When Karl Drops IN

MY world is contained by the walls of my little house and my access to love by the mewing and purrs of a little cat. I accept that I live in a little world, but it is expansive too. The great minds who line my shelves come to talk daily with me and we debate the very themes of life and civilisation. I'm touched, flattered, that Aristotle stops off in Seddon to thrash out the Great Themes and happier to report that I often get the better of the grumpy old Greek. As to Adam Smith, we wrestle and tumble but when our conversations are done and he has conceded defeat, graciously, it is on to tackle Marx in the red corner and me in the white, about to be taught a lesson.

Marx is the one person you can't lay a glove on. The logic, pure and sublime. The profundity in cutting to the economic essence of  class, that endless tallying of exploitative economic units. There are cogs and Karl saw their spinning whir. We have met them and they are ourselves!  Ground down and ultimately discarded, Karl saw the fate for all of his day who inhaled the air just then starting to become saturated with modern industry's carbon-spewing onslaught.

Karl and I were chatting again just this afternoon and while his habit of appearing in his long johns is a bit disconcerting, he still managed to draw out of me the serum of solace,  the antidote to despair that I have distilled from so many, many sources. Karl could afford to be optimistic. He had diagnosed the problem and had reason to believe it could be cured. We have seen the world become less fair, the great philosophy never really executed, always compromised by human weakness.

I should be abject with gloom that the last, best hope for all mankind had been tried and failed, but I am not, not at all. Here are the ingredients that go into my tonic of optimism: Feminism. Aboriginality. You, dear Karl. And the Earth, Mother Earth, whose breast sustains us.

Of you I sing, and of you I will write.