Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
I saw this recently on the 'Recommendo' newsletter. It looks like a good set of questions. Twitter thread of self-fulfillment questions |
Greg Isenberg says he asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves and then he shared them in a Twitter thread, as a list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The ones I’m pondering are:
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'Lightning Rods'. Published 2011. Started 16.8.22-Finished 31.8.22
Thoughts? Beautifully written. Remarkably funny. Huge degree of intelligence on the part of the writer. Could not recommend this enough! Sadly this couldn't have been written by a man these days.
The mechanism for preventing sexual harassment suits against male workers in corporations is given full expression. My favourite novel of 2022 until, that is, I started reading 'The Last Samurai' - More to follow on that.
The primary object of social work is to create a society where it has no need to exist.
Right away we are approaching a battle. A battle against systems that would deliberately create a dedicated organisation where a specific type of activity which we may call surveillance social work is brought to bear upon the poor. Surveillance /measurement/ Secret monitoring/ Professional Cabals/
A mean spirited social work that fully participates in the poverty and inequality and discrimination against those who may be poor while paying for families to live in overcrowded and filthy accommodation, children to be abandoned to private social work provisions lacking any sense of obligation and service to anything other than profit. (WELL CLEARLY I’M GOING TO GET LOTS OF MY CHEST!)
The primary object of current social work however, appears to be to engage in a project of technical bureaucratic intervention in a society that invades every aspect of the lives of the poor, most particularly by a creeping intervention in family life, without reference to the capacity for transformation and, even if such transformation were positively acknowledged, without the resources or skills to accomplish it in any meaningful sense.
In this project that I shall call neo-liberal welfarism, the social workers are joined in their interventions by the various tribes of the welfarist universe, united by this project of child protection under the disguise of soft policing by chronic programmes of endless assessment, innumerable meetings, diagnostic determinations, psychological categorisations and psychiatric considerations, various cabals of professionals-only discourse, and endless judgement and measurement. Labels of all kind abound with all manner of evidential weight attached. All underpinned by a legal system chronically obsessed with process and timescales over potential and possibilities and legislation often enacted in fear of further tragedy rather than in hope of better outcomes, with all the practice implications that are embodied in fear of failure, and public excoriation in the hallowed and considered prose of the gutter journalists who delight in the character assassination and moral dismemberment of all social workers unfortunate enough to be involved in the tragedy of the death of a child at the hands of his or her parents.
And so we proceed, marking our milestones by the death of the innocents and 'drawing conclusions on the wall.' We must be risk averse, ever watchful, we must record every detail, we must act before disaster strikes. We must establish modes of ruthless surveillance. And as the gutter press so gleefully command, we must stop these evil monsters bent on murdering children, in their tracks. We must be relentless and give them the damnation they so richly deserve.
RESISTANCE. BY SIMON ARMITAGE
It’s war again: a family
carries its family out of a pranged house
under a burning thatch.
The next scene smacks
of archive newsreel: platforms and trains
(never again, never again),
toddlers passed
over heads and shoulders, lifetimes stowed
in luggage racks.
It’s war again: unmistakable smoke
on the near horizon mistaken
for thick fog. Fingers crossed.
An old blue tractor
tows an armoured tank
into no-man’s land.
It’s the ceasefire hour: godspeed the columns
of winter coats and fur-lined hoods,
the high-wire walk
over buckled bridges
managing cases and bags,
balancing west and east - godspeed.
It’s war again: the woman in black
gives sunflower seeds to the soldier, insists
his marrow will nourish
the national flower. In dreams
let bullets be birds, let cluster bombs
burst into flocks.
False news is news
with the pity
edited out. It’s war again:
an air-raid siren can’t fully mute
the cathedral bells -
let’s call that hope.
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage's (Our Poet Laureate in the UK) Poem is hearfelt and so moving. The prospect of a war at the near end of the first quarter of the 21st Century is almost unbelievable. My own view is that it matters little to bullies that you stand looking on their crimes wringing your hands and decrying the outrage of it. Bullies, psychopaths and murderers only understand a response as forceful as theirs or greater. Then they often seem to disappear as if they only existed as a result of our fear of them, which may, in fact be the case.
The open-hearted response of the British to the assistance of Ukrainian refugees is to be honoured. However I am puzzled about the country's warm response to the Ukrainians compared to the hostile environment and unwelcome meted out to Syrians, Latino's and Africans. Could it possibly be that the Ukrainians are white "like us" and not brown, black and yellow people and therefore "not us but other?"
That would of course mean that the broken bodies of Africans and middle eastern peoples are worth less, that their lives have less meaning. How could it be possible that such poisonous racism could have taken root in the hearts of the Brits?
Of course our black, brown and yellow brothers and sisters have known that for some time.
So we must remember these Iliads are woven in the crook'd dreams of the hollow men and will always be, until our consciousness develops to the elementary point that such monstrosities become unthinkable, even unimaginable. As a species we are not there yet! Not by a long way!
May your God go with you and may all our Gods preserve and support the brave Ukrainians in their hour of War. Love and Will. In balance.
Every year or so, the library in the photograph above — with stacks of books piled high and buttery lamplight aglow — resurfaces on the internet. It is often (erroneously) attributed to the author Umberto Eco, or said to be in Italy or Prague. |
In fact, Kate Dwyer reports for The Times, the library is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of the Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey — a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. His book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, some 35,000 of which eventually made their way into the university’s libraries. |
Why do people love this image so much? Don Winslow, the author and political activist, who recently posted a photograph of the library on Twitter, said it was “as stunning as a sunset.” Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of the blog the Aesthetics of Joy, pointed at the photo’s sense of plenitude: “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of something that gives us a little thrill,” she said. |
And what would Dr. Macksey think, if he knew his library had taken on a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” his son, Alan Macksey, said. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.” |
Ok Happy and Healthy 2022. May your dreams fall like feathers of glory around you as they come to beautiful fruition!
I've been away. Spiritually, intellectually emotionally. UNPRESENT. I'll write about it over the coming months.
For now I have just seen the comments that have been made and been awaiting moderation for over a year for which I am truly sorry. I will answer every one over the next few weeks.
Now he cast his nets at my request,
and all he said reeked of naked truth.
‘First, wake up! And sniff the guiding wind,
the teaching that is written in the sky,
written in the clouds for all to see.
Men were stretched to look up at the stars,
not to snuffle in the clotted mud,
or labour for some crook in factories
Like icebergs calving in a frozen sea,
his words touched me like sea-dreams deep within.
Touched that yearning that I know is in me.
‘You cannot walk through life with eyes tight shut!
And neither is this role a waking dream.
Sleep or wake-each must have it’s place,
and don’t forget to actually breathe!
To breathe is to inhale the dust of stars.
