The French Have A Phrase For It

'To live happily, live hidden' is what the French
translates as. We are all happier for some of our
life being for just ourselves alone. The author
 of the quote is the poet, and writer of plays and fables
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794).

 

Honi Soit*

When I was too young to know
'how to read people', I never knew
what was happening behind the faces 
of the adults I did not realise the depths
of my dependence on
-least of all when they spoke in anger.

I naively took at face value
the phrase 'Always tell the truth.',
not realising that in a world of liars
it would make me more defenceless.

When I did not get what others wanted
me to have, when I misunderstood the adults
I was dependent on, to head off my disappointment
before it peaked they said  'I/we fought in the war
for you to have (name the item they said
they wanted me accept instead here)'.

The point now is that they lived through WW2,
but they did not fight it. Many a child was brave
but bravery was in no way equivalent to combat.

I appreciate now how in the slow post-war
economic recovery even living through a war
became 'a sacrifice', even when that life
was far far away from German bombs
and the sacrifice was doing nothing more
than surviving BBC government propaganda.

But still, the greater pains the British people
inflicted, then and since, were reinforcing
poverty and inequality in the name of 'choice',
on scales that are unheroic in the extreme.

We now live by the values of 'the market place'
where we can neither remember nor forget
that making other people suffer for our gain
is the tradeable commodity.

The market for pain and loss
has to be infinite for trade to continue....

*shame be, or evil be, as in 'Honi soit qui mal y pence', shame be on he who thinks ill of this, the Norman French phrase that used to be on British coins    

In My Two Minute Silence

This Remembrance Saturday
I will contemplate the difference,
and the distance, between the 'victor's justice'
that the great powers, England, France,
the new U.S.S.R. and the ascendant USA,
all gave themselves at the end of World War One,
and what 'restorative justice'
could have looked like for the people
living in the countries that made up
the dependent empires of each of those countries
England, France, the U.S.S.R,, and the USA,
which systematised asset stripping on scales
so grand they looked obscene when measured,
and furthered definitively undemocratic norms. 

I may take more time in my exploration
than Armistice day considers to be justified.   

When Humans Do Not Compute

Inattentiveness of each other's lives
was the main reason The Beatles broke up.
You can see it all in the mixed messages
between the humour and lack of eye contact
docuemted in the more conflicted rehearsals
in the film, 'Get Back', which replaced
the badly edited and far more barbed 'Let it Be'.

A decade and a half after The Beatles split,
'the German Beatles', Kraftwerk, faltered
in their creativity. Many outside the band
wondered why. The first member to leave,
who recently wrote his autobiography, knew.

They were not known for their banter
or making jokes in the studio,
but like their predecessors, all four
were known to work well together.

But as they invested more in computers
they invested less in each other.
Where the music was concerned,
what machines might be made to do
was more fascinating than what humans
had to say about each other. 

Now, doctors surgeries are high tech places,
where receptionists get glued to the screens
that the public know are there but can't see.
The receptionists are too busy to receive
patients who arrive for appointments.

That required human confirmation is gone.
When I go in nobody wants to know who I am,
or advise me of the right place to wait.
As a patient I am much nearer being a ghost
that the staff cannot care enough about,
even to exorcise, than anything more substantial. 

The White Poppy

To remember those who lived and died
in wars unwillingly, still committed in their hearts
 to a peace they were left no choice
but to leave it to others to create
after they died, because they died living for peace.

 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Five - Tafraout

Friday 20th October  2023

  Out early to look for breakfast took us down the street, since our hotel was more basic, not the sort to serve breakfast. More pancakes and bread with tahini, and hot milky Nescafe. We were packed, and the car was packed, and our room was clear and paid for by 9.30 am. 

  

The Touristes Hotel was very simple and very nice. I got one last surprise when I sat in the passenger's seat and Anthony said to me 'We have ten minutes before we leave. I need to look at some maps. Do you want to take more pictures?' So I took more pictures of interesting doors and what ever else took my eye. Anthony says I 'have a good eye', but I find myself oddly ambivalent about taking pictures. In my impression I take my best pictures barely seeing the image but reacting as if by instinct. I am too busy reacting/taking the picture to more fully enjoy the view. For this reason I like taking pictures of things that don't move, that are scenery. Though I know that like the example left of this paragraph waiting for the light to be right requires my patience.

