Invisible Boy... Alien... Misfit...

I have written two memoirs
both of them written and published
online with no print version likely.
Both of them are about the life I had
when how I lived was set by my parents.

In them I relate in sequential detail
as many experiences as I remembered
from being a child sent hither and thither
through to the more self directed existence 
I was meant to have in my mid-twenties.

To write about feeling as if I were invisible
to feeling that I was an alien felt like progress
when I put it all into words. But as it was lived
that life felt more like patiently moving sideways 
away from the past than living a forward looking life. 

I have started writing about life
after being an alien, I have not got
a nickname for the person I was next.
Perhaps he was the stranger, the misfit
and the outsider who drifted
from one landscape and 'community'
to the next, who never fitted in any of them.

Write And Burn

It is a common attitude to be shocked
at the public spectacle of books being burnt
because they are considered 'heretical',
or worse, by some authoritarian state,
of which there are many to choose from.

Though maybe citizens ought to be
more shocked at how much the bully state
normal bullying behaviour until it no longer
commented on in a bullying on-line media.

But to me it is more the private burning
of personal papers that quietly saddens
most with hindsight. I am one of thousands,
millions, of diary keepers over the centuries
who at some point have found some of their writings
were fit only for being ashamed of, whatever
validated us writing them at the time,

We burnt them, not knowing that decades on
we would know better than to feel shame
at our youthful indiscretions. Time would teach us
patience and forgiveness towards far worse
than we did when we were growing up
and we should have kept the diaries after all. 

The Route To The Moment

We know we are 'there',
alive in the moment, 
when we realise that our
journey and our destination
are different parts of the same process,
each is there to help the other,
where, between them, they get us
nearer to where we have to be.

And yes, some moments 
will be better than others.
One moment leads to the next,
which might well be better,
and they all lead on from each other.

    

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (34)

1-One of the easy-to-spot, but still tempting,
click-bait techniques is for the youtuber
or whoever to present their headline
with a question mark, if to suggest a debate
when all they want is to be in emit mode
and the centre of other people's attention.

2-peculiar to British media
is the phrase to 'ramp up',
meaning to raise standards
or spread higher standards
across a particular service sector
or area of government. 

The phrase is used by speakers
who see their cause as 'Cinderella service',
typically the public services of  health
and education who seek to use the money
better than those using short cuts
to run the service at present.     

Sunday Sermon

 Truth is true until it is organized-then it becomes a lie. 

Jesus did not teach Christianity,
he lived it, whilst teaching love,
kindness, concern for others and peace.

Those others were the  public,
soldiers, conservative clergy, friends,
enemies, and attempted followers
of varying degrees of concentration.

We know nowadays what divides
present day society, we don't know
what divided society back then.

Following Jesus means confronting division,
which requires some level of organisation.
Too much organisation cuts out
life in the moment, and tightens division. 

Enjoy finding your right level of disorganisation
where you know where you are going,
and it includes plenty of life in the moment.

Mis-Written Histories

Scapegoating is the popular misapplication
of cause and effect, where when the speaker
speaks they knows that they are mistaken,
but finds greater serenity in self interest.

From Cain slaying Abel onward,
scapegoating has been the subtext
for all 'popular history', to the point
where how life was arranged
when we were more united
is a mystery we decline to account for.

The history of slavery is the example,
par excellence, of how when one group
gets scapegoated by another, the winners
frame the narrative to refer only to themselves,
leaving the losers the weakest of explanations
to account for them being where they are.

Never was this truer than with the evangelists
who bargained with white plantation owners
that even their black slaves needed salvation
and to read The Bible daily, where to be as obedient
to the plantation owners as the slaves were
the evangelists gutted and miswrote their most holy book.
removing  everything that was even slightly seditious,
to placate the plantation owners fear of their slaves
rebelling from the servitude, for being able to read.

For more about it this misbegotten
episode of church, and human, history
please left click and read in full The Slave Bible.

Picture Set Of The Month - September - Psychedelic Textiles

Kustaa Saksi (born 1975) is a Finnish textile designer.  

He uses a jacquard loom to create his work.

He has been exhibiting internationally since 2004. 

His work has also appeared in several UK museums.

With titles to his exhibitions like 'Hypnopomic'
'Call to the Wild', 'Paper Pavillion' and 'Travel as a Tool'
he draws a lot of attention to some startling work.   

His work is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert
museum, and several other museums in Finland,
France, and in The Netherlands     

To me his designs compare well  with the record sleeves
of the psychedelic albums from the 1960s that I first saw
in the 1980s, when I first discovered The Grateful Dead.