Souled

Hypocrisy is the sign of a soul doubly sold
and similarly divided, of somebody living
'well', but way beyond their means.
Every act hypocrisy inspires
is paid for with world resources
that the soul, if it is real, can't own.
Though it aspires beyond this life
to be owned and kept by itself,
it never realises that the self belief
of the soul is definitive proof of hubris.

Second Hand Happiness

was the joy that I settled with best
when I was free of care enough to be young.
It never gave me the surety of status
I saw in others which I might have liked,
but later it saved me from a lot of anxiety.

So what if it left me
at the bottom of the heap?
So what if I was the scrap
against which others saw
themselves to be 'worth more' ?

I was in an uneasy peace
when they were in open war.

This Is Not My Darkness, It Is Yours

This monkey is traveling by Air France/KLM to be used on it's arrival
 for testing the toxicity of gases. It will die of being poisoned.
 It's body will be of more value dead to scientists
than its life was to itself alive. The experiment will not even
 be that accurate,  the anxiety the monkey experiences
 as it dies will seriously limit the value of any
 scientific result from examining the monkey's corpse.
  Better results would have been got from testing the bodies
 of jews and homosexuals etc in the death camps-
 they were not expecting to die of Zyclon B in the showers.
 here is where to find the petition against Air France
/KLM carrying monkeys for experimentation.

 

The Landscape Of Earthly Delights

This is the most sensual and yet tasteful
film poster I have ever seen. I saw the film
'In the realm of the senses'  when the
british film censors, the BBFC, relented
to release it with nearly no edits for sex
or violence in 1992, after it was practically
refused BBFC certificate in 1976, when
instead the censors encouraged it to be
shown in private cinema clubs only.... 

Unpossessive Attentiveness

is a virtue I have often found in others
and dimly seen in myself.
Whilst when small I wished to be lightly held,
shared, and even dandled on the knees of relatives
my ache to be hugged and wanted was to be my darkness.

The family phrase that froze me was ''I want' never gets'.
I was there to say 'Please' and to receive what others
wanted for me. I was their accessory.
In middle age my gloom lost its edge.
'I want' has got me some things I liked.
Fresh space, time and distance have erased
old wants, and finally turned what seemed
irreversable losses into something usable.

But still I seek that mix of distance,
lightness and immediacy.
The gift for others of unpossessive
attentiveness still eludes me.

My First Christmas Card Of 2012

Comfortably Numb

'How nice to feel nothing and still get
the full credit for being alive'.- Kurt Vonnegut

I Was Never A Good Judge Of Vice

for being gripped by depression.
But I am thankful for how my being low
made virtue seem like everything else, hollow.
Depression was my path into self knowledge.
The older I get the more readily I accept
how all rituals are vices.
Everyone has to choose our own.

Beneath the surface distinctions,
all rituals are repeats.
From binge drinking to Communion,
-they are all the bare bones of habit,
ready to be boiled down to form
communities of commonality.

The only moral point I will raise
is to ask how much the ritual refreshes
the ritualist? How well they can
they share their refreshment?
The inability the share, and refresh
others,  is a source of depression.

'Children Should Be Seen

and not heard' was a victorian belief
about how middle class families
should deport themselves at home,
based upon Queen Victoria's meal time
behavior, particularly after Albert died.
In the late 20th century I lived
in the shadow of such deportment.
All too late in life did I recognise
that the phrase actually meant 'children
should be watched and not listened to',
and with that how parents were deaf
to themselves, blind to their appearance.

As I relearnt the phrase it informs very well
how I see governments' see their citizens
in representative democracies.
The voting proles have to be watched,
their opinion massaged into submission
by financial stick and carrot.
The better that come elections they care,
and their ministers not appear like them
-powerless in their anonymity until angry.  

Like Philip Larkin On A Sad Day

I take delight in the cautious
double negatives of phrases
like 'Not untrue and not unkind'.
There is no lottery for happiness,
no structure, no ticket, season or other.
Happiness is something that the mind either makes,
or it doesn't.

Monotheism Is The Idea

that humans are the singular weapon
of the single god of a universal history.
Human custom has it that through the ages
patriarchy has refined that singularity,
perversely destroying the breadth of diversity
and therefore of history, through its conservatism.

Eternity-The Perfume

The odor of sanctity for the devout who never doubt
 (nobody else needs to  wear it).

Viral Idiocy

Creating Misapprehension

I hope never accept how humans knowingly mistake quiet acquiescence
for full agreement, or infer that agreement is the same as gratitude.
Combining these two misapprehensions is the easiest way
to falsifying other peoples history on their behalf, to yourself,
and how to make taboos for oneself. I want to dice with life, not death.

The Height Of Normality

is to render the empathy of everyday ecstasies
into a mistrust of others on a par with  paranoia.

Afghanistan

-A country where government has more interest in wealth
then it has in making laws that the populous can obey.
Opposition is Tribal and opposes central government,
who exist to limits the wars between tribes.
The tribes belief is that weapons exist to make peace,
through death to the other side.
Democracy is a vacuum in which tribes and government,
hollow out of the idea of a civil life for all,
each for the gain of their own hierarchy.

Self Publishing Creates Its Own Settings

As the next multimedia publishing empire
looks for the next still small written voice
to blast at enormous volume
through the publishing multiverse,
one publisher per universe,
with worm holes between publishers,
I notice how my talent comes from living well,
and living proportionately within my own world.
My sense of self comes from being open but private.

Proof Of Selflessness

Once, long ago, I took a personality test-
the results told me that I didn't have one.

The Arms Race Begins At Home

In the 1950s households thought worthy of description
were described in terms of their consumer durables,
the electronics, the multiples of radios, televisions
and other ready diversions that people found handy
for avoiding listening to one another.

In the Britain of  the 1980s came the mass car culture-
a state wherein children depended on their parents
to get on the road and the roads to escape their parents,
into an ever expanding empire of debt.
In that era I learned thrift through the habit of hitching lifts.

Nowadays when I think about how to measure prosperity
I think of the Muslim Middle East where a households wealth
is measured by the patriarch's ability to take offence
at government reform, distant powers,
and the immediate world around him,
and in his collection of Kalashnikov rifles.

The more the patriarch has the more he is looked up to by other (lesser) men.

  

Representative Democracy

is what happens when television tells us
that our vote puts us in the drivers seat,
of government, but the media magnate
who is grooming the leading candidate
is the person who is in actual control.

Everyone else is a dummy with a ticket
in a rigged lottery who would not recognise
the prize even when told what real winnings were,
or how they might claim them.

Abdicating Responsibility

I have often heard the phrase
'Something must be done', about
something that is obviously wrong,
and just as often disbelieved the speaker.
King Edward the VIII said it first,
of the poverty of the miners in South Wales,
on the 17th November 1936, as he toured
his country, meaning they should be supported.

The playboy king, looked so fine in uniform
and had such a good life that 25 days later,
under pressure from The Establishment,
he accepted that he should abdicate.

Everyone who has used the phrase
since seems to echo his detachment.

The More Things Change The More They Remain Unchanged

After the riots in Belfast in September,
and the police chief's call to reason
through the media I found the following
in an old email. It is a timeless
piece of writing, when I first read it
I was acutely reminded of one
of my favourite writers J. G. Ballard...

The Irish Times - Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Heroic Belfast youths engage in rites of noble heritage

