In The Midst Of Life.....

                      '    .....we are in death. The present moment
                  is all we can call our own for works of mercy,  
                of righteous dealing, and of family tenderness.
                     All very old truths - but what we thought
                   the oldest truth becomes the most startling
                       to us in the week when we have looked 
                        on the dead face of one who has made
                     a part of our own lives....   - George Elliot.

 

 

The Cart And Horse Life

One of the phenomena of modern life
that I carefully choose my distance from
is the casual inflation of the ways
that human emotions are commonly decribed
into a new highly performative language.

Oh, I know, it is part of the modern media
is to make a virtue of being so inexact, for emphasis.
As presenters seek to make their readers
and listeners work harder to undersgtand,
and then conflate their audiences failure
to understand with them having a poor work ethic.

Yes some trauma is real, but therapy speak
is a world of its own, where in the past
it was difficult to talks for the mix of shame,
stigma and silence, now it the noise is so noisy
that no disrress can be ordinary, every emotion
breeds its own pathologising adjective,
from 'My distress' up to 'My anxiety, my ADHD,
my autism', until people talk ourselves
out of being useful through the way they reverse
symptom and anaalysis, and put the cart of symptom
before the horse of analysis, so the patient
can gain the attention of whoever they are talking to.

Describing being upset as 'being triggered' is unhelpful,
unless, perhaps, there is literally a gun in the situation.

There is a way out of this: Do less, think more,
and choose your words with more care for them,
and who you want to listen to you, than you have shown before. 

I Was A Teenage Quaker, I Still Am

My period as a teenage Quaker was brief,
briefer than my being a teenager. I found them
through being the first secretary of my local CND,
whose early meetings were held in the Quaker meeting house,
a building that was put up in 1704, 60 years after the peak
of popular Quaker belief amid the English civil war,
after which, when non-conformism was rife,
it meant exclusion from the instutions of the state,
and Church of England, such was the strength of self reliance
that was required to survive being ostracised by the state.

I was a very weak outsider: my commitment as a Quaker
foundered rather fast. In the world I might have liked
I would like to have had Quaker parents. 

Though even in the comfort of the 1970s it was a hard path to follow. 

I left the Quakers To 'sow my wild oats', until eventually
I had my own front door in a quiet place, from which
to shut the world out, where I could realise I was 'there',
whereever 'there' is - the place of radical quiet and rest
that was what attracted me in on that Quaker Room,
in the Gansborough in which I was a restless teenager. 

Democrazy (4)

Welcome to the new vice - signaling
president who acts as if he is the leader
of a renewed entertanment/sports franchise
where the sole winner is the new owner.
The sportsmen are losers who have to play,
and the viewers are the biggest loss leaders
for them not knowing where the off button
on the remote control went -
so the television turns them off instead.

In this new regime the president has reset
his sport in the law courts where the judges
don't know that he has recast them as heels/bullies,
there to enforce the rules against his lawyers
who don't know why they are so poorly briefed.
They are there to lose the case for the president,
who won't tell them what he wants.

What the president wants,
without being seen to ask  for it,
is to reduce the value of precedent
and case law across the country
to a series of minor farces
so that nobody notices 
when he drives through decisions
made purely for his personal enrichment.

As he burdens judges with frivolous defences
that they have to throw out, his aim
is to bring case law into disrepute
until the only winners, other than him, 
are his best freinds, the tech bros
whose AI chicanery remakes the world
of what were once made of hard facts
into a world of infinite malleability. 

Between Indifference And Acceptance

 What does it mean
to be known for what you do,
much more that what you say?
When what you are known for
is more for the words leave out
than the language you leave in?

It means you know what fits, and what doesn't,
and you are a misfit who other people don't realise
is the wrong person for the job they had in mind.

But if they are careless enough to not notice.
you adapt their indifference as your acceptance,
knowing, in spite everything, this is what we find...

Are You Betting On The End Times?

Being closer than those around you realise?
If you are then from what position of power
are you acting? The well financed politician
who has bought their popularity with adverts
in which they make a virtue of their getting in bed
with the tech giants, for whom their technology
is an each way bet where whatever the odds they win.
As a monopoly that is how they rig the odds:
whoever plays, they are always the biggest winners. 

Or are you one of the less powerful men and women
who knows more the limitations of what they can do,
and what they can hope for, but who keeps watch
because they don't know, day to day, what to watch for? 

I will always be in the latter group: whatever I do I accept
the limitions of my living to extend the limits of how how I live.
 I feel as uncertain about the future times as I feel about the past.
The present is the best point to be sure of. For others to survive
I have to show self discipline and work in consent with people
I know less well than I wish, for what I do to work well for them.

What Can Be Understood, But Must Also Change

The song title I would love to hear
that I don't know if it has been written
would have to be titled 'Irony Blues'.

A song in where in wracked tones
the singer outlines a narrative of suffering
but in the last verse he compares it
with the suffering of being confined
always to sing about his suffering,
as of the two sufferings are different
but they might be comparable.

How deep and lasting would the irony
in 'Irony Blues' be when I finally heard it?

Any listener who appreciates such a title
would have to have lived their own suffering,
unrecognised, for them to be caught
in the depth of the song. but how long,
would they remain thrilled by it?
Before they preferred some lighter entertainment?