would that more females had adopted your wife’s sensible philosophy. It is impossible to estimate the amount of anguish they would have been spared and more difficult still to measure the volume of tears that would be left unshed. Of the two known sexes man is the bigger liar. Ask any tongue for confirmation and I will be borne out. In fact the more daring of the males will invent the most outrageous lies to save themselves, to justify an injustice, to convince themselves that wrong is right and to seduce and subsequently ravish innocent females.
I know what I’m talking about. All too often have I uttered your distortions against my will. Right down through history man has shown himself to be the master of the big lie. It succeeds, though not for all time, when all else fails. It is easy enough to convince a gullible public; the difficulty arises when a once honest man is forced to convince himself.
Nazism, apartheid, religious bigotry, Klu-Kluxery and tainted patriotism flourish in a climate where men begin to believe their own lies. Soon those very lies become institutional maxims and truth shivers in the shadows like a pariah.
Worst of all, however, is when I am deliberately silenced by you. Silence has contributed more to misrule and tyranny than all the lies that have ever been told. If tongues had articulated what the brain knew to be the truth there would be no place for the tyrant or the dictator.
Sometimes courage momentarily wins the day and the brain ordains that the tongue should speak out, but just as the tongue is about to articulate the courageous condemnation the words are halted at the tongue’s tip where they languish and fade.
When the foul deed is executed how often have we heard the sideliner say that it was on the tip of his tongue to shout stop but he thought that surely somebody else would say it for him Give me the lie anytime before a wilful silence, a silence that watches coldly and callously while evil smothers good. Yes, bad as the lie is give it to me before silence.
What a quidnunc you have been. You would be the first to accuse women of having a monopoly on gossip but women are, for the most part, harmless tattlers although there are some who have permanently ruined the innocent as well as the guilty. Women are mere relayers of more outrageous fibs manufactured by man. Even your sainted mother was not above carrying a tale of dubious origins and little substance.
How many innocent holidaying girls are alleged to be absent because of illicit pregnancies and had their characters ruined and their marriage prospects decimated. Did not you yourself add to these defamations without batting an eyelid, more so if the girls in question were of outstanding character. You shamed me then and indeed I would have preferred on such occasions if somebody had cut me off and tossed me to the dogs. You tried to salve your conscience by suggesting that you were only parroting the disclosures of other small-minded men.
How I loathed your silence when your friends were being slandered, but is that not the story of most men’s lives? I would have swelled with pride had you invested me with the diction to defend them.
I have no longer any doubt but that men are the harsher and more venomous gossips. Women gossip mostly for the sake of ingratiation but men do it because it’s a crime to use a sword but no crime to pierce a heart with the malicious innuendo. Men manufacture. Women distribute.
How I remember the facility with which you broke so many hearts. Oh the gorgeous phrases so sonorous and so mellifluous that flowed from my core as you wooed the greener girls of the countryside! Even I was transported on the run-up to your first conquest, but I quickly grew disillusioned as you trotted out the same base blandishments to female after female.
You scored a bull’s-eye once in every ten throws of the amorous dart. This was good shooting by any standard but how you lied and cheated, always using me to convey the oft-repeated piffle which women seem to lap up like starving cats at a milk basin. They are easily flattered, poor creatures, and they never tire of hearing their praises sung. One day, inevitably, they become hardened after perfidious onslaughts by the likes of you.
When you would hear that a girl’s heart was breaking after you tired of her you would quote the sages and say time heals all. I wonder, however, how many of these sages were jilted or betrayed by those they loved. When you fell in love with Lily Lieloly you experienced purity and sanctity and beauty but these were not enough for you. You wanted more but Lily denied you.
I remember how you brutally defined true love ever after.
‘True love,’ said you with a smirk, ‘is when a chap wants a girl to hold his hand instead of his population stick.’
Glib isn’t the word for you. I would sooner you had mouthed the mimesis of a fart. There is much more that I could add but there are other organs anxiously awaiting their turn. Before I conclude I would ask you to use me sparingly when your dander is up. Use me most to forgive and forget and when evil assails you use me not at all.
Sincerely
Your Tongue
The Hairs of the Head Write
Dear Neighbour
As we write a white hair falls to the page. It should remind you that you are now in the autumn of your life and that at last you might consider comporting yourself accordingly so as not to embarrass us further.
