Pauline Oliveros,

Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.

Drawing by Katherine I think
She cut my  hair very short so it won’t drop  out if I have cancer
Can you get cancer in your hair?
She said it looked thin if it was long but now it is almost invisible.
If you have cancer,it will take your mind off your hair
So that’s where my mind has gone!
Anyway,cancer is common now
Don’t be so insulting.I am poor but educated
That’s  a surprise.
Why?
Your vocabulary is small
Well,I am, trying to lose weight so I cut out all the words like Schrodinger, infinity, theologian,mystery,Israel,Jesus,love.Jordan,Negev, glottal stop and algebraic topology
So you must be bright if you can remember them even though they were deleted
What is ” deleted”?
It’s the opposite of defeated.
I can’t believe that.
How about retweeted?
Well, if it is retweeted it is eternal,in a very real sense
We deleted “eternal” but God is still here.
So we can’t delete God?
We can delete “God” but not God.
It’s a bit like the gap between the nameless and the name as Leonard Cohen sang in “The Window”
Was it Windows 10?
No it’s about Love coming in through an open window.
And I suppose it goes out through the door
Eventually  it seems to
While we bless the continuous stutter of the Word being made into flesh
Wow.
That was  what LC sang
So  tell me, can you get cancer in your mind?
It would be a metaphor ,like some part of your mind is out of proportion to the rest
No doubt too much higher education can do that
Yes, they are hoping high fees will save the minds of the multitude
Can I believe the Government is doing it out of Love?
Well, there is faint chance.
Infinitesmal.
Be careful or you will put more weight on!
I’ll have to go dumb
For someone Irish that is hard
I’m only 62% Irish
62.5,actually.
Well,I am trying to accentuate my Viking genes
I do like your jeans.Where did you get them?
I found them on a chair in  the bathroom.
Has someone left them?
It’s those elves that come in the night and move all your stuff about.
But their jeans would be very small
It’s all relative.
And so say all of us

When Oscar sits on the windowsill
And sees someone within,
His mouth opens wide in soundless cry,
He gives us his cat grin.
Oscar rubs around my legs
He’s such a friendly soul.
He then rolls round upon his back
And waves his long striped tail.
But after Oscar’s greetings done,
He’s off to do his rounds.
He sets off from the white door
To the long thin gardens end.
Every inch of soil and seed
Is subject to his nose.
The garden looks one way to us,
But he can see much more.
I wish that Oscar cat could talk
And tell us what he’s found.
Ten thousand spider’s weaving webs,
A slow worm on the ground.
A million ants climb up the rowan,
I sometimes watch them too.
I see the striped wasps and honey bees
In this small natural zoo.
The hedgehogs sweet have long been gone,
but we have diverse birds.
Oscar sits on my tall stool.
He watches them for hours.

Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism during the transition he was forced to make  to the UK from Vienna  owing to fear of Nazi arrest and its consequences.His four sisters all died in those Concentration Camps.In this book he apparently suggests that Moses was Egyptian.Edward Said has also written a book about Moses.Some people say he was a ruler in Egypt who had to leave for political reasons….He was obviously very talented.

Moses was an Eruption I hear.So he had to be kept warm in a basket.
Then Foureyes daughter let him gloat  down on the  River Nile…till a bull rushed him
Then he turned into a shrew and found God.. or God found him
But God would not let him find Galilee so he found Emilee ,Loelee and Phoeebilee linstead.
He had many children such as Matthew,Hark,Look and Gone.They were all men and had more children with no wives.They didn’t have any women so who did Cain and Abel marry?Eve?
Is this what Freud never realized… men used to marry their mothers and later their daughters who were also their sisters,Crikey,what a blunder
Blimey what is this Bible?Libel?
As we were taught in school Daniel lived with a lion and a lamb.I’m unsure if they had children…. it might explain a lot if they did.
And finally Solomon was very wise.It was easier then when there was no judge or jury to stop him cutting a baby in two… well, he was just pretending.
I say,the Shrews were very shrewd and clever.Like who told Adam and Eve what to do before Masters and Johnson wrote that book.. the Human Textual Despondency?
In any case Adam could not read.In fact they didn’t write either.And to think children here can write so young.Adam and Eve  have lots of family
Everybody on Earth… pity they are dead and can’t see us though Goodness knows they’d be shocked if they saw our behaviour with our family.

Sometimes it’s absolutely plain and simple .I am sitting in the garden and this enters my mind:

Random apples
Fall Silently
On unknown Newtons

That was it.

