Atheism In America

The above is meme on a T shirt.
How casual the 'Bro' is on it? What age 
will the male be who is going to say that?

The anonymous author ignorantly paraphrases
the gospels. In Mathew Ch 14 v 22-33 we can read
that Jesus walked on water, and the disciples 
thought he was a ghost, Jesus proved how real
he was by inviting Peter to join him.  
Peter walked with ease as long as he
avoided all thoughts about the weather,
thus illustrating the point about faith
being about aim and intent more than
faith being about concentration on the means.
    
Peter nearly fell, but didn't. I respect technology
but with having had one billionaire buy his place
in space, all such travel proves to me is how far
 the love of money can get a person in America. 
  

 

Film Review; 'My Favourite Cake'

 This film is a fine confection. Having seen it and enjoyed it, I find it predictable that the authorities in the film maker's native Iran are not letting it be shown there. At one level it is a feminist take on the gender dividing rules by which Iran operates where women, particularly elderly widowed women, can meet and share meals with each other in each others houses, and elderly men can meet together socially, usually set apart from women. But rarely can single mature widows meet mature men, often divorcees and widowers, socially. 

  The film seems puzzling at first, and then proceeds to engage with the viewer by seeming to be almost casual. This is how 'slow cinema' works. Much later it steps up a few gears and becomes a Hitchcock style romantic thriller as it would play out if Fay Weldon had written the script. To tell you what happens would be wrong of me. It is one of those films where the reviews have to be opaque about the plot, to preserve the surprises for the viewer about how the plot evolves.

  The pace and acting in the film seem entirely believable. It is film led by actors in their seventies acting their age. The script is quite detailed and precise, with the location shooting in some ordinary looking Iranian city suburb adding to the atmosphere. Also whilst the film is slow it is smoothly and tautly edited.

 If this film has a point to make, a target, then that target is the Iranian interpretation of Islam where how women can dress and engage in public is advantageous to men, but the rules are explained as being 'for the protection of women'. The film explores who the rules benefit vs who they are said to protect.  

  I can heartily recommend this film to the fans of films that need subtitles.   

It Is Small Recompense

That when I pick the autumn blackberries
from the nearby roadside hedgerows
the blackberries might be cleaner
than they would have been in the past
because that nice Mr Musk makes cars
with much lower emissions than vehicles
used to emit, before modern electrics.

That Musk is the supplier of such cars 
and makes people pay through the nose
for their servicing and maintenance,
and the cars are computers on wheels,
much to the annoyance of drivers
who learnt to drive on manual cars,
is something I don't want to think about. 

There Is Always A Choice

On my own so much of the time,
I remain unsure about how to compare
how much I feel alone vs having so little
in common with the people around me
who collectively seem rather far away. 

Of Vice And Virtue

The government of my country
have declared that in future
fewer folk will smoke in public.

To save the taxpayer and the health service,
smoking will be even more restricted
away from where people eat in public,
particularly where drink means alcohol
and the language slides from lunch being food
-served where folks sat down to enjoy it-
to being a liquid that is designed
to make the afternoons pass faster
for people who are easily bored.

There has been a minor outcry from
faux libertarians who want to fume,
both about not being in government
and being against government controls
they would choose if they could use them
to best the opposition in their smugness.

There is nothing new about this outcry,
or the inconsistency with which it is pursued;
since the days of canon law, before 1537,
laws that be enforced had to be policed
through the invasion of privacy were common.

That a secular society should raise the same complaints
as a theocracy show how alike many societies are.  

    

Political Science

Alchemy is to autocracy what science is to democracy.

When an alchemist has a success he will share the results
with his fellows, whether alchemist or high status citizen,
but he will never share, or compare with other alchemists,
the processes by which those results were achieved.

Autocrats, like alchemists, root their faith
in their manipulations of nature and people
in how far they are above having to explain
their actions. able, Whether alchemist or autocrat,
they hide their failures behind word salads,
and slight of hand and word presentations.

