Cheap Grace in Language(1)

If apologies had to be sincere
for their makers to be permitted
to say them, then I suspect that far fewer
of the 'Sorries' that are presently said
would be said for the same reasons in future. 

If Tourists Become Terrorists,

in their self indulgent search for kitsch and ease
and it is worth resisting such an urge,
then how much more should we battle
against the planners and governments
who encourage speculators to built flats
by the multiple block on the sites
of once viable, now spent, industries?
The further they advance of short term capitalism,
via tourism the more it becomes is a disease
where gain is for the few, and not for long
and the few who gain live far away
from the masses, in corporate offices.

After The Last Financial Crisis

we found out that firms beyond a certain age
who 'don't adapt with the markets' sow the seeds
of their own demise-death by dinasaurism-
usually when approaching their centenary.
Are The World Cup and The Olympics
now ageing very badly? For more than a decade
they seem to me to have been poorly led,
by 1-their sponsors, the creators of the worlds
least healthy snacks and drinks, who collectively
are responsible for mass obesity in western society.
2-the television companies who are always trying
new gimmicks to report on the action and give us
the results, with the human element provided for
by an off putting partisan vigour, and finally...
3-the international construction industry,
who rely on third world labour to build the stadia
for these occasions.

 All of the above account for a far bigger effort
than those who merely play the games.
Who would have thought that in a sports event
the smallest amount of money for the occasion
was required to be invested in the actual competitors?    
 

Pain vs Gain

Not that Wisdom a pain free path,
 but if going nowhere were better labelled
fewer people might want to go there.

For Choice In Being Parented

as long as the psycho-path is one you can get off, for a different route.

In The Age Of Television

Politics is the art of spinning stories
about the future, in which the politician
poses as the master of the message,
the unmoved mover, against shifting sands.
But in a world in which there is no still centre
-the 'developed' world with its ever expanding media-
they soon become the spun, the commented on,
the reviled and laughed about. I still don't get
how they really expect to be above events
for very long. It is as if the future they aspire
to is only ever meant to affect others, not them.

Can I Sell You An Idea?

It is old, but always good at renewing itself at others expense.

Tailoring Our Appetite To Our Spirituality

Amen.

We Are Far

from where shared liberty
is underlined by mutuality
and a transparent respect.
We are always pushing
others towards libertinage,
rebelling from informed consent.
Far from rules that work,
because of rebellion,
which underlines how hard it is
to retreat and recant
when violence defines our spirituality. 

From The Lumiere Brothers

who produced the first public film, via John Logie Baird
to Andy Warhol and well beyond-with 'the digital revolution'
the mass creation and distribution of repetitive moving images
has charged forward via marketing, telling people what to want
and selling them more of what they already have.
Such that all is now image on repeat. And if all the images
that have whizzed past us were stilled for us to examine
then they would die. Because all these images are merely
restlessness in which kitsch hypnotises with it's motion. 

Loneliness

is solitude with a problem.

Aloneness is completeness
in silence, which varies greatly
and for which there is no comparison.

An All Too Common Complaint

Thank goodness for the balm of isolation!

If Words Failed Us

more often, but our actions held value,
the world would be a less wordy place.
No animal I have known has ever felt
totally unable to communicate
whilst so many humans (myself included)
make deserted feasts of words-and worlds
-for talking up how to be bad listeners.

Some animals respond very well to music.

When Soul Resides In Tax Avoidance

In the dim and distant past some freed men
believed that only their equals in gender had souls.
Whether this was because only they had willies
or whether they needed women and lower status men,
to take the blame when events turned against these would-be strong men,
and for blames sake blame and soul were best kept apart
(how noble of them!) is hard to know.
Their reasoning was probably both, and worse as well
-mediocre tribalism. I now see something similar in my society
which is run by the rich for the richest 1%
and in their souls rests their wealth and status.
Thus their love of money is less the sin of pride,
more their virtue. The 1 % believe that the poor
are to be consigned to oblivion. However hard they work
they will never earn enough for their wealth
to be worth that acme of virtue, avoiding paying tax.

The Best Motivation For Spring Cleaning

As long as we are prepared to use up all of our surplus,
of temporary low level depression.

The Soul Plays Best

and it is at its fullest when the body is a well tempered instrument.

