The search for Truth?

There is something invigoratingly refreshing (as well as totally humiliating!) about discovering that your use of one of your favourite quotations has been inaccurate.

            I cannot pretend to have read Francis Bacon’s Essays, Civil and Moral in full.  Indeed apart from the opening sentence of Essay I, Of Truth I don’t think that I have read any more of them, unless I have unconsciously read them as isolated quotations.

            To test the point I have just made I have traipsed upstairs to get a couple of my dictionaries of quotations: Encarta Book of Quotations (2000) London, Bloomsbury and Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1996) Edinburgh, Chambers.  If you read through the selected quotations drawn from the Essays (1625) you realise just how much and how far Bacon’s thoughts have penetrated our everyday lives.  Sometimes the wording is somewhat different in their modern form, but his witty, perceptive and profound understanding has found its way into common wisdom.

            My own favourite of his thoughts, here written correctly with the verbs in their original form rather than my own choice is something which has troubled and stimulated me in equal proportions:

         What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

The question (which you note Pilate ironically states rather than asks, he neither wants nor expects an answer) is perennially relevant and we too often follow ‘jesting Pilate’ and live in our refusal to face the demands of what Bacon goes on to describe as the “difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth” and the lure of the preference for its opposite is because, “a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure” it shuns the “naked and open day-light” of truth because “that doeth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.”

Although Bacon’s prose is perhaps too dense for a modern reader, it is worth persevering with because it puts you in contact with a liberal understanding of the human condition.  

I have made myself a promise to read more of the Essays because I see a connection with the prose of someone like Sir Thomas Browne, 

a writer I have always enjoyed reading – and another person whose writings may not be universally well known, but whose thoughts have made their way into our intellectual expression.  

You have to like a writer who can think up, for title of whose second (?) most famous work, Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, and it has pictures!  

Both Bacon and also Browne are easily, and productively, searchable on the Internet 

If you have not read them before, you might well be surprised to find out how familiar their thought is to you.

Obviously, the quotation from Bacon has been going through my mind as I look at the situations in Spain, Britain and the USA.  

Truth seems to have become an even more slippery concept in modern political life than usual.  Brexit was conducted with “candle-lights” so dim that Truth appeared to be living in some other debate; truth, honesty, integrity and all other positive virtues are signally lacking from the bunch of chancers who have taken the government in Spain, and Trump has found new depths of duplicity and prejudice that actually manage to throw a glimmer of probity on the mismanagement of Britain and Spain!

I have ever found consolation in Literature.  Thank goodness I have a goodly selection of reading glasses to make my contemplation of so many politicians “poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and disposition, and unpleasing to themselves” as something that can be accommodated within the liberal confines of pages of value!

Little and often!

I've worked out that, when I finally get my Spanish “pension” (it really is so small that it doesn't deserve to be allowed to exist without quotation marks) it will be the equivalent of getting a fiver every day for breakfast – perhaps a bit more, but I'm allowing for inflation and Brexit! Which is much better, as I always say, than having to pay a fiver a day before breakfast! And I get it just for being alive!

     I expect that this delight will wear off and I will get back to the more grimy realities of life rather than spending my time rhapsodising about something which is boringly predictable, and for which I have paid throughout my working life. But, I have to come back to the point that pensions are magical when they happen. Magical that is, as long as you have been fortunate enough to gain access to a scheme which gives you a living return. And of course where you are still living to enjoy it.

     However, enough of that (though I cannot guarantee that I will not wax lyrical when I actually feel the putative money in my hot little hands) and on to more serious things.

     The political situation in the UK is depressing to put it mildly. Not only are Conservative stalking the corridors of power under the delusion that they have coherent policies to govern the country, but also an unelected PM is gibbering about education as if she has been caught in a 1950s time loop! In desperation I look towards my adopted country to show signs of sanity.

      Fat chance of that.

     After two inconclusive General Elections, Spain is still umpteen months into trying to form a government. Meanwhile we have a government in functions to continue the outward appearance of competence. Unfortunately this is being attempted by PP, the Conservative Party of Spain which is, to any reasonable viewer, totally and irremediably corrupt. And brazen about it too. I urge you to put “PP” and “corruption” into Google and see what you come up with.

