Duty Now, For The Future

The modern commercial Christmas
is like many events we endure-
the people who enjoy it the most
are the ones who least understand
how the season is put together.  

Food Credits

The problem is less
'how to have our cake and eat it'
and much more who pays the bill
when we try this dangerous trick.

Opaque Communications

Talking to ourselves is common enough
and by no means a bad  a thing to do.
What is much worse, and all too common
is being a bad listener at the same time.

   

The Limits Of Human Company

There is many a time
that much as I seem sociable
it is more show than substance.
But show seems to be 'enough'.

Enough for that moment
with that person, but insufficient
for me to escape the nagging emptiness
where what would assure me most is beng alone.
Being where nobody seeks after my company
or for me to use what life skills I have
to make me some temporary companion.

When I give but I don't feel my giving.
I am still living, but I am numb
towards my own generosity of spirit.

   

My Third Christmas Card Of 2017

'Red Square UNOVIS' (1921) by Ilya  Chashnick

Brave New Mistakes

I look forward to machines
taking over much of human life.
Mistakes will still be made
but the machines that make them
will not reinforce the old guilt,
and all the fear and loathing
that humans inflict on each other
with such errors.  

Happiness

can never be the goal of a life,
it is only one of many byproducts
of different processes, wherein we try,
every day to simply live well .

However much we are gifted
in our powers of our speech
we can only ever partially know
what it is we are trying to do.

So sometimes it is natural
to be lost for words.
And the best silences
express our contentedness.

Today, Tomorrow, And All Our Hereafters

When 'Why' does not explain why
it is not a matter of capitals and commas,
but the inadequacy of written language
to describe, or engage with, pain and loss.

And there is nothing wrong with that.
Inadequacy is common, if not integral,
to human life. It is what should happen
when, for instance, we become the apex
of the food chain and flood the oceans
with inedible and enduring plastics.

What is wrong is when our shame feeds into
our sense of inadequacy, and the two merge
to dis-empower us. When what we need instead
is to do less today but do something sufficient
to prepare for a more modest and active tomorrow.

Folly is bound to follow
when our shame becomes our pride,
and we cannot tell one from the other.

Christmas Depression

Every November is the same,
the darkness comes sooner in the day,
and the cold is there from breakfast onward.

And even on the best of days
the news sounds sick and tired.

I can't mind it when time passes slowly,
and for those who need
I will still have the time of day.

But the best way for my life to pass
is quietly when I can be alone.

Let The Past Remain The Past

Much as I enjoy studying history
I have no interest in any past life
of my own, some scene
where I might have had a greater effect
than I can know now
on any lives led back then.

Let each life find it's own trouble,
it's own causes for complaint,
and it's own joys too.

And when the joy
outweighs the misery
then that is a small bonus
we can enjoy which we know
might happen in future.

The 'I' Test You Can Pass

Because everything is limited edition.
 It is the height of foolishness to deny this fact.
And if life is as fuzzy as these letters are
than that is as clear as you should expect life to be.

Late Thought For 'Black Friday'

Finally! I understand
the modern 'season of goodwill'
the way a mature adult should;

1- accept the urge to borrow money
at interest rates that make the loan
impossible to clear up or repay,
which means you will be forever in debt.

2- prepare yourself to be sold a dream
that you never knew you had dreamt
because you actually did not dream it,
it had been dreamt up for you,
and many more millions like you.

3-having let your most vulnerable
dependents watched the adverts
on television, ad nausiem, then buy
 what the dream tells them is real.  

My Second Christmas Card Of 2017

'Red Square and Cross'- Painted 1928 by Ilya Chashnik.

Philosophy At The Supermarket Till

'30 percent off' seems like a good deal,
unless of course said offer is on your life
-in which case take whatever means remain
to live it as fully as the offer lets you.

Momentum vs Observation

In our youth we are full of enthusiasm.
We rush into projects not knowing ourselves.
As we work we incorporate our blind spots,
which we and many others are blind to also,
into what we do as part of the sheer rush
that is in the energy is only ours once.
Which otherwise will use itself up.

The older we get the slower we appear to be,
but for being so slow the more clearly we take in
the energies and limits of focus in those around us.

It is best to keep on moving, even when slow,
to draw on the greater energy of those around us.
And where we can, gently draw their attention
towards where they don't know they can't see
that they might be heading.


,  

The Old Choices Of Quiet And Noise

I remember my grandparents,
particularly their approach to travel;
they liked the village they lived in,
they were tardy enough about leaving it
that they rarely traveled any great distance
for any length of time.

The comforts of their home had been hard fought for.

They had an 1950's television set
which was travel enough for them.
It gave them all the movement
they might think to want,
without them having to move.

They preferred the BBC
and stuck to 'The News'.

When the set was turned off
they unplugged it at the mains.
They then covered the screen
with a travel blanket,
which they kept for the purpose.

A woolen patterned test card
that required no power.
 
Then they traveled in real life,
cooked and ate, and played cards
allowing the quiet to settle around us.

The War On Terror Is Older Than We Think

'Night and Fog' is a thirty minute
documentary film released in 1956
on the horrors of the Nazi death camps.
It was made by Alain Resnais.

