A starting phrase, a melody alert,
A trill of birdsong may our ears caress
As sensitive as a baby’s little hands
As touching as the lover understands
We join together in one human heart

As round the world the News our minds will hurt
As round the sacred, carelessly we skirt
As dimly we perceive the  last combat
Then let us be  like  music sung unplanned
From startled phrase

Arpegionne, cello,Franz Schubert
Do not  leave before the great concert
The music gathers from the world’s own lands
Shared  in trembling  heart and soul’s demands
Till all to peace may  make  their minds convert
Give us that phrase.

In the mirror, who do we perceive?
Do we see ourself,does it deceive?
We look different when in varied moods
Ungrown  people  love to sulk or brood
We see ourselves but how are we received?

If  a friend looks sad, perhaps they grieve
We are mortal.,death will snatch with greed
As we turn to dust with ancient leaves
Reflecting on the truth, do not look rude
In the  mirror

Where one has has ventured  must she lead?
Far from home, barbarians spread their seed
Europeans savaged worlds approved
Forced conversions  madden God indeed
With no mirror

 

the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a

religion,
and God is the poetry caught in
any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught
as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the
world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its
closure.
There’ll always be religion around
while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and
intermittent,
as the action of those birds –
crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then
beating, and again shut.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/29/nick-laird-poetry-religion

EXTRACT:

 

Though an atheist – in that I believe we’re here only by happy accident – my sensibility is religious. I like ritual and heightened states. I like mind-altering drugs. I believe in invisible forces – radioactivity, magnetism, sound waves – and I’m more than willing to sit for an hour listening to a church organist practice, which I did just last week. And I’ll let myself shiver along with the immense chord changes. I don’t like faith but I’m fond of its trappings- the kitschy icons, the candles, the paintings, the architecture and, especially, the poetry. Though many great religious figures, from Augustine to Screwtape, have taken prose as their instrument for confessing or cajoling, when it comes to praise, poetry’s the usual choice. I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s magnificent new translations of The Book of Psalms, and “My heart is astir with a goodly word”.

The relationship between poetry, those goodly words, and religion is hard to quantify. Both involve the hidden, working at the borders of the sayable. They share an experiential dimension. Personal religion involves a private speech act (prayer), chanting (psalms), heightened states achieved by ritualised words. The Lord’s prayer is one of the first poems I learned. Leached of its import by years of mindless recital, it’s almost a Sitwellian sound poem to me.

The Narcissism of Minor Differences

 

“The English and the Scots. The Serbs and the Croats. The Sunnis and the Shiites.

If you look at some of the fiercest and bloodiest rivalries in history, what’s striking is not how different the opposing groups are, but how similar. Sure, they often hold different beliefs, but they live as neighbors, share ancestry, and hold similar customs.

In his 1930 essay “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud commented on this dynamic, noting that it is frequently “communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.” Elsewhere he notes that the phenomenon is not limited to ethnic or religious peoples either: “Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.”

If as a teenage football fan you were caught up in a cross-town rivalry with another high school, you know of which Freud speaks.

So what accounts for the peculiar hostility between groups of people that are in many ways quite alike?

Freud chalked it up to the innate human proclivity for aggression and the desire for distinct identity. To see one’s neighbors reflect and mirror oneself too much threatens a person’s unique sense of self, and superiority. It’s what political scientist Stephen Brooks calls the “uncomfortable truth of resemblance.” To alleviate this injury to one’s ego, one downplays their similarities with others and emphasizes their divergences — which can be amplified into seemingly unbridgeable rifts.

Freud called this phenomenon “the narcissism of minor differences.””

