Now, Where Was I?

When absurdity is proof of life 
and the absurdity I see around me
stretches the bounds of all prior absurdity
I have to accept this lacking proof of life
as the proof of who and where I am.  

Once More With Conviction

I recently saw the film 'Un Triomphe' at my local community cinema, which is what else? A former church hall where both the church and the hall were originally the highest profile places along the main street, where in different pasts 'community' was central to the use of both buildings, where the uses the buildings were put to were the glue of small town life.

The film was in French with English subtitles and the plot was easy to summarise. In a French open prison there is a drama group set up among the prisoners who are due for imminent release and they have a change of teacher. The new teacher teaches drama because he can't get the theatre work that he wants to do he seems to have hit the mid-life crisis stage in his life when nothing seems to work as it was meant to.

Six prisoners select themselves to work with the new teacher who to help himself work with his mid life crisis chooses the text that is most atypical for them to follow. 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett, the famous text in which as one London critic when it was first performed in England said 'Nothing happens, twice'. The drama teacher saw the text as a shoe-in for life in prison, where small events assume a significance that in the wider, more free, world they would never assume the same significance.

I thought before seeing the film that part of the drama was going to be the slippery-ness of the text vs the reductive and coarse humour of  the prisoners. There was some of that but that was a kind of starter for the main course, where to learn the text the prisoners have to deal with their own temptations and difficult nature that the prison has left them to sort out, unaided until this class, as part of their confinement. Anger and illiteracy are just two of the problems that the prisoners have to draw from to find the depths in the characters of the text as it is written.

By far the biggest strength of the film was the location filming, which added a depth of feeling to, well, what life might be like in an open prison, what the differences are between life in an open prison and the experience that most of the audience would have had, of never having been imprisoned. To an extent the play 'Waiting for Godot' was what Alfred Hitchcock would have called 'a MacGuffin'-a dramatic device for moving the plot of a film or entertainment along to get the plot nearer what it is meant to be about. Here what the film is meant to be about is the prisoners relationships with life outside the prison. This MacGuffin of performing a play works wonderfully in that regard. 

 There are clashes with the prison authorities, trustees, and other figures for whom part of their self interest is withholding from prisoners what they have themselves-freedom to think and plan, freedom of action within a privileged society. There the film could have dwelt more on the contradictions of the prison system than it did.

The acting in the film is terrific, and another strong reason to see the film at the cinema rather than at home on a DVD where merely having the remote means wanting to use it which breaks the atmosphere that the film creates. It is also a film that you could watch repeatedly for different angles of the drama, the drama as seen by different characters.

How does it end? The end of the film improves on how the play ends and it is a all a quite surprising win-win situation, but I will leave the viewer of the film to find that out for themselves. There is also a post-script to the film that adds to how the film ends which viewers wil also have to find for themselves.

            That is all folks.....   

Snoopy Says It Best

Even without Charles M Schultz
behind him, as is surely the case here. 

 

War, Women, And Refuge

As regional wars and climate crises boil away
and the viability for life on the planet diminishes
so third world government gets more anti-democratic
and the numbers for refugees increase many-fold.

Perhaps it is natural for wealthy Western governments
to want to 'pull up the drawbridge' against the weakest
who seek permanent respite in more secure countries
as secure government across the world declines.

The number of women across the world, in Ecuador,
Haiti, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria,
The Netherlands, Peru, Thailand, Ukraine, Uganda
The UK, The USA, South Africa and Zimbabwe
amongst many other countries who seek
consensual relationships with other women
rather than un-consensual relationships
with men who see marriage as a means
of restaging the wars they have survived increases....

The women who define themselves as lesbian
as a means of seeking escape from the the war
find that the war chases them in the form
of that sexual/therapeutic oxymoron,
'Corrective Rape', or 'Curative Rape'.

Thus marriage, war and language
all get cut from the same dystopian cloth,
as 'The first victim of war is truth'*.

When peaceable refuge between women,
refuge from violent men, becomes illegal
and impossible, then fleeing as a refugee
because you are a lesbian is the only choice left....

*in modern times credited to US isolationist senator Hiram W. Johnson but first written by Greek poet Aeschylus (525-456 BC). As for me, I misremembered it as being written by George Orwell, who wrote so well about perpetual war as statecraft in '1984'.  

   

Boredom - The Final Frontier (2)

I freely admit that I want to be seen
as a man of conviction,
engagement, and of firm opinion
when I lead my online life.
A man who can edit himself
and is sentient-online at least,
still I fall prey all too easily
into the sin of boredom.

