15 May 2007
Repetition is a Form of Change, by 'philtal_uk' (then 38, male, Tyneside) 9 January 2002
You can't read the same message twice - you change, it changes.
You cannot read the same message twice - you change, it changes.
Aristotle, Rhetoric.
'It is difficult to punctuate Heraclitus's writing because it is unclear whether a word goes with what follows it or with what goes before it. Eg, at the very beginning of his treatise, he says:
"of this account which holds forever men prove uncomprehending".
It is unclear what "forever" goes with.'
the same is present living and dead awake and asleep young and old for the latter change and are the former and the former change and are the latter
disconnections combinations wholes and not wholes concurring differing concordant discordant from all things one and from one all things
changing it rests and resting it changes
we step and do not step into the same rivers
we are and we are not
It is wise to listen, not to me, but to the words. The words say: 'All things are one.'
Although the words stay the same, they seem to change.
Though the words stay the same, they seem to change.
Hello ... pleased to meet you all - albeit marginally ... in a place on the edge of things that have no end and which is central and marginal and everywhere between at the same time and ...
Phil
Although separated and virtual strangers, we walk and talk together and blend in thoughts, emotions and feelings and find missing parts in others and giving missing parts to others and we take upon us, together and alone, the mystery of things - all things strange familiar simple complex mixed singular high low bitter sweet sorrowful joyful ... and although it can seem like meaningless nonsense it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense.
Does it make a difference ...?
Does it make a difference whether this message is read or not read?
The act of writing it has brought some difference
(change)to the universe - and who can say what consequences that will have? (Tiny, trivial seeming acts can [perhaps occasionally, perhaps often, perhaps always] have wide-ranging consequences.)
Readings would further complicate matters - and responses even more so.
Plotinus (Enneads):
Heraclitus who, by example, urges us to inquire into limitless matters, posits necessary exchanges from opposites and talks of paths up and down and around and
"changing it rests"
and
"it is weariness for the same to labour freely and to be ruled"
and he leaves us to conjecture and omits to make his argument clear and to reach conclusions, perhaps because he realised that we should inquire for ourselves as he himself inquired
Reality is complex, messy, not clear-cut.
So the way(s) into greater understanding of it cannot be simple, tidy, unambiguous.
Heraclitus rambles through the borderlands between coherence and incoherence.
Strange stuff emerges from that marginal zone.
Lifting the veil ... opening the doors of perception ... and all that.
It can be done - and doesn't require drugs.
But it is (perhaps) a mistake to imagine that what is revealed when the veil is lifted is more real than what is perceptible when it is still in place.
Reality is (most likely) multi-layered - all in all.
No level of reality is likely to be more real than any other
... and when you think you've got it sussed, then is the time for caution ... scepticism ... humility ... that way you go on learning ... or developing ... or just changing ...
Of reality we know nothing firmly ... it changes.
It seems unwise to speculate at random about the widest matters. But what else can we do?
Ramble.
(1) Wander disconnectedly in discourse, talk, writing.
(2) Walk for pleasure and with pleasure, with or without a definite route, and with or without a clear destination
Flame and Vortex.
Both flame and vortex are example of dissipative structures - the maintenance of which require a continuous input of energy, and the effect of which is to dissipate that energy.
In a vortex, the energy is the potential engery of the water, which is dissipated as the water falls.
In a flame, the energy from chemical reactions is dissipated as heat.
As soon as the energy stops, the form disappear.
Shifting sands. Seething seas. Swirling skies.
Sea sounds. Synaesthesia. See sounds.
Of reality we know nothing firmly.
It changes.
... changing waterways churn on while I ramble on ...
Although separated and virtual strangers, we walk and talk together and blend in thoughts, emotions and feelings and find missing parts in others and giving missing parts to others and we take upon us, together and alone, the mystery of things - all things strange familiar simple complex mixed singular high low bitter sweet sorrowful joyful ... and although it can seem like meaningless nonsense it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense.
With few exceptions (perhaps none), every person experiences conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, moral outrage, etc - to varying degrees, at various times and places.
Out of this grows what seems to be a worldwide morality, including notions of altruism, justice, compassion, mercy ... even redemption.
Unfortunately, small-scale personal familiarities, and a limited sense of common interest, narrow the range of moral sentiments - making them selective: applied to 'us' but not to 'them'.
People give trust to strangers only with great effort.
True compassion, applied to all humans (recognised as fully human - and of 'us'), is in short supply.
... meeting as an anonymous strangers in lonely crowds ... throwing love around ... and it changes ... and perhaps it grows ... and perhaps it blooms ... tomorrow ... or tomorrow ... or tomorrow ...
Leonardo's Heraclitean Vision: 'Everything proceeds from everything else and everything becomes everything else and everything can be turned into everything else.'
If you look for long enough, everything might be seen in a young woman's smile ... or an old man's frown.
Leonardo: The artist can call into being the essences of animals of all kinds, of plants, fruits, landscapes, rolling plains, crumbling mountains, fearful and terrible places which strike terror into the spectator; and again pleasant places, sweet and delightful with meadows of many-coloured flowers bent by the gentle motion of the wind, which turns back to look at them as it floats on; and then rivers falling from high mountains and the force of great floods, ruins which drive down with them up-rooted plants mixed with rocks, roots, earth, and foam and wash away to its ruins all that comes in their path; and then the stormy sea, striving and wrestling with the winds which fight against it, raising itself up in superb waves, which fall in ruins as the wind strikes at their roots.
Drafts ...
Names change ... labels change ...
Or, as 'The Existentialist' (concluding naturally, she believed) put it: 'Time passes, people change.'
True enough.
All in all ... it changes ... but the essence of it all remains the same ...
So...
The quaker, the catholic, the anglican (words meaning many things - and not necessarily indicating faiths - while also being merely nominal signifiers of particular, relatively insignificant, individualized human beings) wandered in and out of relative obscurity, and each others' and other people's lives, and noticed a few things that nobody had ever noticed before, and never would again, and missed many other matters that they might have noticed, but didn't.
While the voices sometimes sang in their ears, saying that this was maybe all folly.
'Six hands at an open door...'
But...
There might have been more, and the names might have been different, and ...
The time might not have yet come ...
Or it might have been and gone ...
Or, next time, after a reshuffle, it might all be different ...
One name might have been Zed ... who was a typically British delightfully mixed up mess ... iridescent, polyglottic, cosmopolitan ... a free-wheeling wild daisy ... daisy ... on an old-fashioned upright English bicycle ... riding to the unifying international news agency building through a changing London docklands on an island of sorts (which was nominally a home for dogs) and near the time centre at Greenwich ... and nearby lived mostly ignored people who would not recognise her properly as a fellow human rose because their own blooming possibilities had been neglected ... (and not far away in time and place, under a futuristic light railway bridge, a multicultural ideas spreading news agent was murdered by ethnic nationalists with closed minds who couldn't escape from their past prejudices) ... Z was a far from unnecessary letter ...
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
Or there might have been another A ... a very sophisticated Irish named (and double-barrelled) self-styled working class lass ... who encouraged him to go with the flow with kind words and curving flowing limb motions ... and who walked alongside him in a slightly absurd part-falling manner (which might have had something to do with the vaguely ridiculous thick-soled shoes she was wearing) ... but with her, as with others, there seemed to be a mountainous obstacle course in the space between them ... which even a veteran rambler could not find a route through .. or around ... and perhaps it was better to maintain a distance between ...
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Call them what you will ... ally, catty, philly ... or make them up as you go along ... angels, imps, aliens ... or (as it actually seems to go) rearrange bits of the previously existing into new patterns ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in often not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge ...
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times apparent forms fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course that was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Dramatizing musically ...
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
... we get by and keep on keeping on with a little help from our friends all is on little loves and small acts of kindness and big hugs pulling mussels from shells and pulling muscles in other words squeeze me you know how to do that Annie and get your gun she's passed it's a miracle her paint's all over town and Alison my aim is true I know this world is killing you and her and him and me and OK I was just Cathy's clown on a hillside desolate will nature make a man of me yet visions of swastikas two new pence to have a go and fall wanking to the floor and frigging in the rigging while there are footsteps on the dancefloor the next time I'll be true I heard on the grapevine that rumour had it that I just called to say I love you thank you for giving me the best day of my life and thank you for calling inquiries when I got stuck in the moment records stick stuck records bells on our fingers ask not whom we toll them for we shall have music wherever we go on go on go on at last the go on show at last but not the end there is no end to wandering I would go out tonight but I have not got a thing to wear but don't you forget about me as you walk on by if you see me walking down the street walk on walk on by with love in your heart and take a walk on the wild side and you just know that bitch won't fuck again but say it ain't so Jo say it Jo eh Joe hey hey hey Joe where are you going with that gun in your hand excuse me while I take another face from the ancient gallery and kiss the sky often mistaken for kiss this guy kiss me kiss me you know how to please me yeah yeah kiss me in the milky twilight you wear that dress and I will wear those shoes and she was last seen the last time I ever saw her face wearing stop me stop me if you've heard this one before hey hey hey what's going on we're sailing off the edge of the world living like Fu Manchu there's nothing else to do maybe baby we know where we are going once in a lifetime on the road to nowhere or funky town or kook city and live life from a window just taking in the view all around the world looking for you and you just stayed in your room that day that day when we took off our clothes and you were crying and the stupid things you said and I said we were birds of paradise and you saw the whole of the moon pink pink pink moon no matter where I roam I will return to my British roses before the sky closes on them and opens on others and no one will ever take me from she and she been a long time been a long time been a lonely lonely lonely long time under the northern skies waiting and wondering and wandering on for more life in a northern town wandering on and maybe tomorow maybe someday we'll get by ...
... jigsaw feeling ... has me reeling ... which may be lurching desperately ... or which may be a kind of dancing.
Patterning geometrically ...
What triangles ...
The solitary sage of Walden (or there or there abouts - or some other place of concorde) pointed out that triangles of extraordinary size were set up when two people by chance (as it might seem) separated by many earthly miles looked at the same distant star at the same earthly instant ...
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
Cathy and her clown walked together near the water's edge. Blurs from some perspectives, dots, or even less from others. Viewed from some places and times they become recognizable human forms, though mostly in outline, devoid of many details. Further perspective shifts reveal complexitity upon completity. It is possible to conceive of a multiverse perspective ... all possible perspectives at the same instant.
Two little people on a coastal walk in a small town, on the margins, but at the centre of things ... So it is with all: any point, any person, any event, is central and marginal and everywhere in between.
She is small and short-stepping. He is tall and long-striding. The long and the short of it. Big he who is not so big and small she who is not so small. They do not seem well matched. Their mortions are not very synchronized-seeming, as she is too fond of pointing out for his comfort (and hers perhaps too). She walks close to him, often bumping into him rather clumsily. Mostly she talks, he listens. A deluge of words. Waves crashing on to the shore. Her voice rises in pitch and and increases in tempo as she continues. She seems anxious to get things said, while she still has the chance, while there is still time.
They walk in no particular direction, to nowhere in particular. Separate random walks are taking place, which, since they are walking together, in however an unsynchronized and clumsy and bumping manner, become a shared walk. They walk on the edge of land and sea, near a pub called the Water's Edge. Human naming systems help to make a sort of sense of things, providing reference points and an order to/of sorts.
They seem on the edge of things, in a marginal zone, a place of transition. and they are nearing the edge of their time together. Soon they'll separate, perhaps forever. So it seems she has to get her words said. She talks of people on the edge of things, marginalised people, known as the 'underclass' for want of a more human label, whom she's encountered in the early stages of her training as a probation officer. It seems important to her to let him know of what she has witnessed. He's a bit puzzled by that. She's leaving him behind, but wants to fill his mind with her thoughts and experiences. She's planting trace memories perhaps.
Another way of seeing it ... on the shores of the cosmic ocean a strangely beautiful well-matched asymetric couple mess things up.
(This much seems true: new life comes from asymmetry - the evidence is all around. Fear death by symmetry - when all the complex, messy slightly disordered asymmetrical unities break up, and 'it' becomes a spread of equally distanced particle fragments drifting ever further apart.)
Random walks ...
The myriad contingencies of a short walk in a small town.
But when you consider them with an open mind everything can seem to connect and every part seems integral to the whole.
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the 'underground' (and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks), and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
Perhaps we are often acted upon by organizing forces beyond our understanding.
This long watch, which dog-like he kept ... Soon the long wished for signs might relieve his passive toils ... beacons gleaming through long recurring nights ... Beacons .. which might only be cigarettes ... These walls could recall strange things .. and much else...
Like a shrunken leaf ... that is not really dying ... all recycles .. flows .. changes ... Feebly feeling ... like a dream that walks by day ... the persuasive breath of memories involuntarily recalled ... mostly stirring the heart with songs .. sometimes sensed as beautiful .. sometimes not ...
Like shapes in dreams he wandered through the years, seeming random, planless, his forethought in chains ...
But the vision of the birds might yet work its end into bliss ...
But contraries might yet blast darkly first...
This way the part-time him-her-seer hummed/hymned, dubiously mixing doom and bliss, dark mingling with light ... and much confusion and obscurity ...
Sharing with the way-haunting birds, which seemed to signal something ... he was responding to the strains .. which could not be merely sounds .. there had to be some meaning, some purpose in everything ... the singings sounded of sorrows and glad days ... and of good times that might yet shame the bad.
Meanwhile ... a most unpleasant surprise was in store for the platonic prick ...
...just as the Likely Lass began yawning as he was telling her all sorts of amusing stories that had happend to him at different times and places, and even referring once to the Greek cynical philospher Diogenes, the Weird Sister appeared from one of the back rooms. Whether she had torn herself away from a cold collation, or from the little green drawing room, where some postgraduates' conversation had become more alarming to her, whether she had come of her own free will, or whether she had been thrown out of her previous environment in embarrassing circumstances, which she might or might not later reveal ... whatever the cause or collection of part-causes that had brought her from some other place to this place, she apeared to be cheerful and in the best of spirits. And she was holding on to the arm of the Devil's Advocate, or one who was assuming that role, for the time being, and in the particular circumstances in which they now all found themselves. Yet he appeared unhappy. Maybe she had been dragging him along with her (and even perhaps attempting to pull him to the floor) for some time. Whatever the cause, assuming there was one, the poor Putter-of-the-Case-Against certainly seemed discomforted, for he kept attempting to turn around, while his eyebrows beetled in all directions, and his eyes seemed to be searching for a way to excape from this amicable arm-in-arm promenade with the Weird Sister.
It was, indeed, quite an intolerable situation. The Platonic Prick saw no ther way out of it than to gulp down quickly, with forced convivialtiy, two cups of coffee, with were, of course, laced with red wine, while he kept on telling the most unlikely stories. The Devil's Advocate became ever more disconcerted, but still could find no way of excape. The Weird Sister laughed and scowled at the fun of it all. The Kindly (Ex-)Quaker remained, as often, seemingly calmly silent.
Bridge buildings ...
Ally and philly were sitting together in a bar, which might have been called The Bridge (but that was actually another place, another time) and she began openly to speak her mind to him for once ... The wonderful flow of words enters him and fills him and swells him, and the words change her in his mind ... she'll never seem the same again. After an hour or two, he feels obliged to say something about himself, but when he attempts to interrupt her word-flow, she says, 'No ... I'll speak' ... and the wonderful warming and expansive words continue to come out of her, and to close the space between them, and to fill him with a her glow, which he will never forget, even though, for various reasons, they do not see much of each other afterwards.
She was possibly the least malicious person he had ever met, but ally was the one person to speak negative things about catty into his ears - telling him that catty 'was just not worth it' and that he 'could do better than that woman'. And when he thought feelingly about it then, and for a long time afterwards, he saw multiple possible meanings in what she said ... but he could not accept the proposition that any human being was 'just not worth it', because all are worth it, or else all are worth nothing ... and maybe that was just quibbling ... but ... that was the way it was with him.
Years later, pally ally cropped up in India and Pakistan (this is no fiction) at a time of tension, when some feared the possibility of a nuclear war. She was part of a leading world stateman's 'travelling entourage' (her words) ... to most a unnoticed face in a crowd ... but to the platonic prick she was a symbol of peace ... she carried love with her and no hatred that he could imagine. And oddly enough (or not) tensions on the Indian sub-continent reduced afterwards, and the threat of nuclear war faded. Of course many others were involved. The (pacifying) 'keys' seemed to be: not the 'great' men's [there were, alas, still too few 'great' women on the world's stage] words and deeds ... nor even the charms (which were considerable) of his known female peace symbol ... but all those millions of little loves of little lives of mostly kindly mostly decent people who didn't actually want to slaughter others, or to be slaughtered themselves - maybe they all worked together, without quite knowing it, to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the curious cat cared so much about the marginalized people whom she worked with (and for) that it once (or more) almost broke her. She saw hellish visions of 'bottomless pits of need and deprivation' ...
And there can seem to be no end to the suffering in the private hells of even an affluent society.
But even with such dispiriting thoughts in mind to discourage her, she returned to work and did little things to help people and to fill up the void bit by bit.
In the near past that was a long time ago cat wrote many letters to phil and complained that he never wrote enough to her ... it was a complaint that mixed fairness with unfairness, as most do ...
In her letters, as far as he could remember, she only ever quoted him one line of poetry, from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'... I am a part of all that I have met ... '
As she might or might not have gone on to point out, the reverse it also true:
... All that I have met is a part of me ...
The surprising thing was that while Cat and Al studied much the same subject in much the same place at much the same time, and wandered more or less contemporaneously in much the same streets of at least two other cities ... and had much in common ... and must have crossed paths occasionally ... and had even perhaps caused each other some hurt of sorts, via their connections through Phil ... they never fully met (unless a trick was missed) .. which is something a shame, because they had much good to share with each other ...
It can seem like nonsense, but it does eventually resolve itself into a sort of sense ...
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of amusement might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It seems foolish to speculate at random about the widest matters ... but what else can you do?
Tuesday, 7 July 2020
An 'X.Press' Special ... {?!}
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/07/mirror-express-reach-cut-jobs-manchester-evening-news-birmingham-mail
The owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star newspapers is to cut 550 jobs, 12% of its workforce, because of falling income amid reduced demand for advertising in its titles.
Reach, formerly known as Trinity Mirror, said its group revenue had tumbled by 27.5% during the second quarter, compared with a year earlier, as newspaper sales and advertising plummeted during the coronavirus crisis.
