Discussion On the Plot, synopsis and setting of the novelist Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations 

Fundamentally, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations immortalizes satirizing constitutional democracy, parliamentary reforms bill, labour rights’ and prison amendments through reformation of genteel characters as gentleman. Marginalization and exclusion both extend suffrage of these fictional characters; they accomplish the triumph of success and prosperity of Dickensian doubles or juxtaposition with regard to indigenous or hybridized gender, caste and ethnicity. The publication of “The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin” theorized or reinforced Dickensian novel Great Expectations compelled characterization undergoing cataclysmic degeneration or progressive evolution.

“Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurances.” These lines expostulate the infernal despotism of injustice and tormenting tyranny, grieved by the biographer or the protagonist.  Firstly, churchyards symbolize deathly gallows or gruesome grimace and secondly, prisons symbolize the exploited or persecuted power. Sepulchral graveyard with tombstones and the dramatic encounter with the prisonship or hulk escaped convict memorializes Charles Dickens’ juvenile infancy –the symbolic immaturity. Through freemasonry sympathy or affectionate tenderheartedness, the narrator embodies Abel Magwitch as the marginalized or underprivileged distinction.

Intellectual liberty or freedom of education enables readers to interpret that this aspect Miss Havisham abandons ever since jilted by her fiancé Compeyson twenty minutes past nine.  “She an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises […] and in partickler, would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you see?” The narrator doesn’t want to be governed by institutionalized authority that penalizes the rural village folk community. These majority of oppressed from injustice and victims of presentment becomes marginalized as minority by administrative power, aspects of wealth or finance-the symbolic evil menace. Dickens references to “savage young gentleman contrasts ”“wild beasts” symbolic of modest aggressiveness and profound explosiveness respectively. Abel Magwitch’s Gentleman Compeyson, the sham involvement in feud reflect Dickensian demonic that needs to be polished. This misty marshes or moors scene foreshadowing contrasts with the feud of Satis House, Pip challenged to duel with Herbert Pocket, “the pale young gentleman” ere in the novel.

Moreover, Dickens’ Great Expectations turning point plot twists renders to the advancement of society from the threshold terminal of the sub-urbs to the absolute cosmopolitanism. The narrator or biographer’s migration embodies aquaintanceship with Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer. Beknownst of the stranger’s eccentricity Mr. Jaggers. “smell strongly of soap” body fragrance and the incessant “washing of hands” memorialized by the incidental wedding feast of Miss Havisham’s party. Dickens allegorizes British imperialism, English the parliament and justice system through the obsessive washing of hands as a psychological mechanism to persecute criminals from corrupting or impure him- this symbolize despotism in shrewd criticism. He consorts with vicious criminals and even these ruffians are terrified of him. Although a criminal lawyer-ironically symbolic impenetrable exterior [Mr Jaggers can be characterized as pragmatic, dark, professional and arrogant] Mr. Jaggers was bestowed with the sponsorship or patronage to be Pip’s counselor and guardian. Benediction of wealth and fortunes intrigued Mr. Jaggers to solicit family Havishams’ or Magwitch’s lawsuits of legacy.

“Jaggers has an air of authority not to be disputed” and “a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us that would eventually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it.”  Wemmick’s remark further elicits disposition of Mr. Jaggers when he says, “as deep … as Australia.” Mysterious Molly, the wretched savage caregiving or civilizing was happening by and by. Subtlety of detrimental knowledge pertaining to the appraised Molly’s persisting  existence. The hero’s Great Expectations should be fulfilled by solicitation and purchase of shoes and suits embody the perpetual condescension as a gentleman-symbolic of cultural assimilation to consumerist London.  “Through good and evil I stuck to my books.” and “I had a taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day.” Education of Victorian England and passion of learning exemplifies the Dickensian spirits of Shakespeare’s reading. The narrator subconscious acquiesced privileges of attending the tutorship of Herbert Pocket. Even Magwitch dreamed of being a gentleman despite being a fierce rebel; nonetheless, he wanted to embellishing prospect to mould Pip as a young gentleman. Moral regeneration lacks in the apprenticeship of Orlick [“He should never be thinking”] or education of Drummle [“half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen”] respectively.    

Taxi Driver


Best thing about
not making it as
a writer
is you can write in peace,
read too,


live happy, free,
suffering from the effects
of status
inconsistency. 