Both modern science and democracy
are experiments where confidence
in the process depends on openness,
and well thought out definitions
for the parameters of what counts
as as 'success', where the process
of being observably effective
matters more than any given result.

Though how either of them stands up to new technology
boosted by turbo capitalism always remains to be seen.... 

Book Review - 'The Blinding Absence Of Light'

Prison literature is generally a category on it's own in the book world. From well before the secretive sexual fabulism of The Marquis de Sade through to the profoundly Christian outlook of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress there is a history of epistolary books and first hand accounts where a prisoner or person in forced retreat relates their daily thoughts over time. Or through hindsight they recall what their prison was like including descriptions of the life they wanted to have, but could not have. 

One such unread book on my shelf is 'The Prison Diary of Albie Sachs'. Even Jeffery Archer has written a prison diary about his relatively short, relatively comfortable, time in prison. By their nature these accounts concentrate on small events and changes in microcosmic settings because the world of freedom of choice is beyond the author. The more oppressive the prison the smaller the changes the authorities permit the prisoners to focus on.

If ever you were told that student politics is a dangerous hobby, then in the wealthy liberal West you would not believe it. In the wealthy West student politics are almost a mandatory time to put some distance in values between themselves and their parents, often using the latest technology and jargon. The most oppressive aspect of student living is the levels of student debt they will be tempted to accept. But for anyone living under an absolute ruler, whether president, dictator, or king, then student politics is some sort of toxic forbidden fruit. The idealism of student politics attracts the young partly because they cannot  'read' or interpret the political signals the way the adults around them can. The adults play out a sort of student politics the young can't interpret. The dictator remains God, the parents become the snakes and the students are cast as Adam and Eve.

So it was that Tahar Ben Jelloun was one of a small group of students who took part in a large-scale palace coup against the rule of King Hassan II on the 10th July 1971, the date of the king's 42nd birthday. If you want to read more about the coup please put 'Skhirat Coup d'etat' into the search engine of your choice and follow what comes up. Tahar Ben Jelloun ended up in a no tech high security prison run by the Moroccan secret police for eighteen years.

This book is his recollection of his life in that prison, it details his attempts at being a good Muslim in spite of the paucity of his surroundings, the dirt floors to the jail cells, the constant odour of disinfectant, the very poor starchy food, the being allowed out only for the funeral of yet another prisoner and then not being able to take the sunlight, and so many other privations. The author's biggest battle was his trying to not remember life when he was free, because the memories were too painful for him to recall and stay sane with. As he saw with other prisoners, insanity was the quickest route to death. And in that place insanity was as going to be a horrible death, the worst death was a slow death from being stung by scorpions that were released into the prisoners cell by the guards.

There are short bursts of light and shade in the book, times when he briefly recounts how and where he grew up, recounts some of the simplicity and beauty of life with his mother and sisters that he knew when he was free. But they are understandably rare.

It is a book of very short chapters, thirty nine chapters over 190 pages, with three pages of glossary at the end. That said, it still has to be read v-e-r-y--s-l-o-w-l-y otherwise you skip over some detail that it is an act of compassion towards the author to absorb slowly and meditate upon.

The prisoners have to have group discipline and have to have group activities. So prayers hold the group together, as much as the story telling does. No author's stories seem more apt for group sharing than the writings of Albert Camus, who I never particularly thought of as anti-empire in his writings and yet the toughness of what is required for existential self reliance his writings are apt for the population of a prison where the government wants not to know who the prison governor is, much less who the guards and the prisoners are.

When I looked up how well known this book has become I was surprised at how it has travelled and how many languages it has been translated into. I liked it that much that I found that many of the paragraphs were self contained enough to read well on their own, so on my blog I put up a series of the paragraphs on my blog, each of them linked from the first quote from the book onward Anyone who is interested can read the sequence from the following link https://woodenlodge.blogspot.com/2023.... 

