Modern Halloween

really is going down the drain,
along with the rest of life,
faster than we think.

An Ontological Argument About Ignorance

The violence that modern ignorance
commits to thought and understanding,
and the longevity of the planet,
is too vast for us to account for.

St Anslem of the tenth century (regnal calendar)
was the first to write of the ontological proof
of the existence of an  all wise deity, who wisdom
more than covered our blushes at how foolish we are.

His theory was that however far we thought
whether it attempted wisdom or not, infinity was further,
eleven centuries later and his cap fits our stupidity
and it being our stupidity we just don't recognise it. 

The Past Is Always With Us, We Can See It In The Present

'They [the French government of 1939/40] had developed that technique for lying to themselves to such a degree of perfection that the term 'In good faith' no longer had any meaning; for when self deception becomes routine it ceases to be an excuse meant anything'

From page 119 of the book 'Scum of the Earth' (published 1942 by Cape, Arthur Koestler)

And again, from page 227

'The tragedy is that we move in a vicious circle, without education of the masses, no political progress; but without political progress no education of the masses'. 

Thus proving the fake sincerity in politics produces a fake representative democracy, the democratic equivalent of religions fuelled by cheap grace. Both the politics and religion end up encouraging utter cynicism.

Popular Turn Off's (15)

When a politician says of an initiative
that their party/gov't is undertaking
'It is not just about the money'
they might accidentally be honest.

But after that they will speak in lies,
in the form of managerial bromides
that will disguise their indifference
to ordinary people's lives.

It is what they are paid so well for. 

The Oldest Tradition

Every tradition and art form has it's price,
whereby it survives because it pays for itself
and it is the healthy roots of a popular culture.

The test for any tradition and culture
comes when the art is a prompt for profits
for big non-local backers who buy into it.
They have no interest in the future of the message,
everything they see is merely a medium
for increasing their personal wealth.

When in reality, a low level of sustainability
for the many is the oldest tradition of all.... 

Frozen Hospitality

I can name to the month
when I first had sex in public toilets.
October 1978 if you wanted to know.

My parents knew nothing of a habit
which absorbed more of my time
than I knew I ever realised I had
because I had no words to describe it.

One of my parents knew, he learnt
one Sunday in the Autumn of 1980.

That was when my dad and I met each other
in opposing cubicles, both of us hoping
to meet somebody, anybody, except each other
in the place where we least expected to.

He was drunk enough to be mildly confused
and evasive. I was sober, so maybe I had less excuse.
Though neither of us knew what was excuse enough
to justify our false and naive assumptions of invisibility.

Public anonymity is odd that way,
and familial anonymity in activities
that it was inevitable would be discovered even more so.
Thankfully some of my shame was wiped away
by that public toilet being demolished,
and a concrete TARDIS put up in it's place.

What is harder to date,
because of the anonymity of the sex,
and of the men with whom it happened,
is when one of my fellow cottagers finding out
that I lived alone, and where I lived.


It was one late Friday night, after the pubs shut,
in spring 1982 when he knocked at the front door
that first time and shamed me into letting him in
for only-we-knew-what. I froze every time he knocked.
My consistent lack of response made it easier for him
to insist on the one sided oral sex that he came for.

After that first time he called randomly,
and shamelessly, usually late on Friday nights.
When he had got what he wanted he left,
his silent lack of thanks getting dressed
left me feeling soiled and unimpressed.

As my anti-social sex life of giving invisible men
frozen hospitality in the discomfort of my home
progressed in isolating me I did what came naturally.
I became depressed, and my depression was added,
like it's latest cause, to the long list of problems
that for the lack of any easy to apply resolutions
could never be opened out through conversation.

There was a way out of how depression fed into invisibility
and invisibility compounded depression-leaving everything.
But finding the courage to leave and not look back came ten years later.

