PICTURESQUE COMPETITION: Rahil Hussain

Jamais Vu
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.
Jamais vu, in essence, is the sensation of seeing something you’ve glanced at perhaps your entire
life but truly seeing it for the first time. Thoughts churning in the back of your head in a Maelstrom.
An inky sludge pocked by small holes from which only the screams from a dying planet escape
and in the eye of this nightmare. A vortex formed by the contrast between the enormity and fragility
of nature in which we can see visions of a future. A future tainted by greed, rampant negligence
and the greatest ill of all, apathy. Not of those who try. But those who can and don’t. Those who
take and take and take but don’t give. Yet pass the blame onto others.

To the innocent boy who just wanted to play by a river polluted,

the mother who just wanted the shade of a tree felled,

a girl who wanted to frolic in a rain tainted,

all to satisfy the wants of a few, the needs of the many have been pushed aside. Yet still they come
for more.

One might ask themselves how things ended up this way? Those that take would have it said that
others didn’t do enough. That others should’ve done more, not them though. Never them.

When the rain tastes of ash, it wasn’t the poison they let into the air. It was you.

When the water turns a sickly shade, it wasn’t them. You didn’t do enough.

In the end it was, is, will always be you.

When the world is dying, gasping it’s last… for all the trees are gone, the air a miasma. It won’t
be them, just you and your supposed failures that led to this environment. They will never stop
blaming you, even when their riches increases and yours falls. Even as they lounge around
flaunting their excess and you toil endlessly while still doing your part to keep the world clean.

So, when the skies brown and seas dry. When the air becomes too hard to breathe you should be
glad that in their mercy, they deigned to give you your own sapling to breathe for you. A smile in
your eye for what once was as you walk in the shadows of buildings named after ancient forests.
Its name as alien to you as the taste of water unrecycled.

As you blink the vison fades and you find yourself gazing in wonderment at the sight ahead. A
sight you’d already seen countless times before. A sight you’d taken for granted as ordinary and
banal that id had already melded into the background in your head but now you see it for what it
truly is. As you open your eyes and look around you see…

Trees of green, red roses too. You see them bloom. And you think to yourself.

What a wonderful world.