The day is over we have reincarnated the past in honour of all those people that died in that terrible war, the Queen has spoken uplifting words and we once more return to a state of lockdown and social distancing. Nothing is quite the same though is it?
Well my television watching last night was Mary Beard programme on culture in the lockdown. I admire Beard for taking me round Rome, a historic Rome that still has its history writ large over its landscape like broken teeth in a mouth. She also mentioned the Greek island I went out to all those years ago at 21, it was Delos, an island of ruins. We visited Mykonos which is nearby, and the thought comes to me that at the age of 21 I was not ready for history, or the heat.
But to get back to Mary Beard and culture, Anthony Gormley's was one person she spoke to, his figures stand so evocatively on the beach and then as the sea takes possession of them disappearing quietly. Gormley seems to be a one thread man, solitary figures but eye-catching in their starkness. Beard is not so taken with nature writing though, which is puzzling. Does her analytical mind baulk at fancy sentiment I wonder. Does the historian look through the words and see them wanting.
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I read Brendan Montague most days, he is editor of The Ecologist, a magazine founded by Edward Goldsmith, who later in time turned over the editorship to Zac Goldsmith who ran it for a time. Someone interested in green matters. Well Zac as a Conservative politician has not done good, either in green matters or politics, I think he fumbles on the edge not knowing quite what road to take.
But anyway an interesting article on socialism, and why people like me are confused by the many forms of this belief system but how we also turn away from capitalism with disgust.
https://theecologist.org/2020/may/07/getting-back-nature Brendan Montague
Socialism is the claim that everyone is equal. There are good socialisms and bad socialisms. There is good faith socialism which is an attempt to create a world where we are in fact equal. This cuts against the logic of capitalism, where the person with the greatest wealth has the most power.
But there is also bad faith socialism. There is a socialism that cares about equality among humans but will deliver this at the cost of nature. It seeks the short term benefit of those who support a particular union or party, ignoring the long term cost of mass production, pollution, even colonialism.
You get to pick your socialisms. You can pick many other isms. You can pick none. But - somewhat ironically - you never get to pick your capitalism. Capitalism is always about profit, and never about people.
And it is in any case entirely unnecessary for people to take up the banner of socialism for them to come together and unite for what is a common, and a natural want.
We know a return to the past is both impossible and undesirable. We want our future back: a future where humans are nature, and where nature is resplendent.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And now for something different; My video of the church bells of Normanby is not very good, I learnt to cut and the process takes hours. But from 5 minutes down to two and half minutes. The person appearing in the middle is John, occasionally called 'The Squire' because of the way he is always telling people off around his boundaries.
Criticism of filming! Badly focussed ;)
That video is a delight - pure English summer's day Thelma.
ReplyDeleteI find the bells rather grating though Pat. Sadly our village did not do anything for VE day. Today I now have a great hole outside the garden fence, which they have dug and left. It is after all Saturday!
DeleteInteresting on socialism. I don't think it's possible to believe everyone is created equal. They should be under the law (but at least in the US, they are not even there), but we are born with so many differences and some are economic but many are skills and intelligence. Socialism, even the good kind, would try to deny that and pay them all the same for unequal work. It's what fouls the whole thing up. What we should work hardest on is being sure there is equal pay for equal work and equality under the law. That is a hard enough goal it seems with human nature being what it is.
ReplyDeleteIf reincarnation, the birth kind, is true, then we come into this world with certain memories, that most of us cannot access. They influence who we become in so many ways. If it's not reincarnation, what if our DNA carries family memories, also influencing us. So much unknown that only when we die might we know-- if it's not dust to dust.
When my brother visited us here, we talked about how our parental upbringing was influencing us more now in our own old age than maybe earlier. He lived a very different life, with different choices, than I did, and yet here we were discussing what we thought about this or that and we'd come full circle, I think, back to the way we were raised with the moral standards that was at the bedrock of those years.
Tackling your first paragraph Rain, fundamentally, yes, you should get paid more for being intellectually more clever. But what we have found out in this pandemic, it is not only the science we have had to rely on, but the ordinary key workers who fulfil so many jobs. Our government has lost all the so called 'gains' it made over the last few years by keeping to austerity measures. The government, as does yours, have to pay out large sums of money to keep the economy running. Capitalism has grounded itself for the time being.
ReplyDeleteTackling the second paragraph, not sure I quite believe in reincarnation. The argument was always about nature against nurture. Funnily enough I have just read a true story about 6 boys marooned on a desert island somewhere near Fiji. The writer of the article took Golding's Lord of the Flies and contrasted them against these six boys behaviour during their 15 month stay. They shared and took care of each other, nurture won this time.
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Years back I read a lot on reincarnation. The memories some seemed to bring with them. I still don't know even after my own summer of meditations and regressions to past live stories. Might I have created them? I did a further exploration with a hypnotherapist that fall. It validated what I'd gotten and she had her own stories. With all of that, I don't know what will be when we die.
DeleteDaughter has been to some of Gormley's talks at university. She says his figures are based on himself, which sums him up. She went in anticipation and left disappointed.
ReplyDeleteI think that is the impression I got from him, he is a 'one horse' man, thereby you could say his talents are limited!
DeleteI enjoyed the video of the church bells, I felt nostalgic, there is no church with bells in my neighborhood, and the church I attend is nontraditional in architecture and has no bells.
ReplyDeleteEnglish churches can be beautiful, but always cold in winter. Jo who rang the bells and her husband are very strongly patriotic. They have a flag pole in their garden, which is fairly unusual, and fly different flags through the year Terra
DeleteI was waiting for more bells to join in!
ReplyDeleteThere are only two bells Sue, it is not a posh Suffolk church;)
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