Monsters Inc Circa 1940

'When the French government [of 1939/40] discovered a welcome diversion for the general discontent by exploiting people's natural  hostility to foreigners, and appealing to their pogrom instincts, they merely followed and ancient recipe; the sacrifice of scapegoats is an old established institution. Up-to -date rulers however want something more spectacular than a goat: they need at least a dragon. Hitler had invented the first composite super-dragon called the Judeo-Liberal--Stalin-Rothschild-World Conspiracy. Stalin followed with the Trotsky-Menshevik-Imperialist-Well poisoning-Crop destroying-Fire spitting-Monster dragon. One of the advantages of the modern dragon over the antiquated goat was that the it received one deadly blow after another, but never died, and when slightly tickled in the solar plexus at once regained it's menacing ferocity, thus allowing the modern St George to continue to fight over an unlimited number of  rounds. Another of it's advantages is that the dragon can be re-baptised, consisted so to speak of interchangeable parts. Thus in Hitler's dragon the vital organ called 'Bolshevism' was replaced 'Capitalism' and in Stalin's dragon 'Fascism' by 'Pluto-Democracy' without the least weakening of the effect.

The French dragon, of course, was less ambitious and of a poorish aspect. They could not paint on it the genuinely scary features of 'Dictatorship', 'Persecution'  and 'Tyranny' lest the real little dragons beyond the Pyrenees and Alps should recognise their own portraits and be offended.They painted it [Communist] red but this somehow missed the point, as the enemy happened to be [Fascist] brown. Sot they had to stuff it with all sorts of old rags and trash, Prussian boots and Hun caricatures and sauerkraut and Nietzsche; It's only impressive feature, the piece de resistance so to speak, were the meteques. It was not a very splendid dragon, yet goood enough to stage a fight in a Punch and Judy show and to receive some thudding whacks amid general applause'

-Arthur Koesler from page 90/91 of his first book, 'Scum of The Earth', first published by Cape in 1941. It is about life in wartime in France and all the uncertainties thereof. I recommend it as a good read.    

The Future That Came Out Of The Past

Progressive conservatism is a form of government
where policies are designed with ideas stolen from pasts
that those in power disdain and discredit, the better to disguise their origins.

These ideas are rarely explored in the everyday journalism
of the popular press-it has not the time or the drive to expose
as the roots of gov't policy-the press prefer a good pun instead.

The pun will sell more papers, whilst those in power sell us
debts that look like futures, debts that we would refuse
if we saw what we were being sold for what it was.

Self Control And Appetite

I should accept more readily than I do
that if I serially snack through the day,
in imitation of the continuous partial attention
that frequent use of the internet encourages me to,
then the least effort I can make
is to miss out  on that big evening meal,
equal to being sat in front of the television,
that most people see as normal.

What other way I can give body and mind
the refreshment they require for the next day
for the next day's snacking/partial inattention?

Politics From Abroad

Many times I have lived for six weeks at a time
outside my native country, less to avoid the place,
more in pursuit of a quiet, joyous, and more creative life.

Each time I go away I observe
how different The News sounds
when I am not in the country
that it is about. I listen better
with a more detached ear,
and a calmer frame of mind.

When I return and the news
is about where I am it worries me,
the ground underneath my feet
seems less stable for reports
of what is going on there.

No Action Required

As a gay man I have long known
that some of those I identified with
have talked of, and shared in,
so called 'Sado-masochism'.

And sure, as a gay man who likes
to be well informed I checked it out.

I so enjoyed 'Venus in Furs' that I read it twice
and many times and then I had to give the book a rest
-what I had read left me breathless with expectation.

By the fifth reading I 'got' what the book was about;
undeclared hierarchies which if they were given a name
would be declared not merely null and void, but unhealthy.

The works of the Marquis de Sade bored me much faster.
His writing about rape, sodomy and pillaging other people's lives
only for his fictional victim's morality to live on to be pillaged again.
He showed no awareness of what real human being were actually like.

As I understood more how the silence around violence works
I found I did not need the fear his books set the readers up for,
any more than I, or anyone else, needed his familial insecurities.

I decided that I did not need to be locked up
for half my life the way the Marquis de Sade was by his family,
though my own family did try hard enough.

