The Self Reinforcing Vacuum Inside The Passivity Of World Opinion.....

For all who sin via technology
and the internet, Saint Isadore of Seville 
is not much mentioned nowadays,
but in the sixth and seventh centuries
he was a leading bishop and scholar
in a flourishing Catholic Church.

In these shifting modern times
the Catholic Church has recast him
as the patron saint of the internet
and of technology, with other saints
for bloggers, St Francis de Sales,
and computer programmers and gamers,
Saint Carlo Acutis, so that all who sin
online have these three names,
and more besides, as channels of grace
by which to seek forgiveness for their online life.

But there is a darker, less forgiving, side
to new technologies that renew themselves,
where technically secular and theocratic states
make their legal system a circular vacuum
where for those who are charges with a crime
cannot defend themselves in any language
that they know that the court has to respond to
-the charge denies them the language of a defence. 

After tightening up the law, such states
tighten up what can be said and done
in the courts, the press, and in public spaces
by installing security cameras to with an inch
of outside private houses, thus enhancing
the potential for prosecution by default.

In Kabul the authorities have installed a new
technological panopticon-style security regime
where women who before have no legal grounds
for being out in public alone, and multiple laws
that reduced their liberty, are now even more afraid
than before of leaving, or looking out of, their houses,
as 90,000 surveillance cameras impose shariah law
in the strictest, tightest, definition known in modern times.

It is as if The Taliban are restaging Duke Bluebeard's Castle
with the women of Kabul behind closed doors as the cast,
and the United Nations Observers making the world
a passive audience, unable to change the narrative
whilst having no choice but to watch it, or ignore it, on repeat...

Abandon hope ye who enter here and watch
as Afghan opium sells at ever higher high prices....  

Non-Doms On Mars

I used to worry that billionaires
might want to populate Mars
because they preferred the atmosphere
to them being too much in proximity 
to poor people, and in addition, in their new
unearthly non-dom status they would be kept
in unearthly luxury closer to their money,
whilst they evaded paying tax more efficiently.

Nowadays my worries are more earthly.
Has Donald Trump done all his homework
with his tariffs? Has he set up his beyond the earth
customs and excise offices corps yet? How else is he
going to collect the tax from the duty free
zone of Elon Musks new luxury travel scheme
for those who can afford to live so far removed
from where they were born, in the nuevo riches?

Reading For Life

It is easy for one person to think of another
after visiting them 'their house is disordered,
untidy and they have more stuff than they know
what to do with. Their tendency towards poor
housekeeping runs away with them.'.  

But I would not criticise a home that is untidy
because it has books in it, even unread books
that have not changed shelf or been dusted for years.

Let the house be untidy, and some of the books read
only selectively, let there be curiosity and reason to share,
and books to lend to friends when they are otherwise
resting, Where there are surplus words, fit to be shared
let them be devoured or saved for the right season, later.

                      Much like friendship itself.

In And Out Of The Loop

Your attention please to the difficult subject
of expecting attention whether those expecting
your attention are narcissists and when they are not,
they are simply using a position or a platform
to get the message they have to share across
after which they will eventually step down.

The difference between the non-narcissist
and a person who can't help felling rewarded
by attention is that the person who helps themselves
and leaves office voluntarily has 'an off switch'
that tells them when they have taken enough
of other people's time and attention, whereas
for the narcissist every day is groundhog day,
a day when they repeat the same formula of seeking
attention on the basis of their self worth/soaking up
the time others give them as if they other people need
to be that needy of them in an infinite loop. 

This leads to problem no 2....

For the narcissist time and attention are a zero gain sum,
the more of other peoples time and attention they have
the less such people have for their own ideas and lives,
and the more they get trapped in a circuit of being defined
by the needy leader and less able to define themselves.
The less the narcissist can be told they are selfish,
the more intensely they forbid such ideas in their presence
-because to them only other people can be narcissistic
and selfish, for not giving them more of what they feel is owed to them. 

The more reinforced the loop becomes
the harder it gets for those in the loop
to stop themselves going as loopy as the leader.

The Romans had an answer for this when they had emperors.
The emperor kept a servant to walk behind him everywhere
he was deferred to in public to say to the leader 'You are not a God'.

But the lasting evidence of emperors heeding the servants voice was patchy. 

'I'm Still Here' - Film Review - The Family Film With The Sweetener Removed

How do cinema goers find out about films? They follow the online publicity and wait for the film to appear at a movie house near enough to them. Thus it was that I went to see 'I'm Still Here', the Walter Salles directed French/Brazilian film depicting life under the fifth Brazilian republic from 1964 to 1985, and later. 

The fifth Brazilian republic started from a military coup that was supported by the U.S. government with where the military said they would not infringe civil life, and whilst they did change presidents every five years, the president was always a right wing figure from the same cabal/party. Thus whilst the film starts in the era of family fun and expanding middle class hopes, where mention of politics is hushed away and politics is something men talk about away from women and family, with the arrival of President Emílio Garrastazu Médicir for his five year term, 1969-1974 a crack downs against civil liberties happens against a background of 'left wing gangs' [given the military character of the government how could they be in anything other than gangs?] abducting figures like the Swiss ambassador to Brazil. We see this reported in the film, where focus is on the male heads of households doing their civil rights duties of tracking those seemingly randomly arrested and imprisoned with out habeas corpus, out of sight of the family, and the mother changing television channels, to divert the children from the chilling reality that was on the horizon for all of them. This let the children believe the family was a safe place, and the future would be safe as well. 

But in January 1971 a former senator, Rubens Paiva, is arrested at night from his family home, and the family are placed together under house arrest. The film changes tone from cheerful to sombre with great felicity as the political blackout, where, to adapt a phrase, the first rule of a military coup is to not discuss that it is a military coup. As if discussion of it is to invite getting on the wrong side of the authorities when the authorities dislike citizens knowing what being the right side them is. The actress Fernanda Torres pitches her depiction of Eunice Piava, whose husband is missing but hopefully still alive but might be dead, perfectly. She shows a quiet resourcefulness, as the mother of her four children, with no regular means to an income. The mother is arrested herself and shows stoicism and circumspection when interrogated, and when she is held in a cell. Her daughter is held in a different cell and neither knows where the other is, or where the husband/father is. The maid has to hold the children who remain at home under house arrest together whilst the policemen who stay in the house make the atmosphere murky with how they skulk around. 

