19.01.81
As Rumer Godden says:
“Things do not happen by themselves.
“Unless you start them and work at them and go on working at them,
“they will not happen.
“Even thunderbolts are electricity, not God.
“Also you must remember that people do not usually keep their promises.
You must not expect it.
Think how difficult it is to keep your own,
“and then you will see how unlikely it is,
“that they will keep theirs.”
Wisdom derives from understanding experience, whatever way you understand, your own experience.
If you recognise that your own cognition is absolute,
then you will understand that knowledge is nothing more than static wisdom,
for wisdom is the real experience of self.
No thing more.
Tomorrow is the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
Also, probably the hostages in Teheran will be freed.
A massive operation involving the whole western world has enabled this to come about.
I think historically this event will be well documented,
primarily as a precedent of events to come.
We totter on the edge.
I feel there is a worldwide nationalism in the air.
Some unseen seed spread on the four winds through man’s mind that makes him,
as so often in the past,
act irrationally.
We live in interesting times that have yet to become dangerous.
If capitalist fight communist,
If communist fight capitalist,
If Islam slays a lion,
Correct me if I am wrong
There will be war,
In which the poor will die,
To be reborn again
As wing’d avengers,
To their incessant destruction
By others,
Of their own species.
I’m not a revolutionary
Don’t put me up
Against the wall
I’m not a revolutionary
But listen to my call.
21.01.81
I watch the commentary on television of U.S.A. hostages who are just landing at Tunis airport, Algeria.
In the blackness of night, two blue flashing lights and one red one,
illuminates and gives color to the scenario.
The world press awaits, ready to relay ‘live coverage’ of the event.
Sandy, my dog, understandably sleeps through this page of human history.
I stare boggle eyed at some aeroplane thousands of miles away,
taxiing on the runway to reveal whatever it is we want to see.
A real life movie that is disturbed only by a constant,
verbal, stream from the commentators.
The Algerians, prime movers, apparently in the script have stage managed the affair and it is very good propaganda for them.
Suddenly Algerian TV shows a plane that carries just their officials.
Our observers drone on about the British part played in the affair.
Perhaps every country that played some role could make a movie of their own part of 21-01-81.
Political leaders, Thatcher and Reagan could having starring roles.
Hostage phobia in a phoebic world that turns toward what?
Initially Nationalism as my TV shows and as life has shown.
Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both speak of sacrificing ourselves for the ‘good of the countries future.
They ask for us to see ourselves as part of a ‘Nation’ that needs our ‘individual’ co-operation to survive.
The course of history indicates that the ‘Nation’, in order to test the commitment of the individual,
usually demands greater and greater co-operation from its plebiscite.
‘If I should die
Think only this of me
That some corner of a foreign land
Shall be forever England.’
Rupert Brookes poem echoes in the Algerian night sky.
Nationalism.
The Moslem world, too, appears bending toward nationalism albeit a far more irrational cohesion.
Nevertheless, not unlike the cries of our heads of government that:
“There is something more than you, as an individual.’
In our case the state, in Iran’s Allah, but why?
Perhaps, because there is something in the air.
Indeed that the very air we breathe affects not only our physical selves but also our meta-physical selves,
our unconscious thought.
The root of our perception.
Dealing out fate invisibly before our very eyes.
Simultaneously affecting the whole of humanity
Consequently making a few irrational happenings in the human realm.
A realm ruled by man’s indulgence.
In his own self importance,
To the neglect of his origin,
The space from which he came.
The dinosaurs grew too big for the world and somehow they became extinct.
I saw a hostage come out of the plane.
‘I’ve walked a highway high on cocaine,’ said one of them.
Perhaps, in a different way, we’ve grown too big for the Earth.
Space-waste-extinct.
Dinosaurs shaking hands
Commentators blabbering
That walk up the tarmac.
Inauguration day
How they pray
For deliverance.
52 Americans captured and held in Iran for 440 days,
released as 40th President of USA signs on.
I say, I say, the dinosaurs are dying
Come what may.
