This Blog Is Going For a Lie Down - Please Enjoy The Interval Music

 

A Very Bad Joke

Q-what do you call a non-judgemental
form of a yoga-type exercise?

A-Pontius Pilates....

Great Turn Off's Of Our Time (26)

When someone says
'I don't have a problem with
(insert difficult subject here,
say Frank Zappa)' it might be true.
But the phrase that is often implied,
and never needs said that follows it is
'But I know enough people who do'.

Everyone 'has problems' with some subject,
or other, personally speaking I have a problem
with people who won't process their problems,
even slightly, and they won't change their shape.

They expect the world to defend their troubled pasts,
not realising that everyone has to reshape themselves
and no issue is so exceptional as it can't be resolved.

  

Time Suspended Through Reading

As a teenager I read a lot, I never listed what I read.
I mildly regret not writing reviews of it, with which
to train myself in processing the ideas therein.
That leaves me now with a smaller past
to look back on than I might have had. 

I read a lot of science fiction,
partly because it was a popular genre,
partly because they were not Westerns,
partly because they were fantasy,
and lastly for ontological reasons;

I hoped that what I read would take me
as far away from where I lived as possible,

without me taking drugs I couldn't afford,
which might well make me feel more alien.

Often what I read depressed me,
there were too many weapons,
there was too many conquests
by too many macho hetero males
it was all far too American.

For fiction about apparently unknown worlds
what I read also seemed to have borrowed
from the landscapes of The Old Testament.

I wanted flexi-words, flexi-worlds. 

I knew of no women SF authors,
who would give women characters the lead;
Feminism in science fiction was beyond belief,
or beyond male SF publishers imaginations,
just as Feminism was too much for where I lived.

Years later I read Margaret Atwood.
She showed how mutable the world could be
and how in the hands of an imaginative writer
danger and damage lurked in human form.

She released me from the petrified male lead characters,
the unmoved movers who could not adapt in shifting worlds. 

Before I read her I read the parables of Jesus
I came to see those writings as Science Fiction
for his times; there were utopias and dystopias,
based on the reinterpretation of Jewish Law,
and in some examples there were myopias
where Jesus gave to everyone around him in/sight. 

I still don't understand how the apostles
expected the world's end with so much fervour
Is it something for which we are still waiting?

or is it now something that left us behind?

That sense of time suspended
seems to be a proper Sci Fi ending..... 

Superlative Mediocrity

I will never understand
how it is that my government
is always saying how much
it is doing 'doing more for the country
and doing it better than other countries
do it for themselves, and does what it does
better than every government in history',

I reach the point where I think
that were the speakers of this bilge
challenged every time
they overused it, the listener
would turn the speaker off
because of how ugly
the consistent disagreements
would sound.

And that is before the interviewer
gets to quote the statistics in which
proof of the point gets so diffuse
that you wonder what they
are quoting the statistics for.  

Maybe every government
of every country in the world
does the same thing, They all rely
on a monoglot misunderstanding of language
to hide how they all behave the same way
from listeners who for not understanding
other languages, or their own.
don't know how much each language
is equally good for telling lies in.  

Who Knew That Rocks Believed In Anamism?

 

I Am No Lover Of My Government

In the privacy of my own home,
when the radio goes off,
or my attention span wanders,
I often wonder at the apt titles
for the many government ministers
whose words leave me angry.

I know what their official titles are,
minister for housing, home secretary,
minister for culture, there are many more.
But what I want to know is what ministers
are actually for, beyond self enrichment.
Which one is the minister for sophistry?
For open fraud? For bluff and bluster?
For weak reasoning? For adultery?
For rebuttals? For nervous apologies?
For leaking government documents?
For fake sincerity? For trashing the opposition
when they have done nothing wrong,
other than being out of power too long.

There must surely be many more reasons
for whoever is in power to be there,
and none of them have much 
to do with appearing to be selfless. 

False History Syndrome

Many people are remembered as martyrs.
Nowadays the memory of their suffering
is always retrospective, and often written up
by people who lived that long after
that the suffering happened
that for the reports of the reported suffering
to have impact in the present day 
the suffering once endured has inflated,
to be present as the present day reports
of cause of present day suffering happening.