The last three years of his imprisonment prove the grimmest. Those are the years in which the prisoners' collective resolve crumbles, before the author's resolve also crumbles, which tests the resolve of the reader, to keep on reading. These are the times in the writing when the author feels most broken and unrepairable as a person. They happen when he knows that the wider world knows he exists and where he is. But this knowledge comes to him in the most frustrating and most intangible of ways. This is when it felt right to him to think 'If I am ever released will I be able to feel it?'

It is a cliche to say that the last hour before the light comes is when the dark is at it's most concentrated. In this most exceptional book and story it is true. Eventually the surviving prisoners are all moved. Their prison, place of slow torture and starvation is bulldozed and palm trees hastily planted over the site, as if it were an oasis. Each surviving prisoner is slowly rehabilitated so they can eat regular food, appear to be relatively normal, and their pasts are officially erased. 

Only the look in the former prisoner's eyes remains immune to rehabilitation/reform, there the mark of having been imprisoned and tortured remains. The author finds some sort of temporary peace through being reunited with his mother who for being elderly is somewhat still, her stillness is good for both of them.

Parenthood Today

 When the technology we are urged to trust

seems to us like an errant child we want to punish,
because it has done what we didn't want it to do,
the fault probably started with us; as adults,
we never learned how to control it, or what makes it work. 

It is up to us, the older we get, to simplify
what we rely on, and make technology our servant
on terms we prefer, rather than allow ourselves
to be led by advertising that talks tech up
to be 'the new master', The Way ahead.

I do not want to quantify the media hot airtime
that is dedicated to promoting AI as 'the new tool
to be increasingly efficient' when as technology goes
it is jut another servant that we have to set limits on,
and define it's tasks tightly, if it is to meet our needs.

Advertising is to materialism what porn is to sex,
illustration to the point of unaware self-parody.
We need a wider awareness than adverts allow,
whatever they pay for, to help us define need over want.

Two Years Ago

   Queen Elizabeth the Second, Defender of The Faith, Head of The Commonwealth, and the collector of more state titles from across the world than most citizens could imagine existed died aged 96, eighteen months after the death of her consort, aged 99. 

  I could not watch her funeral on television, though it was touted as a grand and graceful event and was reported on from every media outlet across the UK that was broadcasting. They all talked up how H.M. The Queen was held in high esteem and affection by everyone she met. 

  At home I watched the funeral of another leader, see the film of Joseph Stalin's state funeral above. It was also a lament of grief and loss of unimaginable proportions, To see the crowds and vast slow moving queues was s-l-o-w television indeed, a spectacle beyond belief. 

It left me wondering how long it took for the sense of mourning to wind down and wear off. When did normal life start afresh in the Soviet/Russian Empire? When it fell forty years later?  

Dressed For The Occasion

I'd love to think that if Heaven is real
then everyone present there will wear pyjamas.
Perhaps those who were best behaved in this life
will have self cleaning dressing gowns too. 

We will all lounge about the way we used to at home,
Such clothing denotes a suitably Heavenly sense of ease
about the life outside of time, and our well being
in the space that we inhabit, where we don't have to work
at dressing ourselves up to impress other people,
we are all impressed beyond belief with each other. 

Whither Intelligence?

In the first world wealth my country lives in
those who own cats and dogs spend more
on the care of their animal companions
then people in subsistence economies
across the world have to spend on each other,
or the animals they breed to live off, 
e.g. cows for enjoying the milk of.

Animal companionship is a fine thing,
but monetised in a society in which
money matters more than who we care for
I can't stop myself thinking something
is is seriously out of proportion.

Mental Health Alphabet Soup

There are many acronyms and labels
for mental health nowadays, far more
than existed in my misbegotten youth,
when adults had few words for illness
of any sort, no words to describe the fear
of inviting a doctor the diagnose another
(weaker) family member to being fit
only for the nearest mental hospital,
a feared place, for the rest of their lives.

No words to describe either the fear
of the committed as they become unpersons
in strange surroundings, nor language
to describe the sorrow of the family member
who had to call the doctor, or later social services,
to have them intervene and take over.