The company, which also owns hundreds of regional papers including the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, said more people had been reading its products online over the past three months, but this was not enough to offset the loss in income.
Reach said more than 2.5 million customers have registered to read its papers online, and it intends to increase this to 10 million by the end of 2022, against an earlier target of 7 million.
The group said the job cuts and other changes would cost it £20m, but save it £35m a year.
“Structural change in the media sector has accelerated during the pandemic,” said Jim Mullen, the chief executive of Reach, adding that the company had seen increased adoption of its digital products, “however, due to reduced advertising demand, we have not seen commensurate increases in digital revenue”.
He added: “Regrettably, these plans involve a reduction in our workforce and we will ensure all impacted colleagues are treated with fairness and respect throughout the forthcoming consultation process.”
Journalists in the company’s editorial teams are expected to be affected by the job cuts, as well as staff in the advertising and central operations departments.
The company said that its editorial department “will move to a more centralised structure, bringing together national and regional teams across print and digital to significantly increase efficiency and remove duplication”.
Staff at Reach are understood to be concerned about the plans to create a single editorial division, rather than the current split between national and regional papers.
It is also understood that the national and regional circulation departments will be brought together.
Employees were sent a memo by the group’s editor-in-chief, Lloyd Embley, and chief operating officer, Alan Edmunds, informing them that the company expects to cut around 325 staff from editorial and circulation.
The note said the restructuring plans “will have implications for everyone in our editorial, circulation and printing teams – both regionally and nationally”.
Reach has announced that it plans fewer locations and a simpler management structure for its local commercial and finance teams as it seeks to cut costs.
Staff at regional newspapers are thought to be concerned about the future of local offices, after many of them have worked from home during the pandemic.
Workers have been told that Reach is considering whether remote working should become permanent, and that the company will update them on its plans in the autumn.
Newspaper circulations have begun to increase, said Reach, as the government has eased lockdown restrictions, although they remain significantly lower than levels before Covid-19.
Reach said that the changes at the company will allow it to end the temporary pay cuts for staff, although a 20% reduction will continue for its chief executive, chief financial officer and other board members.
Journalists at Reach’s newspapers said in June they were considering taking legal action against executives after their wages were reduced by 10% at the start of April, which they claimed was “without consultation or consent” and with no reduction to their workload.
Several other news organisations have forced staff to take pay cuts or have announced job cuts amid a slide in revenue since the start of the pandemic.
+++++
open emails:
To: Alison.Little@Express.co.uk
From: philtal_uk@yahoo.com
[An 'X.Press' Special ... {?!}]
Hi Alison,
Haven't written to you for a while ...
I ReViewed this Plum [Pudding Club] 'Pastiche' the other day, while browsing through some Old[e] E-mails ... and thought/felt of 'YOU'/you ...
['] I last ran into young Jingo Little in the smoking room of the Senior Illiberal Club.
She was lying back in an arm-chair with her mouth open and a pretty vacant expression in her eyes ... while a grey-haired dame in the middle-spreading distance watched her with such disgust that I concluded Jingo must have pinched her favourite seat.
That's the worse thing of being in a strange club - without intending it, you find yourself constantly trampling on the vested interests of the Elder Inhabitants.
'Hello face!' I cried.
'Cheerio ugly!' she replied.
Despite what she said, I sat down beside her and settled down to have a few quick ones before lunch ...
Background to all this was that once a year the committee of the [A] B.'s C[lub] decides that the old base could do with a wash and brush up and so they shoo us out, and dump us down for a few weeks in some other institution. This time we were nesting at the Senior Illiberal, and, personally, I had found the strain pretty fearful. I mean, when you've got used to a club where everything's nice and cheery and easy-going, and where, if you want to attract a girl's attention, you heave a bit of bread at her, it kind of damps you to come to a place where the youngest member is about 88 [= 'Two Fat Ladies' - in non-P.C. Bingo Lingo one of the favoured forms of dialogue amongst the Old[e]sters@theSeniorIlliberal] and it isn't considered Good Form to talk to anyone unless you went through the Korean War and/or Cuban Missile Crisis together. Because of that, in spite of her dismissiveness, it was a relief to come across Jingo ...
After a somewhat pained silence, lasting who knows how long, we started to talk in hushed voices.
'This club,' I said, 'is The Limit.'
'It's the Elephant's Backside,' agreed young Jingo. 'I believe the old girl over by the window has been dead three days, but I don't like to mention it in case it is considered Bad Form.'
I Diverted: 'Have you lunched here yet?'
'No. Why?'
'They have waitresses instead of waiters.'
'Good golly Mr Woofter! I thought that went out with the closure of Spare Rib!'
Bingo mused on this for a moment, then straightened her dress absently.
'Er ... are they pretty girls?' she said [conspiratorially].
'No,' I replied [deflatingly].
She seemed disappointed for a while, but soon pulled round.
'I haven't a Bean, you know,' she said suddenly.
I startled.
'Hasn't your auntie forgiven you yet?'
'Not yet, confound her!'
You see, young Jingo had had a bit of a dust-up with Lady Littleham, her fabulously rich Great Auntie, resulting a siz[e]able portion of her Family Allowance being knocked off. I was sorry to hear the row was still on, because I had thought it over. I resolved to do the impoverished Little Lass well with 'Festive' Board/Bored, and scanned the Menu with some intentness when The Waitress finally rolled up with it.
'How would this do you, Jingo?' I said at length. 'A bowl of Jellied Eels, Battered Cod and Chips, some Cold Curry, and a splash of Gooseberry Tart, with a bite of Hard Cheese to finish, all washed down lashingly with Ginger Beer, if you get my drift?'
I don't know that I exactly expected Jingo to scream with delight - 'though I had picked the items I knew to be her Pet Dishes - but I did expect her to say something. I looked up with surpriZe when my list of 'Treats To Come' was met with silence ... and ... found that her attention was elsewhere ...
Jingo was gazing at the recently arrived waitress with the look of a Bitch that has just remembered where her favourite Bone is buried.
She was a tallish girl with soft, soulful brown eyes, and some kind of Express'o coffee-coloured skin . Nice figure and all that also. Rather decent hands too. Impeccably clean. I did not remember having seen her about before, and I must say she added Variety to the mostly off-white, pale and dull Illiberal Club environment.
'How about it Little Lassie?' I said to Jingo, being increasingly peckish myself, and being all for getting the meal order Booked and going on to the Serious Knife-and-Fork Work.
'Eh?!' said young Jingo absently.
I recited The Programme once more.
'Oh, yes, fine, fine' said Jingo. 'Anything, anything!'
The Dark Waitress pushed off to waitress elsewhere and Jingo turned to me with protruding eyes. 'I thought you said they weren't pretty Gertie Woofter!' she said reproachfully.
'Oh my heavens!' I said. 'You haven't fallen for anOther have you?! - and a Girl you have only just seen!'
'There are times, Gertie,' said young Jingo, 'when one look is enough - when passing through a Crowd, we meet Somebody's Eye/I and something seems to whisper ...'
As what seemed to be 'whisper'd trailed off into Jingo's private spaces, the hors d'oeuvres arrived, and we suspended further remarks in order to swoop on the Jellied Eels with some Vigour ... [']
...
+++
... open emails ...
From: "Alison Little" <Alison.Little@Express.co.uk>
To: "'philtal_uk@yahoo.com'" <philtal_uk@yahoo.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 15:25:41 -0000
for the flowers-to-be, thankyou?
...
+++
...
Anyway ...
Dr. ['Quaker'?] A[lison].L[ittle],
I remain feeling 'strange[r]y' Fond towards the Memory of You ... even 'though it has seemed you turned out ToB./2b/into a ['Troll'able'] 'Right-Wing "Bigot"' ...
[I have been at more than a few 'Islamophobia' forums at which D.Express Front Page Leads, some written by you, have been 'held up' - literally - as 'Examples'] ...
Nevermind.
[Even 'though you are 'despiZ'd' by some/many/most of my friends in/on the Left-Wing/Minority/Minorities/Under 'Classes' ...]
I Wish You ...
Best Wishes,
P[hilip].T[albot]
+++++
Journey of the marginal magi - or the 'ramblings' of three fairly foolish B-grade northern philosophers.
A cold coming together we had of it in the northern [skies?] place of learning, and it seemed to be the worst of times for such a journey, and it was such a long journey, the ways were deep and the courses were winding and more complex and strange than we had ever imagined, and the weather was terrible, so cold, so god-forsaken-seeming cold, in the dead of winter, in some almost forgotten provincial place that made us feel inferior, though maybe we were learning something about humility, and up and down and left and right and round and about we went, and it always seemed like there was no getting there, and we weren't even sure if there was any there to get to, and we crissed and we crossed and we cursed, yes we fucking cursed, and we double- and triple- and other multiples crossed each others' paths, or so it seemed, and drank too much, and smoked too much, sleeping in snatches, preferring to travel at night, and perhaps that travelling was just dreaming, but maybe there was something to be found in the dream states, they might reveal things, you could never say for sure, and then we went on to make our ways in the world, but although we got to other places, and took on responsibilities of sorts, and did things actively, and had things happen to us, we never seemed to find a way that was really leading anywhere, or so it often seemed, in night thoughts, which might just have been dreams, you never could tell for sure, and sometimes we heard voices singing in our ears, but maybe they were only radio sounds, saying that this was all folly.
Then, at a new dawn of sorts, we came down to a temperate place, wet, below the snow-line, which smelled of last night's take-away meals and too much alcohol consumed, but perhaps that was just prejudice, what we expected to find determining what we did find, ... and there was another running river, which did, in truth, it was not just a fancy, flow onwards and outwards to blend into the worldwide waterway ...
Bittersweet Tyne, bittersweet Wear, bittersweet Thames, ... bittersweet world-wide waterway ... flow on while we continue our wanderings ...
Three figures, which might be seen as trees in silhouette, poking into a midwinter skyscape ... all shades of blue from indigo to sky flowing into each other in a fluid dynamic system beyond adequate description or full comprehension ... it seemed to signify something, but of what we could not say ...
Cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting more drink and sex, and fires going out and being reignited ... and maybe it was just one more damned cigarette after another damned cigarette ...
And the platonic prick turned away from all that worldly striving, but he could never quite manage to give up the fags ...
'I always said you were a repressed homosexual,' said the existentialist, who could be apparently cruel tongued, but was essentially kind (the platonic realist knew something about essentials), even if she was over-prone to rushing to premature conclusions ... but aren't we all? and he had his own problems with premature rushes, as they both knew only too well...
And the quaker, who was lively and chatty, but didn't speak her mind much, and who was lovely, but often had dirty fingernails (strange how inconsequential seeming memories can linger longer than more consequential seeming ones) became a remotely famous expressive observer of the powerful and rich (a chief political correspondent, in other words)... but she still sang quietly of bleak mid-winters, in the prick's mind at least ... he seemed to see behind her peaceful and pleasant vitality some great fears and some secret sadnesses ... but that must be true of all ...
And the existentialist left the hypothetical life behind her and embarked on an active do-gooding career ... but apparently it just wasn't in her nature to do the thoughtlessly active life completely, so she occasionally returned to the contemplative life, when on sick leave with exhaustion - at least that was one way of interpreting it ...
A hard time we had of it ... or so we pretended sometimes ... but we were affluent, and middle-class, and well educated, and always had multiple-possibilities open to us - too many it sometimes seemed - and what we complained of was usually what we had chosen ... and our hard times were never, in truth, all that very hard.
But voices still sang in our ears saying: 'Maybe this is all folly.'
Had we come all that way, and would we go on all that way who knew how far further, for birth or for death?...
There was a birth, or seemed to have been one, we had plenty of evidence for, and no serious doubts about, that. But there was not enough information to come to other conclusions ...
It was impossible to say, as yet, why we had been gone or been led all that way, along those infinitely complex routes, which were different for each of us, even though there were similarities ... but then, as we knew, or guessed, the 'why?' questions were always the most difficult, and were perhaps beyond answerings ...
Most of this was a long time ago, I remember, or have to remind myself, but it continues, and past flows into, and determines, present and future ... and if the past is, as some suggest, best dismissed and forgotten, then what of the present and future, which become past all too quickly? ...
It was all, some might say, satisfactory, but not really good enough ... so we continued in search of better ...
So the semi-super-semi-shitty sages got all mixed up...
Six hands on a door, pushing open, pulling shut, touching but not linking ... and which hand was attached to which body?...
They were supposed to be there at the same time and place doing the same thing - doing philosophy, that is, loving wisdom in their own peculiar ways, which were foolish, but not entirely so...
But the likely lass came late, or the other two arrived early ...
And the likely lad shouldn't have been there that year, he should have been somewhere else, or he should have come later ...
And the weird sister shouldn't have been there at all, she didn't have the grades, even though she was perhaps the cleverest of the lot, and she should have waited, retaken, and arrived later, or gone somewhere else, like the other weird sister...
Was the likely lass, that often silent thinker, the only one to get it right? had she had worked it out more quietly and carefully than the other two, who were always mouthing off and rushing things, one way or another? Or, as the 2-1 majority suggested, was she the minority that got it wrong, and messed it up for the others?
And it always seemed as if there was no getting there, and we were not even sure that there was any there to get to, because every time we got to some desired there, it didn't seem to be what we had anticipated ... there always seemed to be something disappointing, which made us suspect that it was not the there that we had set out to reach ...
We had much more evidence - too much it sometimes seemed - but the doubts grew ... which was surprising, because rumour (which we said we didn't listen to, while listening to it carefully) had suggested that with more evidence, doubts would reduce...
And experience, which was supposed to be the most important source of knowledge (or at least more reliable than other sources) seemed only to complicate matters further ...
There was a birth, that seemed a sustainable assumption ... it was (whatever 'it' was) so it must have started, or at least have been previously so different that a change from that state to this state, to which the word 'birth' could be applied, was alomst certain to have occurred ...
But where was it leading? ...
The only certainty seemed to be that something was taking its course ...
And so .. meanwhile ... we continue to take our courses ... never sure of the extent to which they are self-determined and of the extent to which they are imposed on the self by external forces ... and ...
... it is such a long journey ... and yet it seems all too short ... and there is so much happening during it .. and yet it seems that nothing much happens ... and voices keep asking:
'Is this all folly?'
The road thins out here ... and a narrowing gorge begrudges a way through ...
But random walkers can get around most obstacles eventually ...
The platonic prick said: 'Music raised me to new heights of love ... until that moment, nothing had so bound me in such sweet chains ...'
It was, perhaps, a rash statement - but now and then, through calm and cloudless skies, a sudden streak of fire cuts the dark, catching the eye that watches listlessly.
He continued: 'Vivid crowning beauties grow in strength as consciousness becomes more appreciative of them.'
The others looked at him with impatience, and, eventually, he agreed that he had digressed enough. It was time to turn their minds back to the road of truth, and to adjust discussion to what time was left to them - but that was not simple.
Names change ... labels change ...
Or, as the pseudo-existentialist (concluding naturally, she believed) put it: 'Time passes, people change.'
True enough.
All in all ... it changes ... but the essence of it all remains the same ...
So...
The quaker, the catholic, the anglican [words meaning many things (and not necessarily indicating faiths), while also being merely nominal signifiers of particular, relatively insignificant, individualized human beings] wandered in and out of relative obscurity, and each others' and other people's lives, and noticed a few things that nobody had ever noticed before, and never would again, and missed many other matters that they might have noticed, but didn't.
While the voices sometimes sang in their ears, saying that this was maybe all folly.
'Six hands at an open door...'
But...
There might have been more, and the names might have been different, and ...
The time might not have yet come ...
Or it might have been and gone ... [and too much has, most probably]
Or, next time, after a reshuffle, it might all be different ...
One name might have been Zed ... who was a typically British delightfully mixed up mess ... iridescent, polyglottic, cosmopolitan ... a free-wheeling wild daisy ... daisy ... on an old-fashioned upright English bicycle ... riding to the unifying international news agency building through a changing London docklands on an island of sorts (which was nominally a home for dogs) and near the time centre at Greenwich ... and nearby lived mostly ignored people who would not recognise her as a fellow English rose because their own blooming possibilities had been neglected ... (and not far away in time and place, under a futuristic light railway bridge, a multicultural ideas spreading news agent was murdered by ethnic nationalists with closed minds who couldn't escape from their past prejudices) ... Z was a far from unnecessary letter ...
[... which I would like to send, but I am careful about decorums, and I do not know a proper form of address for her ...]
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
[.. but then Mary has her own kinds of off-handedness ... and distancing techniques ...]
Or there might have been another A ... a very sophisticated Irish named (and double-barrelled) self-styled working class lass ... who encouraged him to go with the flow with kind words and curving flowing limb motions ... and who walked alongside him in a slightly absurd part-falling manner (which might have had something to do with the vaguely ridiculous thick-souled shoes she was wearing) ... but with her, as with others, there seemed to be a mountainous obstacle course in the space between them ... which even a veteran rambler could not find a route through .. or around ... and perhaps it was better to maintain a distance between ...
[... and off Nessie flowed into the sunset /sunrise with her proeviously displaced bobby-dazzling-silver-buckled-sailor-boy sort of attachment ... which was pleasing but saddening for me ...]
And ... I do not overlook the delightfully expansive Welsh possibilities ... where words flow and flow deliciously ... and the letter arrangements seem to pile up almost randomly [but there are always ordering patterns holding things together, of course] ...
And ...there are all the other wonderful alternative possibilities in the other bits and pieces [... genes .. ethnicity ... culture ...] flwoing into the making of the presently flowering British rose to be considered [... proper consideration never ends ...]
