Exactly what he said,we can’t recall
The software  that he left has uninstalled
Not  by any human agent here
Allow the dread and do not turn from fear
We know just  how he overcame St Paul

On a journey Paul heard a fierce call
Why do you hate Jesus and his toil?
Bitter is the blood and taste of gall
Demons ugly from  old trees will hear
Exactly what he said,

Give yourself  but only God gives all
Do you believe these narratives enthrall?
Jesus, symbol,suffering, human, here
Every human  swims among their tears
Everybody  suffers, must endure
Even in the magic Shopping Mall
Exactly, what he said?
Oh.God is dead.

• Stan was wearing his best suit,topped by a denim apron, and wad polishing the big windows with a microfibre cloth ,as he waited breathlessly for his stunning wife.Mary entered the room wearing a long purple and mauve dress which clung somewhat tightly to the curvaceous contours of her beautifully rounded body.
  On her feet she had some smart pewter ballet slippers and in her elegant hand she carried a huge pewter clutch bag which contained some of her many medications.She addressed Stan,
  “I think I can leave my handbag behind if I put my mouth spray into my bra.”
  “That somehow detracts from the romance of the evening.” Stan pronounced openly.
  “Well,you know,I never had a cleavage until lately and I fell I ought to make the most of it.”
  “Surely I should be the one make the most of it,” he riposted jocosely.
  “Of course you may,my angel,but not in the restaurant,”she answered back sweetly
  “I’ll put your spray in my pocket then,shall I?”Suddenly the doorbell rang.”Who’s this?”It was Annie,their next door neighbour.
  She was wearing a coral velvet track suit with matching Reeboks and sun hat.
  “Hi,I just came in with a little prezzie,”She declaimed.In
  her hand was a huge box of chocolates.
  “Gosh,Mary you look lovely in that beautiful long dress but you’re not
  going on your bike,are you?”
  “No,we are having a cab,but it’s not come as yet.”
  “Well,never mind.I’ll ring 999 and get them to send an emergency ambulance for you!”
  Fortunately,as luck would have it the minicab appeared and it was only as they were entering the restaurant that Stan realised he was still wearing his old denim apron.
  “Shall I take it off?” he pondered.
  On the pro side I will look smarter on the con side I might spill some soup down my front.I wish I’d done more logic at college.
  So he kept it on.Mary didn’t seem to notice.She just took him for granted.If he stood on his head and sang”Jerusalem” she probably wouldn’t pay any attention.
  Then he noticed that Mary was wearing an apron too.It was the same colour as her dress.What a brilliant idea,he thought.
  “There may be money in this.” He could start a small business,
  “Aprons R You” selling lovely aprons in all colours of the rainbow.
  Suddenly he heard noises;he awoke and heard Mary shouting
  “How can you go to sleep when you are out with me?”
  “Would you prefer me to recite the Periodic Table?” he snapped gently.
  “I’d prefer a poem,” she cried…All right,Petal,I’ll think of one soon.In the meantime would you like a fool?”
  “No.I’ve got you,” she responded handsomely.
  “I mean for a pudding?”
  “Oh,yes please.A Rubik fool would be lovely.It will pass the time.You know I get so bored.”
  “Well,I do my best but it’s hard keeping up with you.would you like to read a few truth tables whilst I finish my meat.”
  He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small leather bound book.
  “Truth tables and levitation for geniuses,” by Bertha Russell.
  “Oh,Stan,this looks interesting.I’ve always wanted to fly like an angel or an owl.”
  “It’s never too late to say never.” he responded.
  “Whatever do you mean?”
  “I don’t know.Just because a sentence is grammatically correct doesn’t imply that it means something.”
  “Yes,quite right.And conversely a sentence can mean something even when it’s not grammatically correct.”“Isn’t thinking exciting!”
  “Yes,indeed.I was thinking how exciting it will be to go to bed with you.”
  “Wow,good grammar and full of meaning.I am yours.I am like a ripe plum ready to drop off the tree.I am a cat ready to mate.I am a song waiting to be sung.”
  “Gosh,are metaphors your bete noir?”
  “Je ne parle pas Francais.”
  “Aimez vous ein Nederlander?”
  “Sprechen sie Deutsche?”
  Ist sein mutter immer krank?”

  

May I  have your seat I’m feeling odd?
I recognise you,you’re Almighty God
Where’d’ye get that suit and that top hat?
Oh,Leonard Cohen wanted one like that
Do not strike me with your iron rod

God is inside , lives in  holy  blood
We  connect,respect and so we should
Jesus is the beggar ,cold and sad
Give her help in our iron habitat
May I  have your seat ,  Lord Krishna said?