Eunice has to mark the walls to know how many days she has been in her cell, it turns out she was kept three weeks but kept bad count with the scratches on the wall. But she held herself well and gave away nearly no details about who might have been a communist whilst being interrogated with the sounds of torture audible in the background. 

When Eunice and her daughter returned to the house and the secret police left the house and the family alone, that first hug the family shared on screen looked haunted, the body language between them was that frozen. It looked like ghosts sharing in a group hug. 

What happens from that reunifying hug onward was a long slow construction of a new normality, missing the most vital facts of the whereabouts of their father. The secret police stay in their police cars, parked on the street. The mother is the only one permitted to use the phone and she knows that the line is tapped and that people that the children would be better off not knowing about might ring. 

Where does the film go from there? The family adjusts and Eunice has to be both father and mother without even the maid to help her-there is no longer the money to keep a maid who is a friend to the children. Eunice has to both the one set firm boundaries and the one to make sure those boundaries are not crossed, particularly when secret policemen sit in cars on the road outside the house.

But the family knows that the whole of Brazil is living a strange double reality where the news the family get on television is different from the news reports in internationally reputable newspapers, the family knows it is Brazil in microcosm form where for seeing life close up the inconsistencies and adaptions that have to be observed to get by week to week month make normality seem edgy and dissonant. The balance between life being about grace, versus life being about the pressure to compromise, yield to the government on terms that do not add up is there. As this goes on and on, and on, like the military crack down itself the dog the boy owned is let out onto the street unawares of the family. Cue the screech car wheels and the sight of a dead dog whilst the no-so-secret-police glare at the family retrieving the body of the dog. The upside was the chance to grieve as a family as the whole family buries the dog in the garden. 

Oddly, the president of the fifth republic is only depicted once in the film, when Eunice looks up at his portrait on the wall in the bank as she attends to straighten out the family finances. Other than than that one scene he remains an invisible threat. But this twilight zone of a political regime does not last forever, and Eunice prepares the family to move from their luxury villa complete with secret police surveillance to a large flat nearer their extended family in a another city where the families relative anonymity helps them breath easier.

I am going to end this review here, by adding that the family prove resilient for others, well beyond themselves, as well as for each other, and the 'twilight zone' of the memory of life under military rule, suspected of being either communists or communist sympathisers recedes into the past. If you like family saga films that do updates, 1985, 1992, 2000 etc you will like the last half hour of the film. If you think that these updates feel like false endings that only dilute the resolve shown before on the screen, than be patient with the film, it will reward you with the end.      

Honest Small Ad

Half formed character seeks similar,
for aspiring connection in spite of the gaps.
Brief connections okay but long term preferred.
There must be lots of us 'out there....  ', each
half missing themselves, and half looking for each other.

The Mobile Metaphor

of 'moving the goal posts', when applied
to activities and values well away from sport
but applied instead to how we process real life,
gives how we live a strange elasticity,
where wherever we thought we were,
we are somewhere else, and find that we
can no longer identify what we are living for
-particularly when we don't understand metaphors.   

When Will I Hear 'Nation Speaking Peace Unto Nation' Once Again*?

I was working class when I first heard
the BBC, when I first sought something
to aspire to. I grew up admiring the BBC,
for the clear diction of their presenters
and how they gave each cues to speak,
as if giving each other space was normal.  

It was natural when I was working class to defer
to what seemed 'better', if I had worn a cloth cap
I would have doffed it when the radio was on.

I was in awe of how it was scripted and presenters
and guests did not talk over each other. The BBC
carried it's reputation as the first modern media
as a marker of it's pride in how it promoted itself.

But for being the first in so many fields of expertise
it was also the first to make many mistakes, and the last
to admit how many treasured recordings of the programmes
it has made were prematurely discarded, their value unrecognised.

The difference started there - the BBC was founded twenty years
before Ampex audio tape and recording machines became standard
for American radio broadcasters to record broadcasts on first,
as if they sensed the commercial interest
in preserving programmes, to sell them on to the future.

And Ampex invented video tape for video recorders in 1956,
whilst the BBC filmed public events that it knew were important,
like coronations, but in black and white because the management
thought history should be in black and white, like the print media
who came before it, who breathed jealously down the BBC's neck.

Nowadays I get my daily dose of world news,
comment and entertainment from Youtube videos,
as once I might have got from the BBC World Service,
with no thought before here of Youtube's business model.

They are happy to carry material their users pirate
from other broadcasters, copyright allowing, 
whilst Youtube have a three strike policy
over people who upload video material it owns.

America is a place where justice is bought via lawyers.

Youtube's policy comes down to which broadcaster
has the most expensive lawyers, when few uploaders
or corporations has pockets deeper than Youtube has.   

Over a century on from it's founding,
and unknown numbers of programmes lost,
with the means to make programmes now universal,
the BBC voice remains a distinctive around the world.

But it is a voice that seems to be half drowned out,
amid an ever widening welter of broadcasters,
podcasters, performers and composers - all fighting
for a share of the world population's ears and eyes.

No longer do the airwaves ring with the clarity
of the once proud BBC mission statement,
coined in the days of the British Empire, 
'Nation shall speak peace unto nation*',
but with many other declarations instead.

*an adaption of a phrase from The Old Testament, Mikah Ch 4 V 3.

Marxism Today

I am a great admire of the humour of Margaret Dumont
 and Groucho Marx. Even though Groucho was playing
the role of a would-be omniscient wit had limited
application in real life. Margaret Dumont had the grace
  to be a powerful foil to Groucho's 'childish' insults
    and sophistry. I wonder what the tariffs are
in Freedonia at present? Not as enduring
      as the tunes and the dance routines are.      

 

Mind The Narrowing Of The Gap

In this new age where world leaders
define their authority by how they distance
themselves, using media by which to rule
by decree, and an armed police state, I notice
that worldwide government that once rested 
on ceremonial roles are finding such ceremonies
reduced, as 'strongmen' take all the roles they can
to use as mouthpieces to project their power with.