{And anyone who thinks Brits essentially 'Anglo-Saxon' is surely the smallest minded of fools}
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Call them what you will ... ally, catty, filly ... or make them up as you go along ... angels, imps, aliens ... or (as it actually seems to go) rearrange bits of the previously existing into new patterns ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times the solid things fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
... we get by and keep on keeping on with a little help from our friends all is on little loves and small acts of kindness and big hugs pulling mussels from shells and pulling muscles in other words squeeze me you know how to do that Annie and get your gun she's passed it's a miracle her paint's all over town and Alison my aim is true I know this world is killing you and her and him and me and OK I was just Cathy's clown on a hillside desolate will nature make a man of me yet visions of swastikas two new pence to have a go and fall wanking to the floor and frigging in the rigging while there are footsteps on the dancefloor the next time I'll be true I heard on the grapevine that rumour had it that I just called to say I love you thank you for giving me the best day of my life and thank you for calling inquiries while I got stuck in the moment records stick stuck records bells on our fingers ask not whom we toll them for we shall have music wherever we go on go on go on at last the go on show at last but not the end there is no end to wandering I would go out tonight but I have not got a thing to wear but don't you forget about me as you walk on by if you see me walking down the street walk on walk on by with love in your heart and take a walk on the wild side and you just know that bitch won't fuck again but say it ain't so Joe say it Joe eh Joe Hey Joe where are you going with that gun in your hand excuse me while I take another face from the ancient gallery and kiss the sky often mistaken for kiss this guy kiss me kiss me you know how to please me yeah yeah kiss me in the milky twilight you wear that dress and I will wear those shoes and she was last seen the last time I ever saw her face wearing stop me stop me if you've heard this one before hey hey hey what's going on we're sailing off the edge of the world living like Fu Manchu there's nothing else to do maybe baby we know where we are going once in a lifetime on the road to nowhere or funky town or kook city and live life from a window just taking in the view all around the world looking for you and you just stayed in your room that day that day when we took off our clothes and you were crying and the stupid things you said and I said we were birds of paradise and you saw the whole of the moon pink pink pink moon no matter where I roam I will return to my British roses before the sky closes on them and opens on others and no one will ever take me from she and she been a long time been a long time been a lonely lonely lonely long time under the northern skies waiting and wondering and wandering on for more life in a northern town wandering on and maybe tomorow maybe someday we'll get by ...
... jigsaw feeling ... has me reeling ... which may be lurching desperately ... or which may be a kind of dancing.
What triangles ...
The solitary sage of Walden (or there or there abouts - or some other place of concorde) pointed out that triangles of extraordinary size were set up when two people by chance (as it might seem) separated by many earthly miles looked at the same distant star at the same earthly instant ...
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
Cathy and her clown walked together near the water's edge. Blurs from some perspectives, dots, or even less from others. Viewed from some places and times they become recognizable human forms, though mostly in outline, devoid of many details. Further perspective shifts reveal complexitity upon completity. It is possible to conceive of a multiverse perspective ... all possible perspectives at the same instant.
Two little people on a coastal walk in a small town, on the margins, but at the centre of things ... So it is with all: any point, any person, any event, is central and marginal and everywhere in between.
She is small and short-stepping. He is tall and long-striding. The long and the short of it. Big he who is not so big and small she who is not so small. They do not seem well matched. Their mortions are not very synchronized-seeming, as she is too fond of pointing out for his comfort (and hers perhaps too). She walks close to him, often bumping into him rather clumsily. Mostly she talks, he listens. A deluge of words. Waves crashing on to the shore. Her voice rises in pitch and and increases in tempo as she continues. She seems anxious to get things said, while she still has the chance, while there is still time.
They walk in no particular direction, to nowhere in particular. Separate random walks are taking place, which, since they are walking together, in however an unsynchronised and clumsy and bumping manner, become a shared walk. They walk on the edge of land and sea, near a pub called the Water's Edge. Human naming systems help to make a sort of sense of things, providing reference points and an order of sorts.
They seem on the edge of things, in a marginal zone, a place of transition. and they are nearing the edge of their time together. Soon they'll separate, perhaps forever. So it seems she has to get her words said. She talks of people on the edge of things, marginalised people, known as the 'UnderClass' for want of a more human label, whom she's encountered in the early stages of her training as a probation officer. It seems important to her to let him know of what she has witnessed. He's a bit puzzled by that. She's leaving him behind, but wants to fill his mind with her thoughts and experiences. She's planting trace memories perhaps.
Another way of seeing it ... on the shores of the cosmic ocean a strangely beautiful well-matched asymetric couple mess things up.
(This much seems true: new life comes from asymmetry - the evidence is all around. Fear death by symmetry - when all the complex, messy slightly disordered asymmetrical unities break up, and 'it' becomes a spread of equally distanced particle fragments drifting ever further apart.)
Random walks
The myriad contingencies of a short walk in a small town.
But when you consider them with an open mind everything can seem to 'Connect' and every part seems integral to the whole.
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
Perhaps we are often acted upon by 'Organising Forces', beyond our understanding.
This long watch, which dog-like he kept ... Soon the long wished for signs might relieve his passive toils ... beacons gleaming through long recurring nights ... Beacons .. which might only be cigarettes ... These walls could recall strange things .. and much else...
Like a shrunken leaf ... that is not really dying ... all recycles .. flows .. changes ... feebly feeling ... like a dream that walks by day ... the persuasive breath of memories involuntarily recalled ... mostly stirring the heart with songs .. sometimes sensed as beautiful .. sometimes not ...
Like shapes in dreams he wandered through the years, seeming random, planless, his 'forethought' in chains ...
But the vision of the birds might yet work its end into bliss ...
But contraries might yet blast darkly first...
This way the part-time seer hymned, dubiously mixing doom and bliss, dark mingling with light ... and much confusion and obscurity ...
Sharing with the way-haunting birds, which seemed to signal something ... he was responding to the strains .. which could not be merely sounds .. there had to be some meaning, some purpose in everything ... the singings sounded of sorrows and glad days ... and of good times that might yet shame the bad.
Meanwhile ... a most unpleasant surprise was in store for the platonic prick ...
...just as the likely lass began yawning as he was telling her all sorts of amusing stories that had happend to him at different times and places, and even referring once to the Greek cynical philospher Diogenes, the weird sister appeared from one of the back rooms. Whether she had torn herself away from a cold collation, or from the little green drawing room, where some postgraduates' conversation had become more alarming to her, whether she had come of her own free will, or whether she had been thrown out of her previous environment in embarrassing circumstances, which she might or might not later reveal ... whatever the cause or collection of part-causes that had brought her from some other place to this place, she apeared to be cheerful and in the best of spirits. And she was holding on to the arm of the devil's advocate, or one who was assuming that role, for the time being, and in the particular circumstances in which they now all found themselves. Yet he appeared unhappy. Maybe she had been dragging him along with her (and even perhaps attempting to pull him to the floor) for some time. Whatever the cause, assuming there was one, the poor putter-of-the-case-against certainly seemed discomforted, for he kept attempting to turn around, while his eyebrows beetled in all directions, and his eyes seemed to be searching for a way to excape from this amicable arm-in-arm promenade with the weird sister.
It was, indeed, quite an intolerable situation. The platonic prick saw no ther way out of it than to gulp down quickly, with forced convivialtiy, two cups of coffee, with were, of course, laced with red wine, while he kept on telling the most unlikely stories. The devil's advocate became ever more disconcerted, but still could find no way of excape. The weird sister laughed and scowled at the fun of it all. The kindly quaker remained, as often, seemingly calmly silent.
Bridge buildings ...
Ally and philly were sitting together in a bar, which might have been called The Bridge (but that was actually another place, another time) and she began openly to speak her mind to him for once ... The wonderful flow of words enters him and fills him and swells him, and the words change her in his mind ... she'll never seem the same again. After an hour or two, he feels obliged to say something about himself, but when he attempts to interrupt her word-flow, she says, 'No ... I'll speak' ... and the wonderful warming and expansive words continue to come out of her, and to close the space between them, and to fill him with a her glow, which he will never forget, even though, for various reasons, they do not see much of each other afterwards.
She was possibly the least malicious person he had ever met, but ally was the one person to speak negative things about catty into his ears - telling him that catty 'was just not worth it' and that he 'could do better than that woman'. And when he thought feelingly about it then, and for a long time afterwards, he saw multiple possible meanings in what she said ... but he could not accept the proposition that any human being was 'just not worth it', because all are worth it, or else all are worth nothing ... and maybe that was just quibbling ... but ... that was the way it was with him.
Years later, (2002 in fact) pally ally cropped up in India and Pakistan (this is no fiction [and is if to prove she was a real person, not a symbol, in 2003 Alison supported the dehumanizing and illegal - by the normal conventions of international law - U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq) at a time of tension, when some feared the possibility of a nuclear war. She was part of a leading world stateman's 'travelling entourage' (her words) ... to most a unnoticed face in a crowd ... but to the platonic prick she was a symbol of peace ... she carried love with her and no hatred that he could imagine. And oddly enough (or not) tensions on the Indian sub-continent reduced afterwards, and the threat of nuclear war faded. Of course many others were involved. The key seemed to be: not the 'great' men's [there were, alas, still too few 'great' women on the world's stage] words and deeds ... nor even the charms (which were considerable) of his known female peace symbol ... but all those millions of little loves of little lives of mostly kindly mostly decent people who didn't actually want to slaughter others, or to be slaughtered themselves - maybe they all worked together, without quite knowing it, to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the curious cat cared so much about the marginalized people whom she worked with (and for) that it once (or more) almost broke her. She saw hellish visions of 'bottomless pits of need and deprivation' ...
And there can seem to be no end to the suffering in the private hells of even an affluent society.
But even with such dispiriting thoughts in mind to discourage her, she returned to work and did little things to help people and to fill up the void bit by bit.
In the near past that was a long time ago cat wrote many letters to phil and complained that he never wrote enough to her ... it was a complaint that mixed fairness with unfairness, as most do ...
In her letters, as far as he could remember, she only ever quoted him one line of poetry, from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'... I am a part of all that I have met ... '
As she might or might not have gone on to point out, the reverse it also true:
... All that I have met is a part of me ...
[In passing, it is probably fair to note that Catherine does not have much literary appreciation ... and although she seems to believe herself manneredly superior, she does not follow the rules of polite communication ... and her cruelty sometimes outweights her kindness ...
(Matter of factly, she suggests as a title for these ramblings 'Ravings of a Madman?' - anyone who has used up time reading this far can judge how apposite her suggestion is).]
The surprising thing was that while Cat and Al studied much the same subject in much the same place at much the same time, and wandered more or less contemporaneously in much the same streets of at least two other cities ... and had much in common ... and must have crossed paths occasionally ... and had even perhaps caused each other some hurt of sorts, via their connections through Phil ... they never fully met (unless a trick was missed) .. which is something a shame, because they had much good to share with each other ...
It can seem like nonsense, but it does eventually seem to resolve itself into a sort of sense ...
... for a while ...
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of 'amusement' might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It can seem foolish to speculate at random about the narrowest and widest matters ... but what else can you do?
...
Even if it is perhaps a hopeless and unrewarding endeavour ...
...
And even if there can seem little point to what can often appear to be merely enduring for the sake of endurance ...
...
Pass me another cigarette, please ... and ... do you have a light, please? ...
[... January 2002 ... September 2003 ...]
+++++
p.s. what[so]ever became of 'COPY'-takers ... who needs them in the digital age? ... they come, they go ... and who gives a 'SHIT' when they lose their jobs ... so long as you keep yours/years [when you have survived some 'transition' from 'this' to 'that' ... so it goes?!] ... see you in
pps Ever read Dante's 'PurgeATory'...?, Alison ... NeverMind ...
The owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star newspapers is to cut 550 jobs, 12% of its workforce, because of falling income amid reduced demand for advertising in its titles.
Reach, formerly known as Trinity Mirror, said its group revenue had tumbled by 27.5% during the second quarter, compared with a year earlier, as newspaper sales and advertising plummeted during the coronavirus crisis.
The company, which also owns hundreds of regional papers including the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, said more people had been reading its products online over the past three months, but this was not enough to offset the loss in income.
Reach said more than 2.5 million customers have registered to read its papers online, and it intends to increase this to 10 million by the end of 2022, against an earlier target of 7 million.
The group said the job cuts and other changes would cost it £20m, but save it £35m a year.
“Structural change in the media sector has accelerated during the pandemic,” said Jim Mullen, the chief executive of Reach, adding that the company had seen increased adoption of its digital products, “however, due to reduced advertising demand, we have not seen commensurate increases in digital revenue”.
He added: “Regrettably, these plans involve a reduction in our workforce and we will ensure all impacted colleagues are treated with fairness and respect throughout the forthcoming consultation process.”
Journalists in the company’s editorial teams are expected to be affected by the job cuts, as well as staff in the advertising and central operations departments.
The company said that its editorial department “will move to a more centralised structure, bringing together national and regional teams across print and digital to significantly increase efficiency and remove duplication”.
Staff at Reach are understood to be concerned about the plans to create a single editorial division, rather than the current split between national and regional papers.
It is also understood that the national and regional circulation departments will be brought together.
Employees were sent a memo by the group’s editor-in-chief, Lloyd Embley, and chief operating officer, Alan Edmunds, informing them that the company expects to cut around 325 staff from editorial and circulation.
The note said the restructuring plans “will have implications for everyone in our editorial, circulation and printing teams – both regionally and nationally”.
Reach has announced that it plans fewer locations and a simpler management structure for its local commercial and finance teams as it seeks to cut costs.
Staff at regional newspapers are thought to be concerned about the future of local offices, after many of them have worked from home during the pandemic.
Workers have been told that Reach is considering whether remote working should become permanent, and that the company will update them on its plans in the autumn.
Newspaper circulations have begun to increase, said Reach, as the government has eased lockdown restrictions, although they remain significantly lower than levels before Covid-19.
Reach said that the changes at the company will allow it to end the temporary pay cuts for staff, although a 20% reduction will continue for its chief executive, chief financial officer and other board members.
Journalists at Reach’s newspapers said in June they were considering taking legal action against executives after their wages were reduced by 10% at the start of April, which they claimed was “without consultation or consent” and with no reduction to their workload.
Several other news organisations have forced staff to take pay cuts or have announced job cuts amid a slide in revenue since the start of the pandemic.
+++++
open emails:
To: Alison.Little@Express.co.uk
From: philtal_uk@yahoo.com
[An 'X.Press' Special ... {?!}]
Hi Alison,
Haven't written to you for a while ...
I ReViewed this Plum [Pudding Club] 'Pastiche' the other day, while browsing through some Old[e] E-mails ... and thought/felt of 'YOU'/you ...
['] I last ran into young Jingo Little in the smoking room of the Senior Illiberal Club.
She was lying back in an arm-chair with her mouth open and a pretty vacant expression in her eyes ... while a grey-haired dame in the middle-spreading distance watched her with such disgust that I concluded Jingo must have pinched her favourite seat.
That's the worse thing of being in a strange club - without intending it, you find yourself constantly trampling on the vested interests of the Elder Inhabitants.
'Hello face!' I cried.
'Cheerio ugly!' she replied.
Despite what she said, I sat down beside her and settled down to have a few quick ones before lunch ...
Background to all this was that once a year the committee of the [A] B.'s C[lub] decides that the old base could do with a wash and brush up and so they shoo us out, and dump us down for a few weeks in some other institution. This time we were nesting at the Senior Illiberal, and, personally, I had found the strain pretty fearful. I mean, when you've got used to a club where everything's nice and cheery and easy-going, and where, if you want to attract a girl's attention, you heave a bit of bread at her, it kind of damps you to come to a place where the youngest member is about 88 [= 'Two Fat Ladies' - in non-P.C. Bingo Lingo one of the favoured forms of dialogue amongst the Old[e]sters@theSeniorIlliberal] and it isn't considered Good Form to talk to anyone unless you went through the Korean War and/or Cuban Missile Crisis together. Because of that, in spite of her dismissiveness, it was a relief to come across Jingo ...
After a somewhat pained silence, lasting who knows how long, we started to talk in hushed voices.
'This club,' I said, 'is The Limit.'
'It's the Elephant's Backside,' agreed young Jingo. 'I believe the old girl over by the window has been dead three days, but I don't like to mention it in case it is considered Bad Form.'
I Diverted: 'Have you lunched here yet?'
'No. Why?'
'They have waitresses instead of waiters.'
'Good golly Mr Woofter! I thought that went out with the closure of Spare Rib!'
Bingo mused on this for a moment, then straightened her dress absently.
'Er ... are they pretty girls?' she said [conspiratorially].
'No,' I replied [deflatingly].
She seemed disappointed for a while, but soon pulled round.
'I haven't a Bean, you know,' she said suddenly.
I startled.
'Hasn't your auntie forgiven you yet?'
'Not yet, confound her!'
You see, young Jingo had had a bit of a dust-up with Lady Littleham, her fabulously rich Great Auntie, resulting a siz[e]able portion of her Family Allowance being knocked off. I was sorry to hear the row was still on, because I had thought it over. I resolved to do the impoverished Little Lass well with 'Festive' Board/Bored, and scanned the Menu with some intentness when The Waitress finally rolled up with it.
'How would this do you, Jingo?' I said at length. 'A bowl of Jellied Eels, Battered Cod and Chips, some Cold Curry, and a splash of Gooseberry Tart, with a bite of Hard Cheese to finish, all washed down lashingly with Ginger Beer, if you get my drift?'
I don't know that I exactly expected Jingo to scream with delight - 'though I had picked the items I knew to be her Pet Dishes - but I did expect her to say something. I looked up with surpriZe when my list of 'Treats To Come' was met with silence ... and ... found that her attention was elsewhere ...
Jingo was gazing at the recently arrived waitress with the look of a Bitch that has just remembered where her favourite Bone is buried.
She was a tallish girl with soft, soulful brown eyes, and some kind of Express'o coffee-coloured skin . Nice figure and all that also. Rather decent hands too. Impeccably clean. I did not remember having seen her about before, and I must say she added Variety to the mostly off-white, pale and dull Illiberal Club environment.
'How about it Little Lassie?' I said to Jingo, being increasingly peckish myself, and being all for getting the meal order Booked and going on to the Serious Knife-and-Fork Work.
'Eh?!' said young Jingo absently.
I recited The Programme once more.
'Oh, yes, fine, fine' said Jingo. 'Anything, anything!'
The Dark Waitress pushed off to waitress elsewhere and Jingo turned to me with protruding eyes. 'I thought you said they weren't pretty Gertie Woofter!' she said reproachfully.
'Oh my heavens!' I said. 'You haven't fallen for anOther have you?! - and a Girl you have only just seen!'
'There are times, Gertie,' said young Jingo, 'when one look is enough - when passing through a Crowd, we meet Somebody's Eye/I and something seems to whisper ...'
As what seemed to be 'whisper'd trailed off into Jingo's private spaces, the hors d'oeuvres arrived, and we suspended further remarks in order to swoop on the Jellied Eels with some Vigour ... [']
...
+++
... open emails ...
