Of Quotes and Blogs

A typical quote

As some would know I am always happy with a few quotes. They tend to concentrate the mind, set it off at a tangent from its current grooves - and given many of my own grooves this is not a bad thing all in all. 

Recently I suffered what can only be called a cyber-disaster when my Notebook App disappeared into cyberspace never to be found again. One of my Kindles died on me and took the quotes with it and not even the Cloud could rescue me. The App was incompatible with the latest generation of Kindle. About 40 odd pages of various quotes from two years or so of reading matter became lost to me. 

I must say that there does seem to be progress as far as my life of no calculation is concerned, inasmuch as the tragedy flew by without resort to thoughts of suicide. I downloaded a new Notebook to my new kindle and began again, undaunted.

No shortage of choice

 Anyway, one purpose of these notes and quotes was/is to provide additions to past Blogs. Often, when reading and contemplating I will fall upon a new quote that, at least for me, illuminates the meanderings of a past Blog. I then find the blog and edit it, adding the quote. More often than not they do not so much illuminate or clarify, more that they drift off at a tangent. Not a bad thing at all. Others may think otherwise. Yet I do think that the grooves of our mind can gradually congeal, become part of a persona that is "us". As time passes, we become set in stone. Emptiness, the very heart of compassion, of wisdom, of potentiality, has become lost to us.

I  think of the ending of a poem by Ronald Stuart Thomas, called "Here":- 

It is too late to start

For destinations not of the heart

I must stay here with my hurt

Alas, many seem happy to do so, identifying themselves with "truth", not knowing the hurt at all. 

Well, that is it really, but in order to make this Blog just a little longer, here is the whole poem that I quoted from above, asking what does the short excerpt/quote above add to the poem as a whole - which may seem a funny sort of question. But there you go - there are "quotes" and there is the whole thing.

I am a man now

Pass your hand over my brow. 
You can feel the place where the brains grow. 

I am like a tree, 
From my top boughs I can see 
The footprints that led up to me. 

There is blood in my veins 
That has run clear of the stain 
Contracted in so many loins. 

Why, then, are my hands red 
With the blood of so many dead? 
Is this where I was misled? 

Why are my hands this way 
That they will not do as I say? 
Does no God hear when I pray? 

I have no where to go 
The swift satellites show 
The clock of my whole being is slow, 

It is too late to start 
For destinations not of the heart. 
I must stay here with my hurt.

And so below, a related illustration with quote:-

The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been. 

(John Keats, in a poem to his brother George, on first seeing the sea)

The Season of Goodwill

The Season of Goodwill?

Here we are again, that time of the year when we try to think of what to buy for those who in many ways already have everything they need. While the poor go empty away. Still, it is the season of goodwill, and so I wish our friends in Westminster, home of the UK Government, well. Now running around like headless chickens in ever decreasing circles, let us hope and pray that they find time to fill in their expense claims. 

Don't forget the expenses

Moving on, the days are counting down to Brexit, to 29/03/2019 when the UK officially leaves the EU. But as said, those we have elected to be in charge of proceedings, seem otherwise engaged and in fact are soon off for the Christmas recess. But they have found time so far to put 3,500 troops on standby for the Big Day. Difficult to know just what lies ahead. Many scenarios are being thrown out by the media, from the dawn of Utopia to Armageddon.

The countdown to midnight

I shall retire and hide my head in some of my favorite texts from our world of faith. Often I muse upon whether such is to hide my head in the sand or is it to raise it up high. Is it to close to our world's affairs or, in fact, to become more involved? Yet in the Pure Land world of "no calculation" thanks is given and the world keeps turning; and hopefully, unlike in Westminster, not in ever decreasing circles.

Whatever, one such text  is the Sutta Nipata, part of the Theravada (Southern School) canon of scripture. This has always been one of my favorites throughout my journey through Theravada itself, the Mahayana (Northern School) and on to the Pure Land. Hopefully leaving all the infighting between those schools and ways in my wake. 

Leave in-fighting behind

The Sutta Nipata appears to give evidence of a genesis within folk traditions prior to the advent of Buddhism. At least, I think so. My first acquaintance with it was when I read an essay by Nyanaponika Thera, which concentrated upon its opening chapter, the "Chapter of the Snake". This speaks of the various "skins" we shed on our movement through the Buddhist path, or perhaps our sailing upon the raft of the Dharma. I think too of the words of the Dhammapada, of how the various travellers are like swans upon the lake "leaving home after home behind". Lovely images to contemplate, always remembering Basho in his own Journey to the North, who recognised that the journey itself is home. 

