This weblog will be moving in the next weeks so I can concentrate on FootStpes Press.

Daniel

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He used to amble up and down the hill outside our house when we first moved here. His jacket never fitted him properly as if it were weighted down in one pocket, his head was always tilted to his right as he walked and he never smiled. He barely acknowledged anyone he hadn’t been brought up with but when he did he sounded cheerful enough, somewhat helpful.

I learned after he died and was buried that he had been broken by his wife who had an affair with another man and told him she was leaving. I know we are used to seeing love on film these days, and endlessly reading about it in cheap books striving after its perfection and hoping for its gifts in our lives. But he was an ordinary countryman. He never set the world on fire, he never left the parish in which he was born, he knew some of the roads from before they were set down and he probably never had an original idea in his life.

But love shortened his life.

We are all capable of deep love with all its twists and turns. You don’t have to be any kind of hero to be touched by greatness.

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To A New England Poet

 
Though skilled in Latin and in Greek,
And earning fifty cents a week,
Such knowledge, and the income, too,
Should teach you better what to do:
The meanest drudges, kept in pay,
Can pocket fifty cents a day.

Why stay in such a tasteless land,
Where all must on a level stand,
(Excepting people, at their ease,
Who choose the level where they please:)
See Irving gone to Britain’s court
To people of another sort,
He will return, with wealth and fame,
While Yankees hardly know your name.

Lo! he has kissed a Monarch’s–hand!
Before a prince I see him stand,
And with the glittering nobles mix,
Forgetting times of seventy-six,
While you with terror meet the frown
Of Bank Directors of the town,
The home-made nobles of our times,
Who hate the bard, and spurn his rhymes.

Why pause?–like Irving, haste away,
To England your addresses pay;
And England will reward you well,
Of British feats, and British arms,
The maids of honor, and their charms.

Dear bard, I pray you, take the hint,
In England what you write and print,
Republished here in shop, or stall,
Will perfectly enchant us all:
It will assume a different face,
And post your name at every place,
From splendid domes of first degree
Where ladies meet, to sip their tea;
From marble halls, where lawyers plead,
Or Congress-men talk loud, indeed,
To huts, where evening clubs appear,
And ‘squires resort–to guzzle Beer.

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Once again the conservative party in the UK is tearing into itself over being members of the European Union. One would hardly be aware it was the Conservative party that joined on the 1970s but memories go back further. Churchill said no and de Gaulle said no when he was asked again. The reasons then were less to do with Imperial history and more to do with the deep distrust between the UK and Europe. We have to remember England was on the winning side in World War 2 only because the Russians and Americans joined in.

Nothing focuses the mind of the ruling class in the UK more than the possibility they will lose their Monarchy and in 1939 the elder brother was far more Nazi than the younger one who was actually on the throne.

Today, having seen people try to associate Thatcher with Churchill, what we see is part of the UK living in the past, and how could it be otherwise. These men and women are steeped in history and see it as a greatness that they conquered so many armies. They skim over slavery, the ignore their worldwide theft, they keep quiet about losing America and they never point out how many modern wars are occurring in old possessions they left too hastily.

They don’t want a different future. That’s the battle ground, and that’s the one no one will ever mention.

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Have you noticed how things that are important to one generation vanish in the next, or at least in another? How one century can be governed by people ascribing to one point of view only to have it overturned in another century? I have often believed and accepted that, as the sages have said, we live our lives through our ignorance not through our intelligence. When we discover something we change, but before the discovery we are set in our ways.

There was a time when war was considered the right and duty of every man, today in many places in the world we argue this point. There was a time when religions ruled imagination but that is no longer the case. When men and women had separate places in society, when there was no such thing as childhood, when killing animals wholesale was never considered a bad thing to do, when we believed god kept us alive and not the biodiverse planet.

We look back at the past and sometimes shake our heads at what people accepted as the norm but really, we should be questioning ourselves and asking why we accept what we accept. At what things the future will raise an eyebrow and say, ‘how could they have done that …?’

