Watching the Disillusionment of Loved Ones

There is something profoundly sad about watching the disillusionment of one that we love. The sadness is perhaps proof that we still love them. Disillusionment is nowadays called "Reality check", thanks to the Seventies hippie generation.

That we may have been partly responsible for sustaining their deluded state;
that we may have loved them because we wished to share their deluded state;
that we were unable to find for them a gentler let-down when the disillusionment finally came;
that we have to SHARE the let-down itself.

These are facts known to any intelligent mother, whom has had to grapple with the "Is there really a Santa Claus, Mum?" So Child would never have enjoyed the illusion that Santa Claus existed, but for Mum. Mum would never have loved the Child so much if they never believed what did not exist. Mum later tries to tell Child that Santa Claus does not exist, but cannot find an easy way. Mum feels pain when Child eventually discovers that Santa Claus does not exist, and both their whole frames of being are knocked down.


So it is sad. That's life. An endless string of illusions clutched, each followed by grasping at the harsh brutal truth. As I believe I have always tried to seek the truth, I feel particularly qualified to say that the truth is like the multiverse of universes. When you have uncovered one, so you find you are buried deep within another one that you yet do not understand. So too do I feel qualified to say that there is no pride to be gained, from understanding more universes than the next man.

Yet I want to be sad.
For spring here, faltering,
does not smell the same
As where I left.
I am homesick for a place that I lived in and loved for so long, but whose ruin I could no longer bear to watch.

Funny that, as if I hadn't seen most of it ruined, that I should have been so bothered. Perhaps disillusionment sometimes is the wrong diagnosis.
Perhaps realities change, and we are belittled by our powerlessness to halt the change.

So here in Britain, we wait for spring. There are daffodils out now, and crocuses, but none of the trees are springing into leaf. Nights are still cold, and nothing much is growing fast, even when we have a sunny warmish day.

Today is Budget Day. As if I care. All the farting economists in the world could be piled into a gas oven and it set alight, and I would not be any happier.

I call the world the Planet.
The Planet is too big for me to hold.
Its billions of people are too many for me to scold.
Its development is too much a horror for me to behold.

Thank God we die when we grow old.

Found A Poem Written Long Ago.

The copyright for this belongs to me, the owner of this blog, as it is Original Material. I came across it today, having completely forgotten that I had written it, probably around 1998-1999. It represents a past that is so forgotten, so distant, and most of all so irrelevant today, that it is interesting for that reason alone.

I am not a piece of glass
Another for your collection
But I am a dark wall
Like some of those within you.

You would smash out a hole
brick by brick
Until you could see right through me
You would widen my whole
kick by kick
Until I become your window.

Then you will take your pane,
Fit it to me and fill me with it,
So I keep out the cold and rain,
While still our daze is brightly lit.

You may choose to break me from time to time
But only if you stand by your shattered window
To feel the sky's breath fling its tears
Against your skin and soul,
And then to find a new pane
to fit me and fill me with.

Our loving will be this

Powerful stuff, the feelings of which are today extinct and cremated, not just buried. I think I remember why I was moved to write it, and I pity the person that I once was.

Depeche Mode - stories of Love

Depeche Mode, afloat
Young people, who could be my children,
Cosy on a canal
So young, so in love,
from a land where
Depeche and Heavy Metal
was their Mods and Rockers
Newly Romantic, yet casting me back 25 years
I can remember the meaning of love.
The stories coming from all over the world,
of coincidences, conflict, flights and tragic ends
Of life, and shadow puppetry
Then Overground,
Life on a Sunday Night.
London is most alive
When in recession.
There is a designer thug with his chunky chic Chinese playgirl;
There is an unbelievably beautiful child,
full of bright joy,
and playful light,
and spontaneous life,
the son of unlikely parents,
Unlikely yet so deserving of respect
For the miracle that they are creating.
Eastern European.
They come from all over.
This is London today.
Where did life suddenly come from,
and why did I have to hide from what was there before?

