'Remember Your Dreams'

the sign above my head said,
where by my bed I was also left
the means of writing them down,
before the day's thoughts erased them.

Music filled so many of those dreams,
most of it I'd shared with friends but some
fresh from my head, tunes I'd heard nowhere else.
Other times what came back was news reports
I'd read, on line or in the papers, when they were
the main way for me to learn about the world.

The best dreams would feature my truest lost love,
my one time dog Oscar, who in the short years 
I and my buddy cared for him we were the happiest 
three people could imagine being together. 
We made each other complete and content.

Now my days seem less engaged,
in a daze I do what must be done,
amiably but with less exitement. 

In This Age Of Overstatement

Where does truth have to go,
to be found, away from the shadows
of exaggeration, open evasion, cliches
that so easily block listeners ears,
and the wholely centralised media ownership
where the buck used to stop has disappeared?

I don't know, but seeking that place
starts with believing the place exists,
both in my times and in other peoples,
along with accepting, as we have to,
all days of wading through all that is not
the place seek, and slowly letting it pass,
leaving our search for rest in acceptance
intact. Whilst we seek the same for others.

The Poor Man's Work Ethic

When I was young the values I lived out
were the poor mans' work ethic of working hard 
to stay poor, and when work failed completely
doing government paid for displacement activities,
including further education, to remain active.
Whilst making my acquired cheapness work for me.

There the main purpose of my activities
was to keep me reaching towards the horisons
I could see, that retreated, the nearer I got to them.

I found my way out of this grown up version
of smothercare when I going nowhere slowly
by my being accepted by a world with no family
behind me, where my main experience of work
was the catch 22 logic of not getting jobs
from a market that was set to refuse me.

Nowadays I don't scrabble after money with any effort.
I live within my means and my greatest sense of reward
comes from having survived long term unemployment,
and the poor man's work ethic, with my mind intact.

Film Of The Day - 'My Dog Tulip' (2009)

 

This fine feature length animation is a film you can sink into, as I did when I read the book long enugh ago to be unable to say now when I read it. If you like dogs, and include in your likes unruly dogs, then enjoy with the certain charm this film presents, as man and dog find companionship in each other, against the odds, when both are rejects from normal society.

And please excuse the subtitles being in a language you don't speak, that is a small price to pay for having the original, English speech based, soundtrack......  

The Power Of A Handshake

Of all the devils whose hand, if I were offered it,
I would offer them mine to shake I don't know which
I would trust most. Which I might wash my hands clean of,
after, and whose hand I would set in a queue to make wait
for some distant ocasion where nothing rode on shaking it.

But my discernment tells me that he could present
himself as being of any nationality, any empire,
and could quote any government from world history
from the past to the present, that matched his bona-fides
with his verisimisitilude. Therein lies the problem.

When lies are made to seem so beleivable, and our media
buy into the pride of those who insist on being believed
-no fact checking allowed-then what can the public do?

They have to choose a side, and choose a media
in which their choice includes explanations, aplologies,
and asides that explain when their media will fall in error.
But apologies will be made promptly, to reset where truth rests,
so that same point can be found again later.

I will shake the hand of whoever apologises
in good time, and changes their stance,
after, longterm, we have had enough chance
for opinions to differ with honour. 

Know Yourself Whilst You Can

  This cartoon is from the mid-1970s and is either a tame satire on the ease of corner shop shopping out-of-daytime-business-hours where 'instant coffee' etc seemed new, a satire on the title of the John Lennon song 'Instant Karma', or a satire on the slow collapse of the values and cogency of the then Labour government. Any values that you had to 'just add water' to could not taste of much in the longer term. 

But I put this cartoon here because with the internet we have, fifty years since it made cynical young readers laugh, because in the 2020s our media is caught up in the midst of its own ever shifting fever dreams, where it focuses on one idea then another so fast that readers can't keep up with what is presently promoted as the next trend/the next leader, as the latest dream is paid for by advertisers seeking to sell the latest wares as if they were created - instantly! 

There is a better life to be had by knowing your own mind and knowing where, and what, it should not be led to accept. No product or idea is instant, particularly when we trace how it was developed. Yes, information is relative, and the relativity that informs it tells me that space/time gives us a choice of which space/time from the past to recognise. But space/time cannot be sure of the future: do your best to live in the present, as near as you are able.      

The Ignorance Economy

Is as popular as it possible to be,
just ask advertisers selling products
that are as familiar to consumers
as to make advertising rhetorical,
then view the progress of the gaslighting industry
as it eats through the media - where interviewers
on old media lob softball questions at leaders
who need to hide how old and tired they are,
along with their wealth and where it comes from,
as they seek to sideline all the questions
about popular on-line fraud, 'media influencers', 
cronyisn, spreaders of invisible crypto currencies, 
and popular white collar criminality that the public
endure as new gov't policy becomes, effectively, inaction.

