Remember: you heard it here first

Ian M

Does this make sense to anyone?

---

How is it that all the best talent in the world is magically drawn to the imperial centre of the time? Does it get sucked there by the pull of capital or is a thriving economy the only True Prerequisite for Real Art?

With sportsmen, they will be most able to excel in lands where food and leisure time (to devote to such non-essential activities) are abundant. Look at the decline in Russian Olympic successes post 1990 - it is marked even when you factor in the athletes who were competing for their new home countries.

The best musical traditions have historically been linked to the cities and courts of great affluence. Even today the entire world is under the sway of music made almost exclusively in Britain and America.

What of ‘being the best you can be’. Does this rely on being born in the right place so your talent can be ‘developed’ to its ‘full potential’? Full potential for who? Is it not good enough to play for a local team or musical group? Whose is the satisfaction when you finally ‘reach the top’ and ‘conquer the world’. Not yours.

Is ‘being the best you can possibly be’ a remotely innate human attribute? Where is the motivation for such an all-consuming task when there is no huge cash reward, as there wouldn’t be during a Dark Age in some backwater town in decline, or for that matter, in Cro Magnon France? Is it a tragedy that all this talent wasn’t properly refined — was it wasted on a backward people who didn’t know any better?

Empire treats human natural ability the same way it does the resources of the ‘natural world’. The bottom line in both cases is Plunder for Profit.

Ian M

(I had to find a way to slow down the pace of changing, otherwise I would have been burned out crisp + dry by the time I was 24)

I waited too long!

People having to make their conclusions
After hours on the last day of the job
But their mind was already made up
By the stack of payslips in the corner

They were saying the same thing over + over
Even when they knew it was a lie...

All I needed was One Person to pour
Into the regret of having no regrets;
Just a slender walkway across the ravine;
Just a second rung to hold the ladder together

I needed liveable truths that weren't just
Convenient excuses to carry on like nothing had changed...

I want one fix to last my lifetime long
So I don't have to keep coming on back for more
But for once I'd like to know just what I'm doing
While I'm about my business.

How to slip out of this chainmail windowframe
& into something more comfortable?

To prove my love for myself, I will drive my self away.

(Stranger things have happened—when they were permitted us;
When we allowed our senses to give them birth.)

Ian M

She makes him want to change;
want to pay attention to the clothes he will wear, to the untidied state of his hair;
She makes him replay their conversations with an ear to future elucidity;
She makes him want to prepare his set pieces in unhurried pauses
because the words he wishes to use are special and easily waylaid;
She makes him want to forget personal history in the slow germination of a white wrist

in the space between them.

She makes him want to buy another drink to steady his nerve and quicken his smile;
She makes him want to share in solemn experience;
want to avert his gaze when it chances upon hers intent;
She makes him think in an earth of friendly thoughts all through the sticky night;
She makes him want to change her into a powerful woman
with fuller knowledge of her supple strengths:

She makes him rediscover the pleasure in acquaintance.

DopeBeastie

very sweet, this forbidden

Ian M

almost sickly, no?

DopeBeastie

almost... but no. this is the very essence of attraction. it's what desire drives us to do.

what i think is really cool though, is that this goes both ways. he wants to be a better man, AND he wants to make her aware of her power. there are far too many women out there without a clue

Ian M

PastaNazi wrote:

there are far too many women out there without a clue

Tell me/him about it!

I've a feeling he doesn't get too much luck going about things his way though. Far too many people out there who are seemingly incapable of coming to terms with their own power (submission is the name of the game they're most comfortable with). Everybody walking around on tiptoe, trying not to wake the sleeping giant, trying to 'tread lightly' and 'minimise their footprint'; trying to act as though they didn't exist.

Bullshit!

"Walk like a man, my son"
(Walk like a woman, my daughter)

DopeBeastie

oh shoot...

yeah "don't make a fuss", sit and be quiet

don't argue when the devil wants to buy your soul
just sell the shit and get it over with
you're nothing, totally unimportant
everyone else is more important than you
(as long as you of course believe in yourself, all the while... just don't make it public... you might make someone else feel bad or have a shitty day, or god forbid... hear the truth)

you are not a god

you are a speck.
you are nothing




pisses me off

Ian M

yup, that too.

Ian M

They tell me that it may snow tonight. Almost as though they were granting their permission. They say we will feel a great North-Westerly chill for most of the first part of the week. And if it turns out they were wrong, they will continue in their predictions with the same undiminished aura of confidence. An arrogance in the assumed mastery of a black art.