We who were once black and curly grow thinner and more fragile by the hour. Yet we still manage to compliment each other and how we wish that humans as a whole could do likewise. Here, living together in total harmony, one will notice blacks, browns and yellows, whites and off-whites with occasional strands of uncommon silver.
At this stage of your life, as seen by others, we present a picture of overall greyness and this is as it should be having regard for your years, wasted and otherwise. It is about this greyness that we propose to address you. We might dwell upon other aspects of our relationship with you such as the time you shaved your cranium to the very bone after beholding Yul Brynner in The King and I or we might mention the time you dyed us all red or the time you opted for that infernal white splash, but since these were fads we feel that to dwell upon them would be to defeat our real purpose which has to do with the present time and not the past.
Of late we are growing grey for the second time and would like to remain grey this time. The first time was roughly five years ago. We well recall how your long-suffering wife, the once luscious Penelope Fitzfeckid, and your daughters looked on with mounting alarm as the fine white streaks encroached upon the ebony thatch to which they had been accustomed for so long. They imagined, poor feckless creatures, just as Keats’s bees imagined that warm days would never cease, that we would never change colour or lose so many of our brotherhood to the passage of time. For our part we were perfectly satisfied. Nature was taking its course. The inevitable was happening. Worse if you were growing bald. Now that would have been calamity! We fear nothing more than approaching baldness. For us baldness means the end of everything.
Back, however, to those females of yours. Of course, you would never give ear when they reminded you that you were consuming too much alcohol or behaving like a lecher or spending too much time with your cronies or not spending enough time at home. Your vanity, the most prickable part of your make-up was pricked once more. When they subtly suggested to you that the grey might be kept at bay you readily acquiesced and were induced to part with a substantial sum to initiate the first action against what was right and natural.
They purchased for you at a reputable pharmacist’s a bottle of Greyfix, a mixture which was guaranteed to retain the natural colour of the hair and this by merely using a small quantity of the miraculous composition whenever a grey hair hove into view. Even the cranium itself with whom we are constantly in touch had no objection to our growing grey. Only you, the brain, would disapprove.
You should know by now that a man with a dash of grey in his hair need never grow a moustache or a beard to prove his masculinity. The grey shows that he has been there and back. The white filaments stand out like stripes on a sergeant major or campaign ribbons on a veteran. This is why most grey-haired young men marry early and successfully and this is why women are so attracted to otherwise ordinary-looking men who have nothing going for them save a touch of grey in the hair.
You should be on your bended knees in thanksgiving that you have greyed with such distinction. Were we hairs but brains we would cherish every last grey rib atop the cranium. Whatever else it may be about the colour grey one thing is absolutely certain: it has an extraordinary effect on females of all ages. We, the hairs, believe that it gives the impression of accomplishment. Certainly the man with a discreet tinge of grey has a head start over his rivals. He doesn’t even have to ogle the lady of his fancy. His grey hairs do all the work for him. We also believe that women have infinite trust in grey-haired men. There is a fatherliness about them; they radiate concern. They may be no more than common rogues like yourself but women, more than men, are firm believers in the old legal decree that a grey-haired man is innocent until proven guilty.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
You would do well to utilise us more while we are willing and able to accommodate any prayerful postures you may hopefully adopt before it is too late.
We have been most wrongfully deprived of our right to participate in divine worship. Millions and millions of knees fulfil their proper roles every Sabbath while we languish and pine for our heritage.
I don’t know for sure how medical texts might describe us but more than likely we would be delineated as being joints of the ginglymus type in the middle part of the human leg. We are the articulation between the femur, tibia and the patella. This is what they have to say about us in medical journals but this is a somewhat clinical analysis. There is much more to us that has not been revealed by the followers of Hippocrates.
In all wars from the lowly skirmish to the decisive battle the knees have played vital roles. Without us every rifleman who ever aimed his weapon would be at a disadvantage. Remember the position favoured in extended-order infantry drill in which the soldier kneels on the right knee, rests the left forearm across the left thigh and grasps his rifle in the position of order arms with the right hand above the lower hand. It is we who are at the very nub of this manoeuvre. Upon our mobility depends the very life of every soldier in charge or retreat.
It is we who enable the thirsty traveller to kneel by the roadside spring and it is we who stiffen to attention when the anthem of our country is sounding and yet we cannot recall a poem or song in praise of knees, but then it is also true that the horse which earns the oats rarely receives them. We care not because we know that virtue is its own reward and we are content while we are able to serve.
