Katherinepoetry, reflections, sonnet June 27, 2017 

My polyester trench coat  looks real swell
But inside it, I feel as hot as hell.
And when the storm hit, I found out
It is no raincoat, I have no more doubts.

Which of us desires to dress for war
This is what the trench coat was made for.
British soldiers  on the battlefields
Died in mud locked trenches for what yield?

Do we want to know the Middle East
Was divided by the conquerors at their feast
France and Britain split the old Empire
We see from that the rise of Herr Hitler.

The war to end all wars is on stage yet.
Go hang these trench coats  round the scapegoat’s neck

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/young-muslims-in-the-uk-face-enormous-social-mobility-barriers

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27373131

On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany aboard a luxury cruise liner, the SS St Louis. They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US – but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.

“It was really something to be going on a luxury liner,” says Gisela Feldman. “We didn’t really know where we were heading, or how we would cope when we got there.”

At the age of 90, Feldman still clearly remembers the raw and mixed emotions she felt as a 15-year-old girl boarding the St Louis at Hamburg docks with her mother and younger sister.

“I was always aware of how anxious my mother looked, embarking on such a long journey, on her own with two teenage daughters,” she says.

In the years following the rise to power of Hitler’s Nazi party, ordinary Jewish families like Feldman’s had been left in no doubt about the increasing dangers they were facing.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5553ea3e-959f-11ed-a130-baced48eb788?shareToken=7b6c1ea7f5cebdce47cf6d09f654856e

Boundaries are the limits or rules we each establish to protect ourselves. We should not be venting all our feelings to all people — promiscuous honesty, telling everyone everything, doesn’t help any of us. Recognising that boundaries enable us to take different versions of ourselves to different environments, like work, friends and family, is important for all of our mental health. When we indiscriminately express unfiltered feelings, we can disturb those around us, and not receive the empathic response we need. Human beings are wired to look for danger, and emotions are contagious. Our threat system can be pinged by the other, putting our brain into “code red” — fight, flight, freeze — heightening our sense of anxiety and conflict. When we are in a heightened state our capacity to think deeply and respond sensitively goes offline. It is an evolutionary survival mechanism and the source of most aggression.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-united-states-and-the-refugee-crisis-1938-41

https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/#:~:text=%22I%20write%20entirely%20to%20find,see%20and%20what%20it%20means.%22&text=In%20many%20ways%2C%20writing%20is,aggressive%2C%20even%20a%20hostile%20act.

On the Malvern hills white snowdrops bloom

A cherished life but over all too soon

The grass is frosted, gives our shoes a smack

Looking West we’ll see the mountains Black.

The weather rolls and rotates like a clown.

As I walk, I am my favourite tunes

I want to run away with half a moon.

Not a human Voice to spoil the track.

No percussion,with its lively clack

Maybe there’s a witch but where’s the broom?

One way we see Wales, its Celtic sounds.

Where the Anglo-Saxons ran to ground

Behind us, Saxons’ cider we don’t lack

Enchanted orchards,Newton is in luck

The soft breezed air makes Elgar seem profound

Abandoned verbs are turning into nouns

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/18/sarah-hall-burntcoat-interview-i-used-to-almost-fear-opening-a-book

Proverbs 15:1A gentle answer deflects anger,but harsh words make tempers flare.Reply

Recommended (12)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/07/don-paterson-poetry-often-involves-obsessive-personalities-toy-fights?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

O

Poetry is unlike other art forms because you can’t really do it for a living. It seems more a helpless disposition. I always think poetry may be one corner of a larger syndrome. It often involves obsessive and addictive personalities – and mental illness. Most poets can’t drive a car and the ones who do drive shouldn’t.

