The funny thing was she told the stories so nonchalantly as if they were the most ordinary thing going...as if everyone had a pig or two up their sleeve with or without an *******. And that sidecar with a pig in it. I told her she would have to write these stories out or I'd have to steal 'em. So I stole 'em! I couldn't leave stories like that on the shelf. She was Jan's school friend and they hadn't met for over 40 years and when they got together it was as if no time had passed and they chatted away like schoolgirls.

The sad thing was that both pigs died...one by the shock of being "serviced" in that *** came as a bit of shock and the other little pig from the attempt to give it an *******. When I imagine the little pig zooming around a corner in the sidecar I always see it wearing goggles. Don't think I have ever been told such a deadpan amazing story as this.

***
T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” was originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.

I went to see Ted Hughes at the Royal Festival Hall after an extensive day and night shift work in mental health for about four days as staff went sick or simply didn't turn up.. Couldn't remember if I was to meet my ******* Thursday in Friday street or not or wot. I was right under his lectern and he looked immense  and a lot like Sam the Eagle in the Muppet Show in looks and manner. I kept falling asleep between syllables and would **** myself awake and every time I did so I would get that fierce Hughesian glare!

The title is taken from Alvaro De Campos aka Fernando Pessoa's  MARITIME ODE.

"But the song is a straight line drawn crookedly inside me.."


Curiously enough my friend Jan survived both the crash and the cancer. He thought he was dead on both accounts but would have preferred the car crash as a way to go.

But he pulled through at the last moment which as it happened wasn't his ...last moment. He fought bravely against his cancer and life still has its grip on him ten years down the road.

He's beginning to think he will never die. Don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing! But yes Jan lives on....long live Jan!

"Quelle douleur incroyable, et quelle joie incroyable! "

"Paddy" Kavanagh is one of John Coll's most prominent works of art, situated on the north bank of the Grand Canal on Mespil Road. The statue was built as part of the Dublin 1991 European City of Culture celebrations, unveiled by President Mary Robinson. It was inspired by his poem "Lines written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin".

The dangers of being both sick...and tired...and being sick and tired of being sick and tired and falling asleep reading Old Possum.

Here be the Goldfish and nothing but the Goldish so help me Eliot.

Goldfish
by T. S. Eliot

(Essence of Summer Magazines)

I

Always the August evenings come

With preparation for the waltz

The hot verandah making room

For all the reminiscent tunes

— The Merry Widow and the rest —

That call, recall

So many nights and afternoons —

August, with all its faults!

And the waltzes turn, return;

The Chocolate Soldier assaults

The tired Sphinx of the physical.

What answer? We cannot discern.

And the waltzes turn, return,

Float and fall,

Like the cigarettes

Of our marionettes

Inconsequent, intolerable.

II

Embarquement pour Cythere

Ladies, the moon is on its way!

Is everybody here?

And the sandwiches and ginger beer?

If so, let us embark —

The night is anything but dark,

Almost as clear as day.

It's utterly illogical

Our making such a start, indeed

And thinking that we must return.

Oh no! why should we not proceed

(As long as a cigarette will burn

When you light it at the evening star)

To porcelain land, what avatar

Where blue-delft-romance is the law

Philosophy through a paper straw!

III

On every sultry afternoon

Verandah customs have the call

White flannel ceremonial

With cakes and tea

And guesses at eternal truths

Sounding the depths with a silver spoon

And dusty roses, crickets, sunlight on the sea

And all.

And should you ever hesitate

Among such charming scenes —

Essence of summer magazines —

Hesitate, and estimate

How much is simple accident

How much one knows

How much one means

Well! among many apophthegms

Here's one that goes —

Play to your conscience, through the maze

Of means and ways

And wear the crown of your ideal

Bays

And rose.

IV

Among the debris of the year

Of which the autumn takes its toll: —

Old letters, programmes, unpaid bills

Photographs, tennis shoes, and more,

Ties, postal cards, the mass that fills

The limbo of a bureau drawer —

Of which October takes its toll

Among the debris of the year.

I find this headed " Barcarolle " .

" Along the wet paths of the sea

A crowd of barking waves pursue

Bearing what consequence to you

And me.

The neuropathic winds renew

Like marionettes who leave their graves

Walking the waves

Bringing the news from either Pole

Or knowledge of the fourth dimension:

" We beg to call to your attention

" Some minor problems of the soul. "

— Your seamanship is very neat

You scan the clouds, as if you knew,

Your language nautical, complete;

There's nothing left for me to do.

And while you give the wheel a twist

I gladly leave the rest to fate

And contemplate

The aged sybil in your eyes

At the four crossroads of the world

Whose oracle replies: —

" These problems seem importunate

But after all do not exist. "

Between the theoretic seas

And your assuring certainties

I have my fears:

— I am off for some Hesperides

Of street pianos and small beers!

