Many a couple sees
what they share with each other,
as different sides of the same coin,
their relationship being the currency.
Whatever they share and aspire to,
they hope that it will sustain it's value,
part of the value of the currency rests
on it's stability and longevity.
Ultimately, though, the currency
will prove itself when, unbidden,
it is taken up by younger energies
and takes off in ways that differ
from what is expected to happen.
is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 21 page 108
'When I was in the hole, entire pages of Pere Goriot would come back to me me in my solitude, often at incongruous moments, for example when I had a toothache and could no longer open my mouth. The words and sentences would steam by, and I would hear myself saying them, as if I were reading to sick child or in classroom giving a dictation exercise. It was like a blessing from God. Through his grace, my memory recovered hundreds of pages read years earlier. I could recall them effortlessly: the scrolled past me all by themselves'.
When what used to be called 'patriarchy'
gets described as 'Internalised misogyny'
you can tell that society has shifted.
That is more than a change of label.
But how big the shift is,
and how permanent the change
it sets in place, remains to be seen
long after here-today-gone-tomorrow
people like me will be around to watch.
Even the most observant of folks
can only see as far as their own times.
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| Between time, your heart, and your behaviour there will be a lot of mixed messages for others to clarify into simple decisions of their own, some of which will not be the decisions you want. No matter, as long as you make the decisions that you need to take when you need to take them. For myself lateness became my style, I always reacted too slowly and acted awkwardly when I had to, but that is okay too- in the end it proved survivable. |
As I looked up, the vacuum of space
reflected well the cold expanding height,
the long night-for-day that I mistook
for 'the human soul', as those around me
marked my life according to their normality.
As I looked out, I felt and saw nothing.
I could not fathom why some folk
liked active mistrust,
and put others on win-lose situations
where others had to lose,
for the winner to deny everything.
Who makes a purgatory out of 'family values'?
Makes a life where others appear
to live in the hope of trust, of reciprocity
where they are always better in the future?
It is possible to live in a dark world,
particularly where faith invites you see
a future world that would be even darker
without the weak light of your faith.
But it is a bad trick to see the future
as darker than the present,
false optimism for today, it stretches
the idea of 'life' beyond it's obvious boundaries.
Who in their right mind would want to go there?
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| Because we can't see what it takes away, and with what censorship denies us the sight of it makes us think 'All is well', and stops us worrying. If false reassurance is part of what censorship sets out to achieve, then that is where we have to beware, because a minority that we are not part of being scapegoated might seem okay today, but what happens when somebody we know is denied support for their voice tomorrow? |
Whenever I hear a commentator on politics,
or what community should mean, use the phrase
'We are doing our bit' you can bet what you like
they are more interested in expanding the parts
that other people play the better to make
the speakers role in the world much smaller
and much more to their comfort and ease.
is like the prison it describes,
not a book for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 12, page 63...
'To resist, you must think. Without consciousness, without thought, there is not resistance. In the end we no longer felt like laughing at Kmandar's cruelty. Ditto was carried off in a wheelbarrow. We were relieved. His cell had to be cleaned and disinfected. Apparently, they were embarrassed by this delay, because M'Fadel told us, between two groans, K'mandars orders.'.
The vanity of vanity
is not just that so much of the speech
vanity inspires expands indefinitely
to change nothing, it also denies
how the most effective changes
come though quiet contemplation.
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| Because it is easy to avoid reading, or when you read, read lazily crafted lies where the nearest you get to disbelief is not noticing how easy they are to swallow. Bigger tests of truthiness will follow, and you won't want to miss them. |
As a child I was scared of 'Dr Who'
when as a family we watched the show
when the Daleks appeared
in blurry black and white
their metallic voices froze me.
I would have had more courage
had somebody [surely my Mother]
held my hand during the scary bits,
as opposed to us all sat silent, apart.
In the press of the day,
the way the Daleks spoke
was always compared to the sound
of angry German propaganda.
But back then the popular press
could be relied upon to relive
what had been their finest hour,
repeating the half lies they told
in support of Winston Churchill and WW2 .
The press comparison was false,
which was why I missed the real point
that the Daleks voices had to teach me,
'If you do not want to not get shouted at
then don't join the army.'.
