I think I have hit upon the distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is allowed its little throwaways, its clichés, its bland linking paragraphs. Prose is shored up everywhere by the base foundation of the everyday, so that even when it falls apart we can see the scaffold beneath it and guess what the writer was trying oh-so-unsuccessfully to do. Poetry, on the other hand, has no such safety net. Nothing in poetry can be familar or commonplace, every single word must be load-bearing, nothing must go to waste. Poetry, far from being flowery or lavish, is the ultimate in artistic economy.

And so it only occurs to me now that Scorsese’s films are actual poems, stripped of all life’s fat and gristle, lean and hungry as middleweights. Look at Bringing Out the Dead. Is there a single shot in this movie you’ve ever seen before, or even one obligatory scene? No. Instead, there are moments of such dark, diabolical comedy that their very perfection moves us to tears, and every camera movement is like a word of obscure beauty we had never heard before.

So I’m watching all these scenes in which Bob Dylan looks on with a blank approximation of messianic pity whilst someone or other monologises on a life well or woefully spent, and I’m thinking “What, really?” Is it all a joke about the cult of celebrity, the way we take a bunch of answers and project them onto the guy at the top of the pop charts? Is it a step beyond that, even, a joke about those kinds of jokes? I mean, it can’t be serious, can it? Does the film really think we think Bob Dylan is Christ? But then, everything about those scenes… if they aren’t sincere, they’ll do till sincere comes along.

Bob Dylan’s films seem always to have been about his myth rather than his music, and something like Masked and Anonymous makes you wonder if what we care most and know least about, in the end, is what we mean to those around us. Poems, they say, are love songs to the world; too bad the world never writes back.

It’s funny. When I was young, my greatest fear was of things that looked and even acted like people, but weren’t. Robots, androids, aliens, clones, these were the stuff of my nightmares, not the unambiguous evil of a Jason or Freddy Krueger. Evangelists ought to strike terror into the heart of my remaining youth, as even ordinary men of god do. But the fear inspired by Gene Scott, as it seems to me, is dull, throbbing, like (I suppose) your conscience. His angry eyes, staring out of the screen, are to be propitiated, not avoided. A pensioner’s dream, that, to bask in the anger-turned-love of his gaze!

But the singers! Every now and then, whilst Scott takes (I imagine) a toilet break, a display of flashing telephone numbers foregrounds a couple of Las Vegas-like singers whose every eye movement oozes with oily professionalism, smilingly showcasing the love of God like it was for sale on the Home Shopping Channel, buy now, don’t pay later! They are the chilling ones, scary like the soulless sparkle of Daniel O’Donnell and his dead, unsmiling eyes.

And I could drown in the world as if
My joy were as warm as the honeyed bee
That buzzes at night with fireflies
On the other side of the dark.

In the grand old days, football management sims were just glorified spreadsheets, rows of numbers about how good your players were giving way to a screenshot of a football pitch on which would occasionally flash such bulletins as “HARTLEP’L 1 CREWE A 0″ to the aural accompaniment of frenzied static which, as we all know, is what cheering sounded like back then.

Watching cricket on TV is still like this. It is a long, patient, inert shot of a cricket ground, along the bottom of which a statistical tickertape scrolls, informing us that 4, 19, 2, 0, 192-7, 33, that’s Numberwang! They might as well substitute the footage with a Knightmare-like graphic of your own decomposing face, age eating away at your once youthful looks and sallowing your sunken cheeks to dust. Allow me, therefore, to propose a maxim.

Any activity which is not immediately separable from its scoring mechanics is not a sport, but merely a game.

By this I mean that if you can’t imagine playing it without keeping track of the score then it isn’t a sport. It would be mental, for example, to play Monopoly without money. Darts sans scoring is just some guy throwing stuff at a wall. Kids can happily play football or rugby or basketball without keeping scores. But not cricket, though. A casual game of pick-up cricket wouldn’t make any sense.

Le it be noted that the mere relegation of an activity to the realm of games does not necessarily entail its worthlessness. Cricket is worthless not simply because it’s a game, but because it is an affectation. It has to be. There’s no beauty in it, just the same three or four things happening over and over again for hours on end. Nothing different could ever happen. Nothing different ever will. There will be no genius of cricket, no revolutionaries, just people who are slightly better or slightly worse at doing the same old thing. There’s no aspiration, no innocence, nothing even remotely human. Machines could play it. Cricket, in short, is anti-sport. And I, for one, hate it.

