Floating like seaweed on the tide,
The final leaves of autumn glide.
The birds ride on the wind’s broad back,
They know no fear and know no lack.
The air is filled with unearned treasure.
My happy heart its wonders measure.
The clouds are deep and dark and grey
What snow storms may they fetch our way?
The sun appears and gives a glow
Of yellow to bare branches low.
Red berries bright,like summer flowers,
Decorate the holly’s natural tower.
Sharp thorns protect the smaller birds,
And from inside,their cheeps are heard.
As dusk arrives the blackbird sings,
So much sweetness nature brings.
I turn my mind from in to out,
I feel salvation for my doubts.
I know that I’m part of a whole,
And with all life I share my soul.
In this peaceful place I rest,
As with love’s eloquence I’m blessed.
There’s singing in my inner heart.
Like bees to flowers,my fears depart

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-donald-trump-political-depression-mental-health-2016-psychiatric-cbt-methods-heal-britain-a7528581.htmlPolitics

Quote:

So what is helpful? What’s the cure for political depression? For one thing, liberal conservatives are going to have to borrow from some of the left’s irrepressible optimism. But if my last few months of lethargy and dark doctors’ waiting rooms have taught me anything, it’s that all those in search of a cure for our current political malaise could do well to look at recent advances in the mental health ward. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, or CBT, is today’s wonder cure – but what does it actually entail, and can it save a country as well as it can a person?

CBT is all about breaking unhelpful mental patterns. It’s also about the art of the possible. Under pressure at work? Find one request you can reasonably make of your boss. Determined to run a marathon to feel better about being obese? Start by using the stairs instead of a lift.

In politics, focusing on the big picture can often seem overwhelming. The future is bleak; there are a lot of battles that the forces of liberalism seem unlikely to win. When I think of Trump in the White House, Erdogan imprisoning critics in Turkey, martial law in the Philippines – I could continue – I curl up and go back to bed. When I think about the two refugee friends who I’ve got coming to stay next week, I scurry up and start readying

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/08/frugal-bloggers-budget-personal-finance-poverty

I have read this and agree there is a big difference between well off people being frugal and people who are really very poor and have little choice.There is no direct connection between frugality and holiness

Some ways I have found to save money

[Don’t go without a warm coat and wool hat in winter.Cold thickens your blood and can cause heart attacks or strokes.[

1.Switch to a digital subscription to a newspaper.For the Guardian it is £11.99 a month rather than buying in a shop… £65 a month.
The Guardian will let you read a lot for free
2 Use dishcloths and tea towels instead of kitchen paper.
Cut up old underwear and use for cleaning bathroom etc.
Try using cloth hankies except when you have a cold. Though you have to wash them well
3 Shower less and use a sponge to wash yourself while standing on a towel
4. Use a public convenience while you are out to save on your water bill.
5 In winter if you are not working sit in a public library and read the newspapers.The rooms are usually quite hot.
6 Wash your outer clothes less frequently.
7 Try soaking dry clean only clothes in cool water and then drip dry.I did this with a wool skirt I spilt milk on.
8 Food is a place you can save money.For example vegetarian recipes.Make your own yoghurt etc.
9.Ring your phone supplier and ask if they can do you a better offer as you are going to switch elsewhere if they refuse.I saved £20 pm
10.Meditate,listen to Radio 3, or 4 have tea with a neighbour…. all free.
11 Buy shoes in Sales.
12 Have people round but not the ones who expect a 3 course meal.Ones who like you and don’t mind what you feed them on,
13 Give some of your savings to charity.The RNIB is poor.Guide Dogs get loads of money ironically

My photo

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jun/18/poetry-can-heal-it-helped-me-through-depression

Extract:

For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: “I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.” In the 19th century, people in asylums were encouraged to write poetry, while William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote that, in his depressions, “I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy.” Orpheus was both healer and poet and his lyre could vanquish melancholy.

https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-joyce-carol-oates-20160405-story.html

G

Yet our tendency to forget the haunting brilliance displayed in the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” in the novel “Them,” the novella “Black Water,” the Marilyn Monroe novel “Blonde,” and to focus instead on her tweets or the sheer volume of her catalog seems fitting, because her latest novel, “The Man Without a Shadow” (Ecco: 384 pp., $27.99), is preoccupied with the act of forgetting. It tells the story of a charismatic amnesiac, Elihu Hoopes, whose short-term memory has been destroyed by encephalitis. Though Eli, his ailment and an image he can’t seem to shake — the disturbing anamnesis of a girl’s body floating just below the surface of a stream — are at its center, the book is as much the story of Margot Sharpe, a neuroscientist who enters Eli’s life as a graduate student but over time becomes much more entangled with her patient’s world. The novel wrestles with our complicated acts of remembrance and the various ways memory constructs and colors our emotions and ethics — our entire identity. After all, it’s memory that allows you to discern where you are going, where you have been.