Basho's narrow road - mind the end of the bridge

Well, goodwill  or not, this Christmas blog is complete. There was a really beautiful verse from the Sutta Nipata that caught my mind yesterday as I took a break from playing Candy Soda Crush Saga. Here it is:- 

A good sight indeed has arisen today, a good daybreak, a beautiful arising, for we have seen the perfectly Enlightened One, who has crossed the flood.

"Morning has broken like the first morning" - a beautiful arising

 "A good daybreak, a beautiful arising"

Related Quote:-

It's Christmas time, and there's no need to be afraid
At Christmas time, we let in light and banish shade
And in our world of plenty, we can spread a smile of joy

Throw your arms around the world
At Christmas time

But say a prayer and pray for the other ones
At Christmas time, it's hard but while you're having fun
There's a world outside your window, and it's a world of dread and fear
Where a kiss of love can kill you, and there's death in every tear
And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom

Well tonight we're reaching out and touching you

(Lines from "Do They Know It's Christmas", Bob Geldof/Midge Ure)

Victim of Thought

Some time ago now I read a little ebook called "Victim of Thought". Basically, at least as I saw it, it was an attempt to present, in purely secular and non-religious language, the ideas that can in fact be found throughout the world of "Faith", especially in their more mystical non-fundamentalist expressions - although seeking to express exactly what those ideas are becomes a burden of language!

It was a valiant effort and, I think, worthwhile. So many these days have little time for "religion", a subject seldom raised in "polite" society in the UK. A few carols at Christmas and the job is done. 

Is the treacherous sea of language associated with the confusion of tongues?

Moving on, there is in fact a Facebook Page "Victim of Thought" which I was happy to join. Every so often I make some comment on its pages and to do so in a way that is in fact quite challenging for me. Not to use quotes, or terms associated with any particular Religion or "faith world", but to use only secular language myself, as in the original book. Oh yes, quite challenging at times as my mind slips into its habitual grooves of Pure Land terminology, but nevertheless liberating in its own way. 

Recently one member of the group asked if increase awareness could always be seen as a good thing, adding that their own increase in awareness - in their attempts to grow/develop - had in fact led to a degree of self hate. 

Here is my response (and the eagle eyed can perhaps spot where a Pure Land technical term edged its way in in spite of my best efforts!):-

My own experience is simply that attempting to "develop" is a non-starter. Attempting to develop in a way considered "good" is even worse. Awareness as I see it is always good purely of itself i.e. Non-judgemental awareness, a simple registering of our thoughts, negative, positive, in-between! I am instinctively judgemental of others, instinctively selfish, terrified of authority figures. But such genuinely does not bother me. In the past I suppose we could have believed in "Him up there" accepting us "just as we are", in mercy and forgiveness. For most, that belief is no longer a living reality. Yet pure self-acceptance is, I have found, the catalyst of genuine transformation. But our "transformation" cannot be plotted. It "becomes so of itself" beyond our calculations. Be easy on yourself, which is also - I have found - the key to being easy on others (In spite of what I am aware are my instinctive thoughts) 

A heretical Pure Lander

This led to a further comment from another, that seeking transformation can in fact stall it, that it is about seeing that we are whole right here and now. Well, that last part caused me to pause and reflect and try to settle my thoughts, before finally seeing even that as a form of "calculation", this from my own Pure Land perspective. Should we ask ourselves to "see that we are whole right now"? Is it nit-picking to object, or is it the need for a certain precision of language? 

Clarity. Good or bad? 

Constantly I seek for clarity in my own mind, which does involve words, this irrespective of the fundamental call of "no calculation". For me I return to the words of that mentor of mine, Thomas Merton, who often seems to bridge the gap between "east" and "west". Words he spoke in Bangkok on his Asian pilgrimage from which he never returned:-

"My dear brothers and sisters ('sisters' added to spare his blushes) we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are." 

I find those words capture our "reality". Of inter-being as well as any exclusive thought of "self" transformation.

Thomas Merton in Bangkok

A task, already accomplished, is yet ours to address, each in our own unique way. It captures the paradoxical nature of Reality-as-is, paradoxical simply because Reality, being the totality, cannot know itself except by knowing an other. 

