My First New Year Card

Because a year over, particularly a year
like this year has been, is something
 that it is best to see the back of.

The Temptation To Narcissism

is one of the less recognised
aspects of becoming a parent;
that parents do not see it coming,
make it all the easier to be true.

How else to explain self-absorption
when it is unclear where it comes from? 

I am of the wrong generation
to take seriously the present day issue
of claiming to be, or becoming, non-binary,
though I respect how people wish to be known.

I am 'a he', plain and simple
and given the example of my parents
I have chosen to never to become one.

But for those who are non-binary,
depending on which theory they go by,
they could be any one of five different genders,
with corresponding choices of how to be adults,
only two of which will propagate the species.

In none of those five gender roles
are they free of the need to forgive,
particularly to the children
who might want to be like them
and might well want to be different.

Forgiveness is the key,
for all five genders/choices
to keep choice wider in future. 

The Hope Of Certainty

relies on less than we think
and more than we understand. 

 

I Mistrust Pride

Because it disallows objectivity
and whilst it claims the opposite
it cannot be separated from jealousy. 

The Decline Of Modern Leadership

When empires used to go to war
against the smaller countries
that they absorbed to sustain them
those wars were always fought
with the leaders of the empire
to the fore in the field of battle.

As recently as two hundred years ago
Napoleon used to lead his charges,
from the front, from land or sea,
But he was nearly the last of a dying breed,
as battles changed in character,
and theatres of war got technology.

From the gatling gun,
the first rapid fire weapon,
invented in in 1861,
to the remote robotics of today
a mere 150 years later,
the more lethal the weapon
the less engaged the leaders are
as to where the battle line are,
and how the war is fought.

This process that makes peace,
the absence of conflict,
ever harder to recognise directly.    

The Eternal Present Is Not Tense

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes'-Daniel L. Everett.

I was warned when I started this book that I would want to skip parts of it. In the end I skipped very little and what I skipped were descriptions of Western Academia at it's least self explanatory. Philosophical/linguistic points where the what the author discusses is a sort of chicken/egg argument where he asks 'What came first? Culture or language?'. Culture would seem to be his answer but after settling that question the academic debate among Western scholars of language lingers whilst culture and language appear to be competing runners in a race where they egg each other on and up each others game.

The book starts with a proposition; can a missionary learn the language of a tribe, where the language seems to be the most intractable living language still in use in the world today? the author wants to learn it in order to present The Piraha, who live deep in the Amazon forest close to the river, with The Gospels, nothing more nothing less. The author wants to introduce The Piraha to the Jesus that he himself believes in.

There is a 500 year long history of tribes receiving missionaries first where armies visit the tribes and decimate them after, either through the illnesses the armies carry without being aware of how they came to be so diseased or the wealth of weaponry. There the missionaries do not knowingly play 'soft cop' to the soldiers being 'the hard cop' but the missionaries seem all the more effective in that role, for how they conceal it. That the societies they sought to evangelise were self-policing, lived in proportion on the land they occupied, and the society has little to no need for hierarchies and chiefs when the missionaries come from societies which are highly hierarchical, made it all the worse for the tribes who did not even have a currency of any sort.

So, could a missionary who was no part any soft cop/hard cop strategy, either consciously or unconsciously get a conversion by fair means just through a translation from a proportionately living self policing people with no leader whom they would all defer to?

The good news is that the longer the Daniel and his family stayed the more of the detail of the tribal life of The Piraha they observed. Whilst their lives were shorter, maybe half the length of a wealthy westerner's life, what their lives lacked in longevity they more than made up for contentedness, and a lightness with how they lived. The Piraha had a sense of life in the present tense in their language and culture that resisted all unpicking of it, to create any sense of past and future, a future where life might be different from the present.

The one area where the missionary does some genuinely good work for The Piraha, and sees farther than they do, is in engaging with a Brazilian government land commission to define and protect the boundaries of the tribal forest lands that The Piraha live in as if they own it all, whilst having no sense, nor language for, the concept of ownership.

But with an airtight lock between a language and culture where both are fixed in the present tense as if no other tense existed, or were possible, coupled with the sense that something could only be true if other Piraha have witnessed it, live, all attempts at introducing The Piraha to Jesus and The Gospels foundered. The author would have to have seen Jesus live in the present day in the forest, rather learned to believe in Jesus from reading a book about him for his witness to the Piraha to have any effect on them. Even then the experience of Jesus living in the forest would have to be repeatable in some way for The Piraha to be evangelised, and they could be most resistant to some persuasion, without it being obvious. 