The news events depicted on the screen
become as transient as the screen itself,
the events portrayed hold all the traction
over my attention span
of clouds scudding by in a cheerful sky.

That is when I ask 'What is next?'.
That is when I am most tempted
by the detached repetitions
of online porn, whether filmed
or in written form.

It rarely arouses me;
I have seen it all before.
The same roles with different actors,
all of them filmed at the same age,
the age when they are sexually attractive.

That is when I think
'Is there some washing up I should do?
Is there something to do in the garden?
If only the landline phone would ring
-even if the caller is cold,
or a scammer using an automated voice,'.

I walk away from the screen
to face again the agenda
of how to live well alone
in my surplus of material comfort.

The Will To Keep A Tidy House

is less common than we expect.

A friend spoke to me at length
about their schizophrenic brother
who has been on medication
for decades to keep at bay
his delusions about state security.
Delusions that trashed the relationships
he had with his family, and trashed him
-the delusions made him homeless once,
and put him in the loony bin for years.

'He is better' the friend said
'Though his memory of the years
he did not take his pills is a no-go area.
There the delusions about the government
are his memories, there he mistrusts trust
like you would not believe.'.

The pills manage his illness
a lot better than he expected.
But one thing he cannot recover
is the energy and focus to tidy his house,
and rediscover his previous self
as a now attractive mature bachelor.

Alas, there is no pill that will
make anyone a better housekeeper.
If there were one I'd be on it,
at quite a high dosage. And because of it 
I would be more liked and more popular. 

Delicious As It Is

as a condiment, we in the rich west
should surely think again
about Himalayan black salt.

That it is so easily exported to us
is not only proof of the Chinese grip
on world trade and our sense of taste,
but also proof of the tight hold
the Chinese keep on the Tibetan landscape,
which they want to spread further abroad. 

Bookworm; Noun

A bookworm is not just a voracious reader
but a worm that provides a space that is safe
from the world around the reader
where they can continue to read, undisturbed.  

 

It Should Be No Surprise

That the company that has made
the quantum ethical leap backward
of with no consent from any person
or from any online organisation
has recorded record numbers of images
of everyone who has put their face online
would seek to be more anonymous
in it's pursuit of profitable business 
than anyone could dare imagine.

Only slightly less surprising
is that a journalist has used
good shoe leather pursuing the company,
and written a book about them.
In it she has exposed both their secrecy
and the ethical issues they avoided,
whilst more famous companies,
Facebook and Google did not stop
their pages to be 'scrapped' or harvested
for the faces therein, whilst being squeamish
about being offcicially credited with the work,

The bottom line? 

1-I will bet that in their greed Clearview
won't delete the dead from their data bank
so soon it will be less saleable and more inefficient to use.

2-if you are going to be known for anything
then always think before you act,
then think some more, particularly where
you might be 'owned', identified, by your actions.  

Let's Hear It For The Wives

of the many great male authors,
of the last 200 years, without whom
reading would not be the pleasure it is,
for readers all around the world.

Many male authors chose wives
as companions who were wise
in words and rich in ideas, women
who the law said were the property
of their husbands,
as chattels they were denied the vote.
And yet, uncredited,
and from the domestic sphere
they enriched the world of ideas.

Through their sense of economy
and practicality, they took literature
from being the muddled male domain
it had been since modern publishing began,
and had been for a l-o-n-g time,
to express ideas with which
everyone could identify.

And where their husbands were often poor 
because they were proudly pound foolish,
who lived in pound-foolish worlds,
the women kept their households afloat
with how penny wise they were. 

Every Prodigal Failure

blames themselves for where they are,
particularly when they are in a bad place.
They further blames themselves
for never knowing how well off they were
when the times they lived in were better.

But every prodigal also knows
that to get past the blame games
that made them blame themselves,
even though they did not deserve it,
the loss may be all they have,
they must work with it to change it,
from a loss to who knows what?

Recovery from prodigal loss
comes only from working our changes
until nobody wants to know us for who we once were. 

Talking And Listening

One of my best ex-friends
was a man who was roughly
the same age as me, who I met
by accident in the pursuit  
of friendship by means
which I knew were folly, 
but I still went ahead.

I was hoping for a better pay off
to the hobbies I got involved in.

At first George seemed kind,
bold, and ruggedly handsome.
He also had a very attractive
rural Irish brogue when he spoke.

