Secret Service

The best deeds are done in secret,
never to be credited those that do them,
the best of whom have no need to be known.

That is the most enduring way
to half sustain a half-good world,
and quietly resist cruel inclinations.

Popular Hypocrisy

Wanting to be both popular and right
has always been the height of hypocrisy-
the words of every politician would prove this.

Such want is why I accept belief in God;
the inconsistencies thrust upon him
are everyone's - multiplied,
and writ large enough to be understood
as being well beyond fixable.

Omniscience, Omnipresence and Omnipotence
have always been impossible to combine
in any one person, the better for everyone
to pursue that purest sense of responsibility,
and perfect goodwill in the name of faith.

If I can make my hypocrisy more my own
then people who know me will accept it as my character.   

A Late Thought After The Recent Holocaust Memorial Day

Most terror activity is started by gov't despots.
It starts with the harassment of minorities
in the name of the biggest single majority identity.
It continues until all generosity is squeezed out
of small communities and the minority identity.

It continues with the despot-in-chief
grabbing all the media presence they can
whilst doing nothing to ease the tension
they have created, which they then blame
on anyone and everyone but themselves.

Popular Consumerism

is about to make it's unworthy poor even more disposable,
and much more popular with the worthy poor, the paying customers....

Opacity Theory

Many men resemble their fathers
much more than they want to accept.

Particularly when their fathers
enjoyed being framed by the admiration
that flowed freely from their son's eyes.

Believing themselves to be admired
was an easy way for a father to tell lies
without them ever being seen to do so.

They are long gone when the scales fall
from their grown up children's eyes,
and disillusion comes home to roost
where once false hope believed it reigned.
  

Soft Landings?

I have in my time admired many people,
particularly those who have breezily said
'I always land on my feet'
after talking about their troubles.

But nowadays, when I hear this
I worry about all the characters
my story teller fails to mention,
who, uncredited and at cost to themselves,
supplied the teller of the tale
with their happy endings.

News From The Black Nose

Today my greatest achievement
was to be sniffed by a handsome dog,
on a walk I was on, on my own.

The achievement was more down
to the dog than it was up to me.
She-Heidi was her name-
approached me slowly
-but with confidence-
and gave me a nice lick.

That simple act of acceptance made my day.
   

The Good The Bad And Post-Structuralism

I remember growing up with the tabloid press
and not knowing, for not reading anything else,
that their way of telling a news story
-hiding the narrative behind information and grammar
that was so contorted by the interests of the paper
that the reader ceased to care what was written,
but instead came to enjoy how all news stories
became several puzzles, all with missing pieces.

For me 'growing up' meant not reading the red top press
and wanting the meanings of words to both complex and fixed.
But what did I find when I was meant to be an adult?
Only clever, wealthy, and over-educated people
writing about the about broadsheet 21st century press
as if it was 'post-structuralist', and wanting to return
to the fractured narratives of old, but with longer words.....

Whatever Our Intent

Not that it is necessarily a crisis, 
but the less we look ahead whilst we can
the more likely our inactions will dictate the future.
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Some People Are Like Their Front Doors

-they are very good at keeping folks out
when it suits them.

And it suits them more, and more often,
than they are prepared to admit. 

Predatory Helpers

I never saw optimism as 'predatory'
until I was urged to read self help manuals
by friends who thought I needed help. 

Farming Today

When the rain washes away accounts of 'our success' today
then there will be nobody to know what humans thought
and tried to do to tame a planet that was beyond taming.

Powerpointless

The President's Spokesman is silent because
he is on unpaid leave until The President gets his budget 
passed by The Senate and the Houses of Congress. 
Normal service will resume with the next president.
Until then, enjoy the silence......... 

The Comforts Of Relative Amnesia

In middle age I have to admit to being terrible
at remembering stories I once presumed to know.
Only the stickiest facts stay with me,
whilst I scramble the narrative they were once attached to.

But I am thankful that with what awareness I have left
I remain relatively forgiving of my own forgetfulness,
which also helps me forgive other people's amnesias.

The Consistency Of Old Failures

Why are diets like Political Careers?

Because both seem to work for a time,
but both always end in qualified failure.

To disguise the air of defeat
both hold out the promise
of quiet re-commitment in the future.

For The Absurdly Wealthy

there is no such thing as absurdity,
only a quiet aching void
which most of them don't realize
that money cannot fill.

The Existential Dilema

What do we do when our freedom of speech
reduces everyone else's freedom of thought?

That is what the editors of the popular press
should have on their minds
as they set about their work every day. 

The Accidental Education

is mostly an education in ignorance,
anything the pupils learn that is worth knowing
is surely learned by accident, rather than design.

For 'The Undeserving Poor'

their New Year this year
will be neither more deserving,
nor make them more worthy
than any previous New Year.

In fact for the undeserved
their lives this year
will be as undeserved
as every previous year.

Fear Of Loss

is the surest way of losing what we value most.
The fear ensures the loss, which is how humans
have engineered as many animal extinctions as they have.

Competitive Insincerity

is a game played by people who don't know themselves
where they assume an acceptance by other people
on the basis that that other folks don't know who they are, either.

Since it is a competition there has to be a winner
and that winner is the person who knows themselves least
who can become the most popular by the process
least recognized as being intended for that purpose.

The one rule this game relies upon
is that nobody mentions four things
Sex, Money, Religion, or Politics,
all of which-for not being mentioned-
are the divisions by which the game works.  

Boredom is The Measure Of The Cheapness Of Grace

Many a time humans experience
the cheap grace of manufactured pleasures
in which the pleasure wears out
rather faster than the product does,
and the circumstance and situation
in which we consume it drags on.

Humans are experts in boredom
through mistrusting their senses
and their dexterity with language,
in favor the latest mass media
short circuit/sound bite.

Let our boredom be the recognition
that we should retreat and rest,
do less in the pursuit of a more durable
and sustainable sense of pleasure.

Like My Heroes, Van Der Graaf Generator

I am big in Italy and distinctly unpopular in the UK,
though in a world of change everything remains uncertain.  

The Medication We Want Most

Is the one that is most easily faked and rendered impure 
by common additives, like false hope.

The Middle Men

have always been the people
who run any given society,
however rich or poor
that society might be.

The richer the society,
 the greater the wealth
that the middle men
(the wealthiest usually are men) will collect,
and the more of society's wealth
they expect to absorb in future.

Whether they are lawyers, surgeons,
financiers, accountants, or property tycoons.
their peak ownership comes
when they register their works
as 'charitable', or otherwise avoid all tax
by sending their money into exile.

Then after managing their own wealth
they can help others manage themselves into debt
by going into politics on a ticket of 'Wanting More'
-regardless of which party who adopts them. 
   

Blue Thoughts

Recently I took an air flight. I had to choose of book to read whilst waiting in the airport lounge, and on the flight itself. Such times are ideal for avoiding what is going on me, until there is an announcement worth taking notice of. The book I chose for this journey was 'A Backdoor To Heaven, an autobiography' by Rabbi Lionel Blue (1930-2016). I had not read it since first reading it probably for the only time twenty five years ago.

It reread as fresh and light as I remember him being in his broadcasts of 'Thought For The Day' on Radio 4, for which he was rightly famed. Below are various quotes from the book. Enjoy.... 

'Would I rebuild the world as it was [pre World War Two Judaism] if I could? If somebody offered me a return ticket to the past would I accept it? ....lots of religious people have tried it and the only result is banality.'.

'The facts were beginning to be known in the late forties and it was clear that everything [about the holocaust] had been blessed by some Godly organisation or another. Concentration camp guards had sung Christmas carols, Popes had signed concordats with Hitler and Mussolini and the Protestant State Church in Germany had expelled Jews who had believed in Christ. It was not that religious people were any worse than other people. The horrifying fact was that they were the same'.

'In my mind I decided to give a party and invite the various bits of me to it. If I was not going to have another breakdown then they would all have to meet sometime and learn to put up with each other......      .....a meeting was arranged.'

Religion, real religion begins when it can risk the truth.Conversion takes place when you can admit to yourself all the wrong reasons that are at work. One day at a service I admitted I was not God's boy scout....  ....I became myself and admitted who I was and I could pray.'.

'It took me some time to realize what real sin and real virtue were. I had been so preoccupied with formal ones or synthetic ones. I needed experience and teachers because I could not see the obvious....   ....on my own I could not purify myself to stop myself from playing games.'