A point that is not made, not even made indirectly, but which is easily inferred, is that when the forest is 'your book of life', then the forest is what you have to read to live by. Anything written in books is so outside the experience of life in the forest that the forest itself makes knowledge outside of it seem pale and second hand. That it is only in books that we get a choice of tense, past present and future, well such choice seems absurd to the forest and those who live in it. The forest will always win over anything written or spoken-the forest is there in front of the Piraha everyday as a symbiotic personal experience.

The power of the forest as an everyday experience comes to seriously affect the beliefs of the missionary, who if he could have found one believer among The Piraha he might have found many. But since even as the gospel of Mark is presented to them on tape, as spoken by one of the tribe, eve there the Piraha detect that the reader who says the words is acting out what sounds like merely an act of ventriloquism committed to tape rather than a reflection of the belief of the speaker.

The missionary's attempt to introduce the spiritual binaries of 'the lost' and 'the saved', and the concepts of past, present, and future tenses, through written and spoken language to a people who live only in the present tense and mostly through spoken language and applied life inevitably fails. The experiment of introducing the ideas ends. The Piraha 1 The Missionary 0 then? Up to a point, I came away from the book believing that witness works where there is need for an upgrade to how communal and personal life is lived; no upgrade was required or was possible with The Piraha. The forest made them as free as they would ever be and made the missionary see how freedom had to be seen and lived for it to be real.

The  Piraha means of communication and lives exclude divisions of time into past present and future, and differing personal status. With this the missionary's faith in the structure of the society he came from crumbles as if it had been very gently absorbed by the forest itself. So The Piraha 1 The Linguist/Missionary 1 is the end score in my reading of the book. With their self evident commitment to co-equality for all and treatment of children as would-be adults The Piraha would not want it any other way.

And Breathe In.....

Because 99.999 % of us have more than we could count
whilst holding our breath, and we are part of an ecology
that is dying for us to take it more seriously
than what we think we have and what we value most.  

 

How Much Is Enough?

The modern western diet
is a miracle to behold; choice,
enough to make Croesus jealous.
Fifteen different brand of everything
to choose from on the supermarket shelves.

I don't know about buying all that stuff,
just looking at it, and guessing the weight
of the waste in packaging, is enough for me. 

China Crisis

The Pillar of Shame
was given it's name for a reason.
Removing it because 'it is fragile/unsafe'
says more about the fragile grip
of any publicly accountable rule of law 
in the country it has been removed from 
than any public commentator there
would ever be permitted to say. 

 

New Tactics, Old System

In the days of the Czars
and other absolute rulers
the state sought to control
the non-conformists and rebels
by paying fake rebels to flush out
the rebels who actually meant it.

This 'agent provocateur' activity
was rhetorically easy to justify,
even when the paid provocateurs
did actual damage to the rules
that their paymasters favoured.

Now most adults can vote
but the loss of choice
comes with the policies
we are offered to vote for,
dressed up by how the internet
presents them to us. 

The only sense of a national boundary
that the internet offers the public
is in the advertising they accept.

The new agent provocateurs
are the troll farms that spew out stories
ascribed to invented characters,
where what could be real
and what is knowingly false
is difficult to navigate.

On both the political 'right' and 'left'
nearly nobody knows what is real,
and what has been invented
to tickle their sense of outrage,
as invented by a foreign power.

With the reinvention
of the agent provocateur
we have reinvented the era
of autocrats and monsters.

Have Your Very Own Donald Trump* Style Christmas

And present your friends with the best
in costly hostilities, worthy
of the season of goodwill.
 (lawyers fees and weak prepared
court cases not included).

*Please note that other would-be dictators are
available to threaten your friends with
but they will survive the treats, threats
of The Donald better than other would-be ex dictators. 

 

When Good Will Deceives Us

Good will should be for life,
rather than being seasonal.
For seasons become the reasons
for scammers to practice good will 
by working exceptionally hard
at relieving ordinary people of the money
that ordinarily might have kept them solvent
had they the resistance to being oversold
that which they never needed in the first place. 

The Bigger The Lie

The more anger there is behind it,
and bigger their debts to the banks
and frauds to the inland revenue
that the liars live with,
until they take it all to the grave.

For the liar the only point
of wanting to be president
is for the powers of exemption
from defamatory lawsuits
and and repayments of their debts
that being president gives them.

They leave it to other deceivers
to present policies that offer
uses for power that help others 
which being in power can give them.   

