Who am I?

 Based on jotted ideas recorded while out walking on a winter's day December 20th, 2016 I've been thinking all week about hate, without feeling any hate myself. And also about slogans—how they brainwash us, not into believing  what they want  us to believe, but by reducing the subtlety of our ideas, preventing us from listening…

Shaving Through the Blitz

Here follow verbatim the notes I scribbled on Thursday 7th October 2021 Life can get very awkward at times. I've not asked for this cup to be taken from me, nor am I comparing my succession of predicaments with anything as violent as crucifixion like those martyrs who emulated Him in the surrendered cruelty of…

(Not) Closing Down Soon

I've just transcribed Shaving Through the Blitz  from scribbled notes and posted it here. I'd written these words: This WordPress site, already much pruned, is returning to Blogger, the land of its birth. A few hundred posts from here will be transferred there asap. See you there already!Now I'm asking myself "Why? Are you crazy?…

“Thank You NHS”

I went up to the hospital for a blood test and took these snaps of the approach road. They've been painted here for more than a year, and reflect a massive manifestation of affection for our National Health Service since the pandemic hit us. At various points it has drastically overloaded its workers at all…

Being human with what we’ve got

Dear Vincent A long gap between communications tends to blur thoughts that were sharp when originally conceived - ie: when I first read your excellent last post. Maybe that’s a salutary reminder of how ephemeral our thoughts are anyway! Now that there’s a quiet moment I want to try to sum up what I wanted…

What looks after us?

I've been wanting to write about the role of angels in my life. Like most words in any language, it's loaded with baggage going back millennia. Let's strip off that heavy weight of meanings, leave it in a heap and walk lightly away. I want to go back to a time before I had words…

Theories of Everything

First there was nothing. Then there was something: the Creation, as engineered by the Big Bang and ongoing evolution to this day.Whatever you call it, it's never stopped. Creation continues, evolution is not complete. Here we are: creativeness builds on the legacy of yesterday to bring something new today, unaffected by the future. Such is…

The Tree of Life

“If I can prevent just one person from watching this, it’ll have been worth suffering through it.” Thus begins a review of The Tree of Life by Kevin A Ranson, alias Grim D Reaper; unfortunately one which I didn’t read in time. Published on Blogger, Saturday March 17th,  2012 “If I can prevent just one…

Holy Family

I guess like other educated white males I haven’t understood the the accusation that came out so often last year in the Black Lives Matter campaigns, that people like me are “privileged”. Especially in the sense that there are things we may never be able to understand, such as the sense of global outrage and…

Joy without a cause

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher. Night shall be thrice night over you, And heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause, Yea, faith without a hope?Inspired by G.K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White…

Where We Stand

Politics has never been more rotten, more destructive of the people’s wellbeing. From an impartial distance, this is surely unarguable. But who keeps this distance? From where I stand, democracy (reflecting the people’s choice), and freedom (of the powerful to enrich themselves and do what they like), have become especially poisonous. To the biosphere as…

Invisibles

My guardian angel got her name by accident. It can be traced back to a difference between men and women, in which She (archetypal woman) does chores without remark or fuss. When she dares to interrupt His (archetypal man's) scholarly scribbling, and to ask him to lend a hand, he does so with a little…

Aylesbury Walkabout

I’m on a section of the “Round Aylesbury Walk”. If you go clockwise, the town is on your right and level countryside is on your left. I talk to myself as I go, into this digital recorder (edited below). ‘Suppose everything is just as it should be, already? Suppose everything goes on being just right,…

Amsterdam

I have a special relationship to Holland because Mulder is my surname and I  spent four months near Arnhem in 1947 staying with my supposed father's sister, Auntie Non. I've described that sojourn here In 2012 we took a break to Holland to celebrate our anniversary and her birthday. The other day I looked for…

From Etty, to God

". . . there is a remarkable woman who can give us vision and stability, who can help us to do good despite all the terror due to the Covid-19 virus. She speaks from another time of dread, the Holocaust." From her journal: "You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your…

Guided Randomness

I've often asked myself "Do you believe in God?" but never got an answer, only that it's an unanswerable question. A better one would be "What do you believe in?" One has to search within oneself, but not for some borrowed ideas and expressions, some flag of convenience to sail under and dodge the challenge.…

