Mahler Symphonies-A Guide

Because the memory of the music we enjoy
can be as easily lost as it is gained.    

 

Don't Say Anything But....

The major aspect of secrecy
for those who live with others
who kept secrets from them
is how alike different secrets seem,
such that as the secret keeper hides
what their secrets are about, the clearer
it will seem that something is hidden.

So if you want to hide some facts of life
from somebody else, say your children,
then make sure they can't confuse
what your different secrets are about.

You could accidentally reveal
what you are trying to hide
when there is too much of it.

The Selective Subconscious

As described by the father of psychiatry
is one where if a child describes
an adult sexually assaulting them 
then the child is describing a fantasy.
It did not actually happen. 

Even though of the two,
child and adult, the latter
has more of an awareness of a choice
of behaviour, and will decide for both,
what both of them will say and do,
and what would be admitted to, after.

Whereas when a teenage boy yearns
for the sense of space, the freedom to act,
that he sees in the property owning adults
around him, who he is the property of
and they own the space they act in,
and he expresses that yearning as power
-the death of his father,
and sex-the rape of his mother
then he explores them in Oedipal terms. 

Because Oedipus was the fictional character
who could not recognise the distance
his parents intentionally kept from him,
fearing the curse that had been cast on him
when he was an infant. 

Is every child that adults keep
at such a distance from them so cursed?
Discuss..... 

It seems banal to ascribe
'double standards' to the reasoning
that justifies the detachment of the adults
who own everything there is to be owned
which also bars intelligent children
from the partial self knowledge
of identifying how to grow out
of 'being cared for'.

Children who have no choice
but to be disbelieved
make thoroughly disbelieving adults.

How Ready Am I To Meet My Replacement ?

I was a teenager in 1980 when first read 'Future Shock', first published in 1970. Like many a teenager trapped in the culture of television I thought I was clever for being able to read books. But I was not as clever as I projected myself as being, and I was slow to appreciate that reading is different from understanding and contextualising what you read.

  I had no helpers to help me appreciate the difference between understanding something and thinking I was clever. My family did not read books, they confined their reading to the red top, tabloid, press. Even now-well over thirty years on from being confined by the values of my family I have been slow to recognise what their values were, as expressed via their choice of newspaper.

  But I will explain afresh what a tabloid newspaper is. In every class in every school, with the exception of physical education class time, the class will organise itself into a hierarchy where the most earnest and intelligent pupils will flatter the teacher in the hope of learning more, and receiving more praise than other pupils. The least interested in learning will form a clique where the more distracted and inattentive they can be of their surroundings, the safer they feel. The Tabloid Press are the written equivalent of that clique. With every headline what matters more than it's veracity is how excruciating the pun in it is. Headlines were never meant to inform, if they did they were thought of as failures. My  choice of news in my parents house was like their choice for my schooling, it came from the dunces corner and it delighted in it's own opacity towards and about itself. 

  I don't know how I coped with wanting more of something that I had to imagine what it was in the first place, when I could not see what I wanted around me. My wanting always brought me into ritual disagreements with dad, where because he paid for everything in the house then, however differently the world thought. he was always right. His money being the only money we were meant to acknowledge made him right. There was no point in inferring that he might be wrong or saying that his way of skewing the facts was 'the love of money' via how information was seen. He dismissed The Bible, where the phrase 'the love of money is the root of evil' comes from, as much as he dismissed everything he did not want to know about, because for him how he bought and owned anything he wanted trumped everything outside of him, excluding the weak jokes that daily formed the headlines in the tabloid press.

  Fast forward over forty years and I know what the tabloid press is good for, starter material for lighting fires with. But to reverse back to when I was struggling to know better. When I first read 'Future Shock' I was slow to realise that I might in some way live out what the book predicted. The back story in the book was how the technology of the industrial revolution simplified and replaced a lot of hard physical labour that if it was poorly paid at least gave the people that performed it a life, even if it was a hard life, with less choice than it promised to offer.

  The factory my dad worked in closed when I was a teenager. It had been at it's most fully developed sixty years earlier, during WW1. Before the hangars for air planes were built and air flight was popular it was the largest covered space in Europe, perhaps the world. It was built before the era of electricity being delivered everywhere, so it had tall windows for the space inside to be lit by, underneath high ceilings. The acoustics of the building when all the machines in it were working must have been appalling. The height of the building, coupled with it's proximity to the workers houses, made it so imposing a structure that even when it was useless, and nothing was happening inside, the local reaction to it as building was to feel frozen by it. 

