Rationalisation.

"So how are we coming along with the figures?"

"No that just won't do."

"We are going to have to come up with more savings."

"Yes, you heard what I said, more savings."

"We are living beyond our means."

"We can't go on living beyond our means."

"Which means?"

We are going to have to come up with more savings."

"Which means?"

"We can't  go on living beyond our means."

"Which means?"

"We can't go on living beyond our means."

"So we need to cut costs."

"Cut costs?"

"Yes, you heard me very well. Cut costs."

"Which means?"

"We are going to have to be more productive."

"Which means?"

"We are going to have to do less with more. I mean more with less."

"But what are we doing?"

"We are looking for more savings."

"Which means?"

"You heard me very well."

"But what are We doing?"

"We are looking for savings."

"Who are we saving for?"

"We are saving for us."

"Which means?"

"It will cost us."

"Give me the gun."

"What?"

"You heard what I said. Give me the gun."

"What are you doing?"

"We can't go on living beyond our means."

BANG.

Out on a limb without a leg to stand on.

It's 9:30 in the morning and this wasn't supposed to be happening.

I had other things planned. 

And yet.

Here I am live-blogging a process with all of it's pauses and....history. 

(he adds as an after-thought at 9:38)

Well I find myself leaving this twine of Ariadne. 

God knows why. I don't believe in God.

I come here and intersperse a line...forgetting why.

I take a few deep breaths. 

Other things jump in via DM.

10:34 I spend forty five minutes speaking with my friend Marcin over in Poland about two conference submissions.

I return to this page...to what had already been written.

9:38 

I jumped to Hybrid Pedagogy's submission page.

I read through it and come back to CFP's (I interpret that as call for publications)

I select "The Scholarly and the Digital." rather gingerly. 

Rather gingerly? 

Yes. 

The term "Scholarly" is not one that I would associate as one of my preoccupations.

But I suppose it is time to reassess that.

10:40

Indeed what does it mean to be "scholarly" in complex digitally saturated times.

How do we pull "this" together?

Who pulls "what" together?

This "pulling together"....

What if it means "pushing apart"?

What it it means "letting it flow"?

What if it means "constantly reassessing" boundaries?

What if "scholarly and the digital" "loosely, momentarily hangs together"?

What if we left the centuries built "church walls  of academia" to rediscover "an ambulatory perhaps heretical oralistic dialogue"?

What if we break down the altar to the written word?

What if truth is negotiable, context bound, often provisional but essentially timeless?

What is truth if more than love?

How can love be anything more than intensely personal?

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel. 

He was in a sense my starting point here, when reflecting on a slide count: 73 slides for 30 minutes.

I found myself stripping away any hope that I might have had for a comforting, timed, rehearsed, linear script.  

I was out on a limb, without a leg to stand on.

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel.

I plonk a quote here:

“Digital pedagogy is becoming, for me, coterminous with critical pedagogy, given the degree to which the digital can function both as a tool for and an obstacle to liberation.”
~ Jesse Stommel, “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain”

Blimey, "(Un)Mapping... [(Un)Mining?] the Terrain?

Where is that link to the page I had?

I end up tweeting the link to myself from my phone.

Back to @jessifer and @HybridPed ... https://t.co/NoYnXsUtzy

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) December 4, 2017

"To queer Open is to imagine it as an emergent space always in process. Open Education is not confirmed by courses, platforms, syllabi, hierarchies, but exactly resists those containers, imagining a space for marginalized representation — a space that recognizes our unique embodied contexts and offers opportunities for liberation from them."

Jesse's words above will accompany me in my reflection.

Fluidity in thought, in identity, in containers, in dialogue, in contexts, in scholarship.

Fluidity....I find myself connecting to #lesmauxdesmots.

There are those words which, if small, become battlefields.

LIFE, DEATH, 

BE LONGING, 

i, I, MY, MINE, ME, YOU, YOURS, HE, HIS, HIM, SHE, HER, HERS, IT, ITS, THEY, THEM, THEIRS, WE, US, OURS.

RIGHTS, MEANING, VALUES.

LOVE, FAITH, HOPE, 

Fluidity, scholarity, solidity...

I embed Jesse's keynote from Digital Pedagogy Lab's Vancouver 2017 iteration.

I prepare for more close reading, listening, watching and put this on pause to head towards a class. 11:30

Click on more info to see video with all comments, log in to Vialogues to comment.

Flight lines...

It all started out so predictably.

Waiting around for the boarding announcement.

Queueing for boarding by rows.






Showing identity and smartphone with flash-code.

Falling over my sodding suitcase on wheels.

At last, I was walking down the ramp towards the stationary Airbus 320 destination Corsica.

On entering the plane, it was apparent that this was no ordinary flight.

Indeed, this was a very particular flight.

I did notice that the air hostesses and stewards were peculiarly attired.

Regulation uniform had been hidden beneath crudely drawn, hurriedly personalised t shirts.

While their greeting on board was pretty customary, it was clear that their minds just weren't  on the job.

Something bigger than uniform, function and role was visibly bursting out - attachment, nostalgia, thrill, warmth, every day  human emotion.

On sitting down in our under-sized seats, on attaching our seatbelts we were introduced into a pop-up theatre of humanity.

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this flight is a very special occasion for our friend and colleague Poppy (we shall call her Poppy...in remembrance)...after 20 years of loyal service she is giving up her job as an air hostess to change her life."

At the end of the announcement quasi-spontaneous (rather forced) applause broke out around the aircraft.

"Hurrah for Poppy."

The air-safety instructions delivered mechanically beneath a silly t shirt, gaudy head-antenna and glitter were an event too exceptional for me not to note.

I took a photo of the steward's performance.

