Playing The Game

 

The fact that I am tapping the keys to my laptop early in the morning is a tribute to my determination to lay off my compulsive reading of The Guardian as soon as I had eaten my muesli.  The unrelentingly awful news contained in its pages, that seems to bring to mind the worst excesses of the 1930s, and the feeling that I could do nothing about what was happening, was certainly beginning to get me down.

I now give the Guardian headlines a rapid scan on my phone and do the quick crossword and then leave the gruesome details for later in the day.  I still listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 - there are limits about how far I am prepared to go to set myself free from negativity – but there is something more transitory about hearing the news rather than reading it, and that makes it easier to take.  At least for me.

There is always the problem of 45.  I, like so many others, have never (and will never) come to terms with the reality of the present POTUS.  You see, try as I might I cannot get the news out of my mind, no matter how early in the morning I get up!

I have been struggling to find an image to sum up my understanding of how characters like 45 and the ex-third-rate Foreign Secretary actually see the world.  I know that both of them are incapable of seeing anything without the opaque filter of their own egos, but I do wonder about characterising their views of the political reality around them.

I suppose the easiest way for me to consider them and their activity is to find a game that can act as a metaphor for their respective approaches.

To start with 45.  I think that he sees the world as a game of Jenga, but his concept of the rules is not to see how many pieces he can pull out without destroying the construction, but rather to find the piece that will bring the whole structure down to ruin – and then reveal that he actually owns a much better, gold plated, Trump-stamped version of the game that will make everyone (i.e. himself) much better off.  And, after all, it’s only a game – and a game that lacks the seriousness of, for example, golf.

Johnson, (I refuse to call him by his Christian name because that gives a faux chumminess to his selfish egotism) is the leading instigator of coulrophobia in British life.  Dangling from a zip line while waving a toy Union Flag, tousling his carefully unruly hair, roguishly spouting Latin to liven up his calculated throwaway phrases, he assiduously works to polish his upper-class-twit-of-the-people image to mask his embarrassingly naked ambition.

His game is a more sophisticated one than 45’s, it’s the game of tea leaves.  You wait until the dregs are left in the cup, swirl them around and invert the cup then gaze at the pattern that is left and interpret it as a sign of the future.  Johnson is a master of pareidolia, apophenia, patternicity and agenticity – all of those are words that define the ability to perceive patterns where none, perhaps, exist.  Johnson wittingly or unwittingly (both work for him) situations and then he defines the resultant chaos through the refining lens of his own ego.

And, of course, Johnson has perfected the “delete all and insert” approach to life.  The term comes from my experience in General Body meetings in university where in student debates someone would propose an amendment of the “delete all and insert” type which converted the original motion into its opposite!  Johnson is very good at that because he lacks historical perspective – at least as far as his own ethical narrative is concerned.  So, to play his game, all you have to do if the last set of tea leaves were not satisfactory is drink another cup of tea and get a new set.

 Johnson is a ‘crisis manager’ not, in any sense that he is able to calm the situation or even manage it competently, no, his type of ‘crisis manager’ is the type that makes the most of a self-made crisis to advance his career.

Johnson is working to emulate his role model, 45, so that he can walk down Oxford Street and shoot someone and get away with it.  Given the way that he is regarded by the so-called base of the Lower Than Vermin Party, Oxford Street might be a no-no, but the High Street in one of the more rural shire villages might be a possibility.

It is now time for my swim where I can wash away the import of the previous thoughts, at least for an hour or so.

And then back to my work on Elsheimer, who is proving to be a much more elusive character for my research than I would have thought possible for a painter who is, undoubtedly, famous.  But that makes it all the more interesting and I have ordered books!

When 45 and Johnson have been consigned to the ignoble waste heap of grotesques, the paintings of Elsheimer will still, in their jewel-like intensity, be providing delight.  And that is an article of faith that I keep hold of whenever I listen to the news!

Oh, for the great outdoors!

I am beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and feel the wind where my hair used to be!

I am not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting near.

I do realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing and, more particularly, not doing.

Ideally, I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and foot.  Not bad, you might think – but even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while.  Or a week in my case.  Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar, fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.  I truly am grateful.  But I cannot walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera.  Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in reality. 

The point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they require any physical effort.

At least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks, and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time.  One week to go and I will be ale to go for a short walk.  Outside!

As someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize,  is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up and go whenever I like.  When you can’t, you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and get it done in no time at all.

I am sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t really afford for it to be anything else!  And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon enough.

As my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom (with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in depth.  With a short period where I deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.

But it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority (who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in our life times.  But this feeling of being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do exactly that.  It is the same with 45 in America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some sort of addiction.

The only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect – but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.

Meanwhile, I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital.  I have to admit that my hospital diary stretches only over eight days.  And did I suffer!  Well, the only pain that I felt over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores; discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography nurse.  Hardly the stuff of great drama.  I didn’t feel truly ill when I went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out.  There is no harrowing story of suffering and no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.

There is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late!  That is something worth thinking about.  But my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my observations throughout the week should play to my strength.

At least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

A crumb of happiness!

-->

It shows how low the bar for ‘political satisfaction’ is set that the fact that a homophobic, racist, unconstitutionally acting, twice fired judge, bigoted, accused paedophile Roy Moore fails to make it to the American Senate as representative for Alabama.  By just over 1% of the popular vote.

As Alabama is a deepest red Republican state, a Democrat successfully elected is a triumph, no matter how small the margin of victory.  It has been estimated that over 70% of the white vote went to the Republican, no matter how vile a candidate was standing to represent them!  And they call themselves God-fearing Christians!

Well, amid the unrelentingly awful progress of Brexit in the hands of a group of Conservatives who, at cabinet level have yet to even discuss what sort of Brexit they are actually working towards, a little ray of reason in the form of the wrong person NOT being elected to office is something to relish.

 

As is the fact that the failed Republican candidate was enthusiastically supported by pussy-groper-in-chief, good old kiss-of-death-to-reason 45, POTUS.  In an astonishingly polite and reasonable twitter 45 actually congratulated the new Democrat Senator!  Could it have been written by 45 himself, or is there someone in his office with a shred of decency who managed to get in first? 

45 has, of course, started to twitter a ‘justification’ (sic) saying that he knew that the Republican would lose which is why he supported his opponent in the Primaries and . . . hold on, I am not going to repeat the mendacious Jesuitical (not that 45 could ever rise to the height of sophisticated casuistry that the Storm Troopers of Roman Catholicism reach) rubbish that spills from his mouth and dribbles from his small handed typing fingers.  He lost.  He backed a loser.  Who lost.  Like him.  Tarred with the same brush of failure.  Sad.

This loss of a crucial vote in the Senate should make the passing of the shameless tax grab by corporations, big business and greedy donors more difficult to pass.  Does anyone truly believe that the new tax cutting laws are going to be revenue neutral, or that they are going to create an economic miracle, just like the similar plans in Kansas didn’t?  One waits and hopes.

But, above all, congratulations to the voters of Alabama for doing the right thing and rejecting a clearly obnoxious bigot from high office - and that is something that I did not expect to write in my lifetime!

Is it just me, or is the triumph of May in the Brexit negotiations anything more than mere words?  Try as I might I can see nothing concrete about any of the three elements of Payment, NI Border, EU Citizens in Britain and we poor British buggers in EU countries.  Yes, vast sums of magic money, billions of pounds have been metaphorically waved in the air (presumably to the sound and rhythm of Boris’s whistling); the Invisible Border has been made concrete (so to speak) but the implications for the rest of Britain, following NI’s lead would suggest that we have no Brexit at all; the gambling chips of EU lives are still being thrown towards the baize table as the wheel revolves.   

It’s an unreal combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and ghoti.

For those not aware of ‘ghoti’ I should explain that it spells the word ‘fish’.  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from enough

Take the ‘o’ from women

Take the ‘ti’ from nation

Put them all together and you have all the sounds to make the word ‘fish’

But it doesn’t end there, ‘ghoti’ also has no sound at all!  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from night

Take the ‘o’ from people

Take the ‘t’ from ballet

Take the ‘i’ from business

Put them all together and you have . . . nothing.

And that, if you still remember what I was talking about, is like what has been ‘agreed’ about Brexit and what the British government (I use the term very loosely) have stated/promised/negotiated/said/suggested/mentioned/insinuated - or any other word you might think of to explain exactly what they have done, because for me, I feel that we are dealing with the second pronunciation of ‘ghoti’ and that we have a wordy nothingness to get on with.