How far does each of us have to go
to reach the bottom of this rabbit hole,
before we getting lost in our search?

Before we give up seeking
what we once thought, and reverse
our journey to where our bearings
were firmer, and we knew where we were?

How else are we to set a safe distance from the ignorance economy?

Picture Set Of The Month - June - Landscapes By Stanley Soencer

'Landscape, Gloucestershire', painted in 1940
by Englsih Sir Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

'Beacon Hill near Burghclere' painted in 1927
as painted by English painter Sir Stanley Spencer
(1891 - 1959).

"Panorama, Wangford Marsh near Southwold, Suffolk"
by English painter Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

'The Cottages at Burghclere' painted between 1927
and 1930 by Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

 

Moon Of The Month (2) - The Blue Moon

Is the moon that gives it's name to a lot of human activity,
films, songs, the names humans give to brands of beer,
and much more besides. Last but not least this moon
givies its name to that favourite human activity,
repetition. When within this calendar month,
it is the second time a full moon appears. 

 

How Did Hope Become Hubris?

The new First World hyper-Capitalism
has been confirmed as a form of gambling,
built on long-suspected insider trading,
markets rigged for the benfit of the 1%:
who's wealth is greater than the banks,
and who's power is greater than the courts
in which they fight each other.

In courts the main point of the wealth
being fought over is the dispay of entitlement
which the rich want the poor to see as 'entertainment'.
where oaths mean little to lawyers who in court
will argue that black is white and vice versa,
whilst rich rub the noses of the poor in the debts
they havce to run up to watch the spectacle.

The wealth of the 1% is above all accurate examination.

Commentators fight shy of reversing the equation,
and suggesting that gambling is Capitalism run amok. 

It is easy to see why. Present day Capitalism
bets on future technologies controlled by the few,
particularly through AI, where before the tech
have been tested as 'safe for the public to adopt',
the few use it to maximum conrol and profit
making government pay for with public money
that is more than the riches Croesus* ever dreamed of.

Meanwhile the public get used to not trusting
their own senses whilst being used as human loss leaders
to work out how best test to sustain the use such technology.

*The legend of Croesus (595 - 546 BC) king of Lydia, was that his wealth
was beyond countng. Croesus was the first ruler in the world to mint gold and silver coins.

  

'Be Yourself Everyone Else Is Taken'

Was a fine aphorism, and a bold expression
of the idea of individuality, in Oscar Wilde's times.
Not that anyone has yet found the quote in his writings.
And as Oscar proved, being yourself could lead
to folly and loss of liberty, depending on the company.

But nowadays being yourself online requires security
that is double, triple, lock and with that a knowledge
of how your security works where you have to believe
your expertise is superior to that of other people,
for you to feel secure enough for you to be happy
in seeking the online life of your choice.

Because, to be clear about this, there is a trade
for material gain in stolen online identities,
where the value of the identity stolen is personal,
but the value of the contraband that can be extracted
through the identity being misused, in this modern,
highly value brand aware society is a lot more
than we can confidently ask. Where the brand
that has the highest value is going to be the trashiest,
and the money it sells at has to be seen to be disbelieved.

More thieves, blackmailers,
and other criminal ne'r do wells
find their vocations online,
than anywhere else in the world. 

It is a good job nobody lives there,
though we may admire how those
with the tightest security make it
the right place to leave the remains
of themselves, for others to find.

Miseducation, Miseducation, Miseducation.....

And he would have been vomiting up all
the homophobia, the racisn and both combined,
along with all the short term coping mechanisms
he ever had to rely upon to keep on writing
until he could stand, talk and trust that he knew
his listener believed him and took him at face value.

 

The Circle Of Life

We don't how circular a life can be made to be,
through habit and vice, as we set out to live it.

But what we can kmow is that when we make
other people's lives even more circular than our own,
even more repetitive they need to be,
they are likely to inflict the same to us, unawares.

We find out, too late, we are going round
in smaller circles than we expected to be
and to break out of circle is doable,
but involves changes we can't repeat. 

Picture Of The Day - The Grey Headed Flying Fox Bat

This is a Grey-headed Flying Fox Bat (Pteropuscpoiocephalus)

                   which is the largest species of bat native to Australia.

               This image shows the bat with her pup clining to her belly.

Never Mind The Quality Feel The Advertising

So far, I have found no interest
in the widely distributed wares
of the many infomedia platforms 
that stream images everywhere
that are supported by adverts
for companies I have never heard of.
Where I wonder why they pay so much
when with the advert they have no point
of contact with so many who are advertised to.

