Through a glass, darkly,
We too quickly understand;
Lightning blames the sand.
[For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ~ 1 Corinthians, 13; 12]
****
Light at the Gates:
bring Beauty,
that it may feed
the flames of Desire.
*
Good Samhain⚡️
People can make-believe of anything: an idea; a time/place; a person; the worth of Brexit. It might be founded on sheer strength of feeling or on the perception that a logical position is providing a complete picture. Checks on reasoning are subsumed into the comfort of confirmation bias. It becomes a feedback-loop of superiority and victimhood, working as a shield against all opposition.
The greater the investment in a position, the greater the requirement for its justification and, the more one justifies an investment, the more one becomes consumed by the need to. This is an ideological dependency developing a religious-like zeal for its own protection. Seeing is believing where believing is seeing: these are now the same thing. Chicken and egg. It doesn’t lead to truths, except by virtue of coincidental overlap – luck – or by lessons learned through the observation of its example – judgement.
And because the cold, hard truths of Brexit are self-evident, either you admit your error, to yourself, at the very least, or you double down and brazen it out, in the hope that denial will buy time and yet save your face. Thus, through fear or cynicism, you set yourself to the mission of converting and recruiting others because, well, safety and righteous correctness in evangelical numbers, right?
Thing about navel-gazing:
by the time you look up,
the World has turned
and you are lost
again.
Thing about rabbit holes:
they’re for rabbits and
rabbits means rabbits
and that’s a warren.
Press before leader
Leader before party
Party before country
Country before planet
And myriad fuck-ups
Face off
Man, in all his vanity,
so eager to compete,
has bet the World
to beat her at destruction to create,
by the design of an intelligence
he fakes.
Fire and fury blazing,
Skin in the game schemes,
Glazed, flaming orange,
Power frankly keen,
As though it burned,
Mid-circles, in a furnace
Fit to raze,
With an arsenal, he swore,
The likes of which this world
Has never seen before
”And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly, power… the likes of which this world has never been seen before.” ~ Donald J Trump, 8/8/2017
Once everybody knows, does the poison fade or grow? Where do the pumped-up paranoia and the daft denial go?
Does common knowledge get a welcome in the hillsides and the streets? Enough that moderation wakes to see and win the light of day? Does forgiveness and a sense of humour meet and greet the anger and embarrassment half way? So that vitriol and vengeance dissipate? Does it sweeten up the atmosphere? Does superstition disappear? And do the floodgates spring apart to send a purifying tide to heavy head and fizzy heart or make the distance side to side become a roiling sea? Does the constant churn return us, endlessly, back to the start, where faith and proof demand to function separately? Does some truth unite the factions or divide to further fractions? Will it eat us up or will it set us free?
Brexit aside, which party is more malleable: a party led by a seemingly unassailable yesteryear ideologue or a party caught out and haunted by the overt flaws in its libertarian mindset? Which is more palatable: a party that seeks social justice by means of a chippy levelling down or a party that is so admonished and exposed that it may yet have social justice thrust upon it by sheer necessity and command?
One party merely seeks to scapegoat different demographics; the other is seeing its scapegoats bite back. One is on the upturn of the wheel of self-righteousness; the other is coming down. Which is likely to be the most adaptive: the one coming up on hubris and rose-tinted zeal or the one that is increasingly pulled down by its rich certainties and chastened by the consequences of its overreach?
Now add Brexit. Which party accepts that Brexit is, irrespective of current official positions, the priority that will determine the viability of the whole United Kingdom and the well-being of every individual on these isles? Which party is most likely to listen and learn and accommodate realities and new information? Which party’s approach might be more readily altered by sensible persuasion? Which party seems more sensitive to the scrutiny and pressure of the wider public and the Media? Which party looks as though it can be more easily called out and reined in by its own?
What a horrible state of affairs.
God’s got a direct line
to Downing Street
by a covenant of equivocation
and hellfire in a field of wheat;
a billion sly indulgences that wryly speak
“out-toried”, sit inglorious upon the mercy seat.
A shadow of things to come.
What Britons want
is anybody’s guess.
Do not ask me, for
I am only one;
I did not seek this mess:
not for my gain
not in my name,
was Brexit’s pain begun.
I did not seek this source of stress
that stalks my country,
walks her backwards,
makes her people less
with less.
I did not seek a council of
emboldened third-rate jesters
nor the laissez-disconnect
from fact and intellect that festers;
sends attacks across
my patriotic bows and, even now,
undaunted by reality, does will
a march of muddled expectations.
No, nobody knows
what Britons want,
beyond humiliation
as a glaring guarantee
while glowing Pride
befalls a nation.
juxtaposed 