Affectless survivors lose all heart
Numb like stone  or robots we perform
Our death ,thought far away,  now truly starts

From grief, we are unable to depart
As we’re frozen,  tears can’t run so warm
Affectless survivors lose all heart

In a web or maelstrom we are caught
At most we voice a fierce yet tactful moan
Our death ,thought far away,  now truly starts

Love and pity cannot open forts
Where well defended, hide I fearful with my groans
Affectless survivors freeze dark hearts

Yes,I entertain the guests whom he has brought
My soul is in the kitchen ,frozen whole
My death ,once far away,  now timely starts

Lord have mercy;Jesu pity all.
Numb like bricks we stroll the Shopping Mall
Affectless survivors lose worn hearts
Death ,thought far away,   makes a  real start.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n17/james-meek/nuremberg-rally-invasion-of-poland-dunkirk-?utm_source=LRB+themed+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170727+themed&utm_content=ukrw_subs

Extract

n Britain and the US, the war is thought of as a righteous war, stout-hearted democrats against genocidal aggressors. It is not to deny the essential truth of that, or the wickedness of the Nazi and Japanese missions, to recall the more nuanced reality: the fact that Britain began and ended the war as an imperial power, withholding democratic rights from millions of subjects, the fact that the US fought with a racially segregated army and made use of senior Nazi scientists and Japanese officials after its victory, or the fact that to beat Hitler it was necessary to appease Stalin, to the point of allowing his murderous prosecutors to sit in judgment on Nazis at Nuremberg. The best novels of the war, like Gravity’s Rainbow, Catch-22 or The Tin Drum, are informed by a sense of the fragility of the concept of ‘enemy’, showing characters being systematically betrayed by those on their own side. Unlike Hollywood’s versions of the war, which inflate American valour in inverse proportion to America’s shrinking enthusiasm for personal risk, this year’s flood of war novels are aware that living through a war, as opposed to watching it from a distance of time or space, involves living with rumour, lies, ignorance and prejudice, and that dignity and righteousness are more to be pasted together afterwards than experienced at the time. It is for historians, biographers and screenwriters to write the bardic tales of military heroism which rocked the Sumerians’ world. For novelists, war is the bass line, not the melody.

‘The war is in fashion. There’s still money to be made,’ says Anna, one of the twins in Tessa de Loo’s book (they were separated as children, experienced the war on opposite sides, and met by chance as old women in present-day Spa). I don’t know whether de Loo meant to be ironic – her book has sold more than a million copies – but the success of The English Patient and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the fascination with the war on the part of the human mint that is Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and soon Band of Brothers) must speak eloquently to publishers. In one direct sense at least, the Second World War is about money: it was the last war that materially affected the lives of all the inhabitants of the world’s richest and most powerful countries. It could be called the last G7 war (one of the reasons post-Soviet Russia has been so anxious to make up the numbers to G8 is that it sees the grouping as a club for old war players). It is not just that the rich world’s ancestors went off to fight, but that those who stayed behind were living in a state of war, too.

A strange and lonely feeling held my heart
Gripping like some pincers made of steel.
From my beloved, I had had to part
Then numbness folded round me like a wheel.

And quietness loved,  has now turned into threat
Nero-like, I  fiddle with my  tunes
Pie Jesu’s not made top ten yet!
Larks’ ascents aren’t worth much to a loon.

I phoned a friend, her voice did me no good
It echoed in the chambers of my mind
Where metal walls echo the coursing blood
And escalate these feelings so unkind

Though he l loved has gone and is now dead.
I  see his  shadow on my  heartless bed

“Wittgenstein’s genius is patent to any philosopher who will take the time and trouble to come to grips with his profound but difficult writings. His life, as described by Mr. Monk, seems to have been a lonely and tragic one. He was often tormented by temptations to suicide, and was sometimes on the verge of mental illness. He regarded his life as a professor as “a living death,” and held many of his colleagues, in the various callings he pursued, in loathing and contempt. His only philosophical peer was Russell, and the relationship between the two soured after Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge. Many of his philosophical disciples loved him, but it was a love mixed strongly with fear.

Four times in his life, according to Mr. Monk, Wittgenstein fell deeply in love. Three of his loves were male and one female. (Sensational stories have been told of Wittgenstein’s passion for rough homosexuals picked up in Vienna parks; Mr. Monk examines the evidence patiently and convincingly and concludes that any such encounters took place only in Wittgenstein’s own fantasy.) David Pinsent, to whose memory the “Tractatus” was dedicated, accompanied Wittgenstein to Norway and Iceland in the prewar period; he was killed in 1918. Francis Skinner, who came up to Cambridge as a student in 1930, had an all-absorbing relationship with Wittgenstein in the 30’s; and in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with a Cambridge medical student, Ben Richards, 40 years his junior.

MANY readers will be surprised to learn from Mr. Monk’s book that there was a time when Wittgenstein had plans to marry. From 1926 to 1931 he had a friendship with a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger. For a period he wrote to her almost daily, and he sculpted a bust of her. An entry in his diary for 1930 reads: “Arrived back in Cambridge after the Easter vacation. In Vienna often with Marguerite. Easter Sunday with her in Neuwaldegg. For three hours we kissed each other a great deal and it was very nice.”

