The Worlds Biggest Liars

'The invisible hand' that widens the market place
is itself driven by the law of unintended consequences
as one random decision begats another in a chain
where the results can be both benign and appalling.

That markets only ever celebrate success,
and always bury failure is part of their nature.

We can speak with pride
on being the worlds biggest liars,
particularly when we speak about ourselves. 

Absolute Safety

In these days of everyday trigger warnings
telling me of emotional issues ahead,
from trauma to anxiety, panic and worse
the trigger warnings that alarm me the most
are trigger warnings about more trigger warnings.

They are what tells me that there is nothing else
that there is nothing I should be hearing about.... 

Six Degrees

One recent idea about how people live
is called 'six degrees of separation'.
The idea became the basis for a play
and then it became a film,
before entering into the woozy mess
of mass public forgetfulness.

Less celebrated is it's older cousin,
who is so old nobody knows how old it is.
It is called 'Six degrees of denial'
and the hostility it hides lurks
in logarithms of our smartphones. 

Hierarchies of Empathy

The wealthy who know only wealth
are the least sensitive about how others live.

Animals have more empathy for the human poor
than human beings have for themselves,
and then poor humans, reduced by circumstance
turn empathy into bitter sentimentality.

Nor do the rich have 'common sense',
because their money covers what they lack inside.
So they don't have to think at all beyond those like them.

But the human poor have to have more sense than money
-without sense they would end up with nothing
and still they spend more than enough of their lives
knocking all the sense out of each other.

When 'the last will be first and the first will last'*
we will be living in a truly different order.


*Mathew Chapter 20 Verse 16

How Full Is Your Cup?

I like 'spiritual retreats',
I appreciate the detachment
that they relieve their attendees,
of everyday stuff of life
that wears everybody down.

Though there has to be a simplicity
to the place for it to really do it's work.

The good they do is like everything-limited.
One limit they have is that visits have be repeated
for the good they do to keep on working.

And they cannot not give folks rest
from intractable issues like long term illness,
or a tiredness of life, for which there is no respite.

But a cup that sometimes half fills and leaks
is better than one that when empties, stays empty.

Popular Turn Off's (11)

Like the rest of the us,
popular singers will die.

When they die of old age
they are no longer the rage
that they were of old.
There is always a last lie
which they insist be told
to burnish their reputation.

Their (living) fellow musicians
always tell of the last major project
that they had made plans for,
the foundations for which were laid.
But it was so far short of ready.

The definitive proof of the plan
is the project will be talked about
but never be heard by the public,
who are told that it was so incomplete
that nobody knows what to do with it.

So the public never find out
what was real and what was not.


. 

Photo Set Of The Month-September

One dog rightly taking no notice of who brought him there;
the smells and evidence of other animals is far more engaging. 

The height of the valley reflected in the lake
whilst bathed in the early morning sunlight

Mist on the lake.

Reflections of the trees near the opposite shore on the water.
All pictures taken a September morning in Caylus.