Emile woke  Mary up at 7am.It was a  Sunday in  late October, grey and damp though the sun was still not  too low in the sky
Go away, she told him.The clock has changed.It’s not 8 am yet.I have to wash my hair as well.Get the Observer out of the basket for me,please.
I can’t read. the dear animal replied.And why don’t you rebel and stick to Summer Time?
I know Stan wanted to send you to Eton but we couldn’t afford it.Yet you understand days and calenders, Mary joked  sorrowfully
She got up and found her fleece dressing gown; it was   conker brown covered in coloured spots.She went downstairs and gave Emile a Whitby kipper.Then she made some tea and took it upstairs so she could drink it while she came round from her dreams
Suddenly Annie ran into   her bedroom wearing a  long black vinyl coat and  red knee-high boots
You never locked the back door, she howled like a lost  leopard which has had no  food for weeks
I don’t suppose anyone wants my old TV as it is only 19 inches.And my Chromebook is not something worth re-selling.I do have a new coat.
How about Ray Monk’s life of Wittgenstein, Annie asked her defiantly, her apricot lips pouting childishly as the Riemann of Paris lipstick glittered uncannily like an imaginary number in a dream of Godel.
The people who might enjoy reading it are by virtue of that , not the sort to steal or buy it on the black market.
That is very racist, Annie told her.You should say:the beige market!
Then nobody would know what I meant, Mary said lovingly
Anyway, do you want to come to Marks with me? They have some beautiful coats in
I’d like a pink wool coat, said Mary thoughtfully
Quite right  ,said Annie.Bring back feminine colours
Actually, gay men might like pink coats, she continued.But if they go on the bus they might get dirty.Come to think of it, so will women’s coats
They will have to buy pink puffa jackets and we can wash them at 30 deg.Mary whispered
Using a special detergent, Annie asked?
I have never seen a detergent for washing gay men.I don’t think they will fit into the washing machine.On the other hand, you are small so you will fit in
Shall I get undressed first, Annie asked furtively.
Yes, I’ll try to put you on a  short wash for 15 minutes but it is your choice.Maybe a bath would be safer?
No problem, said Annie intellectually.Are you having one with me?
You’d better be careful, Mary ad-libbed.It might be sexual harassment.
Well, I am not gay , said Annie.
You never know till you try, Mary giggled ,like a child behind the school canteen
Why, we might become gender fluid and then who knows?
And so say all of us
Miaow

O

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11498

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/21/lessons-in-happiness-how-a-short-course-can-boost-your-wellbeing?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Say something kind to 3 people today

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/15/the-observer-view-on-how-the-uk-has-become-a-hostile-place-to-have-children?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The geese have moved their flight path to the East
I miss the  gladness of their graceful wings
And wish I were a bird and not a beast

In the river, they have had their feast
While the sparrows watched and gently sang
The geese are gone, their flight path’s to the East

Seeing their grace at sunset gave me peace
The  natural  world such beauty to us brings
The wish I were a bird and not a beast

North East London’s  cut up by the Lea
No  bridge destroys its power, its currents sing
The geese have moved their flight path  further East

The geese do not  make nests  in a  tall tree
But dwell upon the water  like the swans
I wish I were a bird or honey bee.

As the infant  wisely grabs and clings
So the geese will fight  if threat descends
The geese have moved their flight path to the East
Oh, to fly at sunset  with the least

 

 

 

The ducks swim in the gaps between the ice
Cold blooded , yet kept warm by fluffy down
The river looks uncertain in this light

The sky hangs down a curtain of snow white
The sun, precocious, shines and then it frowns
The ducks swim in the gaps between the ice

Ah, think of Morecambe Bay in sunshine bright
Across the sea the Pikes stand out so proud
My river looks uncertain in this light

Britain’s mountains fierce attract like vice
Like alcohol or sex or low cut gown
Unknowing ducks swim on despite thick ice

Thanks to God for hearing and for sight
The mystery is the Love which was disowned
My river looks so cold as comes twilight

Here is Bethlehem, the little town
Where Christ was born and grew to be cut down
The ducks swim by, the swans walk on the ice
Look up and see the geese in Advent flight

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

Of course, poetry isn’t literally dead. There have probably never been more practicing poets than there are today — graduates of M.F.A. programs working as professors in M.F.A. programs — and I wager that the gross domestic chapbook per capita rate is higher than ever. But the contemporary state of affairs is not exactly what one has in mind when one says that poetry is alive and well — as opposed to, say, on a luxe version of life support.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest that poetry is dead. But the autopsy reports have never been conclusive about the cause. From cultural conservatives we have heard that poetry died because, for political reasons, we stopped teaching the right kinds of poems, or teaching them the right way. (This was more or less the view of the critic Harold Bloom, who blamed what he called the “school of resentment” for the decline in aesthetic standards.)

O

This leaves us in the somber position of Eliot’s speaker in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose “lost heart stiffens and rejoices/In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” mourning the absence of something he cannot name.

More on poetry

This leaves us in the somber position of Eliot’s speaker in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose “lost heart stiffens and rejoices/In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices,” mourning the absence of something he cannot name.

More on poetry

Now you have survived the cruel war.

Never ask me what this mess was for

Leave the Field of battle, leave your mates

If you don’t start tpo run you won’t escape

You have to find an aim and then your life.

Steal the pointed daggers steal the knives.

