Day: July 24, 2017

Smaller than the pebbles drowned sea moist

Photo0581

An agnostic, yet I need my God
For many parts of life cannot be voiced
Without the sacred language, I learned of.

More a place  and less a cruel Rod
Willing us to have the rights of choice
An agnostic. yet I need my God

Lesser than both lower and above
Neither is he man, nor girl nor boy
In the sacred language I learned of.

Greater than  the mountain peaks  of love
Smaller than the pebbles drowned sea moist
Me, agnostic, yet I need such God!

Wilder than a stallion newly shod
Quieter than that little, still, small voice
In the sacred language, I learned, read.

As by our own new sciences, we  are hoist
There’s humour in that  secret, still embrace
I, agnostic, wish  to speak with God
And use the sacred language I learned of.

I still want to keep being lovin’.

Lilium-Kushi-Maya_1There was a late woman from Devon
Who was still blogging when she got up to heaven
When God asked her why
She said “Though I died,
I still want to keep being lovin’.

The angels like laptop computers
And asked BT for some routers.
They need tech support,
So goes the report….
A new career dawns for tech tutors.

Gabriel could have sent Mary an email.
To fill her in on the details.
“God has impregnated you,
I’ll email Joe too,
As we don’t want this venture to fail.

To loss survive

In my heart, my love is still alive
I feel his presence just where eyes can’t reach
I need another person to survive.

I am angry but do not feel enraged
For all must die and life its lessons teach
In my heart, my love  still is alive.

As I write, my pen disturbs the page
The art of love is just beyond my reach
I need another person to survive.

We need another in order to engage
The wit, the sense, emotions that we seek
In my heart, my love is  still alive.

Could that ” other  “be my other side?
The part that dreams and sometimes needs to speak?
I need another person to survive.

Gentler than the rain’s sound on the street
The still small voice sends messages to greet
In my heart, his love is  now alive
I wed my  “other self” to loss survive.

Claws so sharp

I wonder if this cauliflower cheese
Will taste far better than its image looks
In the cook book where I see dead fleas.

I’ll add  some plum tomatoes and fried bees
After all ,I am now my own cook
I wonder at this cauliflower cheese

The fleas must be quite ancient, I suppose.
Unappetizing to the viewer who just peeks
Into the cook book where there are dead fleas.

If the fleas were living, I would freeze.
And wonder if a cat had read my books
I ponder on this cauliflower cheese

I guess I’ll put as well a few green peas
The colour otherwise is somewhat bleak
In the cook book where there are dead fleas.

The cat we had was black and very sleek
With claws so sharp they made my bladder leak
I wonder at this cauliflower cheese
In the cook book where I saw dead fleas.

 

 

 

The origins of post modernism

dellengineeronthehorizon
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/03/the_origins_of_postmodernism.html

Quote:

One philosopher puts Nietzsche’s perspectivism in perspective (pardon the pun). Note the word “postmodern.” Soccio writes:
There is, however, a characteristically postmodern quality to Nietzsche’s perspectivist assertions: By repeatedly calling attention to his own aesthetic perspectivism, Nietzsche models what he asserts in a flagrantly self-referential way. He exuberantly adoptspoints of view. (Soccio, p. 566, emphasis original)
Still another interpreter of Nietzsche describes the logical outcome of Nietzschean perspectivism. Nehamas says:
Every view is only an interpretation, and . . . as perspectivism holds, there are no independent facts against which various interpretations can be compared . . . If perspectivism is correct and, as it seems to claim, every interpretation creates its own facts, then it may seem impossible to decide whether any interpretation is or is not correct . . . (Alexander Nehamas, quoted in Soccio, p. 566)
It is easy to see how perspectivism is a source of postmodernism, particularly in its interpretation of texts. It can make grounded interpretations of the Bible difficult or even impossible. If we cannot establish any fact in itself, then how do we anchor truths in our minds about the world outside of us? If we cannot anchor such truths, then historical investigation is even more difficult. And if we study an ancient text like the Bible, then how can we bridge the chasm between our interpretation and historical knowledge of the context from which the Bible has emerged? It must be noted up front that not all Bible scholars interested in applying postmodern interpretations are hyper-skeptical; maybe they know nothing about the sources that flow into postmodernism, as outlined in the list, above. But too many seem to blithely apply farfetched interpretations, for what end, I don’t yet know.
An alternative version
Some literary scholars and philosophers provide an alternative version of the origins of postmodernism. They divide western history into the modern (typically the Enlightenment project) and the postmodern (go here and here). However, this version gives too little credit to Enlightenment thinkers, who challenged the Medieval Age with all its systematization of knowledge and theology. And their version gives too much credit to postmodernists who borrow more than they innovate, at least in my opinion. Their version has the break between the two as too abrupt and sharp. As Nietzsche once observed, philosophers too often do not know how to deal with history, glossing over or omitting historical events like those in the bulleted list. But those real-life and self-evident events actually happened, and they shook people to their core. Modernism and postmodernism emerge from the events, as well as from the hyper-skepticism begun in the Enlightenment.
So what does all this mean?
For most people none of this means anything, thankfully. But can we depend on our blissful slumber? For a few of us, the heavy and excessive skepticism that masquerades as postmodernism makes the one Book that has influenced Western culture (and other cultures) and has been the guide for hundreds of millions and for the better—makes it unstable and unsecured, cut loose from an anchor of plain meaning. Do we want to lose this fountain of wisdom called the Bible?
Conclusion
The last three hundred-plus years can be characterized as times of uncertainty and instability. The old order has been cracking during this timeframe. Debatably, this ethos or general character was most visible first in philosophy, which then transmogrified other areas, such as politics, social customs, and economics. We lose a solid foundation. We lose our essence as humans. We lose the real world out there, existing objectively and in its own right, apart from and independent of our perceptions and understanding.
It did not take long for the hard-hitting philosophy to be adopted by Bible scholars. Traditional viewpoints, espoused by the Church-both Catholic and Protestant-were and are under siege. Generally, in response the Church divided into liberalism and conservatism, which is closer to the center than fundamentalism. The theological Left largely adopts the nontraditional intellectual criticisms and social trends, whereas the theological Right challenges the new social trends (though not all of them or in the same degree) and explains why the traditional viewpoints on the Bible are still valid and reasonable. Both the Left and the Right have variations, but this brief assessment of the Church’s reactions to modernist trends is adequate for our purposes.