Monumental


Cucumber
madness
pickling
minds
fraught
chiseled on the mountain
head-rushing
LSD trips
in stone
representing
hope, freedom,
the American way
of love
Christian values
dammit
in travail,
growth, organization,
and war
at night
in the moonlight
howling. 


Among the Inhabitants of the Ant-farm


I would be
wondering if there were
no God
the idea to create one
might be overwhelming. 


Rodent


Sharp incisors
naked tail
furtive
eyeball chewing
pet
worthy
of plague.

Blood Stirring Under Scars

Although memory’s boat has drifted far downstream now I remember a movie directed by Resnais about troubled memory, others adapted from plays by William Inge, Paddy Chayefsky, characters living in boarding houses, but alone, clocks ticking, repressed sexual energy, longing; Cheever’s stories, sadness of the human heart, days draining into the gulf of middle age.  I also strain to remember staying near a train station, some storm of my own, some calm, leaving almost-love, airy dreams, behind.

A publican’s spoiled daughter with a taste for carnal excitement who resembled a Toulouse-Lautrec model, liked Elvis Presley, averted her head to exhale smoke, showcasing curls on her nape, hair in a top-knot.  Tracing her after so long, I ambushed logic with foolish assumptions, a wrong address.  You could blame addiction to quietly dramatic tales, wanting two goes at life.

A postal employee in the Dead Letter Office, perhaps a TV soapie fan with an old-fashioned attitude to service enthused by possibilities of solving problems of the aforementioned human heart, placed a newspaper ad that tinkled a tiny bell of memory in a reader’s mind.

I hitch-hiked thousands of miles across foreign soil through the Yukon to Alaska without losing my nerve, yet now, feeling the heft of years, sleeping too much, welcome her answering service, relief a brief respite from angst, my message putting off expectations, but too late to turn back.  Coward, coward, I think knowing not how many blurred, bestilled evenings I have left.

Train arrivals once shook our floor like great wind gusts as we sought each other’s heat.  I again trawl over early chapters, their residuum, questions needing detailed answers.  My agitated phone’s signal engulfs me, trapping a small bird in my chest.  Those trains emerging from the blackest tunnel, those dilapidated days, surge back.  

                                                                         ****************

No Mercy

A thirteen year-old boy wearing a school jumper and gauzy bravado he shall always remember strides towards a beach several miles from his poor family home south of Melbourne, cold, trembling from his latest thrashing.  The gravel road lies quiet but for a lone car driven by a novelist who never stops to offer a ride.

When my father died my mother gave me his wallet, his belt.  He left no memory of kind words.  She knew this.  She remembered.  Inside the wallet, hidden, I found money, too much for the old-age pension, not part of a memento.

The novelist’s family, with their own light aircraft and airstrip, lives beyond the boy’s, all English emigres settling a domain of kookaburras and copperheads.  He has finished writing a book about the fraught end of our beloved world, a world I wanted to experience before it ended, later to be filmed, partly in this area where the posher properties swoon, immaculate, with white horse fences gleaming below a pale moon and its jewels.

Through the long personal twilight I thought about my father’s life, and death, which he feared right until the end.  I thought I heard a man weeping when a bird, seeing only freedom in my window, stunned itself, lay panting on my veranda near a birds-nest fern in a tub before travelling on, a wingbeat ahead of silent cats and certain death.

The car’s sound faded, the boy’s contempt for that novelist, for most adults, parents, teachers, cops, dissolved into shadows at a paddock’s edge, a stray dog passes him, then turns to follow ten yards behind, gait faithful to his, seeking adoption, the boy’s mind running amok through a dreamlike future, that unknown pinprick of starlight we each grope towards.

I fell to thinking about how I found a kind of love, relegated the past, discovered the remainder of my days.  When I returned the banknotes, everything except a cropped photograph of my sister long ago, and small change, my mother’s face stamped her guilty of attempted bribery.  And heartache.

The boy has a pound for each year he has lived, earned, stolen, stashed, his pouch of tobacco, a rage for freedom, for cities’ giddy adventure, thinks he could hitchhike 500 miles to Sydney: in imagination’s kingdom a truck-stop, a jukebox, songs of lonely far-off times.  

****** 

Spelling

Those days furnished no mementos, only hard memories about dreaming of freedom.  Locked up in an historic gaol built in an era of self-satisfaction, of statues, outdated then, townhouses now, we spotted hardened lags wasting precious days in the much larger adult section.  Like them, most of us boys were heading for damnation.  Protocol savage, recent tattoos serving me well, we hearkened back in that pandemonium to times when we were boys as if our collective childhood happened in the distant past.