My reading liberated me from libertinage
along with many other failed hierarchies.

After that no action was required.
I was better off being brave enough
to choose the avoidance of violence.

A Grace

I thank thee Lord
that whatever 'the issues' were
that I grew up with,
where my struggle to understand
became the adult life that I was given to live,
a wholesome attitude towards fruit and veg
cooked from scratch, and a heart appetite,
have not been among them. Amen.  

Multi-Tasking

Many men are victims.
Nearly as many are bullies
and some disguise their roles
by trying to rescue other people,
the planet, of not the whole of space,
or merely the economy of their country.

Some men, particularly preachers,
appear to take on all three roles
at once in single performance.

Don't try this at home folks,
instead save it for the public stage
-at least let others in their privacy
see through you when you act falsely.

The Moon Tells Me

that all the light we know
is reflected from sources
beyond our understanding.

What seems to be our light
is merely a reflection
of light from other places
in a world needs to deny it's own nature.

Excuses Are Like Memes

-they multiply when we are not looking
until they become such a blockage in our lives
we thought that we were leading (but we are not)
that we can't work out where they came from. 

My First Christmas Card of 2018

Because the more abstract the idea of Christmas becomes
the more inclusive it appears to be, and it can happen more often and for longer too!

Popular Turn Off's (14)

The word 'Stupid' is a blunt instrument.
It blunts the logic of any argument
that it is implied in, or used in directly.

Such bluntness will score for the user in the short term.
But long after the user has forgotten their bluntness
the bruises the left behind will reduce the future
of maturity in Politics and logic, such as it was.
  

Reduced Speech

In 'speaking truth to Power'
and refuting Power's lies
open speech will be reduced
to weak and repetitive rhetoric
-as speakers get shouty
about other people's hypocrisy.

But when there is so much hypocrisy
to choose from,
and so many cliches about which to speak,
then refuting it
will reduce speech to noisy repetition.

The Alcohol Culture Explained

and it takes a feminist to observe through a question
what patriarchy has preferred to not say about itself
for thousands of years; the great virtue of alcohol
 is how much it creates and excuses a moral amnesia.

Media Wars

As everyone who listens only to the radio knows,
the road to Hell is paved with radio content
adapted from forgotten and unused film scripts,
and television formats that were cancelled,
which were never to be used.

Speech written for just the spoken word,
for a station that is gives the sense of being live
should be just that, well prepared in it's own medium....

On Preserving Nature for Future Generations

When in the distant past men cut trees down,
and fished for fish all of it
was at a lower level hierarchy of need.

Though men back then
might had egos the size
of lonely planets, I doubt
they took out the biggest
in what they were hunting
merely to flatter their ego.

Their ability to extinguish all life
around them was still far too limited.

Now, conditioned by hyper-industrialisation,
we don't think of today, nor of tomorrow,
but lie to infinity about the abundance
that there was in the past
and wish for life to be that easy again.

Our abundance was always built on us living on less.
how easily folks had it yesterday, yester-year
or whenever industry was not yet like war
-all consuming of everything around it.

By taking out the biggest and tallest first
we reduce the apex of the food chain
and shorten the future of everything
without ever knowing what we are doing.

False Living

The more man-made and material the light of life becomes
the more spiritual and natural the darkness that follows from it will be. 

A Choice Of Bad Government

The consensus of stupidity known as Representative Democracy
is the system that the wealthy West relies upon for it's wealth, at present.

But it is not the only way that we might be ruled,
monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy and mob rule
have all had their run, and all of them could return
-depending the mix of wealth and charisma
of the speaker a political party chooses.

The greater the level of charisma and wealth, the easier 
the concentration of the potential for corruption in fewer heads,
which claim to be all-wise and all-knowing,
the harder it gets to prove their corruption.

Government is the problem we can never fix.

The Cartesian Questions Nobody Wants To Answer

Did Jesus die and rise to live forever
to uphold a world where robots, automata
and other creatures who appear to have reason
but apparently don't have souls should be
recognised as being 'among the living'?

And should those without souls live well?