What good reason do they have to be that ubuitious
whilst being otherwise so competely anonymous?

What I do understand is that the adverts exist
to make the programmes seem less like moving wallpaper.  
 

Were You Thinking Of Dropping Out?

It can still be done. Indeed, it is
probably easier in some places
in the world now than it used to be,
though in the midst of diversity
it is harder to be clearer
about what it is sustainable to drop put from.

The approved way of dropping out
used to be getting drunk and forming part
of your local alcohol culture, particularly
polular among maried men who resisted
the full companionship of marriaage.

The disapproved of way to drop out
from the way everyday time was used
- getting money via a job in a factory- 
used to be recreational drugs. But now
both work and drugs have changed,
beyond all recognition. For some dealers,
drugs are both work and pleasure,
and make htem watchful of authority.

The drugs used to be grown naturally, cannabis
and magic mushrooms were the primorose path
to the easier life, supporting the back economy,
where time and profit run on different lines,
and many of the drugs are now synthetic.

The natural drugs were best taken in times
set aside for allowing the changed awareness,
the giggles and the munchies etc that follow
when life seems to be absurdly happily
and nobody at the time know quite why. 

Nowadays the demarcation of a time to drop out
to drop out for a shirt while is more diffficult,
work and leasure intersect in ways that they
never used to. With the 24/7 city-based lives
and our continuous partial attention span,
the drop out life is just not what it used to be.....

Waiting For The World To Resolve Itself

Reading detective fiction is very different
is very different from trying to follow politics
via the running commentaries of the pundits.

What both share is an interest in what makes
readers and followers care about what they follow,
and goads both further, leading them to who did the deed, 
how it was done, and why they did it. With a cast
of engaging side characters who act as collaborators
who aid and abet the lead character on their journey.

Political pundits today have quite the battle
with many world leaders who occupy prime place,
in making their deeds, their wealth, and the way
they lead their country, seems mysterious.

Wrong footing the pundits tracking them,
both when the pundit offers soft ball questions
 that flatter the leader's profile, or when the journalist
finding villainy in the leaders errant accountability,
is easy when the man with power hides how he got it.

It is at times like these that the reliability of fiction,
a good murder story, seems all the more attractive:
the author has a much firmer control of the narrative
than the political pundit who is struggling to discover
where the bodies are buried, and who put them there.
Although the pundit is dealing with real life, and death,
they have a harder time making the reader care
about futures that they can't make any clearer.  

The Dangerous Gods Act

has never been part of international law.

If it were, then I have to ask who would embrace
being seen as the most litigious person to use the act?
And on what grounds, theologicially speaking?
And for what levels of compensation? And last,
but not least, how much are the lawyers going to make?

But we already have enough disreputabe and secretive
international law courts to guide us
as to how such a law might operate.

One of them is the called
The Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement court,
a secretive court that is now in international law
through it being embeded in the small print
of an unknown number of trade deals
between nations, signed over the decades.

There, only the wealthiest private investors
and the biggest trans-national corporations, 
and their lawyers, can contact this secret court,
to sue some community poorer than than their own,
if they have one, for thwarting some major investment
they sought to make, where the population living close
to where the investment was planned have petitioned
their government on grounds that the investment
will destroy habitats that supported life for all, 
or some other ecological, or public health, threat.

The legislation for the ISDS court
could easily be nicknamed
The Dangerous Money Act,
for how unaccountably it defends
the wealthy in the pursuit of ruining other people's back yards.

The United Nations, started in 1948
as an organisation full of victor's hope, and idealism.
By 1959 it had been being undermined from within
by the CIA on manoeuvres. As America pursued
uranium the way it now pursues rare earth metals
but back then the pursuit came fresh after WW2.

Read my review of the documentary film
about that long, sad and sordid episode of history here. 

Passsing The Time

Reading a book is a fine way to the pass the day,
perticularly when what we read proves informative,
as is listenng to speech radio when the news cycle
is not saturated with events that are trailed that often
that the viewer can no longer cope with being told
the news story as is finally digested by the news cyle.

What both share is that they address the past,
whether recently or long ago, which we reread
as something to what we once thought it to be,
that gets us as close as we dare place ourselves
towards imagining what the future might be. 

The Slow Decay Of Democracy

will not be noticed when it happens.
Citizens will be far too taken up
by the effusive greetings, flummery
and shiny new statesmanship, before
becoming aghast at how amateurish
and undiplomatic diplomacy has become
for them to notice when the state
they used to support has been subsumed
into being the coterie of male billionaires
who see their wealth and gender
as the qualifier for all future leadership,
when what their wealth actually proves
is how monoplies can de-nature the talent
and vitality of a democratic system
and devalue the vote to make it worth
less than the paper the ballot is written on.