We had hoped – oh! impossible dream – that one day you would be summoned into a presidential presence and honoured for services to your fellow man. We saw ourselves bending so that you might kneel upon the tasselled mat. For us this truly would have been a moment to cherish. Only a knee can kneel and kneeling is the sine qua non of knighthood. Then would come the laying on of the royal sword followed by the royal command, Arise Sir Knight!
Sir Thomas Scam. It sounds right and proper but alas your activities over a lifetime were more suited to the jailyard than the palace. In fact there are many who would suggest that you should be permanently incarcerated, roundly whipped every day and made to lie on beds of nails at night. We must be thankful that nobody ever suggested you should be made to kneel upon broken glass.
We now feel obliged to conclude, and still we entertain the hope that you will see fit to make more use of us at wayside shrines and ancient oratories, before the sacred tabernacle and representations of the crucifixion, in cemeteries and places of holy pilgrimage, in mosques, synagogues, pagodas and temples of every denomination, in grand cathedral and humble chantry. Avail of us we beseech you so that you might give thanks to your creator for the life He has breathed upon you and for the longevity He has thus far granted you. Weigh upon us in every holy place and make it known to the giver of life that for every breath you are grateful to Him and mindful of His unparalleled munificence, for life is the father and the mother of all gifts and cannot be estimated in human terms. Press upon us then without delay so that we may contribute to your belated atonement and ultimately share in your salvation.
Sincerely
Your Knees
The Tongue Writes
Dear Brain
It was I who was obliged to deliver the utterance which contained the first lie you ever told. It was a deliberate falsehood devised to ingratiate yourself into your mother’s good books after she had chastised you following a fit of petulance.
You had been sent to your room like many a small boy before you. It was a job I detested and as you know by now I can be a very sensitive fellow indeed with the power to react when an injustice is perpetrated against me. As you lay in your room endeavouring to count the myriad patterns of wild oats on the wallpaper you hit upon a plan which very nearly proved to be the death of your mother. You staggered from the bedroom clutching your breast, announcing in tones of agony from the top of the stairs that you were going to die. You blundered unsteadily downwards towards the hallway to where your mother had hastened from the garden where she had been engaged in the pruning of rose bushes. She was at first petrified upon hearing your screams and then spurred into action like all mothers by concern for your safety.
Upon beholding you she instantly fainted but luckily for all concerned her collapse coincided with the visit of an itinerant chimney sweep who ministered successfully to both of you, to your mother by gently slapping her face and to you by stoutly implanting the toe of his wellington fairly and squarely upon your pampered posterior.
How often has it been said that a kick in the right place often put a man on the right road! Certainly it was true of that occasion for you never employed such a dangerous form of deceit on your poor mother again.
You were, however, to dupe her and others in a complexity of ways for the remainder of your life. How frequently have we heard it said of scandalmongers that their tongues should be cut out. I am just another organ and, therefore, for everything I say you must be held responsible. You dictate to me and I articulate. I fulfil my other roles as a matter of course. I concern myself with assisting the teeth and throat in the vital acts of chewing and swallowing. My mucous membrane attaches itself to food, sloshing it through gum-induced saliva, retaining and refining it for the titillation of my tastebuds and at the end of these pleasurable proceedings dispatching it gratefully past the tonsils, my roots and down the deep throat to the receptive stomach.
I am filled with the most sensitive nerve fibres which issue rebukes and warnings to the entire nervous system as well as the mouth. From my fold to my papillae to my apex I am involved in essential activities for the betterment of the body as a whole and while I do not wish to sound boastful I believe it could be argued that I am an organ who bears great responsibilities as a contributor to the well-being of any given human.
I could go on about my physical philanthropy but these functions I have cited are as nothing in comparison to the awesome power which sends millions of words tripping off my apex day after day. Most of these I will concede are meaningless and although packaged in phrases and sentences it can be safely said that were they never uttered there would be no loss whatsoever to the world. There are countless men and women who have utilised me on a round-the-clock basis and who have never issued a word of common sense. There are millions who use me for nothing better than criticising and maligning friends, neighbours and institutions. There are, mercifully, a gracious and godly few who never employ me for the voicing of evil commentary about others and but for these kind-hearted souls the world would be a more damnable place than it already is. Their example stands out like sweet birdsong in a shadowy grove. As for those who employ me for the distribution of the truth they slash through hypocrisy and cant the way a comet sears through the heavens at night, and yet they do not wound or maim nor do they use the truth for their own advancement. Indeed they wound themselves more by adhering to it, cut themselves adrift from the safe anchorage of convention and expose themselves without raft or lifebelt to the hostile seas of suspicion.
