Laws Are Like Hysterias

Each country and tribe has their own of both
and everyone prefers to keep it that way
by decline from saying anything otherwise.

When one tribe finds that another lives differently
then logically they have to examine their differences
from others when previously they did not.

Then they find that the more they look at others
the more variety they find inside their own tribal life,
a choice of life some than some of them avoided.

In the name of The Demos they all get sucked in,
into unending debates about what has to be shut down
to avoid the hysteria by one group within the tribe
at how another who is part of them does not fit
for never having been officially declared acceptable.

My Second Christmas Card Of 2018

'The Quiet Escape', the kind of season of good will I would like...

Haiku For A Friend

          Our dog thought the old Camembert 

                was as fine to roll in as to eat. 

The Hope Of Companionship

When we put the extra 'n' into fiance
-between the second and third letter-
it will always cost us a lot more
than we are are prepared to admit.

But it should open up resources within us
that will expand us that might be
vaguely worthy of the hope in the word.  

Web-wise Thinking

In my home the spiders
are more houseproud than I am,
and they are easier to keep than I am too.

The Oldest Management Bromide Of All

is not the idea of management itself,
though it might seem like that to many
who dislike being managed by others,
but the phrase 'Something must be done'.

It was first recorded as said in public
by Edward VII. As their king he spoke
to some Durham coal miners at a mine
they worked at which was due to close,
on his last full day as their monarch.

He was clearly more engaged
about how he was due to lose his own job,
through his own madness and folly,
than he was about them losing theirs.

Comment Is Free

and it often comes as bad poetry,
where the more that is written
the less memorable it is when read out.

But making small marks
in other readers lives
is the what bloggers live for
and if bad poetry be the means
than they know the need
-though their audience.

Weather And Grace

'The Heaven's Opening' is an expression for rain,
which has by implication always made people
shrink from it, and seek cover.

But the Heaven I would like would see open
is the one that meets my needs, 
and meets everyone else's
through  an abundance
that makes jealousy
seem pointless.

   

Canine Governance

Dogs are very wise when they ignore 'Dog Whistle Politics'.

They know when they are not the dog in the fight,
and they are right to limit their politics to forming small packs.

They are calm when well prompted against aggression,
unlike their many human carers who credit themselves
with always knowing best, but often prove neglectful.

Robots Have Always Been With Us-They Are Integral To Human History

The market for robot labour is older than we are ready to admit.
Issac Asimov gave The West the word 'robot', in the 1950's
it was a Hungarian word that meant 'slave'. Nowadays
the 1950's is as far back as some folk like to mis-remember.

Asimov meant by 'robot' 'mechanical domestic labour'
and wrote stories casting robots as boons to women,
to keep them happier whilst they remained in their homes,
separate from the men who wholly owned them and the home,
men who claimed the women as their companions,
whilst making something lesser-chattels-out of them
this idea of robots as 'chattels of chattels' remained unsaid.

Real women, and companions of whatever gender,
would have preferred a device that gave that validated
them leaving the house, not being property,
however useful or not, and not being seen as same.

The modern history slavery grew up with modern empires
The British, the Dutch, the Spanish the Germans and the Portuegese
all had them, other countries too. Out of such finery came America.

Where for the many coloured imported humans 'freedom'
was the freedom to be a slave, and for a white few
freedom was their 'duty' to be their owners.

The words 'sadism' and 'masochism' had not yet been coined,
neither as states of heightened emotions in relationships between individuals,
nor as words that described the normalising of cruelty between races.
But the evidence for those terms hid in plain sight, for all to see, or avoid.

Under empire 'slave' meant 'mechanical labour
that meant nothing the slave owner when the slave's body
stopped working and died, because according to their owners
only the slave owners 'had souls and feelings', understood refinement.

Their owners clearly felt a lot, and both their soul
and their capacity for violence came from the right
to render others property, remove and rename them.
According to how the slave owner treated them
the only eternity for the whole of their property
was the eternal 'now' of their enslavement.

Other ideas of slavery and robotics also existed,
when the Czar of Russia freed the serfs in 1871
he achieved it with relatively little loss of life
compared with the suffering of America
in it's Civil War, which probably because of the war
aborted the enlisting of former slaves into full citizenry.

