Tidy

Time is immensely practical.
She tidies up after us.
First we are removed from the mess we make.
Then, slowly, she puts everything back in its place,
each pot and plate and pan on shelves
and in cupboards after our last meal.
She irons out the crease we left
in the threadbare upholstery of our favourite seat.
Our clutter is boxed and bagged
and redistributed to other people's mess
via the local charity shops
where freshly laundered dresses find new anonymity
waiting on the rack for someone else they won't quite fit
for a while. For their while. The while of their turn.
Now the meantime in which we lived is over,
everything that we put on hold finally unfolds,
and helps Time in her task.
All evidence of us is gone,
all tales told, and tales yet still untold,
tales never now to be told,
and generations will be born
not benefiting from what little good we might have done,
or suffering from our more numerous mistakes,
immune at last to our best intentions,
indeed, unaware we ever existed.

And all the little things you noticed,
that no-one else saw,
that irritated or amused you
or made you pause for a moment in contemplation,
will disappear for want of your attention,
at least, the way they seemed to you:
the cat's attacks during its mad half-hour,
and the way it singled you out,
the shadows of clouds slipping slowly over the contours
of the hills where you took all your childhood holidays,
your lover's smile,
the way her hair falls across her face when she laughs,
the look in her eye when something catches it,

The ways these are different for you are gone.
No-one will notice those differences anymore,
not the way you do. The way you did.
But do not be afraid or upset.
Time knows that we are more than our mess,
much more.
We tidy too, helping in our way,
setting things where we hope they stay,
stopping them from going astray,
for a little while at least, if not forever, like her.
Time is our mother, and we will meet again
as sisters and brothers, standing together
beside an open grave when time has ended
and after that last ceremony, when it lies empty,
because there is no-one left to fill it,
there will be no sadness any more,
just the quiet joy of finally putting our feet up
in an armchair prepared for us
by all the posteriors of our posterity,
and a perfect cup of tea.

On magic

People would rather be enslaved by miracles than set free by the knowledge that demystifies them.

In the Harry Potter books, all the teachers at Hogwarts teach you how to perform magic spells. None teach you why the magic works. Because then it wouldn't be magic. It would be science.

My principal objection to the whole world of Harry Potter populated by J K Rowling with wizards and magic is that it teaches children that knowledge about the natural world is a matter of mere performance of formulae with no intrinsic meaning. It is a triumph of reductionism. The idea of understanding the world and how it is constituted is not dismissed, it does not even arise.

Why does this matter? Because this description is arbitrary. It is not capable of communicating the beauty of the world, or locating us securely within it as anything more than an artifice as contrived as the spells which govern it. 

The world is described as though it is a place where people would rather cower in terror at an eclipse, which they imagine is controlled by the whim and caprice of some demon, than marvel at the majesty of a Cosmos in which such things can take place, and can be explained without requiring the intervention of a demon, without invoking some inscrutable, remote authority.

Maybe the people in this world think they can gain an advantage by persuading the demon that they're special, they're not like other people, and deserve special treatment. Maybe - because they have never been invited by the magicians and wizards of this world to make the effort necessary to appreciate the beauty of the cosmos - they are prepared to trade that very beauty and insight for a chance to get ahead of others in relation to the most mundane of concerns, in this tiny world (by comparison) that is described by magic. For them the stars will always be trivial decorations painted on a celestial ceiling that is just out of reach, rather than altogether more beautiful, enormous, amazing structures that are much more distant and yet entirely within the grasp of our understanding.

They are prepared to sacrifice knowledge whose demands are rewarded by real beauty for an illusion no better than one performed by a busker in the market place hiding a ball under a cup.

How do the professors at Hogwarts discover new spells? What's the research and development programme for magic? Or has all possible knowledge been recorded at the dawn of time in the first grimoire leaving us with nothing new to discover, no better than if we were just characters in a book ourselves?

The bone-crusher

I live in a world of impenetrable cliques.
Anyone who claims to like me is lying.
They must be: there is no other explanation,
although I don't know why they do it.
Maybe it makes them feel good about themselves.

No-one hears what I say. Their brains
literally erase all record of my words,
and insert what they think I said instead.
Whatever confirms their assumptions about me
becomes the official version of our history.

I live in a box of one-way mirrors:
I can see them, but they can't see me,
just whatever they want me to be.
Lately that's usually been something nice,
but it wasn't always like that,
and they've no way of knowing which anyway.

I look healthy, but ever since I can remember
solitude has wrapped itself around my bones
hidden beneath my flesh, unseen, twisting
constricting, like a python, rigid, tight like a vice.

It's a miracle I'm still standing. Unless, of course,
the bone-crusher has yet to loosen its grip
and unwind, whereupon I will unravel
and collapse in a heap on the floor,
my skeleton finally pulverised by lonliness.