If this has nor happened in your country yet,
then watch for the early signs of it happening.

It is difficult to reverse the process when it takes hold.

Between Despair And Insanity.

When is it right to despar
of the country you live in?
When you can't tell the difference
between the local sewage industry
and campaigns to renew local democracy:
both have heavily broken delivery systems
that leak very badly. Both smell 'off', toxic.

Particularly when the democracy smells of money,
particularly crypto currency, and presents itself
as the kind of near future many people can read
as long as they think it is that future is for somebody
they don't know of, to live out. There the future
is a lengthy science fiction dystopia, or the despair
of a one of the fourt major Old Testsament prophets.

Whoever follows the sense of loss 
has to choose what distance to keep from it,
to preserve their sense of their sanity.   

The Scale Of My Ambitions

was set so low they did not seem like ambition
at all: I was meant to imitate my parents, and live
within the material means they provided,
accept as a given the second hand uniforms,
and inatentively accept my inatentive schooling.

There it did not matter if I, or anyone else,
'did badly', the teachers got jobs out of it,
parents got their children minded, whilst
the pretence was they were being taught.
The parents could work and live less impeded
by them being parents. My invite was more
to be ignored, then to be valued, anyway. 

Through being me, I failed even the low level
of attemtion/expected achievement expected of me:
to slot myself into place underneath my parents
as part of local life , as a pre-shrunk ready fit adult.

By the time I was set to seek work,
training had been separated from jobs,
employers were paid to train trainees,
but did not employ those they trained,
who nobody wanted. When I applied for local jobs
I stood no chance: employers wanted married women
who would work for less, and stay, however bored
they might get. They had children to clothe and feed,
the way I had been, indifferently, over the last decade.

I was expected to apply for jobs
I was unlikely to get, with alacrity.

Since I had none, I thought education was the ecsape route.
It seemed like a good thing for keeping me occupied,
even if it did not do for me what it was said to do for others: 
make the educated more trainable/employable.

'Too little effort applied too late' would be what employers
thought when I applied for jobs with what I'd learned. 
What that really meant was that I, or my parents, 
had not been competitive enough to demand for me
what employers wanted: I had the wrong family background.

I escaped this catch 22 situation when I found temporary work
in another town. and worked until the temp work ran dry.
With my time being my own I did personal development work,
where in my isolation I improvised who I thought I wanted to be.

If I had understood what the word 'lossleader' meant
-a thing is sold for much less than it is worth, to inspire
cheap grace in future-I would have written myself off,
by agreement with those whp mis-sold the future
to who they felt they needed to sell it to, far far earlier.

What did not kill me made me stranger.

Hubris Heights

From Pharoahs Egypt to modern times,
authoritarian government is the oldest form
of government we know of, though experiments
like democracy were tried, and have been revived.
Key to any government from Theocracy, military state,
to democratic experiment central to them all
is how centralised via bureaucracy is the state?

The pharaohs of Egypt were among the earliest
that achieved high degrees of centalisation.
It is an irony of history that their fame
comes from their former slaves, the Jews.
Who had refined their own centralised
contradictions, on their own, as if how detached
the Jews were from their own internal mechanics
could be disguised, whateve the centralisation
of later empires in Babylon, Greece, Rome, even Islam,
each has left their mark on a world history, the Jews
have unexpectaedly outlived all but one of them.

But  the bigger any human hierarchy gets
the less humane, it becomes, and bigger
the memory of their empires remains,
but as a graveyard  of dimished civilations past.

And even the Jews,
as they embrace Hubris,
may yet join them.  

Signs Of Greater Age (45)

1-Getting a sense of Deja-vu
when looking through the books
in charity and second hand shops
because the best titles you find
are books you read when younger,
and bought at a higher price, prior
to seeing them for less elswhere
not thinking the book might appear
in places you did not expect them to.

2-Still having heroes when you are older
but the older you get the more your heroes
who are alive, and older than yourself
are harder to find, and the most sustainable
heroes exist outside of time-in myth and history. 

3-Unthinkingly thanking Alexa
and those like her after they have done
something you asked them to do:
forgetting that 'she' does not have a gender,
is not human, and grattitude is wasted on her.
But even misplaced grattitude lifts you up
when it helps you forgive mistakes better.      

Formula For The Future

for humans will soon be fore-shortened
as global warming + AI = mass extinction
followed by mass unemployment,
world poverty, and the end of human reason.

Fight Or Flight

is a phrase that needs no explanation in any society
where bullying and being bullied are recognised
as unattractive behaviour that ought to be stopped,
when stopping it is harder than it seems.
The gain the bully gets through his hold
over the situation is hard to dismamtle.