Nowadays we in the west can leave our houses
and have the world brought to us. We live
is such luxury that robots do everything but live for us.
Electricity and technology are like that.
We work for this these luxuries and are changed in our work
by how the language of robotics has re-invented
us beyond all belief, and we have trouble adapting reinvention.

We don't know whether to give up on the idea of 'a soul'
or whether to claim a soul, and be cruel and self righteous.

For humans to work well they need feel good together.
to do that they need a sense of being a team.
Thus employers will work hard on rhetorical P.R.
that make working for them an attractive prospect.
If this gives the boss a self-righteous soul
with which to hoodwink would-be employees
into pretend mutual agreement then so be it.

But woe betide anyone of us
when they get unfit for for work
or when work gets unfit for the doing.

One Of My Lesser Weaknesses

is my admiration of good writing about bad situations,
generally filed under satire or humour about corruption.

The humour makes the democratic deficit more bearable
by making light of it. I need to live within my limits
with my sense of tragedy-I don't want to go under with it.

But still I wonder what good I am
when I observe from the infinite sidelines
of the internet how much of life needs changed,
for it to be sustainable and self preserving,
and it won't be without my direct engagement. 

Love Your Rubbish, Love Yourself, Know The Difference.

I have never understood what now seems to be a mania
 for marketing plastic packaging for it's own sake.
 If ever I not only 'understand it', but without demure
embrace the marketing to the point of failing
to differentiate between product and container
please shoot me for becoming brain-dead.

I will have become like the rubbish I have embraced. 

Popular Turn Off's (17)

The accusation of 'overthinking' something
when the accused is in clear distress
and the accuser has reason to be evasive
because either they think their avoidance is charm,
or they are are trying to justify being unhelpful.  

Two Views Are Better Than One

This is an old idea, two self contained internal dialogues
which work even better when joined up.
Very few of us will 'make a living by being ourselves,
though some may find their hearts on their travels.
In the end it is not a trick, it is 'just' language....

In The Land Of Lies

The best leader is the biggest liar,
the one who can make what they say
seem the most sincere and credible
compared with lesser liars who compete
and follow the bigger liars footsteps.

That is what we have to the vote for.

The bigger the lie the easier life is today,
for the few and sometimes for the many.

And the more we unknowingly
leave future others to process all the troubles
we neglect for them to collect and to live by.

Practical Living/Even More Practical Dying

Urns are tight places
When we are ashes
and want to turn in circles
when the world appals us.

So to have a more comfortable afterlife,
with how the world going to the dogs,
and to still think 'ecology'
by avoiding costly pine boxes,
choose for yourself a bigger urn
in which your relatives keep your remains
when you have to be cremated.

It will give you more room
in which to turn, in the after life/eternity
when witnessing from there how the living live
and it seems disgusting beyond words.

There Is Nowt So Queer

as making war for making citizenship homophobic,
and negative or forgetful of so many other minorities
and communities too. Learn from nature-there even as life
is maintained by limited aggression, diversity comes first-
without diversity there is less to be aggressive against....

Twenty 'Rules' For Better Living

1 - Live beneath your means.
2 - Return what you borrow.
3 - Accept gifts according to the thoughtful generosity in them.
4 - Give clothes with wear in them to charities you trust.

5 - Be kind to unkind people.
6 - Admit it when you have made a mistake.
7 - Seek excellence whilst abandoning perfection.

8 - Listen more, talk less.
9 - Do good deeds without seeking credit for them.
10 - Acknowledge that life is uneven and unfair.
11 - Selectively let others ahead of you in queues.

12 - Be on time. Don't hide behind excuses.
13 - Be organised. Use arguments to help organise yourself.
14 - Know when to keep quiet with other people.
15 - Cultivate good manners, 'please' and 'thanks' work.
16 - Gift yourself plenty of time to be alone.
17 - Every day take a thirty minute walk.

18 - Be humble, be highly selective in your criticism of others. 
19 - Let small matters pass when bigger matters are more immediate.
20 - Use the past, however appalling it is, to live well with others in the present and plan the future.

These rules will improve how we deal with other people every day as individuals.

Apart from no 20 the guidance they can give us is every day and limited. But they will make each day the advice is followed better. The limits of the advice shows up most when we need help and advice because our foe is some faceless government, private corporation or any other legal but non-corporeal human body which does does not care about the inconsistencies it shows to others, but concerns itself with applying rules it did not write, and does not care about, to individuals it/they care about even less. 

