The Uncertainties Of Gradualism

When I was an earnest young Christian,
I found it easy for to believe that good deeds
were signs of of the advance of The Kingdom,
and the more signs I saw, and I was part of,
then the sooner the world was going to end.

I avoided all thoughts of how good deeds
and bad deeds were alike;
both existed in the moment,
as if this world had no end.

Nowadays I still seek signs,
but the life I seek is in rewilding.
The scattering of as many wild seeds
as used to be there, naturally,
in the lands where modern man
has taken them out over the centuries.

Whether deeds towards The Kingdom,
the grandest human saving scheme of all,
which I hoped would cut through
both how money and power trapped people
and made them feel omniscient,
or the spreading of wild flower seeds
via the return of animals to the wilds
from where man long ago banished them,
gradualism means uncertainty,
and humility is our only hope. 

Signs Of Greater Age (51)

With greater age, and because of The Virus,
the world seems to be more detached
which seems fine, good health willing.
But with detachment comes the loss of choice.
Sex for one becomes like meals for one;
both get difficult to invest with any sense of occasion.

Also friends become telephone friends
and with long phone calls shared humour,
and laughter over the phone come to represent
shared release where no other sharing works
where shared release remains important.

But most of all we have to deal with
how we run out of entertainments,
with amusements that cease to amuse.

That is the point where we reinvent boredom
to make what in truth cannot now amuse us
more sustainable in how it fails to amuse....

  

When Uncredited Black Lives Mattered More

Henrietta Lacks (1920-51) is now known
as the black woman whose cervical cancer cells
miraculously multiplied in a laboratory
more than all other cancer cells did,
long after her life had ended.

Now as then, what black lives offered
to the whole of (white) humanity
goes uncredited. Even when (white) history
can be rewritten to properly credit black folk
for the contribution their lives and deaths made
the credit seems so long after the fact
that it can only be seen as inadequate.  
 

Capitalism In It's Many Phases

When political pundits talk of 'Late Capitalism'
I often wonder how late this Capitalism is.
Has it died yet? Was it given a good burial?
We all know how costly good funerals can be,
this burial could take a lot of humans with it.
And what has replaced this late Capitalism? 
How do we recognise it if it has started?

People know what early capitalism was like;
the owner of the factory set the hours
his labourers were made to work
and then slowed the factory clocks
to get more work out of his workers.
Whilst his employees did all they could
to stop themselves from starving,
spending time in a debtors prison,
or being led into the workhouse
when they fell too ill to work.

Middle-period Capitalism was when
anger and reason tamed the worst,
the most profiteering, Capitalists,
and under the new welfare state
nobody need be pushed into poverty, 
and most debt was a matter of choice.

But now, like silence with A.I.D.S.
Capitalism=Death as all life
gets ploughed into production,
as production flips into consumption
and the consumer gets consumed
as production and consumption 
become a perpetual motion machine.

Bob Is Nobody's Uncle

After a l-o-n-g week of the celebration
Mr Robert Dylan becoming eighty yrs old,
I never heard in the media I follow
what I thought ought to be said about him.

So please accept the following...

There is an argument to be made
that Dylan is to guitar based modern music
what Orson Welles once was to the movies,
both showed an accumulation of new technique
and speeded up the changes in the process
of writing and recording, such that the artist
both were bound to gain more critical acclaim,
than either would have use for in their lifetimes.

Mr Dylan was highly charismatic.
This explains to succeeding generations,
who never witnessed first hand
the awe and wonder with which he was handled
as he described his latest musical reinvention,
even when the change was more of style than substance.

The critics must have enjoyed
'being humbled' as they praised his latest work,
Mr Dylan was surely the popular originator
of what is now called 'the humble brag'*
as he disowned other peoples claims of his genius
where as critics they were sharing the limelight
he clung to as he said he was throwing it away.

*The humble brag is where a person
speaks at such great lengths 
about what they don't deserve the credit for,
that the length at which they speak
hides in plain sight the boastfulness 
they like and covertly want to be known for.   

Coming Around Again?