Myself, I must return to Dogen, the zen master, whose own words seem to capture that same paradox. A student of Dogen sought to describe his thought........for Dogen the Way is not simply one direction, from starting point to goal.......the Way is like a circle.......we practice moment by moment, we become fully aware moment by moment, and we are in nirvana moment by moment. And we continue to do it ceaselessly. Our practice is perfect in each moment and yet we have a direction toward Buddha.

Well, whatever, I must be off.

Related Quotes:-

A circle is the reflection of eternity. It has no beginning and it has no end - and if you put several circles over each other, then you get a spiral.

 (Maynard James Keenan)

When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout. 

(Laurence J. Peter)

Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realise that their voice is welcome. 

(Margaret J. Wheatley)

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

(Anais Nin)

Finally, David Jones - artist and poet - once said that everything constituted a sort of circle in some way. "I need to think that everything is complete somewhere"

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

In my last Blog I included a picture of Titch (psychogeographicer) Thomas, or at least, an "artists impression", a pineapple. The caption of Google Images was "Strange Fruit" and this caption made me think of a much more dark subject, one the subject of a book I was reading recently on the history of protest songs. "Strange Fruit" was a song - first written as a poem by Abel Meeropol then later set to music - made famous by Billie Holiday. It concerned the racist lynchings of people in the South of the USA. 

The whole subject of racism, of how each of us have to deal with "the other", involves much of what is in the air at the moment within the UK. But really, it is "in the air" at all times and in all places.

Moving on to our sporting world, many years ago a British Relay team, fresh from winning a Gold Medal, were being interviewed. They were asked what they thought of being of various colours. It was then that I was made aware of the potential of sport to heal - this because until this was mentioned I had not really been conscious that they were of different hues! I was made to do a double take as I thought of each one of the four man team. First and foremost they had been for me athletes.

This realisation came as a blessing, a blessing of just what sport could offer. Now, many years later, as banana skins are thrown at black footballers at UK soccer matches, it has to be recognised that any genuine sea change remains undetermined. 

Leaping away at a bit of a tangent, and looking back at the history of the rise of Rome, there is a superb 15 volume history of that city - from its beginnings to its eventually fall - written by a Japanese lady, Nanami Shiono. Ms Shiono offers many fresh perspectives on ancient Rome, saying that often our judgement can suffer a degree of distortion because the actions of its people are often viewed through the prism of "our Christian sensitivities".

Nanami Shinono

 Ms Shiono, not being a Christian, and looking with new eyes, sees much to be admired. 

(As people were asked in the Life of Brian, "what did the Romans ever do for us?")

Think man, think!!

Up until the fall of Carthage in 146 BC - razed to the ground by the Romans after the Third Punic War - Namami Shiono, along with many other historians, judged the Roman expansion as "benign imperialism". This because those defeated by them were more often than not allowed to continue to manage their own affairs and more; even had citizenship (of Rome) extended to them. Rome also had a citizen army and did not hire mercenaries to fight their battles, as did most other power brokers of the ancient world. To be obliged to serve in the army was in fact a form of taxation for its citizens, an obligation only for those with the wealth and land ownership that attracted a tax demand. Those lower down the scale, though still citizens, had no such obligation. Already, for the perceptive eye, this is a "new" way of providing soldiers, and of just who would be soldiers. As far as I can determine, there were no draft dodgers; those with a true stake in the republic had to fight their own battles.

A Roman filing his tax returns

Citizenship, extended to many others beyond the city of Rome as it often was, can also be seen to be something with lessons for us, now, today. That citizenship was related to allegiance to Rome - not a thing of race, religious creed or colour. This is not an idealization but a known fact of Rome's rise from its mythic beginnings to the fully formed Republic. 

Slavery was another matter - suffice to say that slavery was also at times the fate of conquered people, especially if they had picked the fight with Rome. Yet slaves were not sought for as such on foreign shores and deemed lesser beings because of colour. Again, a slave being rewarded with freedom was not totally unheard of and many, lifted from what is now Greece, Spain and elsewhere, were recognised as highly intelligent human beings, bi-lingual, and became teachers of the young, even historians (whose works are still extant) Nevertheless, freedom, however conceived and imagined, is obviously the bottom line, so let's leave it there. 