The shrillness put into the Daleks voices
was meant to make them sound
like every bully-boy sergeant major
in every empire in the world that promoted
it's own singular authority, combined,
synthesized to sound inhuman for extra sadism.
If pacifism means anything to me now,
as an adult, it meant two things, not shouting at others
and never letting myself be shouted at, if I could stop it.
Least of all, letting anyone say 'EX-TERM-IN-ATE'.
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| The same parabola arch could also describe the levels of closeness I have developed with my family with one variation; my family also contact me around the time of my birthday, as I do theirs. Dutifully, we send each other cards in lieu of knowing how to care and understand each other any better. |
is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 9, page 38
'Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats away at you from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end. I had go through this ordeal to understand something that simple. I remember an instructor at the school in Ahermemou who was a bad man, spiteful and gloomy. He had yellow eyes. The colour of hate. One day, he did not come to class. We learned that he was in hospital for a long stay. i don't recall what happened to him, but people said that he had been bewitched by a maountain woman whose daughter he raped.'.
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| On October 3rd 2022 I put this same notice up, partly because banning certain medical procedures is an act of a fascist state. At the time I did not know how many states in the USA might be so described. As of today there are some nineteen states in the United States of America which are now demanding all the medical records of women whatever state in America they are treated in, to potentially prosecute the women for treatment they receive in states where that treatment is legal, but is newly illegal in all of those nineteen states. These states are Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee Texas, and Utah. Every woman living in these states will be using an alias for medical treatment that is legal in the state they seek the treatment, but is illegal in the the nineteen states listed above. Every woman in these states will be using VPN to make their phone and internet data untraceable to establish their private life. Eighty years ago fascism was an enemy that liberal democracies fought against side by side with Russian Communists as The Allies. When the Axis powers lost the winners hastily divided the spoils and closed that chapter of history. Who will save anyone, particularly adult women, from this new American Republican Fascism? |
Ringo Starr recently celebrated his 83rd birthday on tour in America with other, similarly mature, musicians. Through facebook I recently found the following tribute, where whoever posted it fail to post the name of the author... No matter, the author is right about Ringo as a musician, however much we might wish that John Lennon lived to record and release as many solo albums as Ringo has, thus far; a mere twenty studio albums, eleven live albums, and four EPs....
"Ringo always got, and still gets, a unique sound out of his drums. His drums are as distinctive as his voice. Ringo gets a looser deeper sound out of his drums than others get, that is unique to him. The detailed attention to the tone of his drums is one of the reasons for Ringo's brilliance. Another reason for the looser deeper sound is that Ringo does not keep time with metronomic accuracy. He has an unrivalled feel for a song. When his timing fluctuates it invariably does so in the right place at the right time in the song. He keeps the right atmosphere going on the track and gives it a rock-solid foundation. This held true for every single Beatles number Richie played. Ringo was also a great tom tom player."
I live in the land of saints and scholars
where reading and being well read
were once deemed to be important,
and yet I am often surprised
at the survival of a pamphlet culture.
The subject that the pamphlet/leaflet
covers most is always The Gospel,
where inarticulate and singular
late middle aged men, stand on corners
in central Belfast and silently give out tracts
to passers-by which urge the reader
to 'consider eternity' and 'seek to be saved'.
Admonishing scriptures also appear
on advertising hoardings of buses.
I understand how belief shades into worry
about how are we to be neighbours to each other
in a world where in public places
people appear to not look out for each other?
We are all 'just passing through'...
I would engage with them more
if whoever gave out the pamphlets
could explain to individuals who asked
in conversational and jargon free terms
what their salvation means to them.
Then the recipients of the pamphlets
would know what to be saved from,
and what the saved see themselves saved for.
I remember quoting the phrase 'Drain the swamp'
to describe a change in politics I thought was coming
and I thought was a good idea oh about a dozen years ago.
It seemed a neat way of circumventing a management-speak
on regional politics which I thought was past it's use-by date.
Recently I heard the phrase again, in a different context,
about a politics that I thought that I wanted to see remain.
I thought again, about my former liberal bias/prejudice,
which I once saw as 'inclusive', and still partly do.