Under Covid 19 time has lagged,
and frayed like worn rags
which were weak to begin with,
as the human ability
to plan for the future
has ebbed into abeyance.

Each day I feel like
I am always coming round.
But I never fully wake up,
because the external cues
that would prove it have gone.
And computers are unhelpful.

Life online seems to be
like life outside of time,
something I never expected,
sober at least, in my lifetime.

The days feel as if I am going round,
to who knows where I have been before
and I don't want to go back there.

I am not coming around at all.    

Invidious Choices

Which of the following is better....

To create morally indefensible choices?
or make a life through defending them?

My Mis-Spent Youth

And where I mis-spent it.
This undistinguished building,
erected in 1962, was the joyless pleasure dome,
where as a depressed teen I waved my willy
to older, married, men who did the same.
None of us knew what proof of life or apt solace
there might be for secretive willy-wavers
who if they spoke about it would not believed.

We should have done more for each other
 than collectively prove our numb inarticulacy.
I used to laugh inwardly at the 'have you paid
and displayed' sign which was meant to apply
to the drivers who parked their cars in the car park.     

 

Life And Means

Some of us are born with the back up
that will carry us past the crises
of the normal life, as we careen
from cradle to grave being busy,
whilst hoping we are never tested beyond our means.
Hoping also that we retain our resilience,
whilst knowing it will go sometime. 

Others are born with less,
and when they are kind
their kindness is for others
more than themselves,
and it comes from a means
that is not their own to control
but still they give, trusting
that whatever they have will find it's uses.

Hope beyond our means
means relying on life
that is beyond our means
and it always will do.  

Inconsistency Inc

In the world's most autocratic state
the person with the most right
to be inconsistent is The Great Leader
-everyone else has to be consistent
with the leader's inconsistencies,
to be allowed to 'be themselves'.
 

Hauntology

I am well used to stories of ghosts
being potent entertainments,
particularly in the age of digital television
where a defective narrative
that is well supported
by cheap sight and visual effects
will take in the credulous
who in reality were inattentive
because they were waiting
for the next advert.

What scares me more is when
so called ghost hunters visit old prisons,
of the sort where extremely old laws
which were biased against the poor
falsely criminalised them
where the absurdity of those laws
and the loss of freedom they caused
can never be compensated for,
least of all by faked up sound effects.     

The Paucity Of Positive Thought

I was born well after the end of WW2,
at a time when the welfare state
was well embedded in my country.

I never understood the talk
when the adults around me
said 'Don't mention the war'.

What I understood of the war
was that part of why it was fought
was to bring the welfare state,
the cradle-to-grave safety net, into being.

But now I think I understand;
no adult wanted to be drawn
into telling about the events
when there was no welfare state,
when, as children, they felt
as if they had no sense of self;
and their parents seemed to be
contrary and distant figures
who didn't help there children
where the help was needed.
Their values of their parents
mirrored the propaganda
that 'self reliant family values'
relied upon for their promotion.

Who in their right mind
would willingly talk of when
they had no sense of direction,
and there was none to be found?

That is why I find nothing positive
about my country's great leap backwards; Brexit.

Technology, Identity, And Social Class

Social class, and therefore social identity,
used to be measured by the individuals' proximity
to labour, and to the labour saving devices
that made the lives of working folk more efficient.

The more anyone could pay another
to handle the machinery of everyday life
-make their food, wash their clothes,
organise the payment of utilities bills,
clean their houses, and mind their children,
the more obviously middle class they became.

Some men even secretly outsourced
the bearing of their children
to women who were not their wives
and had to secret about it ever after. 

Working class men who toiled all day,
week after week for fifty weeks a year 
made their wives labour for nothing,
as if detachment from emotional support,
and not being paid for what they did,
was the essence of working class female labour.

What working class men need most
was a pub that was always open
when they were not working
so that as men their tribalism
and their distance from family
that defines their social class
could be well better supported.

