Happy Halloween

I don't know why William Burroughs is smiling here.
Maybe it is because before he was photographed close after
when he'd had his latest shot of methadone, a drug that by omission
he denied he was dependent on for 38 years, where interviewers colluded
with him by them never asking him about it. By his evasions  
he earned his place as the master of the uncanny phrase,
and as an unsettling dark humourist who set standards
of dark humour that were impossible to follow.   

 

This Blog Might Be Taking A Break...

 Please enjoy the interval music, a piece that has only gained in stature in the century or more since it was written, by Eric Satie. He was a man with a sense of humour who saw the future more than he realised when he wrote variations for piano like this....    ...who knows? Perhaps would also have appreciated the youtube adverts that occasionally interrupt the flow of the music.  

In A World Built On Mistrust

How close must I be to other folk
for me to know who my friends are
and give them the space for us to be themselves?

And how close must I keep my enemies,
both to disguise our mutual enmity
and let me know their plans for me
before they can carry them out?

Whatever the distances I keep
from different people, including family,
I have to think clearly about the difference
between being cursed and being a scapegoat.

In the former I live out other people's will
-seeing it as 'good for me to do what I am told',
as if passivity was good for the soul,
when what I am passive to may be poison.

In the latter I carry it knowing it is poison,
and without the choice of not carrying it.
But I carry it whilst protecting myself
from it, in so far as that is possible. 

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Eight - I Am Named Where I Least Expect To Be

My biggest difficulty was explaining to myself what sex should be. I was explaining it to myself because I had nobody to talk with about it. My night time diary became a useful place to review my thoughts and evolve the arguments. I had nowhere else. The writing revealed how I was much nearer I was to being lonely, than contentedly alone. About once a month, the need for sex would become an issue to be dealt with directly. My playing of 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood loud through headphones in my room was one way of attempting to deal with it. But many times that simply did not scratch where I itched. I would feel impelled to visit the near by public toilet in Lady Bay and hope that whoever was there was as handsome as they were anonymous.

My reasoning at the time was that going there was like buying a lottery ticket where the lottery was not actually gambling. But every lottery had a few winners who never need to enter the lottery again. If I could define what 'winning' meant well enough then I could be a winner, and not have to go to the public toilet for sex again.

I did not see myself as a gambler. But if I was, then this was my chosen way of gambling. I was not the type to go within 100 yards of a bookies with a view to entering and putting a bet on a horse or a football team. If I was gambler, then where was the form sheet to read? What were the calculations I could make that could improve my hand, so to speak? How was a meant to improve my odds against the poorer results? I felt okay with the hand I had to play. What I wanted was to have an experience that I would remember well enough after that I did not seek a repeat of it. If anyone had said to me that anonymity and memorability are totally opposite principles to each other, then I would still have wanted to try to combine them. Such paradoxes had been baked into my relationship with my father. Even with the form against my terms of winning being made much clearer to me I could see no other way to play my situation.

As it was I had three memorable experiences that year, out of who-know-how-many forgettable times. All the forgettable visits merged into one unmemorable blob of anonymity. Given that men did not introduce themselves with their names the trick, which it was mine to receive, but not mine to set up, was to meet somebody who was handsome, physically memorable, and organised enough that they recognised it when their physicality impressed itself upon me, and they knew what to do with that effect. The sexual act that I was 'good at' for want of a better expression was me giving them oral sex and asking for nothing in return. It had been something I had first done it at the age of twelve in circumstance that were murky enough that even circa 1990, eighteen years later, I could not put into words what had actually happened. What I could say for certain by 1990 was that what I sought was implicitly consensual sex where the implication came from where I looked for the sex rather than who I was or who my partner was.

A lot of what I expected was built on the implied ideals of masculinity that I grew up with. Aged twelve or thirteen these ideals were that dominant males enjoyed receiving oral sex and disliked giving it. The more well endowed the male, the greater their sense of their entitlement. Where a male sucked dick he was 'gay', but a male offering their dick for being sucked was 'not gay', more likely they were 'highly sexed'. Such obscure and selective ideas of what was sexual and what was masculine lacked any internal consistency, but they were what men acted out. Particularly under the influence of alcohol where masculinity and being influenced by alcohol seemed to amount to the same thing. One of the reasons I was writing the nightly emotional diary was to clear, misunderstanding by misunderstanding , the fog of inconsistency and expectation I had lived with, unaware of how inconsistent it was.

