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...
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.
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?
Healthy Irony is poor black blues singers
hymning what life has done wrong to them
where the passion with which they belt it out
is a partial curative of the conditions the sing of,
and an education and instruction for how some folks
survive the world, for those wh have never suffered.
Unhealthy irony is modern governments piling cover up
on cover up, on cover up, in palimpsests of shame
when rogue agents of the state do wrong in secret
and the powers that be side with those agents,
and against public decency, in the way they regulate
money sex and power, the basis of all law and custom,
and all the complexities that flow out of them.
When I was meant to start work I didn't,
I was diverted to local college courses
where the second and third components
of what I was studying were held far away,
and my family would not let me leave.
The alternative was 'youth training schemes'
in which the money that went with the youths
mattered more to employers than youths learning.
More false starts followed. There was work,
where I, or my family could live with me being
on the wobbly bottom rung of the employment ladder
which could throw those on it out of work at any time.
And then I was no longer a teenager. But my family
clung to me as I tried to move away from the teen
I used to be, whilst I uncertainly sought a maturity
my family had allowed for, and late/slow but sure
get a normal education. My exit started in a place
I did not expect. I read a book that changed my life,
'Depression: The Way Out Of Your Prison' by Dorrothy Rowe,
which explained how for those who are depressed,
much of how they feel comes from the doom loops
in the behaviour and language of those around them.
She wrote
'Not spoiling' a child means trying to break that child's spirit'
and
''After all I've done for you' has alienated more children
from their parents than any act of parent cruelty.'
amongst many other quotes
Slowly, I inclreeased the distance I could sustain from my family,
and slowly I felt better. But all that I will leave for another time
in this much recalled, and often repeated, saga.
 |
| One of over a hundred painted panels on the ceiling of a Romanesque church at Zillich. |
 |
| But the panels that I have selected here are merely the sequence of sea beasts. |
 |
| In the time these beasts were painted the earth was thought to be flat. |
 |
| The land was thought to be surrounded by mysterious and unexplored oceans. |
 |
| Protected by these beasts whose shape and size could only be guessed. Some of us would be happy for the world to return to a state something like that. |
'Your are living on a false reputation
-just like Baudelaire*and Chopin*.
But nothing is more difficult
than making the public go back
on a too hasty first impression.
You are still the slave of your successes
and the reader's idleness would like
to put a stop to your triumphs there....
You are much more inmportant than is commonly supposed.'.
*Both of whom were trapped by their early fame.
Baudelaire and Chopin faced harsh early criticisms
and rigid public labels that evaded the depth of their genius.
Overcoming the rapidly arrived at, lazy early public judgment
takes a long time, The best estimations of artistic worth
last far beyond early limits set by popular critics.