Once it became clear that Wittgenstein wanted to marry her, Marguerite drew back — especially as it transpired that what the philosopher had in mind was a Platonic, childless union.

Faith in God was important to Wittgenstein, but his faith seems to have been a sombre one. God was perhaps no more than Fate. If He was to be thought of as a person, it was solely as a severe judge. Yet Wittgenstein’s last words were, “Tell [ my friends ] I’ve had a wonderful life.” Ray Monk’s book has succeeded remarkably in portraying some of its wonders

Who will navigate my life, if not myself?
Evasion of the truth is best at times
Who will venture to the hidden depths?

In the depths lie darkness and great wealth
We cannot linger long with the divine
Who will navigate my life, if not myself?

Use a ladder with its sturdy steps
Go down slowly  looking not behind
Who will venture to the hidden depths?

Return and take the tiller, safely kept
Look across the ocean fierce, sublime
Who will navigate our lives, if not ourselves?

Sleep when you have fixed the stars bereft
We will get there when we know the lines
Must we venture to the hidden depths?

Trust and strength, humility they test
Only those who trust can truly rest
Who will navigate my life, if not myself?
Who  will love inverted mountain depths?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9797617/Shakespeare-and-Wordsworth-boost-the-brain-new-research-reveals.html

“The research also found that reading poetry, in particular, increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read. The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.

Philip Davis, an English professor who has worked on the study with the university’s magnetic resonance centre, will tell a conference this week: “Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain.

“The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.”

In the first part of the research, the brain activity of 30 volunteers was monitored as they read passages from Shakespeare plays, including King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus and Macbeth, and again as they read the text rewritten in simpler form.

While reading the plain text, normal levels of electrical activity were displayed in their brains. When they read Shakespeare, however, the levels of activity “jumped” because of his use of words which were unfamiliar to the readers.

^{Scans of brain activity during reading show heightened electrical activity when faced with ‘challenging’ texts by great writers}

In one example, volunteers read a line from King Lear: “A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded”. They then read a simpler version: “A father and a gracious aged man: him you have enraged.”

Shakespeare’s use of the adjective “mad” as a verb sparked a higher level of brain activity than the straightforward prose.

The study went on to test how long the effect lasted. It found that the “peak” triggered by the unfamiliar word was sustained onto the following phrases, suggesting the striking word had hooked the reader, with their mind “primed for more attention”.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2016/10/arguing-online-actually-good-your-mental-health

“Mixed emotions

Whether arguing online affects us for better or for worse – it does affect us. Sixty per cent of us feel a racing heart and a rush of adrenaline when arguing online, and fifty percent of respondents claimed that they become “somewhat” emotionally involved in their arguments. In fact, only 4.6 per cent of people claimed to be “not at all” emotionally involved in the arguments they have on the internet.

But what are we feeling? The most common emotional reaction is frustration, with 27.5 per cent of people claiming they felt this when arguing online and a further 18 per cent saying they felt sad when people misconstrued their words and meaning. “Unfortunately the written word can often fail to portray the exact message, thoughts, humour or emotions of the user,” says Branley. “Without facial expressions and body language to aid our understanding, it is all too easy for written words to be misconstrued.”  “

http://research.biology.arizona.edu/mosquito/willott/323/argument.html

http://www.spdbooks.org/Pages/Item/58887/Poetry-as-Magic-DB.aspx

One doesn’t have a vision and then write poetry. It’s just the opposite. One writes poetry and creates a vision. Life follows art…

The geese which I  once loved no longer fly
In their unique  geometry  so fine
Above the school fields  through the empty sky

Some locals think that “immigrants” came by
Trapped the geese and ate them with dark wine
The geese which I  once loved no longer fly

In the morning  I would  hear their cry
Heading South in that great V shaped sign
Above the school fields  through the empty sky

Onto  this  water, London’s first supply
The river here flows down the contour lines
But the geese which I  once loved no longer fly

In  the muddles of suburbia, we find
Conserved places lingering,  benign;
Like the  old school fields  below the empty sky

Never must we humans be resigned
To living where there is no hint divine
The geese which I  once loved no longer fly
But the school fields  house wild birds  beneath this sky

Photo by Mike Flemming 2017 copyright

Take a look at Mike’s blog

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/home.htm

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143643/sylvia-plath-nick-and-the-candlestick

“In “Nick and the Candlestick,” a woman walks through a dark house toward her sleeping infant, and this ordinary action becomes fused with a metaphoric descent into a ghostly otherworld. Addressed to Plath’s son, Nicholas, the poem belongs to the tradition of poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” that directly address a poet’s sleeping infant. “Nick and the Candlestick,” however, teems with evocations of the speaker’s pregnancy and continually merges these images with descriptions of the baby himself. Like the poem’s opening fusion of metaphor and reality, this conflation collapses the boundaries between two things: past and present, memory and experience. In the poem, pregnancy is, itself, a time when two individuals are contained in one strangely altered body. As such, pregnancy, like metaphor itself, becomes emblematic of both the tenuousness of distinctions and of the inevitability of transformation.

As in many her poems, Plath borrows language and imagery from nursery rhymes, harnessing their peculiar mixture of menace and cheerful, linguistic playfulness—a juxtaposition that mirrors the poem’s insistence that seemingly disparate emotions or states of being are often closely entwined. This poem’s title recalls an old rhyme:

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.

If Jack is not nimble, after all, he risks setting himself on fire. “

I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve
I’ve had enough  today and evermore
For mourning mourning’s hard for the bereaved

I think of God and whether I believe
Although to him or her I’m just one fewer
I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve

I wonder if some new work I’d conceive
For God, I have not  got infinite allure
Is mourning squared too hard for the bereaved?

Maybe I’d do better to perceive.
Does God believe in me, does love endure?
I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve

In  my heart, I wish  peace were achieved
Does Jesus want me,  in sorrow so immured
Yet mourning mourning’s right for the bereaved

For life like this, death is the final door
But when it opens what will we see there?
I want the pain to leave;I shall not grieve
In mourning mourning’s  rites  I was conceived

Since arguing is dangerous for our hearts
How can we respond when people start?
We might say, maybe you are right.
Jesus was born on the Isle of Wight.

Or if they say that prayer’s a waste of time.
Say you only read prayers for their rhymes.
Or that you have so much time now you are old
You think you’ll try it as you’re feeling bold

If they say you  lack intelligence
Tell them you’re an imbecile with pence.
My IQ is only 65
But with hard work or luck ,I won the prize

“A survey of new algebra” I won
I’ve has it 50 years and I ain’t done.

I got a doughnut for the second prize
Topology is great  for telling lies

I read all Euclid  when I was a kid
It came in handy in the marriage bed!

I like the cubic forms around your eyes
And tell me, can I guess what’s your bra size?

The Temple builders estimated pi.
Tried to square the circle with their eyes.

A diagram or picture is my style
An  oral   maths test  makes feel surprised

Shall I give home to grievance and  to woe

And cultivate my hatred with my tears?

Shall I remember  carefully each blow,

And add this sorrow to my anxious fear?



I  thought by hating you I would have peace;

And surely I had reason without doubt.

Yet rumination  gave me no release.

For wisdom and compassion, it did flout



I remembered our  past love and  our shared  words

I gave them freedom in my anguished heart.

I did it for your sake, yet then occurred

A sweetness, joy and gladness in all parts.



To  forgive, repent and  let go of such grief

Helps us more than hatred’s legal briefs

Cut off from land by wiles of tricky sea,
For Norfolk is deceptive in its tides,
He grabbed my hand and said, just  run with me

If we had drowned then now I would not be
In England  where   shrill voiced  voters  stride,
Cut off by hopes  installed with trickery

Nor would I, by Donald vexed, see
How he may ask the Good Lord to abide
He grabbed the votes and said, all  lie with me

We would not argue over Ceylon Tea
About how many immigrants God made;
Cut off from  thought by wiles of trickery

I believe  that God  has no pity
He  created man  to be a refugee
He gave no hope yet said,  hey, worship me!

Oh, haunt of mystics send  thy remedies
They’re drowning in the places we can’t see
Cut off from land by tides of  your  Son’s sea
The dark eyed children drown along with Thee.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/05/09/could-frequent-fights-with-friends-and-family-lead-to-an-early-grave/#547c8536785a

People who reported more arguing with their spouses or children were 50% to 100% more likely to die from any cause at all. Those who reported frequent arguing with anyone in their social circle – including friends, relatives, and neighbors – were two to three times more likely to die over the next decade. The results held strong even when factors like depression, gender, marital status, chronic health conditions, available emotional support, and socioeconomic status were removed from the equation.

Drink some tea and eat a piece of bread
Take an aspirin, check that I’m not dead.
Read my Gmail on my Windows phone
Walk to bathroom pressing down my groans

Click “your sources” see the Daily Mail
No, I cry, the Independent’s all
I see Reuter’s  arrived  and it says there,
Princess Di  is 56 and seems set fair

I peer at M & S and see a colour block
It would  look  special on an evening flock
For I love sheep and buy them  outerwear
To keep them clean and fragrant like fresh air

But once a ram gave me a kick on’t bum
So if I see a man I tend to run

1, What was the most original sin ever committed?
2.Name some topics which might give people ideas for original sins.
3 Why did St Augustine think it was a sin for a baby to touch the mother’s vagina? If you don’t know what a vagina is,  ask the invigilator.If he doesn’t know  write Cannot answer owing to innocence and stupidity on the Exam Paper.
4.Why do Catholics think they eat  the Good Lord in the bread at Mass?
5 .Transubstantiation is
a] A town in Romania
b]Part of the Wholly Roman Empire
c] Part of Rome
d] Advanced calculus

e] A Latin newspaper
f] All of the above
g] None of the above
h] A new cookery book.
i] The missing link
7] Why is Patience a virtue?
8]Why did Christians start 2 world wars?
9] Is Freud right in his idea of the Death Instinct?
10] Is the Pope
a]A Catholic
b] A Jew
c] A cake you eat at your birthday party
d] A writer of aphorisms
e] All of the above?