In Memory Of....

Treasure lives where the heart lies,
where Moth and rust make honest dust,
compared with human aspiration.

Matthew ch.6 v.21.

Grief And Grieving

are both personal processes.

For them to be authentic
to the loss that they observe
they must surely be private,
or rather reserved for the few
with a similar sense of loss
for the person who is grieved for.

To live 'amid a national grief'
is to live where nothing seems real.
It is to live where the media
compounds individual losses 
until they lack all individuality.

The presentation of loss
simultaneously represents
everybody and nobody,

The listener soon becomes inured
to what they hear, immune to the grief
for being unable to recognise the grievers.

Diversity Based On Privilege

is one of the many oxymoronic,
and conflicted, figures of speech
that since it exists in public life
has to be embodied in Politics.

As Politics amplifies this paradox
with 'culturally diverse' cabinets
packed with people who all went
to the sort of school where the fees
are investments in future elites, 
and the women who are picked to lead
are chosen and voted for by as few people
as seems it seems decent to admit,
the better to benefit as few as possible,
all the public can ask is how long it takes
before their organised estrangement
shows up in the leader's poll ratings. 

By then it will be too late for reform.
or reversing the slide towards decline
that benefiting just the few engenders.

Everything Fades To Red,

and fades to nothing in the end.
All nature wants to disappear,
As who we once were,
what we did, and why we did it,
are misremembered by the living
for whom mis-ascribing the past
is how they live, their tribute
 to everything around them.   

 

When One Mask Is Never Enough

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Danger in riches. — Only (s)he who has spirit ought to have possessions: otherwise possessions are a public danger. For the possessor who does not know how to make use of the free time which his possessions could purchase him will always continue to strive after possessions: this striving will constitute his entertainment, his strategy in his war against boredom. Thus in the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are transformed into actual riches – riches which are in fact the glittering product of spiritual dependence and poverty. They only appear quite different from what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to mask themselves with art and culture: for they are, of course, able to purchase masks. By this means they arouse envy in the poorer and the uncultivated – who at bottom are envying culture and fail to recognize the masks as masks – and gradually prepare a social revolution: for gilded vulgarity and histrionic self-inflation in a supposed ‘enjoyment of culture’ instil into the latter the idea ‘it is only a matter of money’ – whereas, while it is to some extent a matter of money, it is much more a matter of spirit.”  - Aphorism no 310, pages 283/4 from 'Human all too Human; A Book for Free Spirits' (1996) by Frederick Nietzsche   

Picture Set Of The Month - September - The Album Art Of Sun Ra

Sun Ra (1914-93) was America's best kept
secret and the leading exponent of free jazz
from the times of his earliest recordings in the 1940's.  

His first recordings were blues singles but he hit
stride with his Arkestra jazz LP 'Sun Song' in 1957.
Here is an informed article with plenty more of the
record sleeves that so illustrate his sense of space. 

He was a conscientious objector in WW2 and settled 
on doing forestry work in lieu of military service,
White psychiatrists described him as 'Sexually
perverted and a well educated coloured intellectual'.  

Here is a 1976 live version of familiar tune
'Take the A train', which illustrates the avante garde
nature of black futurism, his gift to Black America.
by Sun Ra and his Arkestra 

 

How Real Hell is....

Depends on where you live in Europe
or the UK. That said belief an any sort of afterlife
or in Heaven/Nirvana/Paradise is either a sign
of the comfort that richest award themselves
or of extreme naivety about the world we live in.

Finally this survey tells us nothing about how much
Hell might have invested in us through making us
disbelieve in it, to varying degrees, whilst waiting
to make itself real at the end of human experience.