And what of my predictions? Can I not hold some small authority in the taste of the air, by the rustle of the bushes, in the swoop of the swallow, by the texture of the tracks in the dune? No - it's another small wisdom that has been robbed of its individuality - of it's connection to the lives of individuals interlinked in a web of the living - and is now a hand-me-down dictation of the way that things are.

What will we do when the reports stop coming? How will we know what to expect when finally there's no abstract authority to consult? Our local knowledge packed up, removed piecemeal to be synthesised until nothing remains grounded in real experience; we are the dependants, the children of the morning, the first for the cull at the crumble of the central command.

They tell me the Great Cold is coming and there's nothing I can do.

justam

It's probably still worthwhile to make your own predictions.

(I like how you wrote that.)

Ian M

justam wrote:

It's probably still worthwhile to make your own predictions.

(I like how you wrote that.)

Thanks.

Lately I've been practicing the assumption that I'm just as qualified as all the experts we're supposed to revere, and whose judgements we're supposed organise our lives around.

This has been a nice change from my usual habit which is to defer the Last Word On The Subject to anybody with even the slightest whiff of authority about them, even if it's something I actually know quite a lot about.

Obviously I can't compete with the amount of time the experts devote to their various occupations, so I have to adopt slightly 'less rigorous' methods in coming to my predictions. In prescribing a pinch of salt with each pronouncement, though, I avoid the embarrassing pitfalls of getting it wrong, whilst at the same time encouraging the independence of my listeners in the formulation of their own quirky methods.

If I'm smart about it, I bet I'm right at least as often as they are

Ian M

Doing Something New
is as easy (or as difficult) as the realisation
that it’s impossible not to.

Only the obsessive compulsives
who must complicate the simplest task in ritual
will tell you otherwise.

Doing Something New
is as easy (or as difficult) as stepping off a path
and into the forest.

Buru

Ian M wrote:

I will stay one step ahead
Of The Game.

I will be stalked
By this hapless hunter,
I will walk, I will canter, I will run
From his blade
Shining hungry
To bite into skin and sinew
In the small of my back.

But when I see
The precipice approaching -
Lumbering like a slow vibration
With every step,
The panting behind furious, thirsty, demented and blind -
At the last, I shall step nimbly aside
With one foot outstretched, a relieved grin in my cheeks
As the flashing body stumbles, spins, screams, sighs ever further below.

This is really good.

I also enjoyed the first post in this thread and particularly this line:
Maybe poetry is nothing if not a dialogue between consenting subjects.

Thanks for sharing.

Ian M

Thanks

I forgot about that 'consenting subjects' line. I should perhaps figure out a new context for it so's it doesn't get lost in the rest of the muddle...

Sharing's my pleasure too.

genie

wow, this is very good post. gotta go now, but definitely coming back to finish reading everything in here. and thinking about meaning of those sentences

Ian M

It’s nice to think that there is a plan for you; that all your particulate idiosyncrasies were put in place at the moment of your conception and shaped by experiences thereafter for a reason. It’s nice to think that you are the way you are for a specific purpose, even if that purpose isn’t always immediately apparent.

Maybe this compulsive, aggressive tendency to isolation was built in by the gods who made me because they in their wisdom could foresee a time when such an obvious handicap would turn to a definite advantage. Perhaps I keep people at bay because I know in my body that there will come a time when it will be necessary to sever ties with everything and every one I love.

Ian M

[don't think I've posted this golden oldie yet...]

my memories were an odour imprinted
in clothing whose solemn rites of
purification I was beginning to question

by candlelight it seemed as I went
about my dry, sacred business at gone
two in the morning (ah, memory!)

it was good to receive the kiss of wet grass
on the soles of my feet; to dance around
the heavy lines, slowly easing their load

by the dull clunk of pegs dropped into the basket
a blister opens on the ball of my middle finger:
the small ecstasy of doubt

Ian M

****

In my country
you can stalk
an innocent man
and shoot him
seven times
in the head
with no provocation
and they won’t call it
'MURDER'.

No.
they will call it
a 'breach of health and safety laws'.

***

See http://ukwatch.net/article/quot_endangering_the_public_quot if you want your blood boiled.

What the fuck is going on?

theskyabove

the article wouldn't open, but yeah...
it's a very wierd world we live on