From: "Alison Little" <Alison.Little@Express.co.uk>
To: "'philtal_uk@yahoo.com'" <philtal_uk@yahoo.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 15:25:41 -0000
for the flowers-to-be, thankyou?
...
+++
...
Anyway ...
Dr. ['Quaker'?] A[lison].L[ittle],
I remain feeling 'strange[r]y' Fond towards the Memory of You ... even 'though it has seemed you turned out ToB./2b/into a ['Troll'able'] 'Right-Wing "Bigot"' ...
[I have been at more than a few 'Islamophobia' forums at which D.Express Front Page Leads, some written by you, have been 'held up' - literally - as 'Examples'] ...
Nevermind.
[Even 'though you are 'despiZ'd' by some/many/most of my friends in/on the Left-Wing/Minority/Minorities/Under 'Classes' ...]
I Wish You ...
Best Wishes,
P[hilip].T[albot]
+++++
Journey of the marginal magi - or the 'ramblings' of three fairly foolish B-grade northern philosophers.
A cold coming together we had of it in the northern [skies?] place of learning, and it seemed to be the worst of times for such a journey, and it was such a long journey, the ways were deep and the courses were winding and more complex and strange than we had ever imagined, and the weather was terrible, so cold, so god-forsaken-seeming cold, in the dead of winter, in some almost forgotten provincial place that made us feel inferior, though maybe we were learning something about humility, and up and down and left and right and round and about we went, and it always seemed like there was no getting there, and we weren't even sure if there was any there to get to, and we crissed and we crossed and we cursed, yes we fucking cursed, and we double- and triple- and other multiples crossed each others' paths, or so it seemed, and drank too much, and smoked too much, sleeping in snatches, preferring to travel at night, and perhaps that travelling was just dreaming, but maybe there was something to be found in the dream states, they might reveal things, you could never say for sure, and then we went on to make our ways in the world, but although we got to other places, and took on responsibilities of sorts, and did things actively, and had things happen to us, we never seemed to find a way that was really leading anywhere, or so it often seemed, in night thoughts, which might just have been dreams, you never could tell for sure, and sometimes we heard voices singing in our ears, but maybe they were only radio sounds, saying that this was all folly.
Then, at a new dawn of sorts, we came down to a temperate place, wet, below the snow-line, which smelled of last night's take-away meals and too much alcohol consumed, but perhaps that was just prejudice, what we expected to find determining what we did find, ... and there was another running river, which did, in truth, it was not just a fancy, flow onwards and outwards to blend into the worldwide waterway ...
Bittersweet Tyne, bittersweet Wear, bittersweet Thames, ... bittersweet world-wide waterway ... flow on while we continue our wanderings ...
Three figures, which might be seen as trees in silhouette, poking into a midwinter skyscape ... all shades of blue from indigo to sky flowing into each other in a fluid dynamic system beyond adequate description or full comprehension ... it seemed to signify something, but of what we could not say ...
Cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting more drink and sex, and fires going out and being reignited ... and maybe it was just one more damned cigarette after another damned cigarette ...
And the platonic prick turned away from all that worldly striving, but he could never quite manage to give up the fags ...
'I always said you were a repressed homosexual,' said the existentialist, who could be apparently cruel tongued, but was essentially kind (the platonic realist knew something about essentials), even if she was over-prone to rushing to premature conclusions ... but aren't we all? and he had his own problems with premature rushes, as they both knew only too well...
And the quaker, who was lively and chatty, but didn't speak her mind much, and who was lovely, but often had dirty fingernails (strange how inconsequential seeming memories can linger longer than more consequential seeming ones) became a remotely famous expressive observer of the powerful and rich (a chief political correspondent, in other words)... but she still sang quietly of bleak mid-winters, in the prick's mind at least ... he seemed to see behind her peaceful and pleasant vitality some great fears and some secret sadnesses ... but that must be true of all ...
And the existentialist left the hypothetical life behind her and embarked on an active do-gooding career ... but apparently it just wasn't in her nature to do the thoughtlessly active life completely, so she occasionally returned to the contemplative life, when on sick leave with exhaustion - at least that was one way of interpreting it ...
A hard time we had of it ... or so we pretended sometimes ... but we were affluent, and middle-class, and well educated, and always had multiple-possibilities open to us - too many it sometimes seemed - and what we complained of was usually what we had chosen ... and our hard times were never, in truth, all that very hard.
But voices still sang in our ears saying: 'Maybe this is all folly.'
Had we come all that way, and would we go on all that way who knew how far further, for birth or for death?...
There was a birth, or seemed to have been one, we had plenty of evidence for, and no serious doubts about, that. But there was not enough information to come to other conclusions ...
It was impossible to say, as yet, why we had been gone or been led all that way, along those infinitely complex routes, which were different for each of us, even though there were similarities ... but then, as we knew, or guessed, the 'why?' questions were always the most difficult, and were perhaps beyond answerings ...
Most of this was a long time ago, I remember, or have to remind myself, but it continues, and past flows into, and determines, present and future ... and if the past is, as some suggest, best dismissed and forgotten, then what of the present and future, which become past all too quickly? ...
It was all, some might say, satisfactory, but not really good enough ... so we continued in search of better ...
So the semi-super-semi-shitty sages got all mixed up...
Six hands on a door, pushing open, pulling shut, touching but not linking ... and which hand was attached to which body?...
They were supposed to be there at the same time and place doing the same thing - doing philosophy, that is, loving wisdom in their own peculiar ways, which were foolish, but not entirely so...
But the likely lass came late, or the other two arrived early ...
And the likely lad shouldn't have been there that year, he should have been somewhere else, or he should have come later ...
And the weird sister shouldn't have been there at all, she didn't have the grades, even though she was perhaps the cleverest of the lot, and she should have waited, retaken, and arrived later, or gone somewhere else, like the other weird sister...
Was the likely lass, that often silent thinker, the only one to get it right? had she had worked it out more quietly and carefully than the other two, who were always mouthing off and rushing things, one way or another? Or, as the 2-1 majority suggested, was she the minority that got it wrong, and messed it up for the others?
And it always seemed as if there was no getting there, and we were not even sure that there was any there to get to, because every time we got to some desired there, it didn't seem to be what we had anticipated ... there always seemed to be something disappointing, which made us suspect that it was not the there that we had set out to reach ...
We had much more evidence - too much it sometimes seemed - but the doubts grew ... which was surprising, because rumour (which we said we didn't listen to, while listening to it carefully) had suggested that with more evidence, doubts would reduce...
And experience, which was supposed to be the most important source of knowledge (or at least more reliable than other sources) seemed only to complicate matters further ...
There was a birth, that seemed a sustainable assumption ... it was (whatever 'it' was) so it must have started, or at least have been previously so different that a change from that state to this state, to which the word 'birth' could be applied, was alomst certain to have occurred ...
But where was it leading? ...
The only certainty seemed to be that something was taking its course ...
And so .. meanwhile ... we continue to take our courses ... never sure of the extent to which they are self-determined and of the extent to which they are imposed on the self by external forces ... and ...
... it is such a long journey ... and yet it seems all too short ... and there is so much happening during it .. and yet it seems that nothing much happens ... and voices keep asking:
'Is this all folly?'
The road thins out here ... and a narrowing gorge begrudges a way through ...
But random walkers can get around most obstacles eventually ...
The platonic prick said: 'Music raised me to new heights of love ... until that moment, nothing had so bound me in such sweet chains ...'
It was, perhaps, a rash statement - but now and then, through calm and cloudless skies, a sudden streak of fire cuts the dark, catching the eye that watches listlessly.
He continued: 'Vivid crowning beauties grow in strength as consciousness becomes more appreciative of them.'
The others looked at him with impatience, and, eventually, he agreed that he had digressed enough. It was time to turn their minds back to the road of truth, and to adjust discussion to what time was left to them - but that was not simple.
Names change ... labels change ...
Or, as the pseudo-existentialist (concluding naturally, she believed) put it: 'Time passes, people change.'
True enough.
All in all ... it changes ... but the essence of it all remains the same ...
So...
The quaker, the catholic, the anglican [words meaning many things (and not necessarily indicating faiths), while also being merely nominal signifiers of particular, relatively insignificant, individualized human beings] wandered in and out of relative obscurity, and each others' and other people's lives, and noticed a few things that nobody had ever noticed before, and never would again, and missed many other matters that they might have noticed, but didn't.
While the voices sometimes sang in their ears, saying that this was maybe all folly.
'Six hands at an open door...'
But...
There might have been more, and the names might have been different, and ...
The time might not have yet come ...
Or it might have been and gone ... [and too much has, most probably]
Or, next time, after a reshuffle, it might all be different ...
One name might have been Zed ... who was a typically British delightfully mixed up mess ... iridescent, polyglottic, cosmopolitan ... a free-wheeling wild daisy ... daisy ... on an old-fashioned upright English bicycle ... riding to the unifying international news agency building through a changing London docklands on an island of sorts (which was nominally a home for dogs) and near the time centre at Greenwich ... and nearby lived mostly ignored people who would not recognise her as a fellow English rose because their own blooming possibilities had been neglected ... (and not far away in time and place, under a futuristic light railway bridge, a multicultural ideas spreading news agent was murdered by ethnic nationalists with closed minds who couldn't escape from their past prejudices) ... Z was a far from unnecessary letter ...
[... which I would like to send, but I am careful about decorums, and I do not know a proper form of address for her ...]
Another might have been M ... a sharp-tongued, snub-nosed Scottish socratic ... passionate and compassionate ... much concerned about The Issues ... who liked dialectics in non-standard dialects ... and complained that talking to him could be like talking to herself ... and who wrote letters with reverse strip-teases in them ... she sat in bed writing to him and put on an extra jumper and extra socks and ... well he was cold-seeming ... and he had once sat on a bed with her when she was wearing a partly transparent nightie and he had pretended very carefully not to see through it ...
[.. but then Mary has her own kinds of off-handedness ... and distancing techniques ...]
Or there might have been another A ... a very sophisticated Irish named (and double-barrelled) self-styled working class lass ... who encouraged him to go with the flow with kind words and curving flowing limb motions ... and who walked alongside him in a slightly absurd part-falling manner (which might have had something to do with the vaguely ridiculous thick-souled shoes she was wearing) ... but with her, as with others, there seemed to be a mountainous obstacle course in the space between them ... which even a veteran rambler could not find a route through .. or around ... and perhaps it was better to maintain a distance between ...
[... and off Nessie flowed into the sunset /sunrise with her proeviously displaced bobby-dazzling-silver-buckled-sailor-boy sort of attachment ... which was pleasing but saddening for me ...]
And ... I do not overlook the delightfully expansive Welsh possibilities ... where words flow and flow deliciously ... and the letter arrangements seem to pile up almost randomly [but there are always ordering patterns holding things together, of course] ...
And ...there are all the other wonderful alternative possibilities in the other bits and pieces [... genes .. ethnicity ... culture ...] flwoing into the making of the presently flowering British rose to be considered [... proper consideration never ends ...]
{And anyone who thinks Brits essentially 'Anglo-Saxon' is surely the smallest minded of fools}
And ...
You get the odd glimpse of the infinite complexity of it all ... but then you lose it ... and you go on with your small-scale guess-work ...
So ...
Call them what you will ... ally, catty, filly ... or make them up as you go along ... angels, imps, aliens ... or (as it actually seems to go) rearrange bits of the previously existing into new patterns ...
They travelled.
Chilly awakenings under canvas. Buses that never turned up. Dreary, slow, often-stopping local trains. The dizzy kaleidoscope of landscapes and ruins. Cities that changed before their eyes as they stopped to stare for an instant. Seascapes and skyscapes. Ships coming in not laden with gold. Flowing patterns of lives in motion in a world in motion, with the increasing density of everyday experience seeming to render all experiences increasingly transient and superficial.
And...
Each found places there were satisfactory for a while, then unsatisfactory.
So they went to other places - or to spaces between things that, for a while at least, they could call their own.
And then one day, or it might have been many days, they seemed to find themselves among people clutching gods of sorts that they did not quite believe in any more, or which, one way or another, or in several (even many) ways did not satisfy all their needs of belief.
It seemed to be a time of general and particular confusion ... or of reconsideration ... or of reviews ... out of which a new synthesis of older ways of thinking might emerge.
If the hypothesis of a fully transcendent creator implanting motion in the system of extended bodies were judged no long sustainable, then it would seem an instrinsic characteristic of the extended or spatial world that everything within it is constituted of particular proportions of motion and rest - which suggests that motion must be essential to and inseparable from the nature and constitution of extended things. The proportions of motion and rest within the system as a whole must be constant, since there could be no external cause to explain any change in the system; but within the subordinate parts of the system the proportions of motion and rest are constantly changing in the interaction of these parts among each other.
Spin spin spin out the ever-changing (and ever so easy to misrepresent and misinterpret) system of Spinoza, or something like it.
Minds in turmoil, how they longed to embrace simples. Many times they rushed towards them, desperate to hold on to solid forms. Many times the solid things fluttered through clutching fingers, sifting away, like shadows, dissolving like dreams, and each time the griefs cut to the hearts sharper, and they cried out incoherent words, which winged into the darkness.
Now down they came to the water's edge, streaming tears ... drops of sea-stuff returning to the world-wide waterway.
Rumour has it that if you throw a cup of water into the sea and return a decade or so later to scoop up a fresh cup of water from the same (which is not of course the same) bit of the sea, then, despite all the churning and mixing that has occurred in the sea over the decade or so, the cup will contain some molecules of the water you threw into the sea at the earlier time. It seems unlikely, but statistical probabilities suggest it - there are more molecules of water in a cup (whatever its size) than there are cups (or the equivalent volume) in the sea.
'I don't know what to say.'
'No words. No words. Hush.'
Hush.
Sea sounds. See changes.
So we made for the outer limits, where the worldwide waterway seemed to flow towards its end - though of course it was an illusion. Some said it was where the Cimmerians previously had their homes, a realm shrouded in mist and cloud, where the sun could never flash rays through the murk. Others said it was a just a small northern town in the middle of winter.
Wandering on, bedlam melodies wandering through our minds ...
... we get by and keep on keeping on with a little help from our friends all is on little loves and small acts of kindness and big hugs pulling mussels from shells and pulling muscles in other words squeeze me you know how to do that Annie and get your gun she's passed it's a miracle her paint's all over town and Alison my aim is true I know this world is killing you and her and him and me and OK I was just Cathy's clown on a hillside desolate will nature make a man of me yet visions of swastikas two new pence to have a go and fall wanking to the floor and frigging in the rigging while there are footsteps on the dancefloor the next time I'll be true I heard on the grapevine that rumour had it that I just called to say I love you thank you for giving me the best day of my life and thank you for calling inquiries while I got stuck in the moment records stick stuck records bells on our fingers ask not whom we toll them for we shall have music wherever we go on go on go on at last the go on show at last but not the end there is no end to wandering I would go out tonight but I have not got a thing to wear but don't you forget about me as you walk on by if you see me walking down the street walk on walk on by with love in your heart and take a walk on the wild side and you just know that bitch won't fuck again but say it ain't so Joe say it Joe eh Joe Hey Joe where are you going with that gun in your hand excuse me while I take another face from the ancient gallery and kiss the sky often mistaken for kiss this guy kiss me kiss me you know how to please me yeah yeah kiss me in the milky twilight you wear that dress and I will wear those shoes and she was last seen the last time I ever saw her face wearing stop me stop me if you've heard this one before hey hey hey what's going on we're sailing off the edge of the world living like Fu Manchu there's nothing else to do maybe baby we know where we are going once in a lifetime on the road to nowhere or funky town or kook city and live life from a window just taking in the view all around the world looking for you and you just stayed in your room that day that day when we took off our clothes and you were crying and the stupid things you said and I said we were birds of paradise and you saw the whole of the moon pink pink pink moon no matter where I roam I will return to my British roses before the sky closes on them and opens on others and no one will ever take me from she and she been a long time been a long time been a lonely lonely lonely long time under the northern skies waiting and wondering and wandering on for more life in a northern town wandering on and maybe tomorow maybe someday we'll get by ...
... jigsaw feeling ... has me reeling ... which may be lurching desperately ... or which may be a kind of dancing.
What triangles ...
The solitary sage of Walden (or there or there abouts - or some other place of concorde) pointed out that triangles of extraordinary size were set up when two people by chance (as it might seem) separated by many earthly miles looked at the same distant star at the same earthly instant ...
What polygons of unthinkable complexity are formed when the consciousnesses of three or more (billions maybe) are linked up deeply for a single instant.
And each individual consciousness is limitless ... set off at any instant in any direction in any individual mind, and you'll never reach an end to the association networks ...
Beyond the outlines ... barely experienced, poorly remembered ... fragmentary details ... the bewildering spread of the simple seeming event ...
Figures in a blended inscape and outscape ...
Cathy and her clown walked together near the water's edge. Blurs from some perspectives, dots, or even less from others. Viewed from some places and times they become recognizable human forms, though mostly in outline, devoid of many details. Further perspective shifts reveal complexitity upon completity. It is possible to conceive of a multiverse perspective ... all possible perspectives at the same instant.
Two little people on a coastal walk in a small town, on the margins, but at the centre of things ... So it is with all: any point, any person, any event, is central and marginal and everywhere in between.
She is small and short-stepping. He is tall and long-striding. The long and the short of it. Big he who is not so big and small she who is not so small. They do not seem well matched. Their mortions are not very synchronized-seeming, as she is too fond of pointing out for his comfort (and hers perhaps too). She walks close to him, often bumping into him rather clumsily. Mostly she talks, he listens. A deluge of words. Waves crashing on to the shore. Her voice rises in pitch and and increases in tempo as she continues. She seems anxious to get things said, while she still has the chance, while there is still time.
They walk in no particular direction, to nowhere in particular. Separate random walks are taking place, which, since they are walking together, in however an unsynchronised and clumsy and bumping manner, become a shared walk. They walk on the edge of land and sea, near a pub called the Water's Edge. Human naming systems help to make a sort of sense of things, providing reference points and an order of sorts.
They seem on the edge of things, in a marginal zone, a place of transition. and they are nearing the edge of their time together. Soon they'll separate, perhaps forever. So it seems she has to get her words said. She talks of people on the edge of things, marginalised people, known as the 'UnderClass' for want of a more human label, whom she's encountered in the early stages of her training as a probation officer. It seems important to her to let him know of what she has witnessed. He's a bit puzzled by that. She's leaving him behind, but wants to fill his mind with her thoughts and experiences. She's planting trace memories perhaps.