A free man and a slave - and never the twain shall meet?

I think I am drifting and waffling as usual, but surely such lessons have to be considered in our current world of Nation States, of sometimes ludicrous imaginings of racial "purity", where immigrants are seen as second class citizens. One fact gleaned from Roman history:- a new citizen of Rome, just twenty years after being of a conquered foe, was elected as one of the two yearly Consuls, the highest position within the Roman republican system. 

Truly astonishing if thought is given to it. Truly astonishing.

Anyway, to finish, a poem by Mary Angelou, "Equality":- 

You declare you see me dimly 
through a glass which will not shine, 
though I stand before you boldly, 
trim in rank and marking time. 
You do own to hear me faintly 
as a whisper out of range, 
while my drums beat out the message 
and the rhythms never change.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free.

You announce my ways are wanton, 
that I fly from man to man, 
but if I'm just a shadow to you, 
could you ever understand ?

We have lived a painful history, 
we know the shameful past, 
but I keep on marching forward, 
and you keep on coming last.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free.

Take the blinders from your vision, 
take the padding from your ears, 
and confess you've heard me crying, 
and admit you've seen my tears.

Hear the tempo so compelling, 
hear the blood throb in my veins. 
Yes, my drums are beating nightly, 
and the rhythms never change.

Equality, and I will be free. 
Equality, and I will be free. 

Related Quote:-

"Strange Fruit" is a protest song, a musical response—in equal parts sorrow and anger—to the barbaric practice of lynching, that horrific brand of racial terrorism used to reinforce white supremacy from the end of the Civil War through the mid-20th century. 

At the time "Strange Fruit" was first released, lynching remained a shockingly common and socially accepted practice; even powerful liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unwilling to support an anti-lynching bill in Congress, fearful that it would cost him too much political support in the South.

Written as a poem by Abel Meeropol in 1937, and recorded as a jazz song by Billie Holiday in 1939, the song marked a kind of turning point between the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. In the song, you can hear the powerlessness and despair of an age when African Americans were afforded few legal rights and little political power; you can also hear the determination and resolve that led to a revolution in American race relations over the following decades. 

"Strange Fruit" is a song that sings to both a dark past and a brighter future.

(From Shmoop Notes)

THIS WEBSITE USES CO

Psychogeography

Yes, another buzz phrase enters my vocabulary. Psychogeography. This the title of another cheap little ebook as I trawled the Kindle Bookshop seeking solace from the latest absurdities of Brexit. 

A psychogeographical map

Apparently psychogeography is to wander around a particular environment noting in particular diverse ways the impressions gained. Well, something like that.

It does seem to me to be nothing new at all, irrespective of the rather pretentious name. I tend to wander around most of the time registering various impressions.

Apparently, in psychogeography, you add a further dimension by giving consideration to the impressions others might register from such an environment. This I would say is rather more difficult. 

Graffiti that moves

Graffiti, often found during urban perambulations, inspired Philip Larkin to pen his poem "Sunny Prestatyn" (which is a great little UK holiday resort):-

Come To Sunny Prestatyn

Laughed the girl on the poster,

Kneeling up on the sand   

In tautened white satin.   

Behind her, a hunk of coast, a

Hotel with palms

Seemed to expand from her thighs and   

Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.   

A couple of weeks, and her face

Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;   

Huge tits and a fissured crotch

Were scored well in, and the space   

Between her legs held scrawls

That set her fairly astride

A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while   

Someone had used a knife

Or something to stab right through   

The moustached lips of her smile.   

She was too good for this life.   

Very soon, a great transverse tear   

Left only a hand and some blue.   

Now Fight Cancer is there.

Add your own graffiti

Obviously, as Titch Thomas ruminated during his very own psychogeographical wanderings, he chose not only to register his impressions, but to actually add his very own to our urban world. This for others to make notes upon, or even to compose poems about. 

Our latest snap of Titch Thomas

Really, I find it difficult to grasp exactly where the novelty is in psychogeography. It does seem to have no particularly unique content. Then again, I am really being just a little bit facetious. Brexit takes its inevitable toll.

Related Quotes:-

Cities are sites of mystery, and psychogeography seeks to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday.

(Art Haus)

Psychogeographer? The word, defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals”

Like psychotherapy psychogeography inhabits the uncertain border between science and art. It is the exploration of landscape and nature as a mapping of the psyche, in which inner terrain becomes outer terrain and vice versa, and in which the structures of society are experienced by the act of walking the land.

