Life in transitions

Preliminary thoughts

2006-05-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Preliminary thoughts on new writing south and meeting Brian Catling

In search

in search in search search s eeerch

just another urchin

in the life   Brian

objects    a catling gun

cattle

cat

catch me

just pen nibs to collect

no cartridge cases

puts me on my metal

subjects

me

we  I eye eyed

subjected

to experience  s

pushed into place

into history

into time

ah!  back to dying

fragments left behind

on mantlepieces

hap pi ness    in the south  so th u

mark s  on the page boy

writing of happiness   embarrassment

all my life in search  of    happiness   no

human potential

your daughter is exceeding her poetential

potent that

the wrong word

word for a tyrant

do not exceed your poetential

why write nonsense

it is not Art

what is art?

object   ion

impermanence  ugghhh

I want to leave my mark

Did you not read Heidegger?

Marks are meaningless

no just not important

stuff

get stuffed

we   need to be remembered

amen to that

marks in the memory

stay forever

do not decay

but brains decay

We are one ONE  won

in the mind of Dog

unless he is dys something or other

all confused

in quanta without envelopes

We are seen

and remembered

I am afraid to be such things as dreams are made on

of?

There is no dog

But we are soul

we are momentarily embodied

More than moments

I and this body-shell-being

which comes to life and dreams and dies and is reborn

want to become Dog

I am dog if I but knew myself

Marks on the landscape

we on the floor

happy man

Where is the drama?

where is the text?

where is

the performance

Art?

2006-04-30T06:16:00.000-07:00

2005-02-27T05:27:00.000-08:00

Rowan's garden wall, and mine

All is lost, but none shall lose their prizes

2004-07-15T01:40:00.000-07:00

The Butler Report has exposed flaws and failings in almost everything in the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Blair claims full personal responsibility, and refuses to understand that he must resign. Butler describes it as a collective failure. He finds no one individually culpable. If it is a collective failure then those responsible should all resign. Yet not one offers to do the decent thing.
Gill and I have never felt more ashamed to be British. We squirmed as we watched Tony Blair skipping off to Downing Street with a huge grin on his face, for all the world like Peter Pan, in a fantasy world of his own creation.

It is your responsibility and mine to see that this Puer Aeternus is held to account as the adult War Criminal he is.

For once Michael Howard did his job well. With ruthless precision, he exposed the transition from insecurity to total certainty in the Government's description of the existence of Weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq.

"We all know he had them." as my MP wrote to me.

How? Because we sold them to him to attack the radical Islamic state next door. then he was the good guy, fighting for western cecular values against the theocratic muslims.

But the evidence that he still had them in 2003 was somewhere between patchy and non existent. Mr Straw added to his critical analysis of Blair's dossier-making on TV yesterday afternoon. He had been the first to describe the other one, which was nothing but a plagiarised student thesis, and 10 years out of date, as the "Dodgy" dossier. This time it was more a more or less Freudian slip. He called it the "dottier". Yet, in this Alice in Wonderland world we are now living in, Blair can announce, once again, that he has been judged and found innocent of any duplicity.
One of the most important things that emerged from Butler, which has not yet been picked up properly, is the Attorney General's judgement that war would only be legal if the evidence of WMD were incontrovertible. Blair just had to sex up that dossier. He had to hang onto his insistence on the existence of WMD long after everyone else had given up on it. Butler also exposed the source of the fantastic lie about "45 minutes to doom." It was the CIA/M16 stooge, we have now put in charge of Iraq. There is a nice pay back for lies and deceit. Butler is clear that this false claim should not have been in the dossier.

You and I must conclude on the evidence put before us by the Butler inquiry that the evidence for the existence of usable weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as placed before the British Government by our security services, was totally insufficient to justify the assertions made by Blair.

The war was illegal, and Blair knew it.

That makes Blair a war criminal, responsible for the lives of at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians, and thousands of Iraqi and coalition troops. He should also be held to account for the lives that will be lost in coming generations of children as yet unborn who will die from the depleted uranium, truly ugly weapons of terrible destruction, which were used by our forces on a civilian population.

If we cannot find a way to bring Blair to trial in an International Court of Justice, then let us make it clear that we will never again elect a Government which is led by him. He must go, and go now.
Nick Owen 15 July 2004

Dump Blair this polling day

2004-06-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

"The time has come for changing" by Nick Owen

Come members of parliament
Lend me an ear
I'm telling you loud
And I'm telling you clear
Your job shall be forfeit
If you're backing Blair
If your job to you
Is worth saving
This leader of yours
Must be sunk like a stone
For the time has come for changing

Come all you philosophers
All those who care
You elected a leader
This young Tony Blair
Riding to power
On a wing and a prayer
The truth
Needed lots of massaging
But the winner then
Will be losing now
For the time has come for changing

Come all you New Labourites
Take head of this call
Don't you see that your values
Have gone to the wall
You're backing this fascist
While we are appalled
There's a battle out here
And It's raging
If you don't wake up soon
Then your end is in sight
For the time has come for changing

Come all of you voters
Throughout the land
I'm spelling it out
So you all understand
The oil of Iraq
Was not ours to command
For the pipelines
The war we were waging
Was wholly illegal
And utterly damned
So the time has come for changing

The line is in the sand
The curse has been cast
It is time to dispose
Of this lier at last
Or the present disaster
Will never be past
The order was wrong for invading
And those who've complained
Will not be arraigned
And the time has come for changing

2004-05-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

My spiritual home

Alien Twin. Brought to us by Babyworld: China

2004-05-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

On the counter at my local corner Bangladeshi store sits a box full of plastic eggs. They are half transparent so you can look in on the world of the alien twins. Apart from the Spock-like ears, these small plastic toys, swimming in a tangerine amniotic goo, are pretty close to human twins at about 8 weeks beyond conception.