Face-to-Face

The ghost of Christine Keeler is returning to public view, in the form of a TV series now on BBC, and a forthcoming exhibition in London, which I heard about through Natalie D'Arbeloff's blog, in which she says Christine Keeler was, in that story, simultaneously absolutely powerless and absolutely powerful. She was neither victim nor…

While Unsleeping

A kind of liberation ensues when you accept the situation, displeasing as it may be, that you find yourself in at this moment. For example insomnia & remembrance of past mistakes—to name but one. For me, they are synonymous. Liberation is an art, the act of turning something round the other way.To embrace the negative…

Strange Angels

Video is a clip from "The Doctor", a 1991 film starring William Hurt and Elizabeth Perkins. Background music is from a song by Laurie Anderson. Strange angels - / Singing just for me / Old stories - / They’re haunting me /This is nothing like I thought it would be ¶ Well I was out…

Shapes

As I lay awake this morning before getting up, a great procession of thoughts came to visit me. Thoughts? I'm not sure what a thought is. They were dwelling-places of the imagination, like images from a waking dream. I guess they were prompted by my last post, which suggested I’d work on my life-story; and…

Dancing on the Bar

I'm finding that life is full of pointers from a friendly universe, to guide us on our way, if we are open to the moment like a small child seeing everything for the first time. These words from author Earl Mckenzie spoke to me this morning, and helped crystallize my resolve: Retirement gave me a…

Love Affairs

Farzaneh has an imagination, which directs his hero towards a variety of young women encountered during a year in downtown Vancouver, where “all types of girls can be found on the street”. At the end of the novel, in conversation with a waitress, he confesses “I like insecure, moody, promiscuous ice princesses who like to…

Glad

My life has changed so radically in the last 7 days that I don't know what to say. Unless I write, knowing I'll reach a handful of readers, I won't have access to my true thoughts and feelings. Strange perhaps, but it's been this way for a long time. In ordinary consciousness, this radical change…

Brexit dream 4

I was going to call this “The Vision of Perfection”, I’ll try and explain later. But then I jotted down the outline of a confused dream I’d just woken from. An interpretation slowly took form. To dream it at all seemed exhausting. There was a great deal of fruitless effort was being made, seven nights…

The unfairness started with Adam & Eve

Before that apple business, Adam and Eve were buddies, gambolling around the Garden with the other animals like a couple of kids and if they had sex at all, it was innocent sex. Then sly old Satan, dressed up as a snake, wriggled up to Eve, handed her the apple and aroused her curiosity with…

The writing on the wall

Yesterday I was accosted by a big black woman of mature years on a corner of the Ledborough Road—that village pump, that microcosm of this glorious world, a few stones'-throws away.  She was not unbeautiful, the sidewalk was not wide, she only needed to stand there to slow my pace. She beamed as though I…

The Bitter Taste

From Bryan White Occasionally, I like to revisit ideas that I disagree with, to see if I can find a reason to reconsider my position. It's a wonderful thing when something compels you to change your mind. It's like a whole new area of the game board opens up. Suddenly there are all these fresh…

“Cancer, I Love You”

I’ve been following Arash’s World for years, always enjoying his essays and book reviews. I found his latest review of particular interest, and bought a copy of the book, very reasonably priced on Kindle. It’s inspired me to submit a review of my own, not in rivalry to Arash’s, but because I was given a…

The Free Soul

I've written several times about spiritual writings from the thirteenth century: Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe. Each risked being fingered by the Inquisition as a heretic, and took steps to demonstrate orthodox obedience to the powerful Catholic Church. Marguerite Porete stands out from the others and is the most interesting by far. Almost…

The Steps

From Bryan White So how did I get here? And what do I do now? There's a point when your kids are still little. They're little, but they're not babies anymore. They're starting to need their space. You're not just a young couple with a baby; you've officially reached that turning point where you're a…

Smarts

From Bryan White From time to time, I come across these women online complaining that "Men are intimidated by smart women", and I can only presume that they're talking primarily about themselves, prompted by some personal experience that they found exasperating. The thing is, I'm not sure if this is something that's actually happening, or…

The Fraud

(writing from Mumbai) As he sat in his armchair thinking about how useless his life had been, he couldn’t help contemplating his own mortality. Had he fallen from his motorbike a few inches further to the right, the van's tyre would have run over his head. Not that he was afraid of that possibility at…

An open letter to the person complaining . . .