The monastery

Although these monks practised every vice
to its extreme, their virtue somehow remained intact,
as though there was some obscure higher purpose,
some forensic detachment, or aloofness of demeanour,
that mitigated their every trespass. Every foray into this world
every observance of its ways and customs, every degradation,
was somehow clandestine, a subterfuge, all evils necessary
so that the saint could infiltrate the world undiscovered,
and become familiar with our turpitude under cover of sin.

Obscenity and innocence were interchangeable,
both equally stratagems of this same high mission.
Moral considerations were mere cards to be played
for stakes that were never made clear to us
according to rules that changed with every hand.

The monks did not compromise their vows
when they cast off their habit and dressed like us,
talked with us, adopted our loud profanities,
joined in our revels, belched, raised a glass with us
in blasphemous praise of undeserving sinners
and their gross, prodigious exploits,
their notoriety, their transient crucifixion of fame
and well-publicised parodies of glory,

or remained silent, like us, in church, when praise was due,
surreptitiously pilfering alms from the collection plate as it passed
to squander on unsanctified wine in some less holy place
where we raised cathedrals of flesh, and demolished them,
and reclined among their ruins mocking all reputation,
luxuriating in the wreckage of our renown,
and made the altars anvils of our lust. Their rule was a riddle

beyond the comprehension of all wit, so it was said.
The inscrutable will of God was no mere premise
to be elaborated by human reason limping in pursuit
in the lame logical progression of the rule's ordinances.
Rather, the rule itself defied scrutiny, embodied that will,
so it was said (for those who had read it were all now mad),

and so the monks it ruled were tolerated on the basis of faith alone
and their every whim and excess and transgression indulged
because of an equivalence with virtue reckoned in some lost algebra
by which they led us step by step towards an understanding
we would eventually come to regret more than anything else,
and we ordained them with our own eagerness
to believe in an impossible salvation.

We came to realise our own footsteps marked out their cloister
in every shadow-swept alley where souls are traded for expediency,
for brief neon vanities and temporary respite from self-inflicted pain,
and as our options narrowed with every poor decision,
as our desire for the numbing anaesthesia of lust or revenge abated
- the cycle of vengeance itself exhausted us,
and we tired of each other's gradually declining bodies -
as our appetites became dull through over-indulgence and familiarity,
and fatigue and our own decline instructed us in matters of priority,
as we found we had to be selective about where we invested our energy,
we gradually recognised in the acquiescence,
the tolerance and reconciliation, that became the only things
for which we could any longer summon up the effort,
not redemption,
but an uncanny resemblance to redemption
that was the cruellest possible condemnation,
the verisimilitude of virtue, a redemption we would now forever be denied,
the apparent virtue of a condition to which we had condemned ourselves,
the easy virtue of depleted sin for which we could never claim any credit
and which we could no longer escape with any extravagance of vice.

The monks departed,
abandoning us to a monastery of our own making,
where we were imprisoned without reprieve,
and we found all we had to hold on to was each other
and the desire to deliver ourselves was thwarted
by the addict's inability to accept grace undefiled,
but to pay a price for everything.

Pushkin

A shooting star thinks it's an only child,
glimpsed bright and brief alone some moonless night,
then gone before a sibling from the sky,
companion of the star, sharing its flight,
refutes the lonely aspect of its light.

Stray, feral, hybrid, huge, wild or half-wild,
unsuitable to obtain for a child,
my father chose you from a stray cat's brood
which otherwise was meek and cute and mild,
the least amenable to love, most bitter,
the untamed savage, fiercest of the litter,
and we rejoiced in your blood thirsty mood.

We fed you to prevent you eating us,
placating you with a can of whiskas,
and anyone who stroked you would receive
a mauling that required some stitches.
We'd warn visitors "withdraw your hand"
if they'd reach out without wearing a glove.
You didn't mind if the meat was not canned,
while we did not enjoy the sight of blood.

Peerless you prowled, burning in the night.
You granted birds and rodents no respite,
and in the morning we could not ignore
the carnage that you left at our back door.
The local dogs fell under your control,
after you mauled them if, on your patrol,
they failed to bow to the top carnivore.

One day you could not go on any more.
I saw you as you struggled to draw breath,
all strength departed, yet defying death,
with undiminished will. The stuff of yore.

I felt you pass, and with it, all stars set
forever past horizons in the west,
announced the end of days in my sad heart,
a congregation of lost shooting stars.
You were much more than a beloved pet.

Glad tidings

The next Independence Referendum won't be won online. It will be won on the door step, at the water cooler, down the pub and over the garden fence. It will be won in conversations with friends, family, neighbours and colleagues, not with complete strangers who already agree with you, in social media echo chambers.

So remember there are more important things than someone agreeing with you. It is more important to be respected and respectful than to be right. Your enduring relationships are more important than your occasional vindications.

