Posted on May 17, 2019
Should we write in form to make a shape
Or let our minds run free, associate?
Such tangled webs within the mind are draped

Oh, to run as free as antelopes
But from sharp tigers noone will escape
Can we control , disarm within a shape?

Love’s enacted falsely , making rape
Inside our hearts shall we recover hope?
Such tangled webs the curtained mind creates

Round the marbled minds we half dazed traipse
Wherever we go hunting, we’re too late
Can we control our fear within a shape?

Collapsing faith cracks , can we concentrate
Or from the deal , do we dissociate?
Such tangled webs of mind make ripe our hate

Now sex compels but will can’t procreate
Can kindness smile and friendship instigate?
Should we write in form when we love shape?
Our mingled maps of mind might alter fate

Words float like water in a stream,
Reflected gently by sunbeams.
This stream flows swiftly to my heart
And through these words your love is caught.

The space inside my heart is clear,
Your love will find its right home here.
Your words are treasures in my night,
And in the dark, they glow with light.

Oh,let me read your notes of bliss,
And seal them with a loving kiss.
I hope this stream will always go
Where living waters softly flow.

For love is kind, and love is true.
Connections form from me to you.
And love creates an open heart,
From which all other feelings start.

Yet love is free, and does not bind.
Love is glad,and not unkind.
So if my love displeases you,
Then you can find a lover new.

I have life inside my heart
Which will sustain me if we part.
I wish you much great happiness…
And know my grief will one day pass.

But for today,let’s laugh and play.
Let’s make love inside the hay.
It’s summer and we like the heat.
Let’s celebrate with kisses sweet.

Teacher why have you brought a cat to school?

So he can learn to read

He can’t even talk.

I’m not going to get him to read out loud

Why have you brought a frog to school,

Because I was coming to school when I found him.

Well don’t come to school via the Bullring tomorrow

Teacher to girl why have you got a curtain ring on your finger?

It won’t fit on my toe

Why have you got a hat on in the classroom?

I wear it outside as well.

Are you Jewish?

I’m not sure but I thought I’d practise the rituals

Surely your parents must know whether you’re Jewish.

They’ve not been speaking for the last 10 years.

The should go to a marriage guidance counsellor.

They’ve not got married yet.

And how old are you?

I must be at least 9 months.

If you were 9 months old you wouldn’t be able to talk.

There’s always a first time for everything.

But you’d be a newborn baby.

Can’t they talk?

Have you never seen a newborn baby?

Yes I have seen them when my mother gives birth and she says to them I’ll never have sex again.

And what o1¹ they say?

It’s too late now

I said I am waiting for transport not where is the banned port

I said I’m writing my blog not get lost in the fog

I said I want good pain relief not I want to compare our disease

I said I love Pablo Picasso not you look very declasse

I said I’m going to pick some apples not I’m going to lick  some nipples

I said I like Stephen Leacock not I’m turning into a peacock

II said am I too old to blog not go and fall off a log

I said I prefer cats to dogs not I prefer rats to frogs.

I said do you like a hot dinner not don’t tell me you’re a sinner

Too old for sex not I shall break all your necks

I said what is your name not you are entirely to blame

I’m getting tired of all these misunderstandings and you think I’m just rambling

I said are you a psychiatrist not I’ve got infantile paralysis

We can get spectacles for our eyes and hearing aids for our ears but what can we get for our minds?

You have to be brave to write because all you have ever felt, experienced or studied can be drawn up into your consciousness whilst you write.A friend of mine who is a writer put it like this.
“It has taken me to places I’d rather not have gone to.”
However she said she manages to live through it.At the time I had only written mathematical works so I didn’t understand what she meant.But I have now had some experiences which give me a hint of what she was trying to say.If you’ve had many fearsome experiences then these feelings may come up when you loosen the grip  of consciousness.
However I have also found a spirit of laughter in me which is new.Step into the darkness without knowing.It’s only by going there that help may come.But the fear is that it won’t.You can’t get an insurance policy beforehand.
Are you stepping into a void or will there be something there?
Also in drawing or painting, it can take courage to draw what you perceive.I found that especially when drawing buildings and studying perspective.I’ll see if I can find a drawing to illustrate it.I have the feeling,
“No, No.It can’t be this steep a gradient.It’s too much”
And in being inside a building like Westminster Abbey or Durham Cathedral trying to assimilate the vision, the huge spaces and the power and size of the shapes can create awe or even terror.One can lose one’s sense of self entirely.But it can also be revivifying when one has returned.The fear is that one will not return.
Maybe it’s the same with relating to people as well?