Nowadays there is no working class,
the factories men once laboured in
are memories consigned to distant histories.
The labour saving machines their wives
were not paid to use have been replaced
by push button/pre-packed lives
where computers have gained control
over lives defined by consumerism
much more than anyone wants to see;
how we live lacks the sense of agency
that we had before new technology
gave us all identical non-identities. 

The Depth Of The Immorality Of The Judeo-Christian Ethic

James Baldwin packs a punch in writing,
in an excerpt from his 1980's collection of essays
'The Evidence of Things Not Seen'.   

 

We Are What We Forget

Everyone will be familiar to point of amnesia
about the trickle down theory of technology,
often because it has gone on so long
and it has rarely been clearly articulated.

From from the valve radios of the 1930's
through to small black and white televisions
to those early portable MW and LW radios,
and the stereo radiograms of seventy years ago,

to the music centres of fifty years ago
through to the walkman of more recent times

-the more portable and private the listening,

the better the quality of sound became,
but the less musical the newer music became

as new sounds matched newer technologies.

What I find most discomforting is how little
we remember of how entertained we were
by those technologies that have filled
so much land fill, if indeed the items there

were allowed to decay that constructively

in the days before talk 'green footprints'.  

 

The More Things Change.....

 ....the more will they stay the same.

Ask any Jew celebrating today,
the day that history says is when Moses
was given the ten commandments,
with the festival of Shavout
a/k/a 'The Feast of Weeks'.

How many of those commands
that they were given then
are kept as they were given?

Presently 'Thou Shalt not Kill'
'Thou shalt not Steal'
and 'Thou shalt not lie
are undergoing significant revision
as the co-ownership of land
is proving to be of such oblivion.

That said when a command is broken
it is never just one command that breaks;
other commands get broken simultaneously
and more break with the hiding of the facts.

Human beings are like that.
  

The Catch With Safety

is two fold and contradictory;
on the one hand safety is never what it appears to be,
true safety is deeply layered and hides how it works
from who it protects, as if it it's safety
partly lay in how it operates incognito.

On the other hand we never have enough of it,
however much we are aware that our security
pushes poorer people into living by risks
that we would not begin to dare to calculate,
much less contemplate accepting as an everyday reality.

Bob Dylan was wealthy when he wrote the lyric
'When you got nothing, you've got nothing to lose,
you're invisible, you've go no secrets to conceal.'*
berating an unknown young and shallow socialite
but logically he was right,
though such poverty is like death
-anyone who has been there
finds it hard to want to report
to those who have not been there
how they survived it.

 *from the song 'Like A Rolling Stone',
which like every song Bob Dylan has written
in the past 60 years is now the intellectual property
of the Universal Music Publishing Group,
he reportedly sold the songs to the company
for a nine figure sum, in December 2020.
Maybe he was more generous than usual
with his Christmas gifts that year,,,,,, 

When The New Less Is The New Enough

And less has been most of what there has been
on offer between people this last fifteen months.

 

Does Time Fly Faster For The Self-Important?

I can remember the analogue world,
and I know it is still out there, somewhere.
It was very slow and it consisted of
long letters hand written to friends,
time to reflect, and non-vocational classes
where folk who were more curious met together
to aspire to some physical real-time life skill.

Nowadays that world is fractured
and it hides in plain sight
whilst the internet morphs
into being the medium
which becomes it's own message,
eliminating all other sense of time
and every other media in history.

What I remember being told  most
before the internet took off in the 1990s 
was how self important every message
that anyone ever made was going to be,
now that world wastes peoples lives
whilst seeming to be endless frivolity.

It is as if mis-selling never existed
in a world where most have less to say
and we are all forced to use
the most self important means of saying it.

Great Indecisions

are at least as much the reasons
for what happened in history
as the supposedly great decisions
which mediocre men use to make
themselves seem larger than they are
as they proclaim what is important.

When the chance for consensus
makes itself known to people,
that is where a shared indecision
becomes the starting point
for finding out what they did not realise
they did not know about each other.                              

Maya Love

is tough and enduring, beyond all suffering
it always comes back again. Maya Angelou.

Alone Again, Naturally...

