Recorded 100 years Ago Today - 'Young Woman Blues' - Bessie Smith

 

Young Woman’s Blues (Bessie Smith) - recorded by Bessie Smith's and her Blues Boys. Bessie Smith (vocals), Joe Smith (cornet), Buster Bailey (Clarinet), and Fletcher Henderson (piano).

October Moon - The Hunter's Moon

...looks like every other moon, after all the moon remains the same
and lends itself to many different foreground images, for contrast.
What changes is the activities linked to the moon that month.
Hunters in the wild like good light, just as their quarry
like the shadows to hide in.

So as the nights get longer and the light of the sun is reflected
more brightly by the moon, so the moon becomes
the hunter's helper, where only the hunter knows.
what their role is in the hostilities between hunter and hunted. 
 

 

Tempted By The Lure Of Employment

I have never read 'The Screwtape Letters'
by C.S. Lweis, but I recently heard a speaker
list the ways in the book, in which Screwtape
seeks to educate his nephew Wormwood,
in the trade that they both practiced, tempters.

I read the list and it reminded me of what I met
from employers, when I called myself a jobseeker.

In job applications I filled in, and the few interviews
I was granted, employers used exactly the same tactics
on me that Screwtape sought to teach Wormwood
to set up the rules neither of them wanted to live by,
but which they wanted everyone else to follow.

isolation
seperation
distraction
seduction
illusory temporary comfort
wearing seekers out,

The height of the illusion was raised in the phrase
'The devil always finds work for idle hands',
as used by knowing, property owning, adults
which they applied most readily to the youths
who landed on government traning schemes,
for them not having any other employment.

There every youth was presented with the idea
that the path to employment could be found
by them doing what their trainers told them to do,
and never asking questions. When the true aim
of the scheme was to create long term work
for the trainers, and the management above them. 

I remember acutely the seduction,
the illusory temporary comfort, that wore seekers out
where as a job seeker I was easily distracted
I never found the path that led to paid employment:
where ever I applied, the path started somewhere else.

So thank you for C.S. Lewis for the guide
to Human Reources and Modern Management.  

The Badness In My Method

Ensured that I was rarely seen
to be on the right side of history,
whatever the narrative presented to me.

But I grew up with that adversity towards reason.
My mentors were the adults who put themselves
the other side of the many well reasoned arguments
that they were presented with, which they would say
others should accept, whilst setting themselves apart from.
Whilst denying that their principles looked nearer
'do as I say not as I do' than they could demonstrate.

As far as I could tell the people who most respectfully
disagreed with each other were the allotment holders,
who gave each other autonomy because the plants
they grew set and won the arguments there -
as long as the plants were alive they remained silent.

For several years I have not cut my grass,
I have left my garden untidy. Now the ecology
quietly agrees with me over how long the grass 
grows between the trees and bushes should be.
In the heat the temperature is notably lower
 - by two or three degrees every summer.

Thus proving there is method in my badness.   

The Most Enduring Doom Loops Are Always Rational

In a world of seemingly infinite credit,
assuming that both can be quantified,
how does money compare to common sense? 
how do they contrasr in the scale of human reason?

Are each to be argued over whilst kept seperate?
Some of us can put others into debts so unrepayble
That Sisyphus would struggle with the repayments.
Where those who have the power to push others
into debt without becoming indebted themselves,
will be the last to reisst the temptation toward insanity
 - for then being Midas-like and the last to recognise it.

For as long as the powerless are powerless
they have to remain vigilant,
to observe what they are unable to change. 

Meanwhile we all get pushed through the doom loops
of debt, and insanity, that are as perverse as they are rational....  

The Readers Rest

The older I get, the more I read, 
though my reading rate is slowing,
because what has increased in value for me
is my appreciation the succinct paragraph
which when I read it on the page tells me
'You can stop there take a rest.'. 

Bad Weather Friendships

Having friendships is all very well,
after all everyone who likes to be liked 
we see unpopularity as pointless isolation,
 - a masochism that is not even a gain
for the person applying the pain to the suffer.

But when our friends become covers
for our vices, pride, greed, lust, envy,
gluttony, wrath, and sloth, because 
for those who share these qualities
they are the equal of each other in virtue,
such virtues change the world we all inhabit.
Where our vices are a discomfort to our enemies,
and mutuality and comfort to our friends.

In this age of the denial of the evidence
we have to ask, and listen for the answer,
to discover how much the values we share
with others make us bad weather friends, 
mutually denying how we are beating the path to destruction
- by denying our roles in the effects of global warming.