At My New Dentist

I filled in the form
to identify any conditions
that I might have
that would restrict
how they could treat me.
Under heart conditions
I put down 'generosity',
since in a mean world
it is a big defect. Gently,
my dentist asked me to erase it
and initial the crossing out,
because their computer
does not quite yet have
a big enough sense of humour.

Rubbish Is Us(2)

By their rubbish
they will be known.

The Oldest 'Have It All' Society

in the world is patriarchy. Then, when men thought they, 'had it all'.
The 'all' they believed they owned was listed in the final Commandment.
(Exodus Ch 2 Vs 17) under 'what not to covet' it lists;-
'Your neighbours house,
 his wife, his servants [both genders],
his ox,
his donkey
or anything else'.

This was a list was of what is one man's that another should not covet,
as much as what another had that his neighbours should not want,
and it was not exhaustive.
I don't mind-who would argue with the abbreviations of history?
But if from cattle to wives [did men make children the property of women?
And reclaim them when they became adults? Discuss...  ]
as mens property they had to be silent whilst sentient and owned,
as units of currency not for overt exchange between men,
and not even a neighbour to each other in their keptness
-for not being able to own property, being owned
must have been incredibly demeaning. A slow form of torture.
So modern women dream of pretending to omniscience,
then please think again about of the consciousness of others
that you what you want to own, and let that limit your ambition.

Circular Non-Living

because where ever you are in the cycle
you are not rooted in the physical space
of where you are, and you are thinking
 to exist somewhere else. 

Election Special

The powers that be play 'pass the parcel' with responsibility,
via artifice, distance, and blurred rules that always break down.
But only after paying out generous expenses.
We trust a media that not only lets them do this,
buy which also shifts the public's awareness away
from what 'real achievement' means in the real world
-change with solidity-
whilst impressing on us the cheapness of novelty.

Fly Too High

for being too small

can get you shot down.   From here.

Repression vs Reflection

How did I become
the type of person my parents
always warned me against being?

Asking The Impossible Of Government

In a liberal capitalist economy
slavery will only become a convictable offence
when legislators pass legislation that forces judges
to account accurately for the irreversable power
of the conditioning that is reinforced through poverty.
Values where reward no longer rewards and to sink
to the bottom of the financial system is to lose
all ability to distinguish traffickers who will cheat
the poor of their wages with easy talk, from those
who are there to genuinely help, and not exploit weakness.
Particularly when in reality all that traffickers have to offer
is a well preserved fear which hides in plain sight
of the determination, once being the weakest, themselves,
to never be there again-by putting others there instead.

Utopianism For One

The aspirations of Ralph Waldo Emerson
were 'To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children…
to leave the world a better place…
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you [he] have lived. This is to have succeeded.'
I don't know how close he got to his aim,
or what the price was, but if he met his aim
and the effort was less than the gain
(with laughter it should be) then truly
I hope he was not one of the few.
The world would be better if we are the many.

The Emetic Of The People

Politics is the art of government.
In this age of worldwide arms manufacture
military rule, representative democracy
and oligarchy are the basic forms of that art-
and each form props up and collapses the other.
Modern representative democracies support themselves
by exporting arms to wholly militarised societies,
and insists to their own, less run-by-the-gun civil society
that they don't need such militarism whilst omitting
to say 'But we do need to export military hardware
to undemocracies to create the balance of payments
that supports you'. There was a satire about inequality
called 'Eat the rich', the best retort to which was to erase
the first word and write 'vomit' instead. How are we
going to vomit up the will to manufacture and export arms
from our gut to support a genuinely peace based civiliation?

The Greater The Power

the more reduced the sense of humanity.

The Gravity Of Taxes

I have finally worked out the point
of space travel, it was far from clear.
What up to now has been scientific endeavour
will for a rich elite become the destination du jour
which will become a tax loss for everyone else to live for.
After that the more covert future of the Moon
is that it is going to be less of a place to go,
and more an abstract destination for the profits
of multi-national corporations
There accountants will breathe purer air
and give themselves charisma,
whilst on earth lawyers will define the moon
as the place of residence for the corporations
whose technology transforms our lives
-but the residency is only for tax purposes.
Lawyers will state with stately gravitas
that since gravity is like tax-
both hold people and collective endeavour back- 
then their clients reserve the right to have less of either.
Yes! The Moon is set to be the elite corporate tax haven.