The walking dead

Without love
I am just another one of them
The walking dead

I've heard we're born alone
and we die alone.
I suggest it is a plain truth that we are more alone when we die than when we are born, if only because you cannot be born if your mother isn't there!

In between, to live alone is like being dead.

The Internal world in the External World of the Globalized Economy

Spirituality is as much of a need as sex, food, mental exercise, work and socializing. Today I caught on Radio 4 a repeat Catholic service by one John O'Donohue that was recorded in March 2001. Note that this was still at the height of the Millenium Economic Boom, just when the Dot Com crash had begun, and before the New York 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.

There is something lost in the transcript which is conveyed in the service, but it is possible to Listen Again for up to a week on Sunday Worship

There is a sublime wildness in God that calls us to risk becoming who we dream and have long been dreamed to be. .... More often that not, the language of religion falsifies the subtlety of Divine Presence and Imagination, and labels and names mislead us into the bland territories of the obvious. Often, when you wake in the middle of the night, unprotected, uncertainty finds you. The role and name you wear during the day, the things you do, what you have achieved, who others hold you to be, all of that seems so far away now. You feel alone, a stranger in the world. Though disturbing, such moments of dangerous knowing draw us deeper into who we really are and why it is that we are here.
..

We can have everything else, friends, achievements, possessions and success, but if we have closed off contact with God, something gnaws at us and the heart can find no contentment. Deep in every heart, this longing is alive. It seems that Hegel and Nietzsche were right. In our times, God has died. Churches are emptying and the public talk about God as clichéd, dead and deadening. There is no excitement in that kind of deity, and deftly the psychology of consumerism has stolen the garments of deity, to present products that awaken, even if only temporarily, the call of desire. We need to find a new concept of God in order to awaken our lives and impassion us again with eternal desire. We need to unearth our submerged longing for the Divine. We have allowed our desire to become cheapened through false satisfactions. We seem to have lost the practice and patience of true desire. Our surface minds are saturated with invitations that lack direction and depth. For too long, we have lingered on the chromatic surfaces, where nothing can root and where experience is reduced to a momentary gleaming. We need to reach deeper and begin to excavate our eternal desire. Without the passion of God, all the proofs and arguments of theology become dry and forced. Perhaps belief, after all, is but a helpless attraction go God, and the saints and mystics are people who simply fall head over heels in love with the divine. We have become weary of Religion telling us how to think and what to do. In a time when culture is trading soul for image, we need to retrieve again a sense of what Keats called ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’. The deepest thing, after all, in each heart, is the imprint of the divine. The loneliness in us is a loneliness for the tenderness of God, and we should never allow any system or voice to evict us from the embrace of that tenderness.
..

One of the great mysteries of the world is the mystery of difference. No two pains are ever the same. In a landscape, each stone, tree and field are different, but difference doesn’t seem to trouble nature. Each stone dwells in its own shape of stillness. Outside, millions of years pass, but can never enter or intrude on it. For humans, though, difference is always intense. No two faces are ever the same and behind each face there is a hidden world that no one else can see. Each life is a narrative that remains mostly hidden.

This is why it’s so difficult to be human. You live in two worlds, the outer world of name, family, address and role, and the inner world which is profoundly nameless, where no one else can enter, and which remains intimate, though unknown, largely to you, yet so much depends on how you see and understand this amazing, concealed world that you carry around every moment. If you live only in the outside world, your heart will wither in the famine fields of image, information and noise. You will become so weary and worn, struggling on the treadmills of competition, impression and pretence, and you will never learn to be yourself. One of the most noble duties of the human being is to learn the art of individuality.

The Irish word ‘ushla’ [?] captures this. It evokes the coherence, dignity and rhythm of being at one with your own nature. This finds classical expression, for instance, in the confessions of St. Patrick, where we see his ‘ushla anima’, his nobility of soul, a life of critical and creative presence always at the threshold of risk.

