Delivery

T omorrow the new words arrive.
H ow much they give us for the old ones
I n part-exchange is anyone’s guess. Some say
N othing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Spreadshirt

Stimulus: WordPress Daily Prompt Thin

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Twice A Day – a true story in 100 words

Sit perfectly still. Close your eyes. Let thought subside.

When your mind is quiet, begin repeating your mantra. Any word will do. Say it aloud or just think it.

Whenever other thoughts come, let them happen. They’re not important. Imagine they rise like bubbles from the depths of a pool and burst upon reaching the surface. Return to your mantra.

Stop after twenty minutes, letting ordinary thoughts return. Open your eyes.

Benefits seemed slight at first but I gradually stopped panicking, started revising and managed to sit 10 Final Exams in 5 days.

Turns out I knew more than I realised …

 

 

Image: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health – NIH

Stimulus: WordPress Daily Prompt Slight

Kicking Against The Pricks

One poem per post? Who says? Here’s three for ya!

 

R ather than just cruise on autopilot to any and
e very old theme-park they choose to send you,
b etter by far to stick a pin in the map –
e ach surprise destination a new tomorrow. Best of all,
l earn to map-read. Real places are out of sight, off-piste.

 

R epeating pure guff off a page
E arns many a lackey their wage,
B ut let them once spy
E very word is a lie –
L oad up paychecks or lock the cage.

 

R emember the stroppy guy at the back of the room that nothing suited?
E ven the most obvious, trivial truths were grist to his tricksy mill.
B lack was white, he’d say, or maybe an undiscovered shade of grey.
E veryone else wanted to move to the vote and go home, pub, anywhere!
L isten, he’d say, get this wrong and out there could disappear …

 

 

Image: Twitter

Stimulus: WordPress Daily Prompt Rebel

Laugh, I Nearly Died …

 

L et me make it
A bundantly clear that
U nder no circumstances is any wogue, wascal or wuffian to
G win, snigger or guffaw with
H ilawity in wank diswegard of
T he wather weasonable wuling by your
E mperor that he is entitled to pwonounce the letter
R in any wuddy way he weckons is wight!

 

 

Image: Simple Wikipedia

Stimulus: WordPress Daily Prompt Laughter

Freeze Frame

R e-armed the world with bombs of love
A rrows of warm desire
P ointed them at cold cold hearts
I t froze on the order Fire!
D reams just like movies go down to the wire …

 

 

Image: Illusion 360

Stimulus: WordPress Daily Prompt Rapid

Pop Music (Part Two)

Where was I, by the end of Pop Music (Part One)? Banging on about freedom, I’ll be bound!

Or rather, I’ll not be bound. Anything that restricts my freedom of movement – my natural right to become a fuller, deeper, happier version of myself – is utterly intolerable. I won’t conform to anyone else’s idea of who I should be or how I should behave.

Most of all, I reject any attempt to limit me to any particular culture. The age-old tactic of those who seek power over others is to divide and rule. Convince people they are surrounded by enemies and they will be putty in your hands. Allow them to Flaunt their imagined superiority over others and turn them into little Hitlers.

I’m sure most people have seen this fairly short documentary film about an anti-racism classroom exercise. If you haven’t, I can thoroughly recommend it:

50 years after this startling little film was made, education is still the battleground for hearts and minds. Telling is no substitute for experiencing. And empathy is the most powerful educational tool. To use the teacher Jane Elliott’s favoured phrase, Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins. 

So I prefer to assume everyone is my friend unless and until I see evidence that they’re not. Evidence of my eyes, not hearsay. Innocent until proved guilty. I base this on the fact that I belong to many cultures which reach out to include the vast majority of my fellow-creatures. Not only that, but these cultures overlap to provide an intense and overwhelming reassurance that my faith in most others is firmly grounded and impervious to interference from above.

I use the word ‘culture’ to describe a broad affinity arising from a perceived similarity. There follows a list of the cultures I belong to, in no particular order:

reader
parent
writer
grandparent
music
human
sport
animal
walker
European
sibling
art
friend
pacifist
theatre
internationalist
cinema
sentient being
green
philosophy
history
quizzer
voter
egalitarian
partner
teacher
science
blogger

Yes, blogger. Last but not least. In a way, it includes all the others. And that, of course, is true of them all. They intersect with one another and all (plus others I may have left out) combine to bring me the fullness, depth and happiness I require.

You, I’m sure, could make a similar list and a similar case for its indivisible totality. We have an affinity based on perceived similarity. We belong to so many common cultures, it makes sense to imagine we share one culture. No one can put a name to it because no name would be sufficient to describe it. It is in the process of development, invention, evolution. And no one can possess it for it belongs to us all.

It remains to be seen whether we can keep it in our sights amid so many calls to withdraw our empathy from those that somebody hidden in the shadows deems to be different, alien, other … whether the circles that bind us will remain unbroken.

Turns out I’m happy to be bound after all …

OK, I’ve done my link to WordPress Daily Prompt. Now all that remains is to justify the title. Bubbles pop, you see, and ‘Bubble’ was yesterday’s Prompt word and then there was that Bert Weedon track and … and … oh, never mind, here’s Joni Mitchell !!!