Love and hate would toss us  if they could
Get perspective, rise above the flood
Climb the mountain pikes, abhorr the flat
We need to change positions, where’re ye  at?
Another point of view won’t drive you mad
May I  have your seat ,I looked at God

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry/2016/06/love-affair-between-science-and-poetry

Extract

Is it tomorrow yet?
What shall I dream of tonight?
Shall I sleep in my own bed or in the cat’s?
Am I the cat’s mother?
What are the patriot’s games?
Is Ireland a Jewish State as Jesus was a Jew [ maybe he still is]?
Can anyone be a Catholic? How can you tell?
Can I be buried with glee?
Do you like Jennifer Warnes?
I love her with all I have
Praise be the Chord

I made an old friend laugh a  lot when I suddenly switched from Educated English into my broad  Lancashire accent.She was thunderstruck.I’ve never spoken like that before in front of her.I sound  like Thora Hird.. I look like her.Am I her double?

Where the cow slips there slip I
How come this beauty?
Where the bull rings, there ring I
Ravel your duty
There’s no  deliverance
From heeding life  at once
To learn love’s wisdom

 Photo by Mike Flemming copyright

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.” To embrace this account of the human person, which is of course a traditional Christian one, is to decenter the world of politics—not to ignore it, but to shift it toward the periphery, to see it as among the second rather than the first things. (Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p 46; Jacobs, p 56)

C S Lewis ,best known as the author of Narnia, was an Oxford Don who wrote  about Christianity [Mere Christianity]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/19/i-was-scared-of-losing-my-sight-then-writing-brought-me-clarity

“Before, says Peretti, she was “very scared of showing people I had a disability. For a long time, I tried to be better than a ‘normal’ person. It was stupid. Now I know that we are all different, and we only have to be ourselves. I am this way: a writer, a woman, a person with a disability.”

Like a child afraid of the dark, the unknown filled her with dread. “Now I know that no one can control the future. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

For Mafalda, a keen goalie, letting in a goal because she doesn’t even see the ball coming and being ditched by her oldest friend, are particularly unexpected. Without self-pity she crosses “having a best friend” off her list of essential things. “I thought, for a long time,” says Peretti, reflecting on her own attempts to suppress her need for human connection, “that it was very hard for other people to be close to someone with a disability, or problems in general. But it wasn’t hard for me to be with marginalised refugee children. It’s not hard to be with someone who needs help.

“Being lonely was a great fear of Mafalda’s, and of mine. It is a sort of death, being lonely. Finding a true friend, a real friend, is the most important thing for Mafalda – and for me as well.””

The death of God implies he did exist
And of his sayings many were possessed
The still, small voice, the burning bush, its fire
The prophets ,Moses ,Jesus, Jeremiah

On God, a  snail without a shell , we trod
On his face of love,  we  left much blood
The quick of human flesh was dragged and torn,
Oh, tortured people, God lived in your forms

Tear your finger nail side,see it bleed
Imagine pain both dreadful and unseen
Where was God’s own dwelling place, we cry
To the lowly, he was in the sky.

God was buried live in  earth  which shrieked
My people,where are they, ah can  none speak?

A number of Jews who survived the death camps went to their old homes in Eastern Europe.I am not saying which country
They were buried live.The earth heaved for hours

• Ballispipes(voice box)

• Ballybant(belt)

• Banglin

• Bant(twine)

• Banterin(haggle)

• Baokes(beams)

• Barley

• Barm-bo(barm dumpling)

• Barmy(Silly)

• Barrowfells(barrowfields)

• Barst(burst)

• Bat(hit)

• Beawt, bowt(without)

• Beylin(Boiling)

A kettle beylin on het fire means home
A place of greater safety, allus known
Mi mam wer  mekin  bread and  dad wer heah
I  live now cos mi daddy drank that beer

T’cat wer sat down on   our old rag rug
I was in ‘t kitchen  peeling spuds
We had ehn old gas cooker  and a sink
Otherwise we’d only pen ‘n ink

Mi ballispipes are useful as I hum
Hopin’ song will bring mi daddy home
But  now and then they cause some people wrath
Like a woman in my  Wensday morn Art Class

She shouted ,is there summat wrong wi’ you?
Where to start, is Confession ever new?
Abaht mi singin’ I  don’t sing bi will
I think it’s daddy, he is wi’ mi still

Oh daddy I  don’t miss your ballybalt
On my bum it left eternal welts
Yet you sang me lullabies and   I rode  on ye back
A livin’ ,breathin’ ,human haversack

This photo is from Mike Flemming’s Natural History Blog

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

Auden and God

“In the 1950s and 1960s his  [Auden’s ]religious views began to coincide with those of the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose letters from the Nazi prison where he was eventually murdered had expounded an adult, “religionless” Christianity that had left behind all childish fantasies of a protective, paternal God. Bonhoeffer’s God experienced human suffering: “It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.” Auden told friends that of all the doctrines that the early Church had condemned as heresies (such as the Gnostic and Manichaean heresies that regarded matter as inherently fallen or demonic), the only one in which he believed was patripassianism, the doctrine that the Father voluntarily suffered with the Son.”