Less recognised where agression is normalised
is one consequence of being bullied: being frozen,
from the bullying that goes on, unrecognised,
unti it all ends where the thought is....
'This behaviour does not have any consequences'.

Frozen agreements look like normal agreements,
informed by consent, but agreements that come
from a lack of presonal space,or choice, are in fact
frozen lives acted out when whoever cares for the result
cares enough that appearances hide what they are not presented as. 

Policeman Quits Job: Shock Headline

When I was seven I asked my dad
at the dinner table, the only time
he was there to be asked anything, 
a sensible adult 'real life' question.

His reply stunned me to an awkward silence.

I asked my dad about how to deal
with bullies [in primary school].
His reply to me was brief, simple,
and indegestible: 'Hit them first'.

I could not process what he said.
I'd seen him angrily throttle my mother
last Christmas, not that I was meant
to have seen that. It all happened
too fast to move me to where I
might not have watched it happen.

I was too young to know how Christmas
was oversold, or how the expectations it raised
created a discontent that could not be quenched, 
once ingited, much less that dad was an alcoholic.

The argument between them blew up,
without warning, right in frront of me.
Following dad's logic I could not see
how he saw my mother as the bully
who he had to hit before she hit him.

She made his meals, washed his clothes,
looked  after his money, and saved him
from a lot of the duties of being a parent. 

How was I meant to process this violence
between adults, when reparations were so private? 
How was I to follow his advice in school,
where the logic behind rules was so much
more complicated than I could explain to myself? 

Fast forward over fifty years, and ordinary Americans
scratch their heads, much the way I once did,
to share their incomprehension at the new
'hit then first, partially explain later' foriegn policy,
where change is heaped on change, until there are
too many wars in the world to explain their origins.

And the former world policeman
has changed sides and quit his job,
signaling he wants to join in with the enmity.    

The Fog Of Post War Rationing

Post war rationing after WW2 ended in 1954,
but a new rationale was ushered in after that:
men were heroes because they 'won the war',
where children were taught to not ask
why their dads were so often absent,
and their mothers were firmly tied to the kitchen,
and could not work, even though, previously,
when single, they had been required to work
in munitions factories and do the jobs for half the pay
that men had done before those better paid men
were trained by the government for life on the war front.

Being a bully was what reinforced
the fog of post WW2 rationing best,
not just in the 1960s, but for many decades after. 

Nobody bullied other people better
back then, and lied about it to themselves
to those around them, than the alpha male
heads of households who measured out
their sense of entitlement in the units of alcohol
they consumed with their equals in the pub,
each night, where with the alcohol induced psychosis
and depressions they doled out on their family,
the family submitted to the head who 'keep order'. 

Everyone could see how those
who the male heads of households froze,
removed all fight and flight from, but....
nobody could not put into words
how the freezing worked, the language
that put the controlling male in charge
was frozen, along with the family.

The result was labelled 'acceptance'.

Anyone who defrosts themselves much later
through sober, mature, and co-equal company
can wonder at who they might have been
and where they might have gone in the world 
had their parenting been more actively helpful.

From The Energy Of Slaves To The Latest Energy War

If in it's first phase, American wealth
was built on the energy of black African slaves,
which like industrial slavery across the world
had to be euphemised after it was ended,
to dignify a history that were it honestly told,
and accounted for fully, quoting the accountant's ledgers
it would be a self perpetuating cause for eternal shame.

The accounts of the discovery of coal, morse telegraphy,
and railways, though the American civil wars,
was the biggest demonstration of their uses
these three major new discoveries could be put to.

Where civil wars led, American corporations
led later where the imitation of life through peace,
but even more for indiviual profit, resided ever after.

Fracking for oil had barely been discovered
in America, so the civil war was the last war
where the control of oil was not
what the war fought over. That said....

The precedent of oil being the reason for the war,
the control of the energy the world  relied on,
had been set by arguments that justifying slavery
being at the core of why America went to civil war,
and the reason behind the Jim Crow laws after.

Fast forward umpteen wars over oil later,
and whilst oil is still the root cause
behind every global conflict in the world,
the world is now divided by digital conflicts.

There data is the new energy and and the more
data individuals put on line for the Tech Bros
to own, the more like the economic systems
of ownership that that once made slavery
the acme of Hellish levels of inequality 
the use of the internet is returning us to.

When we don't own what we write,
we are free to write what we want,
from '***k you' to 'I'm glad we agree',
but getting cotrol of the medium
you write it on has to be the aim.   

Anything else is being dishonest
about how little you/we all own
when we don't own our language.

Citizens of totalitarian countries
and empires already know this
and find it amost existentialist
to find how behind every fascade
and screen of their county's internet
it leads them back to their government,
from which they can never exit.  

