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.