I remember a female teacher, one of the few who refused to be taken in by your pretended illnesses. When you blamed another boy for your own piddle-stains on the freshly whitewashed gable of the schoolhouse she requested you to stick out your tongue so that the world might see the black mark on its surface, proof if any was needed that you were already at that tender age an unrepentant liar.
You obdurately refused to exhibit me in public. Now I am an organ which never entertains aspirations towards vanity and thrusting me forth in public, medical examination excepted, is not my idea of fun because I am not in the least pretty or personable. The better organs never are.
However, on that occasion I fervently wished that you would for we tongues have properties with which we suffuse ourselves and were you to make a spectacle of me on that occasion I would have been as black as the bottom sod in a raised peat bank.
Organs are not capable of acting independently of the brain but they are capable of reacting, often with embarrassing consequences.
There are many men who believe that it is both proper and natural to tell lies to women and indeed they believe that those who tell the truth to wives, especially, are leaving the side down, as it were. Fortunately most women do not believe daylight from the opposite sex who would use them for their own ends. I once heard your own wife admonishing your daughter for believing what she had been told by a neighbourhood rapscallion. Said your long-suffering spouse on that memorable occasion:
‘My dear, you are not to believe a word of it and from now until the day you die you are not to believe a single word you are told by a man, especially a married man.’
Would that more females had adopted your wife’s sensible philosophy. It is impossible to estimate the amount of anguish they would have been spared and more difficult still to measure the volume of tears that would be left unshed. Of the two known sexes man is the bigger liar. Ask any tongue for confirmation and I will be borne out. In fact the more daring of the males will invent the most outrageous lies to save themselves, to justify an injustice, to convince themselves that wrong is right and to seduce and subsequently ravish innocent females.
I know what I’m talking about. All too often have I uttered your distortions against my will. Right down through history man has shown himself to be the master of the big lie. It succeeds, though not for all time, when all else fails. It is easy enough to convince a gullible public; the difficulty arises when a once honest man is forced to convince himself.
Nazism, apartheid, religious bigotry, Klu-Kluxery and tainted patriotism flourish in a climate where men begin to believe their own lies. Soon those very lies become institutional maxims and truth shivers in the shadows like a pariah.
Worst of all, however, is when I am deliberately silenced by you. Silence has contributed more to misrule and tyranny than all the lies that have ever been told. If tongues had articulated what the brain knew to be the truth there would be no place for the tyrant or the dictator.
Sometimes courage momentarily wins the day and the brain ordains that the tongue should speak out, but just as the tongue is about to articulate the courageous condemnation the words are halted at the tongue’s tip where they languish and fade.
When the foul deed is executed how often have we heard the sideliner say that it was on the tip of his tongue to shout stop but he thought that surely somebody else would say it for him Give me the lie anytime before a wilful silence, a silence that watches coldly and callously while evil smothers good. Yes, bad as the lie is give it to me before silence.
What a quidnunc you have been. You would be the first to accuse women of having a monopoly on gossip but women are, for the most part, harmless tattlers although there are some who have permanently ruined the innocent as well as the guilty. Women are mere relayers of more outrageous fibs manufactured by man. Even your sainted mother was not above carrying a tale of dubious origins and little substance.
How many innocent holidaying girls are alleged to be absent because of illicit pregnancies and had their characters ruined and their marriage prospects decimated. Did not you yourself add to these defamations without batting an eyelid, more so if the girls in question were of outstanding character. You shamed me then and indeed I would have preferred on such occasions if somebody had cut me off and tossed me to the dogs. You tried to salve your conscience by suggesting that you were only parroting the disclosures of other small-minded men.
How I loathed your silence when your friends were being slandered, but is that not the story of most men’s lives? I would have swelled with pride had you invested me with the diction to defend them.
I have no longer any doubt but that men are the harsher and more venomous gossips. Women gossip mostly for the sake of ingratiation but men do it because it’s a crime to use a sword but no crime to pierce a heart with the malicious innuendo. Men manufacture. Women distribute.
How I remember the facility with which you broke so many hearts. Oh the gorgeous phrases so sonorous and so mellifluous that flowed from my core as you wooed the greener girls of the countryside! Even I was transported on the run-up to your first conquest, but I quickly grew disillusioned as you trotted out the same base blandishments to female after female.