Sometimes I get a sentence,usually a line of song with music which I hum.
Quite often it is not the first line,but a middle line.I write it down when I get home:

Your words have cut my heart like  freezing snow

Then I have to decide what kind of poem.It suggests a villanelle to me so I have to get a first line

I  opened your last letter  with no clue

I like half rhymes
I  opened your last letter  with no clue
Eating  in my garden by the pond
Your sentence cut my heart like  freezing snow

I have changed the last line  as sentence implies judgement as well as a structure of words

Snow and pond  have a lot of rhyming words so I  think I can use this stanza to begin

The  Letter sent by a coward
I  opened your last letter  with no clue
Eating  in my garden by the pond
Your sentence cut my heart like  freezing snow

I opened  your last letter then I knew
I mistook your words,I had been conned
I  opened your last letter  with no clue

My heart  beat wildly wondering what to do
My eyes went blind, your hatred was unearned
Your sentence spat on me like  hail and snow

Round my mind, like birds emotions flew
No  cause nor explanation I discerned
I  opened that last letter  with no clue

My face  turned white,my voice  was muted so
Silently, I staggered from my chair
Your sentence cut my soul like  freezing snow.

What helps us when we have such pain to bear?
Will we  want to live or  love or care?
I  opened your last letter  with no clue
Your sentence,  like a  rod, beat me anew

I shall leave it like this.I might post it because if I imagine another person reads it I can see it more objectively and may see weaknesses.Sometimes I change it when I move it to a poetry website.

http://www.wikitanica.com/2016/05/fake-friends-quotes.html

“From my opinions here are some tips to look out for friends if they are real or fake?

1. Do friends bully other friends?
2. Do friends swear a lot?
3. Do friends backstab each other?
4. Do friends gossip when you nor around?
5. Do friends fake being your friend?
6. Are friends  around you when you feel down?
7. Do real friends exist?

Question to ponder on: Are you a good friend?

He was so handsome my ears wept
I smile crookedly as the 23 injections  of anaesthetic was very unaesthetic including a scar like a winding river down the side of my nose with 38 little holes were the stitches went
He was so charming I collapsed and died.
Her smile was completely vertical and so was I not.
His face was a parabola  of joy
My figure became an ellipse and my lines  vanished
He was so ugly, it was a relief to kiss him
As he aged  he shrank so it was easier to kiss him without standing up or down.

https://youtu.be/86lczf7Bou8

“A person hears only what they understand.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

https://www.britannica.com/science/cognitive-dissonance

The Bard is a Leopard
There is nothing he can’t rant
Flesh and lean are the raptures
He wants me to pose
Near bashful daughters he leads me
To imbibe some holy spirits

He rides me along with his wrath
He gives clues to his rhymes
If I could  walk  with  his valet in darkness
No heaving would we feel
You are there with your crooks and  your laugh
With cheese you  make my eyes shut

It was like the dead losing their minds
The only reason you are in the mental  health unit is because you have bad manners
He  kept on mocking over my apple tart
She  bit and broke the apple’s heart
When is a nipple tart?
It was like the wild being with child
I have admitted a sin but it’s  veiled
How accurate are our conceptions?
Every body wants me in jail
Every body wants me,in jail
Just say, they want you jailed
In jail or out, they want me
I misheard her smile
Her smile went from one ear to the other ear.That was mine.
His laughter made my eyes ache
His groans tormented the rats and stopped them sleeping in his bed.
I tasted his wit and added pepper
Are you so funny you are in the farm?
Do you mind?

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

In dark grief. the human world seems  frail
The self and the outside seem not to meet
And just as do the blind when they read braille
We feel our way without the gift  of sight.

Should we seek escape in film  or book
While unstable in our  little world
Anxiety into the cracks will leak
And take our virtue  so our self  will fail

With no diversion, we must feel the  pain
As sorrow swirls around our heart and gut
And others must not show us their disdain
Nor stamp on our prone body with their foot

The world has gone and with no skin I  roam
Unprotected through this  iron cold zone

How like a prison is a body lame
The mind calls up desires and feels no shame
But bones and joints eacg give me piercing pain
And who will pay insurance or take blame?