The best way out of this fog of inconsistency remained to find a person who I could trust enough to talk with in frank basic terms about my sexual experiences with. I had male Christian friends, but I knew better than to burden those friendships with anything that personal and that 'unchristian'. But I had learned enough to know that whoever I met in the singularly sexual setting of my choice to know there was a strong chance that the men I met were probably in heterosexual relationships. But even in the silence there was hope. The married men I met for sex in Gainsborough always looked shabby and were usually sexually inept. The men I met for sex in Nottingham may well have been married but took better care of their appearance and had a confidence about them that sort of rubbed off on me. At least I think it was confidence.  

The first of the three encounters was with a well endowed bodybuilder who was very controlling and in a distinct hurry. I did not care whether he knew he was a living cliche, or did not reflect on his self image at all. I was too astonished at what a feast for the eyes he was. If he knew he was a narcissist then that seemed quite justifiable to me. He had an energy about him that was as pressing as it was brief. The second memorable encounter was with bearded and hairy fat man who lit up the dank surroundings we found each other in. I was happy to do whatever eased him, and to marvel at how at ease he was in himself. He took matters more slowly than the body builder had, which gave me time to reflect as he directed events. He gave me my first gay kiss.

One way to tell who was married with sex in public toilets was that such men never kissed; the implied rule was that kissing was something they kept for their wives. What they offered in the toilets in the way of non-procreative sex was with parts of themselves other than their lips. The profile of the person I wanted to meet there was that they had to be gay, and they were able to speak and listen. They had to be knowable and want, or at least be patient with, me.

In my diary I noted what I thought about married men who had gay sex. I wrote about how in their minds they tricked their way past all discussions about monogamy within marriage by implying that marriage was more about faith in property management than any demonstrable personal trust between two people. After implying their argument they would avoid the specifics of who says what, who does what, and how much what the partners say and don't say to each other lines up with what they each do within the marriage.

I still resisted the idea of 'being a gambler'. I accepted that I took risks, the irregularity of the laws about homosexuality gave me no other choice. If I were a gambler the following was the closest I would get to 'the form'. Married bisexual men divided their lives, including their sexual lives, by label/activity where different labels often evasively defined different sexual activities. A married man would reserve his kisses for his wife, and make them a prelude to full sex, where he assumed that only he knew that. But his wife might well predict his expectations from his behaviour. But away from the home how much the man was understood by how he divided his actions whilst hidden in the silences of the places he chose to go. The silences in these places came from every sort of motive, from common taboo to the fear of being openly seen as utterly selfish.

The most open reason for being opaque was to observe how the tone of the English language words for sexual activity made the conversation uncomfortable. Slang made the subject sound cheap and juvenile, whilst formal and correct scientific terminology made the subject sound detached and impersonal. In between those extremes many mechanical metaphors stood in for when the bodily specifics got too personal. E.g. the motions of crank shaft in a four stroke engine being described as 'suck, squeeze, bang, and blow', as my maths teacher described them to my late teenage self in the engineering workshop circa 1980.

And then the silence was broken. I was at the toilet one late summer Saturday night, being quietly generous my usual way to somebody I thought handsome where the only oddity in the situation was the tight lilac coloured ladies lycra swim suit that he wore. And then he said 'Thank you Malcolm'. With three words he broke what seemed like a spell that was over me. Before then I could not put words how much I felt invisible in the silence and such invisibility made me feel safe. 

Clearly, however much I felt that way at times, I wasn't invisible. I had reconsider how I calculated risk. I did not go back to the toilet for several months. (101 lines).

A Warning, A Consolation

When you 'are not the sharpest tool in the box',
it does not mean that you won't get used 
by the hierarchies of the powerful,
and others keen to pull rank.

What it means
is that whether you know it or don't, 
you need to be doubly wary of who uses you and why. 

To be blunt, those who lack sharpness will take you up
to flatter themselves that they are sharper than you,
thus destroying whatever edge you had left.

The consolation is that being misused is survivable.
Being cast as 'a loser' happens to far more people
than many who are taught to see themselves as losers
realise, until they start to look around them.  

Thought From The Pew

One wet Autumnal Sunday.
The leader of the service was polite,
not very chummy and formal of tone.
How evenly he spoke during the sermon
made the point he was trying to make
harder to follow. The point at which
my ears pricked up was the phrase
'personal relationships'. Did my ears
detect a spontaneous repetition in that phrase?

Between the personal and impersonal
relationships can - and will - vary wildly. 

Signs Of Greater Age (60)

 1-watching far less television
than you have watched in the past
but enjoying watching detective series
for the location filming and the weather.
'Montalbano' for the Italian weather
and 'Shetland' for it's coastal scenes,
cosy small town life, and rolling heather. 