Dear sir (or madame, or however you're supposed to formally address the fragile star children from the planet Zir who have recently come to walk among us), I saw a comment you left somewhere the other day, saying that you "can't stand" when people start sentences (or maybe it was paragraphs) with the word "and."…

The Book of Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe was a bloody-minded woman, living in a time when England was still Catholic. Bishops, priests and friars held worldly and spiritual power. bloody-minded: Chiefly Brit. Perverse, contrary; cantankerous; stubbornly intransigent or obstructive. Cf. bloody adj. OED She came from the provinces, had no education and bore 14 children to a husband socially beneath…

The Coffee House: a brief history . . .

. . . from De Quincey to Starbucks Coleridge had published Kubla Khan in 1816. The first English translations of the Arabian Nights in the early 18th century had provided an aura of magic and violent intrigue. And The Travels of Marco Polo had been widely available since the Middle Ages. As a result, the…

Angels, Chaos, Truth

The last two pieces posted here have left important questions unanswered: What can we really know? What kind of consequences may follow inaccurate assumptions? Do we have any chance of explaining the unexplained, and should we even bother? Is there a wisdom we can call upon, or allow to reach us, which we can use…

Kant’s Trick

From Bryan White “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” George Orwell, 1984 Out of some…

Girl with a Pearl Earring

From Bryan White I just finished reading Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. A few posts back, when Vincent said that he was "inspired" by books that he was waiting to get in the mail, I was in a similar situation at the time with this book. It was sitting on my bookshelf,…

Art as Generosity

Art is a way of giving to the world what one holds most precious John Sebastian Bach had good reason to be grumpy. There was scant appreciation for his enormous efforts. He didn't get paid for writing music. In those days there was a system of patronage. He'd be engaged by a city council or…

Under the surface

From In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, 1930: . . . To return to the lonely ichthyosaurus-ego. This ichthyosaurus-ego exists in every man, woman, and child. It is the feeling of the soul in relation to its body and in relation to what surrounds its body. It is profoundly susceptible to moods of…

Carbon Footprint

From Bryan White In my last post, I gave a few examples of song lyrics that I claimed "created a piece of common ground." For the sake of giving a more complete picture, I figured that I should also try to give an example of poetry or lyrics that, in my opinion, fail in this…

A Way with Words

From Bryan White My daughter writes poetry sometimes, and a few weeks ago, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about some advice that I gave her years back regarding poetry writing, and I was expanding on it in my head. I find that my thoughts are often addressed to someone I…

Just like that

This is an impromptu rant, just to get things started. Perhaps meaningless and incoherent. From someone who used to support the #metoo movement—not any more.

Sittism or Maybe Whateverism

From Bryan White The other day I was telling Vincent that I almost wish the Buddha story ended with him just literally sitting under a tree, and that was it. The more I think about it, the more I kind of like it. That might be the one sort of religion I could get behind.…

Wittgenstein on imagination

And if that thing itself ends up being disappointing? All the more reason to try to return to the thing as you were imaging it beforehand. Obviously a space exists for it, the space that the thing you wanted to find defaulted on occupying. From PI: “If I say I did not dream last night,…

Jordan Peterson & Susan Blackmore

following on and in response to Bryan's piece "Something Meaningful". Here are some notes I wrote while watching this debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syP-OtdCIho “Peterson is a hard man to categorize” – he frowns at the very idea! “The new atheists have a problem with establishing an ethic” “Measuring well-being” – right Harris & meditation (Blackmore does it…

Something Meaningful

From Bryan White On YouTube, I've been watching a number of different debates (more conversations, really) between Dr. Jordan Peterson and various prominent atheists and secular scholars. I'm not sure at this point who does or doesn't know who Jordan Peterson is. I've followed his ascent with interest though a few different waves of noteriety,…

Here in October

From Bryan White Greetings! Summer has ended here in Phoenix, and I have to say, the weather has been beautiful. It's been cool and pleasant enough to open the windows -- and it's always the sweetest air that comes through open windows. We had a genuine rainy day (a couple of them actually) last week,…

The Poetic

From Bryan White For a long time, I was divided between two possible directions that I wanted go with my writing. On the one hand, I felt like I wanted to write something "intellectual" for lack of a better word, something that was like a complicated machine with all kinds of ideas and moving parts,…

Bless my soul

Bless My Soul I know why the blackbird sings his strange and mournful song on a summer’s night ’n’ I know why the spirit brings us back into this world until we get it right ’n’ I’m on a roll and I begin to see the light bless my soul I’ve been around so many…