'  ....prayer and drink go rather well together. Some rabbis used to have schnapps before a service, and it certainly helps remove that deafening self-consciousness and artificial language which mummify prayer. The ghetto walls which once seemed like fortresses now seem[ed] like companionable ruins. Because they did not prevent anything I became rather fond of them.'.

'Righteous indignation is such a sleazy emotion.'.

'Of course there will be rows. You can tell Him [God] to get out of your life and He will go. But after the love has gone you will feel so empty, you will call Him back. There is nothing like the pleasure of making up. It leads to the release of love. With a human beings it is consummated in bed, and with a divine being with repentance.'.

' ....most mornings I get in the post I get an assorted mixture of religious tracts, journals and texts. I put them aside; occasionally out of curiosity I read them through. It is a strange cocktail or breakfast time.  ....underneath the love there is a quite a lot of sadism.'.

'Religion has a habit of telling where you ought to be and not starting from where you are. It is also not very good at getting you from one to the other, or telling you how to evaluate the experiences en route.'.

'If you use a loudspeaker you cannot help going in for simplifications and you certainly cannot get personal in a modern auditorium.'.

'I have recommend [to] the searchers that I know that they find a place where they can stand aside from their ordinary lives to see what is extraordinary. I have a great affection for a contemplative priory, it is genuine, nobody is trying to sell me anything.'.

When I was a Rabbinic student I was sent a small congregation outside London and I day-dreamed romantically and happily......   I would be wise and humble and unnoticed, except by God of course, my hair would grow grey in their service and my sermons ripen like old Stilton; I would be rather holy.'.

'A manufacturer showed me a vast computer and I wondered if religion must always be vague and evasive. Could it ever achieve that clean precision?'.

'When divinity is ditched law and custom become autonomous, rather like tabus. Community ceases to be an expression of worship and becomes an object. When their inner balance is disturbed legal religions like Judaism (and possibly Islam) slide into communalism and politcs.'.

'Some religious literature disturbed me, because though the words were love the taste was hate.'.

'There is no direct relationship between religion and straight forward happiness.'.

'No wonder dogs were not favored by the prophets, they were so much better at inducing guilt.'.  

The Religion Of America Is Insurance

Though originally it was the reverse;
religion was a way of insuring the near future
through controlling family and work.
'Legislating for the community' became
a low level human automation
via The Protestant Work Ethic.

Now there is no such thing as community;
advertising and consumerism have destroyed
most of what was the sense of individual self was for.

The future of work is now assured by robots,
the word 'robot' was originally Czech, it meant
'imitation-human machine that provided forced labour'.

With work so automated
then all sense of community
must also be mechanized.

Markets for rationing health
have to cover everybody,
the meaner the rations for the poor
who gain least from the work ethic the better.

Then community can return thru debt,
from making the poor credulous targets
for cold calls from insurance companies
whose main aim is to turn themselves
into the financial equivalent of a death cult.

Relative Dishonesties (2)

Many people who live in ghettos
believe that where they live
is designed to keep other folk out,
when the truth is nearer
their ghetto is designed
for their confinement.
  

Relative Dishonesties

It is sometimes written by folk who enjoy porn
that 'Pornography is more honest that Religion',
as if a little private immorality
were less dishonest than sounding preachy.

Having tried both porn and religion
and being well acquainted with them
for longer than I care to think
I simply don't believe this line,
about their relative dishonesty.

They both share many features;
both are second hand experiences
both feed off a sense of something 'lacking' within us.
both are habitual/repetitive
both feed off fantasies of what might be
both capitalize on a a sense inequality
and both would go a lot less further
without the money used make them popular.
      

A Short Note To My Government*

*and to every other government around the world
that tells it's citizens about it's levels of efficiency
that much that such high efficiency levels can't be true.
  

The Limits Of Literacy

I am used to online questionaires,
the sort that ask 'How many books
from this list of 100 have you read?
Click and scroll down here to find out'.

I often get good scores on these lists,
the more miserable the titles listed
the higher my scores will rise.

What I have never got, though,
is what to do after reading so many books,
that leaves me with an active sense of purpose.  

The God Of Serendipity

is an uneasy deity to serve.

Many times S/He
will put their followers
into a state of need,
and then provide for them
in the least expected way,
leaving us with nothing to say
beyond yet anther relieved
'Thank you God/ess. Amen'.

My Only New Year's Card

Perhaps one card is enough when not knowing 
what to beware of broadens the choice that much.