In the final analysis, at the end of the day, when all's said and done, everyone is wrong about almost everything almost all of the time anyway. In any discussion there's a good chance you are both wrong. There's only a slim chance even one of you is right. So stay respectful in the light of your mutual fallibility.

Make sure you have your facts straight. Develop your own critical faculties and be sceptical when evaluating evidence and arguments. Resist the urge to prove a point.

Remember the most we can achieve is the alignment of the various different perspectives we all have on incomplete information. We can base the alignment of these different points of view only on shared values and priorities.

Always remember the common ground you share with those that disagree with you. History suggests social progress is achieved by the slow development of more compassionate and enlightened values, not by the availability of new evidence or the improved logical rigour of the arguments by which it is evaluated. These remain relatively constant. Priorities and values are things you can agree on, even in the absence of evidence, even if not all priorities are shared.

Don't complain, explain. If someone repeats something you know to be inaccurate, provide the correct information without complaining about the misinformation or its source. Every time you complain about it just makes your listener think about it more. Talk about what you want them to think about, not what your opponents want them to think about, even if you want to talk about that to contradict them. Calling someone a liar just makes people think about the lie. Replace misinformation with information rather than the negation of the misinformation. Affirm, don't deny. Let people make up their own minds.

Any idea expressed as a way of belonging rather than a way of knowing will survive all contradiction. Indeed, it may become all the more entrenched for being challenged. If someone holds a belief to feel a sense of belonging to a group of people with similar beliefs, contradicting that belief will not change their mind. Discuss an alternative idea instead. Make their sense of belonging feel better by giving them a better thing to belong to, a better belief to share. Be the bearer of glad tidings, not the prophet of doom. 

At all times listen, and speak only occasionally. Make sure everyone feels they have had their chance to speak, especially those who disagree with you. You will not change anyone's mind. People change their own minds. The most you can do is explain what you believe, and make every effort yourself to base those beliefs on sound evidence and reasoning, and compassionate values and priorities. You can only do this once you have listened.

Democracy is not a beauty contest. It is not a consumer choice. It is not a legal verdict. Its decisions are provisional, not final. The evidence is always incomplete, because no-one can see the future. The criteria on which a decision is based are always evolving, because our priorities change. Democratic decisions are not a matter of determining the most popular subjective preference from a number of options. Who decides what those options are?

Democracy is part of an ongoing process of inclusion. Democracy is how the inscrutable subjectivity of the lord is overruled by the rational insight of the commoner on whom it would be imposed. Democracy is how we raise a reasonable objection to what we would otherwise have to accept.

We are living in an age where we are being increasingly enslaved by our own subjectivity. We are asked to choose between discreet, limited sets of meaningless, interchangeable, highly controlled options, and are then told we have made our choice, are treated as though that choice is final, and are content because of whatever appetite is temporarily satisfied as a result. It is more important than ever to act on the basis of intellect rather than appetite.

This is the best of what the next Independence Referendum can be: a process of engagement in which heterodox opinion and minority viewpoints are as important as whatever majority view prevails at any given time. Because the Yes campaign must be able to accommodate the diversity of opinion one would expect and indeed encourage to flourish in an Independent country.

Eimhir

The world could not survive
the undiminished presence
of a beauty so luminous,
so incandescent and startling,
as yours.

A visitation from a perfect world
and a prisoner in this one,
your beauty reminds the world
that it is ugly and overcome
in every comparison with you.

That is the only sense I can make
of what would otherwise be made
more cruel by being arbitrary:
the world's impositions on you.

Let me pretend there is a purpose
to the way the world curbs its exposure
to the beauty behind the mist
it wraps around your mind
to protect itself.

Let me pretend there is a purpose
to the weight it hangs on you
to fatigue your limbs
and exhaust their strength.

Let me pretend there is a purpose
to the way the world tries to limit
what is seen of the singular beauty
that exposes all its ugliness, 

for if you are possible
who would not want to dwell
forever on your countenance
and forsake the world altogether?

I know this pretence of mine
offers you no relief
other than perhaps the knowledge
that you have been seen and recognised.

I promise one day that will be enough,
and I will rejoice
as the world entire burns down
after one single glimpse
of your undimmed radiance.

Blood Moon, January 31st, 2018

Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche: "Everything has returned.
Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment,
even this last thought of thine itself, that all things will return."

Nothing is any less miraculous for being commonplace.
The rarest marvel's precedent lends its allure to all things,

and in the indefinite recursion of this last thought of yours
is spun the silky gauze the Moon sets on the world tonight
since time began. The eclipse to which you turn your telescope,
tilting it towards her at perigee, marks eternity's span.

and though the recurrence we reckon by astronomy today
shows there is no dream that is not also stalked by nightmare
in this twilight all dreams are one, if for a moment, and forever.