Another way of seeing it ... on the shores of the cosmic ocean a strangely beautiful well-matched asymetric couple mess things up.
(This much seems true: new life comes from asymmetry - the evidence is all around. Fear death by symmetry - when all the complex, messy slightly disordered asymmetrical unities break up, and 'it' becomes a spread of equally distanced particle fragments drifting ever further apart.)
Random walks
The myriad contingencies of a short walk in a small town.
But when you consider them with an open mind everything can seem to 'Connect' and every part seems integral to the whole.
Sitting in my small town room, given strange powever by technologies, the workings of which I do not understand and never will, I seem to travel far, and seem to perceive many things.
Common culture. It is in us all. Flowing through us all and being transformed by us all.
All in all.
All things might be written in a single book of love, of which creation is the scattered leaves.
Organisations can form in the underground [and they can be forces for good - not terrorist networks], and they can communicate in undertones, and without the constituent parts having much conscious awareness that they are a part of a larger whole.
Birds flock together at appropriate times, but probably are not much aware that they are flocking.
Perhaps we are often acted upon by 'Organising Forces', beyond our understanding.
This long watch, which dog-like he kept ... Soon the long wished for signs might relieve his passive toils ... beacons gleaming through long recurring nights ... Beacons .. which might only be cigarettes ... These walls could recall strange things .. and much else...
Like a shrunken leaf ... that is not really dying ... all recycles .. flows .. changes ... feebly feeling ... like a dream that walks by day ... the persuasive breath of memories involuntarily recalled ... mostly stirring the heart with songs .. sometimes sensed as beautiful .. sometimes not ...
Like shapes in dreams he wandered through the years, seeming random, planless, his 'forethought' in chains ...
But the vision of the birds might yet work its end into bliss ...
But contraries might yet blast darkly first...
This way the part-time seer hymned, dubiously mixing doom and bliss, dark mingling with light ... and much confusion and obscurity ...
Sharing with the way-haunting birds, which seemed to signal something ... he was responding to the strains .. which could not be merely sounds .. there had to be some meaning, some purpose in everything ... the singings sounded of sorrows and glad days ... and of good times that might yet shame the bad.
Meanwhile ... a most unpleasant surprise was in store for the platonic prick ...
...just as the likely lass began yawning as he was telling her all sorts of amusing stories that had happend to him at different times and places, and even referring once to the Greek cynical philospher Diogenes, the weird sister appeared from one of the back rooms. Whether she had torn herself away from a cold collation, or from the little green drawing room, where some postgraduates' conversation had become more alarming to her, whether she had come of her own free will, or whether she had been thrown out of her previous environment in embarrassing circumstances, which she might or might not later reveal ... whatever the cause or collection of part-causes that had brought her from some other place to this place, she apeared to be cheerful and in the best of spirits. And she was holding on to the arm of the devil's advocate, or one who was assuming that role, for the time being, and in the particular circumstances in which they now all found themselves. Yet he appeared unhappy. Maybe she had been dragging him along with her (and even perhaps attempting to pull him to the floor) for some time. Whatever the cause, assuming there was one, the poor putter-of-the-case-against certainly seemed discomforted, for he kept attempting to turn around, while his eyebrows beetled in all directions, and his eyes seemed to be searching for a way to excape from this amicable arm-in-arm promenade with the weird sister.
It was, indeed, quite an intolerable situation. The platonic prick saw no ther way out of it than to gulp down quickly, with forced convivialtiy, two cups of coffee, with were, of course, laced with red wine, while he kept on telling the most unlikely stories. The devil's advocate became ever more disconcerted, but still could find no way of excape. The weird sister laughed and scowled at the fun of it all. The kindly quaker remained, as often, seemingly calmly silent.
Bridge buildings ...
Ally and philly were sitting together in a bar, which might have been called The Bridge (but that was actually another place, another time) and she began openly to speak her mind to him for once ... The wonderful flow of words enters him and fills him and swells him, and the words change her in his mind ... she'll never seem the same again. After an hour or two, he feels obliged to say something about himself, but when he attempts to interrupt her word-flow, she says, 'No ... I'll speak' ... and the wonderful warming and expansive words continue to come out of her, and to close the space between them, and to fill him with a her glow, which he will never forget, even though, for various reasons, they do not see much of each other afterwards.
She was possibly the least malicious person he had ever met, but ally was the one person to speak negative things about catty into his ears - telling him that catty 'was just not worth it' and that he 'could do better than that woman'. And when he thought feelingly about it then, and for a long time afterwards, he saw multiple possible meanings in what she said ... but he could not accept the proposition that any human being was 'just not worth it', because all are worth it, or else all are worth nothing ... and maybe that was just quibbling ... but ... that was the way it was with him.
Years later, (2002 in fact) pally ally cropped up in India and Pakistan (this is no fiction [and is if to prove she was a real person, not a symbol, in 2003 Alison supported the dehumanizing and illegal - by the normal conventions of international law - U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq) at a time of tension, when some feared the possibility of a nuclear war. She was part of a leading world stateman's 'travelling entourage' (her words) ... to most a unnoticed face in a crowd ... but to the platonic prick she was a symbol of peace ... she carried love with her and no hatred that he could imagine. And oddly enough (or not) tensions on the Indian sub-continent reduced afterwards, and the threat of nuclear war faded. Of course many others were involved. The key seemed to be: not the 'great' men's [there were, alas, still too few 'great' women on the world's stage] words and deeds ... nor even the charms (which were considerable) of his known female peace symbol ... but all those millions of little loves of little lives of mostly kindly mostly decent people who didn't actually want to slaughter others, or to be slaughtered themselves - maybe they all worked together, without quite knowing it, to calm things down.
Meanwhile, the curious cat cared so much about the marginalized people whom she worked with (and for) that it once (or more) almost broke her. She saw hellish visions of 'bottomless pits of need and deprivation' ...
And there can seem to be no end to the suffering in the private hells of even an affluent society.
But even with such dispiriting thoughts in mind to discourage her, she returned to work and did little things to help people and to fill up the void bit by bit.
In the near past that was a long time ago cat wrote many letters to phil and complained that he never wrote enough to her ... it was a complaint that mixed fairness with unfairness, as most do ...
In her letters, as far as he could remember, she only ever quoted him one line of poetry, from Tennyson's Ulysses:
'... I am a part of all that I have met ... '
As she might or might not have gone on to point out, the reverse it also true:
... All that I have met is a part of me ...
[In passing, it is probably fair to note that Catherine does not have much literary appreciation ... and although she seems to believe herself manneredly superior, she does not follow the rules of polite communication ... and her cruelty sometimes outweights her kindness ...
(Matter of factly, she suggests as a title for these ramblings 'Ravings of a Madman?' - anyone who has used up time reading this far can judge how apposite her suggestion is).]
The surprising thing was that while Cat and Al studied much the same subject in much the same place at much the same time, and wandered more or less contemporaneously in much the same streets of at least two other cities ... and had much in common ... and must have crossed paths occasionally ... and had even perhaps caused each other some hurt of sorts, via their connections through Phil ... they never fully met (unless a trick was missed) .. which is something a shame, because they had much good to share with each other ...
It can seem like nonsense, but it does eventually seem to resolve itself into a sort of sense ...
... for a while ...
All this was a long time ago. But what is a long time? The long and the short of it all. Big he who was not so big and small shes who were not so small. I remember little but much. I forget much but little. And I would do it again but in different ways. Repetition is a form of change. Nothing is the same twice, so nothing is the same ever. Say hello, wave goodbye. Wave goobye, say hello. In every meeting, the image of birth, a sort of coming together. In every parting, the image of death, a sort of falling apart. I never knew you well enough, you never knew me well enough. So it goes. Undertanding of other people is, like all understanding, never good enough. On it goes. On we go. Finding out more. Making new patterns, remembering and forgetting, building up and breaking down. Say hello, wave goodbye. Kiss and hug if you want to, do not kiss and hug if you do not want to. Something was taking its course, that much is certain, if no more. Whether we follow a course to birth or to death is uncertain. And that uncertainty clouds the issue of whether we act freely or follow courses determined for us. But there does seem to be free will on the local human scale. At any possible world junction there are many, perhaps limitless, possibilities open to us, and every instant brings us to a new possible world junction, when a small act of choice can make a huge difference. But if, whatever choices we make, the overall course of things is towards a break up of all unities, and so towards oblivion for all, then individual destinies seem trivial. If it is not to be futile, then we must find courses that lead somewhere, to some betterment, some resolution, some harmony, some development, or just some continuation. Maybe it comes down to faith, but that might just be wishful thinking. But you never know - and maybe there's hope in uncertainty. No one, the pessimists or the optimists, really knows. Humans are perhaps just too limited in understanding, and probably, however developed they become, always will be. That is the way it seems to be and maybe will remain. And so one cannot escape from the voices singing that this might be all just folly. But then folly is not the same as futility. And folly is at least amusing and out of 'amusement' might come a more profound kind of comedy, which is a movement towards harmony, and when the motion is towards harmony then perhaps the easier it becomes to make approaches towards some ideal harmonic state - even if it is never reached. And actually achieving complete harmony might not even be desirable, because that might be the end of it all - after which no more for worse or for better.
It can seem foolish to speculate at random about the narrowest and widest matters ... but what else can you do?
...
Even if it is perhaps a hopeless and unrewarding endeavour ...
...
And even if there can seem little point to what can often appear to be merely enduring for the sake of endurance ...
...
Pass me another cigarette, please ... and ... do you have a light, please? ...
[... January 2002 ... September 2003 ...]
+++++
p.s. what[so]ever became of 'COPY'-takers ... who needs them in the digital age? ... they come, they go ... and who gives a 'SHIT' when they lose their jobs ... so long as you keep yours/years [when you have survived some 'transition' from 'this' to 'that' ... so it goes?!] ... see you in
pps Ever read Dante's 'PurgeATory'...?, Alison ... NeverMind ...
Tuesday, 7 April 2020
'Patterns' and 'Dramas'
Tuesday 07_04_2020
'... the "king's" two bodies …'
Reference Text: Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
… the 'king' is unwell / the state is unwell …
… the state is unwell / the 'king' is unwell ...
'... the "king's" two bodies …'
Reference Text: Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
… the 'king' is unwell / the state is unwell …
… the state is unwell / the 'king' is unwell ...
Tuesday, 8 January 2019
The Temptations of Blue Peter
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:03 am
Subject: The Temptations of Blue Peter
The Temptations of Blue Peter (or pseudo saintly singleton upon Tyne).
They try to tempt him, but goodman trueman has none of it.
But is he a real good soul? or just a polite faker?
Scotty had a little nightie and her small cherry tips could be seen through it.
But he seemed not to see them.
Or did he really?
You could never tell with him.
He seemed a nice one, but was he a bit of an evil one really?
Or (worse perhaps) was he just dull and dutiful?
She got the half grapefruits out to test him further.
He seemed impressed and even licked his lips a bit.
But was he doing it to remove a bitter aftertaste or a newly sweet one?
You could never tell with him.
Faker or shaker?
Coffee always gets them up ... but not him it seemed, and the sloppy git just sat there blandly.
Was he a shitster beneath it all?
He often got all mixed up in his own mind, what with all these incredible things he found
himself accused of - why he even ended sentences with dangling participles.
That was the problem with the ones with the dangling bits, they never knew the proper places to put them, or kept it up for long
enough.
The things he was accused of never ended ... why he even slopped on a lavatory seat to make some mark of
disrespect (and he'd always done his best to be a more careful bog pisser than many of his kind).
[And goodness gracious me ... wasn't liberal whitey a terrible racist too?]
Anyway, it was black coffee in bed ... and that was the way he liked it wasn't it? but if that was so, why
did he sometimes have it milky whitey, or all creamy frothy, of with spit and what on Earth was it Baldrick
put on the top of the darling officer's homemade brew?
There always seemed to be little distractions to be reconsidered ... and there always seemed to be fresh
intruders.
And pat she came, like the catastrophe in the old comedy.
[He seemed to know his Shakespeare did the young old boy, but was he just a copyist or a true lover]
Was it a dragon of a mother or a bag of wind or a pair of thundering Welsh thighs with valleys and hills
between them? It seemed one and it seemed all, and from time to time it seemed to change from place to place.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:26 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
So in came the Welsh duchy and she unzipped it ... and out came the words that never seemed to stop
flowing in a juicy sort of joyful way ... and was she another Irish joy-see one, even though she had an obvious
Welsh voice and name?
[At this point, another intruder opens the door looks in and closes it again - and she's
got a Welsh name and an Ulster accent.]
You can never tell with these British thing-gys, they are never quite one thing nor another.
[And as for the thin guys ... they were really fat boys trying to climb out of their
skin - the spots gave it all away ... the real selves would burst out, poisonously or not, sooner or
later.]
Poor Scotty couldn't get a word in, but she knew that pictures were often better than thousands of words. So she
went to the prop cupboard and there she found it, the album with all the proofs of life ... or maybe it was
just a book of snap dragons.
She opened up the flaps and showed him a beautiful one in the lotus position.
It was, or seemed to be, a 78-year-old female Captain Beefheart Fan.
But that proved nothing other than there's nowt so queer as straight folks who camp it up
because they are bored, or for some other unlikely reason ...or maybe just maybe because faking it can sometimes
reveal reality more clearly than doing it for real, as others might believe.
Welsh dutchy had never stopped speaking, even when he seemed more interested in gazing at Scotty's treasured bits. Then it was almost
like magic (but he still didn't believe in that of course) for her wild and whirling words seemed to conjure
into existence an album of her own.
He now had two open flap flip books on his lap and couldn't make up his mind which to try first. Maybe he'd just have
to think about it for a while longer, or maybe he should try out some touchy feely gestures.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:37 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
Poor half dead white male wasn't feeling too well.
Heat seemed to have dried up his brains, and while he'd had a breakfast of sorts he was still hungry
and thirsty.
Coffee and a half-grapefruit isn't much for a real hard leader of men is it?
It was almost as if they were telling him that he was a bit on the flabby side ... while he was laughing at the fat ones in
other times and places and even once slapping one on the belly, not playfully, but with what must have
seemed a bit of malice in it, but then that was a reflex response to some other minor cruelty directed at him over
some trivial seeming, but no doubt important to someone else, fault or flaw or gaping sin line that might
send one and all to hell, but just as likely, when you reflecton it, to rise them all to heaven, somehow,
somewhere, someday ... and when and if we get there it might turn out to be no sort of there that we could ever
understand as a there ... it might just be, well, somehow, for better or worse a bit different.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:52 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... and when they were all laughing at some crude bit of nonsense that was quite funny actually, the
Welsh puritan, who looked a bit Irish and must have had some Scot and English and all sorts of other bits in
her, and who liked a laugh in other circumstances, said she really didn't find the joke very funny and
was really quite offended by it ... and the likely lad said: 'She's the moral minority' ... and they all
laughed at her ... but the joke wasn't funny any more, because laughter was now separating rather than bringing
together ... and in her discomfort she carried the secret discomfort of them all, which was that they didn't want to
live in a world in which the decent moral people were sometimes apparently in the minority ... and while there is
much to be said for levity, including the coarse seeming kind ... the anti-comical voice is not an
unnecessary one ...
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:57 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... it's not always a barrel of laughs - and that would be unbearable in its own way, as the anti-comical
voice reminds us from time to time ...
... but it's not always a valley of tears - and the horrible howling yahoo makes a serious point from time to time ...
+++++
Cor High Lights philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 12:58 pm
The fatties decided to solve the slimming problem by going on a sponsored scoff for charity. But the event was a fiasco, and the judge stormed off with custard pie all over his face. Some kindly fans enjoyed his discomfort, and paid the scoffers a few extra pounds. The fatties were rewarded with icecream. The observer believed in being charitable - but not too kind (and it was Lent remember).
[But when was he going to get more than a cheap sweet treat? (He heard it said regularly that all that mattered was the result, and that worried him a bit, because that was not all that mattered.)]
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 1:34 pm
I was conceived around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, so I never had much of a future ... that's what I actually imagined for a long time ... but maybe I was mistaken ... the bombs have missed me for 38 years and still counting now ... and although it has often seemed mostly solitary and frustrating, and not amounting to much, it hasn't been a waste of time (I hope) ...
There was much love making going on in the autumn of 1962. Most of it was done in private, which is probably the best way, but some of the results got out. Many might imagine that it came as a flood of relief when the tension was all over. My guess is that it went on before, during and after. [And as a matter of natural fact, it must have!]. There's a good chance that it was the love makers who in many small ways spread positive feeling to calm the crisis - rather than the crisis being turned off by the powerful-seeming decision makers. Whatever was the case, those of us born in the 60s can stake a claim to being children of love - even if our own parents (and even we ourselves when we grew up) were too square and conventional seeming to be full hippies.
...
The baby born at Woodstock ... what is he or she doing now? And what of Mr Port-O-San Man? He had a shitty job, but he liked to mix with the kids having mostly harmless fun, and gave them just that extra bit of comfort with soft toilet paper. The bit extras, the tillys, can make such a difference.
Of course all children of all decades are love children one way or another. But the love can seem to be diminished so easily.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:00 pm
The fall reoccurs in some ways every day in the everyday.
I was walking with a young woman down a side street. Walking in the opposite direction were a small boy (I think) and his mother (I assume) hand in hand. The boy fell, and the mother, presumably lost in some personal preoccupation, shouted loudly without any apparent sympathy: 'Get Up' (but in a Geordie accent - which translates to something like 'Gerrup'). The boy got to his feet, silently as a recall, but there might have been forgotten tears, and they walked on together. When my walking companion and I (who were not hand in hand) had walked on a few paces, I let out a loud long laugh. I did not seem to have to explain to her why what we had just witnessed was so terribly funny (i.e. not funny at all).
A few years later, during a telephone conversation I had with her when I was perhaps a bit depressed, and my voice was trailing away to near silence (it might 'just' have been shyness), she said to me abruptly 'Buck up'. (I suspect she might have spend too long in the House of Commons listening to Margaret Thatcher.) I didn't laugh then, and held it as a minor grudge against he for years. But it seems quite funny today (tomorrow it might be a slightly different story). And maybe we all need to be reminded to buck up from time to time. (Maggie had many purposes maybe.) And apparent, or even actual, indifference can sometimes be kindly - giving us rests from intense emotions and helping us to endure difficult times.
