Hope

would be imagining, for lack of proof,
that I have an agreeable afterlife.
Despair would that in that time-outside-time
I would become a candidate for canonization.
I could not cope the debate that is part of being chosen.
The only cause for whom I would want be
a sign of hope, or a patron saint,
would have to be for the perpetually unemployable.

Comfort Eating

When cannibals prepare the dead
for consumption I wonder-
what is the emotive effect of their preparations?
It seems to me that boiled down the responses
reduce to two kinds of comfort; affirmation
of the kinship of your own community
or vengeance upon some enemy tribe.
Though straightening times like siege, war
and famine will equally inspire sufficient
desperation in our appetites to turn
us into what we fear on Halloween Night.

Heads/Tails

Self control is a dog wagging it's tail for joy,
in waiting in clear sight for the cause of it happiness.
Lack of self control is the tail manically wagging it's owner,
as they chase each other in a circle, tormented. No end-point in sight.

Cheese, Saints And Scholars

Early in his presidency Charles de Gaulle asked,
'How do you govern a country which has 246
varieties of cheese?' to reflect his wonder
at the diversity of France. Would that the English
could have had a similar reflective lightness
with their historic deforestation  and their creation
of settlements in the land of 179 saints and scholars.
I trust the saints scarred the invaders with nightmares.

The Diary Everyone Wants, Really....

I have mine and already there are confirmed
 dates on which I am to be disappointed.

Initiative

is a word that people use
to describe the actions of others
when an action praises them,
without them asking for the flattery.
Nothing wrong with that.
But when the flattered take so well
to being surprised by praise,
that they think to themselves
that the sea bed is their universe,
the world is their oyster
and they are the object of tribute,
to be polished by praise
then others, plain as they are,
will disappoint them in the end.
Even as it seems too late
we have to be our own grit,
and resist the tidal shift
of ungraciously consuming
other people without their consent.

Affirmative Reflections

It seems strange to me how I have grown as person
 for having a buddy to reflect and who reflects me...

New Hope For 'The Poor' In Rich Countries

We all know what recession means-
the end of a cycle of economic growth.
Whether the cause of the end
is false corporate accounting coming to light,
bank loans running out and debts being called in,
or some final decline in an area of manufacturing,
does not really matter.
Everyone ought to know that progressive
economies crash once every decade.
Instability is inherent in the system.
But a short sighted media won't look back,
or ahead, though they might look abroad
to see the new growth through the old dead trees.
What we are told instead
is that 'downturns don't happen often'.
Headlines tell us that the measure of a recession
is a few utterly grossly rich people,
people who make money out of money,
suffering a big loss of income,
a small loss of property, but no loss of life.
The loss is mostly of some affected style than anything more.

For those whose lives go unreported,
because they are too near the botom
of the system to matter to the media
there is no real loss, what they lose
in delusory lifestyle aspirations
they more than regain in involuntary,
but self improving, self discipline.

Time

does not wear a watch,
and admire itself.
It gets on with it's task,
-measuring out life
not through wealth, poverty,
or any other relative terms
or abstractions,
but by being the presence within the hands
that change moments of consciousness.

The Posthumous 'Outing'

of Jimmy Savile as a serial paedophile
has shocked a lot of people,
not least because his presence
brightened light entertainment for decades.
What the shocked would prefer
to not contemplate, with their taboo-
ridden family values is how over the years
their taboos created in non-heterosexuals
a sense of being damaged and invisible-
especially to each other,
and making amongst themselves a culture
of 'Don't ask, don't tell' for their invisibility in the media,
which was a mirror in which
we all hoped to see ourselves.

For myself and others I will always prefer
sex of every sort to be both negotiable
and consensual. When a person can't tell,
fantasy from reality, for being blinded
by the light entertainment industry, it is Hell.

Advertising

is the levy upon truth
which consumers are led to believe
pays for growth and choice in the economy
of the near future.
But actually  the adverts shrink the present
tense and add to our debts, by fore-shortening 
the longer term possibilities,
the better to make life-through-choice more vertiginous.  