When they do I would like to think
that it because those who esteem themselves
as having both a soul and sound reason,
and therefore the Eternal Moral Authority,
to realise that their 'having a soul'
makes them even more responsible
for the futures of those that don't
than they can ever understand.

And if it should be different
and those with souls
can treat those without
as shabbily as humanly possible,
with no risk to themselves,
then Eternity is surely
the acme of pointlessness.....

Popular Turn Off's (13)

The illogical overuse of superlatives
by politicians from Micheal Gove to Donald Trump,
and many shades of politician in between in public speech.

Such language is hailed as 'bold and 'inventive'
by their followers, whilst it is actually nonsense on stilts.

The misuse of these superlatives renders language
so meaningless and banal and so turns off the listener
capacity for reason that I dare not quote any examples
for fear of boring the reader into a submission
where their mind goes blank and I am responsible.

We can all find out own examples and silence them
before they numb us into a state of not being able to listen.

When We Are Bored With The Best

then the rest of  what life has to offer
won't get the appreciation that it deserves.

Not even our capacity for snobbery.

Common Judgement And The Limits Of Life

When a family of algorithms unite,
to attack something that humans put up online,
then it is natural for us to worry about internet security.

We are taught to think that the point of technology
is to provide us an infinite expression of thought,
as long as it avoids real people speaking to us directly.

We resist anything that attacks 'our freedom'.

But people have been divided by different ideals
and the records of events that they have survived
long before human beings passed so much time
amused by the effects of computer algorithms,
some of which will prove by turns to be hostile.

In The New Testament, which quotes The Old
the classic binary division was sheep and goats,
both of whom had to face their final judgement.

We are not there yet.
So before any such judgement
we can be the animals that we are,
in mixed flocks, and prone to entropy
and rather less binary divisions.

Popular Turn Off's (12)

'Slowly, the tide is turning....  '

see also

'The tanker [of state] is slowly changing direction'.

When ever pundits and politicians
talk of slow change it means
that they will be doing too little way too late
for those other people whose serious problems
they are meant to be addressing,
but they will protect their own interests with vigour.

And such talk gets them off the hook twice.

Whatever change happens and good is done
for those living in the future it cannot be credited
to any leader who is living in the present.
  

How Blindness Breeds Perversity

This is clipping from the local newspaper 

in the town I grew up from 1962,

the year after I was born.

It says that the council are celebrating

the opening of a public toilet.

I wonder, was there a ribbon
over each entrance
and did the mayor cut it?

And was he the first to use the facilities?

I knew that toilet well, for reasons common to me

and many others-the sense of my sexuality 

being fit only for keeping well out of the family house. 

I find it perverse to imagine the pomp and circumstance

that the council and the local press cooked up between them

being invested in something that was going to embody shame 

and become the stain of self mistrust for many generations of men 

who were going to wave their willies there, 

in the hope of attracting similarly stained/shamed men.

All because nobody wanted them 

as the people they actually were.

But then again this cutting is evidence 

of how much perversity can be blind to itself,

as if blindness itself breeds perversity.... 

The Low Tech Revolution That Never Happened

Part of the left wing life in the 1980's
was being critical of the lobby
that made the values of a military economy
out to be more important than the civil life
that we were told that it was there to protect.

I was one of many who wanted to see
the factories that made military hardware
that supplied the arms for all the little wars
around the world that never stopped kept open.

I believed that the factories should stay open,
but be turned over to making peace time goods,
for people that needed them.
We should end 'Want' as well as we could.

Nearly forty years on from then, and what we have
in the developed west is vast amounts of money
spent on high tech pleasures developed in Silicon Valley
where the goods are controlled be the few and used by the many.
In the digital age pleasure is defined as detached
and it is supported by the glossiest promotion possible.

For all the change in budgets and priorities
this is not how I saw the future back then,
what I saw put skills into people's hands,
rather than disabling their critical faculties.  

Photo Set Of The Month-October

Reflections in glass architecture 

seem to me to be an apt metaphor

for the life of multiple surfaces of  people who live in cities.