https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/adamant

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/oct/18/improve-focus-concentration-span-expert-tips?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Preoccupation is a dangerous thing

We see not what is there but what we bring.

Put aside your thoughts and busy care,

When you are so occupied you are not here

Being here is living with our friends

Not wandering lonely down the streets’ dead ends

Do not let your worries make you blind

Do not let them make you too unkind

The weak will hurt the vulnerable nearby

Don’t let that beam live too long in your eye

When the windows shattered
And the splinters flew in
He just made for the back door
And left me
not knowing where to begin.
When the shards of glass hit me
And pierced my vulnerable skin
He was already going
Leaving me
feeling he was an inhuman being.
When I fell down covered in glass and bleeding,
And the storm raged on,
I didn’t look round because
I knew,I knew,I knew,
I knew he would be gone.
Suddenly peace came, the storm had quite
disappeared..
It was all over so quickly
Not as murderous as I feared.
My wounds were bad,I have to confess.
I had no bandage
Nothing with which to dress.
With an old towel I cleaned my blood
Then I lay me down to pray.
Since that day,no storms come this way.
My wounds are healing
I have just one thing to say.
When the storm was so bad
He left me all alone…
but strangely since then
all is peace and calm.
His absence has become
almost a balm.
But I hear stories of fierce storms rising up
In towns and villages
Not too far from here, where a wandering man appears.
Seems like he’s running to get away
From some storm
But he takes it with him
He gives it form.
So when the windows crashed in
glass flew at my face
he left me all alone
In what he thought
was a very dangerous place.
Did he not pick me up
and carry me outside?
No,my daughter,he left me alone;.
But since then
I lost a great burden…
And I lost a great feeling of shame.
Rise up,you women,bleeding and torn.
For on days like this,a new resolve is born.
While you live don’t accept all the blame.
Don’t live so long as I did,in fear and in shame.
Rise up and find that calm
In the eye of the storm…
On days like this
a new woman is born

They’re hunting snails
In New South Wales
They’re hunting bees,
And shooting trees.
They’re hanging worms
For lengthy terms
They’re on a diet
And don’t we know it.

The diet of worms shall be our fare
And on the bible. we shall swear.
We’ll swear our oath
We are not loth
We’ll strangle frogs
They’ll die in bogs.

We’ll always use four letter words
And they shall be our hunting swords.
We’ll kill the good
We’ll burn the wood.
We’ll shout out,fuck.
We’ll burn the book

We’ll let no thin skinned people live.
We’ll always take and never give
We’ll use our charms
To quell alarms.
We’ll molest girls
Cut off their curls.

As we’re human,  we are mad.
We kill the good ,seems love  is dead
We saw the babe in Bethlehem
We saw him die between two men.
We did not run to cut him down
We said,Oh,fuck,another clown.
For he spoke love
And said to give.
For he spoke peace;
Let joy increase

Like most human,we are crazed
We see it and we’re not amazed.
No sunset red
No welcome bed
No golden dawn
No welcome morn
No loving arms
No sacred charms
No newborn king
No tune to sing

Oh,we are damned
We are broke
We built Auschwitz
Saw the smoke.
And now it’s built again,again
While   drop the bombs
In Bethlehem.

And on our knees, we women crawl
To bury babies born too small.
To take the swords from these mens’ hands
And bury them in desert sands.
To pick up scraps of humanness
To hold their hands for God to bless.
We did it wrong,we did it bad
We never thought  or we’ve been had

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/SSE/article/viewFile/325/298

About  The Thought Fox

” The poem itself is beautifully modulated in its use of assonance and
off-rhyme. It has the delicate, brilliant and perhaps cold qualities
given to the fox, though it also has its boldness and concentration.
Thus the poem itself enacts the metaphor of the title: it is the
thought-fox.
This sort of wit and concentration is Hughes at his best. His
humour certainly gets blacker, and Crow (1972) is very like an
obscene version of the Road-Runner, but it is a very important
part of his general attitude and poetic manner. In “Pike”, for
example, the changes in tone from the neutral description of the
opening through the off-hand humour of stanza six:
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
73
SYDNEY STUDIES
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herbto
the terrified apprehension of the last stanza:
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
(Selected Poems, pp. 55-56)
form a dramatic and emotional pattern that makes this perhaps
Hughes’s most disturbing poem. The humour is an integral part
of that dark world which so fascinates him. Perhaps it is one of
several things he learnt from Nietzsche.
In an interesting interview with Egbert Faas published in
London Magazine in January 1971, Hughes spoke a good deal
about his concern with “the primeval world”.l He felt that modern
man had turned away from the dark forces and “settled for the
minimum practical energy and illumination”. He attacked “the
psychological stupidity, the ineptitude, of the rigidly rationalist
outlook”, though he did not underestimate the dangerousness of
the non-rational world:
“If you refuse the energy, you are living a kind of death. If you
accept the energy, it destroys you. What is the alternative? To accept
the energy, and find methods of turning it to good, of keeping it
under control-rituals, the machinery of religion. The old method is
the only one.”
This does not mean that Hughes is a Christian, or even sympathetic
to Christianity with its ideals of self-sacrifice (his equation
of the Virgin Mary with the Great Goddess of the primitive world
is highly questionable, whatever cults survived in early Christianity).
I am not sure that it even means that his imagination is
“theological”, as Peter Porter has suggested. But it does mean that
it is religious and that it is concerned with language as magic and
with poems as rituals. “Jaguar” does contain evocations of animal
power and freedom and “The Bull Moses”, one of his greatest
poems, is an apotheosis of primitive sexual strength. This is one
of the reasons, I think, why the poems are so elaborately structured,
why the language is so forceful and compacted. They are
not attempts to express violence or to titillate us with violent
thrills, in the way that you might say Thom Gunn’s poems are,
though we are often conscious of the element of fascination that
Hughes feels. These poems have a real respect for violence and try to treat it as a religious force”

Water that the sun burned up too well

It seemed the fires of Grenfell Tower had spread
A hear oppressive like the fires of hell
London smothered in air dull and dead.

Flames that slobbered with a passion red
Water that the sun burned up too well
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

God permitted Satan with his dread
Britain quarrelled, split , prepared to kill.
London smothered in air dull and dead.

A referendum showed us all ill-bred.
Neighbours spoke in words that I call vile.
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread

By what person is our nation led
who fills our stomach with acidic bile?
The PM spoke in words both dull and dead.

Tempers raged like fires all fresh and wild
Evil was to emptiness beguiled
It seemed the fire of Grenfell Tower had spread
People smothered in the fire lie dead

In looking at this I realized that the handwritten poem with its alterations is interesting but also if you look at it from a slight distance the poem itself becomes like a drawing where there is a certain beauty in the arrangement of the lines and the words

To me,at one point, it looked like a music score.

The script is like music score

Through which we pass as through a door

Imagination’s home

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/destiny

Allocking means killing time

.Agate means at wotk in Bolton dialect

That’s killing time

Am allocking agen today
That’s killin’ time, as now we say
Ah,shud be agate but oh ah can’t
Work ‘as gotten ‘ard teh find

Ma mammy’s ill and she’ll soon die
I must wear a suit and tie
Allocking meks me feel ill
Did mother make a legal will?

Am all allooan up on’t Pike
Rivington is weear folk hike
Am all allooan and ah feel low
Allocking is touch ‘n go

Where’s mi daddy an’ ‘is pipe
Where’s dad’s jacket,full ah smoke?
I want him back ,mi mam’s alloooan
You ‘ed wonder at ‘er groans

Where’s mi cat and where’s mi dog
Where’s ower’ handmade fireside rug?
Made ‘eh rags and hooked through cloth
Eeh, won’t God be filled with wrath?

God is never all allooan
Never allocks, he’s a stone
Amno bettin’ ‘eaven exists
That’s why all wa men get pissed

But ah’ve seen Hell ,oh Ama sure?
Nothin’ yooman shall endure.