Reasons For Disbelieving A.I. Pt 3

This advert on an electronic billboard in Bristol
Airport compounds everything about A.I. I distrust.
It is glossy and slick, it is for a service where the need
is less than the advertisers think, and the male minds
behind it have not thought further than female=cheaap
and practically infinite. When in the real world
 real women want men, want everyone to be real.
 Not fantasists mislead by the doom loops they create
       with technology they don't know they don't have control of.     

 

Money May Talk

And find an easy audience
for what it has to say, 
when it may well talk.

But it does not listen.

Is that why humans
so readily follow
where money goes:
to find the currency
of intentionally avoiding
listening to themselves?  

In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.

Ars Longa Est, Vita Brevis Est

Cave art from caves in Spain.

Where we can't know when or how
the images became depicted on the cave walls

Or even the species that created them.

What we can guess is that the images they left were
what they might have dreamt about.

 If only our dreams could be made that simple
-then the future of the panet might be more assured.....

 

Dante's Guide To The Internet

Where the higher the number of the circle of Hell
in which you can locate your activities, the more you know
what you may be condemned for. Oddly enough
what I did not see listed there are the writers
of criminal viruses that affect many computers,
unawares. But maybe the whole thing is an infection
in itself and we cannot assume that there are saints
and good guys among the Billionaire tech giants,
that is credulity stretched too far.  

 

The Misleader Of The Free World

and his friends, the tech billionaires,
may own nearly everything a billionaire
could think to want. But what this new 
hyper-weathy generation do not have
is the what Roman Generals and Emperors
knew was very necessary: their persomal auriga,
the servant who was trusted to follow
the leaders as they were cheered on
by the crowds to whisper in their ears
phrases like 'Remember you are not a god', 
'Look behind you remember you are a man',
You are not Jupiter*', 'Fame is fleeting' 
and finally 'Momento mori', to remind
the great to limit how they were worshiped
by the masses from making them delusional.

*Jupiter was the Supreme Roman deity
for the sky, light, and for thunder.
He oversaw the laws, and social order.
He protected the Roman state.
and was depicted carrying a thunderbolt.
He was associated with the eagle.
As the Son of Saturn and Ops,
he was brother to Juno (his consort),
Vesta, Ceres, Neptune, and Pluto.
He overthrew his father, Saturn, to lead the Pantheon.  

Persecution And Sufffering

Will come to us all as individuals
from around the globe and across the earth
as life breathes through us. The persecutiions
that seem the worst disguise themselves
until they are recognised being calibrated
through calendars, and set to time limits,
throuhg which they burn out, in real time.
Until real time becomes a history by which,
if we can recall it accurately, we may measure
some of the possible suffering and reward to come. 

Some suffer knowing their suffering is finite
though they can't know how it will end
or what their reward for enduring it will be.

Other people suffer and project that their suffering
will be the sole cause of the end of the world
something that they tell one and all is imminent.

I understand suffering and privatiion well enough.
I also appreciate that it can seem disporportionate
but I simply don't 'get' how the suffering of anyone
alive now, or in recent or modern times, can say
that their suffering is that central to the future
of all time and space throughout the universe,
such that they should command the collective attention
of the billions alive of that apex species: Homo Sapiens.

That self absorbed path leads one way only: towards insanity.

Picture Of The Day - Reflections Of A Tricoloured Heron

This is a Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor)
with material for the nest for itself
and it's partner. 

 

In The Alphabet Of Unrecognised Neglect

 'A' stood for abandonment-the rupture children felt
when they were taken to school and left with strangers.
'B' stood for bereavement and the sudden loss of the familiar:
family surroundings, friends, toys, routine, even home food.
Teacheers and carers called this “homesickness” and trusted 
that it would pass when the children had no such sense of certainty.
'C' stood for  captivity, the realisation that there was no way out
from rigid and often punishing routines, no escape, though some tried it.
This often lead to 'D',  dissociation and  the development of a false self
that the child felt helped them appear be brave, and survive the situation
whilst cutting them off  from their truer self without them realising it.

And so this alphabet goes on whilst the author of the theory behind it,
Joy Schaverien (1943 - 2025) outlines the theory of 'Boarding School Syndrome',
where what is presented as a materially privileged life hides from parents,
puupils, and the staff who ran boarding schools a multi-generatonal sense of loss
where difficulties with intimacy are passed of as 'normal'. The recognition
of life-long mental health problems is slow to arrise, waiting until adulthood
for the neccesity of therapy to be clear, where the syndrome gets easier to use
as an excuse to explain away previoiusly unexplained offhand behaviour. 

But that is the world some people, lots of people, live in.
Some of my best friends might recognise this picture
and remember how I used to behave, without knowing
that I grew up in a care home for five yearss, where I
saw my parents for thirteen weeks of the year. When I left
the home I had no close friends: I left who I knew behind.

I have survived: in a country with the safety net
of a welfare state and a strong charity sector
people will. But I find thatt the safety nett
for retrospectivle repairing my mental health,
and the family the helps indiduals connect for life
are harder to recognise and find. I have what is left
of my true self, which the care home cared enough
to not touch, when with hindsight it easily could have.

For a fuller explanation
of Boarding School Syndrome
than what I have room for
on this blog please left click here.

Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child by Joy Schaverien 

No Mow May

Is the time to not mow the grass
if Britsh gardeners can bare to watch
as the grass grows, and insterad comfort
themselves by the lives of the insects
living in the grass being extended,
by their now quiet lawnmowers.

Picture Set Of The Month - May - The Oil Paintings Of Ray Lowry

'Two Ladies (Coach and Horses)', as pianted by Ray Lowry
in the early 1970s before he became known for the
cartoons he became famous for. He painted the Coach 
and Horses pub, a pub he no doubt frequented, several times.  

'Early Evenng', capturing two friends and a mother
 with her chidren crossing each others paths
outside the Coach and Horses in Cadishead. Early 1970s.

'Bus Stop - Manchester' as painted in the early 1970s
by Ray Lowry. A Summer street scene set in suburban Manchester.
.

'Road Sweeper' - Ray Lowry, early 1970s. I discovered
the creativity of Ray through his satirical cartoons
that punctured the pomp of the music industry,
in the New Musical Express. 

 

 

Moon Of The Month - The Flower Moon

The Flower Moon is the name given to the spring moon, 
defined by the lushness of the new growth of vegetation
after the plain times of winter become distant memories.

Farmers in there more sentimental moments
 write of the flower moon in their almanacs.

Whilst city folk, lost to the cycles of nature
 beyond the greening of their cities may look up
in their quieter moments and wonder
 at the trees and hear the  birdsong
 as the birds sing louder to hear each other 
in the parks over above the noise of the nearby city.

 

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

After the recently abandoned Whitehouse press dinner, where the guests enjoyed their Pea and Burrat salads, the lobster and steak  had to be given to the poor when the room was abandoned, I find the conspiracy theories far too politically partisan and cliched to be either credible or amusing. I prefer to wonder why for his latest non-event the present Misleader of The Free World chose as cover for getting out of an event he did not want to attend to re-enact the plot of the 1972 French film 'The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie', where privileged but corrupt guests try repeatedly to set up a dinner date for themselves, and with each attempt increasingly bizzare and absurd reasons stop them sitting down and eating. Until at the last attempt, the meal is disprupted by hails of gunfire so the guests scuttle to hide under the tables, one guest (see picture above) stealing a snack from the table. The film ends with the guests emptily walking down an empty road, the credits rolling down the screen. Nobody dies. How unlike real life in gun cultures around the world, where life is so expendable it seems to be worth misrepresenting. How surreal, how civilised....     

                                       

 

The Unanswerable Question

If the collective noun for existentialists was 'an angst'
what should the same term be for a loose collection of outsiders?

You'd Better Disbelieve It

 I do my best to steer clear of the new, ever more flexible,
digital colouring-in books of the kitchy fantasy cartoons
of A.I. based imagery that now passes for politics.
But the perveyors of this new media find such fanasies
so easy to create, and they know most about how much
such images undercut the arguments of legacy media
that deep, far, and fast, it is no longer a fair competition.

I don't need to use that many brain cells to know
how absurd this politics-by-meme is. I understand
how infantile the arguments behind  these images are.
But amid the faster moving logarithms of social media
it is hard to find a more grown up politics that explains
the matters the and media that leaver me better informed.
For those I turn to BBC radio programmes and podcasts. 

On Becoming Naturally Anti-Social

And this was when I still went to parties,
I can't remember the last party I attended.
I am sure I left an impression of weakness. 

 

A Joke In A Recent Russian Newspaper

 'Can you tell me where I can get
a long term low interest mortgage?'

Answer: 'in 2018.....  '. 

My Appreciation of Nicolai Gogol

One of the plays I will always admire is
'A Government Inspector' by Nocolai Gogol,
for how much it scripts the vanity, delusion,
and sheer pettiness of life in a nuclear family
in the smal town I grew up in, in Midlands England.

There we had not the humour to realise
when we were being played for a joke
when how we lived became the punchline.

The locals took at face value each announcement
of some bright new future that was never to arrive
until the next announcement of the next future
that never arrived, and the promised future after that.
Until, when the announcements were added together
nobody knowing from which point in the past
they should have started to feel the dissapointment.