Processes that once seemed liberal, inclusive
where checks and balances led to accountability 
becomes bully pulpits for men who lack self control
to freely exercise their lack of self control with.       

War By Other Means

always starts with propaganda by other means,
as Edward Bernays knew, from the start of his hype
of  American consumerism and then the stock markets
to ever bigger booms, which were then followed
by the biggest worldwide crash on October 29th 1929.
This bust only lifted, and became a boom in the USA
when the world went Boom!! with World War II,
in September 1939, which America joined, two years later. 

But long before WW II, on the 17th of June 1930,
Republican president Herbert Hoover signed into U.S. law
the Smoot - Hawley Tariff Act which protected  America
from trade that America did not want, from all across the world,
whilst supressing trade between countries for years to come.

Fast forward to 2025 and Donald Trump wants to use tariffs
to reassert a new 'America first' policy, to 'reclaim from abroad'
jobs that Trump claims 'Should be American jobs',
as if American money should command greater patriotism 
towards it than other countries currencies should do for them,
when with the world being 'a market place' all currencies are the same,
dependent for reputation on the policies of the government behind them.

At least in America's wars start by means other than arms, unlike Putin's Russia. 

There wars start with over-egged readings of history, and the need
to hide from the population how much money only works for the ultra wealthy.  

Hurrah For Ronin The Rat

The hero of the day for detecting the maximum
number of mines in one day in the much mined
country of Cambodia for sniffing out over 100 mines
and bits of unexploded ordinances, combined in one day.

Of course, how much this record was contributed 
to by the parties that laid the ordinances
so prolifically originally, and made the land
unusable and have given the APOPO centre
so much work to do, is the debate we all have to get past.   

 

'Ernest Cole: Lost And Found' A Short Review

I had never heard of the photographer, Ernest Cole (1940 - 1990) before a rave review for this new documentary film appeared on my radio, which I admit I was not that attentive of, since I was eating my evening meal at the time. 

Then I saw a listing for the film at my local art house cinema. Again, whilst I knew nothing about Cole, I knew about the subject of the director's previous documentary, 'I Am Not Your Negro', polemical writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924 - 1987). I had in recent years appreciated how James Baldwin had a righteous anger, where because of his views on division by race he put a commitment into modern homosexuality, another part of his life, that the white English middle class homosexuality I had encountered simply did not have. I have for years liked the figures who get marginalised for the art they make and what they had to say, who drew a commitment to social change from their marginality, but had to wait for their recognition. Ernest Cole is one such figure. 

The film is a crisp 106 minutes long, and not a minute of it is wasted. I don't know, or remember, many critics who write about what I recognise when it is present in a film, editing. If the image and sound that is melifluous and smooth to the point where the message of the script is delivered that well the listener has to take stock after to realise what message was/is then that editor is somebody who should be praised and thanked in my view. 

This film is the story of a photographic book, the story of a photographer and the story of a man who was broken by his own message. To start at the beginning, the laws that created Apartheid in South Africa after WW2 were complex, overlapping, and allowed no escape for those who were confined from public expression by them. As Ernest Cole grew up so these laws developed, and were expanded. These laws included laws on censorship which both prohibited black people from taking photographs and prohibited the publication of photos that did not explicitly flatter the white hierarchy in the country, amongst many other overlapping prohibitions. By some fluke Ernest Cole started work in a magazine as one of the dark room staff. He got a camera and illegally started taking pictures of Apartheid as it was publicly expressed, on the streets and where the seats and fountains with 'whites only' written on them were. The way that men and women dressed, according to the richness of their culture more than their material wealth, he found particularly photogenic in black and white. Life in the city streets must have excited him a lot. Inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson he photographed anything and everything, and he had that 'eye' for a picture where the construction of the image spoke of so much more than itself.

For most of a decade his negatives were his diary and his diary was full of the misery of Apartheid, whilst attempting to be joyful about life. We all know the phrase 'I can't breathe' as used to describe the effects of American racism on black people who feel discriminated against, economically and more directly by the police. Eventually Ernest Cole had to leave South Africa to relearn how to breathe. He felt he was choking on his own talent, his gift of expression. He escaped South Africa with his negatives, which the censors and the authorities knew nothing about, hidden away. He got to New York by boat and contacted a photographic agency to try to get his negatives printed in a book about South Africa. Initially no publisher was interested.

He had a stroke of luck as regards getting his work published, but not as regards his life. The Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was stabbed to death in September the 6th 1966 as he entered a place he felt secure, The House of Assembly in the South African state legislature. Meanwhile Ernest Cole was in New York as a temporary illegal exile, illegal less because of how America viewed his status, and more because of how he had escaped South Africa gave him no means of re-entering the country, and his family were still there. This was a stressful enough status to have to manage daily in itself. Cole's illegally taken pictures depicting a South Africa that went back longer than Verwoerd had been in power found their value in New York, and were published in a book as a witness to a world that South Africa denied existed. With the book 'House of Bondage' it seemed like his life's work this far had found it's place in the world. But he was doubly grieved that the photographic book was banned in South Africa. The suffering he had photographed and the life of exile that caused him such grief had gone far deeper into him than anyone wanted to know. Only fellow exiles from South Africa who were part of an underground New York jazz scene who were similarly scratching a life out from the margins of American society could touch where he felt most grieved.

Before he was thirty he had made the impact on the world he had wanted to have from his first days in the darkroom aged fourteen, but he had no impact on his homeland and was exiled from his family. He remained estranged from his family, criminalised by the South African government and utterly lost living in America. He lived another twenty years on the margins of New York life, and for a period he lived in on the social margins in Sweden, a place where his photographic eye found nothing it could focus on. But he found fellowship with other photographers there. Somehow-nobody alive presently knows how-his negatives and notes about his photographs were kept together and intact but he got separated from them. One of his Swedish photographer friends kept them and they ended up in a bank vault with no records of the deposit in 2016, long after he had died in a New York hospital in 1990, where his mother was the last person to see him alive.

To say 'this film is impactful' is to utterly underplay this documentary feature. If it, and the images in it, do anything to highlight present day racial inequality in a way that remedies and reduces it I will be glad. Ernest Cole engaged in art for life's sake, rathe than art for art's sake. The present day people who cannot breathe are not holding their breath waiting for their release from injustice, they were having the breath knocked out of them by the ongoing renewal of racism via apartheid.

P.s. for a review of the documentary film I saw in February 'Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story' please left click here.         

A Most Earnest President?

To paraphrase one of the more famous aphorisms
coined by Oscar Wilde, to address the pressing issue
that the 'free' world is presently facing....

'To elect Donald Trump once
may be regarded as misfortune,
to elect him twice looks like carelessness',

And however much we try to care,
none of us knows what carelessness
that is yet to come, which will outlive us.... 

Picture Set Of The Month - April - The Paintings Of Chico Da Silva

Francisco Domingos "Chico" da Silva (1910 – 1985)
 was a Brazilian painter associated with primitive art  
and modernist Brazilian painting.

Chico da Silva, was born to an Indigenous Peruvian
 father and a Brazilian mother. His early years
were spent in the Amazon forest. There, he saw first hand
the rich local flora and fauna. His father, a boatman
died from a rattlesnake bite, following this Chico
Chico moved with his mother to Fortaleza.

 

Chico taught himself how to paint, with no clue
that painting would be his career. He initially painted birds
 on outsides of local fishermen's houses, using charcoal, chalk,
and natural pigments. 

From 1961, Chico worked at the Federal University
 of Ceará’s art museum, where he was introduced
to his first dealer, Henrique Bluhm.
His dealer made him famous and got the artist
exhibitions at prestigious venues.
With his fame came the doubt of the critics.
His death in 1985 was from alcoholism,
a cause of death that it is hard to know was cause for regret.   

Preserving Your Ideals

In this age of renewed dictatorships,
where we need to speak truth to power
our words seem more like shouting at liars,
by using media so removed from the target
that the only way to promote our ideals
will be to relearn how to forgive and forget
the anger of our enemy before it consumes us.
-what else can we do to preserve our sanity? 

This Mothers Day

should be a day to celebrate enduring and flexible bonds
where mothers and children give each other the space
to change with new circumstances that surround them
 so that even when they are horizons apart
      or further beyond, they can both be strong.     

 

Life Ancient And Modern

My acquaintance with the term 'incel'
is a distant one, I am the the wrong age,
the wrong faith, and the wrong sexuality
to engage with the latest media wildfire
lit up and set running by the drama 'Adolescence'.

But I understand what 'incel' means
-involuntary celibacy for those for whom
sexual intimacy is a thing intensely to be wished
where abstinence leaves young men conflicted
and angry well beyond all rationality. 

If male teenagers are anything like they were
when I was a teenager, the pressure they live with
is that they are expected to marry, but see marriage
as offering them sex with fewer strings,
whilst financiers see marriage as the chance
to saddle the young couples with all the debt
that can be devised, whilst families want decorum
and children from their offspring who simply want
a space of their own to work out what and who to be. 

Money, sex, and power/order, are the primary colours
that every society blends to manage the sense of choice
in different societies, where each colour pulls against the other.

Down the ages monks robes have been tied with a cord,
which had three knots in it, to remind them of their vows.
The first knot is for poverty, the second is for celibacy,
and the third is for obedience, the primary dividers
of family and society unified, under control, muted.

No issue that those monks, the trapped 'incel youths',
or we, can face falls outside those three contrary pressures.  

The Hare Of Misunderstanding

For misunderstandings to run their term
they have to grow long legs very fast,
and then be shod in firm footwear
to beat the truth to the exit door
to get out, beyond the block,
and replace more nuanced narratives.

But truth is okay being thought of as the tortoise
who is terribly slow, whilst the hares race ahead.

Truth knows that eventually the hare
will exhaust listeners ears with it's stories
-old Public Relations stories are always hollow,
time is the best means of proving their hollowness. 

It is only when the public are prepared
for a more considered historical perspective,
that was less feet of foot at the time,
but commands the attention better.

Report From The Past....

I find that said past is very much echoed
in the present day, where life feels as if
there was never a time when these points
were genuinely confined to the past.
2025 is just the latest echo chamber
of the content from the past
where we would be not much worse off
 recognising how much change
changes less of life than we think. 

 

Slavery Is Nothing To Write Home About

The very point of slavery for the enslaved,
occupation for the occupied, is how much
their former homelands are now occupied
by peoples of different bloodlines from them,
who in reducing them forced them to write
to maintain the memory of who they once were.

For the enslaved, the displaced, 
or remnant of those exterminated,
whose shared sense of myth is intact,
at least as far as they are concerned,
'Home' is a memory distilled by time 
where re-enacted rituals remind them
to feel sick for how far in time they are
from when they lived much more fully, 
where the past seemed like the present,
both were part of a much longer continuity.  

Relative Truths

I have a friend who buys and sells,
books, antiques, other things as well,
as long as the goods are second hand,
in fair condition, and of some value.

When he talks it can be hard to trust him,
but when I got to know him better I learned
that part of his trade is in the value of words.
as he sells things. He often found it tempting
to tell me anything about what he has for sale
as if I might buy it, for knowing no better.

Trickster figures can be friends, and be like that.

Slow Realities

I knew I was getting slow, when my landline rang.
On the end of the line a lady from a call centre
told me I had been specially selected to be sold
a brand new design of landline call blocker.

She was too young to remember
'Readers Digest' using similar sales lines.
I wasn't, but still I kept my tones civil. 

I replied 'This is new to me, so how does it work?'
she soft soaped me some more, making hints
about posting the device to me, whilst I
politely avoided any mention of my banking details.

I realise now that my first question
should have been to ask the saleslady
'Would it stop calls like this? If it does
let me save you the sales pitch' and put the phone down.   

The Discomfort Of Choice

Leaving behind what we have outgrown is often painful,
 whether what we exit from is a relationship or a situation.
But think on this before clinging to the reluctance to change:
in the longer run our exit may improve the lives of others
and advance how we see ourselves in relation
to our new neighbours, in our new neighbourhood.  

 

It Seems Rather Late

to contemplate the words of Lutheran pastor
theologian and concentration camp survivor,
Martin Niemöller, as they were written in 1946.

Many know how they start 'First they came for....  ' 
and then comes the list of people 'they' arrested,
in order, Communists, Socialists, Trade unionists,
Jews, until I was arrested. Because I had not
spoken up for others when I could have spoken,
and there was nobody left to speak up for me. 

Contemplating this in the light of the new
high speed 'Act/shoot first, think later,
deny the error by making more, all whilst
quietly repairing the damage' kingship 
of Donald Trump what the public have to learn
the most is react fast, and act collectively, 
to actively defend the courts-the branch of the executive
they have easiest access to, to defend their rights,
presently sorely abused by executive (dis)order. 

Free Speech

Hypocrites are all for increased freedom of speech
- the more it destroys the internal consistency
of  public argument about government policy,
and the more it is in favour of brazen hypocrisy
whilst breeding blind inattentiveness, the freer they feel.

The freer they feel the more they make other people angry.

The State Inside The State Inside The State Inside The...

Living in now-peaceable Northern Ireland,
where the guns that remain are now well hidden,
but the anger and division behind them stalls politics 
every so often The Belfast Press have a headline
like 'IRA Terrorist Killed By SAS and MI5', 
About a a historic death that went unexplained
when writing 'IRA terrorist' was a tautology,
one circular phrase among many in the mess
where only police reform could reveal the truth.

It still takes decades to interrogate past decisions
to confirm what the dogs on the street told each other
when no human was listening: that deep within the state
the public knew about, there was another state, inside that
and inside that another and so on, until at the core
there was an agent provocateur 'security state'
who to find out who was the real 'enemy within',
beside itself, had keep the whole war going....   

Take The Wait Out Of Wanting Less

And apply for all the positions in society
that you know you will be rejected for now.
This will enable those who were always intent
on rejecting you to complete the process sooner.
This will prove to those who seek to reject you
how obliging you are, and help them deny
how much they seek to embody rejection.

This is a council of hope, the sooner
a person gets past the potential for despair
that their seeking acceptance invites,
the sooner they can embrace rejection and lead a quiet life.

The Big Disconnect

The problem with isolationist politics
is not just how much bad fences
always depreciate the neighbourhood,
where the loudest shouts at the weakest
'You owe me', when they just don't.

This quickly leads to isolationist states 
depreciating the values of citizenship
among it's own population as if how it acted
had no consequences, which in turn
means the state has to fake how wide
its support is among journalists
until the public reading of politics
is laden with Alice-in Wonderland logic, 
replete with its own disconnected semiotics.

This hides, amongst many sensible questions,
how, when, and where, the big disconnect started.

Peace ? Ceasefire ? Whatever !

Whether peace or ceasefire,
both take longer to put in place
than impatient leaders who, locked
into wars they didn't know how to stop,
find they don't have the time to organise
respite for themselves or their enemies.

The last proposed peace between Ukraine,
and Russia that never found acceptance
was 'proposed by the Russian Orthodox Church',
long known as an instrument of the Russian state,
apparently so that its clergy could return
to buildings they have been ejected from
to celebrate a solely Russian Christmas.

As alliances renew through new proposals 
and shuttle diplomacy between the willing
gets ever more tight lipped and frenzied,
few can predict what will happen next,
beyond how even fewer folk than before
will get reports about the progress of the war.

Age And Purpose

Given the ability of the developed world
to keep its citizens physically healthy 
well past the age their strength has its use
this will lead to rising numbers of elderly
living for years with fading memories
of how, and with whom, they were useful.

I can see a time when death notices in newspapers
will diminish, but notices that from a certain date
this or that person is going into a nursing home
to live out what remains of a forgotten life,
recalled briefly in print, will become familiar. 

No Full Stop With The Death Sentence

The UK suspended the death sentence for murder
in 1965, nearly a decade after the last two hangings.
The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, hung up his rope
very quietly soon after completing his last job in 1957,
no more were to follow as people viewed with distaste
their own fears, made public of 'justice gone wrong'
where the wrong man and woman died of a crime
they should be punished for more by committing them
to criminal mental institutions, grim as they were.

Nobody else applied for the post of hangman,
and no new way of  judicial murder was devised.
The suspension remained until the law was struck
down, annulled, in 1998. How unlike America
the UK was, where different states competed
in reinventing different ways for completing
the death sentence, different lethal injections,
different gases for gas-based death, new designs
of electric chairs, and even reviving the firing squad,
the list of state means of death keeps getting longer.

And all this whilst fewer and fewer states used the means
of killing prisoners, and for a few years it was banned outright,
death row lengthens, maintained by stays and legal appeals. 

Into this debacle Judge David Duncan was chosen to report
to the governor of Arizona on the competence and methods
of the those who led the law in state executions. 

It is a long and grizzly read, but take in what you can of it here.

Narcissism By Other Means

Whether governments disagree through trade
or from bearing lethal arms and hand grenades
war is never just war. It is politics by other means
where what the politics might have been for gets lost
in the melee of bad diplomacy and insults
such that watching the news is best left to those
who put themselves on the screen, only they
could bear to view themselves that way.

For everyone else it life through a glass darkly.  

Sisyphus Seeks Narcissus For Honest Relationship

Today's Sisyphean task,
aside from seeing the world
as a place that has a purpose,
will be for me to start yet again
working out how to tell the chief narcissist
the depth of his hypocrisy, when presently
he is so far from me he doesn't know where he is
well enough for him to understand what I have to say.

He has to be shown how his hypocrisy
is the consequence of his narcissism
in some way that he will understand,
whoever that leaves on a suicidal mission.   

When Aloneness Whistles To Me

The measure of my company
that I hear most clearly
is when my tinnitus murmurs 
'When there are no other people
you have no need to miss them'.

This Was My Lie, Tell Me Yours

When I was growing up, it was de rigueur
to teach children to accept being deceived
about what sex was by adults who believed
that sex = lies so arguing they were different
was pointless. Teaching children to be grateful
for being fed lies was all that parents could hope for.

Children would make their own journey
through a world that was divided by deceit 
the way that generations before them had

until how they lied became their own lore,
to be nurtured behind their own front door.

That their parents were the first to teach
the necessity of deceit because they owned
the front door that the child hid behind
would be the last lesson they had to endure.

If any child got that far into being an adult,
that they wanted to end the age-old cycle of lies
by omission, they would have had to learn
to omit to have children they had to lie before.  

Despair Renewed

 I have often seen the quote

'Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them'

blandly passed off as a modern day truism,
no particular target of it's warning pointed out.  

When it is quoted, the writer neither credits the author, 
Spanish/American poet and philosopher George Santayana
nor recognises that in recycling the quote
the person repeating the quote is recycling
an old blame game, where the knowing
blame the unknowing for not being like them,
covering up how close to being unknowing,
and like what they criticise, they might be.

Despair that renews itself so unknowingly
reflects rather poorly on its own fallibility.  

Pushing Ninety

I don't watch television. It repeatedly redefines
misinformation, and with each repeat defines idleness.
There is already too little thought in the speculations
of the speech-based radio that I sometimes listen to.

But recently I enjoyed one programme, where the pleasure
lay in the editing of the visuals as much as the subject, Alan Bennett.
The title 'Alan Bennett At Ninety' said it all in a world
where leaders much younger than that age go insane
every time they to take to the media, in stage managed events
where the leaders ill chosen words are as natural as his staff
taking the blame for every error of judgement he makes,
to make the leader seem all the more immaculate.

Mr Bennett, playwright, actor, author, diarist, memoirist,
had over the years mined a well lived life for anecdotes
that would outlive their time, once more gave the BBC
an hour of his most composed self, allowing himself
to be shown as a two fingered typist, typing new writings.   

The dryness of what he said, and stillness of his room
were odd at first. It took some time to reflect on how well
he depicted, without declaring it, how asexual he was.

To be that still, that reflective, and yet so evidently alive 
is something I will be aspiring to in my old age. 

Numbed And Numbered

Anyone, any government, in any negotiations
has four basic positions they can settle for
with their enemies, their opposition:
win-win, win-lose, lose-win and lose-lose.

 Many a declining empire has chosen lose-lose
when it has picked which war to fight,
on the grounds that the other side is smaller.
The other side can less afford to lose
what it has than the empire
Which is rich in citizens it can lose
as cannon fodder, to prove the superior
fire power of oligarchy, over democracy. 

This is Russia's position with it invading Ukraine:
Russian can afford to lose far more than Ukraine can,
and with its autocracy and control of the media
it has already devalued what 'being Russian' means.

When Biden's America gave/sold it's surplus arms
to Ukraine to help it fight back, it strove to make Ukraine
a winner, whilst clearing out some of its arms dumps.

But with Trump such altruism, flawed as it was,
is off the menu. As Trump gets aggrieved to order,
the quiet kindness of Biden is a distant memory.
Trump needs to be the only winner in transactions
in which winning is believing he is the only engineer
of the transaction. Trump has to sow conflict
and make losers out of his enemies and advisers,
as if they both were alike, 'jealous' of his need tor be right.

Oligarchy and empires are slow to recognise
life beyond their control, but when such life advances
in their back yard, they will be numbed
by how much their days are numbered.   

A Choice Of Dangers

Many people know that public book burnings
are a sign of a democracy in a state of distress,
the sign of imminent deportations, and worse.

But there is a stage well beyond that,
where citizens have to burn books in private:
the ideas in them have become heretical and dangerous.

If aired anywhere by citizens,
these ideas would get their adherents arrested and tortured.

Still, I would rather have it that some ideas are still dangerous:
the most dangerous state is when the majority have no thought at all. 

Mark, Read, And Inwardly Digest

that today is World Book Day,
the day the book publishing industry
seeks the attention of the public
via the more ephemeral media, film,
television, podcasts, and the internet,
as to how, down to the last news bulletin,
they are all founded on words to make
what they say intelligible to their audience.

How much more people become aware
because of this day of the power of language
remains to be seen, but we have every means,
including blogging, to share and declare this. 

Whose Puppet Are We?

One of the easiest accusations to aim
at the politician we, as individuals,
dislike is 'They are puppets', as if,
through labelling them we claim
to be an authority over the misbegotten state
they front and the narratives that hide behind it.
Until under us their number is up, they are history.

Puppet states and puppet leaders have existed
from ancient Egypt, Rome, and Babylon onward
right through to modern Russia, China and America,
the latter of which resists being called an empire,
but through the trade rules it sets for smaller countries
it acts exactly like an empire, propagating slavery under it,
not least from within for laws like the Jim Crow Laws. 

Empires are consistently opaque, and the way
that America presents itself is true to to the form.

Given how similar puppetry is to slavery,
amid the toing and froing between America,
Russia, and Ukraine, all of whom have histories
which they wish the public would ask less about, 
the least the public can do is ask the empires
of Russia and America Who is controlling you?
What false history is pulling your strings?
By what long annulled law do you rule the universe?

Don't be surprised, though, if when these empires blank you,
take your voice by controlling the media, and cuts down people
like you for claiming a life outside of subservience to them,
that these empires don't want you to believe exists.

Marriage Etc

I have distant friends who nowadays
say of themselves to others 'I was born Gay'.
I understand why they say it, but also I find
that the same birth right is not true for me,
in spite of my sharing in their sexuality. 

In the language that was common
when I was born, couples were meant
to court, engage, then marry for life.
There marriage meant men being
the only breadwinner in the house
they got themselves in debt for,
and slowly paid for with their wages.

There men lived most outside the house,
in the world of money and power, and alcohol.
Women were meant to stay at home and not ask
to see the man's wage packet each Friday.
As housewives and mothers they were meant
to say nothing about what they did without
whilst being grateful for what they were given.

So much for the social divisions of the 1950s.

The reason some men now say they 'were born gay',
is that in some churches and 'tradition based' structures
the view is promoted that inside every gay man and lesbian,
there is a heterosexual who at an early age got diverted,
but who can be brought If the gay man submits with vigour
the diversions that made them gay could brain-washed away
and family values will replace a misbegotten past.

Such beliefs have long been on the dark side
of the health and wealth gospel, where success 
is worshipped, and money always comes first..   

I am gay, but I was not born that way,
I was converted to it by how change,
choice, and money were set against me,
making marriage etc a fantasy
I was never going to complete.

What Is On TV Tonight?

Whatever it is, a book* will be better. 
Because the measure of a life
is how much more live books are
than adaptions of them for visual media
can be. And only print can do this.
I prefer my print on paper but if some.
folk prefer e-readers okay, but let it have
nothing to do with me. 

*excludes texts where no hand, eye,
  or mind has shaped what is written,
I.e. 'A.I. texts in which machines learn
badly how ordinary people write
       and can't sense what the text is missing.        

 

The Deity Of Dyslexia

Many wonder how much
God is the deity of the dyslexic,
with how His Word was loosed on the world, 
and when the world became so prone to error.

On the first day of creation The Word created the heavens,
the second day the earth, the third the waters,
on the fourth day land the between the waters,
on the fifth day came the creatures of the seas and the land.
And in those days the days varied vastly in length,
God did not need a watch to knew what the time was.

The result and the timing were perfect. But with man
The Word got mis-spelt. Woman came after that,
woman, of whom man thought 'She is my alibi:
before God I will blame her for all I don't want to be known for.'.
When God invented obedience to himself he made it as part of choice.
It took man to take the choice out of obedience, and create slavery,
making the sense of choice disappearing universal.

With modern science came a new choice
of who to blame: nobody. Where theology
pointed toward the human 'who?' and 'why?',
in the oldest, and most circular, blame game,
Science made friends with Hypothesis, Test, and Result
when all four confined themselves to the much more
reflective question of 'How?', with our being.

Nowadays I am careful about how I live,
and seek to believe, whist avoiding the blame games.   

Picture Set Of The Month - February - The Paintings Of Paule Veselay

'Six forms in Six Compartments' as painted in 1936
by British painter Paule Veselay, who chose the name
when first worked and her work was exhibited
in Paris in the 1930s.  

'L'Animal' as painted in 1929 by female artist
Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984), who retained her fame
in Paris long after working there in the 1930s,
but returned to England In 1939. 

'Composition' as painted in 1933 by British abstract
artist Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984) who also made
 sculptures, made constructions with string,
and collages. 

'Paris' as drawn in 1926 by Female Surrealist
Artist, Paule Veslelay (1892 - 1984). 

'Neolithic childhood: art in a False Present' a 1930
painting by Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984) who in
this image was drawing on the sense of crisis
in society and politics prevailing at that time.  

 

The Tramp Of Time

Living in the UK as long as I have,
I have lived through one change of monarch
[she started young and was exceptionally healthy],
and fourteen changes of Prime Minister.
I have been a UK citizen both when it was
outside of the EU and when the UK was in it.

In both the EU remained the UK's closest neighbour.  

Abroad, there have been six popes, 
twelve different American presidents,
and seven different leaders of Russia,
where stable leadership meant corruption
at the top and increasing economic instability
the further down the social hierarchy you look.

The seven part series that documents
life under the third to sixth leaders, Trauma Zone
shows this up in more detail than can be absorbed, perfectly.

My views of the leadership have changed
as I have aged. In my twenties when Capitalism
disappointed me I was curious about Communism,
but from the place I was in I could not separate truth
from propaganda, not even with petty local rulers.

The older I got, the nearer I got to being the age
of the leaders that I both despised and admired.
I thought that with parity of age with them,
when I was over fifty, I'd come to a more balanced view.

But with my age, as I am now,
the links between age and competence
are more complex than I previously read.

All I can say is that populations reap what leaders sow,
and the wisest leaders are often the quietest,
but they have to wait for history to downsize
the noise of the loudmouths who want their say
to speak for everyone else, little realising
that they are just bit part players on the world stage.     

No Holiday In The Sun

What will those in the liberal and free west
do when their government decrees that only half
the population can be citizens of their country,
and for those who are citizens, the government bans
them from forming any sort of political party? 

And where a government permits a political party
to be formed they even more reserve the right to ban it
from standing to be elected in the few places
it might win, in the country's upper and lower houses?

Such a hemmed in voting process is a tricky idea to crack,
when brutality is rife, and the jails are intimidatingly filthy,
as if the people who are kept inside them are not worth
the pittance the government pays for the prisoners to be put there.
 
What would those in the liberal and free west do
if in lieu of being able to form political parties
government permitted citizens to form political societies
where, apparently, the nature of the government
can be discussed, but such societies are excuses for spies
to listen, unawares, in on how citizens think,
in an exercise in agent provocateur thinking
where the government arrests independent thought
before it can find any significant expression.

Such a government does exist, it is presently
promoting itself in the liberal, rich, west
as a holiday destination, it's name is Bahrain

Weather Report

From the memory fog of my mind
to your foggy thoughts is a distance
that I don't know how to calculate,
but through attempts to communicate
we might both learn how far apart we are,
though, daily, distances will vary.

Families And How To Escape Them Chapter Thirty

By the autumn of 1991 I was going nowhere slowly, and enjoying the journey whilst being uncertain about the destination. I had done short term paid work, and I was still contracted by the Job Centre to apply for jobs. My schooling and work experience streamed me into a place I did not want to be. I did not want the jobs I could apply for and wanted the jobs I could not apply for. My way out of being pressured this way was to apply for the jobs I could apply for, but put too little effort into making myself seem vital to the employer. I then told the Job Centre 'I did my best'. When the reply came back and I did not get the job they said 'Better luck next time', forgetting how often they had said that to me before. I drew the best choices I could get out of a stalemate situation. A year after applying I was left alone to wait for the group therapy placement that was due to me. Whilst waiting I continued to write my thoughts down every night, to get a better night's sleep. My days were full enough making the little money I got each fortnight stretch as far as it needed to.

Another tactic with the Job Centre was to do the maths with the jobs on their boards. When a job was one I could apply for but when I did the maths I could prove I would be worse off than my simply being left on benefits, then I pointed the financial disadvantage out to the adviser, who would let me off from seriously looking any further. Amid the economic shrinkage neither I nor they felt any great need to apply ourselves, or get other unemployed applicants, to engage with the idea of employment with any rigour.    

With all the media talk of the next downturn in the economy being closer at hand than anyone wanted to predict I was preparing myself for enjoying being long term unemployed. There I did my best, socially, to hide how much I enjoyed being at the bottom of the heap. Though perhaps I was more transparent about how I did not esteem myself than I intended to be, as this image shows.