2-looking out for new films that star
the elderly actors who we liked in your youth.
Being reassured by how they age with us
where the script writers put humour and warmth
into the stages of life where people used to be ignored.

 3-reading books because they are the slowest
and most user-friendly way of being entertained,
and also because they are also a way of inducing
that afternoon nap that passes the day, the best way.

Sleep and dreams are what we live for, even electronically.  

When The Wind Blows

Over Gaza and The Lebanon
and other neighbours of Israel,
as Israel starts the third world war,
using the lethally over-developed modern weaponry
and state security apparatus it has developed
over seventy years, for spying internationally
on countries it secretly despises. Their first target is
the levelling to the ground of all the buildings
and the civilisation among Israel's neighbours.

The fallout does not need to be nuclear to be utterly destructive.

All the weapons need is a human/Jewish driver
 to do the job the weapons are for - destroying 
all neighbourliness and upholding an eternal enmity
whilst continually talking in smooth words.

In party politics, worldwide, it has been said,
'keep your friends close and your enemies closer',
without finishing with 'If you want a limited peace.'.
(It would be rhetorical to say peace is always limited.).
Nowhere was evidence of this strategy for politics
more played out than in the densely populated areas
that modern Israel has fought for its place in.

Lebanon, Palestine, Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt,
are all lands that have never had the character to be at ease
with each other. Like the Ottoman empire they were all once part of,
they had to be ruled by 'strongmen', where diplomacy
is always weak and late, when it is staving off emergencies.

To quote a once popular Jewish entertainer* 'You ain't seen nothing yet',
not that he was directly talking about the time scales of declining empires. 

*Said by Al Jolson at the end of in the first film
with a soundtrack 'The Jazz Singer', made in 1927. 
     

Life Is A Series Of Bumps

I started life as a bump in my mother's life,
a first stumble 'forward' among many,
the point of every bump/stumble after
being to 'get over it' whatever 'it' was;
to find hope and respite without seeking
to be to closely listened to by those
blind guides, my family, who could not
admit that they had neither answers for me,
nor clues as to their own sense of destination. 

I hope that when I meet the last bump,
when I want my doctor to 'bump me off'
I will not be made to cling to a life
I cannot frame with answers to questions,  
but the doctors and nurses will help me
take that transition in my stride
and in full comprehension of my sanity.    

Fresh Mis-deliveries, Daily

In the era of analogue communications
being repetitive was never a problem
-relatives and neighbours used to repeat
themselves with each other all the time.

Then with the arrival of smartphones
and Facebook neighbours became more distant.
They were made more aware of how little
they had to say was fresh, original or new,
and how alike neighbours are to each other.  

Finally, I have understood how neighbourliness
works in the age of digital communications.
Facebook exists so that in small towns
where Amazon delivery men don't know
their way around and leave their parcels
on the wrong doorstep, Facebook is the way
to tell the intended recipient of the parcel
where to collect it from, given Amazon's failure.   

100 Years Ago

Adverts like this were kicking against the pricks
of American patriarchy, the apparatus of law and custom
where men devised a life for all according to their own
anti-scientific self interest, where women and non-white
people were always several rungs below rich white men
on the social ladder that they called 'American freedom'.

That a century on from those times women have
advanced to becoming presidential candidates,
and still rich white men advocate to dismantle
health care for women, and echo the false science
of eugenics to appeal to voters sense of superiority,
even looking back for advances that reassure us
leaves us with finding warnings.

The above advert is from 1927. Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a birth control activist who fought to legalize birth control. This ad is from 10 years before the American Medical Association recognized birth control as an integral part of medical practice and education.

 

Blessed Are Those With No Voice, Where Money is The Language

Recently the president of  Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 
said “We have a stray dog problem, a problem
that does not exist in any developed country.”,
as if the problems of developed countries
were preferable to those of poorer lands
where the hand to mouth existence of many
made the citizens of the country more hospitable
to those who lived on the land without money,
the dogs and cats whose lives enrich the backdrop
of those for whom a lack of money does less for them
than the surfeit of wealth and debt in wealthy countries
does for the rich, they have to measure the value
of their domesticated animals in pet insurance and vet fees.

To live immune and invisible to the ways money 
measures who we are is a choice devoutly to be wished.
If we want to see beyond what the blinkers that wealth
stop us seeing we can, please left click on this link to start.  

More Heat Than Light

What with all the different wars
that are now being reported on
so copiously, one point I am glad of
is that I do not watch television news.

With radio/audio the arguments and statistics
remain the same, but with less need for footage
to illustrate what the fighting is all about,
and who each side are, the radio presenters
are more free to argue the de/merits
of the wars than television could ever be. 