The nearest there was to a describing word
was the word 'dibby' as a synonym for stupid,
which one teenage male would use describe another
who knew the word felt wrong, but were too weak
in themselves to say 'dibby' a word of abuse.

Nowadays we have more names to describe
variations in mental health than we know
what to do with. P.T.S.D, 'being bipolar',
A.D.H.D, dyslexia, dyscalcula, dyspraxia,
aphasia, dementia, Altzheimer's, 'the autism scale'
and words for many more conditions, besides.

Note; conditions, not illnesses. And nothing
for the individual to made to feel guilty for,
more something to be sensibly managed. 

I can't feel bad over this improvement
but I feel ill at ease when the individual
behaves badly and blames their condition,
and that way justify being unneighbourly
whilst expecting to be better treated than the less needy.

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Five - Unreliably Yours

To restructure my life after Boots had booted me onto the dole queue, and to prove I was still willing to work to The Job Centre, I picked up from where I had left off five years earlier and returned to doing voluntary work of my own choosing. When I worked as a volunteer in the mid-eighties Gainsborough was a deep pocket of economic depression amid an uneven country-wide upward mobility. If Nottingham was even a bit like the Gainsborough of the previous decade then I knew where I was better than other people did for whom 'being in the wrong place at the wrong time' was a first time experience. 7

Even better, in the 1990's my parents could no longer tell me to submit to the worst choices that were open to me in the hope of some weak short term acceptance, To them I was now a guest who they could co-opt into performing old routines-Mother's area of interest in particular-on my visits to them. But I was no longer the person who would obey her blindly, not even recognising my own blindness. The Gainsborough of her memory was gone anyway, along with the manpower services commission scheme jobs.  13   

The advantage with my voluntary work was that I found out who to work for, based on what I could see that I could do. When I limited the work to what I could see how to do it, that made the work more agreeable. Any charity of any size that had to rent a building to operate was already going to be tighter for money, so the free labour that came it's way could negotiate when and how to be most useful. Church based charities had a ready made network for seeking volunteers, their church notice boards. It was through that network and word of mouth that I chose what to do.19

The disadvantage to my presenting my voluntary work as an effort to work was that when most paid jobs required either a degree of sophistry, a disguise for the lack of employer support, or some mild degree of coercion to make the reduced choice for the new employee seem attractive, then presenting my open choice of subscribing to good natured voluntarism went against the disguised market forces that were behind the new recession. I quietly resisted the poorly disguised bad deals, when bad deals were the norm. But what if I bad deal presented itself as unavoidable? 25

Jed who lived in the shared house was partially deaf and worked in a gardening centre had found a job that that was a win-win. It fitted well around his disabilities-plants were quiet as were many of the people that bought them. With 'my nerves' and my unresolved feelings around my being gay I was unsure there was any job that would be a win-win that readily fitted around my weaknesses and needs. And if there was a win-win job for me then it would not take much of a change in economic climate for that job to become a win-lose. And anyway I saw my job that year as 'working my way 'out of the closet'', escaping being a bruised square peg who had been hammered into a round hole, rather than looking for better disguised bruising through employment. My voluntary work fitted around my agenda.  34

I worked one day a week in a dry house, serving food at lunch time to the sober homeless who might be tempted to getting drunk on the cheap elsewhere but in the house they simply wanted somewhere to sit down and be sober with their mates that was warm, and be served a meal and all the tea they could comfortably drink. For my own small daring to be different I took The Pink Paper in to read on the quiet. It was a weekly newspaper where the content was aimed at, and representative of, gay men. It was London-centric, rather than having much about Nottingham in it, but that was fine. If there was local content in it that would have been my entre into local gay life then I doubt I was ready to use the knowledge gained from the paper as my introduction. If the newspaper had a purpose for me it was to prove that homosexuality was a thing of words and civil life at least as much as it was about having nothing to say and much reduced means of meeting people socially, well beyond waving my willy in the toilet as if I were drowning in the wrong choices, or waving as if there was nothing wrong and I liked being silent. 46

