Good Advice

 Often that has been the only way of sustaining family values.....

Bearding

is a presently an American verb which describes
the active use of the companionship on offer
to an individual to obscure an identity/activity
which society would see to be the cause of shame.
I am fine with the term-if we have depth
of character we will have several identities,
and prioritize-keep some of them private.
King George VI's philately comes to mind.

My problem is with other people being shamed,
though I know enough to know that this should be familiar.
I learned late but well about how to grow up
through a family who were like many,
they denied that their son and heir was 'gay'
to everyone-particularly themselves.
Their inheritance was my closet as they insisted
they were 'my beard', but still I would forgive them
if they sought my respect, which they unlikely to.

I never wet shaved when young,
and grew a physical beard at age 19.
It remains today-much improved with age.
Many a time I was with family they made jests
cheaper and more personal than their usual jokes
at my beard's expense, with lines like
'What are you hiding under that facial growth'.
I understand it now; it was jealousy.
As 'my beard' they want me never out-grow them,
never discover who I might be outside of them,
and most importantly never recognize who I was with them.

The more my natural/physical beard improved.
The more quietly family pressed their falseness
and the more consistently I was suicidal, angry
and depressed, the less I could live without
the companionship of my choice-where
if  there were cause for shame I would choose it,
rather than have it chosen for me unawares.

Wither Loyalty?

The oldest oldest push-me-pull-me
 in the world is love vs like.
Love draws us, like it or not,
into the realm of another whom we find
that we just can't resist. The best we do
is learn how the other person ticks
from the gaps in how we engage with them.
When society demands  that we always
accept each other, heedless of how we feel
it is the surest path to masking depths
of mistrust and debt that, unwatched, breed.
These debts in support of character
will either write off all respect
between the lenders and the indebted
or make what is owed un-repayable
-and unforgiven (and unforgivable)
the memories fester until life
becomes irredeemably painful.

If perpetual acceptance means
being disallowed to dislike others,
wither the generosity and loyalty
of choosing to forget their wrongs? 

For Adults Only

A Catholic friend of mine recently confided in me
that she thoroughly mistrusts the gospel verse
Mathew 18 vs 3. I agreed with her,
not because I was a Catholic, rather more
because I understood that any child who tried
to comprehend the God of Old Testament
-with it's prickly morality of the good
that only just outweighing the bad,
where nature means nothing, God is good,
and Man is bad, particularly for the Jews
who, good as they are for believing in Him,
still make very bad humans as they fail to serve
this uniquely distant, invisible and personal God.
The Jews tried this whilst as a nation of tribes
getting repeatedly burnt up as dross,
used as slaves, in the Egyptian, Babylonian
and Roman empires successively and their faith
/culture nearly subsumed by the Greeks.
Any child who grasped this would truly be a miracle.
But they would still be undone by the psychopathic
disregard for children by the adults of the Old Testament.
If they understood all this they would still repeat the insanity.

Worse Than Hell?

Biblical stories about Hell describe a scene
that is familiar from repetition, but rarely examined.
One where there is 'much wailing and gnashing of teeth'.
I assume the gnashing is from mental trauma,
and is a sign of the most severe and permanent stress.
But I think also that the teeth that gnashed in Hell
were the sufferers own; theirs from their former life,
when they had eaten well to stay healthy,
even as they had behaved worse than badly.

In medieval depictions of Hell
suffering is hierarchical but universal,
and never one-sided, those who goad
others to suffer are always being goaded
towards torturing themselves even more.

The common description made by those
who reached the Nazi camps as the guards fled
is that those arriving saw 'A scene from Hell',
and not being there then-as they arrived-
I gladly accept their description of the suffering.

But given the small portions of thin gruel
issued as rations in the 27 work camps
I would dispute that it was Hell-the nutrition
in the food was insufficient for the workers
to keep their teeth, never mind their lives.
What could they gnash with, as they wailed inwardly?
Inwardly because if as a prisoner
you wanted to help others
then weakness had to be flatly denied.

And in all 11 of the death camps the arrivals
were meant to die, and their overlords live
sumptuously on the sale of their remains.

In the medieval depictions of Hell
suffering was far more egalitarian.
In the depth of the depicted suffering
human life was never as cheap
as the Nazis made it seem,
to justify themselves.

For The Oldest And Best

in unwaged creativity
the most basic choice
since the troglodytes
it has to be housework.

Culture Comes In Salvos

Every nation state has it's cultural cannon
through which to fire its greatest hits,
a list of authors, composers of music
and otherwise creative folk who,
for a populous with a weak grasp of history,
their works create a narrative on which they can lean.
The British cannon includes William Shakespeare,
Christopher Marlowe, Milton, Handel, Jane Austin,
Robbie Burns, William Blake, George Elliot
Oscar Wilde, Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten,
and finally-for me the 20th century essayist, George Orwell.
Anything work under 60 old has yet to settle in.
The difficulty with such  pre-digestion
is that the culture is hard to refresh and simply repeats on us.
With books beyond copyright then the written word
dies repeatedly on the digital screen, through adaptation.
Such that people seeing it only half understand where they take note.
With historic forms-choral music-they become
more fun for performers than for their audience.
As history claims culture, so culture becomes nostalgia
for people who falsely imagine what the old culture once meant.