A Piece Of Fine Writing

 'Shining lines of ripples drew out slowly from the the pointed wooden floats of the catamaran, the flat green leaves of the water lilies seemed to be gliding past. The Longpond lay silent in the summer morning; the sun splashes in front, seen through the lashes of the lids closed in dreamy contentment, were like glittering birds in flight. A wood pigeon was cooing in a fir tree on a distant shore, a family of blue titmice were wheezing and saying, chitter-chee, chitter chee, as they flitted among the willows leaning out of the bank. So peaceful was the shining water, with the faint haze of the summer morning not yet cleared by the sun high over the beech trees: the blinding spiky sun into which the swallows vanished. So fare into the blue air were they flying that the boy sitting still on the cracked wooden seat above the two floats could hear no sound of their twittering. It must be like this after death he thought, seeing the blue of heaven in the water beside him. 

from Chapter 9, page 95, of  'Dandelion Days' - Henry Williamson, written in 1922.    

My Fourth Christmas Card

'A19' by Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy

 

Welcome To The New Billionaire Anarchy

Universal Basic Income
will never be long term policy
in any country in the world
for as long as the wealthy
find tax avoidance lucrative,
cheap enough, and easy to do,
because government tax law
is complex enough to make it so.

The legal language of modern tax codes
can never be made to make the accountants
of the wealthy arrange to pay the taxes
that the wealthy know they should pay.

Because the ultra-wealthy
and the new multi-national companies
rarely have to comply with government policy,
and can withhold their taxes
governments will never have the money 
to re-distribute towards those
who work finds unworthy,
who will never be offered a job
in a shrinking market for work
due to creeping automation.

That the ultra-wealthy are those
who control who work finds worthy
whilst they also extend automation
in work, whilst not paying the taxes
on the profits from same....
shows us how much modern government
soon won't be able to organise anything
worthy of the name.  

 .   

The Hope Of Obscurity

Speaking truth to power
will always be difficult
when leaders compete
not just to be inconsistent
but to be inconsistent for gain
as much as they can legally hoard,
and hide from ordinary people.

But such speech will out,
and leaders need not doubt
that for all that they appear benign
they will miss the signs
when it is their time
to leave the world stage,
and embrace obscurity.

The New Unforgiveness

America first got into television in the 1940's.
They were not the first, before them The Third Reich
broadcast daytime television in the 1930's,
until the economy went on to a war-footing economy
when broadcasts were reduced, and then they ended. 

American Christians were late comers to light entertainment,
they came to television in the late 1970's/1980's.
They were particularly naive about the distorting effects
of broadcasting on the characters who filled the screen.

When pastors were inconsistent with their congregations
face to face every Sunday then their congregations knew it,
and the inconsistencies were in scale with the communities
that the congregations were part of. The hypocrisy was in scale.

When pastors started preaching on television,
to tame studio congregations they did not feel
the power of the distancing effect which television does,
the pastors were extremely naive about it.

It was like the effect facebook is now said to have
on groups and individuals; the amount of money
made from advertising and seeking donations
became vast and self perpetuating, and it multiplied
as preachers learned how hate sold better than engagement.

We who use facebook etc should learn
from the failure of the tele-evangelists
to learn about the distorting nature
of the smoke and mirrors they used.
We too speak through distorting mirrors,
and algorithms which we know little about.

Given how negativity so easily multiplies,
and we will be the last to see it started with us
we should seek always to be affirmative.

Peacetime Pastime Creativity

One of the more hidden aspects
of lives lived out in full peacetime
is how nothing disrupt the constancy
of creative activity for the wealthy artist.

There, life is an unending stream
of different projects to be completed,
before death provides a natural end
to any further word or intent to act.

For many artists it does not end there,
there is often that last book to write/
recording to be completed in order
to be published posthumously
though such projects seem melancholy
without their author to promote them.

But long before that the calendar
becomes so full of anniversaries
of past events held on different dates
that the public remember their creative leaders
by the date they first heard/saw and heard
their peak experience of said artist.

By then all creativity seems to happen in the past tense. 

 

Great Turn Offs of Our Time (23)

'He may be a criminal but he is our criminal'
is a phrase that many invoke, when they settle
on some particularly choice lawyer, leader,
or politician with his shiny charisma,
who they know is a criminal but they think
'as long as he is criminal for me
I can control him and he is the criminal, not me.
I can disown his criminality as my employee.'.

But the point about criminality is it's dishonesty.
When we employ somebody else to steal for us
whoever we employ is as likely to steal from us,
and lie by omission about it to our faces
as they are to tell us that thy have done our bidding.

The real question with any criminal practice
is how long it takes for it to be discovered,
and who will be most destroyed by it's discovery.