Oates will appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 9. This phone interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What carries you from one book to the next? Does an image come to you or a character or an idea you want to explore?

In a long work like a novel, a number of elements have to come together. It’s like a river into which many tributaries are flowing. The river builds with different smaller streams. You have one idea and then another and then another. I always start with characters about whom I care. I like to work with characters who are representational. I am interested in the personal, but I also want to write something that has a larger significance in terms of society.

“The Man Without a Shadow” is not only a fascinating portrait of its two main characters, Margot and Eli, but an examination of memory as the very bedrock of the edifices of our identities, our personalities.

I’m interested in how we fashion our personalities out of somewhat selective memory. We forget much. It is both very natural and very normal to forget a good deal. Things that we remember may have a certain cast. As in a movie, there’s a certain tone, of lighting, of music, of sound, so with our memories some people have a natural tone of melancholy and others have a more optimistic or cheerful tone. We all know people who are determined to be upbeat and other people who seem to be looking over their shoulders all the time, wounded and complaining. Personality to me is the ultimate fascination — how we’re all so different, and yet we’re very much alike in many ways.

How did the function of memory determine the book’s structural and aesthetic choices?

The novel is constructed as if it were notes on an amnesiac. A neuroscientist is keeping a personal journal and part of that is the novel, but then we’re also in Eli’s memory and imagination too. We see what he’s remembering of his past. He’s haunted by his past. That’s true of many people. There are seminal incidents in people’s lives that they keep returning to and thinking about. He’s tormented by something that happened when he was very small and didn’t have any ability to comprehend. He’s trying to comprehend it with his art.

Author Joyce Carol Oates talks with Michael Silverblatt during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC on April 19, 2015.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Are there similarities between comprehension through art and science? You write of Margot, “She has always asked questions for which there are not ready answers. To be a scientist, Margot thinks, is to know which questions to ask.” Is that also in some way the definition of a writer?

A scientist is someone who is really looking at the causality of things. If you were a political scientist, let’s say, you would look at the current political situation with Donald Trump and the others in a very analytical way, seeing it maybe as part of a cycle of American politics. A scientist is always looking at the context, whereas most people just read the newspaper and throw it out. “Does this thing have consequences?” “What does it mean?” “Is there a precedent in history?” These are questions that a scientist would ask, and a novelist asks these questions as well.

calendar@latimes.com

Malone is a writer and professor of English. He is the founder and editor in chief of the Scofield and a contributing editor for Literary Hub.

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https://schlemielintheory.com/2013/07/16/emmanuel-levinas-don-quixote-and-the-hunger-of-the-other-man/

Quote from the above article

Like many Jews over the centuries, I am fasting to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.  Now that I’m in middle of the fast, I’m having a hard time distracting myself from my hunger.  In the midst of being enthralled with my hunger, an academic memory came to my rescue.   I remember how the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, in apposition to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, argued that it’s not about my death and suffering (as Heidegger would say (in translation) my “being-towards-death”), it’s about the death and the suffering of the other.  Echoing this, I thought: perhaps Levinas is right, it’s not about my hunger; it’s about the hunger of the other.

Strangely enough, Levinas writes about the “hunger of the other man” in relation to Don Quixote (a comic figure which has appeared quite often in Schlemiel in Theory).  In 1975 and 1976, Levinas gave a course at the Sorbonne. His course notes are included in the book God, Death, and Time (translated by Bettina Bergo).   On his February 13^th 1976 lecture, Levinas addresses Don Quixote and the “hunger of the other man.”  This talk, to my mind, gives us at least one angle to understand Levinas’s approach to humor.

Let me sketch it out.

Before making his reading of Don Quixote, Levinas prefaces with a meditation on the relation of thought to the world. He writes: “thought contains the world or is correlative with it”(167).  He notes that by “correlative” he means that it comes “prior to” the world.  In this spirit, Levinas argues that thought “disqualifies” anything that would be “disproportionate to the world.”  He provides two adjectives to describe things that would be disqualified: “all thought said to be ‘romantic’ or ‘theological’ in its inception.”