In the days of wars between Protestant and Catholic,
there were real sufferers and martyrs,
as evidenced in 'Fox's book of Martyrs'
-as complete a compendium of sadism and suffering
as could be compiled, that without the motive behind it
being clear it seems like such a graphic waste of life
that it is hard to credit why it happened.

It is now explained as the stirrings of nationalism.

Islam also has had it's splits and 'holy wars',
in which every side proclaims rewards for it's own
and punishment for the rest in the next life,
based on their group-think. 

In the present secular age,
with 'nothing to kill or die for',
and no particular 'side' to be on, 
martyrdom is hard to comprehend,
and yet many still kill, and many die,
for causes that they can no more stop
than stop themselves being absorbed by.

This proves that even with 'religion in decline'
division is not so in decline that citizens
can stop themselves being divided
by loyalties that are not loyal to life itself.   

North Korea Celebrates Easter

 

Alone In The New Russia

In 1947 Hans Fallada wrote
one of the first anti-Nazi novels
to be published after World War Two.

It was a fiction based on the experience
of real life couple Otto and Elsie Hampel,
who filled anonymous postcards with comments
that were factual and critical of the Third Reich
which they left anywhere they could leave them
without being traced. They left the postcards
as acts of resistance against a government
that believed in it's own omniscience.

'Alone in Berlin' broke the author,
who was driven to be an alcoholic
through fifteen years of struggling
to write fiction worth reading
that got past the Nazi censors.
with them gone, both he and his country
were broken, seemingly beyond repair.

He had to see what was still there,
what was good, and was still intact,
and in 'Alone in Berlin' he found it.

Now Russia is at war,
it's citizens live under censorship,
but some citizens have taken a leaf
out of Hans Fallada's
handbook of quiet resistance;
on some supermarket shelves
where there should be descriptions
of the goods on the shelf above,
there are one sentence reports
that say more about Ukraine
than the media are permitted to share.

Some citizens have been caught
in the act of changing the price tags
for news they can believe,
because in the Hans Fallada book
there were no security cameras.

But modern Russian citizens
know, just like Fallada did,
that freedom of information
has no price - which is why
their government disallows it. 

Judas Iscariot; An Appreciation

Judas has always had a bad press 
from when he could not forgive himself
for mistakes that he was not the author of
to when he took the rope and killed himself,
to become the patron saint of suicide,

He was dead before Jesus died on the cross.
so Judas joined the dead before Jesus did,
when Jesus descended there, and took those
who were meant to live to the hereafter.

That was where they first remet,
after Jesus' death in which Judas
play his part, against his own will
and against the wishes of those around them.

Nobody knows what they shared
after so much drama, any more
than they know what Judas' disciples life
was like-it was never written down.

If wanted to remember Judas Iscariot
I would prefer to imagine that unwritten life,
the three years during which the disciples
were sent out, and found their teacher
as they met the needs of the needy,  

Highly Driven ?

When I was growing up
men coyly said, in ways
they would not expand upon,
'Oh, I have a high sex drive',
to excuse their infidelities,
which they hinted at,
but then refused to list;
they were married. 

It was comments like that
which made marriage
difficult to understand.

What was the point of an institution 
which did not meet their needs?
I  knew what institutions were
after my family sent me to one.

I understand it now,
the same men who hinted
at being highly sexually driven
also furtively suggested
that they were 'well endowed';
They had a strong drive
but it was only to tell lies
and best other people.

Men liked boasting with each other
about who they believed they ruled over,
though their rule was often empty minded.  

The Want of Queerness

To be queer is to be an honest outsider
in a world where from the outside
of other people's worlds
what you see is how dishonest people are
-from their insides out.

Would than I had been queerer
when I was younger,
I would have been honester
about who I was
and who other people were. 

Shock News

A new universe is nigh
through the black hole
the other side of the plug....

 

A Life Through Words

A living writer is a read writer
-even when the writer is dead
their words being read
will make them come alive.

