Deities Don't Have Debtors

-they make everything they create
to remain in perpetual debt to them.

Some deities are said to be selfless,
whilst others in their graceless behaviour
reflect the less law abiding elements
of the society that they reflect.

It is also true that believing in one god
and expecting this one ruler and their rule
to be universally easy to adhere to
is far harder logically harder to do
than anyone can think through.

Human variants in obedience and rebellion
are far harder to link to an unseen solid-state ruler,
who never changes and is a fixed point around them,
when their followers will fluctuate quite so much.


than they are to gods who portray human psycho-dramas.

And Heaven's treasures never age-they have no 'sell by' date.

Time And Distance

The difference between a British person and an American
is that the Brit will think that 100 miles is far to travel,
no problem to the American who will be stumped by time
-thinking that a 100 years is an longer than eternity.

My Latest Reading

is 'Dishonest to God; My Autobiography'
by Satan (Sisyphus Publishing Press).

There is no year on which it was published
and there is no copyright law on the text,
which rearranges what I have already read
each time I start afresh on a new section.

I have checked,
and yes,
the book does have an end.

But I have no idea when I might reach it.





P.s. The flyleaf tells me that there is a companion volume,
titled 'Unreliably Yours; How I Inspired History's Greatest Liars'
-by the same author, Satan, with some of is more fallen helpers.
No copy could be found when I searched for one. All extant copies
are presently used as guides by the departmental ministers
of every national government around the world, as part their quest
for eternal rule and the vanquishing of all opposition,
particularly from those they say they rule for but actually over-rule.

Hollow Hierarchies

A position of privilege is a grand place
from which to see the lack of  choice
that other, lesser, people apparently endure.

But observation that leads to inaction
is not really observation at all,
but a paralysis, a kind of death,
of the will for change that pervades the whole universe
.

Suspicious Planning

We are only ever told 'Plan B is to get into debt'
after Plan A pans out badly. It takes that long
for us to be suspicious about all planning, all along.

Because it is when Plan B really kicks in
that we learn what the planners meant to happen.

And usually what 'planning means
is that one closed and barely known hierarchy,
deciding for everybody how they should live;
How much or little the masses should be living on.

If the clique were clearer about it sooner
they know their plan would disappoint.
Hence the Plan A/Plan B strategy
for what they intended from the off.

Better for transparency's sake,
better disappointment through honesty
which allows for changes to be made later,
than denials and evasions all along.

Immoral Equivalence

Is the province of bullies and cheats.
It hides their deeds par excellence.

It blames the weak for their weakness
and beyond all reason it conforms their defeat.

Immoral Equivalence has shaped all history.

Pond Life

What the big fish have to remember
as they roam the pond
as the apex of the food chain
is that size isn't everything.

And they were once small
and dependent on the defenses
of the creatures they went around with.

With survival there are no blind hierarchies.

Hobson's Choice

What can the poorest do more than watch
as their time is bartered away by the rich?

This will go on until they have no more life to live,
they will have been devalued by how
their lives are shared beyond them knowing.

An Illustration Of Grief

And if the difference between the two seems dramatic
it is merely the difference between how a therapist
sees their client and how the client sees themselves 

He Did Not See It Coming

Robert Hunter, did you see the death of Jerry Garcia coming?

I always saw it coming,
but seeing it coming is not the same as seeing it.

I didn't get the feeling he intended to live for very long.
In fact he had said as much, at one point I can remember.
He was conscious that it was not going to last forever.
Nor did I think he wanted his life to last that long.

There are things about Jerry I just don't understand.
Or maybe am not capable of knowing.





And this was said long after Jerry had died,
when Jerry's Garcia's death put asunder
a creative partnership that had lasted thirty five years.

The Past We Never Thought Was With Us

In recent years the public have been made aware
of the issue of sexual child abuse to the nth degree,
through media reporting, through misery memoirs
which became a publishing industry success
second only to 'I survived the Nazi death camps' type books,
but rarely through any near-historical fiction.

Books published in the past, in the 1960's
rarely describe child abuse in any detail.
But one book I read recently did, and yes,
the reader has to read between the lines
and it does involve clergy....

'Father Gusewski had thick wavy hair,
black with the merest hint of grey.....

....Once when I was about thirteen,
he ran his small hairless hand down my back,
from my neck to the waist of my gym shorts,
but stopped there because my shorts
had no elastic band and I tied them with tapes.
I did not give the incident much thought,
Father Gusewski had won my sympathy
with his friendly, often boyish ways.
I can still remember his ironic benevolence;
so not another word about the occasional wanderings
of his hand; all perfectly harmless,
it was really my Catholic soul that he was looking for.'

From page 87 of  'Cat & Mouse'-Gunter Grass.
First published in German 1961, in English 1963.
Translation; Ralph Manheim. 

For The Dog Owners Among My Readers

It will add to your sociability and widen your awareness
more than you could ever realise beforehand.

Saving For That Rainy Day

Because remembering and preserving pain is a talent
common to all life in which human beings 
have excelled over every other species.

Let The Gaps Grow

Children can only mature
where parenting means support
with gaps for life outside of them,
so that children can feel secure when alone,
they won't feel lonely that easily.

The parenting that leaves no gaps
freezes the family and spoils the children.
It creates parents who will never let go,
and never admit how tight their grip is,
on children who will itch for their freedom.

Heaven

is the place we discover the alchemy of memory.

The normal life of decay, pain and agony
stop in their tracks the creation of positive futures
and the new memories that we like to keep.