“Disqualified” thought, argues Levinas, is not equated with the world (which thought contains); it is equated with what is to come.  It is, for this reason, equated with “a question” and “hope.”  Levinas goes on to say that “God” is also included as something which is “disproportionate” with thought and the world.   To be sure, God, hope, and the question are deemed to be “outside” thought and, for that reason, outside the world.

Writing of this, Levinas wonders how much we can be “affected by what is not equal to the world, how one can affected by what can be neither apprehended nor comprehended”(167).  In other words, how much can we be affected by that which is disqualified by thought?

Following this question, Levinas launches into a discussion about the disenchantment of the world.  He addresses this, like Martin Heidegger or the sociologist Max Weber, from the angle of technology.  Unlike them, Levinas sees the disenchantment fostered by technology as good.  Here, however, he notes that although it is good, technology “does not shelter us from all mystification”(168).  Now “there remains the obsession with ideology, by which men delude each other and are deluded.”  And, says Levinas, even “sober knowledge…is not exempt from ideology.”

Everything, even knowledge, is still threatened by mystification.  Levinas finds the source in what he calls “amphibology”: “technology cannot shelter us from the amphibology that lies within all appearing, that is, from the possible appearance coiled at the bottom of all the appearing being.”

Benjamin Hutchens explains that amphibology is the “confusion between what something is and the concept that enables what it is to be known.”  This, says Hutchens, leads to a “kind of ambiguity.”  John Llewelyn cites Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being – in his claim that “language is the house of Being” – as an example of “amphibology.”  Being is ambiguous and this ambiguity troubles Levinas as he sees it as the source of what he calls “bewitchment.”  And, as Llewlyn suggests, this ambiguity goes along with the ambiguity of language.  Perhaps this implies (and may even be a jab at deconstruction) that one can easily become enchanted with the play of words and language and this may distract us from the other.

What Levinas seems to be saying here is that what threatens the project of demystification most is the embrace of ambiguity as such and this kind of ambiguity is associated with how things show themselves or appear.  Levinas notes that the basis of “man’s persistent fear of allowing himself to be bewitched” is “amphibology.”

And, strangely enough, the writer who best illustrates amphibology and the attending fear of being “bewitched” (and “allowing” oneself to be bewitched) is Cervantes in his book Don Quixote.  In fact, Levinas says that “bewitchment” is the book’s “principle theme.”  Levinas finds this to be most pronounced in chapter 46.  Hinting at his own phenomenology of the face, Levinas calls Don Quixote the “Knight with a Sad Face” and points out that “he lets himself be bewitched, loses his understanding, and assures everyone that the world and he himself are the victims of bewitchment.”

Photo in North London

Thanks for all your calls and emails,
Thanks for caring that I’m here.
In my darkest,lonesome moments
These replies will keep you near.

Thanks for answering all my letters
Thanks for the time you give ,
Thanks for sharing your deep thoughts,
And being so generous with your love.

Thank you for your wit and grace,
Thank for your funny face.
Thank you for your bright blue gaze and
Thank you for your warm embrace.

Thank you,thank you,thank you,thank you.
Love you ,love you,love you,Love.
Thank you,thank you,thanks to you,
Because,because,because,Because.

My drawings are so funny.They make me laugh

http://www.drdansiegel.com/blog/2014/03/17/the-self-is-not-defined-by-the-boundaries-of-skin/

https://www.thetimes.com/article/0e1cd27b-cec9-4dd8-98a3-c7e89a08f46b?shareToken=d687d08eeeb5ec36410b50130df32dd9

Mary was looking at the carpet in the hall.

Look at this carpet,she said to Emile

I can see your paw

marks all over it

Yes I trod in some red paint that someone has spilled on the pavement.

I think I will have to get you some shoes said Mary but you can take them off when you go in the back garden.

Do you mean we’ll have to go to the shops to buy me some shoes said Emile hopefully

I don’t know. If I went to a toy shop they might have some dolls wearing plastic shoes.

I don’t want plastic shoes the cat responded angrily.

My feet need to be able to breathe

So you would like leather shoes will you Emile?

The only alternative seem to be Wellington boots.

But do they make Wellington boots small enough for cats?

I don’t know the cat said wisely

Well if you would only learn to read you could look on the computer yourself.

It goes against my wilder nature to learn to read.

Well Mary said do you believe that I have no wilder nature ?

I believe you did at one time but I haven’t seen much evidence of it recently

That’s because Stan is dead, she shouted.

That would not bother a cat,

Well you may not have noticed but I am not a cat. And if you’re so pretty and wild, love me love me do

Don’t be so ridiculous. I am too small to make love to you.