NEWTON EMERSON

NEWTON'S OPTIC: THIS WEEKEND’S rioting in Belfast shows the adaptable, innovative and modernising side of the city’s feral underclass.
Think of a sectarian interface in Northern Ireland and you will almost certainly picture inner-city streets of run-down terraced housing, separated by corrugated iron peace walls decorated with naff “community” murals.
But the flashpoint of this weekend’s disturbances was a new roundabout over a six-lane underpass, connecting a retail park and a shopping centre to the M1 and Westlink urban motorways.
It would be hard to imagine a more typical 21st-century landscape, let alone one more forbidding to human interaction.
The roundabout itself is nearly a quarter of a mile wide, surrounded by multi-lane approaches and high-speed on-ramps. Pedestrian access is strictly corralled through crash-proof steel barriers.
Yet the heroic youth of loyalist south Belfast and republican west Belfast crossed this hostile wasteland to engage in the rites of their noble heritage, proving that the ancient traditions of Ulster will not be crushed beneath the tarmac and concrete of materialist car culture.
In so doing they reclaimed a sterile space which the planners had sought to deny them, echoing other progressive urban movements like London’s guerrilla gardeners or Italy’s slow cities campaign.
Ironically, it is suspected that the Westlink was deliberately built to separate South and West Belfast, so rioting on its major overpass subverts its intended function in a joyous celebration of spontaneous urban vitality.
It is only a pity that the 123ft-high aluminium peace sculpture in the centre of the roundabout has not yet been built due to lack of funds, as it could have been dismantled for missiles and weapons in a powerful act of symbolic repossession.
After trashing the roundabout, trouble then spread to the nearby Bog Meadows Nature Reserve. It might seem that rioting in a bog is a backward step, pandering to outdated and possibly racist stereotypes of ignorant muck-splattered savagery.
However, the Bog Meadows Nature Reserve is a Unesco award-winning wildfowl refuge based on the latest thinking in wetland and grassland conservation. Bringing this challenging space into the sphere of rioting venues is a triumph of logistics, lateral thinking and environmental awareness which greatly advances the dynamic of urban conflict situations.
It means, for example, that when a police officer shouts “duck” they might now be referring to an actual duck.
Finally, after trashing the Bog Meadows, both sides attacked the Donegall Road Kentucky Fried Chicken in a postmodern rejection of both shallow consumerism and their own disgusting obesity.
This is the largest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Ireland, while the US state of Kentucky is strongly associated with Ulster-Scots influence, tying in potent themes of cross-community and anti-capitalist tension with the “drive-through” motif of the earlier disturbances at the roundabout.
In many ways, the entire weekend can thus be seen as a triptych of performance art set-pieces, unconstrained by the physical and mental barriers of provincial bourgeois society.
It is often said that Belfast’s shiny peace process makeover is a superficial development which has passed the urban underclass by. This weekend, loyalist and republican rioters proved otherwise.
They are every bit as happy wrecking the new city centre as they were wrecking the old one.

Fifty Shades Of Blandness

Why is it that when I pursue pornography
I feel like a man who wanted to create
and share a meal with a friend, prepared
from scratch, with fresh vegetables
herbs and spices, and the meal be served
with wine at an elegant table with lit candles,
but in the process of my pursuit I end up
reduced to putting hot water into a pot noodle?

Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Cave painting of a horse.

Cave Painting Lascaux (South West France).

Aboriginal cave painting.

Urulu cave painting.

Love Comes In Triangles

With thanks to  http://pogonophiles.tumblr.com/

State Security

In 1604 poet Sir Henry Wotton wrote
'An ambassador is an honest man
sent abroad to lie for his country'.
Does this make a politician
a person who stays at home
to lie in the name of The State?

Sir Henry Wotton.

The Sport

of being a restless spectator
to the activities of others
in a well padded armchair
is the most natural inactivity
known to man.

Ageing Is About Life,

life is about change,  aging is about entropy.
When offspring depart nests will empty.

The departed always hope that time will leave intact
what they leave behind, learning only later
how time alters them, and where they have left.

Departed or left behind,
with age the horizon levels,
and draws us near, embraces
us in the stillness of acceptance.

Is It The Lightness

of a shared kiss that makes men resist sharing their lips?
Prefer instead that more intense sense of another
chowing down on their member,
swollen in the pride of self absorption?

The New Open Air Private Hospital Was Strangely Unpopular...

Strange indeed how having to pay made people so healthy.

 

 

From 1896 To 1932

in the Modern Olympiad atheletes
erratically did their best without
government support. The sacrifices
towards excellence that were made
were made by well meaning
self-financing amateur athletes
standing in for their countries.

That spirit went out like a light
in 1936 with the invention
of the Olympic torch, which
with every subsequent Olympiad
symbolised earnest nation states
'pursuing excellence' through
hyper-efficient sporting elites,
and bureaucrats ticking boxes.

The Trickle Up Effect

is as old as The Fall.
As old as men press-ganged
by rulers to serve as soldiers
and sailors since ancient times.
As Control descends to the leaders
of the new global industrial base
I am pained when I (rarely) observe
factory workers making products
they would like but their wages
will never afford, in a hierarchy
they will never see the top of.

Farming started that hierarchy
10,000 years ago, reinventing animals
and plants as loss-leaders to support
an ever-expanding human population,
Reducing everything in it's path.
Before farming the more things changed
the more they could change again,
the more the change was accepted
and change was merely change
not measured growth or shrinkage.

After the world was farmed,
the more everything changed
the more it shrank. Even now
we think it a triumph that we
can measure the shrinkage.