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/17/behind-the-anti-semitism-crisis-of-jeremy-corbyns-labour-party/

 

Although Stan was 92 years old he still rode his bike as much as possible in the summertime.He was out in the garden pumping up the tyres before going off to the Library when suddenly his neighbour Annie appeared at the gate,bedecked as usual in finest Scottish tweed with a long pendant on a solid 22 carat gold chain swinging nonchalantly from her neck,with a matching ring attached mysteriously to her upper lip
“Who’re you,the Lady Mayoress” he joked noisily as he felt nervous.
Where’s Mary?” she whispered shyly.
“She’s up with her widowed sister Joan in Scotland ” Stan admitted nervously.
“Joan,that’s not a very Scottish name!” Annie joked.”anyway how about we sit down here on this bench for a moment”.She pulled him vigorously towards her.Stan responded regretfully yet politely
“I’m afraid I can’t stop.I have all these  old books overdue and the library shuts in 15 minutes.
“Don’t worry, sweet heart”, she cried softly.”I’ll pay all your fines.I’ve just come into loads of money.”
“Oh,how’s that.my angel” Stan murmured into her ear.
“I just shot Bert.If you help me to get rid of the evidence,I’ll share the loot with you.”
At the funeral,Annie was dressed in a beautiful dark brown suit from Jaeger.She went around the room making sure everyone had enough food and drink..As she leaned over towards Stan her heavy gold locket,inside which was hidden the bullet that killed Bert,swung over and hit Stan a glancing blow on  his temple.
Stan fell to the ground where luckily there was a thick  wool carpet
“Do you think we should ring 999?” someone asked sarcastically.Within minutes paramedics arrived.
“So,is it that chair again?” they clamoured.
“Yes,this foolish old man fell over and the leg came off my new antique chair.I’ve only had it a few days and it’s not insured.”
“Did anyone ever tell you,your eyes are like deep pools in the Sargossa Sea?” The paramedic whispered into her right ear.I’m  Dave,by the way,her muttered.
“Have you still not finished that Creative Writing Course?” Annie shouted,continuing..
“I’m getting tired of you admiring my eyes.What about my nose?”
“Has anyone ever told you,your nose is the shortest they’ve ever seen?” he said furtively
“That’s a bit boring” Annie retorted. angrily
“Yeah,maybe I should change to Art,” he ruefully moaned, his eyes on the ground
“I love the way your deep blue and turquoise eye shadow is melting round your eyes and running down the sides of your nose.”
“Hurry up and fix my chair,and while you’re about it,you may as well take Stan down to A and E for a head X-ray.”
Glancing  slyly at Annie in her Jaeger suit with carefully contrasting deep coral blouse and opaque teal blue 80 denier tights with 6 inch stiletto heels to complete the outfit, not to mention her raspberry coloured bra which clashed violently with the coral blouse, which, as it happens, was more transparent than she realised, Dave picked up a hammer and began,excitedly,to mend the broken chair as this would put her in his debt.
“This is what life is all about,my boy” he thought.Little did he know the true tale, that Annie had murdered her husband merely because she felt very  bored.
Boredom is very dangerous.If you are affected why not go out and look at some hats?

Image by Katherine from a photo she took 2013

The late night news was very black today
Get ready for the angst , be mobbed by tears
A whale has swallowed Brexit and Ms May

No more shall little children, heedless, play
For  love imperfect has not paid their fear
The late night news is very grim today

Let the moon and stars each turn to grey
As in their grief they weep with hate sincere
A whale has swallowed Brexit and Ms May

Who will pay the bill  or  write the Play
Can  it be that lady, Germaine Greer?
The late night news is very grim today

Where do whales live,how about E bay?
Or in the House of Lords, is there a pier?
A whale has swallowed Brexit and Ms May

Who would have thought that vote would bring us here?
Weep well, oh mine eyes,have you  got no tears?
The late night news was  wonderful today
A whale has swallowed Brexit and Ms May

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/12/06/auden-and-god/

 

““To pray,” Auden wrote, “is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.” This may seem a denatured idea of prayer, but Auden took it seriously, and seems to have prayed in exactly this sense. The only value he found in “petitionary prayer”—prayer that asks for something—was that the act of expressing desires can reveal what they are, so that “we often discover that they are really wishes that two-and-two should make three or five, as when St. Augustine realized that he was praying: ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’” Auden prayed to a God whom he knew he thought about in falsely human-centered terms, but only by doing so could he listen with any attention: “I can see…what leads [Paul] Tillich to speak of God as ‘Ground of Being,’ but if I try to pray: ‘O Thou Ground, have mercy upon us,’ I start to giggle.””