It is a film that was much admired
in it's time, the style of it
has been much copied since.

I have seen it, twice.

Every time you see news footage
of natural disasters and wars
in high density urban settings,
where the camera lingers
over where life is no longer present
those images copy the images
of Auschwitz and Mejdanek
that Alain Resnais filmed.

But I feel appalled that never delved
into the origins of the film's title.

It was the title of the 1941 Nazi policy
which was the original 'War on Terror'.
The forced removal of political opponents
who when they were arrested lost all recourse
to the due process in law that they had before
under the Geneva Convention, as the Nazi State,
prosecuted their war the length and breadth of Europe.

Musical Artillery Seems To Be The Best Weaponry

This is a Trench Cello, so called because it is the same shape
as a first world war artillery box, in which are stored the parts
to create the working musical instrument that is in the name,
including a pitch/tuner and the bow to play it with. 

 However much war remains lethal to humans, animals and habibats,
the older wars were slower in transporting men between the fronts
from which they fought 'for their country'. Weapons were slower
and more limited than the modern guns and bombs. This tardiness
was what allowed soldiers time to rest and play music to each other,
on instruments like this, whilst those just listening to write
about the home they miss, or play cards and take their ease.
  

Is That Money Belt You Are Wearing? Or A Strait Jacket?

Money is a form of insanity
The more folks have of it,
the harder they have to work
to present themselves as 'normal'.
Hence 'The Protestant Work Ethic',
which took Organised Religion
(an unstable form of social glue)
to new heights of hyper-insanity.

The more money we have
the more we warp any reality,
built on simple commensality.

The Paradise Papers prove all this.  

A Marketing Opportunity Missed

Every year, as the light draws in
and the dark nights lengthen,
so adverts for happy families
that are so thoroughly synthetic
that they are effectively emetics
fill the screens of televisions
across the western world,
proclaiming 'It's Christmas!'.

What manufacturers and advertisers
seem never to have grasped
is how many men react against
these images that sicken them,
because however much men have families
they dislike how they are possessed by them,
owned by how they work to pay for everything.

Given this, there should be a Christmas
celebration that is marketable to the men
who pay for their families, but want their own world
where they have a choice about the distance they keep
from the relatives who insist they close to who they are kept by.

More humbug at Christmas! That is what men cry.
And since mass marketing can sell us black as it were white
and vice versa, then why cannot advertisers sell us

'The Happier Humbug Laden Season of Goodwill'?

If they were really clever they would make it last all year. 

My First Christmas Card Of 2017

 'Suprematist Com

position'-Ilya Chashnik (1922)

Maths vs 'Religion'

The popular understanding of protestant work ethic
has been responsible for more activity
than with hindsight has seemed intelligent.

The humans who believed in predestination
sought their makers approval
through competitive and profitable good works
-the better to secure their place in Heaven
and make sure of their enemies' place in Hell.

When computers and algorithms
have taken over 95 percent of all jobs,
for which people used to be rewarded
for learning how to accept boredom
without complaint then the humans
will have set up a system and a test
more real than any Calvinist theology.

There altruism through very limited activity
both towards themselves and the planet
whilst still being the apex of the food chain
will be the only realistic choice left to them.

Everyman

My U.S.P. is that I have
no interesting features.

No Dictatorship

can ever be truly benign,
not even for a brief while.

The Armistice Days That I Will Remember This Week....

will be the men who survived.... 

great wounding and extensive restorative facial surgery

who were as brave in the socail isolation after 'The Great War'

as they were on the battlefield during their time on it. 

I Don't Mind

Medical science,
and extreme wealth for the few,
extending human life for even fewer
to almost infinity if they can get there.

All I would ask is that any such life
would have a sense of purpose,
engagement, and altruism to match it's length.

Otherwise it will seem far longer than it is. 

How Do You Manage Your Holes? or The True Purpose Of Religion

We all have blame-shaped holes in our lives,
and if we are to have a self and self control
then these holes do have to be managed.

Any person of faith who is open and honest
will admit that the hole never really goes away
but it slightly changes shape every day
and with every paradigm of life it shifts, significantly.

If we do not take control
of the shape of the hole
then we will be unaware
when it changes us,
and we will not be in charge
of the changes we are put through.

Anyone who says they have no 'blame shaped hole'
in their life is either a psychopath or a politician,
there is not much to choose between the two roles.

It is a mark our modern sense of equality
that politicians and psychopaths can be of either gender. 

100 years Of One Sided Thinking

And the longer it has gone on, from the foundation of the state of Israel
and the many wars since, the more the empire of suffering continues
until nobody knows where to start, to try to put an end to it.
The suffering is all too endemic, the defensiveness is all too absolute....  

On The Anniversary

of the 95 theses written in Latin
being nailed to the Wittenburg door
my I offer my humble readers a joke
I told a little more recently

My Lutheran Landlady; 'Martin Luther had terrible digestion problems'.

Me 'I know, it was the diet of worms that did it'.  

Is That A Thesaurus In Your Hand?

Or are you just immensely pleased to see me?