Each one of us is completely individual. No one else sees the world like you do. No one else feels pains like you do. No one else has the view from where you stand, and no other carries the memories and gifts and wounds that you do. You were sent to the Earth to learn to be yourself, to see and recognise the miracle of your own individuality. Something is coming alive in you that can be found nowhere else, and the Divine Artist exercised huge care in creating you. For thousands of years before you came here, you were prepared, you were dreamed and imagined, who you would be, when you would come here, where you would arrive, to whom, and all the drama and depth of narrative that would emerge as your life.

Immense care went into shaping all the events and experiences that unfold naturally as your daily life. Nothing is accidental and when you forget yourself, neglect or deny who you are, or desperately try to ignore your soul, you disrespect the gift that was so tenderly and lovingly prepared for you. When you negate yourself, you diminish the divine, and when you awaken your life and inhabit the sacrament of your own individuality, you enter divine presence. The mystery of your individuality was given to you not merely for yourself, but as a gift to awaken divine presence wherever you go. To be the individual that you were dreamed to be is often a hard and lonely path to travel. Though there is shelter in sameness and predictability, there is no growth or peace in a denied life.

There is a bit of genius here that rises above the mundane doctrines and machinations of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, although he recognizes that we have to find a new concept of God, he is forced to use the word God endlessly to express his criticism of a soulless materialist life.

Note also that he also resorts to implying that an individual is on this earth by DESIGN, which is one of the ingenious psychological devices used by human beings, and taught by the Catholic Church, to insulate the internal spiritual world from the external real world. To believe that you arrived and exist by design automatically bestows upon you:

- a sense of purpose and direction
- an omnipresent sense of supervised guidance.

There is no doubt in my soul that we all need spirituality, but if we are to be individuals, then we should not want to be sheep with the wool pulled over our eyes. Specialists at the Internal World, in a Global Economy, should beware how they are used to serve the Global Human Machine.

There is at least one new concept of God, mine, or this blog would never have come into existence. It is harder to get words shorter than three letters in English, but the shortest word of all is one with no letters. When I say that there is Love and the Planet, then there is my internal world, and my external world both in the very title of this blog.

He said to His disciples: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens. They neither sew nor reap. They have neither storehouse nor barn and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds, and can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

You see that Christianity dwells on teachings from a time when Nature was so abundant that there was no prospect of Man ever dominating it as completely as today. God does not feed the ravens very much any more, for Man has been killing the Planet while also killing God. Anyone who cannot see that the Planet must be protected, must foolishly believe in Divine Providence. Divine Providence did not build the Ark that saved all living things. Divine Providence made floods, and famines. Divine Providence is an extravagant belief that can only be indulged in by well-fed poets. Spirituality does not need to be associated with such extravagance.

Nonetheless, there is a deep need for spirituality such as John O'Donohue expresses. The Churches and those who think they are Christian, should begin to update themselves so that they can address the world that exists today. They should not rely on applying their speciality for the internal world on those people who arrive at infirmity, old age, and death's door. There is a need in the vast population, and that need must be served, or its perversion will continue to destroy the whole Planet.

Isn't She Lovely

I had to go into Central London today. It was the hottest day of the year so far, but the temperature barely crawled up to 26 degrees, and I never once broke into sweat. This eventual arrival of summer was obvious from the number of tattoos visible on rough labourers who, surprisingly, still have jobs in this lame recession.

Enfeebled on the way home by the Lurgy I suffered mid-week, brought on by the trauma of losing my bike last week, I walked with heavy feet, and looked at the London Wall. The City gardening contractors are still obeying Chelsea Flower Show practices: using rubber rakes, wasting water on the grass in this dry weather, and teasing the flower beds to look as crisp and clean as china flower vases. There is a healthy fig tree, heavy with fruit, and a herb garden in honour of the herbalist John Gerard, in front of the Worshipful Company of Barbers (they were the original surgeons and medicine men, because they had knives). The garden bends into one of the Barbican's modernist rectangular ponds, softened with lovely water lilies to catch the splashing water of its plain fountain. Already I was seeing here people who had the saintly beatification of being "lovely" about their person.

