The End And The Means

Some 'markets' never stop amazing people as they grow.......

Between Life And Death

nobody knows which way to turn,
particuarly when both make what we have
seem like masks that are fixed, and burn.

My Second Christmas Card Of 2015

by Gerhard Richter.

Looking Out Of My Window

I realised that Black Friday
was less a one day increase
in cheaper consumer choice,
and more a day of winter weather.

Toy Town Dystopias

Security cameras never need to lie
to entrap customers in shops-
slick advertising slack consumer law
and scammers do all that work for them.

Under Construction

 It is being built by a government near you,
and you had better not ask too much about how it works.

Present Conditional

A life 'on hold' is very different
to a life that is held as if valued.

Money Is Like Guilt

-both are inventions
which empower their inventors
to make other people dependent
in ways which dependents lose choice
even as their needs are defined and met.

Why? Indeed....

Perhaps it is the arms industry, but as ethical living goes, killing seems repetitive....

Who's Happiness?

'Take these pills' the nice lady doctor said,
'They will make you happier than you are now',
'I am glad you put that in qualified terms'
I replied, knowing but not saying
that I no longer knew what happiness was,
-in either relative or absolute terms.
Nor did I know calm or rest,
becuause of how I was 'cared for' either.

But if my taking the pills made me good
for other people in all their restlessness,
neediness, gainfulness, and with the outright lies
they always told and never acknowledged,
then for their sake I will take the medication.
What 'self' I have has no power to command
that others modify their behavior for my benefit,
but politely accepts demands that I be 'normal'. 

Consumerism Modernised

Where we have to particularly watchful for the toothrot.

 

Marrakech In The1930's......

'As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women–threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.

When you walk through a town like this–two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the ragsthey stand up in–when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces–besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.

I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.

An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French:

“_I_ could eat some of that bread."

I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of the Municipality.

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamoring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumor of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters–whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

"Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance–everything."

"But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?"

"Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They're cunning, the Jews."

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays  reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one’s shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.

Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women, when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman, that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing–that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it. There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.

This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas–on the whole–the plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.

As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward–a long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.

They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.

As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.

But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper'-George Orwell

My Mind

often wonders at what the ear
that aurally feeds it hears
from the mouth that issues
forth it's thoughts, when they occour.

The White Death

Nowadays cancer is all the rage
for writers of a certain age
who have outlived the will
to waste their youth to folly,
for great comfort and profit.
Writers were poorer I was young
and the best I read were long dead.
They had died young, well middle aged,
and not from cancer, but from tuberculosis.

My First Christmas Card Of 2015

The message inside said 'Have a very minimalist celebration'. I'll try...

This Blog is Taking A Rest: Please Enjoy The Intermission Music

I Am Used To My Own Life Being Pointless

After all in any hierarchy
-particularly in families-
the bottom must be selfless
to give the top it's 'character'
-it's fitness to decide and rule.
But I have never quite adjusted
to how my actions might make
the live of others quite as pointless
as my own sometimes seems to me.

Liquid Politics

Kenneth J Galbraith prepared a speech
for U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson.
After reading the speech Johnson asked Galbraith:
“Did y’ever think, Ken, that making a speech
on ee-conomics is a lot like pissing down your leg?
It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else".

There is more than one quote by President Johnson
which used passing urine as metaphor for politics....  

My Proof Of Non-Conformism

The more the more I tried to fit the more I stood out as being odd.

Sixty Five years Ago, Today....

GBS

Shaw is dead. The great dark gates of death that have been locked against him for so long swung open for a moment at dawn yesterday and the lean derisive Sage looked over his shoulder for a final twinkling trice - and was gone.
GBS, who has said most things worth saying in the past century and who has had the world by the ears and tail for longer than any writer in history, finally learned the most difficult and most simple of tricks - how to die.The frozen field-mouse stiff and cold under the hedgerow knew it before him ; the fledgling in the cats paw understood it and the poor weighted mongrel in the canal beat him to it in having an earlier glimpse of the last sombre secret of how to leave this life.
Only this glittering Jack Frost of a man, whose contemporaries began to die at the turn of the century and who has pierced and exposed most of the follies and foibles of mankind had not, until the birth of yesterday, achieved that final shattering achievement, the ending of life, and in this case the ultimate awesome passing of George Bernard Shaw.
The mould is broken. There was none like him before him, none like him when he was alive - and there will be none to match him now he has gone. Shaw in love seems almost grotesque - though there is much evidence that in his time many women did not think it so. How for instance could any girl in his arms deal with this sort of stuff? :
'When you loved me I gave you the whole suns and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul. We possessed all the universe together - and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well!'
Mr Churchill, who know a golden intellect and a diamond-bright pen when he sees one, has paid his profound respects GBS. But he has also recorded his censure at some of the gaucheries of the sage in his antics.
'If truth must be told, our our British island has not had much help in its trouble from Mr Bernard Shaw. When nations are fighting for life, when the palace in which the Jester dwells not uncomfortably is itself assailed, and everyone from prince to groom is fighting on the battlements, the Jesters jokes echo through deserted halls, and his witticisms, distributed evenly between friend and foe, jar the ears of hurrying messengers, and mourning women and wounded men. The titter ill accords with the tocsin*, or the motley with the bandages.'
GBS died after a fall when reaching out to prune an old and dying bough with secateurs. The symbolism would not have been lost on him. he was almost certainly a happy man for a very long long time. But even on that he had the last paradoxical word. Said Mr Shaw 'A life time of happiness? No man could bear it : it would be hell on earth.'

Daily Mirror Columnist Sir William Connor, who wrote under the name Cassandra on the death of George Bernard Shaw, November 3rd 1950. 

*funeral bell             

In Rememberance Week

Remember the alternative to the official recognition of the fallen and falling....

On Home Ownership

As the richest people in the world
increasingly detach themselves
from the poor, through their wealth,
the more the rich few reinforce
the private ownership of everything
whilst redefining the value of care
to only what is valuable to them.

What each of us needs is very simple
- a door we can close against the world
when it presses us to be who we are not
-behind which we can be at ease in ourselves.

Watching Television Alone

Watching television used to be sold
as 'an activity for all the family'
-something to bind family members
each to the other via the values
presented on the screen.

Where does this leave the person
who lives and watches alone?
If, well more likely when, they disagree
with the presenter will they let it wash over them?
Or swear at the screen repeatedly, get angry,
and have to turn it off if they want some calm?

Whether they agree or swear at the screen
on their own there nobody with whom
to share affirmation through agreement.
No shared joy at being positively surprised.
No feedback through spontaneity.

Just freshly minted inertia
which blocks out the silence
that would speak a lot clearer
to all about how to make true rest.