Being remembered via language
is the eternity they least expected, 
when they expected not to survive. 

Undone By The Media Once Again

I have written before  about 'sore winner syndrome'
where a right wing populist not only wins an election,
and wins it by apparently fair seeming means,
but then complains about all the parties and forces
who stood against him, as if they had no right to be.

Now the world is faced with a country
that not only slaughters the citizens
of it's neighbour and brother in history,
with a venom worse than that
with which Cain slew Abel,
using weaponry more lethal
than Cain could conceive.

And not only does the country deny every action
that it has taken with said weaponry
(perhaps understandable given the obscenity
of the imbalance of military might, and motive,
not mention with all that, they still have not won)
but it now blames the invaded country
for 'invading itself' and for 'being Nazi's'
when a totalitarian government, and war,
is what the smaller country is now resisting.

And the bully country denies it outright.
To quote a once a once unpopular song
life in Ukraine is 'Hell without the sin',
and there plenty more of it to come...

The Want Of Playfulness

One of my weaknesses
is to combine understatement
with a dry irony when describing
this or that problem, a mix
which more literal minded people easily miss.

It is not as if I seek to to be misunderstood,
more that I seek to see amusement in the world
where it seems to be less present.   

Grey Is The Colour Of Hope (3)

'We did, however, hold a New Year celebration. We managed to keep back a box of toothpowder when we returned our washing things, and used it to outline a full sized Christmas tree on the black metal surround of the unused stove. I did the top and middle part and Natasha, lying on the floor (she was unable to get up at the time) drew the trunk. Actually not one trunk, but two, wearing zek 'come now, come now' boots. We had made a paste out of the toothpowder with a bit of water, so the whole thing came out really well. It was such a happy little tree. And lying on the floor - Natasha on her sixth day of hunger strike, I on my eleventh - we rejoiced when when we looked at it, like a couple of children.'.

An excerpt from 'Grey is The Colour Of Hope', a KGB prison memoir written by Irina Ratushinskaya which was first published in 1988.  

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (25)

'Raising awareness' is such a pretentious phrase,
but that does not stop it being repeated so often
that people don't realise it has been used.
They have turned off from the speaker using it
before the phrase come out of their mouth.

The phrase was originally phrased as
'telling people', as 'I am just telling you
so you know' when the hearer knew all along
and had heard all clearly; no need for reminders.  

Grey Is The Colour Of Hope (2)

 'A rabbit, a wolf, and a fox are sitting in a Soviet prison cell. The rabbits is there for the evasion of military service, the fox is there for being a thief, and the wolf is there for rustling horned cattle. Suddenly the door flies open and a rooster is flung into the cell.

'I'm a political' he cries immediately.

The others gaze at him in amazement and awe. 'That's really something!' they murmur respectfully 'We're just common criminals, but you . . . . Tell us what did you do?'

The rooster assumes a heroic stance 'I pecked a pioneer* on the bum!'.

But all jokes aside, wild romantic liars like this don't become 'political prisoners'. After all, our women's political zone, reserved for 'especially dangerous state criminals', is the only one of it's kind in the country. There are other women political prisoners scattered throughout other Soviet camps, but you don't find yourself in the Barashevo Small Zone just for possessing an over-vivid imagination. The KGB are not fools by far, so what could their reason for sending so transparently false a person into our zone? Why do it?

Gradually things start becoming a little clearer. Vladimirova announces that camp or no camp, she will continue her struggle! She even has a plan prepared: first we must establish contact with the men's political zone - it is not far, after all, just across the road. All we have to do is cross our no man's land in full view of the two guards armed with sub machine guns, climb over the fence, cross the road, climb another fence and pass through another no man's land under the eyes of the guards: as for negotiating the barbed wire obstacles - well that is child's play.'.          

*Soviet equivalent of a cub scout or girl guide  

When The Window Dressing Becomes Redundant

I notice how during the present war
many Western multinational companies
have withdrawn support and supplies,
and by extension their names,
from Russia and from The Ukraine.