Rosa awoke later than she liked to which indicates a control freak element in her personality.She had stayed at her desk till the sun was rising, writing her intriguing diary which she fantasised would rival Sylvia Plath’s.She got up gingerly and made herself a cup of tea in a china mug on a work surface in her lovely peach and teal kitchen
Passing water into a small bottle for the doctor to have analysed was a task even the most brilliant find hard.Rosa was not even the averagely brilliant amongst the brilliants of history like Plataho,Aristittle ,Simone de Boredwoy or Blazed Rascal not to mention St Coal.She grabbed her mobile as a dying man at his wife’s hand and rang the cab service. she used now she was unable to see properly or ride her bike.
Hello, she cried, it’s Rosa Benchez here.Can a driver pick up my urine sample and take it to the surgery for me.Thank you so much.
No problem, the manager told her and soon afterwards a young man with dangling earrings and showed him the sample hidden inside a Sainsbury’s shopping bag.He looked puzzled but agreed on payment of £259.89
She realised she had not eaten any breakfast so decided to have an early lunch instead.As she ate her toasted cheese and snake oil she fell into a daydream.She was with her online man friend walking through a huge field of her favourite flowers, cyclamen.They were walking along companionably without holding hands but together whilst also being apart which waa delightful.This was agreeable since she had never met this very charming man in the flesh.He was called XY Matrix although his parents had never studied algebra as far as historians can tell.Could it be a pseudonym?
Maybe he was being raised to be a mathematical prodigy but he became a writer and musician and managed to earn a good income and he had a beautiful detached house filled with antiques and ceramic lamps like Freud’ study.In fact , he had copied that from historical photos and descriptions and one day he planned to become a therapisr.
Rosie and Fox as she called him got on well and shared a liking for poetry and music.Sometimes he had sent her music as attachments on his emails.He seemed to love Wagner and Britten which is a curious combination to the British woman.He loved Britten’s Donne’s Sonnets sung by the stunning tenor Ian Bostridge.

After lunch, Rosa opened her laptop.She found an email from Fox.
You have been here and broken all my windows and my bath is ruined, he wrote.I am moving house to get away from you.And I am having plastic windows installed there,
Rosa was alarmed as it defied common sense.She did not know where his house was and it was in another country.So she emailed him back,
What is wrong , dear?You only said 2 days ago that my poetry and linguistic jokes had helped your sick friend when you went to visit him in the hospital.
Waiting anxiously for his answer, she sipped some coffee and looked at her friend Dolly walk by, dressed in a pink suede jacket and black linen culottes with unmatching red boots
.Where is Dolly going she wondered pensively, feeling like a cloud floating over Rydal Water in the winter not knowing which way the wind might blow it.
After two hours of utter silence, she decided to wait until the evening when she had put away the groceries and written a triolet or two.She was keen to do it before she lost the impetus and had to write a lecture,
The whole evening went by so she emailed him again.But again he did not reply.
The next morning she found a letter on the doormat.

1, Rancour Villas
Horror Lane
Terrortown
Undear Rosa

I thought you would be kind and gentle like your poetry but you haveave wounded me.You asked me what date my dental appointment was which was an invasion of my privacy.You told me you would not mind if your son was gay whereas to me it is a sin to indulge those sick appetites and you should not encourage him.You refused to send me a photo of yourself with nothing on except a pair of socks and a hat.I hate you now.I am deeply aggrieved that you have ruined my entire life

Signed XYM

XYZ McSez
A dental appointment? It’s not as if she had asked him if had a sexually transmitted disease or whether he really believed in Jesus as his Saviour.Nor had she asked him if he liked to smoke cigars in bed nor if he let Lassie his sheepdog sleep on the bed and cuddle with him.For all she knew, the dog might be his partner or even his wife

She emailed him as she felt anxious in case he was having a breakdown.He replied, saying she was not who he thought and he was finished with her forever
I wonder who he thought I was, she asked herself as she sat with tears in her eyes feeling concerned about what was really going on in his dear mind.Her cat Lucy ran up and sat on the arm of the chair gazing frenziedly at her owner and mother
Don’t worry Lucy.I am sure I will soon be ok.This must be a mistake.I think he has got paranoia which gets worse and then better

Rosa looked on Amazon and found a book called

BBC News image

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/betweenus/writer-urges-us-reclaim-our-sleep

At issue here is our inner life. In a chapter called “The Social Divide,” Duff describes the widening gap between sleep and waking consciousness. She briefly traces the history of the marginalization of not only our own subjective experience, but also the mythologies that once provided its context.

