........................................................................................ - a weBlog by Snowy and me.

Friday, 17 January 2025

Daylight Again?

'We must not let daylight in on magic'
wrote the journalist Walter Bagehot
(pronounce Badget) in 1867, about the public
viewing the openly grieving Queen Victoria
clearly missing Albert as she performed
the royal duties that she alone could do
for a public who were kept at such a distance
from her, that they only knew who she was
and what she did by what a tame press wrote about her.

But grief and duty are part of a long list
of markers of life best not looked at too closely
if they are going to maintained in an age of deference and wide disparities
of wealth and poverty, health and disease,
crime and cruelty also thrive when the public
averting their eyes from them, the less
to be offended by the effect of knowing
what happens when they are left unwatched.

And by the time hem,
ing unobserved
 best left unseen,
many a family only     of royalty

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Surfing The Waiving Of The Rules

The 21st century liberal line is
that 'slavery is wrong', as if in our time
we speak for all history,
and in our time we can account
for what history was meant to be. 

But history tells a different story,
and the older the times we look back on
the less reliable it gets, and harder it is
to explain the times are to account for,
and yet 
we should examine them closely
to find the humane and compelling in these accounts.

We can't know who wrote those account about powerful men,
any more  than we can know what the men were like as children
or the women their mothers were, and what parenting was like. 

The lives of women and children were seen
as too weak and inconsequential
for accounts of them to be thought to matter.

In this historical vacuum lived the domestic slaves, 
where they were like women and children,
where they were all became the property of male masters
and patriarchs who owned everything that was owned,
from cattle, sheep, to family, servants, and language.

For slaves domestic slavery to a household
was a way of escaping homelessness, poverty,
and worse; it was better than the alternative.

Where histories record a loss of choice,
we must recognise history as the outcome
of the Hobson's choice past for the present day.
 

With the enlightenment came industrial slavery
and an industrial scale slave trade, in which
the rich countries named the poor countries
ransacked them for resources, and abducted
their population to process what ransacked
and dumped the slaves, their names lost from history,
in moves which were the opposite of domestic slavery.

Where domestic slavery housed those it contracted,
in their lack of means, industries of every type
made millions not just homeless but stateless,
existing well beyond their means of reversing it.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Distant Living

I can resist being pushed into debt,
I
 am comfortable, each night
that I return to the warmth of my bed
where I have a choice of book to read
or an enquiring radio programme
to fall asleep to half way through,
and a diary in which record
my thoughts, dreams, and days.

Each day I eat my breakfast,
with the bad news of the day
the radio tells me, and I note
how much 'me' is part of 'media',
whilst wondering what to do after.

What happens between the morning
and the night 
is meant to be a life,
much of it is life 
according to the screen
I read, and compose from to write this.

Since the computer screen replaced television
I remain amazed at how well my days fill out,
with me so low on the world's priorities
whilst I live without companionship.

This is what 'my freedom' now consists of,
the freedom to age in comfort at home,
as part of a mass collective of indifference
connected  by how we are meant to care
when don't know what to say each other.

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Choose Your Battles Carefully

Because swallowing the unacceptable,
and accepting less
 is the choice for everyone
with a sense of sanity and proportion about life
and anyone prepared for the insanity of being
themselves at all costs deserves the end result.

  

 

Monday, 13 January 2025

As Prophets Predict

the future of the human race as being in space
I hope the adherents of these secular prophets
take the fullest account of the stuff that humans
are made of, the bacteria, elements, and DNA,
and last but not the least of these, the viruses
that limit the longevity of human life,
to keep the universe cleaner than they kept the earth. 

Sunday, 12 January 2025

Powerful Invisible Friends

The poorest children in the world
don't go to school; they still learn
but amid their poverty what they learn
is how effectively poverty make invisible
both individuals, and individuality.
 

What the educated world's young take home from school
reduces to either how to be a bully without seeming to be,
or how to withstand being bullied in plain sight,
when those who might stop it
excuse it-in the name of 'competition'.

What unites both the bully and the bullied
is how much both states use fear and threat,
where the fear of a threat isolates us in plain sight. 

I remember well the shouts in primary school,
where the bullied tries to say to his bully
'I will set my dad/my big brother/the police on you'
as if said person would defend them, where mentioning the police
was the weakest threat; the police were viewed as people
who looked after their own before they looked after anyone else.

The invisible friends of the bully were usually stronger
than their opposite number in their silence,
they would encourage him to bully harder
where the invisible witnesses of the bullied
bore witness to the weakness of the weaker boy.

Adult hierarchies were explained as those with the most
had earned it by making the invisible hand of the market
their powerful friend, until they tamely ate from it's hand,
more readily than anyone else was allowed to.

It was hard to argue against imaginary thinking like that. 

Saturday, 11 January 2025

Who Do You Fit Around Awkwardly?

The image above presents the idea
of 'the humility tile' where those living
in the dwelling are warned against the pride
they invest in perfection when they see the floor.

  When I first saw the image the word
I saw was 'misfit', as if the tile was out of place
in the space it took up. But it fitted the space
very well, well enough to explain,
how we can be wrongly placed - socially - 
and how a workable imperfection
is the best we can ask for.