My country has just ended it's latest round of elections,
a round in which the party that had the the most empathy
with the underdog, and those with the least in society,
made the biggest losses any party of recent times could make.

Where the voting system was 'first the pass the post',
a system in which the candidate with most votes
wins once and for always, they lost the most.
The only reason that other candidates ran
was to become also-rans who would have
been better off doing anything but standing. 

For all I think about how to share out
the good things in life in a way that seems fair
I have clearly have been slow to learn
about how well the politics of selfishness
are packaged and sold to an electorate
that cannot resist the deceptions
of the advertising that conceals
the impulse that it wants people to act upon.

But what do I know? In the 40 odd years
of my being entitled to vote
I have been voting for the party,
and argument, that has lost that often
that they seem to exist to get spoken over.

In the 11 national elections
and over 20 elections for local government
I have had the luxury of helping choose
the opposition that I wish to keep standing
whilst they never gain office.

All I can say about voting for the losers
is 'Somebody has to do it, to keep then standing
and for the winners to win in elections
where the illusion of choice matters,
for there to be the appearance of open competition.

Signs Of Greater Age (50)

1-You still like books as you get older,
but as you age you can't get your head
around how young people call reading
'Biblio-Therapy' as if there was no history
of reading or writing for instruction,
and they have just discovered
how valuable reading books is.

2-Falling asleep when you read,
and not quite getting the hang
of repurposing the process
so as to make reading a mechanism
for choosing when you sleep.  

Creatively Unwaged

For the length of my adult life
I have been used to having to do
what I wanted to do for free;
nobody would pay me
for what they wanted done
when it might have been
to my financial advantage.

I was in my thirties when I volunteered
take telephone calls on a helpline
that supported the queer and depressed
across all of Northern Ireland.

I stayed until the phones stopped ringing
because the internet had become the in thing.

I was forty when I volunteered
to refurbish hand tools 
that would otherwise go to waste
for them to be sent to countries
where electricity is scarce
and they were bound to be valued.

It was remarkable
that I stayed for a decade
with that charity, even though
I was not very good at what I did.
Still, as 'a poof', I was useful proof
of their policy of inclusivity.

Finally there is this blog,
started 1st of Feb, 2011.
I was so caught up in writing it
that I never noticed the decade date
when it passed. 

All I can hope
is that between this blog
and the prose blogs I have written
my writing style has improve
since I started-if it is not 'there' yet
there something I can do about it-keep going.....

Sex

Sex
Never repress it
Never be against it.
Rather, go deeply into it
with great clarity,
with great love.
Go like an explorer.
Search all the nooks and corners
of all your sexuality,
and you will
be surprised and
enriched and benefited.
Knowing your sexuality,
one day you will
stumble upon your
spirituality.
Then you will become free.
The future will have
a totally different
vision of sex.
It will be
more fun, more joy,
more friendship,
more play than
a serious affair,
as it has been
in the past.
Sex is just
the beginning,
not the end.
But if you
miss the beginning
you will miss
the end also.

I used to have this in writing
on my living room wall,
until the writing fell apart.
Now I leave it to the world.   

 

The Language Virus

I was in my teens when I first read the 1970 book 'Future Shock' by Alvin Toffler which concerned itself with how soon computers were predicted to discomfort the old who would never 'get the hang of them'. From it I learnt that this new world would prove advantageous to the young, for whom their use would become second nature.

I was young enough to feel  that in 1980 I might be one of those who would feel quite comfortable with what the author wrote about it all. I was ready to study computers at 'O' level standard in the subject which was closer than most people of any age would get to computers where I lived. No matter that the way the class approached the subject was at the teacher's level, slow, methodical, very technical, utterly without reference to any future our studies had, and utterly without any sense of the practical or commercial application of the subject. 

I did not mind that; it became like some some sort of game or a study done for it's own sake rather than for the future it was once meant to directly offer. I was in an exam factory and the subject was interesting, if somewhat laborious, to get an exam pass in. The morality of the use of computers to misinform the public was not part of what we studied, though with hindsight I wish it had been.