What is "lovely"?

It must have been sometime before the millenium that Britain got fed up with "nice". Then we had nasty. It must have been at some time after the 2004 London terrorist attacks, that "lovely" became de rigueur. Corporations had to demonstrate social responsibility, including caring about humanitarian and green issues, and their human resources assets.

When I arrived in Finsbury Circus, the largest green oasis in the City of London, all my dread was hardened. There they were, all being "lovely", as the lunch hour was beginning on a summer Friday, on the grass, on the benches, in the sunshine. The internal melodies of R.E.M. Shiny Happy People kept their loveliness at bay from the pain I feel so easily when I am unwell. Indeed, to wander through London whenever you are not feeling well is the opposite of all medicine, even the crudely effective sort that John Gerard practised 450 years ago.

All of these Lovely People in Finsbury Circus were young, fit, healthy and good-looking. If they had not been born onto the Conveyor Belt of Success, then their youth and looks meant that they were quickly put onto it. Here we are, in a darkening recession, where even the people of Glasgow East, despite being the most sheepish form of Labour supporter, have finally thrown eggs into the unlovely face of Gordon Brown, our Scottish prime minister. Here we are, in another global food crisis, where over a million people in Ethiopia are waiting for a grain shipment from South Africa, or they will starve in the next month. Here we are, in London, where there are plenty of people whose pain needs to be shared.

And there I was, seeing the lunchtime workers in Finsbury Circus, being "lovely". Before Lovely, people in the City had to be thrusting and sexy, so this is a new social phenomenon.

When I saw the shop, The White Stuff, advertising "Lovely Clothes for Lovely People", I knew it was time to blog about "lovely". Attack!

"Lovely" has nothing to do with Love. In the English language, there is only one word for Love, which is a stunning reflection of the naive level of understanding of love in English culture and history. Sorry, I have to tell it like it is. As I have said before, in English, Love is just another four-letter word.

So what is "lovely"? To be Lovely is:

1. to appear absolutely harmless and non-threatening, and
2. to portray an aura of compassionate intelligence,
3. to appear to be able to extend kindness to anyone in the vicinity who should need it.
4. to appear to have an easy laughing heart
5. to know you must hide all your pain underneath lest it might violate the fragile fantasy of happiness of those around you.

Yes, "lovely", is superficial as it gets, even if it is the nicest form of superficial you can get. This is because Lovely is the old Nice.

The most "Lovely" people seem to live in North London, for miles around Crouch End, but they are not alone. They are just green enough so that they feel worthy. They are just humanist enough that nobody can say they don't care. They are all so terribly lovely, and live in such gilded lovely worlds.

"Lovely" is also endemic in the workplace. To see it in the City is a recent social phenomenon, but it has been brewing in the public sector for years. Particularly in the NHS, it has been adopted as the perfect camouflage by those staff who know that they are overpaid in relation to what they produce.

At least Lovely People are not bicycle thieves, knive stabbing murderers, or coke-snorting greedy City Traders, but their problem is this:

Lovely people are not part of the solution, so they are nonetheless part of the problem. "Lovely" does not solve any problems, let alone pressing ones. "Lovely" is a form of mutual social masturbation, akin to sitting around making cups of tea while bombs are falling on your neighbours.

*******

Onward to Spitalfields market, where Loveliness acquires Grittiness, and what do I have to report, except that the devastation of Spitalfields Market is finally completed, since I first blogged about it 4 years ago. Indeed, even the Health Food Shop near where the Spitz used to be, was finally moved out two months ago, and is now across the road while this last bit of the market is given the same tacky makeover worthy of a BBC Television programme. Yes, London is now for sale to those who couldn't give a damn about authentic historical places: so long as it has been modernized with the bling of Millenium Oil-Powered Industrialization, someone will pay more for it. Russians and Kazakhstanis, I suppose? Or Malaysians and Middle-Easterners, maybe? Who knows. It is all Global Capital, and the Lovely People of London who gather in Finsbury Circus, are quite happy to take home their wages while fostering this globalization.