In the big picture, the real innovators did not begin in the 1960s, but in the 1870s. The hyper-radicals (see Part One), particularly of the 1960s, are mere borrowers with only a few twists and turns on old ideas in modernism. They transmogrified it. Wider mass communication gave them a larger audience than early modernists had.
And postmodernist interpreters of the Bible are mere borrowers with few innovations. Postmodernists reflect the uncertainty and instability in society and intellectual trends and infer that discourse (how we communicate in a variety of ways) is likewise uncertain and unstable. This uncertainty and instability is especially apparent in a variety of interpretations of the Bible, which has been locked up and strangled by traditional interpretations, so they say. Apparently, it is the passionate goal of postmodernist interpreters of the Bible to free it from the stranglehold. If meaning in all discourse is uncertain and unstable, then they intend to demonstrate how the meaning of Scripture is likewise uncertain and unstable, dethroning any privileged viewpoint along the way, even time-tested and steady ones.
But to what purpose? Which way are the postmodernists headed? That remains to be seen. I’m not sure they know the purpose or direction of their application of the latest trends to the Bible in their postmodern project. But I do not at all find their purpose or direction to be “groovy.”

James M. Arlandson can reached at jamesmarlandson@hotmail.com

I wandered lonely  in my shroud

I wandered lonely  in my shroud
That boats stopped by with whales all filled
When all at once I saw a pound
A burst, of  folded unpaid bills
Beside the cake, beneath my knees,
Fluttering and dancing or they freeze
Continuous as the cars that wind
And  mangle up the stinking way,
They  charged us never-ending fines
Along the argument mof days
Ten thousand saw I all at once,
Tossing the  cheques into the Bank
The graves beside them once were paved
And did the  have nots  recite   free
A poet could not but be floored
In such good bottled rcompany:
Amazed—and mazed—but little fought
What wealth the show to me had brought
For oft, when with my pouch I fly
To shopping in expensive mood,
Teeth gnash upon that timid  cry
Which is the hissed beatitude
And then I write my garbled will
And prance till all the garden fills

Pray,please for me

 Apologies to SIR THOMAS WYATT
Pray, please, for me, you  who my cooker  broke
With faked food,  hot frying in my chamber.
I have seen them griddle, flame, and smoke
That now are  cold and do a  lamb dismember
Sometimes they  filed  their briefs  inside my Aga
And  flaked bread  on my hand; whereon  sheep tgraze;
Busily baking  buns with  a  new range
Spanked by government  fools so  very wise
Twenty more times cooked on ribboned  lace
On these thin oven trays, we twinkled ice
When my denim apron from her neck did fall,
She  caught  a fish  for me in her arms thrall;
Therewithall  while sweetly  we drank Kirsch
She softly asked, “How do you  like your flesh?”
It was no dream: my bread unruly baking.
But all is  bleak now, as I ‘m cooker-less
Entering a  strange new future of uncreating
 Yet I have  all this sweet new yeast to raise  and bless
And she  promises to use  fat cookery books much less
But since that I so kindly am  now served
I ache to know what special meal she loved

When love and hate can enter no debate

We  draw a map of love inside our minds
Before we learn to speak and separate
And hatred too is structured by these lines

But owning such a map can make us blind
If we use just that to navigate
We  draw a map of love inside our minds

Some have mothers  tuned in and most kind
The map’s a good description of estate
Hatred too is structured on these lines

But some experiences we cannot bind
When love and hate can enter no debate
We  draw a map of love inside our minds

We need to let both love and hate combine
The pain and anguish may be very great
Our  mind is  better structured on such lines

Some may  think our life is made by fate
Others learn by how they correlate
We  draw a map of love inside our mind
And hatred too, is structured by those lines

 

Memorising poetry is good for us

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-should-memorize

 

Extract

“My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.

Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart.

I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered.

Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.

So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)

The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat”