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Some of the material in this article was previously presented at:- Community and Critical Psychology conference – Birmingham Sept. 2003 British Psychological Society – History and Philosophy section conference, March 2002. Community and Organisational Psychology Research group, Manchester Metropolitan University, January 2002. This is part of a longer project with aims of understanding the development of Latin American Social Psychology of Liberation, and reviewing its potential contribution to theory and practice of applied psychology in the British (and related) context. The article is based on a) reading the literature in Spanish (and where available) in English, but not the Brazilian literature in Portuguese; b) attendance at the International Congresses of Social Psychology for Liberation in 2001 and 2002; c) discussions with Latin American and other colleagues working within this framework; d) visits to Venezuelan community social psychology projects in 1996 and 2002, and e) the resp

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/dec/08/child-migrants-after-calais-video

http://celebritybabies.people.com/2009/02/06/teri-hatcher-creates-imaginative-space-for-emerson/

How do I find imaginative space between what I know of the facts?

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What you’re trying to find is the “anarchic, gift-conjuring, un-knowing part” of the writer’s mind, as Rose Tremain puts it, and it’s not easy. Presumably, you’ve decided your policy – your personal ‘rules’ for this project – about what you can change or invent, and what you must stick to. But that leaves a lot of stuff which you don’t dare let your free brain conjure with.

I suggest that you make a firm decision to grant your researched facts no more special status than you would the facts about your home town, say, or where you grew up. Then try all the ways you already know of growing a scene or a story out of those materials. Or try some of these. For all of them, forget there’s any such thing as “allowed” or “not allowed”; you can always tidy things up later, but for now let anarchy rule

I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin. Leonard Cohen
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Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis

When Stevens discusses the pressure of the real, he talks about it as a violence done to our very selves. He writes that poetry is the way we can resist that pressure, that violence, not in order to avoid the real, but in order to preserve within ourselves the necessary space of imagination, possibility, humanity, love, a space that can help us live our lives. Poetry, because it is ultimately undistracted by whatever uses to which language is otherwise devoted (telling stories, arguing or convincing or informing, buying and selling, preaching, condemning, and so on) has a unique role in this preservation of an imaginative space.

http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/george-orwell-tries-to-identify-who-is-really-a-fascist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

in History, Politics| December 7th, 2016

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Two neologisms, “Post-truth” and “Alt-right,” have entered political discourse in this year of turmoil and upheaval, words so notorious they were chosen as the winner and runner-up, respectively, for Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. These “Orwellian euphemisms,” argues Noah Berlatsky “conceal old evils” and “whitewash fascism,” recalling “in form and content… Orwell’s old words—specifically some of the newspeak from 1984. ‘Crimethink,’ ‘thoughtcrime,’ and ‘unperson’…. They even sound the same, with their simple, thunk-thunk construction of single syllables mashed together.”

“The sheer ugly clumsiness is supposed to make the language seem futuristic and cutting edge,” Berlatsky writes, “The world to come will be utilitarian, slangy, and up-to-the-minute in its inelegance. So the future was in Orwell’s day; so it is in 2016.” As in Orwell’s day, our current jargon gets mobilized in “defense of the indefensible”—as the novelist, journalist, and revolutionary fighter wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” And just as in his day, the euphemisms pretty up constant, blatant lying and racist ideologies. We can also draw another linguistic comparison to Orwell’s time: the widespread use of the word “fascism.”

Berlatsky uses the word without defining it (when he talks about “whitewashing fascism”), except to say that “fascism thrives on falsehoods.” That may well be the case, but is it enough of a criterion for an entire political and economic system? The word begs for a cogent analysis. Even Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini’s rule, felt the need for clarity, given that “American radicals,” he wrote in 1995, abused the phrase “fascist pig” as a pejorative for any authority, such that the word hardly meant anything thirty years after World War II

Father Maximilian Kolbe  gave his life  to save a Jewish man in Auschwitz.Despite being starved and despite the nine other men  havingdied,in the end  shot St Maximilian as he had not died as expected. In fact he had prayed with all tfe men as they died.We  probably can’t do that but what era are we now entering?
https://archive.org/stream/WallaceStevensTheNecessaryAngelEssaysOnRealityAndTheImagination/Wallace-Stevens-The-Necessary-Angel-Essays-on-Reality-and-the-Imagination_djvu.txt