You scored a bull’s-eye once in every ten throws of the amorous dart. This was good shooting by any standard but how you lied and cheated, always using me to convey the oft-repeated piffle which women seem to lap up like starving cats at a milk basin. They are easily flattered, poor creatures, and they never tire of hearing their praises sung. One day, inevitably, they become hardened after perfidious onslaughts by the likes of you.
When you would hear that a girl’s heart was breaking after you tired of her you would quote the sages and say time heals all. I wonder, however, how many of these sages were jilted or betrayed by those they loved. When you fell in love with Lily Lieloly you experienced purity and sanctity and beauty but these were not enough for you. You wanted more but Lily denied you.
I remember how you brutally defined true love ever after.
‘True love,’ said you with a smirk, ‘is when a chap wants a girl to hold his hand instead of his population stick.’
Glib isn’t the word for you. I would sooner you had mouthed the mimesis of a fart. There is much more that I could add but there are other organs anxiously awaiting their turn. Before I conclude I would ask you to use me sparingly when your dander is up. Use me most to forgive and forget and when evil assails you use me not at all.
Sincerely
Your Tongue
The Hairs of the Head Write
Dear Neighbour
As we write a white hair falls to the page. It should remind you that you are now in the autumn of your life and that at last you might consider comporting yourself accordingly so as not to embarrass us further.
We who were once black and curly grow thinner and more fragile by the hour. Yet we still manage to compliment each other and how we wish that humans as a whole could do likewise. Here, living together in total harmony, one will notice blacks, browns and yellows, whites and off-whites with occasional strands of uncommon silver.
At this stage of your life, as seen by others, we present a picture of overall greyness and this is as it should be having regard for your years, wasted and otherwise. It is about this greyness that we propose to address you. We might dwell upon other aspects of our relationship with you such as the time you shaved your cranium to the very bone after beholding Yul Brynner in The King and I or we might mention the time you dyed us all red or the time you opted for that infernal white splash, but since these were fads we feel that to dwell upon them would be to defeat our real purpose which has to do with the present time and not the past.
Of late we are growing grey for the second time and would like to remain grey this time. The first time was roughly five years ago. We well recall how your long-suffering wife, the once luscious Penelope Fitzfeckid, and your daughters looked on with mounting alarm as the fine white streaks encroached upon the ebony thatch to which they had been accustomed for so long. They imagined, poor feckless creatures, just as Keats’s bees imagined that warm days would never cease, that we would never change colour or lose so many of our brotherhood to the passage of time. For our part we were perfectly satisfied. Nature was taking its course. The inevitable was happening. Worse if you were growing bald. Now that would have been calamity! We fear nothing more than approaching baldness. For us baldness means the end of everything.
Back, however, to those females of yours. Of course, you would never give ear when they reminded you that you were consuming too much alcohol or behaving like a lecher or spending too much time with your cronies or not spending enough time at home. Your vanity, the most prickable part of your make-up was pricked once more. When they subtly suggested to you that the grey might be kept at bay you readily acquiesced and were induced to part with a substantial sum to initiate the first action against what was right and natural.
They purchased for you at a reputable pharmacist’s a bottle of Greyfix, a mixture which was guaranteed to retain the natural colour of the hair and this by merely using a small quantity of the miraculous composition whenever a grey hair hove into view. Even the cranium itself with whom we are constantly in touch had no objection to our growing grey. Only you, the brain, would disapprove.
You should know by now that a man with a dash of grey in his hair need never grow a moustache or a beard to prove his masculinity. The grey shows that he has been there and back. The white filaments stand out like stripes on a sergeant major or campaign ribbons on a veteran. This is why most grey-haired young men marry early and successfully and this is why women are so attracted to otherwise ordinary-looking men who have nothing going for them save a touch of grey in the hair.
You should be on your bended knees in thanksgiving that you have greyed with such distinction. Were we hairs but brains we would cherish every last grey rib atop the cranium. Whatever else it may be about the colour grey one thing is absolutely certain: it has an extraordinary effect on females of all ages. We, the hairs, believe that it gives the impression of accomplishment. Certainly the man with a discreet tinge of grey has a head start over his rivals. He doesn’t even have to ogle the lady of his fancy. His grey hairs do all the work for him. We also believe that women have infinite trust in grey-haired men. There is a fatherliness about them; they radiate concern. They may be no more than common rogues like yourself but women, more than men, are firm believers in the old legal decree that a grey-haired man is innocent until proven guilty.
