Saturday 21st Dec.2019When I look for gold
for John Stiles
(Silence)
Strongly
Strangely
slowly;
lke a child in water
a child I once cared for.
Seems to me I am more what Barthes describes as a "clerk"
than a priestly "author".
Post-revolutionary I might be
but there is still a narcissism, an enjoyment,
sound, even song.
Is there the fragmentation of ecstasy...?
Is there fragmentation in ecstasy?
I'm in a lecture.
Alex Duttman is in the chair.
Christophe Merke is discussing chapters 1-5 in Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory". Someone eulogises Beckett.
I look at the pen in Merke's hands,
he's so confident it still has the top on.
It has a white dot,
which means its a "Parker",
(actually it means it"s a Paper-Mate Florian later explains,
joking that Merke is parking his thoughts in theory.)
Anyway, whatever it is, it's not gold
Like the one I used to have,
the one I was given in Truro
and which I lost when I worked on the parks in Southwark.
I look around the room,
there is hardly any gold anywhere
Walking back that evening, I promise myself, that i will buy some when I get paid.
Days pass, til it's Monday evening.
I'm so tired I go to bed early
trembling like a baby.
Is this flu or tiredness?
Kleinian renegotiation
or Lacanian fragmentation?
Rebirth or regression?
Was it induced by the Vivaldi I was listening to earlier?
Going to bed isn"t easy anymore.
Mike Parsons
“Tout chrétien a une double mission : chercher à voir Jésus et permettre aux autres de le voir...Rappelons que Dieu n’est pas toujours là où nous pensons le trouver. C’est sur la Croix que Dieu se donne à voir : nous ne le voyons vraiment que quand nous contemplons le visage défiguré de Jésus crucifié. L’heure de Jésus, c’est l’heure de sa mort et de sa glorification. Dans cette mort, le salut s’est ouvert à tous : il n’y a plus ni Juifs, ni Grecs…” (Père Jean-Paul Sagadou, assomptionniste)
"... as a tortoise draws in its limbs,
The wise can draw in their senses at will.
Though aspirants abstain from sense pleasures,
They will still crave for them. These cravings all
Disappear when they see the Lord of Love.
For even of those who tread the path,
The stormy senses can sweep off the mind.
But they live in wisdom who subdue them,
and keep their minds ever absorbed in Me.
p.393 The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living
Volume 1 The End of Sorrow by Eknath Easwaran
"The deepest root of the evils and iniquities which fill the industrial world is the subjection of labour to capital, and the enormous share which the possessors of the instruments of production are able to take from the produce."
John Stuart Mill
Chapter XIII The Right Of Labour To Profit
from The Co-operative Movement Today by G J Holyoake Methuen 1903
Profit in the store is the dividend of custom; profit in the workshop is the dividend of labour. Co-operators therefore maintain that the workman is entitled to a dividend from the gains of the workshop.
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"Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher's life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues - humility, poverty, chastity - and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not ascetic at all in fact. He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life , but rather the "effects" of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher. Humility, poverty, and chastity become the effects of an an especially rich and superabundant life, sufficiently powerful to have conquered thought and subordinated every other instinct to itself. This is what Spinoza calls Nature: a life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms of causes and effects. Humility, poverty, chastity are his (the philosopher's) way of being a grand vivant, of making a temple of his own body, for a cause that is all too proud, all too rich, all too sensual. So that by attacking the philosopher, people know the shame of attacking a modest, poor, and chaste appearance, which increases their impotent rage tenfold; and the philospher offers no purchase, although he takes every blow."
Gilles Deleuze - Spinoza: practical philosophy
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Christmas Box
“And then the presents, after the Christmas box.”
Dylan Thomas - “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”it was morning
And its true,
everything does fit together.
I believe that.
That is faith,
poetry, politics, religion,
becoming a father.
It’s a sort of gliding through life,
knowing that there will be enough time
and money
for Christmas to happen.
A confidence, faith, love, joy, happiness.
An opposition,
An endurance.
Another 100 years.
another generation,
another Christmas box.
Mike Parsons