Oh Wail, oh wail, oh

Ooow...Aarrhh Oh!
Wail
From the Bed to the Sofa.
Wail
From the Sofa to the Bed.
What have I done
Wail
It all went wrong
OwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggggggggHHHHHHH!
Whine
But not a sound's been made
the wail song has moaned silently
Sullenly for months
So deeply that it has been unseen
But wails do surface
For air.
It's been all my fault.
Wail, Waaahhhh!
It's all gone wrong.
Life's not worth living
Alone.
What have I done
To deserve the very life I despise?

The weekend of playing briefly with the old lovelessness
Yesterday came down with a heavy dull, dumb thud.
In mere hours I had shown here all there was to show
all that was green in my pleasant land
And even to me it was so obvious there is nothing here
That I want any more.

Today
Lying on the bed
Waiting for life to return to my drained will,
Love loomed again and again
Each time it was your face
Your hairy face,
Filling my field of view.

I yearned
And chastised myself for yearning
But I need to believe in love
Even if love will not believe in me.
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/offthepage
What have I done wrong,
but where was the glue
to help us to stick together?

The kiss
The perfect most loving kiss
I miss.

Walk softly and carry a big roll of carpet

If I had not walked,

I would not have heard the grasshoppers and crickets, whirring away in the grass despite this hopelessly grey summer.


If I had not walked,

I would not have gone into the shop and found the best cheap padlock I could find.


If I had not walked,

I would not have picked up the roll of carpet and walked it home, much to the amusement of those I encountered.


If I had not walked,

I would have ridden my bicycle, but since the idiot that stole it has not returned it, and the police have not gotten around to looking at the report,

I could not ride my bicycle.


That bicycle is gone. Hope has a limited time offer. Despair's sale is over.

Forgetting is one of the most useful by-products of an un-inhibited emotional reaction series including depression. Depression should never be stopped or dragged out with stupid things like Prozac. Depression should be processed to its own comfortable conclusion.

That bike is gone. So are you, so you keep reminding me.

Forget, forget, forgotten.

Postscript

If I had not walked, I would not have a sore foot.

If I could forget, then I would have no wishful thoughts. Then at last, I could be just like these loveless, soulless people? If I cannot beat them, should I join them? If I cannot join them, should I not leave them?

They who cannot love, are they not machines? Should they be ridden like bicycles, until they are worn down, or should they be loved until they learn how to love?

When you remind me that we must move on, that angers me.
How much harder it is to move on when there is not even a decent bicycle to move with.
How hard it is to move without a bicycle.
All those people who refuse to move without their cars, or a bus, or a train, or a taxi, or even a horse. How lazy they are.
To move on, with only your two feet, is something that homo sapiens var. industrialis has lost the ability to do, and I am unsure that I can still do it.

Once, I too had a car, and sat in a glass workhouse, not a greenhouse,
being watered, nurtured, fertilized,
without ever having to use my own two feet.

The cars are gone, now the bike is gone, but I still have my two feet.

God help me when they are gone, for the people in London
whom to me have always seemed the bravest,
are the elderly infirm
who struggle on foot through the uncaring and pushy
who struggle on foot to cross the road against the traffic
who struggle on foot to drag their shopping.
And never does someone else of their own age,
or indeed of any age,
driving past in their car,
stop and offer them a lift.


For this is how London has been ever since the Eighties, and even now, even with all the wealth that China exports to us, and all the handouts that the government has thrown into the wind, it is the same, except that fewer of those elderly poor are English.