I thought the exam result might still be useful. This was before exam inflation, where to get anywhere with qualifications that once seemed adequate my exam results had to be more numerous, gained more rapidly, and with better grades than I might have thought before there were over three million people, mostly men, who were unemployed, where work experience was that valuable many employers were no longer giving it out, they expected other employers to provide it for them.

Decades later I learned to make computers work sufficiently well that I felt that I could call myself a writer, for the want of a more useful label. I discovered that the obverse of Alvin Toffler's predictions were the word worlds conjured up in the worrying prose of William Burroughs, of which very little was usually enough. In his work a scabrous immorality, deep mistrust, and hostile confusion all found their maximum entertainment value.

Now I am older I live simply, and rather well on less. I live well out of the way of the great majority. Alvin Toffler's predictions have returned to me like old ghosts who have supped well on human troubles and become refreshed by the new situations which have given them greater powers to haunt than ever I would have thought. I must be one of many to feel this way. 

Government websites on Covid 19 are my case in point. They speak in a self referring technical language and work though circular links between this page to that page and back, and that there are no phone numbers given with live human beings at the end from which to get a live explanation, or breakdown of what words on the screen actually mean. When that happens the words and the screen become the verbal equivalent of mazes that seem designed to confuse and not elucidate. When the links on the page link to another page. it is a mirror site which does exactually the same as the site that got you there, but in reverse.

That the evasive jargon would multiply with it being put into new, more impenetrable, forms which are even impossible to process was surely part of Alvin Toffler's warning, 

Boredom-The Final Frontier

The quietest fear that has stalked
the financially secure
in this year plus of Covid 
is the fear of boredom,
the fear of having nothing to organise
and nothing to dress up and be on show for.

The wealthy are used to spending their way
out the fear if inactivity,
and calling it 'creativity'
when it is a self indulgence
that is proven by how the poor go without it.

Covid has limited this 'creativity'
to the super-rich for whom money
has long ceased to limit how they think,
actual wealth is just insensate numbers.

At the drop of an email sent by a secretary
they can buy historic estates worth millions
in rich countries and 'self isolate' in them,
though their wealth made them self isolated, anyway.

For the rest of us with the normal fears
the way out of boredom is to find more pleasure
in the smaller victories in life;
there are no other victories are left.

Impersonally Yours?

One of my most overused phrases
is with regard to advice on phones
-when talking informally to friends
who I feel free to ask suggestions
from as to who might advise me further,
because we have both been there, I ask
'Do you think there be a live human being
at the other end of the line?'.

There is a quite serious point
behind my question, though.
Some telephonists that I have
encountered were so controlled
by the caller-handling script
dictated to them on the screen
in front of them, a screen I can't see
-but from the way they give out 
so little information with so little care
I can tell that the script is guiding them.

They are not 'live' in any accepted use
of the word-they have no autonomy.

Another point hides in plain sight
behind my much overused sarcasm
-how much does automation make
personal service seem impersonal?
How much does automation devalue
the very idea of service to others
by making what one person does for another
'One more action, among too many to value'?

'Lord Give Me Chastity, But Not Yet.....'*

As an occasional pursuer of porn
and a serial reader of detective fiction
of the type where it's selling point
is how much it lacks elegance
I was recently surprised when I realised
how alike these two interests I had were.

Both cut to the chase with indecent haste,
both make a lack character development
their chief virtue and both keep you seeking
by never giving their pursuer/reader
what they actually want; a truly satisfying ending.

*the youthful prayer of St Augustine of Hippo
as recalled in his forties in his 'Confessions',
written circa 400 A.D. in Latin. It is a book
that I read all the way through, once. But,
like the works of Kierkegaard, it is a book
that I would now find had too many words in it
and its ideas are presented in the wrong order
-but then again what is modern man meant to do
with history, beyond argue against it? That is
what St Augustine and Kierkegaard did.....

Picture Set Of The Month - May - Bright Skies

Because where I live 

has so many fields around it

with such epic skies above

 

that living anywhere else would be silly.