'Fair play', some might say,
'They believe in a free world
that they can do what they want'. Really?
They can do whatever they want,
except make losses in a war-based economy
that they always knew that had no control over;
where they were window dressing
for the slow removal of life and choice
for the mass of common people,
as an autocratic politics took over.       

Caught In A Bubble On A Screen

The fusion of the prosperity gospel,
first formalised by White America of the 1850's,
and the techniques for how to act on television
should surprise nobody
who has the right brain cells to rub together.

With all it's ticks and techniques
television broadcasting itself is proof,
if proof were needed, of prosperity.

But the fusion of television performances,
The Gospels, and being the richest nation on the earth,
has made the world's richest nation shifts the baseline
for how much is enough for it's citizens to live on,
so far above what the rest of the world can ask.

I can't imagine what it is like
to be trapped in this bubble
where you can never have enough
until you turn our television off, for good.

John Wesley is quoted to have said 
'Earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can'
to his followers and from the crowds that he drew
he knew what performing was, but still I suspect
that he would have looked askance
as he recognised the detachment
of performing through television. 

Grey Is The Colour Of Hope (1)

 'So we passed the time reading, or by training mice. There was no way of getting rid of them, so we decided to amuse ourselves. On the one occasion during those two and half months when the prison authorities let us make purchases from the kiosk, we shared the candies and rusks we bought (there was nothing else in the kiosk) with our long-tailed friends; they needed a change from prison-issue bread, too. Fortunately there were no rats in the punishment barracks, because there simply was not enough food for them. Their hunting ground was around the kitchens in the main zone. 

Sharing a cell with Tanya was easy. In conditions where some minor quirk of character could strain relations there were never any problems with Tanya. I have lost count of the days we spent in the punishment cells. Nowadays [now I am well away from being imprisoned] I often find myself look at some new face and wondering: what would it be like to share prison soup with you? Or carry out the slop bucket? Or conduct a hunger strike? How would you behave with the KGB? And, as a rule, the answer comes fairly quickly. This is not a deliberate exercise: it is the result of having had to assess people in extreme situations. Is it fair to look at people that way? Who knows..... '

From page 286 of 'Grey Is The Colour of Hope' a memoir of her time in prison by former KGB/political prisoner, 1982-86, and Ukrainian poet Irina Ratushinskaya (1953-2017).

 .      

In Greek And Roman Times

scholars and lawyers kept libraries
of their's and other writers works
purely for their own reference.
Because knowledge was privately owned,
and meant for the wealthy
it was not meant for sharing.

As a scholar approached death
so they would burn all the scrolls
that they once held dear
and had once used daily.

The excuse they gave as they set light
to their lifetimes work was that others
might inherit all the mistakes they made.

This is partly why the documents
that is most found from the 2nd century
onward are fragments of The Gospels;
the knowledge these fragments contained
were considered not to have errors in them,
though as was seen later they could vary,
and they were not private; what they said
was what was held in common between believers.

So, as many private libraries were burned,
The Gospels were copied and got disbursed,
and with the burnt scrolls much of the material
that cross-referenced the literature that remained,
including The Gospels and St Paul's letters,
were destroyed by the fear of imperfection. 
   

Picture Set Of The Month - April - The Art Of Maria Primachenko

'Black Beast' painted in 1936 by 'primitive'
Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko (1909-97). 

'Blue Ox' painted in 1936 by Ukrainian artist
Maria Prymachenko, who survived Stalin's purges
by avoiding being labelled as an intellectual.

'Lion' painted in 1947 by Maria Prymachenko
(1909-97) whose work is now literally under fire
from the Russian tanks and missiles that rain down
in the National Folk Decorative Art Museum in Kyviv.

'Pea Beast' as painted in 1971 by Maria Prymachenko
(1909-97)-this is one of her lighter paintings
after the strange and savage beasts she painted
in the 1930's represented the many cruelties
that Ukraine endured   

'A Cow Like That Gives 5000 litres a day', as painted
in 1978 by Ukrainian 'primitive' painter,
Maria Prymachenko, for more about this serious
artist who competed against Picasso, the year 
he showed 'Guernica', and who praised her
for her simplicity and talent, click here.