Because when I watch The Pianist, I find it to be full of what Werner Herzog would call dead images, stale, lifeless, obligatory scenes which fail to bring home the Holocaust to anyone. Cinema has trivialised suffering to the point whereby eliciting an audience reaction is now a tightrope walk with Sentimentality, it is true, and The Pianist does well to eschew this high-wire gamble. But it doesn’t really have anything powerful to offer us in its stead, just cliché and convention. So because the movie doesn’t have anything new to say about the suffering of the Jewish people, I catch myself watching the scenes of women and children being herded onto cattle trucks and asking “Who would allow this? What ordinary human being could have done this for a living, and then went home and had dinner and played with the kids and read the newspaper?” But the movie is not really interested in such questions. No ordinary human beings could have done it. There were no ordinary Nazis. QED.

But there must have been, mustn’t there? What was running through the heads of the German soldiers when they witnessed scenes of heartrending misery a thousand times worse than anything Hollywood has to show us? Fear? Denial? Group hysteria? Was there genuine madness there? I sometimes worry about the way movies like these actually absolve us all of the Holocaust, allowing us to shake our heads in sad wisdom and sob chastely whilst ignoring entirely the fact that these unspeakable horrors where not committed by a bunch of fairy-tale ogres but by us, ordinary people, the rank and file of mankind. The Holocaust was not something the Germans did to the Jews, but something we did to ourselves.

I realise this film is not about the Germans, but it is not about the Jews either. It is not about anything much, so far as I can tell. Adrien Brody’s character survives the war through sitting impassively around and relying on the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s how it really was, and those who emerged from the Holocaust with their lives were not necessarily the ones with great internal fortitude and guile, but the ones who were impossibly lucky over and over and over again. Probably that’s exactly how it was. But I doubt many of the people who managed to live through that kind of horror were as utterly devoid of mental and personal resource as Brody’s character is here, so completely lifeless and inert that the very fact of his still breathing takes on a kind of bizarre fascination.

And maybe that’s Polanski’s point, that the only way to survive was by being that kind of inactive, impassive, virtual non-entity, creeping below the registers of detectable life, and that any kind of desire to be involved in the business of living was what got people killed. That would be a truly horrific moral choice to make, between Dying and Not Living. I can’t imagine it. But neither, it seems, can The Pianist.

“The thing about being seventy,” she intones somberly, “Is that you can’t make plans anymore. Ten years, five years, two, you don’t know how long you have left. You won’t see your own grandchildren grow up. You keep the house tidy so that it won’t be too hard for your daughters to clear out when something happens to you. These things. But you still have to go on living your life as if nothing were different, even though it might all end today, tomorrow, next week.”

She sighs wistfully and I want, I want I want I want to leap from my chair with a Cartmanesque screech of “GodDAMMIT! What am I supposed to say to that?!” But I can’t. Instead I have to lie, spout platitudes, pretend not only that I understand but that, hey, it’s no biggie, you’ve got years to go before you’ll need to worry about things like that, man, tough broad like you will probably see the rest of us out etc.

You’re right. You’ll die soon. How awful.

You may have noticed that I am scared of Death. You may also have noticed that the Pope of Rome’s a Catholic, and that a bear shits in the woods. But what I am actually afraid of is humourlessness. I’m not that keen on dying, but I can accept it. What I can’t accept is that it isn’t funny. It won’t be like in Super Mario when I triple somersault through falling bricks and fireballs only to fucking volley a green shell against myself. There’ll be no harp-playing angel hovering above my head; I won’t be going around the Glasgow Underground trying to punch other ghosts, or coming back as a snowman, or an oven glove, or an origami swan. I’ll just be lying there. Dead. It’s not a pleasant thought.

I don’t know. Maybe death is like being drunk, only funny when it happens to you. Who knows. I hope at least my murderer has a laugh.

From curtained closets calls distinct
Clash in closet air: distant cries
And whimpers, duelling miseries,
Beeps succinct.

These are my friends: the rattled retch
Of hueless mucus, gargled blood,
The distant dentures’ dream of cud,
The smacking letch,

The rasp of life filed down by breath,
The patient sleep, the doctors’ rows,
The man more quiet than a mouse,
More still than death.

Now light breaks not where no sun shines
On curtains thick and twilight-heavy,
And death draws tight, and lifts his levy
In waning whines.

The chequered ceiling’s dark and wide,
And traces ‘L’, and thinks of things;
Kicked-over castles, leapt-over kings,
The day outside.

But tea-stained Bibles cannot keep
Our thoughts, nor do our thoughts keep them,
When fears our fears come to condemn
And will not weep.

We are not ours. We will not die
In draughty corridors. Our rest
Sleeps on in a soft and warmer breast,
And so shall I.