Opacity Unlimited

When Secrecy and Pedantry combine
they are like fallen angels who give birth
to a powerful and impenetrable opacity.
Each works for themselves first,
and the other second.
Their task (which they don't discuss)
is to erase the line between overt and covert lies
in all they do, thus erasing all chance of transparency
in the minds of everyone below them, and with each other.

Self Realisation Made Easy

....and an inferiority complex can leave us
(falsely) feeling just as useless as others too.

Hell

is founded on good intentions.

Bliss Unconfined,

is blind to all otherness
-this seems fine
until it collides
with reality.

For The Poorest

of the world recycling
the remains other peoples
lives is their meat and bread.
The most durable futures
ensure there is more of life
to come for more people,
the durability of which
requires greater modesty
than we are ever prepared for.

The Measure Of Liberty

in any civil society is the vast space
between what we mildly abusively call
'the nanny state'-cars that beep to tell us
when to put our seat belts on, smoke alarms
that go off when the toaster burns the bread,
and other security devices that benefit their suppliers
more than their customers who are obliged to buy them
by insurance companies. These things are meant
to reassure us whilst taking money from us,
instead they diminish us, but leave us intact enough
to fear the thought police. The scary ones who watch us
when we don't know it, so our progress in forming ideas
is plotted far ahead of us by governments and others bent
on conditioning, who employ amoral agent provocateurs,
the better to head us off before we get near to making
the changes that would lessen our leaders' leadership.

The Self vs The Off The Shelf Life

Finally! I understand 'science fiction',
how as a genre, its themes neatly divide.
At one extreme it is about clean utopias
run by distant rulers through machines
in which the populous know their place,
because 1) society is one big machine.
2) The machinery that fixes human roles
also defines an inflexible and complex utilitarianism,
the warping of which provides any plot in these books.

Books in this mode adapt well to film franchises,
with pick 'n' mix pseudo-religious/mythical foundations
which perpetuate a lot of the conservative orthodoxies
of their day. Co-incidentally this makes the films
easy to explain, lends them a false air of 'being prophetic',
and finally with the the profit from product placement
and toy licensing comes the financial reaffirmation.

Given how cohesively the political, philosophical
and monetary are bound together, I can see how easily
this type of fiction can replace religions,
where the faith utterly fails to make reality just or fair.

At the other end there is the human and ethical dystopical-
where there is just as much technology, but human alienation
provides the plot material. This has made for some great
difficult books where the portrayal of discomfort is leavened
only by deepest shafts of black humour.
Very few films are made from these books-the subject
of the terror of a mind trapped inside a system adapts uneasily.
It fails all branches of politics, though it can illuminate insanity.
So, no franchise there then, though the odd radio play has worked.

These are the authors who's work has marked me most deeply,
George Orwell, William Burroughs, Will Self, Kurt Vonnegut III,
Margaret Atwood and J. G. Ballard-there are many others.
They have taught me more about myself vs life
than I could have prepared to learn before I read them.   

The Shoppers Rest

Airports have had multi-faith
spiritual rest rooms for many years,
and these rooms are in transitory places,
where their chances of being well used
are surely minimal. Why not have them
where the human traffic is at high volume,
near people homes, in the local supermarket?
There they would be the shoppers rest-
the one area in the aircraft hanger
sized buildings where Mammon measures all
and life is stressful. Add volunteer chaplains
to help calm shoppers and the rest rooms
could start to re-inspire faith in community.

True Silence Is Never Cliched

Thinking about it,
the truest freedom of speech
should be absolute freedom from cliche.
This is something we all  fall short of offering,
not least when silence-
or the stillness of listening-
might grace us far better
that our noise lets us realise.

The Maths Terrorists

Al-gebra wanted the calculate the democratic deficit.

 

 

Since The Word 'Love' Is So Overused

then a truer measure of our freedom in speech
is how much respect we can work into the words
we share, and hoard it when we talk to ourselves-
who reading this has never tried that? Or keeping a diary?
This respect would make it clear to those we know
that we do know them, and know them to be needy,
but they are in no way insufficient. We are there to help
see their needs met, so with us they can be themselves.