By the lily pond 2012

Shimmering light
The lily pond
The music of your eye
The touch of your arm
Your always honey smell.
I love.
Rustling trees in a row,
A wide green lawn;
People stoop to see small flowers.
A snail on the path.
The perfecton of the shell.
I believe
Unusually tall dandelions
at the edge of this wood
Wave in the warm west wind.
We smile.
Sitting pen in hand
I wonder what I would have written
In all the letters I’ve not sent you.
Far away on the Ridgeway,
Cars,seem small as ants,
Rush towards the motorway.
They make us laugh.
How green the meadows are
How fresh the old trees.
I gaze at you.
I find I am.
It’s mutual.
I thank you

,Masud Khan thought

.human beings had “from time immemorial” needed an “other” to relate to in order to have stability and to learn about the self and, in prior eras, people used God as the “other” with whom they could relate.3 But as religion became less personal, the relationship to God was replaced by friendship with mortals, and mortals served the purpose as well as God had: “To sense oneself alive in another’s preoccupations is to be in a state of grace.”4 Love relations were important, he said, but friendship lasted longer.

From the book

False self

by Linda Hopkins

The path on Arnside Knott came to the shore
Where sea and river meet at my heart’s core
Where wild flowers grow, where butterflies float on.
The views of Lakeland Hills ,so ravishing

My heart was only half alive till then
The land surpassed imagination
I was used to mills and dirty air
Despite the heather moors and hilltops bare

Later death came near on Langdale Pike
My fingertips were hurting,feet agape
Then my toe was back on a foothold
The shadow of the mountain huge and cold

Beauty,love and death, the opera calls
Singing as we walk the danger walls

https://www.emmahigginbotham.com/recent-interviews/alexander-mccall-smith

 I recommend this  interview very strongly.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-rare-interview-with-philip-pullman-the-religious-atheist

 

 

“‘I like to say I’m a complete materialist but…’ Pullman allows himself an English teacher’s dramatic pause, ‘matter is conscious. How do I know that? Because I’m matter and I’m conscious.’ Once again, Pullman opts for complexity and nuance, and you can hear the same dislike of hierarchies in his critique of some popular science. ‘What you often get in people of this stripe (and Brian Cox — the TV physicist — goes in for it as well), is a sentence of the formula “X is no more than/just/merely/nothing but Y.” For example: “The world is nothing but the action of molecules” or “Love is merely the movement of electrons in the brains.” Sentences of that sort are nearly always mistaken,’ says Pullman. ‘I would prefer they were put in the form of “Love is a movement of electrons in the brain, among other things.”’

‘Among other things’ would be a great motto for Pullman’s ambivalence (or should that be multivalence?) about matters of belief, fiction and science. He is of the old school of secularism which holds that faith should be kept out of the public sphere, but still refuses the kind of inquisition that seeks to root out mistaken beliefs: ‘What you feel and believe are private to you and belong to nobody else,’ he counters. ‘What you do in the public sphere is what’s important.’

Yet on one thing, Pullman’s faith is profound and unshakeable. He’s now in his mid-60s, and though he thinks about death occasionally, it never wakes him up in a sweat at night. ‘I’m quite calm about life, about myself, my fate. Because I knew without doubt I’d be successful at what I was doing.’ I double-take at this, a little astounded, but he’s unwavering. ‘I had no doubt at all. I thought to myself, my talent is so great. There’s no choice but to reward it. If you measure your capacities, in a realistic sense, you know what you can do.’”

I do not see my future, how to go
But now I have steam cleaned the kitchen floor
If I run out of all my china plates
I’ll eat meat off the floor till I am late.

I only see a half of what most see.
But still enjoy to swill my throat with tea.
The world is so delightful, I must smile
My grin is wider than the Royal Mile,

We wonder about ethics and virtue
But what matters is our choice and choose we do.
The new doormat’s good, for it is bright
My little bay tree loves the air and light

When the dirt is vanquished for a time
I sit down with a pen and start to write.
Dirt’s a symbol of our human sin
Yet without it, plants have nothing to grow in

So dirt and dust, creative elements
Are only bad when they create a stench
I found some fruit that rotted in its bag
The odour was, in its way, very bad.

