To be successful is our conscious goal
But surely first must come the making whole?

Invisible except to abstract thought
We see them with an eye we  must construct
The transcendental numbers came unsought

We only know a few, so we were taught.
Pi and e from inner space were plucked
Invisible except to abstract thought

Even  calling zero, number naught
Was   very  hard  just like the empty set
The transcendental numbers came unsought

Once we defined real  numbers then we light
The way to finding what we now detect.
Invisible except to abstract thought

Danger lurks where men have taken flight,
Into the abstract world without respect.
The transcendental numbers were not sought

Like we  put a plug in to connect
We may be shocked by feeling its effects.
Invisible except to abstract thought,
The transcendental numbers ,  hardly bought

Deep mysteries lie between the numbers whole.
Ratios  have a logic  we accept
But, in between,  infinity dwells veiled

At first, one  merely counted  shark fin whales
Such numbers seem both simple  and direct
Yet mysteries  hide between  the numbers  whole

Sheep and goats  are counted  soon as well
Yet mystery  an hypoteneuse   reflects
For at such points   infinity dwells veiled

A number which gives 2 when  squared itself
Can nowhere find a ratio to check.
Yes, mysteries lie between  our numbers  whole

The Greeks  rejected such irrational stealth
To geometry  only  they chose to connect
For on a  line, infinity dwells veiled

On infinite shores, their reason was well wrecked
As those who tried to measure circles found defects.
Deep mysteries lie between   the numbers  whole
On  lines and arcs, infinity dwells veiled

I might go to church again except I don’t like confession
Well, just tell a few of your sins
We don’t use the term sin so much now
Have your hurt anyone?
Just the people who read my blog on a  bad day
And the people at the bus stop
How?
I spoke to them,I forgot I was in the South.
They are cold and distant
I took undue pleasure when one I hate missed the bus by 2 minutes.
What was she throwing at it?
Just her crutches.
Well, you can go to Confession now
Are you a priest?
I didn’t mean this minute
Well stop telling lies
I was just passing a remark
Well go back and say hello to it
What,now?
When you have time.
Oh ,look we forgot to get on the bus.
Is that a sin
Stop being so scrupulous
Well two sins are better than one!

I like leopard skin but  what do you think,because it might make you seem to support the Tories.
I am a Tory!
No offence meant.
It’s interesting how we put our feet in our mouths
How many mouths have you got?
Ask a silly question
OK Will  it rain tonight
Why?You can’t dry washing in the dark
Yes, you can
Where?
In the airing cupboard or  in a heatwave.
Where do you  keep your heat wave?
I see English is  not your mother tongue.
That is very true.I spoke with my eyes first.
My eyes were too shy!
They look lovely now
Appearance and reality
Are you a philosopher?
No,I’m still human.
Thank goodness.You look green
It’s those antibiotics.
Surely they are not filled with green dye.
You never know these days.It might be a preservative.
So true.
Well have you ironed those tops yet?
No,I am waiting till everybody else irons theirs
Will you wear them crumpled
Yes, they will match my face
It looks ok to me
You are myopic
Am I? I thought I was Nordic.
They are not mutually exclusive
Wow.That is amazing.
Sorry, it  fell off my tongue.
Well,put it back and swallow it
Oh,look, the bus is coming
So is something else
You must stop drinking coffee.
But it  is yellow
I haven’t washed your trousers for 40 years with knowing that
Is it 41 years.
About

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-beautiful-mathematical-explorations-of-maryam-mirzakhani-20170724

Quote:

“The meanderings of sadness that news of Maryam Mirzakhani’s death brought compelled me to read every article I could find about her, and when I could not find more articles, I started to read the comments of the readers. Many of them wrote that they saw her as “unrelatable and incomprehensible,” given that they were “math challenged.” However, Maryam was the opposite of unrelatable. She reminded us, in words and actions, that mathematical ideas can be understood if one puts enough persistence into the task.

She was not the star of her lectures; the only stars were the mathematical ideas. She spoke calmly and clearly and radiated deep enjoyment of the process.

Maryam had the ability to quickly perceive the appropriate wavelength of her interlocutor and speak accordingly, a rare quality in a mathematician. She listened with attention and was very generous with her time. Behind her kind serenity one could perceive a steely tenacity and a deep well of ideas and, of course, a passion for math and an incessant quest for the fantastic “aha” moment. This moment often took years for her, because she worked on profound questions.

After one of her lectures, we walked together chatting. Suddenly, the voice of a child came from an adjacent room and Maryam exclaimed, “Anahita!” The voice belonged to her daughter. Maryam’s exclamation lit up the room. She sounded totally different than she had during the lecture. Her entire humanity was in the exclamation.

Maryam’s work connected ideas from different areas of mathematics. Part of this work consisted of counting closed curves on surfaces. A mathematical surface is, roughly speaking, the outer layer of a solid object. In topology, surfaces are studied up to the point of deformation — they’re allowed to bend and stretch but not to tear — thus the old joke that a topologist can’t tell a coffee cup from a doughnut. Surfaces can also have holes and edges. In this way, a disk and a cylinder can both be thought of as surfaces.”

Read more by going to the link above

The rain soaked dust is rising like a mist
As in Port Meadow,Oxford riverside
The sun returns and takes it in a kiss.

The open spaces offer us real bliss
Where truly God  or holiness reside.
The rain soaked dust is rising like a mist

Yet when  we have the time do we resist;
Ignore the need to go where love abides?
The sun returns and offers us  a kiss.

The damage from the News give hearts a twist
Our dreams   may splinter, though we’re side by side
The rain soaked dust is rising like a mist

Do we know the life that we have missed
Taking in the media though we sigh?
The sun  shines brightly over  this abyss.

What is it  we do until we die
Breathing in the solitude awry?
The rain soaked dust is rising like a mist.
The sun returns and warms the iron fist

Poetry is good for the soul, therapeutic for problems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Sexton

I am a kettle made of stainless steel
I am a saint,  for tea  is brewed to heal
And , unlike kettles on an old  coal fire,
I am not dirty nor do I perspire.

My mirrored sides reflect you as you cook.
Look at me and read me like a book
I’m  full of love and hotter than a man
Oh, dear lady, love me while you can.

Superior mother,  yet inhuman  I;
Even electric kettles sometimes lie.
I shall never punish you, my dear
For perfect love like mine shall wield no fear.

All I ask is that you polish me.
For, in between your hands, I  yearn to be.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-british-jobs-david-davis-divorce-bill-spanish-pensioners-immigrants-a7934881.html

The success of the Brexit negotiations show that we’re finally getting our country back

“What is grace? I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.”
~ Saint Augustine

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/07/mahmoud-darwish-poetry-palestine

Extract

For the last 12 years of his life, Mahmoud Darwish was my neighbour. He was a shy, private man who was rarely ever seen in public events unless he was reading his poetry. I served with him on the board of the literary magazine, Karmil, which he edited. Except for these work meetings, I rarely saw Darwish. Sometimes I would come across him taking a walk around the hills of Ramallah; sometimes at the house of mutual friends, but never in public places, restaurants or cafes.

The opportunity to find out more about my neighbour came when we were both under curfew during the invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army in 2002. It was then that I got a call from the aptly named Bomb magazine in the US to conduct an interview with Darwish. I readily accepted hoping that through an intimate one-to-one discussion I would get to know my famous neighbour better.

We just had a few hours in the morning when the Israeli army lifted the curfew to allow people to shop. I asked Mahmoud to come to my house for the interview and he agreed. As always, he was immaculately dressed but, like all of us, he looked tense and concerned that we finish on time so that he could make it back to his house. We ended up spending three hours together, where I was able to find out how he was managing to write under these conditions.

He described to me his poem State of Siege, which he wrote in response to the Israeli invasion. It was “a poet’s journal that deals with resisting the occupation through searching for beauty in poetics and beauty in nature. It was a way of resisting military violence through poetry. The victory of the permanent, the everlasting, the eternal, over the siege and the violence.” Hearing him speak, I realised how fortunate I was to have found a kindred soul who was struggling with the same difficult issues I was having in my attempts to write about the invasion.

He was adamant that Palestinians “cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity.” In his diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, just out from Saqi, under the entry entitled “If We Want” Darwish writes: “We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying, ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful.'”

http://forward.com/culture/books/382028/how-poets-and-novelists-are-mourning-john-ashbery/?attribution=articles-article-listing-17-headline

Quote:

“John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.”

======

David Lehman, a poet and the editor of The Best American Poetry series, included in his remembrance for The American Scholar a mention of sharing an office with Ashbery in the 1970s. He noted that “It was also fun to observe as things JA said in interviews entered the general discourse. For example, ‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ And: ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’”

Reflecting on him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, poet and novelist Ben Lerner imagined Ashbery inserting some jokes into his tribute in an august periodical, like Tom Sawyer spying on his pomp and ceremony of his own funeral. “I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was,” Lerner wrote.

Then he channeled Ashbery in paranthetical: “(here he would probably make a joke: ‘Television is pretty good, too,’ or ‘Antibiotics can come in handy’).”

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/books/382028/how-poets-and-novelists-are-mourning-john-ashbery/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/09/08/depression-physical-illness-could-treated-anti-inflammatory/

“Current treatment is largely centred around restoring mood-boosting chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin, but experts now think an overactive immune system triggers inflammation throughout the entire body, sparking feelings of hopelessness, unhappiness and fatigue. “

Whereas the eastern hinterlands of Norfolk, north of King’s Lynn, do have relief features in the form of cliffs at Hunstanton which reappear near Wolferton village within Sandringham Estate. There is a gentle undulating landscape that is predominately farmland but of a more intimate scale than the open landscape around the corner of The Wash towards the west. Trees and woodlands feature much more greatly here, and the church spires are lost much more easily amongst the hills and woods. In part, this area has been nationally designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is a landscape based designation which includes placing statutory duties on relevant bodies to ensure it maintains its character and beauty. Remnant sea banks do not tell the story of the land here, but Norman Keeps make a hint towards past landscapes.

Uplands of the eastern Wash coastal line that feature inland further south within the entity. © Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk

By the Wash, the estuary of the Ouse
And three more rivers adding to the swell
We saw the seals pass murmuring the Blues

Nature opens up if we read clues;
The giant sky, the sound  of a church bell;
By the Wash, the estuary of the Ouse.

A dangerous place, where currents catch the loose,
Old Hunstanton, white sands,cliffs with frills.
We saw the seals pass, shimmying the Blues.

Only painters need to find new excuse
For watercolour blends into the cells
By the Wash, the estuary, the  Great Ouse.

My eye with radiant colour was imbued
Then it passed more deeply to my soul.
We saw the seals pass murmuring the Blues.

Nature can bring calmness,make us whole
And in its fierceness also make  us bold.
By the Wash, the estuary of the Ouse
We  heard the seals pass, stuttering the Blues

I have had a ludicrous day wondering if some wool trousers I bought could be washed despite the label saying not to.Then I learned you should only wear them 3 times before cleaning.I guess giving them away is the easy option.
Or I can

1.Put them on a hanger outside if  there’s a breeze as it will kill bacteria.
2 Steam them to kill germs
3 Buy a tumble dryer and a home cry clean kit
4.Buy some Febreze  to take away an odour
5.Steam them with a hot iron.
6.Brush them with  a hard clothes brush
7.Use them to send Morse code signals and hope the movement shakes   off the smell
8.Accept that we are too clean nowadays.
9.Never mix with other people
10.Give them to the Oxfam shop
11 Wear them as a shoulder wrap
12 Tie them round my head in winter
13.Cut them up and make a bed cover.
14.Let the cat wear them
15 Sell on E bay

OR

Wear six pairs of underpants underneath to be sure no evil female odour  gets on them

The silence seems more friendly than  before
It’s like a melody  felt in my ear
This love has taken from me, my own fear
When silence was an omen with dark door
The flowers and all of nature, I adore
Gone are paranoia and its seers.
The silence seems more friendly than  before
It’s like sweet silent music to my ear
I am drawn to love you more and more.
Hypnotic  like the sun on Windermere
A misty air arising as we peer
The silence is more friendly than  before

I meant to put the cyclamen outside
Their scent’s  so good, I may keep them near me
We walked through yellow gorse near the North Sea
Such perfume like a flowery, prickly bride
Flowers and their  small hearts can never lie
Nor can maples and the holly trees
I meant to put the cyclamen outside
Their scent’s  so good, I may keep them near me
I must be sure I don’t let them get dry
I   promise I will  listen to their plea
No longer can plants stand on our TV
I meant to put the cyclamen outside

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/22/losing-online-friends-same-as-real-life-relationships

“When we get close to people online, we run the same risk as getting close to people in the real world: that we will love them and then lose them. And yet, just like in the real world, we reach out anyway, because that’s the kind of creatures we are: ones who crave emotional connection, be it across cyberspace or right across the table.”

Why did Jesus walk on water?
They had no roads!

Why did Jesus have followers?
Because he had a blog in mind

Why did God  make us?
That’s what we all wonder

Why did Jesus love us?
Because he had not met us!

Did Jesus keep a diary?
Maybe the Red Sea Scrolls.

Did Moses like law and order?
Only on tablets.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/why-i-write

“What we take out of life is the luminous moment, which can be a bare branch against a morning sky so overcast it’s in white face, seen through a window that warps the view because the glass has begun to melt with age. Or it can be the face of a beautiful man seen in passing on a crowded street, because beauty is always passing, and you see it but it doesn’t see you. It’s the promise that beauty is possible and the threat that it’s only momentary: if someone doesn’t write it down it’s gone. The moment vanishes without a trace and then the person who experiences that moment vanishes and then there’s nothing. Except perhaps the poem, which can’t change anything. As Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, which also implies the possibility of making “nothing” an event rather than a mere vacancy. Poetry rescues nothing and no one, but it embodies that helpless, necessary will to rescue, which is a kind of love, my love for the world and the things and people in the world.

In a graduate contemporary poetry class I took some twenty years ago, a fellow student complained that a poem we were reading was “Just trying to immortalize this scene.” I found it an odd objection, since I thought that’s what poems were supposed to do. One is deluded if one believes that one can actually preserve the world in words, but one is just playing games if one doesn’t try.

The world cannot be saved, in any of the several senses of the word. To save the world would be to stop it, to fix it in place and time, to drain it of what makes it world: motion, flux, action. As Yeats wrote in “Easter 1916,” “Minute by minute they change;/ …. The stone’s in the midst of all.” Poet and critic Allen Grossman is not the first to observe that poetry is a deathly activity, removing things from the obliterating stream of meaningless event that is also the embodied vitality of the world and of time’s action in and upon the world, which creates and destroys in the same motion. The stream of time is both life and that which wears life down to nothing. “Poetry is the perpetual evidence, the sadly perpetual evidence, of the incompleteness of the motive which gives rise to it” (Grossman 71).””