An infamous murderer, a DJ on the outside, ran our in-(the big) house radio station.  I listened wrapped in a cloak of provisional safety holding a flat earpiece connected to a wire, alone at last, dreaming of freedom, endurance of solitude the best time for me but apparently not for many of the other young offenders between 4p.m. and 7a.m. when we emptied our waste in the cold light, avoiding splash, fetid stench swirling in the air, our reek the only vestige of us in that stink hole free to float away.

Old magazines circulated.  Most boys didn’t care to read, or couldn’t, although they liked the pictures.  Glossy photos of food outraged my hunger for a meal better than degrading.  Swimsuit models caught my eye, my breath.  I devoured word knowledge tests dreaming of freedom using a pencil stub kept in my tobacco, often guessing the opposite to correct answers of multiple-choice questions, otherwise doing OK.  I instinctively mentally corrected spelling mistakes reading the despair, defamation, humour, and of course, rage, in graffiti etched and inked over years into my walls, but I lacked answers.  Still do from time to time, faded tattoos become motifs these remedial years on.

Two boys who hit an elderly newsagent harder than intended when robbing him received crushing sentences, unlike mine.  The younger one, who acted tougher in the yard, was overheard sobbing nocturnally in that silenced madhouse of rage sorrowing for a lost dream of freedom, or the dead man.  Who knows?  I can’t find them on Google, but traced another, a loud, ignorant boy from those drear days, dead now, described as a habitual petty criminal all his life.

There was a girl whose letters had finally caught up with me.  She worked in the city.  On my release, unmet, resolute after a careful countdown, a thing I still do, the raw cry of a tram rattling towards the bright city surged my young blood.

                                                                     ***************

Ian C Smith, P.O. Box 9262, Sale, Australia, 3850.  <icsmithpoet@gmail.com>

Wide Reading Among Kids – WRAK Donation Promo-Script.

A child can read.
A child can dream big by reading one book.
A child be it from a rich home or a poor home has the same potential to dare to dream.
The easiest way for our beautiful pearls to escape this world into a world of possibilities is for them seeing themselves in stories.
Stories told by locals and in African settings.
Wide Reading Among Kids – WRAK campaign needs you to put a seraphic smile on our little one’s face.

Make your contribution in a form of donation as low as 1 Cedi daily and in one year you’ve blessed a community.
Kindly, send your Mobile Money Support as Donation to MTN: Mo-Mo Pay ID: 760719 or Pay to 0594064037 – Account Name: Donkomi Fie Ltd.
Better-Still, Call or WhatsApp: +233247654113 for more information or Enquiry about up-coming WRAK Outreach Programs, Book Camps and Educative Projects.
You can also log on to: www.widereadingamongkids.org to read and learn more. Go-Fund-Me Donation Web-Link: www.gofundme.com/f/xccby-wide-reading-among-kids   https://soundcloud.com/ikeboatofficial/wrakpromojingle  

Wide Reading Among Kids – WRAK – Improving Kids Reading

Originally, Written By Dennis Mann #Founder #President #Director – WRAK.
Re-Written Edited And Studio Recording Voice-Over By Ike Boat

Out There

It’s out there
We must drive in it
Walk in it
It’s out there
It’s too much with us
Getting and spending
We get it
Understand what we
Have done
Wasted our powers
Given our hearts away
Lost the tune
Forgot the words
The weather changes
Sealed in the politics
Of now
Of what we did
What we are doing
It’s out there
That’s all
Just out there
The earth of it
The air of it
The water
Collecting the evidence
Details it will use
Against us
It’s all out there.


Climate

This hot breeze holds the afternoon
summarizes it in a brief moment
says so much about what we have
these days – too much sun, heat,
a few clouds that give into the days
spinning by, so little rain. This is
the climate change they promised us
warned us about, while we were too
busy with other things, things that
seem trivial now in the nineties, in
this heat wave, in this drought. We
air-condition what we can, we sit
in any shade we find, fill plastic pools
for the dogs, joke about running
through the sprinkler like we did as
children, a game we no longer can
play. The news we hear and watch
doesn’t bother mentioning this any-
more, as if the scientists have given
up on us, realize playing Cassandra
didn’t help, doesn’t help and like us
feel this hot breeze, that summarizes
what’s left of our afternoon, this brief
moment that says so much about what
we have done.