Heaven is the continuity of memory restored,
restoring all life to more than it's former glory
by means that we can barely guess at.

What the faithful know about the place
they can never ever back up well enough
for those who say they lack the faith to believe,
except by how well those led by faith are restored as examples.  

Openly Unpopular Authoritarianism

was often a rare form of government,
at least in recent times,
not least because  it's leaders and spokesmen
(they usually were men)
could not speak without revealing the heavy chip
of neediness and guilt that was on their shoulder.

But if this form of rule has any virtue at all,
it is that the leader's style will offend the many,
sufficient for them to form a mass movement for change.

Thus 'Representative Democracy' -
the people choosing representatives to govern on their behalf
- is provoked to renewal by the very men who dislike it.

The Worlds Biggest Liars

'The invisible hand' that widens the market place
is itself driven by the law of unintended consequences
as one random decision begats another in a chain
where the results can be both benign and appalling.

That markets only ever celebrate success,
and always bury failure is part of their nature.

We can speak with pride
on being the worlds biggest liars,
particularly when we speak about ourselves. 

Absolute Safety

In these days of everyday trigger warnings
telling me of emotional issues ahead,
from trauma to anxiety, panic and worse
the trigger warnings that alarm me the most
are trigger warnings about more trigger warnings.

They are what tells me that there is nothing else
that there is nothing I should be hearing about.... 

Six Degrees

One recent idea about how people live
is called 'six degrees of separation'.
The idea became the basis for a play
and then it became a film,
before entering into the woozy mess
of mass public forgetfulness.

Less celebrated is it's older cousin,
who is so old nobody knows how old it is.
It is called 'Six degrees of denial'
and the hostility it hides lurks
in logarithms of our smartphones. 

Hierarchies of Empathy

The wealthy who know only wealth
are the least sensitive about how others live.

Animals have more empathy for the human poor
than human beings have for themselves,
and then poor humans, reduced by circumstance
turn empathy into bitter sentimentality.

Nor do the rich have 'common sense',
because their money covers what they lack inside.
So they don't have to think at all beyond those like them.

But the human poor have to have more sense than money
-without sense they would end up with nothing
and still they spend more than enough of their lives
knocking all the sense out of each other.

When 'the last will be first and the first will last'*
we will be living in a truly different order.


*Mathew Chapter 20 Verse 16

How Full Is Your Cup?

I like 'spiritual retreats',
I appreciate the detachment
that they relieve their attendees,
of everyday stuff of life
that wears everybody down.

Though there has to be a simplicity
to the place for it to really do it's work.

The good they do is like everything-limited.
One limit they have is that visits have be repeated
for the good they do to keep on working.

And they cannot not give folks rest
from intractable issues like long term illness,
or a tiredness of life, for which there is no respite.

But a cup that sometimes half fills and leaks
is better than one that when empties, stays empty.

Popular Turn Off's (11)

Like the rest of the us,
popular singers will die.

When they die of old age
they are no longer the rage
that they were of old.
There is always a last lie
which they insist be told
to burnish their reputation.

Their (living) fellow musicians
always tell of the last major project
that they had made plans for,
the foundations for which were laid.
But it was so far short of ready.

The definitive proof of the plan
is the project will be talked about
but never be heard by the public,
who are told that it was so incomplete
that nobody knows what to do with it.

So the public never find out
what was real and what was not.


. 

Photo Set Of The Month-September

One dog rightly taking no notice of who brought him there;
the smells and evidence of other animals is far more engaging. 

The height of the valley reflected in the lake
whilst bathed in the early morning sunlight

Mist on the lake.

Reflections of the trees near the opposite shore on the water.
All pictures taken a September morning in Caylus.

Our Obsession With Decline

will only be seen what it is, obsession,
when we see the decline of the decline
that obsesses us, and we accept it
for not being what it appeared to be,
but something very different instead.
.

One For The Homeless (Who Are Unlikely To See It)

Because the world homeless are likely far more with far less materials
than ever the character of James Bond could ever imagine. 

Solipsism

is immersive experience
in which we share our loneliness
with similarly self absorbed people
in the mutual hope of it being halved.

Does it ever halve? For short times
when we have the greatest energy
to break out of our lethargy.

The rest of the time
the solipsism multiplies
at different rates, leaving us
in an ever expanding universal vacuum.

Modern Mysteries

There are two major mysteries in modern life.

Their rise has been simultaneous.

Whenever I contemplated either of them
I never wondered whether their rise was coincidence.

Nor did I ask 'What is the link between them?'

The first is the near universality of Television
as society's primary means of communication
where the sense of a badly reported broken narrative
which puts the listener off wondering which it is,
was the reporting was poor or were the facts unavailable,
and also puts everyone off wanting to know better.

The second is the new language developed
by art critics to describe and sell modern art
to a sceptical public lacking in aesthetic sensibility.

This language is pretentious and appeals to the wealthy,
who buy the art knowing that the works are often simple
but the concept behind them disguises their simplicity.

What binds both modern art criticism and television
is that we cannot get beyond narrative fractured by design. 

Solid Housing

just got more a bit more solid, and with a roof like that
it will stay dry. Now that is what I call a real wood store!

Posessiveness Will Out

It is mere process
when jealousy curdles into anger
because somebody correctly labels jealousy in another for what it is.

The difficulty starts with spotting the lies
before they become the back stop of those on the defensive,
and reversing how they work.

Popular Turn Off's (10)

'S/he has questions to answer' is what is said
by the opposition to a particular politician
who was born to be a bad leader
because he is an opposition figure
and when he leads can't face the media
because of their record from the past.