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself…. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.

WH Auden

Photo by Andre David Manjon Escobar on Pexels.com

Emile woke  Mary up at 7am.It was a  Sunday in  late October, grey and damp though the sun was still not  too low
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 basjet for me.
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   savagely
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

Using google maps I see
I can walk to Tewkesbury
It will take me 50 hours
Just time for the milk to sour

If I have a motor car
I can get there in 3 hours
Is it worth it just for once?
£20,000 at a glance

I wonder can I hire a bike
I have an old one but it’s white
The tyres have rotted and it’s sad
Better just to say its dead

No wonder the Royal Family
Spend so much on fealty
Their own train is very good
If only if it were real  brown wood!

“To pray,” Auden wrote, “is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a human so concentrates his/her attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that s/he completely forgets his/her own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, she/he is praying.” This may seem a denatured idea of prayer, but Auden took it seriously, and seems to have prayed in exactly this sense”

I sent this article to a few friends.One sent  back an elegant and beautiful  description of his view of the world and what it has within it though  being an atheist he may not pray in the [old fashioned] Christian sense.He may pray in the above sense but to him  it’s not prayer it is being alive and experiencing that

Another lapsed Catholic sent a short note saying  she wasn’t interested in God
She didn’t ask me what it meant to me or why it had seemed interesting enough to send to her.She may like me have suffered the utter boredom of a convent school

Are some of us living in a complete and enclosed world so we don’t care what interests  others? And we feel safe.After all, the boredom of the Rosary nearly drove some of us insane.That was no prayer that was rubbish to me.Yet some people have found it a help in times of trouble/Maybe just feeling the beads is nice?

I suppose in Auden’s piece he wants to be involved in humankind and the world of nature, the Universe of some aspect of that.And he also liked the invocation of the  spiritual by means of rites and rituals which has been part of our history from the start……

A bit like music or an art show….?

““To pray,” Auden wrote, “is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a human so concentrates his/her attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that s/he completely forgets his/her own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, she/he is praying.” This may seem a denatured idea of prayer, but Auden took it seriously, and seems to have prayed in exactly this sense

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-h-audenI

A starting phrase, a melody alert,
A trill of birdsong may our ears caress
As sensitive as a baby’s little hands
As touching as the lover understands
We join together in one human heart

As round the world the News our minds will hurt
As round the sacred, carelessly we skirt
As dimly we perceive the  last combat
Then let us be  like  music sung unplanned
From startled phrase

Arpegionne, cello,Franz Schubert
Do not  leave before the great concert
The music gathers from the world’s own lands
Shared  in trembling  heart and soul’s demands
Till all to peace may  make  their minds convert
Give us that phrase.

In the mirror, who do we perceive?
Do we see ourself,does it deceive?
We look different when in varied moods
Ungrown  people  love to sulk or brood
We see ourselves but how are we received?

If  a friend looks sad, perhaps they grieve
We are mortal.,death will snatch with greed
As we turn to dust with ancient leaves
Reflecting on the truth, do not look rude
In the  mirror

Where one has has ventured  must she lead?
Far from home, barbarians spread their seed
Europeans savaged worlds approved
Forced conversions  madden God indeed
With no mirror

the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a

religion,
and God is the poetry caught in
any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught
as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the
world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its
closure.
There’ll always be religion around
while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and
intermittent,
as the action of those birds –
crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then
beating, and again shut.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/29/nick-laird-poetry-religion

EXTRACT:

Though an atheist – in that I believe we’re here only by happy accident – my sensibility is religious. I like ritual and heightened states. I like mind-altering drugs. I believe in invisible forces – radioactivity, magnetism, sound waves – and I’m more than willing to sit for an hour listening to a church organist practice, which I did just last week. And I’ll let myself shiver along with the immense chord changes. I don’t like faith but I’m fond of its trappings- the kitschy icons, the candles, the paintings, the architecture and, especially, the poetry. Though many great religious figures, from Augustine to Screwtape, have taken prose as their instrument for confessing or cajoling, when it comes to praise, poetry’s the usual choice. I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s magnificent new translations of The Book of Psalms, and “My heart is astir with a goodly word”.

The relationship between poetry, those goodly words, and religion is hard to quantify. Both involve the hidden, working at the borders of the sayable. They share an experiential dimension. Personal religion involves a private speech act (prayer), chanting (psalms), heightened states achieved by ritualised words. The Lord’s prayer is one of the first poems I learned. Leached of its import by years of mindless recital, it’s almost a Sitwellian sound poem to me.

The Narcissism of Minor Differences

“The English and the Scots. The Serbs and the Croats. The Sunnis and the Shiites.

If you look at some of the fiercest and bloodiest rivalries in history, what’s striking is not how different the opposing groups are, but how similar. Sure, they often hold different beliefs, but they live as neighbors, share ancestry, and hold similar customs.

In his 1930 essay “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud commented on this dynamic, noting that it is frequently “communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.” Elsewhere he notes that the phenomenon is not limited to ethnic or religious peoples either: “Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.”

If as a teenage football fan you were caught up in a cross-town rivalry with another high school, you know of which Freud speaks.

So what accounts for the peculiar hostility between groups of people that are in many ways quite alike?

Freud chalked it up to the innate human proclivity for aggression and the desire for distinct identity. To see one’s neighbors reflect and mirror oneself too much threatens a person’s unique sense of self, and superiority. It’s what political scientist Stephen Brooks calls the “uncomfortable truth of resemblance.” To alleviate this injury to one’s ego, one downplays their similarities with others and emphasizes their divergences — which can be amplified into seemingly unbridgeable rifts.

Freud called this phenomenon “the narcissism of minor differences.””

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/17/behind-the-anti-semitism-crisis-of-jeremy-corbyns-labour-party/

Although Stan was 92 years old he still rode his bike as much as possible in the summertime.He was out in the garden pumping up the tyres before going off to the Library when suddenly his neighbour Annie appeared at the gate,bedecked as usual in finest Scottish tweed with a long pendant on a solid 22 carat gold chain swinging nonchalantly from her neck,with a matching ring attached mysteriously to her upper lip
“Who’re you,the Lady Mayoress” he joked noisily as he felt nervous.
Where’s Mary?” she whispered shyly.
“She’s up with her widowed sister Joan in Scotland ” Stan admitted nervously.
“Joan,that’s not a very Scottish name!” Annie joked.”anyway how about we sit down here on this bench for a moment”.She pulled him vigorously towards her.Stan responded regretfully yet politely
“I’m afraid I can’t stop.I have all these  old books overdue and the library shuts in 15 minutes.
“Don’t worry, sweet heart”, she cried softly.”I’ll pay all your fines.I’ve just come into loads of money.”
“Oh,how’s that.my angel” Stan murmured into her ear.
“I just shot Bert.If you help me to get rid of the evidence,I’ll share the loot with you.”
At the funeral,Annie was dressed in a beautiful dark brown suit from Jaeger.She went around the room making sure everyone had enough food and drink..As she leaned over towards Stan her heavy gold locket,inside which was hidden the bullet that killed Bert,swung over and hit Stan a glancing blow on  his temple.
Stan fell to the ground where luckily there was a thick  wool carpet
“Do you think we should ring 999?” someone asked sarcastically.Within minutes paramedics arrived.
“So,is it that chair again?” they clamoured.
“Yes,this foolish old man fell over and the leg came off my new antique chair.I’ve only had it a few days and it’s not insured.”
“Did anyone ever tell you,your eyes are like deep pools in the Sargossa Sea?” The paramedic whispered into her right ear.I’m  Dave,by the way,her muttered.
“Have you still not finished that Creative Writing Course?” Annie shouted,continuing..
“I’m getting tired of you admiring my eyes.What about my nose?”
“Has anyone ever told you,your nose is the shortest they’ve ever seen?” he said furtively
“That’s a bit boring” Annie retorted. angrily
“Yeah,maybe I should change to Art,” he ruefully moaned, his eyes on the ground
“I love the way your deep blue and turquoise eye shadow is melting round your eyes and running down the sides of your nose.”
“Hurry up and fix my chair,and while you’re about it,you may as well take Stan down to A and E for a head X-ray.”
Glancing  slyly at Annie in her Jaeger suit with carefully contrasting deep coral blouse and opaque teal blue 80 denier tights with 6 inch stiletto heels to complete the outfit, not to mention her raspberry coloured bra which clashed violently with the coral blouse, which, as it happens, was more transparent than she realised, Dave picked up a hammer and began,excitedly,to mend the broken chair as this would put her in his debt.
“This is what life is all about,my boy” he thought.Little did he know the true tale, that Annie had murdered her husband merely because she felt very  bored.
Boredom is very dangerous.If you are affected why not go out and look at some hats?

Image by Katherine from a photo she took 2013