“I was most familiar with Greek mythology,” she explained. “[The Greeks] paid a lot of attention to sleep and dreams and how that material is worked in us. I was surprised to find out how my Eastern philosophical traditions had studied sleep. Three or four thousand years [later], we think we’ve just discovered it. But there’s so much folklore and cultural life passed down from generation to generation. Everything that mothers learn from their mothers to promote sleep [like] lullabies.

“With the Enlightenment we sort of erased our awareness. Darkness became aligned with [what] we were trying to rise above—emotions, feelings. We wanted rational control, and you can’t control sleep. Sleep is one of the ways we return to nature. By responding to alternating phases of light and darkness, we return to our natural cycles, and join with all of life.”

Sleep and health

It’s no news that regular sleep is important to our overall health. In her work as a counselor, Duff has found increasingly that a good night’s sleep is instrumental—even essential—to our emotional well-being. As part of her intake process, she routinely asks her clients how they are sleeping.

“Once they got more sleep,” she said, “their issues became more manageable. Even bipolar disorder and major depression are often preceded by six months of sleep problems.”

On the other hand, as she states in the book, the “effects of sleep disruption on mood, perception, and behavior are so strong” physicians sometimes misdiagnose patients as having psychiatric disorders when those patients “simply need better sleep.”

Along with diagnoses come medications. In a chapter on the commercialization of sleep, Duff notes: “The use of sleeping pills among adults between twenty and forty-five doubled between 2000 and 2004. In 2011, 60 million Americans filled prescriptions for sleep medications, up from 46 million in 2006.”

Statistics that I find deeply disturbing.

The problem is not so much the amount of sleep we get or how we get it, as it is our relationship with sleep.

“We want to commodify it,” said Duff. “[We want sleep to] help our days be better rather than offering its own vantage point. It’s about productivity. We keep going over the day’s events, but we process them with a different mind, much more associative, which works more by Gestalt. That’s why people will come up with solutions [when they’re asleep]. It’s non-conscious processing, which goes on when we’re awake as well. But we don’t pay attention to that either.”

Duff points out that the problem isn’t with science, but with “scientism”. She is glad that scientists are paying attention to sleep and making serious studies, but she worries about them “jumping on the bandwagon of making money—selling us machines and pills.”

She encourages us to take back our sleep, which she likens to a “n

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/17/carol-ann-duffy-writes-bombsite-poem-about-trumps-uk-state-visit?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/25/loves-labour-by-stephen-grosz-review-the-truth-about-relationships?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

He has only written two books and they’re in the form of stories I found it very interesting and his first book the examined Life I have reread and far more in it than I remembered.

Beautiful written as well

The Myth of Apostolic Authority https://share.google/4jGaSsYjRjb2wbzZL

Mary was knitting a large shawl on a circular needle and following the pattern in her BBC knitting book from the 1970s she had to increase in the center of each row by one stitch or was it two stitches I cant quite remember.

When she got up to 228 stitches and was beginning the next row she forgot where she was and so she began to count from the beginning to see if she’s reached 114.

She got up to 98 when Stan who was reading the Guardian turned her and says,. have you read this article by Samuel Heeps today!

I don’t think so, she murmured as she began to count from the beginning again.

When she got up to 97 he responded

Surely you must know whether you Readvit or not.

Yes perhaps I will remember soon she retorted as Emile mewed silently.

The third time she got up to 101

The fourth term she got hooked to 103

Are you sure you don’t remember this article, her husband

Mary is a very patient woman but nobody is perfect so she stopped knitting said to her husband can you look at me please

So he did and then she said I am knitting this very big shawl but I am not an expert and sometimes I have to count the stitches so before you speak will you look at me and see whether I am counting or not please!

Oh I’m so sorry darling. I never speak when you are writing on the computer or reading the latest work of Adam Phillips in but I did not realize that you can’t knit something like that without having to look at it carefully now and then.

So then Mary began and got to the center and increase in the middle and stitch on both sides

And eventually she finished the shawl

And decided not to divorce her husband

After all, who would want a totally silent husband?

That’s a question I can’t answer

The only sure way to catch a train is to miss the one before it

GK Chesterton

Of course this assumes that all the trains leaving your station are going to the same place

If not you might miss the trend from Oxford to London and instead the catch the train from Oxford to Slough

At my local station here all the trains go into London. So he would be right .