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

Yesterday, I was getting ready to go off to the allotment. Warm day, though still cloudy and drab, I actually remembered that my water bottle for the bicycle needed filling.

So I went to get the bottle from the bicycle. I opened my front door

I looked.

I didn't see.

Shock. I quickly looked inside to see if I had kept my bicycle indoors for once.

No.

It was stolen.

I was unbelievably upset. I was shocked. Horrified. Then distraught. I don't think I cried this easily over my father's death. This was yesterday. I am still progressing through the emotional stages of anger, self-blame, denial, despair, and depression. People who don't have emotions, or who who belong to civilizations/cultures that repress many emotions cannot understand this, and cannot see the point of it.

They may as well be the loveless soulless criminals who stole the bicycle on which so much of my life has depended, and was depending upon. What loveless soulless people. I was ready to bid them goodbye forever. For there are many strains of humans that have survived, multiplied and prospered on a reproductive method of loveless rape and loveless child-bearing. Indeed, the barbarians that had the Tower of London, and an empire, then the First World War, and the Second World War, could hardly yet have been removed from the gene pool of the British population.

And I, like so many fools before me, having once been in awe of this barbarous animalism, like a moth to a flame, have now for so long been living in a civilization and a culture that knows no love, that I have had my fill of it.

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

In the English language, love is a four letter word, and even to the intellectuals and academics who chance upon this website, the mere mention of it invites as much contempt as a Flash sex video on "Doing it with your dog".

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

What have I, where do I have to go, and when did I start?

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to you
You're looking so well
Whatever bent your wheel
Seeing you makes me melt.
So even I cannot deny
I am still in love with you.
Happy Birthday to you.

They don't cater for Bicycles built for Two

Lazy, lazy,
give me your answer true.
Am I crazy
to want to pedal for you?
It's not my belief in marriage
That makes me want such baggage.
But trains don't take my wedding cake,
And my bicycle built for two.

Copyright - Love and the Planet, June 2008.

We ride our bicycles alone. To ride tandem together is still difficult in post-liberal England. If you ride tandem, you cannot travel far. No train will take you. If we don't get very far on the tandem, or when the tandem breaks, we blame each other. When we ride our bikes alone, chances are, that only one bike would break at a time. When we ride our bikes alone, we get to ride our own way, our own trails, covering much more distance than we could on a tandem.

This is all metaphor. How do couples stay together even when it appears that the Whole has become lesser than the Sum of the Parts? Is coupledom so conditioned by Cultural Institutions and Peer Pressure that it persists despite failure? Does it persist through the Faith or the Hope that the Whole will improve, or does it persist through the perception of perpetual success. The Cultural Institutions responsible for sustaining these emotions collectively failed in the Sixties, and since then, have relied more on deaths than on births and marriages.

Or is it, once again, Evolutionary Nature, that some couples persist unthinkingly, obeying evolutionary instinct despite all the disincentives and obstacles placed before them by modern technological civilization?

These are the great questions of a post mid-summer day.

Love

To Love is:

- to Care for,
- to Protect
- to Nurture.

Most women do this to their children naturally and usually very well. This is why there are now over 6 billion humans on the planet.

To love the Planet is:

- to Care for the Planet,
- to Protect the Planet,
- to Nurture the Planet.

Most men cannot do this naturally. Nature has for most of Mankind's history, been seen as an enemy. By seeing it as an enemy, Mankind has fought to control and master Nature, and hence has evolved and multiplied at its expense.

Hence to love the Planet is uncommon, especially at this point in Man's history, when it has expanded so rapidly, so aggressively, on the strength of the urge to control and dominate Nature. For only when these common sort of men have exhausted Nature will they exhaust themselves. And only after they have exhausted themselves will the day come for those who can love the planet to take over. Except that there would be no planet left to love.

Hence it follows that those who love the planet, must control Man, before both are devastated.

This has happened before in history. The threat of Nuclear Holocaust was perhaps the best recent example.

The current threat is far more insidious.....