The Chinese are famous for toy making, and infanticide. But many cultures have historically murdered twins as being odd and therefore dangerous.

Babyworld has made them alien and yet desirable for children and shop keepers in one breath. Well, no, they don't breathe. But they can be used to do all sorts of strange child-oriented things.

I expect you can safely flush them down the toilet too. Maybe it is all part of preparing us for a world where the foetus remains alien and to be toyed with and gawped at.

Is there a chance that we could learn to be compassionate with the unborn twin or even the unborn foetus?

Or will we have to make them into aliens before we can safely examine them and their human potential?

Society is technologically ready to observe the womb world. But emotionally we are a long way away. We are hopelessly alienated from our early humanity.

The foetus, especially the twin foetus, is too alien to be loved, yet fascinating like the old freak show at the circus.

Come to think of it, the Chinese are famous for circuses too, and invading spiritual spaces like Tibet.

Go on Blair, sell them a power station, we will buy into their alien twins.

BBC NEWS | Health | Why do we need a stem cell bank?

2004-05-20T02:56:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Health | Why do we need a stem cell bank?: "Whatever the benefits, there's no getting away from the fact that human embryonic material has become a research tool for the pharmaceutical industry - that the moral status of the embryo has been lowered for the sake of medical advance, profits, and extending the lives of an increasingly elderly rich western population"

ETHICS AND THE EMBRYO

First you pressure follicles to ripen fast like lettuce under glass. Then you remove them and fertilise them. You implant a few into a woman so she can have children. The rest you send to the new bank for use in research.

Some people will tell you that this is not human life it is just a bundle of cells. This is a lie that makes life easier for the weak minded.

Others, like the ubiquitous Lord Winston, will tell you that these may be living, but do not count as human life, because they are not yet individuals. Until fourteen days of development have passed the life is not individual, since it could become a twin, or a higher multiple.

I am not sure when and where in the history of ethics a human life became tied to individuality in this way. Perhaps it is all part of new labour ideology.

Twins have always been problematic in human society, and to twins themselves. Am I truly an individual if I am a twin? Perhaps my life is fundamentally less significant, less valuable because I am a multiple.

An egg cell is not a human being till it is fertilised. Nature dispenses with these once a month. But the idea that the fertilised conceptus has the same status as the unfertilised egg because it still has the potential to beome more than one individual seems to me to be the worst kind of logic. It would make better sense if it could not become an individual at all. But it can and will, if implanted in a womb.

The only thing that differentiates the stem cell from the fertilised egg cell is that it cannot generate a placenta and thus create a full human being. It can do anything else, which makes it the perfect tool for human tissue repair.

Winston and his scientist and administrative colleagues want to abort these embryos to extract their stem cells. What could be the objection? They would have been destroyed anyway. Why deprive suffering humanity of the stuff of near immortality?

Its all a matter of value, of status and of ontology.

One Israeli is worth around ten Arabs, one western life worth around 50 eastern lives. One rich old succesful individual western man is worth an infinite number of lives that have not yet reached the state of being individual.

"Whatever the benefits, there's no getting away from the fact that human embryonic material has become a research tool for the pharmaceutical industry - that the moral status of the embryo has been lowered for the sake of medical advance, profits, and extending the lives of an increasingly elderly rich western population"
The writer of the article attached does not really go far enough here.

Once you begin the Winston argument from individuality where do you stop? At a seminar I organised at Somerville College Oxford, it was suggested that the new born baby is not an individual yet since it has no "I" consciousness. May we not return to infanticide on these grounds. Does brain damage count as stopping someone being an individual? Perhaps, as Jung suggested, most people never differentiate from the herd enough to be considered individuals.

If only individuals are safe from the surgeon and the poisoner we all have something to insecure about.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Iraq handover at 'full throttle'

2004-05-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Politics | Iraq handover at 'full throttle'

So Blair and Bush cosy up at least once a week now to help make the transition faster.

I wonder what they are saying. Blair, under pressure from the F.O. says the Brits will pull out if asked.

We know the Americans intend to stay as long as they have stayed in this country.

I think it is time we threw the arrogant empire out of Britain too.

America, we don't need you here to protect us, either.
You don't make us safe you don't make us free.

You are oppressive

We don't want to go on living in a Lynndie sort of England

We don't want puppet Blair either. He is no better than the puppet rulers in Iraq.

Hopefully he too will soon be gone

A family of trees

2004-05-18T03:57:00.000-07:00

A FAMILY OF TREES

Mother, a massive enveloping oak
Dips her toes in the water
She looms out above the stream
With the sun like a bird on her shoulder
Her arms are stretched as wide as heaven
Her hair a vast wild mane

Father, a weird and ancient oak
A twisted wild wizard
Aloof
High above the bank
His head and shoulders are withered
Shrivelled
Almost dismembered
He is only alive through his high magic

The Willow youth
Stands silently slender
Up to his single thigh in the swollen stream
Like a stork in motionless meditation

The toddlers
A cluster of mischievous thorns
Scrabble in the muddy hollow
All arms and legs and elbows
Having fun

Uncle has arms like tentacles
Snaking up and out and round
From his hideout
Below the bridge

He is a tree troll
His fingers
Drum on the parapet
A challenge to every traveller
Who walks his way