The most dangerous situation would be where you missed your train from king’s cross to Peterborough and git on the next train which was a non-stop express to Edinburgh

There are trains like that because I’ve been on one and I remember going through Newcastle very fast which I did not recommend.

How softly sweetly,gently flowers pose
Carnation,orchid ,daffodil and rose.
For their intricate petals form a shield
Yet bees with striped force shall make them yield.
Appearances,both natural and contrived,
Mixed with the wiles of human nature thrive.
As knowing not, we pluck the apple rare
And bite its flesh,with teeth we have to bare.
We too deceive the innocent who pass
Not seeing watchers hid behind the glass.
The windows break,the deep earth quakes;
Seized is the maiden ,he her virtue takes.
Beneath the surface,force and fierceness thrive.
What fearsome, burning God enjoys our lives

Ezekiel sits on the floor eating an orange 

He has four teeth, he can stand up.

He can’t walk yet but he dances.

He’s as tall as the table 

What are you thinking Ezekiel? 

You are murmuring and muttering

You are singing and whispering

Speaking in words and sentences is in a way or diminishment of all this.

I can see what we lose as we grow older

Oh happy,Ezekiel, you like oranges.

You want something and it appears as if by magic.

It appears as if you created it.

Be our guest

The future is a story not yet told.

Are fantasy and dream creative acts?

The future is still fiction for the bold

We aren’t like concrete set into a mould

And yet we all must die, that is a fact

The future is a story not yet told.

Some may travel through the realms of gold

Taking in the virtues that they lacked

The future is still fiction for the bold

We’re always moving on, life is not on hold

Selfish day dreams never teach us tact

The future is a story not yet told

Into my dreaming head such thoughts are packed.

Slipping in the mire of all my lacks

The future is a fiction not yet told

The future is a story for the world

Who did the gooseberries fool?

Why does hair gel?
Why do strawberries jam?
Must eggs lie on toast?
She fried her own eggs daily.

She even made her own bread
We had grapefruits bigger than the grapes.
Why do sheets change?
Do pillows have good cases in law?
Why get married when you can go to prison?
Why have a man when you could love a cat freely
Why marry a wo/man when you can go fishing?
Just relax and act naturally
My therapist is dead but I’ve never mentioned it.

She may rise from the dead but I don’t think yeast is sufficient to cause that.

Mary had been reading a new book called,” The Path” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh.To her surprise, vrshe saw it reviewed on her phone where she read the guardian news

.She had decided to get out of bed on the other side
When she awoke the next day, she remembered her vow.Unfortunately, she forgot she was inside a fleece sleeping bag with a zip on one side only.Should she get some scissors and cut her way out on the other side?Or was that a foolish idea since nobody but she would know she had failed her to keep her first new promise.
She heard a noise and them her friend Annie came in wearing a long satin nightgown and a green velvet trench coat.
How do you like this, she asked Mary?
Mary was very red yet silent
What is wrong, with you Mary?
I need to pee but I can’t get out of bed on the wrong side.
You have no choice, said Annie.You must not wet the bed or die from a burst bladder. Get out on the right side

But I feel a failure on my first day.
Maybe that is your lesson.Accept you can’t do it and get on with your day.
Mary ran to the bathroom.What a relief passing water can be to poor ladies who suffer afflictions in these regions.
Annie went down to the bijou yet complex kitchen and began to make some toast and boil some eggs.She gazed at the peach walls and melon cupboard doors unable to decide if she liked them.Maybe kingfisher blue might have been better.Too late now.Mary could not afford a new kitchen even if this one was really old.At least it was not orange as was common in the 70’s.
Mary came in with her golden hair standing up on end like candlesticks from the Synagogue.
I just got a shock, she said
I can see your hair is standing on end.Was it the electric socket?
No, there was a man looking into the window and I was naked in the bath.
Perhaps it was King David, Annie joked.Why don’t you have frosted glass?
Stan said it would frost itself in the winter.He was the least practical man in the world.
Maybe we could glue artificial frost onto it?
Who was the man, asked Annie her cheeks pinker than her perky pink lipstick by Licumb ; those lips which were so thick and sensual with a lovely curve.
Mary tore her eyes away from these lips.I didn’t have my glasses on, she said.Maybe it was a man from a hot air balloon?
Maybe someone fancies you at last,saidAnnie.
Do you think I’d go out with a man who does things like that?
No, you could stay in with him, Annie joked, as tears of mirth made her green eyeshadow and red mascara stream down her cheeks like rain after a nuclear explosion.No wonder men ran after her in the street.
You could succumb to his charms,Annie whispered.
I think I’d like a man more sensitive than that, Mary screeched.
Well, Mary, you are so lacking in knowledge the art of flirting you only notice men when they do something really wild or unusual
Like what, asked Emile who had just munched up a bowl of dried cat food and was full of energy.
Well, Stan kept pretending he loved reading Newton’s original writings which he bought from some unusual website thinking it would impress Mary. However as he failed O leve; maths 5 times he could not understand it.He sobbed and cried in the public library and Mary was moved by his grief.Later on, though, he became angry at her intellectual talent and took me as his mistress to get back at her.She never even noticed!
I don’t see how having a mistress is a revenge on poor woman who was given her genes by God, said Emile.
Don’t be daft, she buys her jeans from TK Maxx, Annie answered.
And so do all of us.

I can’t write any more right now!

The vital line is drawn with human  hands

When all the force of art is gathered in

The heart , the arm the fingers with the brush

Create a mark and then we can begin.

The other self will help us if we ask

We fear to lose control, we hesitate.

With our courage ink and paint will flow

Through our being truth and love relate.

Creating symbols new is very hard

We risk our vision, fear that we will fail

With wary hands, we tremble to begin

The still small voice, the the centre of the gale

Ecstatic moments, flood our souls with grace

In that littlle crack we find god’s face

The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke
The way the back leant curving into space
The dance and danger both are thus evoked

Like a play, a drama, fire and smoke
A dance performed so swiftly and with grace
The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke

The heavy bull is pounding,is provoked.
A threat, a man,  intrudes into his space
The dance and danger both are still evoked

See, the  matador throw out his cloak
A   dash of black, and here we see his face
The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke

The mind needs just a hint to  see the whole
We fill the present with our past distaste
The dance and danger, mirroring dark smoke

 Acting both dramatic and displaced 

The artist may still love what she forsakes 

The vital line was drawn with one brush stroke 

he dance and danger ,life and death evoked

Because if you’re not bad enough getting worse is better for you

https://archive.philosophersmag.com/emmanuel-levinas-a-snapshot/

O

Levinas’s philosophy is clearly governed by a deep-seated pacifism. In fact, it is one of Levinas’s central contentions that Western philosophy is wedded to a counter-ethical process of conflict. It is this radical idea that underpins Levinas’s first magnum opus, Totality and Infinity (1961). This treatise opens with a discussion of war – an all-encompassing, as well as literal term for conflict. Levinas states that it is the Western preoccupation with the truth that generates this conflict. In short, if one is able to apprehend the truth, one is essentially self-sufficient or “total”. For Levinas, this reassuring sense of totality is disastrous for it harbours an underlying antagonism towards others who are liable to challenge one’s authority.

Levinas traces this conception of totality back to the teachings of Socrates and Plato. According to classical authority, the self is literally self-contained – it is able to contain the truth. For Levinas, this spirit of autonomy was perpetuated in the work of philosophers as diverse as Plotinus, Bishop Berkeley and Hegel. In addition, Levinas also detected a return to this spirit of self-sufficiency in the phenomenological work of his former tutors, Husserl and Heidegger.

In an attempt to evade this tide of thought, Levinas turned his attention to the constitution of subjectivity. For Levinas, far from being self-sufficient or total, the self can only exist through reference to the non-self. In short, self-knowledge presupposes the existence of a power infinitely greater than oneself. Echoing the famous Cartesian cosmological argument, Levinas thus suggests that the subject is indebted to the idea of infinity. In direct opposition to contemporary continental thought, Levinas thus reinstates the subject – a subject that encounters itself through the mediation of an-Other. According to Levinas’s intricate argument, such an encounter precedes the disastrous desire for truth.

Crucially, Levinas argues that the encounter between the self and the Other is always passive. In slightly different terms, one welcomes the Other as the measure of one’s own being. It would seem to follow that one’s subjectivity depends upon a non-aggressive or non-violent interface. Given its passive nature, Levinas concludes that this interface is a proto-ethical moment that precedes all other ethical discourse. In this way Levinas undercuts traditional ethical debate.

0

Today, Levinas’s ethical thought is frequently discussed in relation to diverse academic fields beyond the traditional boundaries of philosophy. Disparate fields such as sociology, literary theory, historiography and anthropology have all benefited from the priority Levinas accorded to “the Other”. This ubiquity stands as testimony to both Levinas’s profundity and growing contemporary relevance.

At the time of writing, Lawrence R Harvey was teaching and completing his doctoral thesis on Levinas and the ethics of representation.

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