I need a good sinner
I am  not Hungary
Where is the damage?
Is there a desert in the kitchen?
The Neg’ev… sounds like my wife
Are you a misphlogistonist?
Do you like a beginner at  dinner?
Why do we always have three horses every night
Sorry, three hearses.
I like an  egg fish
Sign,aye. Give me a pen.That’s an order
Is Rael still here?
He’s gone over to Rome
Wireless in Gaza?
Tireless at Murder
The order is   in Gatwick  they say,
Is this a war or just a piece of one?
Conflict with glassy fists is vulgar,regina.
Where will it all end? At the bottom.
So King David had his Hotel and Solomon had the Temple then some terrorists blew up the Hotel.Where was King David at that time? I see they are now Rulers
I’ll say this for King Herod.He knew his pie from his  irrational jumbles
Why, I never knew he built a new temple all by himself.
What a Nero!
Do you like the Pope? I didn’t even know he was on FB!
Do you ever bleat? Join Blitter or otherwise Bitter.
What a nun, aeon!
I scrambled   my legs on  a low heat
We can’t even  afford an oven.
What did they do with them after Auschwitz.. give them to Charity or sell them to another  evil Fascist country to pay for the re homing of the survivors who were refused entry to   the UK or USA and then we complained when they decided to flee to  the Holy Land.I bet Jesus wept all night.Unless he was not a survivor
That made me blink.
Oh, fire a blank.for God’s sake.That’s blass venomous.. you will remain in hell >
I told you to vote Leave, so don’t claim me
It’s still a free cointreau,I daresay.
Food for the bitch, work for the  whore.
Death  to the Menace.
What   about God? He’s not got a blog yet so no About

https://youtu.be/KtBbyglq37E

• 

  Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everythinginanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole

• Edith Stein

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-jewish-mark-twain/355735/

” Her book is nothing less than a cultural history of American Jewry as refracted through its most celebrated artifact. Fiddler, which debuted in 1964, is placed within its moment. After a couple of decades of postwar assimilation during which Jews, like Catholics, won gradual mainstream acceptance, ethnic identity was beginning to reassert itself. The melting pot was being reimagined as a salad bowl, and the movement that Fiddler helped launch would eventuate, 13 years later, in Roots. Some potential backers worried that the show would prove to be “too Jewish.” Its Jewishness, in fact, turned out to be the key to its success.

But what exactly did that Jewishness consist of? If Fiddler marked the early days of multiculturalism, it also represented the climax of the process by which the Jews of Eastern Europe were rendered safe for their grandchildren, reduced to a set of reassuring stereotypes—poverty and piety, laughter and tears, candlesticks and chicken soup and “warmth”—that preserved them not so much in amber as in schmaltz. The paintings of Chagall, the photographs of Roman Vishniac (redacted to eliminate signs of prosperity or modernity), books like Life Is With People (1952) and, indeed, The World of Sholem Aleichem (1943): for the new suburbanizing Jews, those Unitarians with yarmulkes, such artifacts performed a complicated kind of psychic work. They gave them a past to adore, but also one that they could proudly leave behind”

On the patio stand my bay trees  in their pots
An acer red,a lavender   for gnats
The spiders weave their webs and so  do I
All I write down here  may be a lie
The truth’s a mountain. not a democrat

The toad crawls back  uneasy, the frog spits
I know I have retained a molten wit
My skin is healthy and it  slowly knits
The lord of death, another I defied
On the patio

The darker side is where my patio sits
In the evening,   by choice candles lit
Here an air raid shelter war defied
As we fought the Nazis and their spies
Wary of the past, alone  I sit
On the patio

