September haiku

I haven't been keeping track of the days. I thought today was Thursday, but I'm informed that it's Friday.

I thought it was a couple of days ago I composed a haiku in my head, looking out the kitchen window at the garden, but it might have been longer. I think it was July that, looking out at the same view, I composed another haiku, which I meant to write down, but didn't. The July haiku went something like this:

To say that there is
Honeysuckle by the door
Is only the truth.

The September haiku went like this:

Rain. Wind shakes the web.
At first I miss the spider –
There, under a leaf.

I think it was on the same day I composed this latter haiku that I listened again to the album Ocky Milk by Momus. I think it might be his strongest album of this century so far.

Momus is known as being a 'fake' artist, in that he favours Brechtian distancing, often writes musical pastiches, is suspicious of what he calls "rockism", which is characterised by the Romantic emphasis on authenticity, etc.

However, listening to Ocky Milk, I felt again what I have felt before, that there is at least one sense in which 'fake' doesn't cover his creative output. I think my favourite songs by Momus are all characterised by an autumnal or sometimes even wintry mood – 'Beowulf', 'Lovely Tree' and others. Ocky Milk has its share of these, and the best of them all, for me, is 'Zanzibar'.

When I say autumnal, I have in mind a particular feeling that has haunted me all my life. Wistfulness comes close, but, perhaps only in phonetics, perhaps also in other ways, sounds a little too close to 'whimsicality'. What I'm talking about is something deeper.

It was only quite recently – this year, I think – that I learned a word I wish I'd known a long time ago. That word is 'sehnsucht'.

It's a German word and apparently untranslatable. Therefore, I may be using it inappropriately to fit a feeling of my own for which there are no words. However, in support of my intuition, I strongly associate the feeling I have with children's stories such as those written by C.S. Lewis, and I find that the word 'sehnsucht' had particular resonance for Lewis. Of sehnsucht, he wrote that it is:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

We live in an age when people try to film ghosts on popular television shows. No self-respecting ghost would appear on Britain's Most Haunted.

Perhaps the word 'sehnsucht' should not even exist. Perhaps I should not even have written this.

I will publish this, but I am sure I will feel ashamed.

Let's just say I'm a fake, and pretend there's nothing more to it.