You could run up and down my spine with Algipan on your feet

I’d rather wear perfume on my feet and run up your bosom.

Naughty cat, bestiality is not allowed in Britain.

Well don’t tell anybody about it. It’s not real bestiality just running up your body with perfume on my feet.

Well it’s something that no human being could do without seriously injuring me.

So you see there could be an advantage to marrying the cat

Yes my love I do love you very much Emile but I would really like a man as well as you and maybe you could find a lady cat that you could marry then we can all live in this house together then you and your wife could have some kittens

I’ll have to see who the man is before I agree to that. He might not like cats.

Is that case I should tell him you are a dog.

And so say all of us.

Stan and the standard deviation

Stan was teaching social statistics to a group of elderly neighbours.Since he was 101 it gave much hope to them to see him demonstrating his prowess with various techniques on the overhead projector,.He was planning to do some logic and some philosophy too.Annie was sitting by the door so she could answer the bell if any paramedics turned up for tea or supper…
I’m not going to calculate the standard deviation he murmured.”I just want you to grasp the general purpose.”
“Deviations,they’re not normal are they?” enquired his neighbour Henry,an ex-English teacher.”So how can they be standard.It’s utterly confusing..”
“Are you thinking of deviants?” Stan enquired calmly yet nervously
”Certainly not,at my age I’m long past that!”
” Still it adds a bit of excitement to the class.” he thought silently
How do words in ordinary language relate to those in Statistics?”asked Henry kindly.
“They are just more precisely defined in statistics.To say someone is a deviant is a rather vague term.”
“No,it’s not!My neighbour is a deviant.He always dresses entirely in yellow.”
“Well,that must be hard to do.Certainly unusual.” Stan agreed boldly.
“But in another country that might be the norm.So it’s a matter of context.In statistics it’s more prosaic..There’s a formula.It’s totally independent of context.Have you ever wondered why so many mathematicians have a touch of Asperger’s syndrome?”
“No,it’s not something that meanders through my mind much”replied Henry wittily.
A shudder passed through the audience on hearing the word “formula“,which perhaps they considered something of a deviant word. Anything with letters and numbers mixed together is certainly not welcome in many people’s minds, along with their more unusual sexual tastes, desires and inclinations which were kept secret even from themselves in many cases.So Lacan appeared to think.As I am unable to understand his writing myself,I cannot be sure if he was right or even half right.
“Time for tea,” called Annie,hoping to divert their attention to the everyday realm of food and drink.She carried in a platter of mouse [mice?] sandwiches kindly donated by the local ambulance service and some iced Victoria sponges she and Stan had made the day before in her new naga oven.
“Just a quick word about next week.We’ll take a look at ratios and proportions and maybe see how that relates to the concept of rationality.”
“That sounds fun!” Annie called encouragingly
.Henry decided to act on a deviant desire and fell onto her lap
”Oh,dear!” she gasped loudly as the chair collapsed under her.
”Why can’t you be deviant at home?”
“My wife won’t let me!” He kindly answered.And it’s impossible truly.
“And look,” Stan continued,”we’ll have to ring 999.This chair is in fragments.I thought for one day we’d be able to avoid calling them out!”
“Well,life is not controllable.” said a quiet but fierce looking lady with sharp green eyes.”That’s what makes it tolerable“
She then greedily consumed a large piece of iced sponge cake .
“I can stand the thinking if the cake is good” she whispered to her shy friend Amy.
”That’s rather a feeble argument,”Amy retorted.”You can’t really compare cake and statistics.”
“I’ll compare anything I like!” the green-eyed woman snarled loudly.
“You do what you like but you must keep a sense of proportion!”As we all know….
“Now then,have you rung 999?” Stan queried of Annie.”Yes,here they are,and they’ ve got a stretcher for the chair!”
“Well,that’s certainly unusual,even deviant“,Stan thought anxiously to himself.
”Where do they get their funding? Is there a fund for distributing money to help chairs which are not normal?

