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Back in McDonald's (have I ever been away?) and some workman is repairing some piece of electrical set-up. Quite a shrieking of electric drilling, and it makes a change from children screaming. Well into pop biographies at the moment and one quote caught my eye... I have always believed that rock ’n’ roll comes down to myth. There are no “facts.” (Lester Bangs, in "Rod Stewart") Not actually reading a Rod Stewart biography, but the quote was from another book sampled. No "facts". It makes me think of the art of translation......and it is an art. Samuel Beckett apparently suffered much as he sought to translate his own works, written in French, into English (or vice versa) Sometimes he gave up the job as impossible. Very easy to translate "the cat sat on the mat" but when you get down to nuances of expression within one language to translate/express the self-same thought/feeling into another becomes a daunting task. The implications of all this is far reaching. I leave it to you. For me it relates to "judgement", particularly of others. Reflect upon this:- It’s difficult to be a legend. It’s hard for me to recognize me. You spend a lot of time trying to avoid it…. The way the world treats you is unbearable…. It’s unbearable because time is passing and you are not your legend, but you’re trapped in it. Nobody will let you out of it except other people who know what it is. But very few people have experienced it, know about it, and I think that can drive you mad. I know it can. I know it can. (James Baldwin, interviewed by Quincy Troupe) It's difficult to be anybody in this world, where "hell is other people". In a preface to a bio of Elvis Presley I found this:- “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel,” Milan Kundera wrote in what could be taken as a challenge thrown down to history and biography, too. This suspension of judgment is the storyteller’s morality, “the morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding.” It is not that moral judgment is illegitimate; it is simply that it has no place in describing a life. To be honest, thoughts on this bring me to tears, still being emotionally raw from ditching anti-depressants (into the second week now) We are all living "lifes" and the judgements are terrible at times. "Judge not, lest you be judged". So true. We can know ourselves in the judgements we make of others, and we can therefore stand condemned while the one we judge rests in the mercy and grace of Reality. But whatever, back to the biographies. Reading one on Charlie Watts at the moment. A good man, beautifully flawed as we all are......" there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" as Leonard Cohen sings in "Anthem". Just stop trying to make a perfect offering! As Keith Richards, his bandmate, said:- He was a very private man. I always had the feeling that I wouldn’t necessarily step over or enquire about something, unless he wanted to talk about it. There was no side on him, there was no act to follow. Charlie was just what you got, which was Charlie. He was the realest guy I ever met. So Charlie was just Charlie, which says it all, or says nothing. Take your pick. PS One story from the book made me laugh, about Keith Richards in his library, on steps reaching and stretching up to get a book on anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci from the shelves. He slipped and did his collar bone. Keith reports that while he never got the book, he learnt a lot about anatomy!

successors irresolution

Yes, in glorious colour!

Did the graphic novel depict this scene? So it goes.

Had to laugh as I read through (for a second time) the graphic novel "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut. The "hero" Billy Pilgrim has the serenity prayer up on his office wall:- God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Then it says of Billy that the things he could not change were the past, the present, and the future! Which jogs my memory of the opening lines of Four Quartets by T S Eliot:- Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden All "unredeemable"? Spoiler alert The end of the same poem:- Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (You can tell I'm not very busy)

Another view, this one showing my own best feature......

The view from the till.....

Now at Oxfam. I always bring my own music, but the Ramone's "Rocket to Russia" was playing so I've left it on for the moment - their cover of the old Searcher's hit "Needles and Pins" (or is it "pinsa"?) has always been a favorite. Posting my previous story, I was remembering (or trying to) a little haiku. I've found it.... For those who proclaim they've grown weary of children there are no flowers What I was going to write before, my original intention, was about trying to describe my actual state of mind recently - a sort of void with all the various thoughts/moments spinning around and about. It's all a bit strange. But just by chance I picked up on a book by Jung, "Psychology and the East" and hit on a passage that was immediately relevant, about the disintegration of the conscious mind and the protection it needs from the "centre". An image really grabbed me:- The guy is "centred" even in the storm of revolving "selves" which each have their own disintegration into other "selves"! "Be still and know that I AM God" Well, I'm not making much sense. Back to the Ramones!