To me this adage implies that someone in pain  needs only use more will power to blot out the pain.This is  false.If  it were true it would be dangerous.Should we banish the pian of a broken leg and continues using it we would do more damage or possibly go unconscious and even die.Will power is affected by fatigue,it is not limitless
When Jesus said,Take up your bed and walk to the paralysed or crippled  he said it  we  believe as the Son of God who could work miracles
Maybe some of the people’s problems were psychosomatic and faith in God might  give them confidence to try to walk.These things have occurred under hypnosis.I don’t have any data
But pain is a neccessary warning signal and we cannot turn if off. entirely.People born unable to feel pain don’t live very long
If you suffer chronic pain you do use all your will power to keep going.However it is finite and you pay a heavy price.Like you go shopping get home and can’t walk for 3 hours.

The only sensible  saying would  be “mind interacting with matter” and even that assumes Descartes division of us into a body and a completely separate mind where we live and  take decisions.I expect this is imagined to be in the brain.Since we still don’t know what mind and consciousness are  Descartes supposition may have had bad consequences.
If we pay attention to our body  in the places which hurt this when kept up for a good while can relax some muscles  and tendons.I used to do it for migraine but it would take at least 2 hours lying down and gently focussing on the pain which would gradually ease.Keeping very still stops one vomiting too.Of course you need a quiet place to do this and work is no that place
I have not yet found it helps arthritis but maybe it takes 3 hours or 5 hours and would not someone have written articles about it? Relaxing is usually good but  many people are strained at work and struggle to keep going.That’s why  A and E is full of drunken people at the weekend… they have be injured in falling or brawling
We educated people may blame these workers but could you spend 50 years in the coal mines [ and bring up 6 children alone]  which my grandad did? He didn’t drink much as in those days they were paid starvation wages and Mum had to go to Soup Kitchens sometimes.If he drank he had not much money
You may say if men didn’t get blind  drunk  then, why do they now? Ask a sociologist.It seems also to be common among  middle class youngish people.I feel it’s a release of tension and if you go back to your flat alone on Friday you might be judged a loser.I know of people who go  out of London on a train,get  home and  have no idea about it the next day.So it can be dangerous even if it helps arthritis pain

People who say, mind over matter, also are asserting their superiority to us sufferers who are weak willed  morons

I did an IQ test  once and I am a moron which seems odd as I used to be a mathematician!Really it shows they are rubbish on the whole
Rubbish is the in word now

The other technique which does work is Distraction.Meet friends and talk, write poetry, paint and draw.Get a camera and  play with it.Go out and get a whore.I am unsure where you get them from but maybe now we are all whores.
Go to a party and get utterly knackered.But when you go to bed you still feel the pain.So how about all those free books you can get? Anything out of copyright might be available as an e book.I know someone who has read the ancient Greeks this way and also Newton and Hook.He has few friends as most people don’t understand such things but if you do, read all night and then have a nervous breakdown
Going  mad may stop pain.I can’t say as yet  and if I do I probably won’t be able to write an article about it.But on the whole given mental health’s low status in the UK I will not advise anyone to even think about it.How do you go mad? Does anyone know the ideal way? First have loads of money for carers and a nice home with space for them….  and no doubt you will end up  seeing a CBT therapist who will train you to believe you are sane and have no pain.That’s a different kind of madness

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/is-mindfulness-making-us-ill

Can something be too soon a metaphor
The Holocaust, a genocide no more
A word for something evil  done by man
A little worse than burning the best pan

Do metaphors make people do bad deeds
When we need  new ways and  stunning schemes
How about  we torch the Union Jack
And throw it  at a Constable hay stack

That’s pathetic, we need nuclear bombs
Stored inside the wombs of  virgin nuns
When birth arrives a triumph and a roar
The London Hospital shall be no more

No London,no New York,no Leningrad
Just a beetle  looking quietly sad

In the Waiting Room the folk look dumb
Like a Van Gogh  painted with the thumb
Colours swirl uncanny as I peer
I guess my perfect hate has made more fear
Wondering what the dickens is to come.