The trouble is, of course, that ‘wordy nothingnesses’ while they might keep the perennially warring EU factions of the Conservative Party momentarily apart, they do nothing for life as it is lived in the real world where real people have real needs.

Living in Spain as I do, what does this ‘triumph’ of negotiation say about my entitlement to healthcare in my adopted country?  What does it say about my ability to travel on the continent on which I live?  My right or not to stay in Spain?  My rights as a Brexit blighted citizen in a re-defined country relationship?

You try finding concrete reality in the vacuous mouthings of dithering, incompetence from the British government, added to the astonishingly lazy arrogance of Davies as he ‘negotiates’ by the seat of his pants with no apparent need for projections of what his airy pronouncements might mean.  Because the Spanish government is going to ask all the hard ‘W’ questions like: What?  When?  Why?  Which?  Who? and so on.  To these our government has no answers, mainly because they have not had the wit to think of the questions themselves.

So, what about the Spanish government?

After the stealing sequestering of art works from Catalonia and sending them to Aragón in defiance of the natural course of law yesterday, the powers that be have today declared that the number of political prisoners jailed at the moment is woefully inadequate and there are plans to incarcerate 40 more of the officials who participate in the dangerously democratic referendum held on the 1^st of October of this year.  You remember, that was the referendum when the world saw pictures and film of members of the Civil Guard and National Police smashing their way into polling stations and into the people who were in them.

Our President is in exile in Belgium and, while the craven Spanish Government has withdrawn the international arrest warrant for him, because it was likely to have been thrown out of court and humiliated the government by its rejection, it has retained the Spanish arrest warrants.  So, if our President were to step foot on Spanish soil he would be immediately arrested.  For the time being our President continues to canvass and participate in the Catalan election via video from Belgium. 

Our President speaks a number of languages including French and English and so he is more than able to communicate with the International Press.  The Spanish President speaks one language, and his command of Spanish has been, um, a little individualist at times.  He has also rejected questions in press conferences which have not been in Spanish.  It is almost sad to watch Rajoy at international gatherings as he attempts to show that he is chums with people who look mildly irritated and embarrassed when he approaches.

We are now only eight days away from an election that could define the course of Spanish history for generations, and indeed the course of European history.  The election in Catalonia involves us all.  What happens to Catalonia will be seen as an indication of the strength of democracy not only inside Spain, but also within the EU and the wider world.

You are involved in what happens on the 21^st.  Keep watching!  Your future is at stake!

Swimming and thinking

Sometimes I think too much.

Take my first view in the original production of Omen II.  A decent enough film I thought, and the superior sneer of Damien at the end of the film was masterly.  But not really frightening enough for me.  Until I went to bed.  There, in the false comfort and snide warmth of a snuggly duvet I began to think about what I had seen.

In my half awake, half asleep state I imagined a much more graphic film than the one I had seen and my mind decided that there was no way that Damien could possibly be stopped.  None.  No way at all.  Evil was unstoppable.  The end.

Luckily I woke up and life seemed altogether brighter and much less evil-orientated.  My rock solid atheism could re-assert itself and the demons could retreat back into fantasy literature.  But I still remember that night of reimagining the film and I can still retexture the sense of lost helplessness that I managed to create for myself.  And the sense of dissatisfaction at the ‘real’ end of Damien in Omen III or IV or whatever.  Not convincing!

 

Brexit and 45 are not things from which I can wake up.  The demons associated with both those grotesqueries seem more and more real as time goes on. 

Boris,

Gove,

45 and The Mooch seem like overdrawn characters from some Grand Guignol pulp-fiction pot-boiler, but they live and have being in the real world, even when that world is composed of salted, filtered water in a swimming pool.

I used to say that I swam in college because the pool was the one place where I did not think.  That wasn’t really true, or perhaps accurate enough.  What I think I meant was that the pool was the one place where my brain could be truly unfocused and whatever was playing on my mind could be, and usually was, lost in a welter of stream-of-consciousness kaleidoscopic disassociation - so to speak.  In other words my mind was released from early Gothic Novels, or Don Juan, or The Magic Mountain or the horrors of William Faulkner, or whatever it was that I was supposed to be studying and it could bounce along in whatever funny little ways scraps of remembered experience took it.  Then, once out of the water, showered and changed, the real world (or at least what passed for it in Swansea University) was able to reassert itself.