Pop Music (Part One)

B ig me
U p, Promoter Man,
B oost my image if you can!
B ring me
L oads of ready cash –
E xtra cushions when I crash!

Easy enough target, of course, the pursuit of short-lived fame by people – often young and low on self-esteem – who are easy prey for the cynical Svengalis that feed the ever-hungry maw of modern media!

The search for novelty is relentless. Get famous and instantly the hunt is on for new (and now not-so-nice) things to say – scandals, skeletons-in-the-closet, stylistic faux pas – and if there is any dosh most of it will go to publicity agents, libel lawyers and anti-stalker security protection.

What do I know about it, you ask, whose only brush with fame was the soft brush I once wielded when washing Bert Weedon’s car as a Boy Scout during the fund-raising Bob-a-Job Week? Bert who, you inquire? Ah well, none other than the man who shifted a million guitar-tuition books entitled, somewhat optimistically, Play In A Day. Made it sound easy, you see …

And how much did this guitar megastar fork out for his carwash? A bob. Twelve old pennies prised with some difficulty from a battered leather purse. It was clear fame hadn’t turned his head.

Actually, I’m glad it never came my way. I’d only have gone off the rails. Mind you, it might have been a hell of a way to go …

Nowadays, of course, the high-point of hubris is looking up my Stats when I’ve linked to the WordPress Daily Prompt. Today it was Bubble. A celebrity bubble may go pop but if you live in one it could be suffocating. So there! Usually my posts go pop but I’m letting this one run on a bit, if only to prove I’m no flash in the pan … though it could be smoke and mirrors if I don’t come up with a subject soon …

Yeah, fame for its own sake is a dead end. Famous for fifteen minutes, anyway. Famous for being famous, even worse. But fame that’s earned, well, that’s a different story. Last year I posted a list of my personal heroes – Guiding Spirits is the link. Perhaps you share my belief that we carry within us everyone we’ve known or been influenced by. It’s not a religious idea but it is, nonetheless, an idea I think of as sacred. If we are not guardians of the past and gatekeepers of the future, we are nothing.

Something of this is behind the poem in my previous post:

Avatars

M any selves set out at first
E xploring many lives.
N ot one returns without a tale
T o tell of hates and loves.
O ne story holds them all at last –
R emains until one leaves.

There’s a slight tension here between the acrostic word and my interpretation. I made it plural. Having a single mentor has sinister overtones – makes me think of weird cults – whereas a range of influences orchestrated from within speaks to me of freedom.

Any culture worthy of the name encourages a multiplicity of viewpoints. At the risk of repeating myself – and what old codger isn’t? – coming of age in the 1960s was a gas because so many new voices exploded on the scene all at once. OK, maybe under the shadow of a bigger explosion but still …

Such a heady experience of freedom stays with you and any subsequent limitation of liberty always sets off alarm bells. Any attempt to put people in pigeonholes, niches, corners, classes, bags or boxes always gets my goat – maybe the mountain kind that leaps from crag to crag!

Which somehow reminds me of the Lakeland hermit who wrote on the wall of his cave: Don’t waste words, jump to conclusions! 

Haha, am I any nearer that subject yet? Let’s bring in some big guns …

Trust

Oh we’ve got to trust
one another again
in some essentials.

Not the narrow little
bargaining trust
that says: I’m for you
if you’ll be for me. –

But a bigger trust,
a trust of the sun
that does not bother
about moth and rust,
and we see it shining
in one another.

Oh don’t you trust me,
don’t burden me
with your life and affairs; don’t
thrust me
into your cares.

But I think you may trust
the sun in me
that glows with just
as much glow as you see
in me, and no more.

But if it warms
your heart’s quick core
why then trust it, it forms
one faithfulness more.

And be, oh be
a sun to me,
not a weary, insistent
personality

but a sun that shines
and goes dark, but shines
again and entwines
with the sunshine in me

till we both of us
are more glorious
and more sunny.

D. H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930

Compare this with the spotlight of fame which fixes people into set positions, rather like jelly moulds. A famous star is often called a ‘personality’ – perhaps the ‘weary, insistent personality’ that Lawrence so dislikes? Such a person lacks the facility to reflect others and thereby engage with them. They become a closed book and their life a frozen repeat performance.

A book that remains open for me is The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart. This tells the story of a psychiatrist who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions based on the roll of a die. We are all, the novel suggests, restricted by our culture in the choices we make and must take active steps to break out of a straitjacket we may not even know we are wearing.

Our current climate appears to engender fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unalike. Labels and soundbites swirl around the internet like the swarm of furies unleashed by poor Pandora. Superficial judgements are the order of the day and the sensitive feelers of empathy are withdrawn out of harm’s way. The big question becomes Whose side are you on? Unfriending is the default act of a faulty, fragmenting society.

Bluuurrrggghhh!

Do you know what? My bubble has just burst. Outside the sun is shining and I’m off to catch some calming rays. But soon enough I’ll return to the fray in Part 2, my stubborn and perhaps dangerous openness to new ideas symbolised by the next WordPress Daily Prompt – whatever it turns out to be.

Will I fly high or crash and burn?

Click on Pop Music (Part Two) to find out …