I started to feel better about the present
soon after I left the town, though
it took me many years to work out why,
not realising how limited the future
that I imagined for myself was going to be.

Now when I hear a politician say
'We need to listen to the communities',
I wryly smile at the prospect, and wonder
when meeting what my communty could ask them
that they and their minders are capable of delivering......    

Film Review - 'The Titticut Follies' - Frederick Wiseman

Some of the films I see I know nothing about before I go to see them. Oh I could check up, but I prefer to go to be surprised and I know how much, well, some experimental films have high reputation which the everyday viewer will find confusing and disappointing after the film made it's reputation. So what chance did I have with a 1967 documentary filmed in an American asylum for the criminally insane?

Not as much chance as I hoped is the short answer. To put this in context Frederick Wiseman was a documentary film maker who made fifty film documentaries over fifty eight years, which are now being shown in cinemas again, after his recent death aged 95. The British Film Institute called him 'A towering figure'. 'For whom, outside the BFI?' would be a good question for the more ordinary cinema goer to ask.....

But back to 'The Titticut Follies'. It was a difficult film to watch, and process first time in the cinema for several reasons. The first reason is that to complete this film Wiseman had to wrestle control of the material from his colaborator John Marshall and edit it secretely using borrowed equipment. It was only Wiseman's second film as director. It is a film on which he was learning his craft, using a diffficult subject. The second reason is that the film has very little sense of a rythm in the way the material onscreen is cut and shaped. A third reason is that with the filming being in black and white and so apparently poorly edited, the film seems amateurish. But the biggest reason the film is confusing is the subject matter, mostly distressed mental patients who lived in an instiution where only the doctors have any exit from the insanity. If they were  'the control sample', the measure of sanity, the film does not thell the audience that, except most obliquely in how the staff are the performers for the patients at the review, the follies filmed at the beginniing and the end of the film. Not that the viewer is told that the staff are the performers and the audience are the patients, this is 1966. And this is Bridgewater, Massachusetts. 

The institution colours the paitent's every word. The biggest differnce between the paitents and the staff is that the staff are phyically calmer than the patients, but both talk only in terms of where they are. 

The film starts and ends with a revue. The audience don't know who is performing for who with the review. Show songs dominate the revue. In between the show songs the criminally insane seem to lead live where the staff provide a limited structure, where one of the more clear headed patients explains that he asked for help from a social worker, was directed to Bridgewater, and seems to have been dumped there with no route out of the instution.  Medication is heavy part of why he unfit to leave. There were two scenes depicting the treatment of the dead for burial and one scene of what I took to be last rites. The quiet efficiency with which the dead were handled provided some of the calmest, more composed, moments in the film.

So after probably eighty mins of depictions of poorly structured lives, partial depictions of routines where there was no voice over the tell the viewer where the narrative was going or where the film might go next, the film ended by repising the beginning. The nearest to an explanation became two points, one of them made by commentators on the film that I found elsewhere. One was that state policy in the state where the criminaly insane  were being kept had changed when the film was made, 1966, but the staff of the hospital were resisting change. 'Who else was resisting change? audiences might well ask. The aim of the change in policy was to close down the old huge instutions where people disappeared forever, in favour of smaller, more manageable units which could focus with more clarity on the rehabilitation and the reform of criminals. The second point was put on the screen. 

At the time the film was made it was banned-part of my curiosity about it was that it had been banned as a film, to finally be seen by the public in 1991. Why was the film banned? I would answer that just as the criminally insane were left in in instiutions and hidden away from the general public 'for the public's good', so depictions of the criminally insane were banned from being seen by the public also also.

After much petitioning the film was released to be seen by the public in 1991, over thirty years after it was made and long after any point it made seemed cogent, beyond the point about self reinforcing censorship that works like a super-injunction. The film was permitted a release to the general public only with a statement from a judge at the start of the closing credits that Bridgewater no longer treats criminal mental matters this way, saying nothing about the fact that evidently Bridgewater at one time did treat criminal insanity in exactly the way the film depicted.

Seeing the film, even sixty years after it was made, was partly about unpicking how censorship rules work over the fifty states across the USA, rules which the USA might prefer to maintian did not exist, in some oblique 'Nothing to see here, please move along' type legal judgements.

The good news here is that portions of the film are available to be watched on youtube, netflix and other media vendors, where the disjointed depictions of disjointed lives due the nature of the instiutionalisation of those labelled 'criminally insane' make more sense broken up into shorter, still random, sequences. If the viewer on youtube etc feels like voyeur then so did the visitors of Victorian insane asylums who used the payments the visitors made to see and believe they were not insane, towards the upkeep of the institution....       

He Is Not The Messiah, He Is A Very Naughty Boy

Thank you for your attention to this matter.