The Gift Lost In Transit

I took up painting less than ten years ago
and greatly enjoyed it. I had read art books
for decades and long been absorbed
by the way shape and colour, usually in oils,
blended to create memorable images.
When I started I was nearly self-taught
and I had the enthusiasm of a convert.
I felt renewed by how the process filled time.
I particularly like the paintings that 'failed',
-this left me more to do to finish them.
My hero in paint was alive in my lifetime
-Syd Barrett - a free-but-fragile-spirit
who's talent was never tied to money.
I even wrote about his brief period
as a popular writer/musician.
By accident I manage to sell one painting,
equaling the record of van Gogh-
the buyer asked my closest friend for it,
and some other pictures found homes
on the walls of friends houses,
whilst existing in versions online.

But six months ago I had to move,
and leave behind the spaces
I had set up to paint in. Until recently
I did not have had time to paint.
But every time I have set up and tried
in the new space I feel like a child
faced with a meal who is just not hungry,
and does not know why....    

Positive Negativity

Many people I know hate hospitals
and yet have had to stay in them
in exceptional circumstances.
The first measure of them getting better
is their ability to complain when the care
imposed on them is nearer carelessness,
than they care to think, and food is terrible.
The second measure of improvement
is their ability to refuse help and services
that are no help to them, and the best
comes when they devise their own cures,
the better to heal on their own terms.

Absent Messages

The media often ask
'when Artificial Intelligence will arrive?'
And 'How they will we know it is here?'
But this question has already run past us 
-when television was a new mass medium
many parents assumed it had intelligence
-because it spoke to them in a language
they they thought they understood.
Many made it the child-minder-at-the-press-of-a-button.
Another labour saving gadget to give them ease
through disengagement. And it was sort-of free
(via an annual license fee paid by all to the BBC).
Most vitally it saved parents the awkwardness
of asking relatives they privately disliked depending on
to look after their children, and give them free time,
particularly when they knew that their relatives time
was just of just as much of value to them.

Parents only began to complain
when children went on the blink,
from overuse of this distant, absent, minder
-by which time it was too late.
What parents unthinkingly mistook
for artificial intelligence reflected
their own well nurtured lack of thought.

Domestic Heresies (4)

'Expectations are dangerous
when they are both high and unformed'-
'We Need To Talk About Kevin' Lionel Shriver

The Freedom To Be Ill

Work makes us free,
and work makes us ill.
This sickening freedom
is ours to accept or refuse
-within certain limits.

Whatever we choose,
have foisted upon us,
or most likely accept
with reluctant passivity, we suffer.

To make a virtue of our pain
we turn it into a breezy willfulness.
The greater our freedom from pain
the greater the load on others,
the less we feel our own burden.

A Well Phrased Question

Whatever we want to be when we give up, 
growing up will make it more likely.

The Domestic Explanation Of The Trickle-Down Effect

Every week a man gets a wage packet and hides it from his wife who hides the fact from the children how he hides his wages from her. Every week he gives her just enough to keep his house in his estimation. She never knows how much he earns and can never find out. That is a secret hatched between the factory, him, and his work mates, a secret which the latter two parties like to forget daily on the way to the pub-the only entertainment fit for the detached Alpha Male.

But she knows that however much she looks after the house (which is in his name alone) and the children (who to himself he disowns, though he acknowledges them to her so she won't be openly offended) what he needs to deny is how household prices will always go up. This extorts her to make the money stretch further and heightens the art the poor have of concealing their ordinary and everyday poverty from themselves. In the long term this makes thrift surreal and genuine relief from poverty impossible-the covering up becomes more important than the intended effect of respite, even though respite would remove the need to cover up. As long as he gets his steak every Saturday as his treat with which to torment the family by feeding it to the cat when the the steak is cold, because he has had too much to drink that day* then all is well in the household and shall be forever. That poverty concealed is poverty maintained, and mothers conceal far more than they ever reveal about poverty by burying win/lose logic buried in unlistenable cliches about the past** is beside the point.

Amplify this story and you get to know how governments worldwide say they deal with their poorer citizenry and end up giving themselves more rights over their citizens than their citizens have over them. This makes poverty cheap to create and easy to maintain. This can be maintained as long the government are brazen enough and those they create poor enough that they cannot leave to where life might be better.


*My father did this every Saturday night for 25 years, always insisting that he was offered steak and always drinking too much because the the pub stayed open long enough at lunch time for him to come home feeling ill enough to take up a prime place in the house to rest in. His being ill made everyone very quiet and created quite an atmosphere.

**My mothers most personal subject of conversation was how she suffered for me when she was a teenager in WW2. The 'for me' bit was a classic guilt trip and like much false patriotism it worked very well. She suffered whilst men were dying in action in their thousands daily and vast landscapes were rendered sterile through bombing, and with much less complaint than she used. What she suffered was being given clothes by friends of her parents to get around the clothing ration, after which her parents friends' children would then point out to her the previous ownership of the clothing. She implied that her suffering was patriotic which to her meant that we had to do what she wanted. I now view it as how peer pressure becomes bullying amid relative poverty so far back from the front line that the only evidence that there was a war on was rationing.