This mattered a lot, since at root
the friendship was built around
how much he wanted a listener
who he could test to exhaustion
with travellers tales that went nowhere. 

I obliged him in this for twenty years.
For some of his more distraught stories
I found him a therapist who I thought
might help him listen better to himself.
He never stuck any therapist for long,
particularly when he simply wanted attention. 

It all ended with a whimper,
when, at last, I could not give him
the attentiveness he sought,
early in the lockdown from Covid.

For being tired I refused
to apologise for being unable,
and unwilling, to listen to more
of his jabbering. I don't regret it.

A God Is For Life, Not For Christmas

Currently the media of my country
is caught up in a debate about 'dangerous dogs'
when clearly the danger is in their owners,
but such a comment sounds like NIMBYism.

There the young, who always see the ownership
of their first pet in their own right as completion
of their first household, are presently attracted
to a new breed of large dog, the American XL Bully.

I remember forty years ago when my sister
got her first and only council, flat. Back then 
council flats were only rented out to young women
because they were more likely to hold down
poorly paid jobs that had little health and safety,
and be reliable tenants, whereas young men
who were meant to 'get on the housing ladder',
but could not even find 'the employment ladder',
and climbed 'the unemployment ladder' instead.

Council flats had to be allocated in some sort of order.

The first thing my sister did with the tenancy
was get from who-knows-where a large Doberman dog.
Encouraged by her co-habiting boyfriend she called it 'Satan'.
Very occasionally I saw the three of them out socially.

With a heavy dog lead and weak training it pulled them along.
As I looked at them I wondered the oldest question,
'Who was most on a lead there?' and passed on.

When they used the dogs name to it in public 
everyone around them gave them a wide berth.

Since I was religious to significant but ignorant degree,
I could find no words to connect with the three of them.
I thought the dogs name absurd at best, and ill chosen.
I never said anything to her because my younger sister
was also somewhat combative. She never took criticism
from anyone who she did not have to agree with.

I sometimes wonder what happened to the dog.
I suspect it was given away, because it was an
unsuitable pet for a council flat as rented out
to a single working woman. But who knows?

My sister may have learned to be more tender
the hard way-through canine bereavement.
If so I hope the lesson learned was heartfelt.

'M*A*S*H' - A Review

I recently saw the the 1970 film
'M*A*S*H' and I am still amazed
it how sweetly the anti-authoritarian
message it had to convey was delivered.

The script could have been a Marx brothers
take on life in the military, without the frantic
mugging and and playing to the camera
that Groucho had to resort to, to get past
the restrictions of the Hays Code.

There was no Hays Code when 'M*A*S*H was made.
Already weakly applied, with many exceptions made
the code was abolished in 1965.

Robert Altman was free to make his first film,
a back comedy set in a military surgical hospital,
and film most of it on location.

The scenes where the surgeons crack jokes,
at each other's expense, whilst the camera
drew the audience towards their patient's viscera
were the darkest comedy from America, yet,

The open display of humorous insubordination,
was all the funnier when it was done
without even the slightest hint of swearing.

If the last forty minutes were the silliest,
the rest was just magnificent, and made
pondering life and death in the military
more fun that anyone could believe
without them seeing it on the screen.  

Who Wants To Live Forever (2)?

Quite aside from the way that pensions
that are paid indefinitely will surely
require continuous financial juggling
as old money loses it currency
and new money from new industries,
as exploitative as the old, fight each other,
my main reason for not wanting the forever life
is how much medication I would be on
-where how their side effects fight each other
and they would make me a medical battleground
in a world of depleted animal species
where billions of humans are too poor
to have any trustworthy medication at all.

Still, if I have to live in some eternal dystopia
then I will at least save everyone from having
to remember my birthday when I am dead.  

A Rational Explanation For Donald Trump

The 45th President of The United States
was so shocked when the 46th President,
Joe Biden, was chosen by the voters, over him,
that he was unprepared for the loss of immunity
from prosecution in the courts that his being president
had given him, particularly after he had gone
to the lengths he went to, to keep the presidency
in the first place. Fake elector schemes and all.

Everything since has been a public roller-ride
of grief, plotted on the Kubler-Ross scale,
the anger, the denial, the bargaining
(where we currently are with the courts),
the depression (his deposition performances)
all lead to what comes next-acceptance.