What makes you happy

This post refers to a blog called "Soviet Men"  by "Nikolai Vladivostok". It's been defunct for several years. I've been following for a while is currently working in an African country. He's done contract work for years and hopes that his current assignment will be the last. For reasons of security I guess, he only…

The late V S Naipaul

The other day I briefly published a piece on the late V S Naipaul. It was a synopsis of a lecture he gave in 1990, which he called “Our Universal Civilization”(1). After 24 hours, with vague misgivings, I took it down again.(2) It was fun to revive an old skill, the one they used to…

The Wretched

© Anup Roy 2018, edited by Vincent. The story was originally drafted in December 2008, inspiring my piece "Ghetu Files a New Story". I started an edit in Jan ’09. It didn't get very far, but Ghetu provided some edits of his own, amounting to a partial rewrite. We didn't pick it up again till…

The Way to the Land of Freeness

I once wrote a post concluding that all we ever need to know is what to do*. These days, what to do is a important question as how to be. For example this, from the ancient Chinese oracle: Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When you realize there is nothing lacking,the…

About the Magdalene

Click for Wikipedia article Obtainable from Amazon etc. but beware: the alleged Kindle version is a different translation that might not contain the above chapter.

Life-story part 2

I looked again at this post today, it's not good enough, nobody will follow its intricacies, & nobody but I will care. Will try to make it more readable. Consider it as under refurbishment. "My father died in the war," I used to say, "so I never met him." It wasn't true but I wasn't…

Life-story, part 1

I want to tell the story of my entire life up to the present: the bare-bones series of events, with no fanciful embroidery. Let it be like a series of chess moves without the expert commentary. Let it be like a dispassionate ship's log. Let the facts tell their own story. As far as possible,…

There and back

We had a ten-day window free, so we seized it, took a plane to Jamaica. It was partly a surprise visit to see Karleen's granddaughter on her 21st birthday; but also to catch up with many old friends. It was too long since we'd last seen that extraordinary island,  Karleen's home for more than fifty…

Sail Away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCRGrnhdNQE I can’t remember the train of thought, or musical musing, which led me from Laurie Anderson to Randy Newman. It may have gone in the other direction. I ordered “Sail Away” on the 10th of Jan., then posted the piece about Laurie (O Superman) 2 days later. They patently have much in common, being…

O Superman

O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad. O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad. Hi. I'm not home right now. But if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone. Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you…

Rooted here

I've never been constrained by any sense of what this site is supposed to be about. It's always arisen from the urge to write a post, in the context of this moment in space and time. The topics have been innumerable, but after all these years I've realized there's no need to index them, when…

Jotted psalm

We cannot own love, only glimpse, feel it touch us, pass through, dwell in us. We are more or less feeble receivers, picking up signals from an unnown transmitter. Science is a petty thing before love, for it wants to know, grasp, possess, dismantle to fragments harness, claim, proclaim. Yet science is a thing: wonderful,…

“outnumbered by blessings”

It was one of those "whisperings" that I get occasionally when the conscious mind is quiescent. The brain can do funny things. Shostakovich had a fragment of shrapnel lodged in his, left over from WWII. When he held his head at a certain angle he heard music. All he had to do was write it…

When the Past Haunts the Night

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night ... I find myself surprised to discover that the boarding school* I was so glad to leave in 1954 is actually still open for business, run by the same headmaster and his…

Remembrance

We just got back from the Remembrance Day Parade in town. There was a biting wind. In previous years we've attended the church service, but today it was enough to watch the march-past, the saluting of and by the senior officers;  to see the Mayor, aldermen, bigwigs, old soldiers and uniformed youth. We were dressed…

Ledborough Road

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in the morning.* “Ledborough Road has, in recent times, become a mythical place to me. Though often empty of humans, its pavements are occasionally trodden by those who realise that walking is the only way to know the world; and by those…

An Air for Cello and Soprano

Öffne dich, mein ganzes Herze Open up, my whole heart Click here to open the sound file in a new tab From J. S. Bach, Cantata for the first Sunday in Advent, Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland (BWV61). John Eliot Gardner with the English Baroque Soloists at St Maria im Kapital, Köln, December 3rd, 2000.…