Tuesday is my Burger and Chips day at McDonald's, prior to my afternoon stint at Oxfam in the music section of the local Book and Music Shop. The place is crowded, I love the ambience of the place. Crowded! And yet down the High Street the Burger King is virtually empty - difficult to know exactly why one place attracts while another is shunned. Just to say that since Xmas I have been tapering off the anti-depressants. I tried it a couple of years ago with disastrous results. This time I consulted with my GP and I have stuck to a preplanned reduction, not accelerating simply because of "feeling good". From 40mg I now take just 10mg a day, and next monday is the day when they finally go into the bin. The last time I tried I ended up almost in the mad-house. I've probably told this before but really can't remember. In the middle of all the depression and anxiety I had the task of taking a couple of large carrier bags of stuff to my daughter's place, about three miles away. After this, to collect the grand-children from school. It was raining, the wind blowing. No car and the buses here are unreliable. A three mile walk in the wind and rain, with two heavy bags. My eye was on the clock, and the minutes ticked away before I knew I had to leave. The time came, I stood up, and I grabbed both the heavy bags. It just struck me then how impossible it was. I just stood in the middle of the lounge and seriously, it was in my sliding mind the time for the white-coats to come and take me away. I remember simply standing there and saying:- "I need help"......and I meant that I needed to be sectioned, taken away. My dear "other half" (who in all the long years has never said anything like "pull yourself together" or any other bullshit) just thought that I needed help with the task at hand. She said to give my mate Terry a ring, ask him to give me a lift to my daughters. It was something to do. I rang him, and thankfully he was in, and in ten minutes he was there outside. My best mate. Not only did he take me, but he then drove me down to the school to pick up the little kiddies, then he hung around for a few more hours (missing his own dinner) after I poured out a few of my problems to him. It brought us closer. Really, he had saved me from the knackers yard. Once or twice I've tried to explain to him but I think he just looked upon it as a small favour. Gratitude. He was the mate who died from a sudden heart attack just a couple of months ago. What can you say? Anyway, next monday is the end of the tablets day - all being well. The tapering off this time has been fairly uneventful, actually feeling better the less I have taken. Maybe a bit over-emotional and teary at times, but fairly stable; but that said, an undertone of simply feeling very little at all - hard to explain. But I do know that my heart leaps at the sight of "little ones", their faces - children delight me! Well, I must go. But may continue once I get to Oxfam. I had intended a slightly different post but as usual the words just wrote themselves irrespective of my original intentions.

Thanks for the clarification. 😀

Um, err, no, I was referring to the Australian Father Christmas, Derek! The English one is for real, of course!

On and off, I have been getting back to graphic novels. They can be really good on Kindle, where you can just tap any picture twice and it then fills the whole screen. A side swipe will take you onto the next picture. And so on. Looking again at "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" where some guy, his car boot stacked with drugs and booze, roars off to pursue the American Dream! The graphics are superb, capturing the strident and nightmarish theme. Another I like is a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Sign of Four" which was ridiculously cheap on Kindle, about the price of a cup of coffee at McDonald's. Just to mention a quote found right at the beginning of the Fear & Loathing novel, buried in a picture of the "hero" who is draped in Old Glory..... "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man" (Samuel Johnson) Which made me remember another quote, from Shakespeare:- "No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity..... . . . But I know none, and therefore am no beast." Time to go.

Hey, what are you trying to tell me? 😀

At a fundamental level any thought of a need to improve (of ourselves or of others) is an attack upon acceptance. Leading to revolution - which is just what it means, a revolving wheel. New winners and new losers, but also "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" as Pete Townsend has it! True and genuine acceptance is - paradoxically - the way to transformation. Sadly, more often than not, our "acceptance" is a sham - we "accept" with our eyes upon the change it will bring! Therefore...... "No-calculation"! This all involves mercy, forgiveness, and so much more. The associations and correspondences are there to be found across the whole world of our Faith Traditions. What we have to be is what we are.

That virtually sums up his book "Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship" 😀

A good example of this is Father Christmas or Santa. As a child you believed he existed - indeed, the evidence was there - but try believing in him again now that you're an adult! That is precisely how I feel about mainstream Christianity that says I must believe Jesus mission was to come to this planet to die for my sins as a human sacrifice to God - there's just too much water under the bridge now for me to believe that story again, like I did once upon a time.

anonymous A belief isn't something you choose to believe A belief is something you can't choose not to believe

Everything progresses even as it stays the same. One eminent philosopher said that reality is a "constant advance into novelty" and so it is! We stay with our "selves" at our peril. Very much an admirer of Alan Watts and his work at the moment (along with Candy Crush Soda Saga, for which I can proudly claim to be at level 4445) He had his problems with drink but hey, we all have our problems. Fix your own. Reading his "The Way of Zen" at the moment. This from his introduction:- Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the “Great Void.” The void! Positive or negative. Some fear the void, some embrace it. Alan Watts then goes on to quote an old zen saying:- Above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground for the foot. He then says that such language should not actually be so unfamiliar to us, were we truly prepared to accept the meaning of “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.” Nowhere to lay our heads! Most prefer "beliefs", even to the point of claiming that their own set the parameters of an "only way". Quite tragic. Is there an "only way" set in stone, found in a book, that can actually set us free? Gives us the "peace that passes understanding"? More often than not the peace I see in others is all too understandable! As Thomas Merton once said, the only way is in fact "no way at all", a "way" where we in fact become as good as lost. But - as he says again - such a way is not a way out! Well, I waffle. An image found at random on Google. I like it.

Not quite sure what the final two lines mean?

Another page, this with one of William Blake's depictions of God - who was often referred to in other contexts as "Old Nobodaddy"! Blake once wrote a poem addressed to this entity:- Why art thou silent & invisible Father of jealousy Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching Eye Why darkness & obscurity In all thy words & laws That none dare eat the fruit but from The wily serpents jaws Or is it because Secresy gains females loud applause

A couple of sample pages from "Christian Mystics":-

Now awaiting a couple more Blooks from Blookup. One is "Christian Mystics" and the other is a third volume of "McDonald's Memos". The cover shows the church of Little Gidding, associated with T.S.Eliot's "Four Quartets". Which gives me the excuse to quote again the last few lines of that poem, which I love... We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. In the blurb to my blook I say that the pictures are large in comparison to the font of the text as I like them more than the words. A bit tongue in cheek, but almost true. Also that some of the pictures are of Buddhas and suchlike, which is "as it should be". Well, my coffee is getting cold.

I've always loved biographies, mostly of artists and writers ( but of some others too ) They put flesh and blood onto their various works. Apparently some such writers insist that their works should never be related to their lives as lived (I think T.S.Eliot for instance) but - at least for me - they are inseparable. Plus learning all the time. To take a quick look at a play of Beckett's on YouTube and wonder "what on earth is that all about" and then to have it illuminated by the learning and insight of others. Always remembering:- "One can never know enough, but not in order to judge", another profound quote found in a book on Beckett to add to my repertoire! (Not Beckett's words by the way, but appropriate to his own approach to life and living) "Judgement" is incompatible with any true understanding/living - that awful coming to conclusions. I relate it to the Pure Land way of "no-calculation" (hakarai). And then we have Christ's words..... "Judge not, lest you be judged" I'm waffling again.......😀

Pour away, Derek. I love reading about your interests. It opens things up that I certainly may have never considered - such as learning a little about Samuel Beckett!

Samuel Beckett What more can you say?