  If there were buildings in other places in the world that were white elephants, useless gifts to the populations they were meant to serve, then such buildings were at least decorative, palaces, cathedrals and other designs of buildings that combined awe and wealth, then the locals could convert the buildings into museums for tourists to visit. This structure was a living example of future shock, a past that was clearly redundant in the present, where nobody could say so. Back when it was first closed the explanation for it's closure was that the latest attempt to make the space produce something where there was a clear profit from what the space produced, thus justifying it in terms of profit and loss, had been a financial failure. It was at least the third, and maybe the fifth, financial and industrial major relaunch in ten years. 

  What Toffler was writing about was happening around us, we were part of rustbelt England. As long as the way it was described flattered the locals and was written up in terms of the latest relaunch, as THE WAY FORWARD, then it seemed rude and lacking in deference to point out the previous failed relaunches, as rude as pointing out to a woman who thought she was attractive the obviousness of her latest adventures in plastic surgery.

  From memory what Toffler wrote was not party-political in the sense of 'left' and 'right'. He was  neither anti-union or pro-union, anti-boss or pro-boss. But he observed how the newer the technology was the more it would be inherently pro-boss, because it saved more physical labour and cut into, and divided, the cohesive-ness of what remained of work force. The replacement for my dads space in space in the factory in which he changed roles many time was going to be an empty space, a ghost because the machines he and hundreds of other labourers once worked were going to be removed,

  What was I going to do, with no footsteps to follow except to the dole office? Nothing to 'inherit', no place of work to continue to be part of, even if as tradition went, such a tradition was invented? Everyone I might have asked avoided that question. They knew that the money that once flowed through the town because the factory my father worked was producing something, even at a loss, was going to flow a different direction in future. There was no obvious means of attracting the old money back.      

  My generation was the generation who became useless with their hands, as technology and the money with which to be skilled was withheld made them idle. I became subservient to whoever thought the least of youth in general, as long, as governments paid them as bosses to make youths like me appear to be useful, whilst making sure we became useless and lost all confidence in ourselves. Anyone who lacks confidence can be manipulated into the imitation of being useful, and conmen and manipulative people like people who are half-useful, they can manipulate half-useful people for some secondary advantage those they manipulate don't understand.

  I remain unsure that Toffler meant the lesson from his book to be that bitter. But one of the qualities I value most now is the faith I have that I have the strength to outlive the bitterness and evasiveness of the world that I was brought up in, which I now recognise it with rueful hindsight. If any machine wants to replace me as a writer the way machinery replaced my father's job, then let it imitate my personal history of being half-educated and then displaced on the jobs market or replaced by technology. 

  Such a machine had better be ready to defend itself in the world, against the machine that will want to replace it, before the attempted takeover happens.

What Will We Be Extremists For?

On this date in 1963 Martin Luther King
wrote a letter from his prison cell
in Birmingham, Alabama.

He was responding to criticism aimed at him
from unnamed white church leaders who said
his peaceable campaign for colour blind parity
was 'untimely and unwise'.

The letter was called
'Letter From a Birmingham Jail',
and it is proof of how scripture,
as it says it is, was meant to be used
to provide constructive rebukes
when a people fall into error.

It is also a short history lecture. 

It is forty paragraphs long,
here is a link to the whole text,
here is a link to Dr King reading it out.
The gist of it is contained in one phrase.

'The question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be.
Will we be extremists for hate or love?'    

Triggers Seem To Be Everywhere Nowadays

Some are metaphorical, as in literature
which the young seem to need warnings
about what they encounter on the page,
as if reading were some risky activity
where words are weapons that have
to have safety catches put on them.

Other triggers are invisible,
and have been left hidden,
how well I remember my parents
used television as a child minder
and not knowing what I watched,
that I mistook for 'mature adult viewing'.

But the triggers that most need
a safety catch on them are those
on guns, in 'the land of the free'
where 'the right to bear arms'
is not an invite to roll up your sleeves
on sunny days, but the right,
backed by corporate gun sales advocates,
to replace the government when the citizen
wants to believe that gov't needs replacing.

However incompetent government gets
replacing it with gun based anarchy will solve nothing  

Some Rubbish Humour

And the wonder is that it is multi-lingual humour too.