For a man who wanted to be president
mostly for the legal immunity it gave him,
he has yet to count up how many charges
he has added to the list for his trying to avoid
the consequences of his actions altogether.

The bigger consequence will be
for his followers and his party,
who will resist to that last hypocrite
the hangover from having followed a man
who wanted to be above the law.     

'Body Count' And 'Mileage'

are both terms that I was familiar with
the first one in detective series and thrillers,
whether book or film related, the second
in connection with the speedometers on cars.

Imagine my surprise when I learned
that the young have re-appropriated them
as terms to describe sexual experience.
But then I accept all responsibility
for the prudery I imbibed with Mother's milk. 

Innocence was being proud of not having words
to describe what I was never meant to happen,
long after I had experienced the worst of it,
I learned a lot better what it would have profited me
to understand, much later than it was useful to know.

For the young 'body count' is the number of people
they and others have slept with and 'mileage' is years
of sexual experience, The last time I took a test
for sexually transmitted diseases there were thirty five
of them, when all the strains and variations were included.
Given the young's acceptance of vehicular metaphors
I would guess they would call an STD test an MOT,
and count taking one as normal, and with being cleared,
getting the engine revving again at the first opportunity.

Wisdom Is Not

the parsing or division of statements
into perceived questions and answers
to extract the impression of a dialogue
from within a statement by speaker,
or some ancient writings,
translated into modern form.

Though extracting questions and answers
from any statement will help reduce
the fog of popular miscommunications.

Wisdom is knowing when to stop,
whether it is stopping speaking, yourself,
or listening and analysing what other people say,
and stopping doing futile tasks set up in bad faith.

Wisdom lives in the silence, when all is noise
and the noise is too much for anyone to be going on with.  

Who Wants To Live Forever?

Only the ultra-wealthy
who can afford the new technology
at the peak prices it is sold at
and have the business interest
in adapting with changing times.

When any ordinary person ages
they have to be stay sharp of mind
to simplify their lives and adapt
with the changing uses of telephones.

What was once facilitated by a wire
suspended overhead between two homes,
and a bit more besides, the chance to speak
to another person, far away from you,
is no longer what it was.
The telephone has changed,
where our perception of distance
has changed beyond all recognition
into anything but simple ease of use.

The telephone has become a home banking machine
for every possible transaction under the sun, 
except simply talking into it, and being heard.

Who wants to live forever
when the technology makes
such an infinite life
one where we might speak 
but we won't be listened to? 

Give Everything You Have Particularly When You Have Very Little

This is a portrayal of the parable of Lazarus
and Dives (Luke Ch 16 V 19-31). It can be seen
in the Museum of Romanesque Art in Barcelona.

It is a wall-painting from the celebrated church
of San Clemente in Tahull (Lléida). It shows
 Lazarus in a strange perspective with his crutch.
The sores his feet are being washed by some
kind of long-legged dog. Maybe a collie
greyhound cross, a lurcher. The New Testament
says nothing about fictional breeds of dogs.

  When Jesus shared the parable with his audience
he would have said that the spit and tongue
of the dog were it's sole wealth and then
asked his audience how wealthy Dives was,
pointing out real life people like Dives, and 
asking where did it get them? Washing the feet 
of guests is mentioned often in the Old Testament.
Jesus using the the example of an 'unclean'
animal doing a pious act on a man looked down on
would have offended and confused many.
  
The image of washing the feet of the poor
prefigured Jesus washing the feet of his disciples
 as part of the rituals that were part of The Last Supper,
before his trail, his death and his resurrection. 

 

Which Holocaust Is Your Favourite?

 There are a plenty to choose from.

The Holodomor in The Ukraine in 1931-32.
Between three and eight million died then,
and the papers kept on it remain secret.
It is most clearly remembered by survivors
through the shame they felt for eating their pets.

Then there is the Shoa of European Jewry,
1937-45, and the Meds Yeghern,
the genocide by Turks of the Armenians
in 1915-still a state secret in Turkey today.

Or at a stretch the deaths in the first
concentration camps, in The Boer War
as run by the British military in 1901.

More recently there was mass starvation
as crops repeatedly failed in North Korea,
and Year Zero in Cambodia under the Kmer Rouge.

There are many more, large and small,
what with how they go under-reported.

My favourite would have to be the next one,
if only because it is the one we may yet stop.

Invisible Boy... Alien... Misfit...

I have written two memoirs
both of them written and published
online with no print version likely.
Both of them are about the life I had
when how I lived was set by my parents.

