In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.

Ars Longa Est, Vita Brevis Est

Cave art from caves in Spain.

Where we can't know when or how
the images became depicted on the cave walls

Or even the species that created them.

What we can guess is that the images they left were
what they might have dreamt about.

 If only our dreams could be made that simple
-then the future of the panet might be more assured.....

 

Dante's Guide To The Internet

Where the higher the number of the circle of Hell
in which you can locate your activities, the more you know
what you may be condemned for. Oddly enough
what I did not see listed there are the writers
of criminal viruses that affect many computers,
unawares. But maybe the whole thing is an infection
in itself and we cannot assume that there are saints
and good guys among the Billionaire tech giants,
that is credulity stretched too far.  

 

The Misleader Of The Free World

and his friends, the tech billionaires,
may own nearly everything a billionaire
could think to want. But what this new 
hyper-weathy generation do not have
is the what Roman Generals and Emperors
knew was very necessary: their persomal auriga,
the servant who was trusted to follow
the leaders as they were cheered on
by the crowds to whisper in their ears
phrases like 'Remember you are not a god', 
'Look behind you remember you are a man',
You are not Jupiter*', 'Fame is fleeting' 
and finally 'Momento mori', to remind
the great to limit how they were worshiped
by the masses from making them delusional.

*Jupiter was the Supreme Roman deity
for the sky, light, and for thunder.
He oversaw the laws, and social order.
He protected the Roman state.
and was depicted carrying a thunderbolt.
He was associated with the eagle.
As the Son of Saturn and Ops,
he was brother to Juno (his consort),
Vesta, Ceres, Neptune, and Pluto.
He overthrew his father, Saturn, to lead the Pantheon.  

Persecution And Sufffering

Will come to us all as individuals
from around the globe and across the earth
as life breathes through us. The persecutiions
that seem the worst disguise themselves
until they are recognised being calibrated
through calendars, and set to time limits,
throuhg which they burn out, in real time.
Until real time becomes a history by which,
if we can recall it accurately, we may measure
some of the possible suffering and reward to come. 

Some suffer knowing their suffering is finite
though they can't know how it will end
or what their reward for enduring it will be.

Other people suffer and project that their suffering
will be the sole cause of the end of the world
something that they tell one and all is imminent.

I understand suffering and privatiion well enough.
I also appreciate that it can seem disporportionate
but I simply don't 'get' how the suffering of anyone
alive now, or in recent or modern times, can say
that their suffering is that central to the future
of all time and space throughout the universe,
such that they should command the collective attention
of the billions alive of that apex species: Homo Sapiens.

That self absorbed path leads one way only: towards insanity.

Picture Of The Day - Reflections Of A Tricoloured Heron

This is a Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor)
with material for the nest for itself
and it's partner. 

 

In The Alphabet Of Unrecognised Neglect

 'A' stood for abandonment-the rupture children felt
when they were taken to school and left with strangers.
'B' stood for bereavement and the sudden loss of the familiar:
family surroundings, friends, toys, routine, even home food.
Teacheers and carers called this “homesickness” and trusted 
that it would pass when the children had no such sense of certainty.
'C' stood for  captivity, the realisation that there was no way out
from rigid and often punishing routines, no escape, though some tried it.
This often lead to 'D',  dissociation and  the development of a false self
that the child felt helped them appear be brave, and survive the situation
whilst cutting them off  from their truer self without them realising it.

And so this alphabet goes on whilst the author of the theory behind it,
Joy Schaverien (1943 - 2025) outlines the theory of 'Boarding School Syndrome',
where what is presented as a materially privileged life hides from parents,
puupils, and the staff who ran boarding schools a multi-generatonal sense of loss
where difficulties with intimacy are passed of as 'normal'. The recognition
of life-long mental health problems is slow to arrise, waiting until adulthood
for the neccesity of therapy to be clear, where the syndrome gets easier to use
as an excuse to explain away previoiusly unexplained offhand behaviour. 

But that is the world some people, lots of people, live in.
Some of my best friends might recognise this picture
and remember how I used to behave, without knowing
that I grew up in a care home for five yearss, where I
saw my parents for thirteen weeks of the year. When I left
the home I had no close friends: I left who I knew behind.

I have survived: in a country with the safety net
of a welfare state and a strong charity sector
people will. But I find thatt the safety nett
for retrospectivle repairing my mental health,
and the family the helps indiduals connect for life
are harder to recognise and find. I have what is left
of my true self, which the care home cared enough
to not touch, when with hindsight it easily could have.

For a fuller explanation
of Boarding School Syndrome
than what I have room for
on this blog please left click here.

Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child by Joy Schaverien