Meaninglessness

is the dark matter in an intelligent universe,
and humans-in their self belief as the planet's
most creative beings have the earth's greatest
capacity for it, in how it discounts the creativity
of the planet that made them. All history is human.
It all reads as if our inventiveness was designed
to expand the sense of 'something missing'.

Invisible Means?

An atheist is somebody who disbelieves
 in invisibility because he can't see it.

The Military Imagination

In the Gary McKinnon hacking story
it was revealed that many of the supposedly
secure Pentagon computers that Mr Mckinnon
breached to find evidence for extra terrestrial
life had no password, and therefore no security.
Where there was a password it was, umm, 'password'.

Now Mr McKinnon is free from the request
to tried in the U.S, he may still be sued in the UK
for $100,000s to compensate for the effects
of his security breaches,
when he repeatedly tried to warn
them but they took the warning as proof of a breach.
It seems the preferred security the U.S. military
is to hound foreign hackers in the civil courts
of the country they control.

It was not Mr McKinnon's choice
to have aspergers, but it is ironic,
and part of that condition, that what
gave him the skill to hack also denied
him the recognition that intelligent aliens
in full awareness of their otherness
to humans are unlikely to leave evidence
of themselves in so unimaginative
and insecure a place as The Pentagon.

The United Colours Of Eucalyptus

The rainbow eucalyptus

Patches of the outer bark are shed anually

showing a bright green inner bark

This then matures to a dark green that gives way
 to blue orange and maroon tones.  

Dying Is Easier Than Living If You Pay Tax

Death and Taxes have been part of every society
that has had a currency since time began.
The rituals for registering and dealing with death
have evolved,
but legally the process remains relatively simple.
The departed depart and their effects, mortal remains
and property are legally disbursed.
When the departed depart they are not even there.
With their departure
they cannot witness any dispute or sense of loss.

Whereas the modern tax system is a miracle
of self-compounding nests of catch 22 logic.
Forty years ago the american tax code
was 1000 pages long.
Because of modern case law-
led by lawyers and lobbyists-
it is now 75,000 pages long.
'Every time they [central government]
try to simplify it they add 10,000 pages...
 ...even eliminating the loopholes creates
more regulation ' -Lionel Shriver
on ''Start The Week' 12th Oct 2012

Modern Disability

'Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind.'
-Albert Einstien

Seeking Compensation Means Living In The Past

I would love to say that I find life totally meaningless,
and because life means nothing then there is no rationale
for any part of what I have learnt that sustains strong scrutiny.
But I can't.
I have found that life works better without a grande scheme.
The pleasures of the moment are always simple,
and work fine for no over-arching plan because
they are uncomplicated by the need for grand reason.
I know very well that there is suffering in the world,
but this suffering is perpetuated by all the grand scheme
I have known which have at their roots the idea
of particular status-led human beings as highly possessive,
'victims', seeking compensation, from the present and future.


If you want to live in the present don't seek compensation,
or expect relief your own suffering. Recompence is addictive,
and leads to living even more in the past,
where people get ever more tightly wrapped
in the roles of  victim/rescuer/persecutor
that pass for modern culture.
Most of all, if you still have a choice
don't start a family-be replete in commensality in yourself.

The Myth Of Sisyphus, Modernised

Autumn

Winter

Spring

Summer

Why People Riot

'Evil exists in the world
not create despair, but activity'
-Thomas Malthus  

I Could Only Be Anti-Homophobic

if I was against all phobias
and against every mental health problem.
I could only say I was against them
if I did something about it.
As I am, I am against anti-homophobia
campaigns for their humourlessness,
black or other-which may be in the nature
of campaigns or about the universal affliction
that is human sexuality.
Inaction is what leads to a lack of empathy
towards affliction, generally,
which leads us also into waging war
against the very ground
we and every other living creatures live upon.

Cleanliness Is Next To Forgetfulness

For thirty years I have known
of St Anlem's ontological proof
for the existence of God,
and for all that time I doubted it's wisdom.
'greater' seemed so bland a term,
it made belief bland in it's turn.

But today I realised what was missing
from the argument for me.
It is not that God is greater than me,
or as great as I can see him to be-
that limits him to the weakness
of my vision. It is more that God
has seen it all, could remember all.
But he chooses to forget by forgiving. 

The New Potential

Presently society says to the mentally ill,
the morally defficient and other non-conformists
from hyper-bland normality,
that they have to change their disabilities
to become the moral and moneyed
to be the successes their lecturers are.
Suppose instead that social incapacity
were to be marketed, rebranded
as 'the new potential for an economy
that is on the retreat from the brink'.
Would employers follow the argument,
and believe their government?
Or think instead that marketing
had become the new insanity?

For The Fashion

that won't offend on the beach
and will conform to every man made
religious law-it is always men
that draw up these laws, even when
women decide to uphold them
on behalf of men-try the all new lyrca hijab.
Ride the waves whilst wearing it
and see for yourself how well
you stay atop, without being provocative.
Then you too can successfully surf
the Islamic dress code. 

The Unacceptable Truth

is that taboos are presented as communal truths,
and have been used so since who knows when.
Taboos are a community's most acceptable aspects
presented as Total Truth, a monoculture
where vanity rewrites human history
as being a narrative about community.
This is truth as a partial lie,
with the unacceptable known but hidden,
thus 'The Apocrypha' means the sub-standard,
the esoteric, the not worth pursuing
because it won't/didn't reap reward.

Acceptability does not improve anything,
least of all truth. Ease is the primrose path
to depreciation. Thus taboos normalise
the partial lies of what goes unsaid,
and justify the weakness of a weak people.
Taboo is the weakening of community
through the approval of weakness.

Solving The Problem Of The Moment

'So Long as you have food in your mouth
you have solved all your problems for
the time being'-Franz Kafka

Leading People Away From Fact

Advertising is a form of creativity that aspires
to fool all the people all the time
(particularly state regulators)
through discursive arguments
that lead the viewer away
from the most important details
about the product being sold.
The more to make the whole of life
like the advert to consumer
-a fantasy product controlled by the advertiser.

In preliterate christian societies
the weekly speech that mattered most
was the sermon in the church before
the giving of the tithe, where the priest
had more power modern advertising now has.
Whether the priest knowingly lied
or not people would still give.
Their charity, like their community,
was as genuine as their heart's desire for life.
Where as the consumers misled by modern
advertising into conumerism
as an imitation of life are solely
conditioned by company profits.

The Good News

from modern humanists
is that they have proved to themselves
that life is pointless.
They have learned that the liberal belief
in free speech was founded in a myth.
The belief was that progress
was towards somewhere, when the reality
(not as grand as a truth)
our only place to go was nowhere
and we were already there.

If only we would build an economics
on this reassurance-then we can
deliver ourselves and the animals
and habitats we cruelly lord it over
from the progress of evil,
the evil of progress,
and the burdens of wealth.
Finally we could deliver ourselves
from how power corrupts.
If only we could make life and law
naturally nasty and brutish, self limiting by design
-we would be much happier being indifferent and poor.

Post Modern Capitalism Quotes Nature

You don't have to be cynical to understand adverts, but it helps....

Street Art Just Got More Viscera

With thanks to http://thisisnthappiness.com

My Second Christmas Card Of 2012

Otto Dix (German 1891-1969),The Seven Deadly Sins-1933 

Internalising Exile

As time goes out of our mind,
because life goes out of shape
then the space we once knew,
which we grew up through,
and from, will be gone.
Then that is life, vanishing
from in front of us as we look.

Our past is a country changed,
and our passport to it expired.
The memory vacuum left behind
will be our personal anti-matter
in the present tense of the world,
making us tourists of ourselves.

It is now accepted that 'If you can
remember the sixties you weren't
really there', but the truest vacations
from a sense of time do not warp
the sense of the present life and the future.

Telephobia

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dali-lobster-telephone-t03257/text-summary

What We Don't Know

about what we don't know
is how much 'eternity' is the play
within the play of our lives
that we cannot see for as long
as we are acting out the role
of 'being ourselves', every day.
Though others (if they are lucky)
may believe they see how we act
and glimpse our ghost
behind that inner curtain.

Snoopy Says It Best

And of course, he is right. His admiration is surely
 even more right and greater given his sense
 of how he struggles with words....