When catty and I walked hand-in-hand down the street [Which was my idea, even though I was, according to her, 'not very tactile' and 'reluctant to show affection to her in public' (there was some truth in that one, I'll admit) and ... oh yes, don't forget it, adult handholding was just sloppy/soppy childishness.] she had the habit of dragging her feet and then pulling downwards, as if intent on toppling us both over. She laughed playfully and scowled aloud, at the same time, while she was doing this. She never quite managed to topple us.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:09 pm
The anti-comic voice adds this ...
The two tears of kitschness (a word I can never spell without having doubts about it) according to Milan Kundera:
the first says, 'I'm moved.'
the second says, 'Isn't it so moving that I am moved?'
[The kitsch world, Kundera goes on to say, is a world without shit in it - the world of propaganda ... and advertising perhaps as well (though the ads sometimes take you close to the bogs).]
A further voice, the persuasion of which is uncertain, adds this:
What does the third tear say?
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:31 pm
Late Political News.
The long time ago that was about 8 years ago, during the Labour Party leadership election, there was a tediously polite debate between the contenders, who included the now British prime minister, the now British deputy prime minister and yet another English rose called Margaret [Who could be abrasive, but was not the same political Margaret as the one seen as a rose by some, a witch by others, and a mixture by many, and who was deposed from power with a mixture of tears and laughter a few years previously.] The only memorable moment came when the now deputy PM made a throwaway wise little joke about the dangers of loving each other to death. Then he gritted his teeth and mouthed a few more bland pleasantries.
And one of the few exciting moments in the 2001 British election came when John the stocky deputy
flung a haymaker punch at a bulky agricultural labourer (with a timelessly unattractive seeming fish-themed haircut) who had just thrown an egg at him.
Punchers and eggers-on rarely kill each other. And when one big bloke makes a move towards another 'it happens' as I heard a heavyweight boxer say the other day. There's no wishing humans into a better nature than is possible at this time. Dust ups will happen from time to time and just have to be minimized - and where possible ritualised.
And while women might like to see men a touch more tender and considerate, they presumably still like to see some aggressive possibilities. (Maybe I'm just guessing - or filling in some space and time.) Weeds aren't always attractive.
Greetings from a nNorthern Skies philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 7:58 am
Greetings
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:03 am
Subject: The Temptations of Blue Peter
The Temptations of Blue Peter (or pseudo saintly singleton upon Tyne).
They try to tempt him, but goodman trueman has none of it.
But is he a real good soul? or just a polite faker?
Scotty had a little nightie and her small cherry tips could be seen through it.
But he seemed not to see them.
Or did he really?
You could never tell with him.
He seemed a nice one, but was he a bit of an evil one really?
Or (worse perhaps) was he just dull and dutiful?
She got the half grapefruits out to test him further.
He seemed impressed and even licked his lips a bit.
But was he doing it to remove a bitter aftertaste or a newly sweet one?
You could never tell with him.
Faker or shaker?
Coffee always gets them up ... but not him it seemed, and the sloppy git just sat there blandly.
Was he a shitster beneath it all?
He often got all mixed up in his own mind, what with all these incredible things he found
himself accused of - why he even ended sentences with dangling participles.
That was the problem with the ones with the dangling bits, they never knew the proper places to put them, or kept it up for long
enough.
The things he was accused of never ended ... why he even slopped on a lavatory seat to make some mark of
disrespect (and he'd always done his best to be a more careful bog pisser than many of his kind).
[And goodness gracious me ... wasn't liberal whitey a terrible racist too?]
Anyway, it was black coffee in bed ... and that was the way he liked it wasn't it? but if that was so, why
did he sometimes have it milky whitey, or all creamy frothy, of with spit and what on Earth was it Baldrick
put on the top of the darling officer's homemade brew?
There always seemed to be little distractions to be reconsidered ... and there always seemed to be fresh
intruders.
And pat she came, like the catastrophe in the old comedy.
[He seemed to know his Shakespeare did the young old boy, but was he just a copyist or a true lover]
Was it a dragon of a mother or a bag of wind or a pair of thundering Welsh thighs with valleys and hills
between them? It seemed one and it seemed all, and from time to time it seemed to change from place to place.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:26 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
So in came the Welsh duchy and she unzipped it ... and out came the words that never seemed to stop
flowing in a juicy sort of joyful way ... and was she another Irish joy-see one, even though she had an obvious
Welsh voice and name?
[At this point, another intruder opens the door looks in and closes it again - and she's
got a Welsh name and an Ulster accent.]
You can never tell with these British thing-gys, they are never quite one thing nor another.
[And as for the thin guys ... they were really fat boys trying to climb out of their
skin - the spots gave it all away ... the real selves would burst out, poisonously or not, sooner or
later.]
Poor Scotty couldn't get a word in, but she knew that pictures were often better than thousands of words. So she
went to the prop cupboard and there she found it, the album with all the proofs of life ... or maybe it was
just a book of snap dragons.
She opened up the flaps and showed him a beautiful one in the lotus position.
It was, or seemed to be, a 78-year-old female Captain Beefheart Fan.
But that proved nothing other than there's nowt so queer as straight folks who camp it up
because they are bored, or for some other unlikely reason ...or maybe just maybe because faking it can sometimes
reveal reality more clearly than doing it for real, as others might believe.
Welsh dutchy had never stopped speaking, even when he seemed more interested in gazing at Scotty's treasured bits. Then it was almost
like magic (but he still didn't believe in that of course) for her wild and whirling words seemed to conjure
into existence an album of her own.
He now had two open flap flip books on his lap and couldn't make up his mind which to try first. Maybe he'd just have
to think about it for a while longer, or maybe he should try out some touchy feely gestures.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:37 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
Poor half dead white male wasn't feeling too well.
Heat seemed to have dried up his brains, and while he'd had a breakfast of sorts he was still hungry
and thirsty.
Coffee and a half-grapefruit isn't much for a real hard leader of men is it?
It was almost as if they were telling him that he was a bit on the flabby side ... while he was laughing at the fat ones in
other times and places and even once slapping one on the belly, not playfully, but with what must have
seemed a bit of malice in it, but then that was a reflex response to some other minor cruelty directed at him over
some trivial seeming, but no doubt important to someone else, fault or flaw or gaping sin line that might
send one and all to hell, but just as likely, when you reflecton it, to rise them all to heaven, somehow,
somewhere, someday ... and when and if we get there it might turn out to be no sort of there that we could ever
understand as a there ... it might just be, well, somehow, for better or worse a bit different.
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:52 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... and when they were all laughing at some crude bit of nonsense that was quite funny actually, the
Welsh puritan, who looked a bit Irish and must have had some Scot and English and all sorts of other bits in
her, and who liked a laugh in other circumstances, said she really didn't find the joke very funny and
was really quite offended by it ... and the likely lad said: 'She's the moral minority' ... and they all
laughed at her ... but the joke wasn't funny any more, because laughter was now separating rather than bringing
together ... and in her discomfort she carried the secret discomfort of them all, which was that they didn't want to
live in a world in which the decent moral people were sometimes apparently in the minority ... and while there is
much to be said for levity, including the coarse seeming kind ... the anti-comical voice is not an
unnecessary one ...
From: philtal_uk
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:57 am
Subject: Re: The Temptations of Blue Peter
... it's not always a barrel of laughs - and that would be unbearable in its own way, as the anti-comical
voice reminds us from time to time ...
... but it's not always a valley of tears - and the horrible howling yahoo makes a serious point from time to time ...
+++++
Cor High Lights philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 12:58 pm
The fatties decided to solve the slimming problem by going on a sponsored scoff for charity. But the event was a fiasco, and the judge stormed off with custard pie all over his face. Some kindly fans enjoyed his discomfort, and paid the scoffers a few extra pounds. The fatties were rewarded with icecream. The observer believed in being charitable - but not too kind (and it was Lent remember).
[But when was he going to get more than a cheap sweet treat? (He heard it said regularly that all that mattered was the result, and that worried him a bit, because that was not all that mattered.)]
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 1:34 pm
I was conceived around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, so I never had much of a future ... that's what I actually imagined for a long time ... but maybe I was mistaken ... the bombs have missed me for 38 years and still counting now ... and although it has often seemed mostly solitary and frustrating, and not amounting to much, it hasn't been a waste of time (I hope) ...
There was much love making going on in the autumn of 1962. Most of it was done in private, which is probably the best way, but some of the results got out. Many might imagine that it came as a flood of relief when the tension was all over. My guess is that it went on before, during and after. [And as a matter of natural fact, it must have!]. There's a good chance that it was the love makers who in many small ways spread positive feeling to calm the crisis - rather than the crisis being turned off by the powerful-seeming decision makers. Whatever was the case, those of us born in the 60s can stake a claim to being children of love - even if our own parents (and even we ourselves when we grew up) were too square and conventional seeming to be full hippies.
...
The baby born at Woodstock ... what is he or she doing now? And what of Mr Port-O-San Man? He had a shitty job, but he liked to mix with the kids having mostly harmless fun, and gave them just that extra bit of comfort with soft toilet paper. The bit extras, the tillys, can make such a difference.
Of course all children of all decades are love children one way or another. But the love can seem to be diminished so easily.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:00 pm
The fall reoccurs in some ways every day in the everyday.
I was walking with a young woman down a side street. Walking in the opposite direction were a small boy (I think) and his mother (I assume) hand in hand. The boy fell, and the mother, presumably lost in some personal preoccupation, shouted loudly without any apparent sympathy: 'Get Up' (but in a Geordie accent - which translates to something like 'Gerrup'). The boy got to his feet, silently as a recall, but there might have been forgotten tears, and they walked on together. When my walking companion and I (who were not hand in hand) had walked on a few paces, I let out a loud long laugh. I did not seem to have to explain to her why what we had just witnessed was so terribly funny (i.e. not funny at all).
A few years later, during a telephone conversation I had with her when I was perhaps a bit depressed, and my voice was trailing away to near silence (it might 'just' have been shyness), she said to me abruptly 'Buck up'. (I suspect she might have spend too long in the House of Commons listening to Margaret Thatcher.) I didn't laugh then, and held it as a minor grudge against he for years. But it seems quite funny today (tomorrow it might be a slightly different story). And maybe we all need to be reminded to buck up from time to time. (Maggie had many purposes maybe.) And apparent, or even actual, indifference can sometimes be kindly - giving us rests from intense emotions and helping us to endure difficult times.
When catty and I walked hand-in-hand down the street [Which was my idea, even though I was, according to her, 'not very tactile' and 'reluctant to show affection to her in public' (there was some truth in that one, I'll admit) and ... oh yes, don't forget it, adult handholding was just sloppy/soppy childishness.] she had the habit of dragging her feet and then pulling downwards, as if intent on toppling us both over. She laughed playfully and scowled aloud, at the same time, while she was doing this. She never quite managed to topple us.
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:09 pm
The anti-comic voice adds this ...
The two tears of kitschness (a word I can never spell without having doubts about it) according to Milan Kundera:
the first says, 'I'm moved.'
the second says, 'Isn't it so moving that I am moved?'
[The kitsch world, Kundera goes on to say, is a world without shit in it - the world of propaganda ... and advertising perhaps as well (though the ads sometimes take you close to the bogs).]
A further voice, the persuasion of which is uncertain, adds this:
What does the third tear say?
Re: Say it ain't so, Jo philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 2:31 pm
Late Political News.
The long time ago that was about 8 years ago, during the Labour Party leadership election, there was a tediously polite debate between the contenders, who included the now British prime minister, the now British deputy prime minister and yet another English rose called Margaret [Who could be abrasive, but was not the same political Margaret as the one seen as a rose by some, a witch by others, and a mixture by many, and who was deposed from power with a mixture of tears and laughter a few years previously.] The only memorable moment came when the now deputy PM made a throwaway wise little joke about the dangers of loving each other to death. Then he gritted his teeth and mouthed a few more bland pleasantries.
And one of the few exciting moments in the 2001 British election came when John the stocky deputy
flung a haymaker punch at a bulky agricultural labourer (with a timelessly unattractive seeming fish-themed haircut) who had just thrown an egg at him.
Punchers and eggers-on rarely kill each other. And when one big bloke makes a move towards another 'it happens' as I heard a heavyweight boxer say the other day. There's no wishing humans into a better nature than is possible at this time. Dust ups will happen from time to time and just have to be minimized - and where possible ritualised.
And while women might like to see men a touch more tender and considerate, they presumably still like to see some aggressive possibilities. (Maybe I'm just guessing - or filling in some space and time.) Weeds aren't always attractive.
Greetings from a nNorthern Skies philtal_uk
(38/M/Tyneside,UK) 2/16/02 7:58 am
Greetings
Tuesday, 21 August 2018
An out-dated Manufactured Bogey-Man Scare-Story ...
An out-dated Manufactured Bogey-Man Scare-Story ...
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:31:42 +0100
An Itar News on the Hoof Agency EXCLUSIVE
Intrepid brave not holed up in the Green Zone reporter
Doug. McClure reports from somewhere in Tora Tora,
Tickrit-Baghdad.
Birth of New Really Real al Qaeda ™
Bin QucQoo al Maniac, the most dangerous man on earth,
as noted by the number of Qs in his name, today
declared the launch of New Really Real al Qaeda™.
Bin QucQoo emerged from his cave in Tora Tora Mountains, in Tikrit-Baghdad, climbed onto a rock, and set out his agenda in a long declaration that he read out taking at least five hours.
He declared that he hates the West so much that he has
declared war on dusk, and went on to denounce the Sun
for perpetually (every day) defecting to the West for
its night outs.
Also hated by bin QucQoo are: spam, fish and chips,
voting, unicycles, anything beginning with ‘demo’, buy
one get one free (because it has ‘free’ in it) and upon
mentioning this bin QucQoo went berserk and declared
that any words beginning with D, F, V will be banned
from use henceforth, adding these are consonants
anyway, and the change over should not be all that
difficult.
Bin QucQoo, to adulation of his supporters, whom he had
hastily assembled by promises of a hot dinner, and a
couple of cents, declared Zarqawi not fearsome enough
because he only has one Q, then he called upon
Zawahiri to go and find himself a Q from somewhere.
Finally he declared that bin Laden is all hot air, and
thinks because he has a ‘bin’ he can be frightening,
further bin QucQoo proceeded to produce and circulate
some sketches of himself pulling teddy bears heads
off, and robbing piggy banks from various infants, and
children, explaining that the photos had been sent for
development, and complaining that digital cameras are
to blame for the lack of easy access to developing old
instamatic photos. However Bin QucQoo then asked,
where on record is any photos of bin Laden pulling off
the head of any teddy bear? Calling bin Laden a wuss,
bin QucQoo went onto declare that his suicide plumbers
had worked on New Orleans levees, and also his crack
squad of scary men had thrown fire crackers in old
peoples’ homes and shaved their cats’ whiskers off.
Bin QucQoo then went back into his tent inside the
cave and pulled off a seeming tent pole which turned
out to be a howitzer and proceeded to move into the
neighbouring cave to set up his new HQ, declaring New
Really Real al Qaeda™ cares not one jot for small
arms, since these are for girlimen, explaining away
the short haul move due to his bunions playing havoc
with his feet. Before retiring for his dinner, bin
QucQoo sent the following message for the people of
the world; ‘be afraid, very afraid, very, very afraid,
very, very, very afraid, there are more plumbers where
those came from, and they will cause not only leaks,
flooding, but also urinate in your header tanks in
your lofts’.
Ends item
+
News Flash ... bin QucQoo Lives!
An Itar News on the Hoof Agency WORLD EXCLUSIVE
Dateline: a dark and dangerous scarey back-passage in
down-town Baghdad, some distance from the safety of
the Green Zone, 08_06_2006 20:20 gmt
by intrepid reporter Doug McClueless
Itar News on the Hoof can tonight exclusively reveal
that we have uncovered totally true evidence that
really real really new al Qaeda leader bin QucQoo al
Maniac is now officially 'The Most Dangerous Man On
Earth'.
Several Itar News staff today really saw and really
handled absolutely authentic stick-man cartoon
flick-book footage that proves conclusively bin QucQoo
is still alive and plotting.
With today's death of his old rival al Qaeda bogey-man
al Zarqawi, this means that bin QucQoo now has no
serious challenger for the 'World's Most Dangerous
Man' title.
Unquestionable subliminal messages buried in the
cartoon flick-book go on to proclaim: 'Unlike that
weakling al Zarqawi, bin QucQuc is too tough to die!'.
The subliminal messages then go on, for hours, at
interminable length, to give a detailed denunciation
of bin QucQoo's late rival scarey-man Zarqari [along
with the rest of his neighbourhood] for 'being too
weak not to get blown to tiny pieces by massive
American bombs'.
The subliminals finally accuse Zarqari of 'one final
act of unscariness': 'Despite his weak living body
being blown completely to smithereens by the massive
American bombs, Zarqari's corpse remained weakly
intact, in a totally unterrifying manner, and allowed
itself be photographed - with unburnt beard, and with
only a few minor facial burns and grazes - and
fingerprinted for the infidel media to gloat over.'
Any doubts about the flick-book's authenticity were
quickly removed by a hasty forensic analysis of
fingerprint evidence on it. This showed totally
conclusively that it was drawn and first flicked this
afternoon by bin QucQoo himself - before being passed
at terrifying speed around the dirty hands of the
millions of anonymous members of his frightening
network hiding in scarey places all over the world.
Ends Item
+
‘bin QucQoo is CIA stooge,’ says whistle-blower
Another Itar News on the Hoof WORLD EXCLUSIVE
Dateline: a CIA whistleblower's hide-away hole,
somewhere in Canada between Qerbek and the 49th
Parallel, 10_06_2006 20:06 gmt
[Editors please note: the CIA whistleblower was not
paid any fee by Itar News for the interview
transcribed below - except, for the record, for his
standard CIA salary, which we pay him weekly, in cash,
using funds siphoned through to us through an illegal
CIA horse-crap-dealing money-laundering scheme.]
by poop-scoop-sniffing press hound Dog McClot
Itar News can today exclusively reveal that The
World's Most Dangerous Man bin QucQoo al Maniac is in
fact a CIA agent hired to subvert the activities of
other CIA agents in a highly secretive
'back-blow-to-blow-back' operation.
