100 Years Ago

Adverts like this were kicking against the pricks
of American patriarchy, the apparatus of law and custom
where men devised a life for all according to their own
anti-scientific self interest, where women and non-white
people were always several rungs below rich white men
on the social ladder that they called 'American freedom'.

That a century on from those times women have
advanced to becoming presidential candidates,
and still rich white men advocate to dismantle
health care for women, and echo the false science
of eugenics to appeal to voters sense of superiority,
even looking back for advances that reassure us
leaves us with finding warnings.

The above advert is from 1927. Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a birth control activist who fought to legalize birth control. This ad is from 10 years before the American Medical Association recognized birth control as an integral part of medical practice and education.

 

Blessed Are Those With No Voice, Where Money is The Language

Recently the president of  Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 
said “We have a stray dog problem, a problem
that does not exist in any developed country.”,
as if the problems of developed countries
were preferable to those of poorer lands
where the hand to mouth existence of many
made the citizens of the country more hospitable
to those who lived on the land without money,
the dogs and cats whose lives enrich the backdrop
of those for whom a lack of money does less for them
than the surfeit of wealth and debt in wealthy countries
does for the rich, they have to measure the value
of their domesticated animals in pet insurance and vet fees.

To live immune and invisible to the ways money 
measures who we are is a choice devoutly to be wished.
If we want to see beyond what the blinkers that wealth
stop us seeing we can, please left click on this link to start.  

More Heat Than Light

What with all the different wars
that are now being reported on
so copiously, one point I am glad of
is that I do not watch television news.

With radio/audio the arguments and statistics
remain the same, but with less need for footage
to illustrate what the fighting is all about,
and who each side are, the radio presenters
are more free to argue the de/merits
of the wars than television could ever be. 

With television the images impart more heat
than they shed light, the images become
something for the truth to hide behind,
the better for it not to be asked about.     

Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Seven - Choice And Change

The longer Graham did not contact the more I wondered how much there was some mis-explanation for him not being in touch with me. I'd been positive, he had seen how I had 'landed on my feet' with where I lived, and he had my address and phone number. So where or what was the blockage? It was true that he suggested he might be moving soon and would confirm his new address when he was installed but if knew he was moving then how long should I wait for a message? I knew about how young women ended relationships with males their own age, with either 'It is not you it is me' or 'It is not me it is you', as if either way the relationship was doomed for intractable reasons that resisted further explanation. Was Graham retreating for intractable reasons? If so it was hard to tell...

In the meanwhile I had a lot of albums and tapes and it came to me some time after the three days later meeting with Pastor Lou that that there was an issue there with having that much to play and listen to. The quantity of it made it seem much more like 'want' than 'need' after all I would only ever have one pair of ears and one allotted life and time to play the music. He was gentle and factual with me when I talked about it with him. He was concerned that if 'the spirit of death' had been in me then it might be in the records or in the mind and body of the person that bought them if I sold them. I was quite scared by that line of reasoning. Of late in my head and on the A4 pad I had been exploring an argument that seemed familiar from times with family where they coerced me into wanting what they wanted me to have, which was for their benefit more than mine.

Mother; 'I have got this you (name of item here) because I thought you needed them'.

Me; 'Ummm, thanks but I did not really want (name of item), not like that, anyway.'.

Mother; 'Well if I had asked you before I bought (name of item) then you might have refused it and the refusal would have created a bad atmosphere between us. I couldn't afford that.'.

Me; 'But what if you have created a bad atmosphere between us by not consulting me before the purchase? By deciding that (name of item) was what I needed, and whatever I wanted, including wanting to be asked first, would asking have cost you too much? How much do you want other people to laugh at me for wearing (name of item)?

Mother; 'I went without during the war and I endure post-war rationing for you to have the choices that I have made open to you. It is because of me that you have what you have.'.

Me; '(imitates Tony Hancock) Well Exactly! Did the population of the UK endure rationing so that those who endured rationing could later control their children with some imaginary ration book they kept locked in a cupboard that the child was led to think did not exist? Or was rationing endured so that at some point in the future the mentality of rationing could be erased in the name of a broader freedom of choice? So that people would not feel coerced by government determined ideas about supply and demand? So that families would coerce each other into accepting less? 

If you want to ration me via your choices then print me a proper ration book and show it to me as you take away my choices, Be warned; one day-sooner than you think-that book will be past it's use by date.'. 

I liked the music I liked because it was more expressive and emotional than I found government regulated television to be, and because it was like good radio, 'the pictures were better'. I suspect that 'the pictures being better' was where the church felt scared on my behalf, and where I mistook the church for being too like my mother. The images the music gave me were certainly more wholesome and enduring than the images of the Gulf War that had been permitted for being shown on television. There The Late Night News became some macabre video game that viewers regularly stumbled into by accident, before being repelled by the presentation.

As a consumer culture, music had it's wide boys and corrupting figures. But there was not the slightest hint of rationing about it. It's expansion was limited mostly by it's own design and business practice. The musical talent and business acumen of the performers in it were guiding factors too. Where the music business relied on sensationalism for promotional purposes it had a problem-how far could censor baiting false controversy be taken before it looked obviously faked? But already there were many fraudulent free church preachers in the world who via their business-savvy means sold rich people a 'health and wealth gospel' via cable and satellite television where the wealth symbolised by the medium itself made the fraud and weak theology they espoused hard to recognise for what they were.

So I had the problem of a surplus of music, I had one pair of ears and a finite time to enjoy the music I had amassed. I no longer needed to rebel as much as I had previously felt the need to when I was conditioned by Mother's no-exit-from-my-memories-of-rationing type arguments. My sense of what was spiritual had to be practical about material things. I soon saw one practical compromise that I could work out for myself. I had a vast number of cassettes with music on them, too many. The church used cassette tapes to record services on for those who were ill or or otherwise unable to attend church services. What if I donated the tapes with recordings on them that I was happy to lose, to the church? Lou accepted the suggestion with the obvious request that the tapes be wiped before being donated.

A lot of the recordings on them were of The Grateful Dead playing live. By the early 1990's their tours of America made them the highest grossing band in the world. But whether a tape came from when they were poor in 1967 or from the late 1980s their musical ideal was to repay a musical debt, a debt  their musical fore bearers could not pay off which the band could repay. White blues singer Janis Joplin (1943-1970) buying a tombstone for Bessie Smith (1897-1937) with Bessie's name on it for 'the [back] Empress of The Blues' was an act intended along the same lines.

Not once as I erased the music on surely over fifty C90 cassette tapes did I link the idea of 'repaying a musical debt' with the church idea that had prompted me to act the way I was now doing-a fear of 'the spirit of death', a fear of spreading debt and death contrary to the idea of life. The music had served it's time with me. The tape could be reused. In both, whether it was what was first put on the tape for me to enjoy, or with it's erasure, no debt or reason to fear of death remained.

The vinyl albums were a bigger problem, both figuratively and literally. I had over a hundred and fifty albums and they took up quite a lot of space in my room, and I had no friends of the type who I felt a bond with via the sharing of music with them. In the likes of HMV the sales of CDs were expanding, the sales of vinyl were shrinking. CD versions of a lot of what I had on vinyl were yet to come. My, ahem, 'pre-loved' vinyl albums still felt to me like books-although thousands, if not millions-of copies might be pressed up. For fans it seemed normal to have your own copy seemed personal and important.

There was a limited time frame for me to sell the albums for their maximum value, if I was happy to sell them, . If I thought that whoever bought them could and would choose their own spiritual battles whilst listening to them for themselves.

I would have liked it if Graham were about, and if we had enough time and space for me to share with him what I had gone through in prayer, and what I should do next with the vinyl. Reduce the collection  by selling what I had bought in the hope that I would listen to it a lot of times but I had listened to it far less often than I'd hoped to was relatively easy. Selling some more as and when I felt more comfortable with making my own decision about what to discard also worked. The choices were between getting no money from discarding an album or getting some money for it once and the money was whatever the market could bear to pay.

But Graham was somewhere far away and even the people my own age that I'd had as recent church friends who understood the appeal of music, people like Spyder, were absent too.

In the words of The Grateful Dead's 'Ripple' 

'There is a road no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone. 

And so, as I felt ready I sold more records until I'd got to a rump of about thirty albums. I chose a view of life where The Grateful Dead and other inspiring counter culture musicians like the UK based Roy Harper became less literal and material as guides to me. Their lyrics were more my guide, including a guide to what modesty was. I did not need the physical product, the record or tape. As earworms the lyrics and tunes drifted in and out of my head-and since they came and went so easily they left my head feeling a lot lighter. 

A guide to true modestly was not to be ignored. I would need it to agreeably side-step all future obligations to my family as they presented themselves.

To be directed to Chapter Twenty Eight please left click here. 

Signs Of Greater Age (59)

Yet another elderly authoress
has commandeered the media
of my country, to promote
some new adaption of her work.

The 87 year old has pressed
the sex-among-the-elderly button
that the media reserves for those
in desperate need of publicity
who have nowhere else to go.

'Jogging has replaced sex for....  '
runs the headline describing
life for the late middle aged,
as the elderly woman stakes
some temporary claim to infamy. 

Frankly, a little light gardening,
including tasks shared with friends,
and a walk with some purpose,
to clear my head if nothing else,
would be exercise enough for me
and for most physically fit people
who are over the age of being surprised. 

Faith In Imagination

St Anslem, Archbishop of Canterbury 1093-1109,
philosophised that the human imagination
was the measure of how big God is,
his reasoning followed thus; however big
we imagine God to be he is bigger than that.
Thus what our imagination the measure
of where we have not been and might yet go.
which makes reality a history we can only estimate.

So far, so ontological. Nearly a millennium later
belief in God is measured a different way,
how many people say the creeds and how often.
But imagination/fantasy is still ontological;
now it is fed by advertising which in turn is limited
by what can be manufactured to engage us with. 

The selling of 'freedom' inevitably leads to politics.
When George Orwell wrote about totalitarianism,
in '1984' he imagined it as an absolute with no exit,
where every exit was trailed by an agent provocateur.

In real life totalitarianism is always relative
to how we imagine the government to be.
Disguising absolute suffering and privation
on too many people for too long is hard to do
without people who are relatively free
in other countries knowing something about it.

Close to a millennium on from St Anlem
the more material the enquiry the more statistical
the answer, this also applies how relative freedom is.

Read how relatively totalitarian your regime might be here.
If the link does not work in your country, assume the worst.       

Picture Set Of The Month - October - Astral Photography

Is the art of photographing the stars
and other astral objects in the gloaming,
in the late evening skies  

It is very much a subject extended
by newer high quality cameras
that capture evening light

better than cameras before them did. 
My thanks to photographer Iain Daley.