My Third Christmas Card of 2021

 

When Silence Is Not Absence

Many millions of people live out their days
as if they have nothing to say,
and they have plenty of time to say it,
when it is more the case
that the media they accept
scripts so well what they want said
that they can find no point in mouthing
what their media has thought for them.

A Choice Of Pandemic

There many strains of Covid 19
for us to choose from, and learn
how best to not catch them
in the surest way possible,
congruent with civil liberties
and the economy
of the country we live in.

But it does not end there;
in the wild there is now also
an ongoing outbreak of Bird Flu 
and that is trans-national
and trade barriers help it spread
by limiting the vaccinations
of tame birds to stop them
infecting wild, migrating, birds.

So when you see the turkey
it may be more off  than you think.
But remember this;with this virus
nature has it worse than humans know about... 

The Hopelessness of Forgiveness

When I was just old enough
to be advised about relationships
outside of my parents' evasions towards me
my mother told me two distinct things.

The first was
'when you make your bed then you have to lie in it afterwards.'.

The second thing she said was
'Don't bring any little bastards home to me.'.

I understood what she meant with the first rule; 
when you marry it is for life-there could be no change
and no choice once the vows were said,
not even if who you married was abusive
or was a murderer or a criminal
-you chose to marry the abuser,
their abuse is your reward,
abuse is what you married them for.

I understood the second rule even better.
given a choice of abuse or shame,
and I preferred the shame of bastardy,
as if I myself had been born out of wedlock, 
rather than passively living out an abusive relationship. 

Following Mother's advice
led me not only into my homosexuality
as a way of surviving the shame of bastardy,
but to finding a life times affection and support
from a man who lived in the full knowledge
of being conceived and growing up
outside the cursed state of wedlock.
His family related to each other
with more maturity
than I could begin to count.

Thirty years on from my first full choices
I have no regrets worth mentioning
and find modern heterosexuality more benign
than Mother would have wanted it to be,
but still it is strange stuff best left alone. 

My rule for relationships was more conditional;
everyone is bound to make rules for relationships;
part of their making rules is making the rules work. 

The Hope of Transparency

I don't care and I won't give my thanks
when all the green-wash advertising
put up by the wealthy, and the banks,
subsidises the space I take up
in the social media;
I did not ask them to do it.

I'd rather have nothing to say
and no means of saying it,
than knowingly be part of the screen 
that slowly blind the masses
as to the actual state of the planet. 

Radio Daze

Every day an endless tide of non-events
and scenes without denouement
wash through me via my radio.
With every hourly news bulletin
I forget what I was listening to before
and I'll forget again if I leave the radio on.

The measure of my mental health
is remembering to turn the radio off
when I know that I have heard enough
and I won't be able to concentrate on any more.   

My Second Christmas Card Of 2021

Adolph Richard Fleischmann 1892-1968

Untitled || Ohne Titel, circa 1952

 

Have They Checked Their Travel Insurance?

I have been slow to comment
on the modern 'migrant problem',
just as I have been slow to reflect
on the causes of said migration; war
famine, disease, and global warming.

But this much I will observe,
when slavery was an accepted trade
the ships that the slaves
were trafficked in were far safer
than the flimsy rubber dinghies
that today's migrants are given
to take to the English channel with,
to get as far from the famines, wars,
and diseases that bedevil their once safe,
now unstable, 'home countries' as they can.

Also slave owners had to buy
insurance for their captive cargo,
c.f. The Zong Massacre.Whereas
modern, more voluntary, migrants
have to travel by faith alone,
through hostile environments
that are far nearer being like
that they seek to escape from
than anyone would want to know.

At that rate buying insurance
for making sure of your profits,
whether your cargo lives or dies,
looks like sure proof of hubris,
and being well fitted for Hell
when you are ferried to the next life. 

Artifice Of Intelligence

As Alan Turing would surely have observed
the problem with artificial intelligence
is less that it is artificial, and more
to do with whether it is intelligent.

 

My First Christmas Card of 2021

 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Ruined Houses In Ireland

In 1842 a German writer and geographer
called Johann Georg Kohl travelled around Ireland,

he observed, “Ireland is the country for ruins.
Here you have ruins of every period of history, from
the time of the Phoenicians down to the present day.

Not a lot has changed since then, other than
subsequent decades supplementing the number
of ruins found here almost 180 years ago.

A well-preserved ruin, masonry cleaned up, gravel paths
 installed, regularly cut lawns, can no doubt expect
a longer twilight life. For those who need the masonry
to crumble because of the ivy, the experience 
 will always disappoint.