With television the images impart more heat
than they shed light, the images become
something for the truth to hide behind,
the better for it not to be asked about.     

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Seven - Choice And Change

The longer Graham did not contact the more I wondered how much there was some mis-explanation for him not being in touch with me. I'd been positive, he had seen how I had 'landed on my feet' with where I lived, and he had my address and phone number. So where or what was the blockage? It was true that he suggested he might be moving soon and would confirm his new address when he was installed but if knew he was moving then how long should I wait for a message? I knew about how young women ended relationships with males their own age, with either 'It is not you it is me' or 'It is not me it is you', as if either way the relationship was doomed for intractable reasons that resisted further explanation. Was Graham retreating for intractable reasons? If so it was hard to tell...

In the meanwhile I had a lot of albums and tapes and it came to me some time after the three days later meeting with Pastor Lou that that there was an issue there with having that much to play and listen to. The quantity of it made it seem much more like 'want' than 'need' after all I would only ever have one pair of ears and one allotted life and time to play the music. He was gentle and factual with me when I talked about it with him. He was concerned that if 'the spirit of death' had been in me then it might be in the records or in the mind and body of the person that bought them if I sold them. I was quite scared by that line of reasoning. Of late in my head and on the A4 pad I had been exploring an argument that seemed familiar from times with family where they coerced me into wanting what they wanted me to have, which was for their benefit more than mine.

Mother; 'I have got this you (name of item here) because I thought you needed them'.

Me; 'Ummm, thanks but I did not really want (name of item), not like that, anyway.'.

Mother; 'Well if I had asked you before I bought (name of item) then you might have refused it and the refusal would have created a bad atmosphere between us. I couldn't afford that.'.

Me; 'But what if you have created a bad atmosphere between us by not consulting me before the purchase? By deciding that (name of item) was what I needed, and whatever I wanted, including wanting to be asked first, would asking have cost you too much? How much do you want other people to laugh at me for wearing (name of item)?

Mother; 'I went without during the war and I endure post-war rationing for you to have the choices that I have made open to you. It is because of me that you have what you have.'.

Me; '(imitates Tony Hancock) Well Exactly! Did the population of the UK endure rationing so that those who endured rationing could later control their children with some imaginary ration book they kept locked in a cupboard that the child was led to think did not exist? Or was rationing endured so that at some point in the future the mentality of rationing could be erased in the name of a broader freedom of choice? So that people would not feel coerced by government determined ideas about supply and demand? So that families would coerce each other into accepting less? 

If you want to ration me via your choices then print me a proper ration book and show it to me as you take away my choices, Be warned; one day-sooner than you think-that book will be past it's use by date.'. 

I liked the music I liked because it was more expressive and emotional than I found government regulated television to be, and because it was like good radio, 'the pictures were better'. I suspect that 'the pictures being better' was where the church felt scared on my behalf, and where I mistook the church for being too like my mother. The images the music gave me were certainly more wholesome and enduring than the images of the Gulf War that had been permitted for being shown on television. There The Late Night News became some macabre video game that viewers regularly stumbled into by accident, before being repelled by the presentation.

As a consumer culture, music had it's wide boys and corrupting figures. But there was not the slightest hint of rationing about it. It's expansion was limited mostly by it's own design and business practice. The musical talent and business acumen of the performers in it were guiding factors too. Where the music business relied on sensationalism for promotional purposes it had a problem-how far could censor baiting false controversy be taken before it looked obviously faked? But already there were many fraudulent free church preachers in the world who via their business-savvy means sold rich people a 'health and wealth gospel' via cable and satellite television where the wealth symbolised by the medium itself made the fraud and weak theology they espoused hard to recognise for what they were.

So I had the problem of a surplus of music, I had one pair of ears and a finite time to enjoy the music I had amassed. I no longer needed to rebel as much as I had previously felt the need to when I was conditioned by Mother's no-exit-from-my-memories-of-rationing type arguments. My sense of what was spiritual had to be practical about material things. I soon saw one practical compromise that I could work out for myself. I had a vast number of cassettes with music on them, too many. The church used cassette tapes to record services on for those who were ill or or otherwise unable to attend church services. What if I donated the tapes with recordings on them that I was happy to lose, to the church? Lou accepted the suggestion with the obvious request that the tapes be wiped before being donated.

A lot of the recordings on them were of The Grateful Dead playing live. By the early 1990's their tours of America made them the highest grossing band in the world. But whether a tape came from when they were poor in 1967 or from the late 1980s their musical ideal was to repay a musical debt, a debt  their musical fore bearers could not pay off which the band could repay. White blues singer Janis Joplin (1943-1970) buying a tombstone for Bessie Smith (1897-1937) with Bessie's name on it for 'the [back] Empress of The Blues' was an act intended along the same lines.