Rain

We used to say, farmers need the rain
whether We knew they did or not,
but now We all need the rain
like today it rained all day
not just our lawns and lakes
but our spirits too
need the rain
bogged down the way We have been
in a spiritual,
a psychic drought
tired, dry days, one after another
till today
We all needed the rain
and it came down
all morning, all afternoon, this evening
beyond trying to satisfy our lawns and
our lakes, the sound of the rain 
the ticking at times at our windows
the whoosh in the wind
and the calming hush of it 
bring a peace along with it
a whole day of this peaceful sound
of rain
We should all now say we need the rain.

Welcome, readers, to September’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine. This month’s submissions invite us to consider our trajectories as individuals, social groups, or even as a species inhabiting the planet.

Some philosophers and social theorists see the development of civilization as a forward march towards greater moral and material progress. Others view how human societies develop over time in a less linear way. To them, societies take some steps forward and some backward, and sometimes make changes that are just changes, not advancements or declines. And others see societies as capable of simultaneously advancing in some areas yet declining in others.

This month’s contributors ponder where we are moving as individuals or as larger societies. Where have we come from, and where are we going?

Lorraine Caputo writes of trains in Mexico, how they can bring reunion as well as separation. Robert Thomas provides cultural commentary and observations through the lens of two different restaurant dinners, and Sandeep Kumar Mishra writes thoughtful and poetic reflections on travel, exile, loss and the complex humanity of the third world and its residents. Kahlil Crawford outlines the cultural and ethnic history of the St. Paul/Minneapolis area. Ike Boat writes of a hardscrabble up-and-coming life as an artist in urban Accra, Ghana. Poet Mary Mackey interviews Sacramento (California)’s poet laureate Indigo Moor, whose recent collection Everybody’s Jonesing for Something explores the hope, dreams, death and injustice involved with the American Dream.

Mark Young and Charlie Robert intersperse bits of history into clever poems. Mark presents fresh mechanically generated pieces starting with ‘found writing’ in literary and non-literary texts, and Charlie Robert echoes American history with scat-like chant pieces.

Dr. Thomas Fink’s poetry considers what happens when we look at organic life and impose our ideas of what progress means, while Andrew C. MacDonald writes of rural life and the passage of time.

Some philosophers posit the existence of a ‘human nature’ that includes some psychological characteristics that stay relatively stable across cultures and throughout time. To them, people and societies face perennial questions and challenges. Several of our contributors speak to tensions that have been considered part of our nature.

Binod Dawadi encourages people to choose peace and tolerance over materialism, greed, prejudice and exclusion. Henry Bladon writes of the journey of death, physical death and soul-death through harming others. Christopher Bernard’s monthly installment of his story The Ghost Trolley presents through a childhood heroic adventure a conflict between those who seek a simple and humble life and those who wish to dominate and control others. Chimezie Ihekuna’s monthly screenplay preview showcases a drama about a corrupt business manager – and those under him who must choose justice or revenge. Z.I. Mahmud, in his monthly installment of his thesis on the works of Charles Dickens, illustrates how Dickens uses literary devices to advocate for humane values in David Copperfield.

Others among our contributors also speak to questions humans face and seemingly universal aspects of the human condition, but on a more personal and individual level.

Hongri Yuan, in poems translated by Yuanbing Zhang, uses imagery to evoke our pursuit of transcendence amidst our difficult and mundane lives. Jack Galmitz speaks to how we see each other and how we might wish to be remembered. Mahbub rejoices in various forms of love as a comfort during personal or political tragedies. R.P. Verlaine sings of love lost, memory, and remonstrance. Mike Zone writes of a man who loses, or gives over, part of his humanity through love and imagination, and becomes something other than himself.

Michael Steffen’s speakers have to decide whether to step out of their comfort zones to learn and grow, while Mark Blickley presents a man who rethinks his behavior. J.J. Campbell’s short e.e. cummings-esque poetic pieces look at the dangerous and dull places our minds can go when left alone. Elizabeth Hughes reviews Vincent Hollow’s poetry collection Swan Songs of Cygnus in her monthly Book Periscope column, which draws on astronomy and cosmology as a metaphor for the emotional journey of love and grief.

Sushant Kumar celebrates the hard work and devotion of mothers. As he reminds us, we all have someone who birthed and who raised us, we all come from somewhere.