I Who Have Little

I would like, when I was younger,
to have been a kind of modern luddite.
That is to say I would like to have had
a skill, a trade, a means of remuneration
to defend, if required with violence,
in which the skill itself had proven valuable
and had served me and many I knew well.

But from the start of my education, onward,
what I learnt would limit what more I could learn
so that I could never query any deal for work
that was set me up to be the latest youth employment loss-leader.

I could do nothing to stop M. Thatcher
becoming the biggest luddite of all,
with how she restructured work
so that it paid the few at the top
to make sure those beneath them
expected less, until they expected nothing.

The more I learned how to submit
to being a broken unit of production,
the cheaper I lived, until living the cheap life
was the greatest skill I had. I had no other. 

The Lake Of Apples

Is a thirty mins documentary about the balance of nature
on the land, and in the depths, around Lake Prespa,
Northern Macedonia. An eco-system which shifts over time
and with the evolution, if that be the word, of industrial farming
on the shores of the lake's and it's tributaries. Where the application
of a lot of government and EU sponsored science is required
to teach the farmers how to apply some longer term thinking
to their farming methods for life well beyond the thinking to flourish. 

Please left click to watch it here.
 

Faith In Decay

From abstruse post-modern atheism
to reports of the flights of angels
where the details are so scant
our modern minds can't know
what to make of them, the world
we live in today relies on either
witnesses to worlds so long gone 
it is folly to think to rebuild them, 
or we accept some void or absence
that gives us nothing to believe in.

So believe in the world around you,
particularly the non-electronic bits,
the slow decay you see will give you
a world that you can believe in. 

The Metaphor Of Life Under The Knife

The 1975 film 'The Stepford Wives'
was one of many films I watched
when television was my window
on the wider world, that my parents
told me that I was never going to reach. 
With this film I understood the 'us' the 'them'
and how immersive manipulation,
of a rather forced sort, could be made clear. 

In a fictional wealthy American monoculture,
far away, wealth was the property of husbands,
and was measured by the beauty of their wives,
in which the husbands, all plastic surgeons,
who competed with each other, for who had
the most controlled wife. On their own, the wives
competed with each other with how submissive
they could be, under the surgical knives of their husbands.

But, secretly at first one, wife resisted.... 

Aside from the idea of a utopian economy built
on the plastic surgery skills of omniscient males,
which with hindsight seems somewhat unlikely,
I liked the film for how it ended - with disaster.

I understood the film the way I was meant to,
when family promoted the idea of 'the model child',
as if all children should enjoy being immersed
in them being watched, but living unlistened to,
by the teachers and parents who paid for their lives.

Thus, unwittingly, television taught me more
about the world than my parents could admit to. 

My Resolution

for the coming year, if not my hereafter,
is to learn to live better in my own skin,
and learn how not to live under anyone else's.
I used to be a good trier at relationships,
and I was modest with my ambitions 
for whoever I was with, particularly family
where how I did not fit had to hidden.

Now with less to not fit in with, 
and friends more in name than person
I still have something to work on
the choice of skin I should live in,
the better to be grateful, whilst distant
from the pasts I have left behind me.   

The New Disapproved Of Way Of Losing Track Of Time

The old disapproved of way
of dropping out from the reality
of the everyday, and schedules,
of discovering your own sense of time, 
used to be the consumption
of mildly recreational drugs
the effects of which wore off
after a few short hours.

Cannabis and magic mushrooms
were the easy routes for those in the know,
which when taken with an awareness
of 'set and setting', allowed for the change
 in awareness, the giggles that flowed
where we can't explain why a comment
seems so funny, but the release is cathartic.

Nowadays it takes much less to drop out
and it has to be done all on our own.
All anyone has to do is have a landline,
that works but does not ring very often,
have a smartphone for emergencies only,
which otherwise they don't know how to use,
and confine their listening to terrestrial speech radio.
Shun television as slow and cumbersome
as a means of conveying information,
and the internet as being full of rumours. 

The information in the slow lane is all we need.
Will you be better informed about the world?
Probably not, but it least you can be more sure
about your own sense of time, your situation.