But I realise afresh how much 'language is a virus'
and in the swamp that is modern communication
words are always more dangerous than we think.
is much like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoner' will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 8 Page 35
'So, for eighteen years, more precisely, for 6,663 days, I was nourished only on starchy food and dry bread. Never any meat. Never any fish. Nourished is not the word. Kept alive. It did not take me long to forget cigarettes, I didn't even suffer through the miserable deprivation that drove Larbi-Number 4-off his head. He would scream, rip his only shirt, call the guards, offer them anything for a cigarette.'.
For the fourth in this series of blog entries please left click here.
what we were forced to keep secret
in the distant past is now an epidemic,
not that I am complaining.
Though there are worse causes for shame
than secret youthful acts of sex sans consent
for us to seek deliverance from by confessing them.
I lightened my head a few short years ago,
when after over forty years of carrying
a lot of unsorted and secretive self-blame
for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and put with the wrong people,
when, unexpectedly, I was sexually assaulted.
In the end I worked out who the blame
came from and delivered it back to it's owner.
I get that secretive sex causes shame,
and shame is something to discard.
Obsession nearly always hides behind taboo,
discard them too, but carefully.
Change in favour of admitting, and doing more now,
to stop us laying waste to the planet we want to survive
and stop your words turning into a mush of greenwash.
Of course other advertising washes are available....
'Fatally wounded' in a military context
never means what the media suggests
it should of the military leaders
and the wars they report on, namely
'likely to lead directly to their death'.
Nowadays 'Fatally wounded'
need not even mean the departure
of the failed general, or war minister,
from the previous place world stage.
Though the phrase might mean that the leader's errors
have damaged their leadership to the point
where to stay in power they have to be more cruel
and in the meanwhile lower their pubic profile.
Innumerate people now ask
'What is the biggest number'
not thinking it through to
whatever number they get,
adding one to it will make it one bigger.
In Jesus' day, the disciple Peter
asked the biggest number question the following way,
'Teacher, how many times must I forgive?'
as if as a disciple he were some sort of flatterer,
or some cloth eared pedant who saw forgiveness,
and being forgiven, in terms of single instances
that could be ranked, and measured out, between people,
unlike the debts and trespasses a person prays
to be cancelled when they say The Lord's Prayer,
Jesus answered Peter figuratively,
'seventy times seven', but if I were asked
my answer to how often I need to forgive
and be forgiven has to be 'One more time
than I have counted and think I should be',
because I know my ability to forget things.
When ever we get the urge to be beaten,
for not being who we expected to be
don't get anyone else to do the job,
not even subconsciously-do it yourself:
because you will know best when to stop
-when further punishment is pointless.
is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 7, Page 29....
'As for me I quickly discovered that the instinct of self-preservation wold not help me survive. That instinct we share with animals was now out of order as well. How could one stay alive in that hole? Why bother dragging this body, broken and disfigured, into the light? We had been placed in conditions designed to prevent our instinct from envisaging the future. I realized that time had meaning only in the movement of beings and things, whereas we were reduced to immobility and eternity of the material world. We were in a motionless present. The unfortunate soul who looked back or peered into the future rushed headlong into death. The present left only enough space for it's own unfolding. You had to keep to the immutable instant, and not think about it. A realisation that doubtless save my life.'.
For the third of this series of bog entries please left click here.
Present day disasters around the world
are at least as big, and maybe far bigger,
than they have been in the last few decades.
Popular Capitalism makes sure of that.
But in 2023 the popular press of my country
no longer reports disasters as being 'Biblical' in scale.
I am unsure about how to understand this.
Is it that the press are looking for
a more secular adjectives of scale
to describe the latest disasters,
to chase the latest linguistic
and social/religious trends?
Or is it that the Biblical scale disasters
that the press described in the past
seemed back then to be more solvable
than present day disasters, for which
only terms which express agnosticism
towards their solvability are apt to describe them?
If you have any answers to these questions
then please ignore the press, and apply them
to the small battered blue planet you are on right now.
Life, including recovery from disasters,
is more about action than language...
The next time I sneer
at the falsity of the category
'world music', where the aim
is broad commercial appeal,
and support folk musicians.
Please, tell me think again.
In many places across the world
the language of local peoples
is prohibited by rules designed
to destroy local diversity.
There are minority languages
struggling to survive in Estonia,
Basque, Galician and Catalan in Spain,
Occitan and Breton in France, and Ukrainian
in Ukraine under Russian control,
are amongst many, many, examples
where empires and their ghosts
threaten local history and local life.