The shirt I understood to be East German army  surplus.                                                       

They were strong, warm, and light.  As far as my choice in clothing went, they were my aesthetic, my way to dress. I first found the shirts in my twenties. They replaced my mother's way of dressing me, in ill matching and ill assorted clothing from the local Cancer Research Charity Shop that she made me wear even when it no longer fitted me. The clothing had to wear out, the trousers split, before it might be replaced by clothing that by faint chance I might like more. 

With discovering the army surplus market stall and shop I allowed myself to wear clothing, the caps and light coats that were comfortable, that were durable, and cheap. As far as I was concerned the shirt gave me a style, that had my signature to it. 

I took the colours of the flag on the left shoulder the black, red and yellow to mean 'Through the night and the blood come the light', a phrase I connected the phrase to the East German Communist government.

Having now checked the origins of the choice of colour on the flag I was right about the phrase but wrong about it's origins. The phrase went back much further than WW2, to the war that France declared on Prussia in 1870, which resulted in the first united Germany.

Germany was recently reunited when I was wearing these red army shirts I liked. The wall between East and West Germany had been dismantled, and East Germany was exposed as the poorer half of the new, larger, country. But being in the poorer half of society was something I could identify with. 

There were frequent debates on television about who was going to be worse off in the next UK recession, and when it would kick in. Most of the debate skirted around accusations of betrayal, before the argument collapsed into a lack of conclusion. I knew that the next recession would go through the bank accounts, credit cards, and pockets, of people who were far richer than I was before it hit me in any way. 

This new role of agreeable under-performer was also reflected in my commitment to church. I attended all the usual meetings, twice on Sunday and Bible study/house group mid-week. At the end of the Sunday morning service there was often time to ask the preacher questions about the sources for their sermon. They answered me as well, I liked that. The midweek Bible Study group I was part of was far more difficult terrain. Particularly when we studied the more fundamentalist texts-including 'the clobber verses' where homosexuality was thought to be both the subject of the text and the reason for rhetorical moral censure. Then I zoned out as my heart went AWOL from the topic in hand. The more in The Bible God threatened and smote his most errant followers, and similar fates were promised for those identifying with their error, the more I identified with the errors of those threatened, with a hidden glee. Where there was an obvious mechanical sense of sin and punishment we never probed the text with enough rigour for the mechanisms and triggers of it all to be apparent. The backgrounds to the situations Biblical characters get themselves into always seemed to be poorly sketched in and the oldest Old Testament male figures were alarmingly uncaring of their female dependents. But like the loss leader jobs I weakly applied for, there was no point in me applying myself too hard to pointing out the flaws and gaps in the original texts. I did not want to be on another hiding to nothing. 

It did not help that the two closest friends I had made in church had both moved away. Celia had moved house with her adoptive family, and now went to another Bible study/house group. Jerry, who was the first person I had shared that I was gay to, had moved to another part of England where he had started a different job. He gave me his home brew white wine when he moved. It was kept in my landlady's cellar in demijohns. I forget who rang who first each week, of a midweek evening. But sometimes when we talked I was on the sociable side of being drunk from drinking his wine. 

During the time that the nights started darkening earlier I came up with a plan for a change. The idea came to me in the nightly writing I was still doing every night. For years I had known of the weak dad joke about the bearded man who went to the barber to have his beard shaved off and his school cap had been found in the shorn off undergrowth. In the night writing I tore the joke apart, and wrote to myself to say why I found the joke numbly unfunny and illogical at so many levels that I did not care if I never heard it again. I recognised the point in the joke that pleased families, where the cap being re-found symbolised a man rediscovering his childhood. Families found it funny because they sentimentalised children. My letting my beard grow was one of the ways I separated myself as an adult from a childhood I intensely disliked. But with me being on my own, and with no family close by to personally care enough to reinforce a past I disliked, I thought about how my image might change.

Before I asked the local church leaders to help me with the change of image I looked like a cleaned up biker, or late period Jim Morrison on a bad day. 

                                                                                                                                                  

My hair and beard remained clean, and were never cause for  complaint  from  my  fellow middle class Christians, the  people  whose company I kept with the most. But I rarely shaped and trimmed the beard, I had nobody else to trim it for and with the indifferent childhood lacked the imagination to see myself differently. 

In my nightly journal, after dealing with the weak dad joke, I debated with myself in my indirect way coincidence vs causation with mental health, Question;  if I was depressed, which I was sure I was, then how much was my low level hair care regime a symptom of my depression? How much did the low level hair care add to my feeling depressed. How much was my depression about a lot more than how little interest I had in how I presented myself? My hands surely ached from such prolonged writing every night. But it was the only way I had of turning myself inside out until what stopped me from sleeping could be calmed down for that night.

So, I asked my local church leaders if they would cut off my beard and trim my hair very short. Pauline and David were people who treated me as an adult. They seemed to understand how I was, well, unsupported by my family, by the standards of most church members. They said 'Yes'. We agreed an early evening mid-week for them to come around to the shared house I lived in with others, with the kit for the hair cut and clean shave. With very little talk required they understood that I was looking for a change I could make. The change was about spiritual matter and mental health issues, combined.    

As you can see, the hair cut and beard shave make a big difference to my appearance, even to my posture. From this distance of time I don't know what was directly removed with the beard trim and haircut, beyond the previous loathing of the old 'Oh that is where your school cap went' joke. I think what the change of appearance gave me was a relative lightness with how much I disagreed my family, compared with the former suppressed anger that it seemed impossible to dissipate.

With the change in appearance, the positive recognition from other people was welcome even if some of the recognition had hints of being backhanded about me being so slow attached to it. However good it felt I still had to maintain the nightly diary writing to help me sleep well, in lieu of the promised, but distant, therapy. 

And the new, more socially acceptable, appearance did nothing to change the church member's consistent and evasive side stepping around what 'being gay' might mean to those who were gay. That issue was carefully swept under the carpet. They would argue their rhetorical proofs of why homosexuality 'did not exist' because 'families don't create gay men or lesbians', as if families created everything and everyone. Whilst they ignored all the non-parenting of care homes, and the fragile parenting of foster care and adoption, for instance. They could parade their Biblical clobber clauses, but the one thing none of them would so was bear witness to the gospel by simply listening and letting the needy define their needs for themselves.