At first, I could not locate the odour’s source
I wondered if it came from my parts “coarse”
But no I’ve never smelled as bad
As bananas stuck inside a plastic bag

And do it is when we wear manmade cloth
The heat of polyester brings out wrath
For sweat or moisture can’t evaporate
We swelter like a vine of purple grapes.

She has  an Ulster on tow

So there’s more than one Elstree then?

Does your Android Copperfield?

It was just Barbara King’s ulva.

Where is an ulva  or all of you laugh?

This is not my English sense.

Is it your Irish scent?

Do you mean my accent?

I didn’t know your act had an odour

Is  it the order of sanctity?

I see someone who’s not a bishop has been made a cardinal.

It’s all just Circus location.

I suppose the odour and the accent traveled around with the circus

Well they couldn’t travel by themselves

I have never seen an accent without seeing a person

Because you have heard an accent without hearing the person?

Similarly it’s unusual to impel an odour without seeing somebody.

La casa address

I mean a psychiatrist.

What about a psychoanalist?

You’re fined

What for?

The smell icing.

Well there’s always been a bias against dialect.

That can’t be true because at the beginning the dialect was the language so they couldn’t have been a bias against it

It’s the people who spoke the dial out Lucifer from bias

The people who spoke the dialect who suffer from the bias o or the prejudice

Oldest started because I’ve got an ulcer on my toe and from that much stranginess is flowed I only wish the also would flow or fly

Or else,oh!

https://www.thetimes.com/article/39979ebe-07fb-4ab5-8b0e-81f0685bfc4c?shareToken=c0ead3d35ceb4bf0615f1d0b6b605790

King solver says that

sexist and racist attitudes are now less acceptable. “But classism, we have made no progress. Urban well-to-do people still make jokes about dumb hillbillies … Even the very progressive people still buy into the meritocracy

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Iris Murdoch

I love the little cyclamen

I grow it in my own garden

The waxy flowers make colour glow

They are my prayer, it shall be so.

When I am gone and in the ground

Plant me flowers like these around

But now I live and sing my songs

In the end there’s nothing wrong.

Since the beginning of the human cultures, so far as we know, man has always experienced, known and felt his own being through the other. This other was always non-human: a fetish (as in the primitive African cultures); an idol (Buddha is the supreme example); anthropomorphic supra-human presences (the gods of the Greeks abundantly testify to that) or God, that unique invention of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Sometime in the sixteenth century all this began to change (cf. Gay 1966). The most revolutionary characteristic of Modernism is the European man’s decision to be his own sole witness and exclude God, more and more, from his private relation to himself

Masud Khan

Hidden selves.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/04/11/masud-khan-lying-fallow/

. The individual on whom leisure has been imposed in massive doses, and who has little capacity to deal with it, then searches for distractions that will fill this vacuum… A great deal of the distress and psychic conflict that we see clinically… is the result of a warped and erroneous expectancy of human nature and existence. It is the omnipresent fallacy of our age that all life should be fun and that all time should be made available to enjoy this fun. The result is apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.

I have just read in the newspaper that’s a woman died after opening up her ottoman. She went over to put something into the base and unfortunately the bear in the mattress descended and caught her by the neck and she suffocated

It was a gas operated bed and one of the gas cylinders was faulty

I would think mechanical lift will be better

Or just have an ordinary bed with a drawer in it

I wandered lonely as a clown

That wakes one day in A and E.

An all at once she  hears a crowd

Shout: it’s gone private, there’s a fee.

I have insurance the clown lied.

She cracks her knuckles as she cries.

Should they let her go inside?

Which is bigger e or pi?

So in the nightmare

I then died.

My husband’s angry at my lot.

But when I woke he ran away

Do I care? Oh not a jot

Is this lyric is it to text?

Shall I sing or speak the rest?

On the subject my mind’s vexed

I’d really love to fail the test

If you’re a genius, go to bed

Never mind what daddy said.

I think I’ll leave the rest as read

I’m going home to swing the lead.

I’m filled with dread

I don’t care what no one said.