In these places the local languages
hide in music native to the region,
to which the locals cling to for life.
Where music producers see life
in well preserved local languages
in folksong, and in local choirs,
remind me to be grateful...
is more common to life than we recognise.
I used recognise it most when folks
talked about The Pope's claim
that when he was writing about doctrine
he was infallible-as well he ought to be.
The Catholic Church only started to claim
to be infallible on doctrine from 1870 onward,
in direct response to Italian troops
annexing the shrinking Papal estates
and then gifting them by plebiscite
to King Victor Immanuel II of Italy.
Nowadays the flummery of the past
seems so clunky that we discredit history
-it seems like chatter that changes nothing.
Our modern sense of infallibility
comes from the latest technology
-where the less we know
how a bit if kit works
and the better it works
when we pay our fees,
the more infinite our sense of ease,
until our electronics fail us.
Whereupon we throw the electronics in the bin,
not knowing or caring if they will be recycled.
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| wanting to avoid something may be your best guide as to what actually needs your attention... |
For people with something to hide.
First there is the advertising that is pure greenwash
that makes individuals feel better for saving so little
whilst using so much what they save hardly counts,
to the purchase of world scale sports events
-sports washing-by countries who torture their citizens,
where hosting the event disguises their human rights record,
to the last, and least, identity theft of all,
the annual summer theft of the identity
of the fragile LGBTQI+ 'communities'
by supermarkets who promote Gay Pride,
and inclusivity generally, as their latest loss leader,
which it becomes when the promotion passes,
and the summer event is over, until next year.
I have no difficulty with having neighbours
as long as we are the right distance from each other
for our neighbourliness to be mutually beneficial.
Where being the good neighbour gets harder
is where I have to visit one of them
and pass so many more of their gardens
which have there are so few plants
and they are so lacking in character.
Most people over sixty will know something
about the film 'The Stepford Wives',
the modern feminist gothic thriller
and the perfect looking women
who live on a perfect looking estate
where their husbands are plastic surgeons
who secretly keep their wives looking young
through emotionally abusive plastic surgery.
From the distance of my wild garden
I can't avoid seeing my neighbours
daily employing the Stepford Gardeners
sterilizing the world one garden at a time.
is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.
But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...
Chapter 5, Page 18...
'Now I had to feel unaffected before that fateful day [when I was arrested], Even if words or images broke into my night and prowled around me, I would beat them off, send them packing, because I would be unable to recognise them anymore. I'd tell them "You've got the wrong person. I have nothing to do with these phantoms. I'm no longer of this world. I have ceased to exist. Yes, it is me speaking. That is precisely it: I'm no longer of this world-of yours, at least, yet I have kept the power of speech, and the will to resist, even to forget. The one thing I must not forget is my name. I need it. I'll keep it as a testament, a secret in the gloomy grave where I bear my fateful number: 7." I was seventh in line when we were arrested. It didn't mean much.
My dreams flourished. They visited me often. They would spend part of the night with me, disappear and leave scraps of my daily life at the bottom of my memory. I did not dream of liberation, or of the years of imprisonment. I dreamed of an ideal time, a time suspended among the branches of a celestial tree. If it is the child within us who awakens when we are afraid here it was the wise man and the lunatic in me who revealed themselves as ardent opponents, each striving to take me the farthest from myself. Smiling placidly I watched the tug of war between these two extremes.'.
For the second blog entry in this series please left click here.
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| 'Imaginative Printing' by American artist Sam Maitin (1928-2004) He was a painter, teacher, political activist, sculptor, graphic designer, and muralist. |
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| 'Abstract' (1966) as designed by Sam Maitin, known in his lifetime as Philadelphia's 'Mayor of the arts' for how much he helped other artists. |
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| 'The Print Club' as designed by Sam Maitin who in his time as an artist designed murals for many public places such as children' hospitals schools of dentistry and many less well off museums. |
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| 'Kraft Printing Company' as designed in 1962 by Sam Maitin (1928-2004) |
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| 'Printing with an impact' as designed in 1962 by Sam Maitin (1928-2004) |
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| 'Speed Service and Superior Printing' |
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| 'We imbue everything we do with spirit verve and a touch of magic' |