The plot - code named 'Operation QuoQup' - was revealed
to us during a clandestine interview in his hide-away
with on-the-run CIA [Canuck Intelligence Agency]
French-Canadian whistle-blower Duval Quintessence.
The interview was conducted on a '(nod and wink) no
naming of names (if you know what I mean?)' basis by a
team of anonymous reporters, over several days, in Mr
Quintessence's Canadian bolt hole. It is transcribed
in full below. [All names used are in fact real, but
have been changed to protect the anonymity of our
source.]
Interview Transcript:
Anonymous Itar News Reporters: In your own words, can
you please tell us Duval - if we may call you that -
when you first encountered The World's Most Dangerous
Man bin QucQoo al Maniac?
Duval Quintessence: Je premier a rencontré le Plus
casier de l'homme Dangereux de Le Monde al QucQoo Fou
Furieux le jeudi dernier, pourtant il a été appelé
alors El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me fixe A ça
travaillait secret comme un cheval-merde vendeur dans
une ville de l'un-cheval - je ne peux pas donner
l'emplacement exact pour sécurité raisonne - sur la
borderlands de la République de Mooslamania.
AINR [slowly and loudly]: WE - ARE - SORRY - BUT - WE
- DO - NOT - SPEAK - YOUR - BRAND - OF -
CANADIAN-FRENCH - AND - SO - WE - DID - NOT -
UNDERSTAND - A - WORD - OF - WHAT - YOU - HAVE - JUST
- SAID.
[The interview was then suspended for several days
while a translator travelled - by helicopter, plane,
train, bus, taxi, husky-cart, and on foot - from the
Itar News International Media Centre in Kazakhstan -
exact location secret - to Mr Quintessence's remote
Canadian hideaway - C/O Cannock Intelligence Agency
(CIA), Husky House, 1 Mountie Parade, Qubeq/Winnipeq,
Canada, (Zip:) QQ 1Q. With the translator's
assistance, the interview then resumed.]
AINR [through translator]: Can you please tell us
Duval - if we may call you that - in your own words
when you first encountered The World's Most Dangerous
Man bin QucQoo al Maniac?
DQ [actual words]: Je premier a rencontré le Plus
casier de l'homme Dangereux de Le Monde bin QucQoo al
Fou Furieux le jeudi dernier, pourtant il a été appelé
alors El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me fixe A ça
travaillait secret comme un cheval-merde vendeur dans
une ville de l'un-cheval - je ne peux pas donner
l'emplacement exact pour sécurité raisonne - sur la
borderlands de la République de Mooslamania.
DQ [actual translator's translation]: Me first met
Dangerous Man of The World bin QucQoo al Furious
Madman on Thursday last, yet he was called then El Faf
Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me then worked secret like a
horse merde seller in a city of the one horse (I could
not give exact site for security argues otherwise) on
sidelines of Mooslamanian Republic.
DG [corrected translation]: I first met The World's
Most Dangerous Man bin QucQoo al Maniac last Thursday,
though he was then called El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel
Faluki. At that time I was working undercover as a
horse-crap salesman in a one-horse town (I cannot give
the exact location for security reasons) on the
borderlands of the Republic of Mooslamania.
AINR [untranslated]: And how did you recruit him on to
your agency's payroll?
DQ [adapted translation]: He was at that time down on
his luck, being the less successful of two
horse-traders in the one-horse town. So I made use of
my cover as a horse-crap salesman, and sold him some
horse-crap, which, there being a shortage in the
product locally, he was then able to sell on at a
considerable profit to himself. This put him in a
compromised position - because unlicenced horse-crap
sales are prohibited in the Republic of Mooslamania
(along with all the other basic freedoms we take for
granted in the non-Mooslamania world). So I threatened
to inform on him to the local branch of the
Mooslamania Horse-shit Trading Standards Office. Their
reputation is fearsome in those parts, and the moment
I issued the threat he was reduced to quivering wreck
and was completely under our control from then on. I
whisked him out of Mooslamania, using our horse-crap
trader courier network, and he was put through the
standard one-day CIA Stooge Intensive Grooming program
right here - I should really have said 'there' there,
to maintain my cover and all that [I am sure you will
strike that from the record, and generally tidy what I
say up in the editing] - in Husky House, Canada.
AINR [untranslated]: And then, under his new identity,
he was returned to Mooslamania, via the secret
horse-crap trading courier network, and was put to
work immediately in active CIA stooging?
DQ [untranslated] Qui.
AINR [untranslated]: Thank you very much for your time
Mr Quintuple. Do you require payment in used dollar
notes as usual or could we modernize our financial
arrangements to include debit card facilities?
DQ [untranslated]: Pas de commentaire.
Ends Item
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:31:42 +0100
An Itar News on the Hoof Agency EXCLUSIVE
Intrepid brave not holed up in the Green Zone reporter
Doug. McClure reports from somewhere in Tora Tora,
Tickrit-Baghdad.
Birth of New Really Real al Qaeda ™
Bin QucQoo al Maniac, the most dangerous man on earth,
as noted by the number of Qs in his name, today
declared the launch of New Really Real al Qaeda™.
Bin QucQoo emerged from his cave in Tora Tora Mountains, in Tikrit-Baghdad, climbed onto a rock, and set out his agenda in a long declaration that he read out taking at least five hours.
He declared that he hates the West so much that he has
declared war on dusk, and went on to denounce the Sun
for perpetually (every day) defecting to the West for
its night outs.
Also hated by bin QucQoo are: spam, fish and chips,
voting, unicycles, anything beginning with ‘demo’, buy
one get one free (because it has ‘free’ in it) and upon
mentioning this bin QucQoo went berserk and declared
that any words beginning with D, F, V will be banned
from use henceforth, adding these are consonants
anyway, and the change over should not be all that
difficult.
Bin QucQoo, to adulation of his supporters, whom he had
hastily assembled by promises of a hot dinner, and a
couple of cents, declared Zarqawi not fearsome enough
because he only has one Q, then he called upon
Zawahiri to go and find himself a Q from somewhere.
Finally he declared that bin Laden is all hot air, and
thinks because he has a ‘bin’ he can be frightening,
further bin QucQoo proceeded to produce and circulate
some sketches of himself pulling teddy bears heads
off, and robbing piggy banks from various infants, and
children, explaining that the photos had been sent for
development, and complaining that digital cameras are
to blame for the lack of easy access to developing old
instamatic photos. However Bin QucQoo then asked,
where on record is any photos of bin Laden pulling off
the head of any teddy bear? Calling bin Laden a wuss,
bin QucQoo went onto declare that his suicide plumbers
had worked on New Orleans levees, and also his crack
squad of scary men had thrown fire crackers in old
peoples’ homes and shaved their cats’ whiskers off.
Bin QucQoo then went back into his tent inside the
cave and pulled off a seeming tent pole which turned
out to be a howitzer and proceeded to move into the
neighbouring cave to set up his new HQ, declaring New
Really Real al Qaeda™ cares not one jot for small
arms, since these are for girlimen, explaining away
the short haul move due to his bunions playing havoc
with his feet. Before retiring for his dinner, bin
QucQoo sent the following message for the people of
the world; ‘be afraid, very afraid, very, very afraid,
very, very, very afraid, there are more plumbers where
those came from, and they will cause not only leaks,
flooding, but also urinate in your header tanks in
your lofts’.
Ends item
+
News Flash ... bin QucQoo Lives!
An Itar News on the Hoof Agency WORLD EXCLUSIVE
Dateline: a dark and dangerous scarey back-passage in
down-town Baghdad, some distance from the safety of
the Green Zone, 08_06_2006 20:20 gmt
by intrepid reporter Doug McClueless
Itar News on the Hoof can tonight exclusively reveal
that we have uncovered totally true evidence that
really real really new al Qaeda leader bin QucQoo al
Maniac is now officially 'The Most Dangerous Man On
Earth'.
Several Itar News staff today really saw and really
handled absolutely authentic stick-man cartoon
flick-book footage that proves conclusively bin QucQoo
is still alive and plotting.
With today's death of his old rival al Qaeda bogey-man
al Zarqawi, this means that bin QucQoo now has no
serious challenger for the 'World's Most Dangerous
Man' title.
Unquestionable subliminal messages buried in the
cartoon flick-book go on to proclaim: 'Unlike that
weakling al Zarqawi, bin QucQuc is too tough to die!'.
The subliminal messages then go on, for hours, at
interminable length, to give a detailed denunciation
of bin QucQoo's late rival scarey-man Zarqari [along
with the rest of his neighbourhood] for 'being too
weak not to get blown to tiny pieces by massive
American bombs'.
The subliminals finally accuse Zarqari of 'one final
act of unscariness': 'Despite his weak living body
being blown completely to smithereens by the massive
American bombs, Zarqari's corpse remained weakly
intact, in a totally unterrifying manner, and allowed
itself be photographed - with unburnt beard, and with
only a few minor facial burns and grazes - and
fingerprinted for the infidel media to gloat over.'
Any doubts about the flick-book's authenticity were
quickly removed by a hasty forensic analysis of
fingerprint evidence on it. This showed totally
conclusively that it was drawn and first flicked this
afternoon by bin QucQoo himself - before being passed
at terrifying speed around the dirty hands of the
millions of anonymous members of his frightening
network hiding in scarey places all over the world.
Ends Item
+
‘bin QucQoo is CIA stooge,’ says whistle-blower
Another Itar News on the Hoof WORLD EXCLUSIVE
Dateline: a CIA whistleblower's hide-away hole,
somewhere in Canada between Qerbek and the 49th
Parallel, 10_06_2006 20:06 gmt
[Editors please note: the CIA whistleblower was not
paid any fee by Itar News for the interview
transcribed below - except, for the record, for his
standard CIA salary, which we pay him weekly, in cash,
using funds siphoned through to us through an illegal
CIA horse-crap-dealing money-laundering scheme.]
by poop-scoop-sniffing press hound Dog McClot
Itar News can today exclusively reveal that The
World's Most Dangerous Man bin QucQoo al Maniac is in
fact a CIA agent hired to subvert the activities of
other CIA agents in a highly secretive
'back-blow-to-blow-back' operation.
The plot - code named 'Operation QuoQup' - was revealed
to us during a clandestine interview in his hide-away
with on-the-run CIA [Canuck Intelligence Agency]
French-Canadian whistle-blower Duval Quintessence.
The interview was conducted on a '(nod and wink) no
naming of names (if you know what I mean?)' basis by a
team of anonymous reporters, over several days, in Mr
Quintessence's Canadian bolt hole. It is transcribed
in full below. [All names used are in fact real, but
have been changed to protect the anonymity of our
source.]
Interview Transcript:
Anonymous Itar News Reporters: In your own words, can
you please tell us Duval - if we may call you that -
when you first encountered The World's Most Dangerous
Man bin QucQoo al Maniac?
Duval Quintessence: Je premier a rencontré le Plus
casier de l'homme Dangereux de Le Monde al QucQoo Fou
Furieux le jeudi dernier, pourtant il a été appelé
alors El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me fixe A ça
travaillait secret comme un cheval-merde vendeur dans
une ville de l'un-cheval - je ne peux pas donner
l'emplacement exact pour sécurité raisonne - sur la
borderlands de la République de Mooslamania.
AINR [slowly and loudly]: WE - ARE - SORRY - BUT - WE
- DO - NOT - SPEAK - YOUR - BRAND - OF -
CANADIAN-FRENCH - AND - SO - WE - DID - NOT -
UNDERSTAND - A - WORD - OF - WHAT - YOU - HAVE - JUST
- SAID.
[The interview was then suspended for several days
while a translator travelled - by helicopter, plane,
train, bus, taxi, husky-cart, and on foot - from the
Itar News International Media Centre in Kazakhstan -
exact location secret - to Mr Quintessence's remote
Canadian hideaway - C/O Cannock Intelligence Agency
(CIA), Husky House, 1 Mountie Parade, Qubeq/Winnipeq,
Canada, (Zip:) QQ 1Q. With the translator's
assistance, the interview then resumed.]
AINR [through translator]: Can you please tell us
Duval - if we may call you that - in your own words
when you first encountered The World's Most Dangerous
Man bin QucQoo al Maniac?
DQ [actual words]: Je premier a rencontré le Plus
casier de l'homme Dangereux de Le Monde bin QucQoo al
Fou Furieux le jeudi dernier, pourtant il a été appelé
alors El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me fixe A ça
travaillait secret comme un cheval-merde vendeur dans
une ville de l'un-cheval - je ne peux pas donner
l'emplacement exact pour sécurité raisonne - sur la
borderlands de la République de Mooslamania.
DQ [actual translator's translation]: Me first met
Dangerous Man of The World bin QucQoo al Furious
Madman on Thursday last, yet he was called then El Faf
Fuq Bin Falafel Faluki. Me then worked secret like a
horse merde seller in a city of the one horse (I could
not give exact site for security argues otherwise) on
sidelines of Mooslamanian Republic.
DG [corrected translation]: I first met The World's
Most Dangerous Man bin QucQoo al Maniac last Thursday,
though he was then called El Faf Fuq Bin Falafel
Faluki. At that time I was working undercover as a
horse-crap salesman in a one-horse town (I cannot give
the exact location for security reasons) on the
borderlands of the Republic of Mooslamania.
AINR [untranslated]: And how did you recruit him on to
your agency's payroll?
DQ [adapted translation]: He was at that time down on
his luck, being the less successful of two
horse-traders in the one-horse town. So I made use of
my cover as a horse-crap salesman, and sold him some
horse-crap, which, there being a shortage in the
product locally, he was then able to sell on at a
considerable profit to himself. This put him in a
compromised position - because unlicenced horse-crap
sales are prohibited in the Republic of Mooslamania
(along with all the other basic freedoms we take for
granted in the non-Mooslamania world). So I threatened
to inform on him to the local branch of the
Mooslamania Horse-shit Trading Standards Office. Their
reputation is fearsome in those parts, and the moment
I issued the threat he was reduced to quivering wreck
and was completely under our control from then on. I
whisked him out of Mooslamania, using our horse-crap
trader courier network, and he was put through the
standard one-day CIA Stooge Intensive Grooming program
right here - I should really have said 'there' there,
to maintain my cover and all that [I am sure you will
strike that from the record, and generally tidy what I
say up in the editing] - in Husky House, Canada.
AINR [untranslated]: And then, under his new identity,
he was returned to Mooslamania, via the secret
horse-crap trading courier network, and was put to
work immediately in active CIA stooging?
DQ [untranslated] Qui.
AINR [untranslated]: Thank you very much for your time
Mr Quintuple. Do you require payment in used dollar
notes as usual or could we modernize our financial
arrangements to include debit card facilities?
DQ [untranslated]: Pas de commentaire.
Ends Item
Tuesday, 14 August 2018
A True Enough His/HerStory, Book 1, Section 1, draft 1 ...
A True Enough His/HerStory, Book 1, Section 1, draft 1 ...
One day, at about midday, I woke, bathed, breakfasted, donned a blue-themed outfit, and lit another cigarette.
'Out! Out! Brief Candles! Such fleeting moments of apparent enlightenment!'
And so it was that in a smokey haze, I found myself in a somewhat vaguely abstracted state, as if recalling bardic'ly confuzed lines that had almost actually passed between some him-and-her/her-and-him at some indefinite time.
'How much do you love me?'
'There's beggary in the love that can be measured!'
'I die to be loved so imprecisely!'
'Then you die for someone more adept at co'kmanship than myself, dear lady! You should have died hereafter, there would have been time for ...'
At this point I broke off from a travesy of MsMelodrama's diverting attempts to make a tragic mockery of my comedy, and attempted a return to romance.
Unfortunately, so voided had my inscape become, that romance proved impossible, and all too rapidly turned to rather dark-tinged lowly forms of irony/satire travestied from [as if?!] Lucian.
Said another: ''tis no matter!'
I almost agreed.
But then ....
On another day shortly after midday, I heard on the grapevine - or perhaps it was UncleBeeb's MrJeremiadVine show - that rumour had it that recruits were being sought among what sounded to me like 'ne'rdowells' for a futile-seeming quest on a SpaceTimeShip, to be known as TheSearchForTheFoolsParadise.
I thought myself more than a little well qualified to volunteer for this quest.
And so it was that, years later, having been-there-got-the-tee-shirt available exclusively - and for a bargain fee, VAT and P&P excluded - only on that quest, and getting on for one hour after midday one day, I re-read the following personal (b)log-entry: ...
Thursday 16 August 2007 (Eurocentric Dating System (EDS))
On this day, starting from an uncertain place at an, in fact, uncertain date from near the Pillars of Heracles, we sailed with a fair-to-middling wind into the Atlantic.
There we landed at a previously uncharted island peopled by tax-exiled offshore traders.
Shortly after landing we were greeted by a self-proclaimed financial market expert who cried: 'Beware! Beware! Here be bears! Here be bears!'
Thereupon MrDavidCoverdale, a tax-exiled Tyneside-born lead singer of the rock group sometimes known as Whitesnake, who had a hideaway on that island, appeared, as if from nowhere, and said: 'Fear not! Fear not! For I know how to dance bears into harmlessness - having recently, strangely but truly, had a real life invasion of such creatures into my house, albeit in another part of the world.'
And in such unlikely ways a day of surprizes on the island of tax-exiled offshore traders unfolded.
It has to be admitted that, whatever the truth of such interventions, the motives of our voyage remain uncertain.
A certain intellectual restlessness, a passion for novelty, a curiosity about the limits of the cosmic ocean and the beings who might dwell within - or even beyond - it. Perhaps such motives drive us on.
With a view to pressing on further into our formless quest, we delayed on the island to provision and water our spacetimeship on a generous scale.
This gave me the opportunity to review the crew which circumstances/chance had thrown me in with.
They seemed to be of mostly motley make-up, and, for this and other reasons, I had some sense of 'fellow-feeling'.
There was, for example, the ElvisCostello impersonator also known as MrDeclanMcMurphy, and others whose musical interests, as well as their years, roughly corresponded to/with my own.
A search of the stores we had brought with us revealed we were well provisioned with a good supply of vinyl records.
The playing of these items on a more often than not unstalbe spacetimeship brought a mix of melancholy and merriment, as well as much earnest discussion on the seemingly crucial issue of whether '70s and '80s rock music sounded more 'authentic' in the hissing and crackling medium of vinyul rekords and torntibles than in some digitally remastered form.
With such disorientating transition issues to deal with, we clearly needed some skilled and well-spoken navigators and link-people to guide us.