 

Happy Christmas Everybody

 

The End Of The Emptiness

If life is about relationships,
then life is about change as well,
change is part of how we relate,
one to another. Until, very much alive,
we come to nurture rest in ourselves
more than finding calm through other people.

For some this means pretending,
and projecting life as before
but with the content diminished
hidden in pro-forma chores
like sending Christmas cards.

For me this change marks
the 'no return' point, in the season
of good will. Where I stop responding
to the empty, synthetically generated,
custom of greetings and meetings
empty of intent. For both good or ill.

Finding the still point in the emptiness
of human business is not the end.
Seeking stillness, amid the busyness,
is where to seek to Be, beyond definition.  

Christmas 1980s Style With Quentin Crisp

Please left click to enlarge the text, to more fully enjoy
the unsentimental generosity of spirit that Quentin exemplified
as much towards Christmas day as the other 364 days of the year. 

 

My First Christmas Card Of 2025

'Without Title' (1959) as made by American painter

Helen Frankenthaler (1928 - 2011).

 

A Well Worn Refrain Of Unwelcome

As the dates amble, then slouch, 
towards the birth of the special child,
who bisects human history -
at least across the Christian world,
I cannot avoid seeing the anonymity
of my family reflected back at me
with the cards we sign and send each other 
where we say nothing special
because there is so little left to say.

I am one of many for whom
the siren call of a family Xmas
is a well worn refrain of unwelcome.

I wish my fellow waifs and strays,
and family rejects, an honest joy from obscurity
that they would never expect to find. 

Misanthropy Beyond Belief, Modernised

Who knew that the U.S. Military
trained their medics to shoot, using
live animals? It makes me wonder
    how as medics they train for work on humans.    

 

The Future - Boxed In!

I was slow to grow up when I was a child.
Too slow to realise that when the adverts
on television showed toys, those adverts
presented toys being played with in large spaces,
very different to the home that the advert
was beamed into. There the space portrayed
in the advert was part of what was being advertised,
and the children on show were well paid child actors. 

In the room the television was in,
the inactivity of watching television
would be all there was room to do, 
 there would be no room for anything else.
Least of all for a child to imagine
the grown up they might turn out to be.

Unless the television imagined it for them.

    

'Pillion' - A Film Review

 'Pillion' is the story of a gay young man, Colin, who lives in greater London with his family who accept him as being gay as long as the version of 'being gay' he lives out is an extension of their family life where his mother wears the trousers in the house. They are presented as living a comfortable, stable, suburban, life. Colin is a self effacing traffic warden, and has never had a boyfriend, but he has looked for one. His mother chooses dates for him, and he lets her choose them. One night in a straight/mixed pub at the end of another failed date he meets the man his mother never told him about and never knew existed. She is so well insulated in her own world from the definition of homosexuality that Ray represents that Colin is intrigued. For the first time Colin sets up a date of his own with Ray in which Ray proves to not only to be handsome but in need of somebody to control who is amenable to him controlling them. Colin seems unaware that he has been controlled all his life by his mother. Now for the acronym that child-centred family values would deny exists, but is definitely a dish many adults will serve up, or expect, of each other under many different labels. BDSM stands for Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism and Masochism. Colin finds an apparently fulfilling life outside of his family that he would never have guessed existed. The life Colin has in Ray's flat, and with Ray's friends, is an education for Colin that he could never have otherwise been offered.

Will the relationship last? Will Colin change as a person? Did Ray have a less detached, softer, side? Watch the film to find out what bumps in the road they both encounter. What I will say, from experience, is that to recognise our free will, and what defines what controls us, we often have to experience over control as something fresh and new to realise that we have to negotiate our own boundaries to recognise who we, and other people, actually are.

Ask For Less Whilst You Can

What we believe as how life should be
always depends on the first impressions
that replace what was intended to happen, 
where we see shadow of a life that was there.