In my other voluntary work I knew better than to take 'The Pink Paper' in to read in quiet moments. I worked one night a week-either a Friday or a Saturday every fortnight in a Christian coffee bar that St Nicholas church subsidised as an alternative to the notoriously troublesome alcohol based night life in Nottingham. I liked the sound system they had and as a volunteer I could sometimes choose the music. Was (Not Was) and Da La Soul were fine as up to date R&B sounds went as far as I was concerned. World Party were thoughtful listening too. Other volunteers may have preferred some up to date Christian music-the sort of artists who had recently headlined at The Greenbelt Christian Arts festival which I had neglected to attend of late. Say, Deacon Blue, and Mike Peters.  54

But however much I found workarounds for some of the expectations I wanted to break down there was a central problem facing me that I did not know how to negotiate my way around. My life was unevenly compartmentalised. In one difficult compartment there was my being gay which I dearly wanted to be less secretive about, in another I trying to learn more about mental health though I knew that some in my church would say that Freudian therapy was of the occult. In a third compartment there was the church attendance where only at the very edges were the complexities of the lives that people had were accepted. E.g. when Celia whom I had prayed with for a few months, admitted to her friend that she had feelings for me that were far nearer a Mills and Boon fantasy future than the safe sense of accepting merely being prayed for/with which I'd intended. 64

Then there was what to do about paid work. How ready was I to be some sort of loss leader in employment, financially, which left me on housing benefit. I could live with doing such a job but only if it had a no-fault exit back onto the dole from it. Windrush Nursing Home had taught me that much. Then there was my work record. I had done too many ACE schemes and done too little other work to disguise my dependence on government schemes with. What did employers want most? Would they apply the old catch 22 logic of 'you don't have experience? Then say I was barred from the job, because it would give me experience.'? I had found the catch 22 wearing enough last time....72

Finally there was the identity that I had collated as an adult in Gainsborough of part dole queue drop out,/part late period hippy, part record collector, where if I was bad at making relationships then I was better at making relationships with friends through music, lacking in foundation as such friendships would always be. My last and oldest friend in that line was called Graham. Through ease and difficulty, address change after address change, we had stayed in tenuous touch with each other. In the spring or early summer of 1991 he visited me in Nottingham and I tried to show myself more receptive in one area of life where we had always differed. He followed several recently living eastern teachers, where their term for teacher was guru, all of whom promised that the whole world could be transformed in the right instant. We talked about this and I stuck to my Christian belief, but admitted that I preferred the Creation Centred Spirituality of a teacher I'd found over historic, traditional, church teachings, and I was part of the diversity that the household I lived in represented. My tone was conciliatory. 86

But either I hit the wrong note with him, or I could not know that he visited me mostly to say that he was returning to Cornwall for good this time. Where with previous attempts at living in Cornwall he had never lined up both a permanent well paid job and a good long term place to stay, he had pulled off that combination this time. I.e. the visit was mainly for him to say 'Goodbye'. 90

Whether I saw his visit as a delayed fresh start, and he had difficulty saying that the visit was always his last as far as he knew is impossible to say given that his visit to Nottingham was thirty three years ago as of 2024. What can be said is that it would be a long time before I realised how permanent his departure from my life was, and we would both be very different people to who we once were when he finally rediscovered me. 95

Circular Thinking

I understand what euphoria is.
I just can't get my head around
why other people get excited by it.

Picture Set of The Month - September - Untidy Gardens At Their Best

Seaforde wild planting at it's best 
and longest held to. Co Down in Bloom. 

Rare Mexican plant Beschornearea in
Seaforde Co Down in early bloom in April.
The stems can grow to ten feet in length. 

This arrangement of plants and shrubs has
been left to look after itself, much like
the shed that is hidden behind the plants.  

A bank of ferns caught by the sun
will always create dramatic shadows. 

A little honesty is always good for us,
and good for our gardens too.