BWV 140, a Church Cantata of J.S. Bach

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Awake, calls the voice to us) Ton Koopman’s version, with lovely trills and such expressive faces on the video. Koopman is a Dutch conductor, organist and harpsichordist. Like John Eliot Gardner, he completed a project to perform all the sacred cantatas, I can't remember how many there are. I…

Soliloquy

Click to enlarge The Step In Café has a "no loitering" sign. Loiterers throng the fontage of Mo'Fro Barbers & Coral Betting Shop—a favourite spot for Afro-Caribbeans and their admiring hangers-on Idle thoughts while walking into town, Friday lunchtime ... It’s noon but the sky is darkening and the wind has suddenly whipped up as…

The Scheme of Things

Is there a grand scheme of things? Yes, this is something I do believe. As to what it is, I cannot directly say: only circumstantially, in reference to what we can see with our own eyes. As I said in my last, politics and public discourse are toxic these days. After hearing what passes as…

The Idea of Perfection

Perfection certainly doesn’t exist in the seen world. I conclude it must lie in the beholder's eye*. To see only perfection is surely a knack worth having. How we use words is our own business, for such is language; and how they help us understand one another is a great wonder. For some, perfection is…

Friendly White Sheep

Karleen & I were crossing this meadow on Christmas day, it being a mild winter and the grass still growing enough to be cropped by a flock of sheep. They mostly minded their own business and kept at a distance, except for this one. We thought at first she wanted something from us, perhaps some…

Friendly black sheep

Loving What Is

I came to know about Byron Katie through her husband Stephen Mitchell whom I encountered through his translations of Gilgamesh and the Tao Te Ching. Her work, as expressed in books, videos, website and notably workshops staged in many countries, fits easily into the “self-help” genre, especially that aspect which focuses on human relationships and…

English literature’s first terrorist

From the Introduction to John Carey's new book: Honour and empire, with revenge enlarged, By conquering this new world, compels me now To do what else though damned I should abhor. (Paradise Lost, Book 4:  390-92) “This is a terrorist’s logic, and the Satan of Paradise Lost is English literature’s first terrorist. Terrorism—the destruction of…

How to quell terrorists

Disclaimer: Vincent does not know how to quell terrorists, religious or Communist, and has no opinion on any methods for doing so, past, present or future. My title is deliberately provocative and refers to methods used in 1954 in Malaya.  When Burr Deming, in "Fair and Unbalanced" (see Pingback at bottom of comments below), says…

Travelling on Foot

A Wayfarer’s Notes has changed its motto again. Farewell “not-doing”; back to Werner Herzog and his dictum: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” To be sure what he means, I check context. Patrick House: You once walked from Munich to Paris to visit your dying friend, and in your film “Wheel…

Clouds and simple things . . .

I like clouds, trees and grass. They help reconnect with my primitive self, which has no care for fashion, technology or politics. So we went to Saunderton Lee, where I photographed flat-bottomed clouds, the sort you get on a day of sunshine and rain, and which first struck me as worthy of note one August…

Julian of Norwich

. . . all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. The Web is riddled with orphaned "quotes": mangled versions of what someone—the author or one of his characters—may or may not have said. We use them for our own purposes, with no regard for the…

“There is No Other Doer but He”

As journals, blogs are like life: open-ended. You finish one piece, you've no idea what the next will say, or whether there'll be a next one. After ending my last with a quote from Julian of Norwich, to round the thing off as I thought, I never expected to encounter her again so soon. A…

Watching the English

Like Paul on the road to Damascus, I know exactly when my eyes were opened. It was Monday April 3rd, on a trip to town for two significant appointments. One was to see my specialist nurse, to arrange details for my stay at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. It didn't happen then. The other was to collect…

Tethered to a Robo-goat

It's not curtains for me yet, much as I admire the views they bear of Chiltern scenes, as I saw again on my latest visit to Stoke Mandeville, which lasted two nights. I'll pull back the screen to show what happened.Let my goat be called Chemo. I was fed intravenously from her high-dangling udders, while…

Eleventh Child

I woke in the night after a dream, went downstairs to jot it down in the great leatherbound book from Margaret in Canada; then went back to bed and slept again. On awakening once more in the morning, I jotted down another dream. I tried to polish up the drafts into something coherent, but it…

The Exchange of Gifts

As Dr Johnson put it: Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Even a personal health scare, when you don’t really know what’s going on, does concentrate the mind to an extent, till you decide that it’s going to be all…