Heart Bait

'When you fish for love bait it with your heart,
not your brain'-Mark Twain

Doctoring Democracy

Or Hypnocracy* Made Easy

In America one in ten people over the age of 12
are on anti-depressants. The medications
are prescribed by doctors not just for depression,
but for poor sleep, anxiety, neurological pain,
the menopause and many other conditions
that mostly threaten the quality of life,
rather than life itself. The vast majority
who take their pills never seek counselling.
The numbers of people taking the medications
has increased four-fold since 1988, many consumers
of these medications believe they perform
better in daily life in the short term.
But equally many will develop a poor
everyday memory, and still be tired, long term,
and ultimately be unable to wean themselves
off the meds that makes them tired and amnesiac....

 *A hypnocracy is a state where the citizens
believe it is a democracy because they vote
and pay taxes for it, but their representatives
actually have only soft power. Hard power
is in the hands of a self perpetuating non-elect
e.g. doctors and pharmaceutical drug companies. 

My Modest Last Word

The words on my tombstone
are going to be 'the future
is not what it used to be-
nor is the future eternity,
which from here I understand
to be a frozen state-
free of triumphalism'.

Art vs Life

Because of his deathly pallor, for Andy Warhol life was
 anything he could get away with too. I admire him for his
 adherence and honesty about perversity (though I can't
 admire his avarice) . Finally I admire him for trying
 to make the difference between art and life as small as possible .

Like All The Best Stories,

the story of the tree of knowledge decieves,
the better to conceal and retain it's mystery.
In my belief there are older versions
than the tragedy of being expelled
from an infantalising paradise,
where paradise could only be for infants,
and as infants they were bound
to think they were the only ones there.

I imagine the story as told when land
was lightly owned, for being travelled over
by nomads-then the tree was a fig tree
in an oasis where youths who were betrothed
by their parents would given the privacy,
to rest in each other's company.
In the quiet, apart from the group
they would see their future selves.

The shape of the leaf would show
boy himself as a male and the ripe figs
with their gently oozing small hole
at the base ,and the barely concealed
pink flesh inside would show them both
the secrets of the female nature, in which
they would silently wonder. The caravan
would then reform itself and prepare to leave,
calling them to rejoin the communal journey
where time and travel were (once again)
going to take over their lives, changed forever.

The fig tree had done it's work in changing the world
and confirming that the world has never changed.

The Non-Society

I read 'New Society' in the 1980's
because I believed that I was a part
of what they wrote about.
I felt that through reading it
I would better understand
the changes I embodied.

In 1987 Mrs Thatcher, was interviewed
in the magazine 'Woman's Own'.
She aimed to be the last ism going,
she was clearing out all the rest.
For her 'society didn't exist',
it was replaced by lots of new wealth,
which was built on debt.
Amidst the novelty 'New Society' folded.

After that, penetrating insight mattered less.
Due to managerialism and short termism
and a burgeoning pedantry
the culture became more shallow.
For the want of a coherent a platform
open minds have been occluded.

Life Is Much Richer In Colour

Nature-the cowbird feeding off insects in the bison's fur.

Since the beginning of the world every life
has been part of a system of interdependence
and support with other life forms.
In nature's hierarchy many animals find parasitism
productive as a part of their system.
Such that it is vital for mutual survival.

Only humans talk about 'equality'.
Humans are also the only creatures
to create mass social systems
including slavery and capitalism.
With their attendant concepts
of outright ownership, where so few are 'hosts'
and so many are made out to be 'parasites',
in a blindness to nature so compound
in character, it is beyond perversity.

Maturity Through Maladjustment

The 'fools wisdom' in this advice will leave you fewer friends
in life but the firmness of those friendships will be a riches
 in themselves, more than money would have been......

The Fullest Life Is Not For Profit

As a non-believer in the work ethic,
where people discipline themselves
by turning their time into money,
because I remember how other
people's money always made a loss
out of my time,  I am happy to accept
that I should work to be able to take love
at it's face value, lower case intended.
By which I mean I should create consensus.

Where rewards are shared, for beliefs
being combined love is self limiting,
and private. It is a far greater relief
than public charity, the flip side
of modern profit, where through paradox
needs are multiplied into wants, to make
more people want more than ever
before, which always results in losses.

What To Do With Old Video Tapes

With thanks to this isn't happiness