Not once as I erased the music on surely over fifty C90 cassette tapes did I link the idea of 'repaying a musical debt' with the church idea that had prompted me to act the way I was now doing-a fear of 'the spirit of death', a fear of spreading debt and death contrary to the idea of life. The music had served it's time with me. The tape could be reused. In both, whether it was what was first put on the tape for me to enjoy, or with it's erasure, no debt or reason to fear of death remained.

The vinyl albums were a bigger problem, both figuratively and literally. I had over a hundred and fifty albums and they took up quite a lot of space in my room, and I had no friends of the type who I felt a bond with via the sharing of music with them. In the likes of HMV the sales of CDs were expanding, the sales of vinyl were shrinking. CD versions of a lot of what I had on vinyl were yet to come. My, ahem, 'pre-loved' vinyl albums still felt to me like books-although thousands, if not millions-of copies might be pressed up. For fans it seemed normal to have your own copy seemed personal and important.

There was a limited time frame for me to sell the albums for their maximum value, if I was happy to sell them, . If I thought that whoever bought them could and would choose their own spiritual battles whilst listening to them for themselves.

I would have liked it if Graham were about, and if we had enough time and space for me to share with him what I had gone through in prayer, and what I should do next with the vinyl. Reduce the collection  by selling what I had bought in the hope that I would listen to it a lot of times but I had listened to it far less often than I'd hoped to was relatively easy. Selling some more as and when I felt more comfortable with making my own decision about what to discard also worked. The choices were between getting no money from discarding an album or getting some money for it once and the money was whatever the market could bear to pay.

But Graham was somewhere far away and even the people my own age that I'd had as recent church friends who understood the appeal of music, people like Spyder, were absent too.

In the words of The Grateful Dead's 'Ripple' 

'There is a road no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone. 

And so, as I felt ready I sold more records until I'd got to a rump of about thirty albums. I chose a view of life where The Grateful Dead and other inspiring counter culture musicians like the UK based Roy Harper became less literal and material as guides to me. Their lyrics were more my guide, including a guide to what modesty was. I did not need the physical product, the record or tape. As earworms the lyrics and tunes drifted in and out of my head-and since they came and went so easily they left my head feeling a lot lighter. 

A guide to true modestly was not to be ignored. I would need it to agreeably side-step all future obligations to my family as they presented themselves.

To be directed to Chapter Twenty Eight please left click here. 

Signs Of Greater Age (59)

Yet another elderly authoress
has commandeered the media
of my country, to promote
some new adaption of her work.

The 87 year old has pressed
the sex-among-the-elderly button
that the media reserves for those
in desperate need of publicity
who have nowhere else to go.

'Jogging has replaced sex for....  '
runs the headline describing
life for the late middle aged,
as the elderly woman stakes
some temporary claim to infamy. 

Frankly, a little light gardening,
including tasks shared with friends,
and a walk with some purpose,
to clear my head if nothing else,
would be exercise enough for me
and for most physically fit people
who are over the age of being surprised. 

Faith In Imagination

St Anslem, Archbishop of Canterbury 1093-1109,
philosophised that the human imagination
was the measure of how big God is,
his reasoning followed thus; however big
we imagine God to be he is bigger than that.
Thus what our imagination the measure
of where we have not been and might yet go.
which makes reality a history we can only estimate.

So far, so ontological. Nearly a millennium later
belief in God is measured a different way,
how many people say the creeds and how often.
But imagination/fantasy is still ontological;
now it is fed by advertising which in turn is limited
by what can be manufactured to engage us with. 

The selling of 'freedom' inevitably leads to politics.
When George Orwell wrote about totalitarianism,
in '1984' he imagined it as an absolute with no exit,
where every exit was trailed by an agent provocateur.

In real life totalitarianism is always relative
to how we imagine the government to be.
Disguising absolute suffering and privation
on too many people for too long is hard to do
without people who are relatively free
in other countries knowing something about it.

Close to a millennium on from St Anlem
the more material the enquiry the more statistical
the answer, this also applies how relative freedom is.

Read how relatively totalitarian your regime might be here.
If the link does not work in your country, assume the worst.       

Picture Set Of The Month - October - Astral Photography

Is the art of photographing the stars
and other astral objects in the gloaming,
in the late evening skies  

It is very much a subject extended
by newer high quality cameras
that capture evening light

better than cameras before them did. 
My thanks to photographer Iain Daley.