Without a frame the portraits dead

The poet writes in sile a shed.

I hope your heart is not too sad.

Every feeling seems quite bad

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

We’re not afraid just of bad things in our lives like losing people or treasures or jobs.

No we are not just afraid of the bad things but we’re also afraid of being overwhelmed by joy by beauty by love

We think we want love or to be knocked out with joy

But often the only way this can happen is when we are not expecting it

Is this why dating websites don’t work very well?

I’ve been overwhelmed several times by the stunning beauty of buildings like St Paul’s Cathedral.

That happened as I was in a car in the city but I’d lost track of where exactly we were and so I was not expecting to see a floodlit building when I did

It was a marvelous experience but I wonder how often I have blocked things off because either I think I know what it is I’ve already seen that I don’t need to look at it again

Oh because in some way it’s fearful as well. I think Westminster Abbey is fearful inside because it’s so massive.

Could it be the same as people?

We do and we do not wish to be overwhelmed by people.

Also is it just the English who don’t like to talk about such emotions?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s modern life we don’t have time to be knocked out by something beautiful and  be  lying on the ground looking up at the cathedral, when we should be at a meeting or during the supermarket shopping etc

York is said to be the most beautiful city in Europe or one of the most beautiful but I know someone who lives there and she said to me one day

Oh, do you get used to it you don’t really notice it.

How can we stop getting like that so that we can see at least some things a fresh with new eyes?

Until it’s happened to you, you don’t know that it’s possible.

It could happen in a bad way as Hitler was said to have hypnotic power. I don’t have enough evidence of this but it would make things more easy to understand if you’ve been overwhelmed by the evil in somebody else it might kill you or it might make you worship them.

That’s the trouble with political parties.

They themselves or others want to know absolutely everything clearly what are they going to do what are they not going to do but surely they will have to see this country with New eyes hopefully a labour government is more likely to have sympathy for the poor. But they’re clone there’s no point having sympathy unless you’ve got the power to do something to make the Econony stronger, to make it grow.

Maybe we don’t want to think certain thoughts. We don’t want to think that there’s no magic one that can be waved after 14 years of austerity and civil conflict

It’s good to be able to be shocked by what you perceive.

It’s not good to be cynical. Because they’re new do not actually want to know or to see how things could be different because we claim nothing is any good anyway

No,despair,I shall not let you win
I’l fight you with my being and disdain
No,despair, you are a deadly sin
I’ll drive you out by writing with my pen

Oh,despair, be not my constant friend.
I look for one much brighter and less fey.
To you no card or present will I send
You must not steal my company today.

Oh, fond despair,I cannot hide from you
I fly into your blackness like a bird
Yet now it is a golden light I see,
Consoling and so warm it clothes my words

Despair,my friend, I’ll fear no more your deeps.
You open up a door while I still weep

2018

Could it be despair that held me tight

in that February evening and the night

I could not see a way to carry on

Everything seemed dark and I was done

I saw great blackness all around myself

I could not be restored, I had no health

I had reached the end of seeking aid

God alone knew all the coins were paid

Oh gracious mysterious glowing light

That made a warm shawl round me on that night

Impressing me with kindness and goodwill

Holding me until I’d had my fill

Most sensuous, most tangled with love’s grace

Surrounding me, protecting my lost face

As if the arms of love were something real

That anyone who knew this must reveal

Only if we reach that darkest point

May the force of Love with light annoint

I was glad to hear your voice this afternoon

Minor strokes cause worry, if not doom

We all have blood to thick to pass with ease

Tell the doctor they will be quite pleased

They like to prescribe drugs to our old folk

They often try to mend us when we’re broke

And though their drugs may kill they take no blame

They feel so little guilt so little shame.

They gave me aspirin every single day

The dentist was so worried that she prayed

Luckily she quelled the blood that leaked

I was so surprised I could not speak.

Remember good intentions can go wrong.

Winter may develop amid Spring

Do not help another till you’re sure.

What you give  won’t harm them but will cure

If  you are in doubt you should do naught

Life can be destroyed but can’t be bought