The ambulance chasers

"More than 10,000 ambulances have been dispatched with one crew member on board in the past four years," blare headlines on the Herald front page and the BBC Scotland News website, among other media outlets.

Hang on, there are only about 1,500 ambulances in Scotland, according to the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS).

But they don't mean 10,000 ambulances, they mean the number of times an ambulance was dispatched.

So why not say "ambulances have been dispatched with one crew member more than 10,000 times in the past four years" then? Because that doesn't score the same political points and immediately invites comparison with the total number of times an ambulance was dispatched.

Both articles report the words of a SAS spokesperson that "the statistics being quoted need to be seen within the wider context of over 670,000 shifts across this period, meaning only 1.5% of these were single-crewed," but far enough down the article to ensure that few people will read them. (In general, about half of people only get as far as the headline of an article, and of the rest, only about half read further than halfway through). So when you want to de-emphasise rebuttal while maintaining a facade of impartiality and balance, it's important to put it towards the end of the article.

An excellent alternative take on the exact same information is available from thoughtcontrolscotland.com.

But that's not my main problem with this piece. Given this information is being reported in the context of the widely publicised crisis in the NHS in England, presumable it was obtained in response to that situation? No, it was obtained by FoI (freedom of information) request in August.

It's difficult to see the media on this occasion as anything other than unionist mouthpieces when you realise this information was available in August, and was witheld until greenlighted by unionists when it could be weaponised in an attempt to damage the Scottish Government by trying to associate it with a situation in the English NHS which any objective assessment would regard as a vindication of the approach adopted in Scotland. Then, once supplied to the media by the Conservative party, the information is simply regurgitated in a way that preserves the deliberately misleading and politically motivated slant of the original press release.

In their desperate efforts to weaponise the English NHS crisis against the SNP, BBC Scotland News et al. have literally sunk to the level of being ambulance chasers.

The media could report the various calls by health professionals for people to remember that A&E (accident and emergency) is not an out-of-hours service, and to consider whether their GP or a minor ailments or injuries service would be more appropriate before attending. But that would presume they are actually a news service, rather than a propaganda one.
 

Human

Maybe we aren't human after all.
Maybe we are wild animals
pretending to be human,
and society is our habitat,
where we are lost in mimicry,
prowling through a jungle
of replicated behaviours,
and the person we think we are
is an elaborate copy of our prey,
to avoid startling it as we close in,
and our perseverance in its pursuit
has been so thorough
we have forgotten that's all it is,
and we lure ourselves into traps
we set for others,
and as we fall into them
our protestations echo
within the mirror's deceit.

Maybe we aren't human after all,
and our words are redundant,
as noises devoid of meaning would suffice:
simple territorial declarations, mating calls,
intimate tautologies reiterated as acts of grooming,
tiny gestures of supplication and social cohesion;
or perhaps distant, mysterious, remote cries
of distress or ecstasy, heard at midnight
which we are never sure we heard correctly
and which are never heard again
to let us decide which.

That line between repetition and ambiguity,
that boundary between tautology and silence,
between light and dark, is:

a tightrope we try to walk
in the brief intoxicated span of a poem
before stumbling off back into the margins
to wander back into the bone-crushingly loneliness of night, or;

a tripwire we discover with a reckless remark
that ends a relationship, or;

a throat cut at midnight
from which we drink warm dark blood
before receding into the shadows to be at one again
with the ageless, nameless, incomprehensible evil
that provoked that cry of ecstasy or distress
before it was swiftly curtailed, or;

a rope with which we tie a noose around the Moon,
turning astronomy into an inverted execution,
planets balloon worlds tethered to our imagination of mud,
dangling inert, upside down,
warning the stars to avoid this place,

because maybe we are not human after all.
Maybe we are just wild animals.

Tapestry

Reality is narrative. At least,
any reality we can describe and share.

Beyond the fraying edges of our stories
there is a vast empty solitude
with which we each must make our peace alone,
and all our myths are littered with deals and trades
offered to the indifferent abyss.

It is the tales we tell
- to ourselves, to each other -
that turn this wilderness into a home.
We imbue the world with depth and duration
to make a space we can occupy together.
All the stars are orphans,
peering through the threadbare sky,
without the constellations
into which we gather and arrange them.
Every sight is surface
without our efforts to fathom
the meanings they conceal.

We begin to remember
once we begin to speak,
and tell our story,
and celebrate our induction
into the common dream of humanity
as the thread of our story
is woven with the rest,

and we bid farewell to the company we kept
among the trees and rocks and birds and beasts,
and the other diverse objects of delirious infancy:
an alternate reality that can now only intrude dreamlike,
- familiar yet half-remembered -
into the shared dream we now call real,
as seldom as unicorns and hippogriffs,
to populate the tales we tell on those rarest of occasions
when we want to share something intimate of ourselves
among the pageant of hope and memory.