In Fond Remembrance

Oscar D. Tail, 1996-28th Nov 2004.
He is still missed, and will never to be forgotten.

Required Winter Reading

Because the delays and cold of winter
always feel like life deferred to an unknown,
and potentially cancelled, brighter future.  

The Book Of Shame

Many a Family Bible has at it's front
pages left blank for the family tree
where marriages births and departures
were to be listed with some pride.

When those old Bibles were regularly read,
they were read aloud so that all should hear.

But even as families heard they did not follow.

Very few of those pages for the family tree
that were ever started remained fully filled in.

Every family made it's own secrets
about which it should be ashamed
which meant pages get torn out in anger
as branches of the family tree get lopped off,
and the tree becoming progressively less complete
as the characters in it prove their lack of self control.

Thus the in/complete family tree echoes Genesis,
the book so full of murder, guilt, and lies
along with all too many narrow escapes
that it is the book on which modern life is built
such that we don't know how to behave any better.
    

The Deceptive Bargain

'One way or another, power over others always turns out to be a costly burden. A sense of one's own strength, and the freedom to do with it what you will, brings with it a feeling of expansiveness, of exultation. If the realm in which this power is to be realised is turned to wards the creative possibilities of the self, then excitement and joy become possible. But, if this freedom is introduced as power over others, both parties will be trapped. It does not matter whether the power is used benevolently or for exploitation, the result is the same. If I see other adults as weaker than I am in our personal relationships, it does not matter whether they volunteer to be wards whom I must protect or victims whom I am to exploit. If I conspire with them to the illusion of either sort of power, whether benign or malevolent, we are both trapped in a symbiotic bargain. My sense of power over others will limit my freedom to live out my wishes for myself. Either I will feel obligated to care for my wards, or I will have to waste myself putting down mutinous serfs, and guarding against victims who would retaliate.

-a brief excerpt from 'If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him' (1972) - Sheldon Kopp (1929-99) author of seventeen books on self esteem and psycho therapy.    

What Happens When You Distrust Your Chemist

It has to be said; the more embedded in Capitalism
the worlds national health care systems become
the more our illnesses become their profit motive.
The more sustainably ill we can be made to be
the more stable and continuous their profits.....   

My Favourite Insult

used to be 'Every word she says is a lie, including 'and' and 'the''.
For me there are too many people in power to count that I could apply it to.

But it stopped being my favourite insult
when I rediscovered the effect that saying it
had on it's speaker, and the target of it's venom.

Mary McCarthy said it in 1979 on US television
and said it of screenwriter and playwright Lillian Hellman.
Both of them were powerful left wing firebrands
who had sparred with each other since the 1930's.

For Hellman this was a feud taken too far.
She took out a $2.5 million lawsuit on McCarthy,
in which the more the fifty years of Hellman's work
was examined for the evidence it concealed,
the less Hellman was able to write in the present,
until in 1984 she, and the lawsuit, died together.

McCarthy published a little more,
but died five years later,
exhausted by her isolation.

When money kills a person,
it kills them from the inside out.

Forward To The 1930's!

Everything we need to know
about the weakness and strength
of a representative democracy
was discovered in the 1930's,
when bullying governments
acted out in their own strength
and lied to everyone about it-
much more than anyone could believe
-and for the most part falsified history
to the degree that we still can't tell
how they got away with it.

But their weakness showed
when the gov't lost their traction
on public opinion.

As the government split,
so the public also became divided,
which encouraged the most moneyed
to scapegoat those different to them,
calmly expecting others to do the same.

The good news is that history
always varies in how it repeats.

Something new will come
Out of this amnesiac wormhole.

The future readers of this will be it's witness.... 

Where Life Is An Open Prison

Recently I saw the documentary film 'Gaza',
about the strip of land 25 miles long, 3 miles wide
that separates Israel and Egypt, who both blockade it,
stopping even the post for the people of Palestine
coming in from the world, for them to read.

If tears could become prayers,
then many will be shed
as this film travels the world
-portraying a fullness of life
that is beyond all expectation. 

I Have Met So Many People

Who are like this, a series of lids/covers
where the more I try to pull the lid/cover away
the more lids/covers I find underneath, until
 I stop looking for the person I thought was inside,
 who now appears to no longer exist......  

Tragedy And Farce

Karl Marx said of history,
'History repeats itself, the first time it is tragedy
the second time it appears it appears as farce.'.

Every election I have given my attention to
has continued this theme, with variations.

The tragedies become apparent
when speakers speak in mantras
about their leaders, turning speech
into mantraps for catching votes.

Farce makes it's presence felt
in the bluff and bluster
of speakers who filibuster
to stop others talking.
The speaker only stops
when their audience
has lost all reason
and all will to live.

My solution to this admix
is to keep my distance from it;
the tragedy leaves me angry,
and the farce of repetition
takes all point out of life,
leaving me wondering
'What was I where for...  ?'

 

I Don't Mind Voting...

   ...I just want to be as far as possible
from the electioneering when it happens.

When Tenderness Is In The Moment

Travel as an idea is as old as Man,
much older of we include migration
as observed among the birds
and other winged species.

But the history of travel
that I want an account of
is by it's nature impossible
to collate and tell;
a history of hitching lifts.

Please accept the following
as one example
of what it might be like.

Recently I saw an interview
with blues giant B.B. King
where he reflected on his 1940's,
where Saturday's he hitched
from near where he worked
to the surrounding towns
to busk, playing his blues guitar,
in places where both white folks
and black folks both passed by
in order, so he said, to be heard
by the greatest number of people.
Because he had to get enough money
to pay for his passage later that day
to be back to the farm he still worked on.

He spoke of that life
with a humility that nobody
could find fault with.

Maybe that explains why
the history of giving lifts 
and getting them won't be told
-it involves accounting for generosity
about something we can't hold
except in the moment we are given it.   

Whoever Said....

that truth has to be nice
for it to be truthful
was a very nice liar.