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

IN LAK' ECH


The Mayan people strongly believed that every individual is linked by the universal vibration. They referred to human beings as “Huinik’lil” which means “Vibrant Being”. Using this phrase, the Mayan people believed that it celebrated the collective sacred being of oneness anciently. It depicts the connection of human beings to spiritual beings and can be said to be the “Living Code of the Heart”.

It is the same as saying “Namaste” (which Indians use meaning “I bow to you” or “The light in me honors the light in you”).

“I am you, and you are me”or  “I am another yourself.”


.It is the same as saying “Namaste” (which Indians use meaning “I bow to you” or “The light in me honors the light in you”).

It has evolved into a moral code which creates a positive reality in the lives of human beings.

One of my last conversations with my brother( conversations could be 3 hours on the phone )and he told me of a fox he had seen. He asked me why I had never written a poem for him and would I write his experience for him. I did so and it lay there in my scribbly hieroglyph until I managed to decipher my own writing( this is easier said than done). I was going to read it to him at the next phone call but there never was another phone call. The fox and my brother now merging into one in the here/not here.

Richard Jeffeeries...he of the beautiful nature writing that influenced the nature writing of poet Edward Thomas.
Jefferies's novel, After London (1885), can be seen as an early example of "post-apocalyptic fiction": after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.
The house gone to ruin that nature takes back is my memory of numerous houses I have come across including even one on the island of Lampedusa

She was a very cultured elegant woman who had been displaced/replaced by a very much younger version of her self. When she had found out by seeing  her younger clone strolling hand in hand with her husband...she had dropped one of her expensive gloves but that was the least of her concerns.  She later described her desolation to me by quoting Jacques Maritain's letter to Jean Cocteau..." What am I...a man God has turned inside out like a glove..." Being well versed in philosophy she saw her self walking in Garbiel Marcel's "desert universe." She was halfway through his ÊTRE ET AVOIR which became her Bible. She remained in this "broken world" without a soul....like a clock that had stopped telling the time and was only resurrected by finding a young lover who loved her for her self. She never ever again wore gloves despite how cold it got which everyone thought was a curious characteristic tic of hers.

My friend and his wife spent a day at a funfair and went on all the rides...they laughed all the way from swing boats to ghost trains. The day was as sweet and sticky as candyfloss. On the way home they crashed and although he barely survived...his wife was killed instantly. He was very guilty for having survived and blamed himself and conflated both events in his mind and his mind kept coming back and going over the events in minute detail. Past and Present were collapsed into the one time of No-time and he was like a living ghost coming back and haunting himself.

He died alas....from his injuries but as I sat with him he kept conflating the events from the fair and the happening of the crash together so that everything happened at the one and the same time.

That's why I thought of them as ghosts revisiting their last moments.

Like the two personages in...Eyes Do More Than See by Isaac Asimov.

Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist. Bentham spoke for a complete equality between sexes.

The essay Offences Against One's Self, argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual ***.

Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights, and has even been hailed as "the first patron saint of animal rights"

Bentham died on 6 June 1832 aged 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham. A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.

On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.

Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith, it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".

Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulfuric acid and drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. The auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.

When I was visiting my friend Gerry Sweeney during my Da's illness he would always be singing or humming or whistling either  Chaplin's SMILE  or THIS IS MY SONG.... He wasn't to know that my Da would always sing these )to me as a small boy. It was his philosophy for living!

Gerry has a way of reaching into my unconsciousness and coming up with little bits of my past.

So it set me to  remembering my Da mending my shoe to Chaplin's "Terry's Theme from his 1952 movie LIMELIGHT which later would acquire words an become ETERNALLY.

I prefer it as an instrumental  and my favourite version is always this unseen/unheard version( visible only to me ) of my Da with a mouthful of tacks putting down this layer of love for Charlie and his music

In the hospital I had to indeed smile though my heart was aching and I sang the LIMELIGHT theme back to him one last time.

This windhover(kestrel)       seemed to follow us through the unfurling story of our love and always appeared when we were making love whether it be a hotel bedroom or a sunny hillside.   As if it were the same windhover watching over us or a blessing from Fr. Hopkins whose poem I had always loved since I was a child.

    Here then was the beauty of this woman before me waking to our first morning ever together and her beauty almost blinded me and so the misquote of the Hopkins line...'AND the fire that breaks from thee then...' as her beauty flowered in my mind and almost eclipsed me. Her tongue had taught me comfort...her touch had quenched my tears...had touched my heart. Suddenly love had found me and I surrendered myself to the tenderness that befell me with even the littlest of her smiles.

   And yes...she was 'a billion times told lovelier' than I could ever have imagined her. I was blessed and she was my blessing.


And here is Hopkins...in all its wonder and glory!

                         The Windhover:

                         To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion. King-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and **** gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins