Untamed Magnificence - Herstory Indeed

Bessie Smith phographed in 1936  by writer Carl Van Vechen

 'But the stories of her portentious rages, tempestuous love afairs, wind bouts of generosity, epic binges, and not infrequent recourse to devastating fisticuffs - all of which stretch as far back as her public career itself  - leave us with the impression of a totally untamed creature who remained to the end of her days, immune from the restraints of manners or convention.'. - Humphrey Lyttleton on Bessie Smith

Connection And Distance

Comic musician, Victor Borge, said
'The shortest distance between two people is a smile',
I am always surprised when I get even closer
to people I aspire to know, when we make each other laugh....

We can swear that our enemy 'is a terrorist'
all we like, but how are we going to see ourselves,
and them, when we know we have to strike a deal
with them, that puts behind us the old reciminations
that we no longer want to live with? 

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 Eliot.

 

 

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...