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The whole world changes all the time and yet such is the way the mind works, that once it has learned something that helps it survive, it doesn’t take to change very easily. The number of times we have to repeat something to learn it increases as we age, almost as if nature doesn’t want old animals. But the older the animal the better its matrix of abilities for survival so actually, age is vitally important because age can teach or breed on survival successes.

But maybe there is a cut off point where nature dictates that animals that have survived but are too old to do anything but look after themselves, and wont have any more children, have served their purpose. Nature, after all, simply wants more of an animal and nothing more, or so it seems. We don’t actually have anything more to go on than observation on the planet Earth so we may have a one-sided view point.

Change is so fundamental to everything we are and do it seems strange that age should deconstruct the brain and make us more vulnerable, almost as if nature is training us to be less selfish and more thoughtful because only by looking after the old can we make sure they survive.

But how could nature see that as a survival mechanism for a species?

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There are, of course, extreme examples of stress where one can almost empathise with the suicide. There is a photograph from the 1930s where the American photographer was just walking the street and sensed something and took a picture. The picture was of a woman just before she hit the sidewalk, falling onto her back amidst a few passing pedestrians. When you see a picture like that it is surreal. Quiet. A still life. And you are detached from it because it is black and white, and yet held in it, just for your imagination and reason to look closely, is a terrible, tragic moment of loneliness and despair.

Such is the hold of the visual arts that we can all point to photographs of momentous and private moments that have struck our memories so forcibly they remain with us all our lives. In the same way we all act as cameras, as with that brilliant title by Christopher Isherwood, ‘I am a Camera’, but not everything we see is worth while us retaining. But everything we see, is seen and maybe what we find irrelevant others find interesting.

And today press journalism suggests to us what they find interesting we should find interesting. And so despair has become a show.

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So horse meat exists and up to now has only been fed to pets and those people who go to specialist restaurants to eat it, along with hippopotamus steaks and roast elephant. Suddenly DNA is found in beef foods across the UK and everyone is … well … annoyed. I wonder. Because it seems to me this is much more about labeling than about horses. I doubt people who eat foods with brains and testicles in, are ever going to worry about whether or not horses have crept into the bolognese.

People have eaten horses for as long as there have been horses despite the cute tradition of upper middle class children being given riding lessons on their first pony. I doubt very much if this is even due to the economic crisis and manufacturers trying to increase their profits as chickens were fed fishmeal so much they began to smell like fish when cooked and we have been feeding meat products to vegetarian animals for decades.

I do have sympathy for those who argue it is ridiculous to complain over one animals being slaughtered for food rather than another. You either eat meat or don’t, and only those who don’t have any right to criticize the practices of the meat industry.

There is no humane way to take a life. Its a complete contradiction.

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Lucasta Laughing

Heark, how she laughs aloud,
Although the world put on its shrowd:
Wept at by the fantastic crowd,
Who cry: one drop, let fall
From her, might save the universal ball.
She laughs again
At our ridiculous pain;
And at our merry misery
She laughs, until she cry.
Sages, forbear
That ill-contrived tear,
Although your fear
Doth barricado hope from your soft ear.
That which still makes her mirth to flow,
Is our sinister-handed woe,
Which downwards on its head doth go,
And, ere that it is sown, doth grow.
This makes her spleen contract,
And her just pleasure feast:
For the unjustest act
Is still the pleasant’st jest.

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Having just watched another predictable movie, so predictable I skipped chunks of it, I fail to understand why Hollywood churns out such bad story-lines. In the first instance they seem to think their audiences, which are worldwide, will be disinterested if there isn’t an American in the movie. Really?

Then you have the monotonous plots of handsome men and women finding time to kiss in tragedy, the hero and heroine of myth. Well that’s alright, it’s an old story and it works well but do they all have to be white and blond? What’s wrong with a black hero and white heroine kissing? Or two heroines. Are modern stories to be racist?

The anti-hero has to be in conflict all the time, the best friend is the one who dies, the enemy has to be ugly or better still, alien and the alien has to be ugly. Who would have thought aesthetics matters more in a story than the plot?

The upshot of this is that stories that have potential are wasted, and audiences are short-changed. And I realise the problem. The directors and editors do not share the deep imaginations of the writers. It’s about time writers started to make their own movies, the art of what is possible in front of the camera is fast being overtaken buy what is permissible.

