whiling ...

Whiling

There is the exhaustion of literature. I have been reading  &  writing literary works for forty-two years. One feels like the farmer  in the middle of my favourite Joan Miro painting which was still figurative, the sun is hot, and you feel tired from the labour of interpreting the sky, the land, and mostly the people. You might take a break from ploughing, have a word or two with your mule. There is a sense that the earth will take its tributes. You watch the corn grow ripe. The tomatoes redden. Then the land is fallow. The  crops die. The small farms are foreclosed . It’s the time of large combine harvesters and even supermarkets are out of business as the internet, the remote grocer becomes the landlord. Even the analogy seems dated crumbling in your hand. It is interesting to note that postmodernism on the bookshelf is decaying. You see them all there, Benjamin, Fanon, Adorno, Camus … the Modern Masters & Mistresses, Irigary, Cixious, de Beauvoir, Klein, all yellowing, the pages foxed…and passed over for clever is now on the scarecrow.  Susan Sontag is as dated as a Joan Rivers joke. In the future they will be interchangeable.  As you watch a man come back with the mule pulling a cart  full of dead ideas. He is thirsty, the temperature hits 52. But, not in the time of Miro. But how can one write when the ice cliffs of the arctic are melting? You read in the Times supplement is it? One of them. The story of the butt surgeon who performs the operation without surgery. It reminds you of those faith healers who wrenched out tumours from the poor in the Philippines or Indonesia using their bare hands. This adulation of the the preposterously big butt, is it the result of the cancer scare of big breasts. It seems that they don’t want the Earth Mother en total, only parts. Why not have something simpler like painted toenails?

Poetry is a refuge. It should engage.

Whiling again.

There is a tremendous sense of failure , one feels like a Spencer Tracey figure playing the part of the whiskey priest at a reform  school for delinquent politicians. At the beginning there were ideals. You thought you could teach them fairness, justice, equality and sustainable responsibilities. You could remind them of the fundamental principles of harmony and balance. You wanted them to establish a social contract whereby everyone signs up to the key moral concepts of non-hurt and non-harm and instill each and everyone the dialectic of rights & duties. For every right there is a duty and vice versa. But it is to much to ask of them as they had to survive by kow-towing to their respective parties, to the pressures of lobbyists, some good and very often bad. Many of their supporters wanted to keep the status quo. But look at the result. One finds people out on the streets who need medical attention. We find people waiting for years for operations, We find terrible conditions in all administrations. Much of this is  due to ideological and divisive policies. The amount of wastage due to governments that feel the need to change what their predecessors did is astronomical. Why is it that I you are poor that the food which is convenient is addictive? Why is it that banking does not fulfill it’s fiduciary obligations? There should be by law a “banker’s oath” which if someone is going down the wrong road, they should make an intervention. But they don’t. It is a laissez-faire situation – translated into common parlance, “Customers can go fuck themselves.” Also why is it that pornocratization of society has allowed for women with large butts to command such a following they could run for president, and for feminists to herald this cult? It signifies one of the biggest failures of feminism as it has supported the reduction of women into sexual objects, allowed nearly everything that the suffragettes fought for. Whilst this has happened, the drive toward a multicultural society has led to the acceptance of  sexism, homophobia, and general intolerance because this is cultural. The non-harm and non-hurt principles should override all beliefs. This goes for trade and relations. These values are not for the home, they are or everywhere. Here the offence to one’s beliefs is less than the offense to the person. So if it is permissible to cut off a man’s hand for theft because of a belief – then one can question the act and not the thought.