Mary wore her new garnet  red winter coat to go to the dentist and doctor who were in the same building.Unfortunately, it was shorter than  her  wool skirt which had a  quite few moth holes .
First ,she had to see the doctor.
Hello dear,how are you getting on without your husband?
He calls now and then.He told me he has bought me a house in Ealing.
Did he give you the address?
No,but if I am  living in Ealing I shall have to change doctors.
You can change here if you want to !
But I like and respect you,doctor
Thank you so much.Very few people ever praise me.And unlike you many people come here in dirty old clothes.
I just got this new coat.I may not have needed it, but ,to me, it is a symbol of wishing to return to life again.
That’s a good one.I’d better not tell my wife!
Is she  quite extravagant?
Not really.I suppose there is no absolute level of spending which  defines extravagance.What is normal for Princess Kate  would not be for my wife.It is I suppose a way of dressing so you look ok for the life you lead and does not get you into debt.
Surely you like your wife to look good?
As long as she feels good I don’t mind.
Anyway, why did you wish to see me?
Well, you don’t come very much so I wanted to see how you were getting on
I had a panic attack in the waiting room just now.I got vertigo
Are you frightened of me,my dear?
No,I really  love you, doctor.
Shush, that is not allowed
I just meant in a Christian sense although you are a Hindu.But when it comes down to it all religions are about compassion and love if we look carefully.
That is hard to believe nowadays.
I know.I suppose it’s an ideal to aim for.
All I can do is do my job well and look after my family and my patients.
Find God in the little things.See how small an acorn is and wonder.If I swallowed one would an oak tree grow inside me?
No.it would have to grow by the sewer
Imagine under the ground may be thousands of oak tree growing
Only if silly idiots swallow acorns!
I’m sorry.I have this vivid imagination.Can I have it removed and put a plastic one in?
Not yet but no doubt it will happen.Go outside and walk about alot
Why?
Because I have decided you are ok and we’ve talked enough.
Thank you so much,doctor.
And so say all of us
Then Mary picked  up her red coat which the doctor had not seen and she  went into the dentist waiting room.The kind receptionist got her some water as Mary did not understand the machine.Uncountable infinity,yes.Water machines,no.
This dentist was a most beautiful  young woman darting about  like a  colored fish in the  deep ocean.
The filling is still here!The tooth broke.I shall repair it for you.
Thank you,Mary told her.It is almost a pleasure to come here.
Almost? the dentist replied.
It’s a day out for me,Mary told her.I don’t meet young women like you so much.
Oh,my.I forgot to feed Emile.Hi , can you send a cab, please? I must go home or my cat will never forgive me.
A handsome young man appeared with a silver car.It almost seemed like a dream
He was a  Muslim and his wife a Christian.
And  both are good to us.

One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.

Poetry and Poets in a Time of Crisis

“For a long time now, it has been clear to many of us that we are coming to a turning point, if we have not already arrived. We do not yet know whether this election presents a crisis, is the result of one, or is its harbinger. No one does. A destabilized future yawns before us, as a great, worrisome vacuum, into which all our most terrifying visions can easily rush. We might have thought we had some idea about the shape of the future, its challenges and structures, but it seems we do not. Maybe we did not all along.

We only know that the immediate signs are bad. Deep, potentially irresolvable fissures in our democracy have revealed themselves, along with an epidemic of rage, as well as hopelessness. The results of this election were, for at least half the country and much of the rest of the world, a massive shock. Yet even had the results been different, we would still have been in a time of crisis. All the local and global problems were already there, and remain.”

Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

An atheist,an agnostic and a Christian were  looking for  Coffee Shop with some vacant  seats so they could discuss politics.The Christian offered to say a prayer.When  she did there was a clap of thunder and a voice called,
With all the  horror  in  the Middle East, there’s no-one here to answer your prayer at the moment.Please try again  when  Palestine is sorted.
So she replied,How about Syria?
Immediately she was struck by lightning and burned to a cinder
The atheist said to the agnostic, she’d better have a Catholic funeral
No,said the agnostic, better have a  Jewish one!For He is a jealous G-d.If he exists.
What would convince you?
If she came back to life
Lo, the Christian reappeared and said
I don’t believe  that!

The French poet Paul Valéry claimed that a poem is never finished, only abandoned.

“In 1892, while visiting relatives in Genoa, Valéry underwent a stark personal transformation. During a violent thunderstorm, he determined that he must free himself “at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment.” He devoted the next twenty years to studying mathematics, philosophy, and language. From 1892 until 1912, he wrote no poetry. He did begin, however, to keep his ideas and notes in a series of journals, which were published in twenty-nine volumes in 1945. He also wrote essays and the book La Soirée avec M. Teste(The Evening with Monsieur Teste, 1896).”