New technologies should bring with them fresh film-making.

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Out in Vancouver archaeologists have been excavating an old site and some anthropologists have been trying to analyse what they have found to shed light on our innate ideas of fairness. What they think they found was a people who were very egalitarian with no class or social divisions until they settled an area where the salmon were plentiful and food scarcity became a thing of the past. Then they discovered evidence of individuals protecting certain areas of the river, giving food away in feasts to attract friends  as ‘cronies’, they could count on and price fixing of brides. These negative attributes were not fought because no one was starving.

Further experiments on children as young as fifteen months have used observation to demonstrate our innate ability to know when someone is being treated fairly in the division of food stuffs. And they have shown that while we are selfish at age three by the age of eight we have a developed sense of fair distribution.

The age three interest me because that is the age when highly intelligent children have been shown to start to lie.

But the idea that we get lazy about social dynamics when we eat well is born out in revolutions which have always had elements of deprivation and hunger in them across the world.

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I recently wrote one of those truisms you can only get away with in a children’s book, that to win a war it isn’t necessary to win every battle, just to win the last one. I was reminded of this thinking about the situation of the ever widening reach of the enemies of western thinking, and recalling Mao Tze Tung when asked how he would feel if half of the Chinese people were lost in war. He replied, and not wholly ingenuously, that that would leave the other half victorious.

Al Qaeda don’t are about the last ten years, they don’t care about the next ten years. They know the sons they have will leave sons, and so on down the generations and they want to be ready when thee western world fails, as it will in time whether through civil war or environmental disaster. They have years to squander because they look to a distant future.

If we fail to look as far we will lose the last battle. We will lose because we find longevity of struggle difficult and unsavoury, and we would rather be hedonistic in our attitudes to life. We will lose because we think we are fighting modern men, but the only thing modern about these men are their weapons.

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The last time I ever took on a school bully I was seven. All I recall was the teacher wading into the crowd of kids in the playground and pulling us apart. I don’t know why we were even wrestling as I was new, all I do now is that I never much liked being told what to do or being pushed around. Nor have I ever liked seeing others being pushed around.

Which I why I think we are not up to much as a species as we act just like the school bully but on a world stage. No thought is ever given to saying people must limit their numbers to give other animals room to breed, no thought is ever given to simply not building more homes and bigger cities – we just go ahead and do it governed by our individual lust for money without any concept of the finite. I hear politicians telling me innovation and technology will always get us out of the problems the system creates.

I only know one thing about bullies, they never stop unless they are stopped. I don’t think nature likes being pushed around, and I don’t think she takes it indefinitely. Every playground and every planet needs a balance and right now we have upset all the balances.

We are the ones who will fall.

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In Europe in the past when oracles were popular, they secreted themselves in caverns because darkness added to their mystery. The whole idea of Hades being below ground came from this tradition and, indeed, Romans thought reeds were unlucky because they were hollow and the noises that blew threw them probably came from the suffering souls below ground.

The person seeking the oracle would have seen someone half hidden, lit only by torch light, and quite possibly with either their voice masked or enriched in some way and then oracle would give their prediction which was usually, if those that have come down to us are anything to go by, inexact. So strong was the belief in their mystery and so strong was the longing to know, few people saw through all this and the mysterious books used in Greece called the Sibylline Books, were bought and taken to Rome to be consulted at regular intervals.

And today in the UK people pay fortunes to listen to those who, with well-worn techniques, convince people they are in contact with their dead family members. Clinging to the hope that death is not final and affection never ends.

That people take advantage of this doesn’t surprise me but that people still cling to it is terrifying.

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I think it is more than a theory, but light bounces off the planet,  actually it bounces off all planets, and somewhere out in space bouncing around, is light that hit the planet Earth a thousand years ago. I have no idea what the energy levels in light are and how long it takes for light to dissipate but I was always fascinated at the thought that astronauts could travel into space and catch up with light that held the images of past events.