It is rather like my ability to sleep. 

I can be set about by the circling creatures of Goya’s sleep of reason awake, but head on pillow all of them slip into the velvet darkness of oblivion.  True, I sometime awoke in the morning with the immediate and startling realisation of what was there when I went to sleep, but the period of rest was release.

So my swim this morning was much more centred (yes, I am aware of the pun with swimming up and down along a line in a lane) as my mind refused to bounce in its usually happy manner and my thoughts stayed resolutely with the UK leaving the EU, and the POTUS behaving like a kitschy lout.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have written about these two disasters yesterday, adding the joke that is Spanish politics and Justice to leaven the mixture: but my concerns are present in my mind and my mind juggles these awful realities trying to find a modus vivendi.

I am reminded, as I often am, of a millionaire with whom I was once on a committee who once gave me wise advice about money.  “The Great Trick,” he said, “is to keep money moving, keep it moving, juggle it.  Borrow, spend, buy, keep it moving!”  I nodded as sagely as someone who didn’t really know what he was talking about could do, when he added, “And the Second Great Trick, is to know when to start running!”  Which I did understand.

As someone who was sort-of brought up in the Protestant Work Ethic with added Delayed Gratification, I could respond to, but not understand what my millionaire friend was talking about in terms of high finance - but when retribution was invoked which obviously indicated that the “juggling” was a euphemism for cheating, and the “knowing when to run” was away from the police, I knew.

It is like the films of my youth.  In films, in all films, the baddies never won.  Even if the baddies were the ‘heroes’ of the film, they had their comeuppance.  Thieves did not get to keep the cash, murder always came out, Justice had a capital ‘J’.

But that was films.  This is real life.  Where is the Justice with a capital J for 45?  What precisely does he have to do to suffer the punishment that he so richly deserves?  Given the size of his ego, nothing, absolutely nothing is going to dent his own inflated idea of his own self worth.  It doesn’t matter if he is impeached, imprisoned, bankrupted (again), derided, voted out of office, shunned, demonstrated against - nothing, will dent his own belief in himself.

I can imagine 45 (and I like doing so) as a down and out tramp, loose folds of flesh hanging from his gaunt face (making WH Auden look like a picture boy for face cream); his tattered clothes clutched about his lank flanks; his thin weedy hair hanging in lank dead twists; his tiny hands weaving around in what he imagines to be imperial gestures still telling the other homeless waifs of how he once won a great election, of how he was the most powerful man in the world and that he re-made the world in his own image, of how women threw themselves at him in ecstatic adulation and of how he was betrayed by the men, women, judges, voters, Democrats, Republicans, Americans, Germans, Intellectuals, newspapers, television, The Swamp, non golf playing people, friends, family, everyone but himself.  But, of course, he still had it.  He was The Great Negotiator (how almost like a Dalí title that is!) and that he was still, and always would be great.

I then imagine the Great Germaphobe washing his tiny hands and tucking into a salvaged Mac meal.

But the reality is that 45 will be even richer by the time his disaster of a period of office comes to an end.  He was never realize how he was despised.  He will never appreciate the damage he has done to his country.  He will die happy, realizing that he had been the president and “knowing” how great he had been and how he had made America Great Again. 

Not even justice with a small ‘j’.

I realize that writing like this does not really make a difference.  I always hope that somewhere there is a reader who responds, who relates to what I write and spends a passing moment thinking about the issues.  But with Brexit and 45 - what can one do?  One feels that there must be something practical, something real that must be done but what?

I am linked to campaigns in Britain and in Spain about Brexit and holding the government to account - especially with regard to we Brits who live abroad.  I sign any and every petition that comes my way and is sympathetic to my point of view.  I read and respond to the idiocies that I see taking place in the places that I call home.  But I fear that it is not enough.  Brexit seems to be powering (!) its way along, helped and fostered by the selfish nasty party that caused it and a crazed popular press; 45 panders to his debased base and sinks ever lower in his discourse and actions and seems unstoppable.  What is a wishy-washy liberal (with a small ‘l’) like me to do?

Perhaps this recognition of helplessness is stage one.  Determination to move one to something practical might be stage two.  I live in hope and search for the reality that allows this to happen.