Look around and guess the way to go

Over the faint blue mountsains over the snow

Under barbed wire fences, underhand

Through the crazy marsh the sinking sands

In your dream you’ll find your home again

And quite rightly you have earned #ith pain

Mary looked at herself in the webcam.She was looking very  beautiful as she had washed her pale gold hair and applied some scented oils to it and though she was normally not interested in peering into mirrors she was intrigued by the Webcam.
She was happy as she had just removed Superfish from Stan’s Lenova laptop though she wondered whar else might lurk there…Supershark?Emile had been waiting ever since he heard her say
I am getting the superfish out today,Stan,dear.We can have Onion
Tart for lunch.
I shall wait for the super fish,thought Emile excitedly.I can just imagine what it will taste like… wonderful.
Meanwhile Mary who had never been bold enough to act at school was discovering her potential on mini videos one of which was going to be on Twitter soon. asking people to vote for Labour despite Miliband’s adenoids……But though she seemed bold as she spoke out,it was not her native temperament but a kind of madness that had come over her.
Polemical Poison,one might say.
Shall we have tomato salad,asked Stan sweetly as they had a bag of cherry tomatoes.
Mary did not answer because after making her video she realised her face was lopsided.How horrible,she thought.No wonder it’s evil to look in mirrors too much as it makes one self conscious which is bad.To forget one’s self is the best way to live if you can achieve it without taking heroin or laughing gas.
Gas never made her laugh at the dentist who had committed suicide shortly after removing 4 of her teeth and barely managing to bring her back from the clouds above.
He was a gambler and an alcoholic but her mother had loved him and sent all her children there for treatment.Surely that was unethical thought Mary petulantly.
Even if dad was dead ,consorting with drinken dentists was utterly foolish.What  a pity her mother has lived before the invention of vibrators,though come to think of it the dentist’s drill vibrated angrily at times!I had better push these thoughts away Mary decided and warm up the tart as it were
English has too many ambiguous words.

I am no tart,cried Annie rudely .I do it free.

Well.what would Wittgenstein make of that,thought Mary tp herself

Whereof one cannot charge,,thereof one cannot do !

Mary was sitting in her coral and teal kitchen  wondering if she needed some new clothes.The weather had been unusually warm  and she  had forgotten where she had
put her summer dresses.A “special place” is easily forgotten
A crash in the hall  meant the post had come.Here was Lands End   sale catalogue
Mary began to look through it though there  not many summer clothes and shorts did not suit her
Then she  found a   lovely blue dress with a draped front
Annie, her neighbour, tapped on the door and came in, a very lovely sight in her orange striped shift dress with matching lipstick and shoes
Hey, Annie, what do you think of  this  blue dress?
Annie had lost her contact lenses so she peered at the description

Elegant 3/4 sleeve dress with
Exposed statement back zip

The zip sounds weird,hard for a woman to so up,Annie said
Is it to attract men, she coninued?
Well, if a man undid it while I was at a dinner party I would be embarrassed,Mary cried
So would the man,said Annie, when he saw you were not wearing a camisole nor a bra
I suppose it’s a kind of flirting or teasing. Mary murmured softly.
She was ignorant of such things since studying Schrodinger’s equation and his dog.
But it’s not an invitation to bare  me to the four winds
Well,  this is the problem,Annie enthused.To some men it would be preciely that.Not to mention gay women
The most odd thing is that Lands End sell more sporty casual clothes
If it were made of towelling you could swim in the river and then put it on, Annie rambled like an old lady who drank too much brandy
I could put it on anyway but would you like a zip on your naked flesh, asked Mary
in her jocose yet feminine way?
No,I like soft fluffy things on my naked  flesh
Well, please don’t mate with a rabbit,Mary ordered
I only want a merino wool or cashmere cardigan and I can’t mate with that.
Don’t you know I am 103?
No, you are 73, Mary said correctly.I think we should call 999 and see what Dave the 
 skilfull  paramedic thinks about the dress
What a waste,mewed Emile who was hiding inside a  large copper pan.With so many people ill it would be wrong.
Since when have you studied  Ethics,Annie asked him
You don’t need to go to Magdalen College to know wasting NHS money is wrong
Well, he keeps us sane and that saves money, she retorted.
You can’t  grumble, the vet is expensive and he doesn’t call to make us tea,
Nor  does he drive to Barnard Castle to test his hearing aids.
So true
Soon Dave ran in wearing a new sundress made of gingham
That looks stunning,Annie told him
I made it myself, he said, smiling
Well,we would like some.Mary haa mislaid all her dresses.
I’ll bring some patterns round.Dave answered shyly
Maybe  when Boris Johnson resigns
We can’t wait.Look at this dress Lands End are selling
It looks uncomfortable Dave repied.Why not wear a sheet with a leather belt to keep it secure?
Why not indeed?
You may get complaints from the neighbours
And so say all of us