In my prison, I massage as planned
I exercise my mind but understand
I see my toes with  them my white hands
While down the channel runs my little sand

I read King Lear and thought the king a fool
He did not live nor die as monarchs rule
Now I’m stuck inside a structure cruel
I’m like the pin which hides inside your jewel

The body’s more important than the soul
As feeling is the highest art of all

I have to go shopping often or I forget my PIN number.Likewise drawing money from cash machines I must do every day or I forget.But they won’t let one put money back inside the machine!
It’s so demanding to be old now.Someone stole my credit card bur being ill I didn’t know.They managed to buy some groceries twice before I reported it.I thought that was quite touching.
I forget to worry which is a great relief or it might be if I recalled the fact
I find too I am going downhill in manners and called some a a crackling font.Now I am in the mental ward tied to my bed.I feel so cared for as they gave me a Tablet last night and another this morning .I’ve already got several and the hallucinations have got on there and smile from the screen Ionly wanted a largactil but they can’t find them in the Computer Shop.What did you say your name was?

Images by Mike Flemming

“‘Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!’
Quoth the raven,

Edgar Allan Poe

https://gervatoshav.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/gadamer-on-translation-and-living-in.html

“The following excerpts are ripped from their context in Hans-Georg Gadamer‘s Truth and Method and applied to two issues that Gadamer does not directly address, but that I care quite a lot about: why those who view the Bible as authoritative should learn the biblical languages, and how they should go about learning them.*

“[E]very translation,” Gadamer declares, “is at the same time an interpretation.” This is now a cliché, and Gadamer, surely, was not the one who coined it. In class, I like to quote the saying attributed to the Israeli poet and translator, Haim Nahman Bialik: “Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your bride through a veil.”**

Gadamer goes on to say that those who read a translated text can only engage in an interpretation of the translator’s interpretation, not the original. In the somewhat stilted prose of Gadamer’s translators:

[H]aving to rely on translation is tantamount to two people giving up their independent authority. Where a translation is necessary, the gap between the spirit of the original words and that of their reproduction must be taken into account. But in these cases understanding does not really take place between the partners of the conversation, but between the interpreters. … The requirement that a translation be faithful cannot remove the fundamental gulf between the two languages. … Every translation that takes its task seriously is at once clearer and flatter than the original. Even if it is a masterly re-creation, it must lack some of the overtones that vibrate in the original. … [T]ranslating is like an especially laborious process of understanding, in which one views the distance between one’s own opinion and its contrary as ultimately unbridgeable. And, as in conversation, when there are such unbridgeable differences, a compromise can sometimes be achieved in the to and fro of dialogue, so in the to and fro of weighing and balancing possibilities, the translator will seek the best solution–a solution that can never be more than a compromise.” (pp. 386-8)

When he turns to learning a foreign language, Gadamer sets the bar higher than is normally done in your typical Greek or Hebrew language class:

“To understand a foreign language means that we do not need to translate it into our own. When we really master a language, then no translation is necessary–in fact, any translation seems impossible. … For you understand a language by living in it–a statement that is true, as we know, not only of living but dead languages as well. Thus the hermeneutical problem concerns not the correct mastery of language but coming to a proper understanding about the subject matter, which takes place in the medium of language. Every language can be learned so perfectly that using it no longer means translating from or into one’s native tongue, but thinking in the foreign language. Mastering the language is a necessary precondition for coming to an understanding in a conversation. … Everything we have said characterizing the situation of two people coming to an understanding in conversation has a genuine application to hermeneutics, which is concerned with understanding texts.” (pp. 386-7).

In other words, understanding the subject matter requires mastery of the language, and real mastery means living in the foreign language long enough to be able to think in it. “

Lost affections  fragment human souls
And no technician can repair this pain
We break in bits,no longer are we whole

We are the ones we love yet they grow cold.
We search and never find love here again
Lost affections  fragment human souls

My double joints from grandmother I hauled
My eyes  are James’ who on the Somme was gone?
We break like shells,no longer are we whole

Where is  she in whose  arms I was held?
Where will my mind go when  my life is done?
Lost affections  fragment human souls

As we age our bodies grow more cold
Why was there a Pope in Avignon?
They fell apart, the centre had no  hold

Tears of grief fall, Buttermere in rain
Mountains with cascading streams will pray
Lost  companions ,  lost are human souls
We break in bits,no ,we were never whole

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146097/reader-discretion-advised

Just a  few prompts will make me write
My heart  will still writhe to the sound of, who is it?
Lewd songs don’t make Love wake
Flu prolonged will make  us dive
As a dove I’m  on go slow
He taught me to forgo sex.
He shook me below the wrecks
He said spiders  have fifty legs
Where have all the hours gone?
Share love’s call when flowers come.
He  likes a coffin fit after breakfast
Will you hum to the criminal at 3 pm?
No flowers,we respectfully bequest
All  money gracefully deceived.
Ask for polite detention.