How many? All and everything? We might not be able to talk to the images but we could observe. Would these images need enhancing or would they be perfect and would we see as if we had been there. Could we travel with them effectively slowing them down? Would we be able to learn from them, by seeing expressions on faces or solve riddle by actually witnessing the events.

I don’t suppose we will ever know, or ever catch up to historic light. We would need new technology because I am sure some of the light that hits the earth today is not all from the sun and no one has said they have seen anything from another planet in these terms.

Maybe someone should write a book about it.

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There Is A Garden In Her Face

 
There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heav’nly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow which none may buy,
Till “Cherry ripe” themselves do cry.

Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill’d with snow;
Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,
Till “Cherry ripe” themselves do cry.

Her eyes like angels watch them still,
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat’ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till “Cherry ripe” themselves do cry.

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There is an observation common in all countries that when money enters, promises and friendships leave. People think this is because of greed but we should look more closely at what greed is. It is not acquisitive of money just for the money. If that were so most rich people would just enjoy their money but thousands of rich families around the world vie for power in governments and it in that which actually gives us a better description of greed.

Greed occurs because money, wealth of any kind in fact, infers upon the wealthy a power over the imaginations and sometimes the lives of other people. Greed becomes a way in which individuals and families can make themselves bigger in society, set themselves apart through education and culture and ownership to such a degree that they are then able to ‘look down’ upon other people. This is pure animal behaviour.

Greed carries with it the huge deception that power itself makes one super-human, that to sign laws which affect millions can make one more worthy than other people. In fact what happens to the rich is that their greed longs for money with power.

In this way power is given to those without the ethical stamina to control it and instead they are controlled by it.

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I saw posted a comment by a woman that she heard someone say they were getting a scan of the twin they were carrying to make sure the babies they were bringing into this world were healthy, and the woman pointed out they were already in this world they were just not born yet.

Which is quite true but in the womb they are not yet independent and even though we can help babies survive who are born prematurely they need  intensive care at ever increasing amounts the younger they are. It is also interesting to note the conversation women are having as to when they think they have ‘life.’ My mother told me she always knew she was pregnant within a week of the conceptions. She felt a flutter in her stomach. She also wrote an amazing letter on the birth of my sister which is an outpouring of wonder, creation and motherhood in one.

Her own mother went into deep post-natal depressions which took months to wear away.

The way in which women react to pregnancy is vital to how they discuss abortion but it is not vital at all to how they feel about abortion when they have one. I have never met any woman who did not find the trauma depressing, who wished circumstance had been different and who don’t silently mourn their lost child.

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I am not exactly sure what busy days are supposed to tell us. I don’t seem to have stopped today and have been given three new books to think about and one book we thought would be ready on Wednesday needs far more work. Strangely working all day is something I regularly do anyway so it doesn’t phase me or even tire me over much as working from home I can take regular, short breaks.

And that is the key to all living. To pace oneself. To follow the energy patterns of one’s body and not to stress the body too much. I feel sorry for people who need stimulants to get through their days.

Sometimes the yawns of late nights are not so much a sign of tiredness as satisfaction especially when we consider how hard people worked in past centuries, when they did not live on average as long as we do and were graduates at sixteen, writing every day (Pope), walking twenty miles a day (Keats) and keeping strict hours (Dickens.)

The occasional long day is a breeze compared to their lives.

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Our lives have always been affected by events and matters we cannot control. We all know that we do not choose our families, that we are subject to other people’s ideas of what education is, and we all have expectations of what it means to be a ‘good…’ citizen, wife, man etc.

Historians are fond of telling us the things we do not know about how our countries were created, and why. What moved peoples to migrate in the past and why decisions were made that changed history. What we don’t always see is the history around us. How decisions made in one country affect the world and so eventually individuals. Whether from technology or selfish interest.

Politics is like a climate of its own. It took years before we realized that weather events on one side of the globe are created by admixtures of pressure and movement high in the sky, deep in the ocean and often on the other side of the world to us. Years before we knew that shoals of fish create currents, that hot and cold air clash and that too much or two little rain can be a matter of  tree cover.

People die because of these things. National interest is the equivalent of a hurricane at sea pounding its way towards our homes.

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I remember Mohammed Ali ( or was he Casius Clay at the time) saying how amused he was by a white man being titled ‘king of the jungle.’ He knew and he could see how fiction shadows politics and how myths feed assumptions that can in time create nations.

We read the stories today of Troy and the founding myths of all nations, as stories and we are ever eager to see how kindred they are, sidestepping the differences in an effort to join up all experience as human experience. I do it myself. And of course they are all human experiences. But just as tribes intermarrying over generations produce different shapes of face across the world, so these myths are different. And since it is in difference that conflict arises we would be well advised to understand them.

King Arthur is not far from Charlemagne, nor from Aeneas, nor from The Mahabharata, nor from the Monkey myths or any of the stories across Africa about honour and what men will do for the women they respect. But each has fed into their nations and across nations painting upon the minds of their tribes diverse priorities.

Do you take revenge now, or later when your own survival is more assured? Do you pray before you go to war or ask forgiveness afterwards?

Myths are philosophies of life.

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THE DEFINITION OF LOVE.

I.
MY Love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis, for object, strange and high ;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.

II.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

III.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed ;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

IV.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close ;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

V.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed,
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

VI.
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

VII.
As lines, so love’s oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet :
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

VIII.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

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I do not know many soldiers. I was always taught to be respectful of them and come from a  family where my grandfather would always give a soldier a lift if they were hitchhiking. I have no problems at all with women joining the military in whatever capacity they wish to, they have secretly for generations as one or two famous cases prove.

Today they were discussing rape and how one woman killed herself when her rape charges against two military police were dropped.

I am sure sex in the confines of the army is not wholly the same as in the population at large. There is an expectation of conflict do life may end, bodies that are highly physically attractive, and choice and opportunity are plentiful and I am sure both sexes enjoy themselves. But it seems even in this atmosphere the idea that women and men are individuals and that you cannot take what is not offered is not part of the training or discipline.

People may well throw up their hands and ask me what I expected when every army rapes when on campaign, but not every man does and if not every man does there must be a reason why some do. Perhaps sex is so immediate no one thinks it has consequences. How can anything that feels so good be bad?

Perhaps it isn’t anything to do with thinking at all.

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The very funny people at Mad magazine coined this word to explain anti-semitism describing anti-semitism as one form of the world wide propensity for tribes to dislike each other. It has to be said that when tribes do something wrong – take slavery – they have to explain it away, they have to justify it in some perverse way and the phrenology of slavery and anti-semitism are cases in point. Justification is something we all look for in everything we do.

Justifying our beliefs and actions should be implicit in the belief system or the action itself. If it is an add-on you can almost always say it has become an excuse for doing something that should not be done, because, and this is crucial, we know in our thoughts that it should not be done so we look for the justification.

Many religious people have said there is an ethical core to human beings which we try to deny in ( order to go to war, exploit others for money and so forth.) Non religious people say we arrive at our ethics though long discussion and mutual agreement. Neither are quite right.

In order to have something to discuss in the first place we must have an angle on our actions and what they do to others. But in order to advance our ethical thoughts we have to have the incisive intellect to cut through justifications and the courage to speak out.

Ethics and courage are the two side of the same coin.

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Just because writers make up names, does that mean their characters do not exist in real life?

I think sometimes we get carried away with assumptions, because the major reason we call this ‘fiction’ is so that no one can be sued. And the reason that is a possibility is because people recognize themselves in the work, because some writers write from a  conviction that others should ‘know.’ In fact some of the finest fiction is raw, real, immediate which is why it leaves an indelible impression upon the mind because the readers know   people are not only capable of doing that they have done it. The kind of  feeling I had when reading The Grapes of Wrath about the shopkeeper, or Cousin Bette and the French sexual mores.

We use the phrase ‘true of the world’ to describe these things. Jean Valjean never existed as an individual but men like him, and women and men like the others in Les Miserables, did. And from the point of view of injustice still do. That’s the point of writers, like mirrors they reflect, the image exists only because we do. And writing, like light, may be refracted and turned around but it is always a ‘true image’. In recognizing ourselves in fiction the writer finds a truth.

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