First, the glass of my new watch had cracked
Then my credit card had disappeared.
This caused me an alarm like a great smack
And home I came. before new devils leered.

Inside the wallet ,where I keep some notes,
This credit card had found a peaceful rest
My pen though dry decided it would write
Though what I write is nowhere near my best

I wonder if I need a watch at all.
The mobile phone is accurate and clear.
Yet watches have significance past call.
And this one is to my heart rather dear.

On a day when sensing vertigo,
Stay at home, put polish on your toes!

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jun/18/poetry-can-heal-it-helped-me-through-depression

“Arguably, it may be the refusal to create one’s art that causes distress in the first place. John Keats, a licensed apothecary, as was Dante, trained unhappily as a doctor and experienced depression accordingly: his brother feared that if John didn’t become a poet he would kill himself. An unanswered calling can take its revenge, and Gwyneth Lewis’s memoir of depression, Sunbathing in the Rain, notes that it was her resistance to writing poetry that made her ill: “If you don’t do what your poetry wants you to, it will be out to get you. Unwritten poems are a force to be feared.””

I doubt if everyone is like Gwyneth Lewis but I agree unused capacity can make people ill.That’s why Evening Classes were so beneficial to ordinary people with a desire to learn.Very few are left now thanks to Mrs Thatcher.

Thanks for phoning.I have a nasty cough and can’t talk.
You have reached Katherine.Please leave a comment.
I am a poet and don’t I know it!
Thanks for asking me out.I have a box of dates right here.
No, I am not getting married again, even to you, my angel.
I can’t answer the phone as it never speaks
Unless you are Leonard Cohen please hang up now.
This is a robotic answering machine.I don’t take messages kindly.Please leave the kiosk as you found it
Yes,I did have a nice day and that is why I’m not ruining it by answering the phone.Ta ta.

لا يكفيك أن تنساها .. يجب كذلك أن تنسى أنك نسيتها !

It is not enough to forget her. You have also to forget that you forgot her!

أملى أكبر من جهدى .. وجهدي أكبر من موهبتي .. وموهبتى سجينة طبعي .. ولكنى أقاوم

My ambition is greater than my effort. My effort is greater than my talent. And my talent is a hostage of my temper. But I persist

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/

“France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.””

The epithet dirty Jew, Zola wrote in “J’Accuse …!,” was the “scourge of our time.” “J’Accuse …!” was published in 1898.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-celan

Extract

In Paris, he taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure and earned a significant portion of his income as a translator, translating a wide range of work, from Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Charles Baudelaire. His own work as been translated into English numerous times and by several noted poets and translators including Michael Hamburger, Rosmarie Waldrop, Heather McHugh, John Felstiner, and Pierre Joris.

Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. His first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns, was published in Vienna in 1948; his second collection, Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedaechtnis, 1952), brought him critical acclaim. Katherine Washburn, his translator, noted in her introduction to Last Poems (1986): “The title of this book [Poppy and Memory] pointed with a fine vividness to the central predicament of Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel, heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”

While Celan is perhaps best known for his poem “Death Fugue” (or “Todesfuge”), it is not necessarily representative of his later work. Reviewing the 1981 publication Paul Celan: Poems in the New York Times, Rika Lesser said the poem’s “richly sonic, dactylic lines (spoken by the inmates of a camp), while typical of Celan’s mastery of form, content, texture and sound, are hardly indicative of the direction his composition would later take.” As his career continued, Celan worked to “purge his poems of readymade contexts – whether historical, traditional or explicitly religious. The late poems still abound in allusions – private, hermeneutic, esoteric – but increasingly each poem becomes and creates its own context and the context within which Celan’s other poems must be read.”

This transformation has much to do with the language in which Celan wrote. As Shoshana Olidort notes in her Chicago Tribune review of Breathturn Into Timestead: Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (trans. by Pierre Joris and published by FSG, 2014), Celan was “a Holocaust survivor, [who] wrote in German, his mother tongue and also the language of his mother’s murderers … As a German-speaking Jewish survivor living in France, Celan harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through what Joris eloquently describes as a “dismantling and rewelding” of German. The result, Olidort writes, “is arguably even darker than his earlier poems with their direct references to the Shoah. For Celan, darkness is not willed obscurity, rather, the poem comes out of lived experience and is “born dark.”

I looked up at the window of his room
And felt a pang of grief  he is not there
As if I have awakened from a dream
Over me, reality now looms
I have not absorbed my grief, my doom
So little demons constantly reveal
I looked up at the window of his room
And felt my anguish that he is not here

The sky  is stark, the air is cool and still
The black cat’s  run, the birds unfold all day
I sit  down here and with my totty pray
Ye cast o’ foolish thoughts, you raped my will.
We’ve  each enraged the bureaucratic mill.
Oh frigid purse, I never meant to pay!
The sky ‘s  a’spark, the air is warm and shrill
The saturnine demoted  knelled their way
With this feathered pounce, my sample quill,
I  cite the cheque and date it for next May.
Oh, tit for cat, the Tiger’s bed ‘s astray.
Yer  life is settled by  a  harlot’s will
The sky ‘s a shark, the air is sharper still.

The  many teardrops falling from my eyes
Coalesced into a large one as they flowed
And so a little water may give rise
To a river ,then an ocean wide.

As I wept, the large teardrop fell off
And made a mark upon my brand new blouse
For my mascara made it  black and  rough
And thus with a black stain, I was endowed.

If you plan to  weep, then wear old clothes
So you can sob and cry as free as Eve
But it  you are hit, surprised by some old woe
Just pretend of cat you’ve been bereaved.

As little tear drops make a crystal stream
So random happenings turn into our dreams.

Around a splinter, inflammation grows
It seems to be the cause of  many ills
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

I  got a safety pin stuck in my toe
I had a shot of tetanus but not a pill
Around the splinter, inflammation grows

I  trod on this old pin, yet didn’t know
Yet it caused a risk that I’d be ill
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

If it is a bit of wood or claw
The body separates it by a wall
Around the splinter, inflammation grows

My father used a needle, poked  to draw
Until I screamed and uttered a loud wail
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

If no one helps, enormous grows what’s small
Until it brings about our human Fall
Around the splinter, inflammation grows
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams, he is alive again
If, by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
That if were played, my own life would be o’er
That one must live and one must die is plain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams , he is alive again

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2014.899763?src=recsys,

Extract:

I argue that the oft-discussed connection between Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” and Keats’s “negative capability” has led scholars to overlook Keats’s own notion of passivity as a persuasive, as well as receptive, force. I argue that Keats saw passivity as an embodied, and even physically demanding, attitude, that could prompt the interest and attention of others – an understanding that builds on the theatrical attitudes adopted by Romantic stage actors, who struck exciting poses to suspend dramatic intensity.

 



When wanderings take my restless mind
To places peace can never find,
When imaginations linked to fear
Push tranquillity away.
To my green garden I must go
And let my mind and thoughts go slow.
I look  at maples in the breeze,
See sunlight dappled through their leaves.
I see the apples hanging down
And blackbirds peck them on the ground.
I see the hawthorn berries ripe
Upon the hedge in gold sunlight.
And then my soul is brought to earth
Peacefulness is given birth
I feel at one with nature green,
And all that is just now unseen
So back to everyday routines
Without “what for?” and “might have beens”
All is well and shall be so
Wherever we may go.

Oh, crutch you are a help to my bad  knee
Since cycling down the A1 injured me.
I never knew I should have bought a car
And spent my money on a stunning bra.
I only drove at 70mph
The teacher said, why don’t you learn to steer?
And if you go as fast as this you’ll fail
The police will come and you’ll end up in jail
So I never took a driving test
As riding bikes or donkeys seemed the best
But now my knees are giving me some jip
I sometimes weep and bite my bottom lip
With a crutch, I can negotiate
The steps my eye can’t see, the fallen plate
For  my sight is not creating in 3 d
Steps are dangerous to the half blind ones me.
But with a stick, I test the steps descent
A stick or crutch thus accidents prevents
Yet  suddenly I am a crippled fool,
Though other folks like me send out a smile
From young to old in one astounding leap
As with my crutch along the road I creep.
It’s better for my health to take a walk
Or to my crutch I have been heard to talk
I say switch off the laptop close the lid
And answer, who are you talking to, our kid?
Sometimes I say, oh, we need meringues.
That’s me and all my  numerous inner gang

Mary has a dear friend who lives, alas , nowadays in northern Scotland. Clare moved back there when her mother became unable to manage at home. Then Clare developed very severe problems with her feet and legs and had been offered psychotherapy by the pain clinic.
After Mary had  been talking to Clare on the phone she thought to herself,
I wonder if I should speak to a therapist because I am still grieving for Stan and it’s possible therapy might be able to tell me whether what I’m feeling is normal or whether I am going round the bend.
Mary found several counsellors near where she lived by looking on the Internet; she had interviewed five and decided on one called Margaret  Slipknot, Dr Slipknot had a room in a private hospital in the best road of the entire City.
Good morning, please take a seat over here, Margaret said to Mary.
Now you can tell me anything you like; it is completely confidential except that if you tell me you are going to kill somebody or commit suicide, I am obliged to tell your doctor or the police. Is that alright with you?

Oh yes said Mary that seems quite sensible because I understand the motivation behind it all, knowing several widows ; they have mentioned that they didn’t want to go on living alone.But I did not tell their doctor or the police because sometimes everybody feels like that and once they realise it they are quite happy, in a sense.They can accept it.I have got a very good friend next door call Annie and I know many colleagues at the university but since my husband died I feel as if there is a void at the centre of my being and whatever I do will not fill it.
Margaret. said, Perhaps this void has a role to play in your life.
What kind of role could a void have?.Mary gasped
Just say whatever comes to your mind.
A void is not something that people talk about very much and I’m not sure if it’s just the right word to describe what  I am sensing but it is more than just a little emptiness.
Stan used to make my dinner every night when I came home from the University and he also used to feed the cat and put the rubbish out not to mention listening to my thoughts about what happened to me while I was at work,  and all the people that I have met. So when I come home now feeling weary and tired I have to make my own dinner.
And do you make yourself dinner?
Not always. you see when Stan was alive I had a certain motivation to be a good and loving wife. I used to do a lot of planning to make sure that, even though he was going to do the cooking, that there were all the required ingredients in the cupboard plus also spices and herbs and garlic. I realise now that I have not bought any garlic for the past year.
People don’t usually come to see me just because they have not bought any garlic lately, the therapist cried.
When Mary heard the word lately she began to cry because late is a word used to denote people who are dead like the late Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
I see that you are still feeling sad and there’s nothing wrong with that but I am a little concerned about how you will cope with all your new responsibilities as well as continuing your work and life with students, Which all the things you mentioned about your husband do you miss the most?
I think the thing I’m missing him most for is putting out the rubbish. He always insisted on doing this even when he was very ill and I find it hard to remember to do it when I never did it before.It seems to me that a woman needs a man to put out the wheelie bins out and collect big cardboard boxes which need crushing.I feel bad putting the wheelies out by myself in the dark.
That doesn’t seem very nice, Margaret cried, that you only miss your husband because you have to put out the rubbish now yourself. I know that I’m not meant to give you advice.I want to listen to you but I cannot really believe that the main thing that you miss him for is this.
Well said Mary, don’t push me; this is the first session we’ve had and I am still testing the water.In other words don’t you realise that I’m not going to tell you the most sacred aspects of my being until I feel like I can trust you.
I’m not implying that you are an irresponsible,  foolish person, but don’t you think after working for 20 years as a psychotherapist that you should know that even in normal life we don’t tell someone we’ve never met before the very intimate and secret aspects of our being. There are some people who do this when they are not taking into account the person who they are speaking to, who they have never met before.Except people do it on trains.
I see, said Margaret. I will wait until you feel able to tell me what you miss the most. I don’t suppose it’s sex because you are much too old for that, although that is one way that some people fill in a void.
Do you think that women feel that their womb is an empty space inside them and wish to put something into it, asked Mary
Everybody’s different; now even if you have sex it won’t fill your womb now as  I already mentioned I think you are too old to have sex.
Mary felt very angry,
How dare you say I am too old to have sex. Stan used to teach classes of pensioners about statistics and other topics and he told me that many of them said that they were still involved in a sexual relationship.Now we don’t know quite how far they would go in that way but they have an interest.I thought that therapists were not meant to make judgements about what their clients say to them.
Are you really a trained psychotherapist? You must be earning a lot of money to rent this room in a private hospital and as far as I can see you do not seem to have any common sense, let alone uncommon sense.
Margaret’s face went bright red,
I am sorry she cried, I was a little bit nervous when you told me that you were a mathematician And it threw me off my stride because I thought that you might be more intelligent than I am.
Intelligence by itself is not  enough;it can be used to make nuclear bombs; to start Wars ;to gather information about your enemies what you really need  is  time and care and the ability to listen without criticism or judgement for the person who is with you ;you must have met some other people who were quite intelligent .It seems to me that you need more Training so that you are able to deal with your issues of fear of the highly intelligent person. You don’t need to have a fear of them and we are just the same as other people except that for some reason we preferred the geometry of the spheres to dating boys when we were 16.
In my case, it was after I had an operation to remove my appendix and was convalescing for several weeks. I came across a book called “Mathematician’s delight” by W.W.Sawyer And I read it about imaginary numbers and complex numbers so then I realised that mathematics was not just arithmetic and quadratic equations.
I don’t know whether I will come to see you anymore. What you said has taken away my faith in my judgement of people. You seemed the best therapist that I interviewed but now we’re starting I think I might have made a mistake.
Please don’t stop, said Margaret, I need the money!
So you think that I should continue seeing you here when you already proved yourself a little inadequate, merely to give you money. I am afraid I am not rich enough  to see you if I will have to see somebody else as well, since you are no good
I’ll tell you what said Margaret, let me give you another session completely free and see how we get on then.If you are still unhappy with me then, of course, you must find a different person. I realise my training was incomplete because we are all graduates or doctors and then we do five years training so we believe we are superior to most of the people who come for treatment but when I speak to my supervisor I will tell her that I think we all need to look at this question of superiority because neither you nor I  is actually morally or ethically superior to everybody else ;it can sometimes appear that we can see somebody is very inferior morally like  Hitler or Pol Pot but it’s now obvious most of the time
I’ll give you a call, Mary said when I have made my mind up; it is very kind of you to offer me a free session when you are so short of money. if I were your therapist, I would tell you that you were short of money because you are not very good at your job and therefore you will not have enough patients to make a living.On the other hand, it may be that you need to take an extra job, stacking the shelves in the supermarket to give you enough money to live on without exploiting human beings like myself.
However, I am glad that I realised that I feel this  void inside me because I now realise that I felt it long before my husband died and it must be linked to something else in my life, not just to him
Alright, said Margaret thank you very much for being so honest I hope you will come again.If not, I wish you good luck in finding someone who can travel with you on your journey into your new life.Thank you, said Mary. I will phone you soon, goodbye.
When she got home she told Emile, her cat.He said he wished he had gone with her to see how beautiful Margaret was.
That is very selfish, Emile.You need to hear what she says!

And so say all of us.

Are we bristling with an untold rage?
The  silence aches with menace  and  hot hair
I feel our minds and hearts are disengaged

Why do we blame God for our steel cage?
The glass around it mists with such despair.
Are we filled with old, unholy rage?

We don’t recognise the players on our stage
And what is worse, we feel we do not care,
As our minds and hearts are disengaged

The scriptwriter was not named on the page!
They told  it all  and left our feelings bare,
So we bristle with unruly rage.

Are we in need of ethical  triage,
Assessed by saints and demons of despair?
While our minds and hearts are disengaged

Would we were in  gardens, unknown, fair
As Leonard Cohen’s songs drowned out our fear
Are we condemned to tussle with our rage?
I sense our minds and hearts awry, dismayed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/philosophers-are-hypocrites/392087/

“…..as the cliché goes, people don’t always practice what they preach—particularly in some professions. Take the police: when Florida’s Sun Sentinel examined the records of 3,915 officers who had traveled on toll roads in 2011, the paper found that nearly 800 of them had driven at speeds of 90 to 130 miles an hour, many either while off duty or in violation of department rules that barred excessive speeding even in emergencies. Or consider physicians: one study of 500 doctors found 38 percent of them to be overweight, versus 33 percent of American adults (to be fair, the doctors’ rate of obesity was lower) [1]. Or those in retail: according to the security company Checkpoint Systems, the people who steal most from North American stores aren’t shoppers, but employees.”

“Another study shows ethicists to be especially delinquent library patrons:compared with other philosophy texts, “contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy” were roughly 50 percent more likely to be permanently missing [3].”

Can the Ethical be Primary?

An extract:

“Ethics is kind of ‘in your face’ in a way that things-in-themselves are not.  You can start the ethical endeavor from someplace other than ontology – in experience perhaps.  It is possible that ethics is primary:  ‘What should I do?’ comes before ‘What is there?’

This question put me in the mind of Emmanuel Levinas, who I was studying for my dissertation prior to going from fully to partially examining my life. His Wikipedia entry has a nice succinct section on this point:

[Levinas’] work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas’ terms, on “ethics as first philosophy”. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called “ontology“). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the “wisdom of love” rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word “philosophy”). In his view, responsibility precedes any “objective searching after truth”.

Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person’s proximity and distance are both strongly felt. “The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.”^[3] At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one’s freedom, to affirm or deny.^[4] “

In short, the Other comes before any Object.  There is a sense in which this view makes a category claim about Others vs. Objects – they are wholly different.  This doesn’t entail that one is prior to the other (and I suspect that at some point Derrida probably deconstructed that opposition).  If we at least grant the distinction between the two, I read Mark’s comment as saying there are practical reasons for spending our energies on ethics instead of ontology and I am sympathetic to this view.  You can live your life never knowing what is-in-itself, but you will at some point in your life have to make a moral decision.  It’s worth giving that some thought.

Levinas’ ultimately will claim that responsibility for the Other is the foundation of our Subjectivity, taking Heidegger’s notion of Sorge (Care) to it’s logical conclusion with respect to other Dasein.  While I won’t claim to understand what Levinas is really all about, listeners have probably caught on to the fact that the Ethical is of much more interest to me than ontology.  Metaphysically or practically ethical questions take priority for me.”