The more we live on these sloppy seconds,
occasionally glimpsing what should have been,
the less we have to worry about leading parodies
of the lives that we were meant to live,
where promise becomes more and more the script
of what could not be delivered until we tire
of the latest salesmen's rattle bag of stale tricks.

Ask for less whilst you can.

From glory to parody
is a shorter journey than we think.
Only by promising ourselves less
can deliver we deliver each other a life
that leans towards a sustainable sufficiency.  

Quotes Mangled In Translation

When I was a child I listened as a child.
Selectively, I could quote what I heard,
not knowing how to ask, and being unsure
whether what I remembered was accurate
to the facts. My mind could easily wander.

A few of the phrases my mother often used stuck with me,
one of them was 'Don't have children, have grandchildren',
a phrase that to my easily scattered mind became
'Being a grandparent is better than being a parent',
and implied criticism of me being a child.

As if I had the choice of being an adult.
I did not know, but have learned since
that my Mother was quoting Gore Vidal,
who was partly raised in great privilege
by his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore,
who, though blind, encouraged a love books,
whilst he served in the US senate.

It would have been a better for me
if the quote ran 'Don't get born into penury
where there are no books.'. So much
of the original context was lost to me. 

Another quote that got truly mangled in how it was
handed down to me became 'Great minds think alike,
and mediocre minds seldom differ.'. A comment
about quote false agreement. Or so I thought. Knowing no better.

Today I found the original quote 'Great minds
have always encountered violent opposition
from mediocre minds.'. As quoted at about 
the six mins 50 second mark in the fourth
of The Reith Lectures, as said by Albert Einstein
in support of Bertrand Russell circa 1940,
as Russell was being cancelled as lecturer.

It hard to imagine how the quote got converted
to what Mother said, who to be kind to her,
found fighting her corner in life difficult.

Whether I agreed with my Mother or didn't,
she made my fight for my own corner in life
hard enough, but still a seek a space of my own
in which I can be agreeable and modest. 

Today many Americans get labelled 'violent and wrong',
by their government, as if violence is at it's most right
only when the government organises it. 

Hybrid War/Hybrid Peace

The oldest human wars were singular
and simple. Armies aimed at each other
where the limits of the weaponry
were more than made up for, by
the enmities between the rulers
of different sides who were more alike
than either side dared recognise.

Such times now seem improbably quaint.
Modern peace, like modern war, is hybrid, and complex.

When modern states start modern wars
the front line is the civil life of the enemy state.
The weaponry is long range and can be military,
economic, or electronic, including false information.
The most concentrated of which leaders will serve up
to civil life on their own side, to disable all opposition.

What efforts should we make to sustain
our hybrid, complex. peace in the the face
of powers unable to think outside of themselves?

This remains an active, live, question.....  

The Each Way Bet

That America offers the world where the world
is be lead to believe that it could have it's cake
or communion wafer, so to speak, and eat it too.
Via the manufacture, refinement, promotion
 and use of guns to break the sixth commandment  
as part of 20th/21st century capitalist expansion
as if there was no other explanation need be offered. 

 

America Vs The World

With America in the grip of a myopia
so bracing that it does not recognise
where it's present elite mis-leadership
has sprung from, what are the countries
once supported by it to do to replace
and replenish their no absent support?

The first point for the world to observe
is that there is no golden era to look back on,
nor did any such invented era begat the world
an elite from which White America's leadership
descends from, and from which White America
can look down on all it surveys, as nothing it sees
is as good as it is today, or in the mooted hereafter. 
  

My Third Advent Card Of 2025

'Path under the Rain' or 'Landscape in Regen'
as painted in 1914 by Felix Vallotton (1865 – 1925)
a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated
with the group of artists known as Les Nabis.

 

The Preview For The Unbelievable Afterlife

It used to be joked about Richard M. Nixon 'How can you tell he is lying? His lips move!'. I suspect that many modern leaders have gone several times better than this quaint humour.

They can tell more lies with fewer lip movements, they can lie without their lips moving, by getting proxies to tell lies for them. They can lie in their sleep by making their lies a currency all their own. There the language becomes an invisible crypto currency where we only pretend to follow the exchange rate.