There was to be found on our mission control airwaves at least one fine navigation guide sometimes known as MsHalfEmptyHalfFullMonty.
She was misquoted in another today's log as saying: 'I am 69 and when I saw the man urinating in my rose garden I rushed out ... and to my surprize found myself pressganged into a lunatic spacetimeship enterprize ...'
The navigation guide's first mate was sometimes known as MsPosh.CassGreen.
She was misquoted in the same log as saying: 'And next up my channel is that shuddder-in-my-loins MrWillyClinton.'
The log then recorded this verbatim statement: 'MrWillyClinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman! - whose moniker is MsPosh.CassGreen."'
With scenes involving such potential steamy-seeming-scene-stealing-semenators to be incorporated, it was clear that our spacetimeship required an imaginative upgrade ... perhaps into a some sort of slappyhappyslippysloppysloop-like vessel ... ecstatically and otherwise(E)specially strengthened for some long and arduous passages, with baggage allowances made for fuckers, suckers, friggers, wankers, allsortsofsocalledsodomites, to say nothing of other mild perversities, and needlesstosay diversely allowed-for distorts of consentual adult play-making/mating.
In the new improved vessel of our wildest dreams we carried on, for at least another day and night.
We were carried quite quietly along as if on a soft breeze, while the crew were mostly distracted by self-and-other-indulgent pursuits.
'Well ... with a void seemingly before and after us there seems bugger all else to do,' one crew member was heard to tartly observe.
I was almost inclined to agree.
But then ...
As if to frustrate further the forementioned types of fore-and-after-play, on the next day's dawn, the previously soft stellar winds rose to a harsh tempest.
Caught up in this heavy cosmic turbulence, with inexplicable dark materials and inscrutable particle-wave ripples in the background, we found ourselves unable to control our vessel.
And so we surrendered ourselves to the elements ... let the ship run ... and were storm-driven for more than eleven weeks ...
On the eightieth day a sun came out quite suddenly and surprizingly, and we found ourselves close to a lofty wooded island, round which the waves were murmuring gently, the storm having almost fallen by this time.
We brought her to land, disembarked, and, to recover from our long tossingly turbulent voyagings, lay a considerable time idle on shore.
At last we made an attempt at a fresh start.
Some previously attention-demanding impetuous teens or twenties numbers of crewmates fled the womb of the spacetimeship to pursue their own courses.
This left the maturer-seeming remaining rest of us with more freetime to fill.
So ...
Leaving a thirty-or-forty-something of our number slumbering in drugged/drunken states, pretending they were guarding the ship, a soberer fifty-or-sixty-or-something of our party set off on a tour of inspection of the mysterious island.
We had advanced about half-a-mile/a-kilometer inland through woods, when we came upon a brazen phallic-shaped pillar, inscribed in characters that seemed like Greek to to most of us, but which however were worn and dim and difficult to decipher.
A classically educated former public school boy/girl disclaimed:'It most truly and absolutely surely reads: "Heracles and Dionysus reached this point"'
Those of us more comprehensively educated expressed some scepticism.
Not far off from the pillars there were two footprints on rock-forms.
One footprint might have been an acre in area, the other being smaller.
The classical scholar conjectured that the latter was Dionysus's, and the other Heracles's.
A wag who had spent schooldays at the back of the classroom retorted: 'You mean BigDick and LittleDick!'
We did obeisance, according to bent, with laughter or disdain, to these observations and proceeded.
Before we had gone far - would you believe it? - but we found ourselves falling into a river which ran wine-filled.
It flowed full and copious, and might have been navigable in parts, had we not all got rather rapidly drunk on the free bounty it offered us.
This river of wine, the classicist maintained, was sure evidence of Dionysus's sojourn in these necks of the woods.
It was just as surely sufficient evidence to convince others in our party that the inscription on the pillar was an authentic indicator of TheArgumentForDesign.
The rest of us were too pissed on the free wine to care much about such speculations.
The following day, in a hugely hungover state, we took some painkillers and resolved to find the source of the wine river.
We followed the river up, and discovered, instead of an expected fountain, an unexpected lake.
Signs around the lake read in a dozen or more IndoEuropean language systems: 'Produce of the European Union - if you journey here from one of the union's disadvantaged economic zones, you are entitled to help yourselves.'
This proved an offer that could not be refused by most of our party.
Nearby were planted a number of huge vines covered with grapes.
From the root of each there issued a trickle of perfectly clear wine, the joining of which made the river.
It was well stocked with great fish, which a trade expert assured us were of the species known as 'CashCowedOpportunity', usually abbreviated to 'C.O.D.'.
They resembled wine both in colour and taste.
Catching and eating some, we at once found ourselves intoxicated.
When we sobered up, some biologists in our group dissected the fish and found them full of wine-lees.
While this biological investigation was taking place, it occurred to some of the more temperate members of our party to mix these C.O.D.winefish with more ordinary seawater Haddock - more ordinary cod being in short supply in those parts as in others because of overfishing - thus diluting the strength of the spirituous food.
Well fishily fed and wined/watered we now crossed the river by a ford, and came to more vines of a most extraordinary kind.
Out of the ground came a thick well-grown stem; but the upper part was a woman, complete from the loins upward.
They appeared like a deranged artist's representations of a wanton lady in the act of turning into a tree just as a libertine enters her.
Perhaps for this reason it occurred to a deranged tabloid journalist present in our company to name this newly discovered vine PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy.
From the finger-tips of PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy sprang vine twigs, all loaded with grapes; the hair of their heads was tendrils, leaves, and grape-clusters.
They greeted us and welcomed our approach, talking in slurred forms of all the languages of Earth.
The PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy plant-forms went so far as to kiss us on the mouth - and whoever was kissed staggered like a drunk.
But the plantforms would not permit us to pluck their fruit, meeting any attempt to do so with cries of pain.
Some of them made further amorous advances; and one of my comrades who yielded to these solicitations found it impossible to extricate himmself again from their embraces - man-became-one-with-plantform, striking root, fingers turned to vine twigs, tendrils grew all round, and embryo grape-clusters were soon to be witnessed.
Seeing no alternative, we reluctantly left the man-plantform there in metamorphized state and hurried back to the ship, where we told our tales to the druggies and drunkards who had remained there, including the tale of our friend's experiments in viticulture.
'I saw it all without going with you,' replied one unimpressed psychaedelic experimentor.
The others expressed varying degrees of interest, incredulity and/or indifference.
Then, after taking some casks ashore and filling them with wine and water, we bivouacked on the sand for one final beach-party blowout on this intoxicating island.
Next morning we set off before a gentle breeze.
About midday, when we were out of sight of the island, a vortex suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty Earth miles above any form of solid ground.
She did not fall back into the usually mostly predictable cosmicoceanmedium, but was held suspended aloft in a unfamiliar reality randomizing medium, and at the same time carried along by a stellarwind which struck and filled the sails.
For a whole week we pursued hair-raising courses in these totally unpredictable state(s), consuming all our stocks of the wine to sooth our nerves.
On the eighth day we spotted a potential landfall.
It was an island with vapour for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light.
We reached it, cast a relieved anchor, and landed.
Inspection soon showed that it was inhabited and cultivated.
In the daytime nothing could be discerned outside of it; but night revealed many neighbouring islands, some larger and some smaller than ours.
There was also another land below us containing cities, rivers, seas, forests, and mountains.
This we concluded, tentatively, to be the Earth, from which some said we had intially set out on a date sometimes recorded as Thursday 16 August 2007 (EDS).
One day, at about midday, I woke, bathed, breakfasted, donned a blue-themed outfit, and lit another cigarette.
'Out! Out! Brief Candles! Such fleeting moments of apparent enlightenment!'
And so it was that in a smokey haze, I found myself in a somewhat vaguely abstracted state, as if recalling bardic'ly confuzed lines that had almost actually passed between some him-and-her/her-and-him at some indefinite time.
'How much do you love me?'
'There's beggary in the love that can be measured!'
'I die to be loved so imprecisely!'
'Then you die for someone more adept at co'kmanship than myself, dear lady! You should have died hereafter, there would have been time for ...'
At this point I broke off from a travesy of MsMelodrama's diverting attempts to make a tragic mockery of my comedy, and attempted a return to romance.
Unfortunately, so voided had my inscape become, that romance proved impossible, and all too rapidly turned to rather dark-tinged lowly forms of irony/satire travestied from [as if?!] Lucian.
Said another: ''tis no matter!'
I almost agreed.
But then ....
On another day shortly after midday, I heard on the grapevine - or perhaps it was UncleBeeb's MrJeremiadVine show - that rumour had it that recruits were being sought among what sounded to me like 'ne'rdowells' for a futile-seeming quest on a SpaceTimeShip, to be known as TheSearchForTheFoolsParadise.
I thought myself more than a little well qualified to volunteer for this quest.
And so it was that, years later, having been-there-got-the-tee-shirt available exclusively - and for a bargain fee, VAT and P&P excluded - only on that quest, and getting on for one hour after midday one day, I re-read the following personal (b)log-entry: ...
Thursday 16 August 2007 (Eurocentric Dating System (EDS))
On this day, starting from an uncertain place at an, in fact, uncertain date from near the Pillars of Heracles, we sailed with a fair-to-middling wind into the Atlantic.
There we landed at a previously uncharted island peopled by tax-exiled offshore traders.
Shortly after landing we were greeted by a self-proclaimed financial market expert who cried: 'Beware! Beware! Here be bears! Here be bears!'
Thereupon MrDavidCoverdale, a tax-exiled Tyneside-born lead singer of the rock group sometimes known as Whitesnake, who had a hideaway on that island, appeared, as if from nowhere, and said: 'Fear not! Fear not! For I know how to dance bears into harmlessness - having recently, strangely but truly, had a real life invasion of such creatures into my house, albeit in another part of the world.'
And in such unlikely ways a day of surprizes on the island of tax-exiled offshore traders unfolded.
It has to be admitted that, whatever the truth of such interventions, the motives of our voyage remain uncertain.
A certain intellectual restlessness, a passion for novelty, a curiosity about the limits of the cosmic ocean and the beings who might dwell within - or even beyond - it. Perhaps such motives drive us on.
With a view to pressing on further into our formless quest, we delayed on the island to provision and water our spacetimeship on a generous scale.
This gave me the opportunity to review the crew which circumstances/chance had thrown me in with.
They seemed to be of mostly motley make-up, and, for this and other reasons, I had some sense of 'fellow-feeling'.
There was, for example, the ElvisCostello impersonator also known as MrDeclanMcMurphy, and others whose musical interests, as well as their years, roughly corresponded to/with my own.
A search of the stores we had brought with us revealed we were well provisioned with a good supply of vinyl records.
The playing of these items on a more often than not unstalbe spacetimeship brought a mix of melancholy and merriment, as well as much earnest discussion on the seemingly crucial issue of whether '70s and '80s rock music sounded more 'authentic' in the hissing and crackling medium of vinyul rekords and torntibles than in some digitally remastered form.
With such disorientating transition issues to deal with, we clearly needed some skilled and well-spoken navigators and link-people to guide us.
There was to be found on our mission control airwaves at least one fine navigation guide sometimes known as MsHalfEmptyHalfFullMonty.
She was misquoted in another today's log as saying: 'I am 69 and when I saw the man urinating in my rose garden I rushed out ... and to my surprize found myself pressganged into a lunatic spacetimeship enterprize ...'
The navigation guide's first mate was sometimes known as MsPosh.CassGreen.
She was misquoted in the same log as saying: 'And next up my channel is that shuddder-in-my-loins MrWillyClinton.'
The log then recorded this verbatim statement: 'MrWillyClinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman! - whose moniker is MsPosh.CassGreen."'
With scenes involving such potential steamy-seeming-scene-stealing-semenators to be incorporated, it was clear that our spacetimeship required an imaginative upgrade ... perhaps into a some sort of slappyhappyslippysloppysloop-like vessel ... ecstatically and otherwise(E)specially strengthened for some long and arduous passages, with baggage allowances made for fuckers, suckers, friggers, wankers, allsortsofsocalledsodomites, to say nothing of other mild perversities, and needlesstosay diversely allowed-for distorts of consentual adult play-making/mating.
In the new improved vessel of our wildest dreams we carried on, for at least another day and night.
We were carried quite quietly along as if on a soft breeze, while the crew were mostly distracted by self-and-other-indulgent pursuits.
'Well ... with a void seemingly before and after us there seems bugger all else to do,' one crew member was heard to tartly observe.
I was almost inclined to agree.
But then ...
As if to frustrate further the forementioned types of fore-and-after-play, on the next day's dawn, the previously soft stellar winds rose to a harsh tempest.
Caught up in this heavy cosmic turbulence, with inexplicable dark materials and inscrutable particle-wave ripples in the background, we found ourselves unable to control our vessel.
And so we surrendered ourselves to the elements ... let the ship run ... and were storm-driven for more than eleven weeks ...
On the eightieth day a sun came out quite suddenly and surprizingly, and we found ourselves close to a lofty wooded island, round which the waves were murmuring gently, the storm having almost fallen by this time.
We brought her to land, disembarked, and, to recover from our long tossingly turbulent voyagings, lay a considerable time idle on shore.
At last we made an attempt at a fresh start.
Some previously attention-demanding impetuous teens or twenties numbers of crewmates fled the womb of the spacetimeship to pursue their own courses.
This left the maturer-seeming remaining rest of us with more freetime to fill.
So ...
Leaving a thirty-or-forty-something of our number slumbering in drugged/drunken states, pretending they were guarding the ship, a soberer fifty-or-sixty-or-something of our party set off on a tour of inspection of the mysterious island.
We had advanced about half-a-mile/a-kilometer inland through woods, when we came upon a brazen phallic-shaped pillar, inscribed in characters that seemed like Greek to to most of us, but which however were worn and dim and difficult to decipher.
A classically educated former public school boy/girl disclaimed:'It most truly and absolutely surely reads: "Heracles and Dionysus reached this point"'
Those of us more comprehensively educated expressed some scepticism.
Not far off from the pillars there were two footprints on rock-forms.
One footprint might have been an acre in area, the other being smaller.
The classical scholar conjectured that the latter was Dionysus's, and the other Heracles's.
A wag who had spent schooldays at the back of the classroom retorted: 'You mean BigDick and LittleDick!'
We did obeisance, according to bent, with laughter or disdain, to these observations and proceeded.
Before we had gone far - would you believe it? - but we found ourselves falling into a river which ran wine-filled.
It flowed full and copious, and might have been navigable in parts, had we not all got rather rapidly drunk on the free bounty it offered us.
This river of wine, the classicist maintained, was sure evidence of Dionysus's sojourn in these necks of the woods.
It was just as surely sufficient evidence to convince others in our party that the inscription on the pillar was an authentic indicator of TheArgumentForDesign.
The rest of us were too pissed on the free wine to care much about such speculations.
The following day, in a hugely hungover state, we took some painkillers and resolved to find the source of the wine river.
We followed the river up, and discovered, instead of an expected fountain, an unexpected lake.
Signs around the lake read in a dozen or more IndoEuropean language systems: 'Produce of the European Union - if you journey here from one of the union's disadvantaged economic zones, you are entitled to help yourselves.'
This proved an offer that could not be refused by most of our party.
Nearby were planted a number of huge vines covered with grapes.
From the root of each there issued a trickle of perfectly clear wine, the joining of which made the river.
It was well stocked with great fish, which a trade expert assured us were of the species known as 'CashCowedOpportunity', usually abbreviated to 'C.O.D.'.
They resembled wine both in colour and taste.
Catching and eating some, we at once found ourselves intoxicated.
When we sobered up, some biologists in our group dissected the fish and found them full of wine-lees.
While this biological investigation was taking place, it occurred to some of the more temperate members of our party to mix these C.O.D.winefish with more ordinary seawater Haddock - more ordinary cod being in short supply in those parts as in others because of overfishing - thus diluting the strength of the spirituous food.
Well fishily fed and wined/watered we now crossed the river by a ford, and came to more vines of a most extraordinary kind.
Out of the ground came a thick well-grown stem; but the upper part was a woman, complete from the loins upward.
They appeared like a deranged artist's representations of a wanton lady in the act of turning into a tree just as a libertine enters her.
Perhaps for this reason it occurred to a deranged tabloid journalist present in our company to name this newly discovered vine PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy.
From the finger-tips of PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy sprang vine twigs, all loaded with grapes; the hair of their heads was tendrils, leaves, and grape-clusters.
They greeted us and welcomed our approach, talking in slurred forms of all the languages of Earth.
The PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy plant-forms went so far as to kiss us on the mouth - and whoever was kissed staggered like a drunk.
But the plantforms would not permit us to pluck their fruit, meeting any attempt to do so with cries of pain.
Some of them made further amorous advances; and one of my comrades who yielded to these solicitations found it impossible to extricate himmself again from their embraces - man-became-one-with-plantform, striking root, fingers turned to vine twigs, tendrils grew all round, and embryo grape-clusters were soon to be witnessed.
Seeing no alternative, we reluctantly left the man-plantform there in metamorphized state and hurried back to the ship, where we told our tales to the druggies and drunkards who had remained there, including the tale of our friend's experiments in viticulture.
'I saw it all without going with you,' replied one unimpressed psychaedelic experimentor.
The others expressed varying degrees of interest, incredulity and/or indifference.
Then, after taking some casks ashore and filling them with wine and water, we bivouacked on the sand for one final beach-party blowout on this intoxicating island.
Next morning we set off before a gentle breeze.
About midday, when we were out of sight of the island, a vortex suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty Earth miles above any form of solid ground.
She did not fall back into the usually mostly predictable cosmicoceanmedium, but was held suspended aloft in a unfamiliar reality randomizing medium, and at the same time carried along by a stellarwind which struck and filled the sails.
For a whole week we pursued hair-raising courses in these totally unpredictable state(s), consuming all our stocks of the wine to sooth our nerves.
On the eighth day we spotted a potential landfall.
It was an island with vapour for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light.
We reached it, cast a relieved anchor, and landed.
Inspection soon showed that it was inhabited and cultivated.
In the daytime nothing could be discerned outside of it; but night revealed many neighbouring islands, some larger and some smaller than ours.
There was also another land below us containing cities, rivers, seas, forests, and mountains.
This we concluded, tentatively, to be the Earth, from which some said we had intially set out on a date sometimes recorded as Thursday 16 August 2007 (EDS).
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