  Our journey to Tafraout was mostly uneventful. One of the pleasures of the journey for me was that this being my second such trip I could take in the scenery much more easily, and Anthony was happy to stop at anything that looked like a photo opportunity, which given the brightness of the sun was plenty. The roads through many of hamlets/small communes were often quite rough which required Anthony to drive quite slowly, which in turn made us all more aware of the photo opportunities in the colours the walls were painted, and the different plants and trees that were either side of the narrow road. When I saw another driver also taking photographs of oleanders, date palms, and even common geraniums that thrived, seemingly uncared for, where there often seemed to be no humans living as we stopped. 

  Tafraout looked bright in the afternoon sun, as we arrived. I had forgotten the sound of the muezzin, which in Tafraout could be heard really clearly everywhere across the village. It is a recording broadcast from somewhere within the tower of the mosque. I assume that once, in the times recording, all muezzin calls were live. When the words were slowly shouted or chanted by the imam from the top of the tower, the speaker's voice would spread as far as ever it needed to. We heard the call to prayer in our previous stop, in Tiznit but it sounded submerged, rather, within the noise of commerce and traffic from our room at the corner of one of the routes into the old quarter. The elongated vowels in the shout/chant of the muezzin always sounded to me like the speech that every Master of Ceremonies spoke to the live audience in the recording, at the start of the wrestling that my dad insisted the television should be tuned to every Saturday afternoon.

  Friday afternoon prayers sounded quite loud from where we were in our new hotel room, as the rest of the village went quiet. We were staying in the same hotel we stayed in last year, even the same room. 

 We were served coffee on the balcony which overlooked the central junction of the town, I knew Anthony was not going to rest after, from how he was energised to take pictures of the shadows the chairs and table made with the brightness of the sun. 

After ordering our meal for the evening, another vegetable tagine to be served on the balcony, that evening. Together we went to see Anthony's carpet dealer. Last year, when I first saw the place I marvelled at his shop and took lots of bad photos of carpets, where the pleasure was more in the taking of the photos than the later processing the images that my camera had captured.

Anthony gave the man the rough dimensions of the carpet he wanted, and said it was going for a tapestry for a large wall. One reason I think Anthony liked this carpet dealer was not just that he was the representative of women's co-operative of carpet weavers, and therefore there was a virtuous circle in buying carpets from him, but also he has good gut instincts for what his customers wanted. The second carpet he brought out to show was the obvious choice. The first carpet we were shown was good, but not quite right. It was as if the first were were a taster for him knowing what we wanted to buy that hid how he knew what we wanted. At this point I should have gone straight to the hole in the wall to get 2000 Dirhams (equivalent to £165) out of the hole in the wall to cover payment for the rug and the hotel when we left. But I didn't, we further investigated the market, telling ourselves we were looking for postcards, we found one or two designs that we liked enough to take take back to our room. Anthony wrote one postcard to friends back home. I have lost interest in sending cards to friends. I have lost enough friends in the last three years that sending cards to the few that are left seems to be an unrewarding venture.

  Before dinner I read more of 'Carn' - Patrick McCabe. Some of it rather exaggerates a sense of drunken queasiness, but like all life in small towns, the queasy parts, and the moments when events spin out of control of the townsfolk, are when people are having the most fun.

     A sharp wind was blowing across the town

and over the balcony in the evening, which meant that we ate indoors, at a traditional Muslim  or Roman table, with near ground floor seating around it, all much lower than a Western dinner table and upright seat. The tagine was perfect and very filling, we refused the coffee that was offered after. Even if it was milky Nescafe then we did not want to be drinking anything more than water that late.   

    Another, rather good, day over, and with something to show for it when we take our purchases home and I take down one of my paintings and put the rugs on the wall in their place.

For Day Six of this holiday diary please left click here.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

I live very well on my limited income,
mostly by buying safe but short-dated food.
I have no problem with the pennies I spend,
and never will have, all things being well.

But soon I will have a problem with the pounds
I might pile on with all the moreish junk food
I see, which my wallet can afford,
but I don't need, and when I buy it
and don't do the exercise to work it off,
eventually it will add to my waistline.