October 28, 2019
Walking on the long white shore with you
The perfect sands, the sky and sea so blue
The rippling waves made patterns on our shoes
Oh,come back,sweetheart ,I can’t bear your loss

The church at Old Hunstanton has a pond
Ducks and geese were waiting for more food
The silence was enormous, like the sky
Interrupted by a wild bird’s cry

At Brancaster we nearly met our deaths
Cut off by a wave behind our backs
Young and green ,we knew no panic then
But now I feel it as I walk alone

Without my anchor I may float away
A little speck of dust in that wide bay

There’s being a lot of talk about the winter fuel allowance handout which used to be given to retired people in the UK

No it is only being given to Peter on pension credit which means that very few people will actually get get it and of course this will affect some people quite a lot

Although the state pension went up by 10% in April 2024 which is quite a large rise although it’s linked to inflation so it’s not as large as it might appear to be

No if you want to prove that some people are suffering badly because of losing the wind to feel alone and I’m sure it’s not difficult to find some cases within the guardian there was a case of a man cited who he had been living in London in comes to the accommodation and he decided to go and live in Devon

His pension per month was 1300 pounds. He was renting a bungalow which had quite a high rental and after we’ve been living there for a little while among the low rent was 1100 pounds per month leaving him with only 200 pounds a month for food and heating and all the other bills not to mention clothing.

Obviously he will miss the winter feud allowance but it’s only 200 pounds per year not per month or per week so 200 pounds let’s say if you get it for the winter six months that will be about 34 pounds a month which might just about paying some of your electricity bill.

But I don’t think this is a valid case because most people is pensions were 1300 pounds a month would not be paying 1,100 in rent or if they were they would have to move to something cheaper.

There are many people who may own their own houses and are not paying any rent at all and they will be perfectly able to live on such a low income if they were careful but it seems impossible for this month to live on it even if he got WFA.

I don’t know why they wou

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/04/16/prescribing-creativity-the-meta-diaries-of-marion-milner/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/16/john-major-trump-us-isolationism-threatens-global-democracy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.salon.com/2016/10/31/walt-whitman-saw-donald-trump-coming-genuine-belief-seems-to-have-left-us-the-underlying-principles-of-the-states-are-not-honestly-believed-in/

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/15/its-time-to-rethink-boredom-procrastination-and-regret?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Roads are made for journeys not destinations.

Confucius

As Mary stood by the fridge at bedtime, a can of fly killer brought by dear Annie fell off the top and struck her red,orange and brown framed spectacles on the top.The heavy can hurt her nose
I hope nobody thinks a man has done this. she said to Emile
Well,I didn’t do it ,he mioawed cheerfully
It must be an Act of God, she mused.I hope there is no bruise
Ah,well.Are you sleeping on my bed,she asked Emile
No,I think I might go out roaming
Looking for frogs,she teased him
I may return, depending on the weather
Suddenly Annie knocked on the door
Are you all right, she asked anxiously?
Why, what is wrong,dear?
Your nose is blue
It’s that fly stuff, it fell onto me!
I’m terribly sorry.We must put it somewhere else.
Choose between me and the flies,Mary joked.
You are my best friend.I will not bring this stuff again
I am off to bed,Mary cried.Let me lock the door behind you
Annie ran out, and stole The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk.She wanted to discover why Mary liked Wittgenstein.And it covers a dangerous and terrible era in human history from the end of several Empires to the Second World War and beyond
I wonder what the children of Dr Mengele and the other dreadful criminals who committed torture and atrocties would feel like when they learned the truth abou their fathers
So Annie is embarking on some serious study while Mary is reading Woman and Home magazine.What is causing this strange change?
In bed ,Mary gazed at an article on ” How to dress well when you are over 80″
Alas all the clothes were expensive.Very
Does it matter what I wear, she pondered?
I suppose people do judge by appearances, she concluded.But which people?
Maybe I shall dress in one colour from now on.But not black.
Blue is a good colour.From now on if I buy new clothese, they must be blue
Maybe just a blue silk scarf is enough to make a vivid impression
Mean while Annie is crying over “The Duty of Genius” because at least two of Wittgenstein’s brothers took their own live and his sisters were almost captured by the Nazis who had to be bought off by the family wealth unlike Freud’s sisters
So what are we complaining about in the UK, she asked herself before saying some almost forgotten prayers.
And wished her husband were there to hold her in his arms.At least one of her husbands would have been most welcome

And so feel all of us

My old blue fountain pen allows
The ink across the page to flow
Like wet paint from an artist’s brush;
And words come in a rush.

Enchanted by the hand that writes,
Bewitched by art, beauty alights.
The script is like a music score
Through which you pass as through a door.
Imagination’s home.

As,mysteriously,to you,to me,
The spirits of our hearts are tamed,
By rhythms of pen,of brush,of mind,
They enter vision quite unplanned,
Like moths to flutter softly round
Fire joined heart and hand.

The pen slows down,the hand goes still
And just as dreams at daybreak will,
They shrink,they disappear,they’re gone,
I almost caught that one.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/13/londons-first-roman-basilica-found-under-office-block?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

What a silly place to build a Basilika!