     The sheer number of cases of corruption involving PP is astonishing. Don't get me wrong, other political parties on the left and centre as well as the right are corrupt, but they are nothing compared with the epic corruption shown by the party of 'government'!

     And what of the left, the opposition? In the Way of the Left they are at each other's throats. The major opposition party, PSOE has not gained enough seats in either election to form an alternative government of the left. To be the government they would have to pact with another party or ask for abstentions from other parties when the election of a President occurs.

     In the first election PSOE could have pacted with Podemos (a new party of the left) and they would have had an overall majority. Instead, after the election, Podemos was filled with elation and suggested a pact in which they would become partners in government and stipulated which ministries they wanted all the while waving a positive book of legislation that they wanted to get through in double quick time! PSOE (especially the so/called Barons or leaders of the party) were horrified at what they saw as the presumption of a bunch of Johnny come lately leftie extremists.

Podemos was also in favour of giving Catalonia a referendum on independence and therefore this was an added, and for many in PSOE a clinching reason for retreating from any agreement with what in politics counts as alacrity.

     Instead PSOE pacted with C's, another new party of the right. This 'brilliant' strategy did not give the combined parties an overall majority and the C's were anathema to Podemos and so in the Presidential election in parliament both PP and Podemos voted against. Stalemate. New elections.

     Amazingly, in the new elections, PP (The Putrid Party) after a series of revelations which showed the systemic nature of corruption at all levels in the party, actually gained votes! People, ordinary people, always have the capacity to astonish. C's lost some votes and Podemos gained some but, and this is why we are still without a government, there is still difficulty in forming a government with an overall majority.

     PP (sic!) have the largest number of votes but no overall majority. The C's (the political sluts of Spain) having pacted with PSOE on the left, now switched to the right and voted with PP for the old President. Everybody else voted against and therefore we had no new government.

     The left, i.e. PSOE and Podemos now no longer can combine and form an overall majority, they would need the abstention of the C-s sluts or the active support of other small independence parties.     A big no no for PSOE.

     The situation, as it draws itself out, grows more complicated. Recent elections in Galicia and the Basque Country did not work out well for PSOE and so, over the last few days some senior members of the party have resigned from the executive committee trying to cause the resignation of the current party leader. Other members of PSOE have been murmuring about abstaining during the next presidential vote. Everything seems to suggest that Rajoy and PP will form the next government. The left seems incapable of seeing the big picture, that a continuing government of Rajoy and PP will be an out and out disaster for Spain and they need to bury differences and work something out which keeps Rajoy out too.

 

     I have no confidence that people will see sense. I think that party loyalty is something which is far too important to far too many people, and the fate of the country runs a very unconvincing second best to party|personal gain. It is a depressing realisation, but I think it is all too accurate.

But the sun is shining and I was able to do a little light sunbathing. So, at the moment, not everything is ill in the world!

Pay-back time?

I never really know whether to be jubilant or deeply suspicious when Official Government Bureaucracy works in your favour. 

            The fact that I was able to park immediately opposite the front door of the Social Security Office in Gava was unsettling in itself, and I actually drove past the parking space at first because, obviously, it couldn’t possibly exist – it was far, far too convenient to be true.  But I backed into the space like a guilty thing and marched with a determined step towards the fray.

            I didn’t even get through the door.  The queue snaked out into the sunshine and a glimpse of the inside showed a serried rank of glum looking petitioners sitting waiting for a free official.

            I had come to the office to find out what an inscrutable official (stamped) letter meant.  It was important because it concerned my state pension – of which more anon.

            To make things simpler there is a machine at the entrance to the office that takes you identity number, links it to an appointment and spews out a numbered ticket.  You take it and wait, staring at an LED notice board watching for something approximating to your ticket.