(From the Buddhist Art website "Urthona")

And last, a poem and morer elated to psychogeography written long before the word existed:-

The City of Dreadful Night

James Thomson was a Scottish-born poet, atheist and anarchist. He struggled with depression, insomnia and alcohol-abuse throughout his short life and his work frequently reflected the bleakness and despair of his life’s experiences. Thomson wrote The Doom of the City in 1857 and his best known poem, The City of Dreadful Night in 1874.

Raymond Williams calls The City of Dreadful Night: ‘a symbolic vision of the city as a condition of human life’. Williams asserts that, by the Victorian-era, the city had become a new form of human consciousness. The city of Thomson’s poem is clearly an imagined London. But it is not the dynamic hub of Empire of the popular imagination: for him it is a city of death in life.  A place permeated by loss of belief, loss of purpose and loss of hope.

The City is of Night, but not of but not of Sleep;

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;

The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain

Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,

Or which some moments’ stupor but increases,

This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.

The City of Dreadful Night takes the form of the poet’s journey through one night in the city and suggests a reworking of Dante’s Inferno. In terms of atmosphere it can be viewed as part of the Gothic tradition, but the setting is a supposedly modern city. The poem’s structure is interesting – it alternates odd-numbered seven-line sections giving description with even-numbered six-line sections giving narrative. This very mechanical structure seems to suggest an inhuman, mechanical world. A world where its inhabitants merely follow their allocated roles within a continually-running machine:

They are most rational and yet insane:

And outward madness not to be controlled;

A perfect reason in the central brain,

Which has no power, but sitteth wan and cold,

And sees the madness, and foresees as plainly

The ruin in its path, and trieth vainly

To cheat itself refusing to behold.

Thomson’s narrator is an alienated wanderer, a joyless flâneur. As he walks he encounters other aimless wanderers, in fact the city teems with people: it is a haunted space. But the wanderers walk, not to arrive, not to satisfy any purpose, but to make a kind of penance to the silent, impersonal ‘necessity supreme’ that permeates the entire city:

There is no God; no fiend with names divine

Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,

It is to satiate no Being’s gall.

In Thomson’s eyes the hopes and everyday concerns of the inhabitants of the ‘real’ London are just daydreams; eventually they will awake from what they think is reality and embrace ‘this real night’. In Masao Miyoshi’s words: ‘the desolation of the decomposing self permeates the dreadful night of his vision’.

For the poet wandering the city streets there is no alternative vision and no contrast to the unremitting gloom, as a result of which there is a complete absence of any hope. Even in that other nightmare vision of the modern city, Eliot’s The Waste Land, there is the hint of some hope, but here there is none.

Wherever men are gathered, all the air

Is charged with human feeling, human thought;

Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,

Are into its vibrations surely wrought;

Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,

Are breathed into it with our respiration

It is with our life fraught and overfraught.

So that no man there breathes earth’s simple breath,

As if alone on mountains or wide seas;

But nourishes warm life or hastens death

With joys and sorrows, health and foul disease,

Wisdom and folly, good and evil labours,

Incessant of his multitudinous neighbours;

He in his turn affecting all of these.

Strange, dark images fill the lines of Thomson’s poem, a vision almost modernist in its self-conscious power and summoning up images of a type echoed many years later in Eliot’s work:

That City’s atmosphere is dark and dense,

Although not many exiles wander there,

With many a potent evil influence,

Each adding poison to the poisoned air;

Infections of unutterable sadness,

Infections of incalculable madness,

Infections of incurable despair.

Thomson, in his The City of Dreadful Night, characterises the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair for the many, which contrasts with the political and economic confidence enjoyed by the few. London in the nineteenth-century had seen an explosion in the size of its population and a proliferation of its downtrodden underclass. George Gissing wrote about the psychogeography of  this human underbelly of the city in his The Nether World:

Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.

The French artist Gustave Doré, together with his journalist colleague Blanchard Jerrold, spent three months wandering the grittier streets of London in 1872, just before The City of Dreadful Night was published. As a result of their investigations they published London, A Pilgrimage to highlight the experience of London’s poor, or what Jerrold called ‘that long disease, their life’. Doré and Thomson never collaborated, but the artist’s illustrations make a fitting accompaniment to Thomson’s poem.