'This Blinding Absence Of Light' (3)

 is much like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,

it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoner' will to live.

But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...

Chapter 8 Page 35

'So, for eighteen years, more precisely, for 6,663 days, I was nourished only on starchy food and dry bread. Never any meat. Never any fish. Nourished is not the word. Kept alive. It did not take me long to forget cigarettes, I didn't even suffer through the miserable deprivation that drove Larbi-Number 4-off his head. He would scream, rip his only shirt, call the guards, offer them anything for a cigarette.'.

For the fourth in this series of blog entries please left click here.   

   

The Present Trend Towards Confessing

what we were forced to keep secret
in the distant past is now an epidemic,
not that I am complaining.

Though there are worse causes for shame
than secret youthful acts of sex sans consent
for us to seek deliverance from by confessing them.

I lightened my head a few short years ago,
when after over forty years of carrying
a lot of unsorted and secretive self-blame
for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and put with the wrong people,
when, unexpectedly, I was sexually assaulted.
In the end I worked out who the blame
came from and delivered it back to it's owner.

I get that secretive sex causes shame,
and shame is something to discard.
Obsession nearly always hides behind taboo,
discard them too, but carefully.

Change in favour of admitting, and doing more now,
to stop us laying waste to the planet we want to survive
and stop your words turning into a mush of greenwash.

Of course other advertising washes are available....

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (30)

'Fatally wounded' in a military context
never means what the media suggests
it should of the military leaders
and the wars they report on, namely
'likely to lead directly to their death'.

Nowadays 'Fatally wounded'
need not even mean the departure
of the failed general, or war minister,
from the previous place world stage.

Though the phrase might mean that the leader's errors
have damaged their leadership to the point
where to stay in power they have to be more cruel 
and in the meanwhile lower their pubic profile.

The Infinity Question vs Forgetfulness

Innumerate people now ask
'What is the biggest number'
not thinking it through to
whatever number they get,
adding one to it will make it one bigger.

In Jesus' day, the disciple Peter
asked the biggest number question the following way, 
'Teacher, how many times must I forgive?'
as if as a disciple he were some sort of flatterer,
or some cloth eared pedant who saw forgiveness,
and being forgiven, in terms of single instances
that could be ranked, and measured out, between people,
unlike the debts and trespasses a person prays
to be cancelled when they say The Lord's Prayer,

Jesus answered Peter figuratively,
'seventy times seven', but if I were asked
my answer to how often I need to forgive
and be forgiven has to be 'One more time
than I have counted and think I should be',
because I know my ability to forget things.  

Self Knowledge

When ever we get the urge to be beaten,
for not being who we expected to be
don't get anyone else to do the job,
not even subconsciously-do it yourself:
because you will know best when to stop
-when further punishment is pointless. 

'This Blinding Absence Of Light' (2)

is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,
it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.

But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...   

Chapter 7, Page 29....

'As for me I quickly discovered that the instinct of self-preservation wold not help me survive. That instinct we share with animals was now out of order as well. How could one stay alive in that hole? Why bother dragging this body, broken and disfigured, into the light? We had been placed in conditions designed to prevent our instinct from envisaging the future. I realized that time had meaning only in the movement of beings and things, whereas we were reduced to immobility and eternity of the material world. We were in a motionless present. The unfortunate soul who looked back or peered into the future rushed headlong into death. The present left only enough space for it's own unfolding. You had to keep to the immutable instant, and not think about it. A realisation that doubtless save my life.'.

For the third of this series of bog entries please left click here.   

Normalizing Disasters?

Present day disasters around the world
are at least as big, and maybe far bigger,
than they have been in the last few decades.

Popular Capitalism makes sure of that. 

But in 2023 the popular press of my country
no longer reports disasters as being 'Biblical' in scale.

I am unsure about how to understand this.

Is it that the press are looking for
a more secular adjectives of scale
to describe the latest disasters,
to chase the latest linguistic
and social/religious trends?

Or is it that the Biblical scale disasters
that the press described in the past
seemed back then to be more solvable
than present day disasters, for which
only terms which express agnosticism
towards their solvability are apt to describe them?

If you have any answers to these questions
then please ignore the press, and apply them
to the small battered blue planet you are on right now.

Life, including recovery from disasters,
is more about action than language...