How To Cancel The Future; A Simple Guide

Dystopias are are often described as 'nightmares'
for those that recognise such suffering in others
but who like to think that their pointing at dystopias
leaves them outside of what they see elsewhere.

For those who struggle to live
for being too close to merely existing
the lack of light is not a metaphor.

Darkness is key to the nature of Dystopia.

And in the deepest Dystopian states
there is no sense of time, no night no day,
it is a life beyond all light or darkness.

The people who live there live as if....

Man and his political choices
have reversed the clock of life
returning the sequence of Creation
to the The First Day where it is stuck,
we are all water, without form and void.

Time and light might once have been known,
and may still exist, but only in an unknown future
with no means for us who know nothing other
than what and where we are to get there.
.

There is No Such Thing As A Civil War

All wars are uncivil,
if not completely barbarous
-on wildlife, landscapes,
and last and least of all,
the humans for whom 'heroism'
is their Almighty excuse. 

The Royal Perogative

I often think of King Canute
when I go from room to room
tidying all before me in my home
until there is no more to be done.

If I do not learn how to reverse my untidiness
it will come back at me like the tide and control me.

The New Sociable Brutality

There is a new tribalism about,
less the old binaries of  class vs class,
but multiples of groups of otherness,
each of which gets more critical
of what it is not, the more of them they are.

The height of criticism is brusquely
describing other people as 'sensitive'
whilst thinking of your own group as tough,
whilst denying that your toughness causes damage
is the oldest cliche, and adds to the cliches
of the accompanying media anger.

Defensiveness is like the tide,
it will not be denied;
it will cover everything.

I can't stop it, but I will resist the lies.



  

Signs of Greater Age (46)

(1) Seeing handsome young men and women online
and knowing that you should know who they are
-they are famous. But feeling infinitely damned
for by being unable to recall what they were famous for.
The media generates far too much material
for even a small fraction of it to be memorable.

(2) To understand the modern life
you refer back to what you read earliest and most,
such that at the time felt like 'your guide'.
What you find that the book still holds true
-but not in the way you expected it to.

Only Disconnect

Solipsism is the immersive experience
where we share our loneliness with others
and they share their loneliness with us,
all of us hoping to see our isolation halved.

When in reality it grows exponentially,
and by it's nature we are that last to see
how continually we connect the wrong way
to create bonds of trust that will last.

Beware Of The Malgorythms

When you go online, in search of thrills sublime
you won't know the digital footprint you leave
until the next time you are faced with a adverts
for products that you didn't think you wanted.

These adverts are what make your journey free
at the point you set out to it. With being a consumer
and there not only no such thing as 'a free lunch'.
When you most think that your life is 'free'
it will be what marketing departments munch on.

Sight For The Uninterested

Both blinkers and habits can help us
to avoid seeing what we think
we really don't need to see.

But more often than not both bind us
to seeing less than we ought to view
of the consequences of what we do.

The Past We Never Thought Was With Us

In recent years the public have been made aware
of the issue of institutional sexual child abuse,
to the point of mass burn out on the issue.
Misery memoirs citing abuse in amounts
of the vary between prurience and detail
are probably third on publishers lists,
behind 'I survived the Nazi death camps'
and all new celebrity autobiographies,
for supporting a sagging publishing industry.

But books published in the past, in the 1960's
rarely describe child abuse in any detail.
Though one book I read recently did.
and yes, it does involve Catholic clergy.
To understand what is going on
the reader has to read between the lines
of what was originally poetic prose....



'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. 

Future Signs Of Emptiness

When virtue is more signal than intent
the messages will increase in their urgency,
if only to make the fullness of the past
seem equal to the vacuum of the present,
as our morals go into terminal decline.

Some will ask where our morality went,
when it seems to be distinctly absent
and previously it seemed to be there.

But the new, now emptier, future
cannot be cancelled now it is summoned,
particularly when so many murmur
that it was hiding inside us, all along.

Thought For The Present Millennium

There can be few nations, if any at all,
that have not been found rape and racism
to be useful tools to raise their world ratings.  

Photo Set Of The Month November

A French pottery fair in Summer

with lots of bright and very expensive pottery.

Not everybody liked it.