            The machine was surrounded by a vociferous crush of people who were treating the ticket dispenser as if it were the sort of electronics that required a PhD at least to make it work.  I mean, I have to say it’s not rocket science: you press a button, type in your number, push another button and take your ticket.  Old women of all possible sexes were looking at the instructions on the machine as if they were written in Glagolitic and were building themselves up into a frenzy of incomprehension.

            My own situation was a trifle more complex as I had come on spec. as it were, in the vague hope that “just a little information” would not necessitate the making of an official appointment.  I was, in other words, trying to short-circuit the sacrosanct procedures of a Government Office!

            As the harassed woman from the information desk made her way back from trying to sort out the chaos by the number machine I waylaid her and in impeccably bad Spanish, but with an irresistibly winning smile!

            What followed is, I have to admit, a refutation of the mythic stories of unhelpful officials.  She explained what the document I was waving at her actually meant; she took me to a computer station; she sat me down, brought up my details and explained further; she printed out a new document for me and, most importantly, stamped it.

            It seems that I am entitled to a Pension in Spain!  This was completely unexpected and I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.  She was delighted at my delight and told me that usually people were pissed off with how much they were going to get.  As I had expected nothing, anything was a triumph.

            It’s not much, a couple of hundred euros a month, but, coming in is much better than going out and even after tax, it will pay for a few lunches a week.

            Like my official state pension from the UK, the actual amount is nothing to write home about, but my pleasure at receiving it is out of all proportion to how much it actually is!

            I have not, you understand, got a single solitary penny of either pension yet, so I am writing in a state of pleasurable anticipation.  This will last for a couple of months when something should be paid into my account.  The satisfaction will last for a few months more, right up until I find out exactly how much tax will have to be paid, then black depression will descend as I see exactly how much the states (Spain and the UK) think I can live on!  At least I know what to expect and so I can put aside a sum to pay the taxman in the New Year.

            My state pension from the UK is tax free as I don’t live in the country, but I understand that Spain will claim the right to rake in the cash – and don’t worry about my writing this and “letting them know” the UK and Spain have already contacted each other and my status is known by both countries.  No escape, in other words.

            Still, a Spanish Pension!  I was so delighted I wrote a poem, which I print below.

Pension bonding?

To those so young,

and dreading years ahead,

where work dictates the Moments of a Life,

or it apparently does so,                 

I might say               

                       there is

a rite of passage,

not anticipated ‘til,

it’s inadvertently revealed.

And it is this.

There will, I promise, come a time

when, out with friends, or at a meal,

you’ll chat, and when goodbyes are said

you will discover that there’s been

just one, sole, topic taking up your breath.

Some years ahead, for you, maybe,

but talked about with passion

or with pride – or fear.

A life-target that,

so long as you’re alive,

you’ll make.

I’ve reached the age where

what was said some

“not-so-many-years-ago”

is now a near enough reality.

And I observe

a process that involves

a bouncing to and fro

between two states

that claim me both.

I’ve always said I lead a double life,

as here in Spain, what is in Britain

just a letter placed between the

‘fore’ and ‘sur’ of my two names,

becomes a patronymic force and

Señor Morgan suddenly exists!

And I found out today,

(I have the printed sheet

and the official stamp)

that ageing Brit’s entitled to

a small (but welcome) sum,

paid monthly, right into his bank.

That illustrates more surely

than my bad Spanish can,

that one belongs, one is a part.

For nothing is more real

than the cement of governmental cash.

For those who are interested my latest drafts of poems can be read at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es and I will be happy to respond to any comments you might make.

Meanwhile I continue to get up early to go and have my swim, though I will have to do more if I am to lose the extra weight that the nurse demands I do.  And today a good swim was not matched by a good and restrained food intake.  And next week there are visitors and it will be churlish not to respond to their desire to eat well.  Perhaps I can limit the “drink well” part and feel smug and justified – though the scales are impartial and glacial when it comes to their view of reality!

Work continues on the anthology “Together Apart” with discussions continuing with the printer about what, exactly we can afford.  I think I see a resolution and I will have to contact my fellow poets to keep them in the loop.  I hope that publication will still be towards the end of next month.  I am, in spite of the darkness of some of my poetry, essentially an optimistic person.

Honestly!