How ceaselessly and infinitely these leaders might lie in his next life have yet to be proven. Who, right now, wants to witness, and echo, such an unbelievable eternity?

Mark Twain's Idea Of The Good Life

was 'friends, good books, and an easy conscience'.
Where the more all three decay the less
the individual knows what to do about it.

For books we can return to pasts that predate
electronic media, where radio was the first
step into transient media futures, and tape
could save a lot but equally deceive the listener.
But for friendships and conscience I see no future.
Friends define each other by how fixed the media are
that friends share - how well I remember friendship
being defined by quietly listening to the radio
where conversations better than I could muster
on my own ruled the airwaves - where I failed
to foresee how time evaporates friendships into the ether.

And in a political world where leaders seek obedience
without thoughtful self examination, an easy conscience
will be prone to  changes where it is right to fear
will be for the worse that it is right to fear will be irreversible.  

Inhuman Values

I have tried to understand the issues
connected with modern migration,
where certain wealthy public speakers
say 'the country is over-full already,
what the rich need is to send the poor abroad
to work hard in remittance economies,
or as pirates, to make more money for us.'.
As if money were the be all and end all
of their nation state. When money is only 
the palest representation of personhood
anyone could fantasise of as real.

But to understand the migrant issue,
I blame the arms industry for enriching itself
at the expense of human life and AI
creating an alternative government
that nobody can make any sense of.

Life Without Friends

A quiet part of me knew all along
that anyone who lives long enough,
and remains in good physical health
will outlive all their old friendships,
and often hear words that used to carry
some depth of meaning shallow out
into thoughtless repetition.

What does that quiet part of me
have to say now the moment has arrived
when all human connection lacks substance?
Nothing much with me having nobody to say it
to in person, though I can say that nothing here, online.

Hopeful Travel

What do I hope for when I am unsure
that my life is being drained of purpose
and that I can't stop it going that way?

That the time spent getting there
will be much longer than the arrival.  

Time Outside Of Time

How does time pass with nothing,
no mechanism or social calendar,
to mark it's passage into eternity?

Time passes the same way it would
with days and other markers to follow,
let life prove times passage is the same
whether it is marked by activity,
as much as when it is not.   

My Second Advent Card Of 2025

Ruined Country: Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folie Wood, 1918
by British landscape painter Paul Nash (1889 - 1946).

 

Like Temptation

Christmas does not just knock on the door,
but presses on the doorbell until you respond
and leaves messages for you on your answerphone
for you to respond to whoever you faintly connect with.

We can escape, to where the season of goodwill 
has no reach. A true holiday, away from it all,
would be to stay in an Islamic country,
as long as you are comfortable with
their police state/human rights record. 

Signs Of Greater Age (43)

1-The necessity of an electric under blanket in winter,
over which to make sure of a good nights sleep. Along with....

2-A 'big foot' in which your feet may rest whilst at the table
when the rest of the house is enduring the winter chills.  

2-For those with online lives that never stop
a heated mouse mat in which to warm the hands
whilst clicking forward with your life.  

Giving Tuesday

Is the day, in this digital age,
that is meant to be the counterpart
to the mass corporate temptations
of Black Friday that fuels the adverts
that the likes of YouTube could not do without.

The biggest downside of Giving Tuesday
is how much the adverts for the charities
that try to take advantage of the event
look like every advert you have ever seen,
where the gloss put on what is on display
as 'needy' undercuts the idea of giving to charity.
 . 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita - Pictures Of Birds

Stork, Maguar stork, as created in 1914 
by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944).

'Parakeets' as created in 1927 by
Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944).
 

'Heron in a Cage' as created in 1915
by Dutch artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita,
lest we forget, was a man who died in Auschwitz.

Galah cockatoo. or Roseate cockatoo,
as presented in this lino cut style drawing
by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. This is one
of many works rescued from the home of the 
ailing Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita by
his pupil M. C. Escher and others immediately
after the arrest of Mesquita, his wife and son
by the Nazi invaders of Amsterdam.