The Uncertainties Of Gradualism

When I was an earnest young Christian,
I found it easy for to believe that good deeds
were signs of of the advance of The Kingdom,
and the more signs I saw, and I was part of,
then the sooner the world was going to end.

I avoided all thoughts of how good deeds
and bad deeds were alike;
both existed in the moment,
as if this world had no end.

Nowadays I still seek signs,
but the life I seek is in rewilding.
The scattering of as many wild seeds
as used to be there, naturally,
in the lands where modern man
has taken them out over the centuries.

Whether deeds towards The Kingdom,
the grandest human saving scheme of all,
which I hoped would cut through
both how money and power trapped people
and made them feel omniscient,
or the spreading of wild flower seeds
via the return of animals to the wilds
from where man long ago banished them,
gradualism means uncertainty,
and humility is our only hope. 

Signs Of Greater Age (51)

With greater age, and because of The Virus,
the world seems to be more detached
which seems fine, good health willing.
But with detachment comes the loss of choice.
Sex for one becomes like meals for one;
both get difficult to invest with any sense of occasion.

Also friends become telephone friends
and with long phone calls shared humour,
and laughter over the phone come to represent
shared release where no other sharing works
where shared release remains important.

But most of all we have to deal with
how we run out of entertainments,
with amusements that cease to amuse.

That is the point where we reinvent boredom
to make what in truth cannot now amuse us
more sustainable in how it fails to amuse....

  

When Uncredited Black Lives Mattered More

Henrietta Lacks (1920-51) is now known
as the black woman whose cervical cancer cells
miraculously multiplied in a laboratory
more than all other cancer cells did,
long after her life had ended.

Now as then, what black lives offered
to the whole of (white) humanity
goes uncredited. Even when (white) history
can be rewritten to properly credit black folk
for the contribution their lives and deaths made
the credit seems so long after the fact
that it can only be seen as inadequate.  
 

Capitalism In It's Many Phases

When political pundits talk of 'Late Capitalism'
I often wonder how late this Capitalism is.
Has it died yet? Was it given a good burial?
We all know how costly good funerals can be,
this burial could take a lot of humans with it.
And what has replaced this late Capitalism? 
How do we recognise it if it has started?

People know what early capitalism was like;
the owner of the factory set the hours
his labourers were made to work
and then slowed the factory clocks
to get more work out of his workers.
Whilst his employees did all they could
to stop themselves from starving,
spending time in a debtors prison,
or being led into the workhouse
when they fell too ill to work.

Middle-period Capitalism was when
anger and reason tamed the worst,
the most profiteering, Capitalists,
and under the new welfare state
nobody need be pushed into poverty, 
and most debt was a matter of choice.

But now, like silence with A.I.D.S.
Capitalism=Death as all life
gets ploughed into production,
as production flips into consumption
and the consumer gets consumed
as production and consumption 
become a perpetual motion machine.

Bob Is Nobody's Uncle

After a l-o-n-g week of the celebration
Mr Robert Dylan becoming eighty yrs old,
I never heard in the media I follow
what I thought ought to be said about him.

So please accept the following...

There is an argument to be made
that Dylan is to guitar based modern music
what Orson Welles once was to the movies,
both showed an accumulation of new technique
and speeded up the changes in the process
of writing and recording, such that the artist
both were bound to gain more critical acclaim,
than either would have use for in their lifetimes.

Mr Dylan was highly charismatic.
This explains to succeeding generations,
who never witnessed first hand
the awe and wonder with which he was handled
as he described his latest musical reinvention,
even when the change was more of style than substance.

The critics must have enjoyed
'being humbled' as they praised his latest work,
Mr Dylan was surely the popular originator
of what is now called 'the humble brag'*
as he disowned other peoples claims of his genius
where as critics they were sharing the limelight
he clung to as he said he was throwing it away.

*The humble brag is where a person
speaks at such great lengths 
about what they don't deserve the credit for,
that the length at which they speak
hides in plain sight the boastfulness 
they like and covertly want to be known for.   

Coming Around Again?

Under Covid 19 time has lagged,
and frayed like worn rags
which were weak to begin with,
as the human ability
to plan for the future
has ebbed into abeyance.

Each day I feel like
I am always coming round.
But I never fully wake up,
because the external cues
that would prove it have gone.
And computers are unhelpful.

Life online seems to be
like life outside of time,
something I never expected,
sober at least, in my lifetime.

The days feel as if I am going round,
to who knows where I have been before
and I don't want to go back there.

I am not coming around at all.    

Invidious Choices

Which of the following is better....

To create morally indefensible choices?
or make a life through defending them?