I want to get  the bus though noone’s home
Only Alfred clawing at my comb
It’s not as if a cat could read King Lear
I  dream  of Summer  donkeys  by the pier
In the Waiting Room

Oh, for Istanbul and   rounded Dome
No pointed steeple like a finger torn
The floating heavens here enclose   the higher
If waiting is a horror, I’m a liar
We are a  haul of  herrings   shipped to  shore
In the Waiting Room

 

 

On the NHS, we have to wait
Weeks of blood tests,no sign of a date
There are people who’re worse off than us
They almost die just stepping off the bus
Have they kept  quiet  lips till   time’s too short

You know my wife, the man begins to state
Never seen her yet, the doctor bleats
The nurse recalls the scar   and the skin loss
The blooming doctor doesn’t give a toss

That’s not  true,  the doc has  just two feet
Two hands, two eyes, one head and  folk to meet
He cured the nose, but killed  the man  in’t verse
Wasted money from the Nation’s purse
Let them test the heart,  forestall the hearse.
On the NHS

What can’t be allured must be cured
What can’t be  pure must be  demure
What can’t be  lured  must be procured
Whar can’t be  immured must be insured
What can’t be endured must be disappeared
What can’t be  borrowed  must be  followed
What can’t be horror may be sorrow
Sodom today and Gomorrah termorrow

 

 

Stan is feeling low and sad

His good wife Mary has gone mad.

Stan is feeling Guilt and Fear

He knows now that it’s wrong to leer.

Stan has been a naughty boy.

He let a mistress with him toy.

But Mary found his mobile phone

When she was at home all alone.

His mistress lived next door to him

It made it convenient  for to  sin.

While Mary worked hard teaching maths

The lovers lingered in the bath.

He was meant to do the chores.

Chopping wood and painting doors.

He had to bake the cakes and bread.

So that the household would be fed.

But Stan into temptation fell,

As did his neighbour Anne as well.

They enjoyed kisses and hugs,

And lying down in woolly rugs.

So, Mary, she was most appalled.

She screamed and yelled and cried and bawled.

So Stan has gone for therapy.

What sort of changes will he see?

He lies down on a long brown couch.

Behind which the therapist crouches.

He says to Stan,”now let it rip.

I want your mouth to be unzipped.”

Was your mother kind to you?

Did she train you on the loo?

Did she wash your mouth with soap?

Was she prone to sulk and mope?

Stan thought this man verbose.

So he kept his own lips close.

When he got the bill to pay.

He told the therapist,”No way”

“You have been the one to talk.”

He glared like a crusading hawk.

“You should pay,not I pay you!”

What was the therapist to do!

“I’m glad you’ve managed to speak out.

Your sanity is not in doubt.

I’ll tear the bill up for this week.

And next time I want you to speak.”

So Stan unleashed his every thought

Just as  Freudians once had taught.

I don’t know how he feels inside.

But language is a useful guide.

And as he sees his therapist,

His mistress is not greatly missed.

He  wanted more attention,

So now his bad ways are all gone!

He got a part time job as well.

He can pay his therapy bill.

Mary is still teaching maths.

And now it’s she with whom he baths!

Uncertain times unsettle human minds
We live without our choices   well defined
A fog of grey encompasses  our thought
Wonder from what pedlars we  have bought
In the mirror seek but cannot find

Like the one eyed man can lead the blind
We  can live without  complete design
Else we tighten, tense and overwrought
Uncertain times

Trust  is lacking, for the lost we pine
Life and death  seem not to be aligned
All those little rules our teachers taught
Do not seem to give us  peace from  excess thought
As through the world we walk as if it’s mined
At certain times

 

“For firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of his fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.  … Such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or even misery might be felt.  In a timid man, on the other hand, the instinct of self-preservation might be so strong, that he would be unable to force himself to run any such risk, perhaps not even for his own child.”

Charles Darwin