D

https://archive.philosophersmag.com/susanne-k-langer-a-snapshot/

O

In her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) her intent was to authenticate a new notion of the “rational,” but how she does it is of fundamental importance. The classical tradition, Langer claimed, generally identified the rational with the “logical,” with discursive thought and objectivity. It then had the difficult task of explaining, or explaining away, such important human concerns as art, ritual, myth, and religion. Langer showed that these forms of meaning-making were embodied in vast sets of symbols and symbolic practices with their own distinctive “logic,” a non-discursive logic, quite different from the discursive logic of language and mathematics. They belonged to the domain of “presentational forms,” not “discursive forms,” a key distinction of her work. Presentational forms, Langer showed by an examination of their logic, are not mere effusions of an irrational subjectivity but articulations of the felt sense of things to which they give us unique access. They orient us in the world in the deepest existential manner, effecting participation in vital values and giving us visions, embodied in symbolic images, of our place in the cosmos. Langer, prior to extensive developments in semiotics, showed that they are worthy of philosophical study in their own right. Her work compares favourably in heuristic power with, and complements, C S Peirce’s great attempt to avoid logocentrism. We are a symbolic species at every level and not just language-endowed animals, although Langer held discursive symbols in the highest regard, as did her intellectual companion, Ernst Cassirer.

Langer was a devoted lover and practitioner of the arts, especially music, which she had studied in detail in Philosophy in a New Key. In 1953 she published Feeling and Form, a masterful generalisation and application to all the arts of the theory of music elaborated in that book. Its key idea was that feeling had a distinctive “morphology” that is exemplified in different ways in the different genres of art. Art works, she claimed, give us knowledge of or insight into ways of feeling the world in every shade of its expressiveness. They articulate feeling and are not mere expressions of personal feeling. They are presentational symbols and their meaning-contents are the “primary illusions” peculiar to each art form: virtual space in the pictorial and visual arts, virtual powers in dance, virtual experience and virtual memory in literature, virtual time in music, the ethnic domain in architecture, and so on. Langer showed art to be an authentic symbolic form and her notion of a “morphology of feeling” exhibited in the artwork is a permanent contribution to aesthetics.

In the last twenty-five years of her working life Langer attempted to develop the notion of feeling as a term to cover all the manifestations of minding. The result was Mind (1967-1982), published in three volumes over a fifteen year period, and which remained incomplete, due to her advancing age. It anticipated many of the current concerns in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Its central idea is that feeling is an emergent property of natural processes but that its paradigmatic manifestation is the rise of symbolisation and the proliferation of cultural forms and their attendant conflicts and permutations. Central chapters in this book carry out and reformulate Langer’s central insight and claim: symbolisation and the power of abstraction are the keys to what it means to be human. In a return to and deepening of her initial proposals in her first philosophical work, Langer distinguished between generalising abstraction and presentational abstraction, the two fountainheads of all those frames of meaning in which we live out our lives. It was the working out of the implications of this distinction, present at the beginning of her intellectual journey, that forms the connecting link of her whole remarkable philosophical career.

Robert E Innis is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Indiana University Press).

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The Seasons

The season alters imperceptibly;
No point exact which demonstrates the turn.
Yet soon come changes which our eyes can see
Leaves dry and crack, the acers seem to burn.
And so it is with human beings too.
Each day our loved one looks the same to us
And yet the body alters like leaves do.
Small changes made with neither noise nor fuss
.We change into transparent ghosts of self
Thus totter down the avenue of life
Death approaches with its common stealth.
To separate the husband and the wife.
In winter all is black and we despair
Yet deep in earth, worms silently repair

Katherines history, Thinkings and poems, villanelle  September 3, 2019 1 Minute

Life is movement life is song and word
We try to capture life in all its forms
Life is wild as tigers,sweet as birds

Life is what we get yet don’t deserve
The birth of infants and the  food of worms
Life is movement life is song and word

Life is not what’s said but what we heard
Grace comes down like leaves as Autumn turns
Life is wild as tigers,small as birds

Like a boiling pot that must be stirred
We need to watch  for only then we learn
Life is movement life is song and word

Love comes to the empty, is not earned
The heart   like Joan of Arc  is made to burn
Life archaic , everlasting curves

Of our empty fantasy we’re shorn
Like the fields of wheat and barley corn
Life is movement life is song and word
Life is a wild melody   lovelorn

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Quiet_Mind

A quiet mind, and human wholeness, are available through controlling discursive thought and developing nondiscursive perception. Like learning to walk or to talk, using the mind well is a matter of patient repeated efforts. This course provides a simple method for controlling discursive thought; and for making nondiscursive awareness your primary perspective, through which discursivity is guided in creating a flourishing life and a flourishing Earth.

https://www.lionsroar.com/the-practice-of-not-thinking/

https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/susanne-langer-on-signs-symbols-and-embodied-meaning/