In them I relate in sequential detail
as many experiences as I remembered
from being a child sent hither and thither
through to the more self directed existence 
I was meant to have in my mid-twenties.

To write about feeling as if I were invisible
to feeling that I was an alien felt like progress
when I put it all into words. But as it was lived
that life felt more like patiently moving sideways 
away from the past than living a forward looking life. 

I have started writing about life
after being an alien, I have not got
a nickname for the person I was next.
Perhaps he was the stranger, the misfit
and the outsider who drifted
from one landscape and 'community'
to the next, who never fitted in any of them.

Write And Burn

It is a common attitude to be shocked
at the public spectacle of books being burnt
because they are considered 'heretical',
or worse, by some authoritarian state,
of which there are many to choose from.

Though maybe citizens ought to be
more shocked at how much the bully state
normal bullying behaviour until it no longer
commented on in a bullying on-line media.

But to me it is more the private burning
of personal papers that quietly saddens
most with hindsight. I am one of thousands,
millions, of diary keepers over the centuries
who at some point have found some of their writings
were fit only for being ashamed of, whatever
validated us writing them at the time,

We burnt them, not knowing that decades on
we would know better than to feel shame
at our youthful indiscretions. Time would teach us
patience and forgiveness towards far worse
than we did when we were growing up
and we should have kept the diaries after all. 

The Route To The Moment

We know we are 'there',
alive in the moment, 
when we realise that our
journey and our destination
are different parts of the same process,
each is there to help the other,
where, between them, they get us
nearer to where we have to be.

And yes, some moments 
will be better than others.
One moment leads to the next,
which might well be better,
and they all lead on from each other.

    

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (34)

1-One of the easy-to-spot, but still tempting,
click-bait techniques is for the youtuber
or whoever to present their headline
with a question mark, if to suggest a debate
when all they want is to be in emit mode
and the centre of other people's attention.

2-peculiar to British media
is the phrase to 'ramp up',
meaning to raise standards
or spread higher standards
across a particular service sector
or area of government. 

The phrase is used by speakers
who see their cause as 'Cinderella service',
typically the public services of  health
and education who seek to use the money
better than those using short cuts
to run the service at present.     

Sunday Sermon

 Truth is true until it is organized-then it becomes a lie. 

Jesus did not teach Christianity,
he lived it, whilst teaching love,
kindness, concern for others and peace.

Those others were the  public,
soldiers, conservative clergy, friends,
enemies, and attempted followers
of varying degrees of concentration.

We know nowadays what divides
present day society, we don't know
what divided society back then.

Following Jesus means confronting division,
which requires some level of organisation.
Too much organisation cuts out
life in the moment, and tightens division. 

Enjoy finding your right level of disorganisation
where you know where you are going,
and it includes plenty of life in the moment.

Mis-Written Histories

Scapegoating is the popular misapplication
of cause and effect, where when the speaker
speaks they knows that they are mistaken,
but finds greater serenity in self interest.

From Cain slaying Abel onward,
scapegoating has been the subtext
for all 'popular history', to the point
where how life was arranged
when we were more united
is a mystery we decline to account for.

The history of slavery is the example,
par excellence, of how when one group
gets scapegoated by another, the winners
frame the narrative to refer only to themselves,
leaving the losers the weakest of explanations
to account for them being where they are.

Never was this truer than with the evangelists
who bargained with white plantation owners
that even their black slaves needed salvation
and to read The Bible daily, where to be as obedient
to the plantation owners as the slaves were
the evangelists gutted and miswrote their most holy book.
removing  everything that was even slightly seditious,
to placate the plantation owners fear of their slaves
rebelling from the servitude, for being able to read.

For more about it this misbegotten
episode of church, and human, history
please left click and read in full The Slave Bible.

Picture Set Of The Month - September - Psychedelic Textiles

Kustaa Saksi (born 1975) is a Finnish textile designer.  

He uses a jacquard loom to create his work.

He has been exhibiting internationally since 2004. 

His work has also appeared in several UK museums.

With titles to his exhibitions like 'Hypnopomic'
'Call to the Wild', 'Paper Pavillion' and 'Travel as a Tool'
he draws a lot of attention to some startling work.   

His work is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert
museum, and several other museums in Finland,
France, and in The Netherlands     

To me his designs compare well  with the record sleeves
of the psychedelic albums from the 1960s that I first saw
in the 1980s, when I first discovered The Grateful Dead.