The steward in the steward immediately came towards me, stood over me and demanded that I delete the offending photo.

"Taking photos is against the rules." he said sternly.

I couldn't not agree with him on a number of levels.

First: I was unable to ask permission before hand. He could quite rightly find that a rude imposition.

Second: I was treating him as an object. (actually it was the strange juxtaposition of discourses which fascinated me).

Third: He had no means of knowing whether I might, not only steal his image, but spread it on social media.

Fourth: The celebration for Poppy, the applause, the silly t shirts may not have been officially sanctionned. Any photo of their transgression might have resulted in punnishment for the perpetrators of the celebrations for Poppy's farewell flight.

I deleted the offending photo...sheepishly.

What I didn't mention to the steward was that I hadn't taken one photo....I had taken two.

During the flight, I felt a moral dilemna: I wondered whether I should confess to the man, ask forgiveness (again) and explain what I wanted to do with the photo, ask for assent, or delete it before his eyes, thank him, and wish him well.

There was at no moment any untransactional dialogue between him and I.

During the flight, it was all steward-speak:

"Would you like savoury or sweet snack?"

"No we don't have any tonic water."

"Thank you."

"Bye bye."

He was much too taken up with his "hen-flight" celebrations to be bothered to speak to me when I stepped off the plane.

I decided to keep the photo.

On leaving the plane, there were the air-crew, champagne in hand,  taking selfies of each other in their glitter glasses, and t shirts with red hearts on them.

Was the fancy dress for Poppy or for the passengers?

I struggle to untie the ethics.

• As passengers, we had no choice but to accept the Poppy theatre.

• As passengers, we were a captive audience to the aircrew's celebration.

• As passengers, we were expected to participate more as a back-drop - as  extras to their party, than invitees.

We were being reduced to the role of audience on reality TV.

On arriving the airport, I went to seek a means of escape.

My connecting flight being in a few hours, I walked up and down trailing my baggage, looking for a bus, taxi, pavement (sidewalk).

I was confronted by transport desert.

Et merde.

I resigned myself to a long stay in the airport.

No transport, rubbish souvenir shop, low battery.

It's extraordinary how electric sockets become oasis in transport desert.

I found the shortest charging cable known to modern man or woman or wilerbeast in a combination safe on a wall.

Who invented that beauty?

BRAVO MATE! (WTF?)

No movable chairs. None. Only fixed chairs. Only fixed metal uncomfortable chairs.

A woman helpfully suggested that I might leave my phone in the safe to charge.

She didn't understand my plight.

I wanted to use the bloody phone to release my soul purgatory not lock it up in a box.

I sat uncomfortably, at an angle on my suitcase, my back suffering, my head throbbing at their fucking security messages which were every ten minutes.

"Your suitcase will be taken away and destroyed if left unattended."

I couldn't leave the suitcase unattended cos it was the thing I was sitting on.

As the time ticked by the onslaught of their loudspeakers drove me progressively madder.

Thank God for "Hyperspektiv" app which is a means of expressing dynamic paranoia like no other.

Hyperspektiv, PicPlayPost,  iMovie,  hours of sitting in alienating airport, bored, Audiocopy, Dynamite...BOOM!!!!!

I noted today in the Guardian that the prisoners of Guantanamo have an art exhibition going on in New York.

The article was entitled:

"I CAN GET MY SOUL OUT OF PRISON"

Well fuck yes.

Pushing the sky away.

Then we were in the car...

We'd found a way out of those little timetabled boxes.

We don't realise how close freedom is.






Four hours to get up to Paris to get to the Nick Cave concert.

There was that feeling of apprehension.

Would we get stuck in a horrendous traffic jam around the Péripherique?

Would we find the right exit off the Péripherique?

Would we find the car park?

Then we had arrived.

We walked hand in hand through the autumn colours on the paths leading up to the Zenith.

And then we were there.

For two hours, we were taken up by the music, the emotion, the rage, the beauty of the performance.

There are moments which mark you.

The four hours drive through the night, through that fatigue that amplified the moment.

Excitement fighting against the will to sleep.

A road flashing by, fog in the Combrailles, eery headlights of anonymous co-travellers.

Pushing the sky away.

I got a Facebook message from Sébastien over in Lima in Peru.

At three o'clock, it was the last hour of the class, for him it was eight o'clock in the morning.

He had just come back down from the mountains.

He had a biblically bearded look.

We grouped around the phone.

Fifteen minutes of freedom...amplified by the small size of the screen.

"People say that I am lucky." he said.

"I'm not. I made a choice. I got a ticket. I was scared. Now I am free."

"When you are in those boxes, and you are surrounded by all those messages which make you feel helpless you don't realise how close freedom is."

"You are young, there is a world out there, there are generous people out there. I am free."

Pushing the sky away.

I was feeling hemmed in.

I tweeted Teresa over in the UK.

We chatted.

As we chatted that hemming feeling was transformed into something quite different.

I walked outside into the garden.

Blue Sky, a light breeze, a friendship.

lovely to hangout with @sensor63 and remotely enjoy the blue sky and sunshine in Clermont Ferrand! #warwler #cmc #oie @UNICollaborate

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) October 11, 2017

Constraints become canvasses.

We had already moved on.

“All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.” 
Nick Cave

Engraving a rose.

I paused, grief pitched.

It was leaking, ground up.

It was decaying, sky down.

Its canvas was crumpled.

Its fly sheet was fraying.

 Its frame was haggard.

All shrieked of decomposition.

I salvaged a bag of pegs.

The A's, I kept, as keep-sakes

I took four photos.

Its was an unwilling engraving.

It, however, had already become something else.

engraving.

a rose.

Les Maux des Mots: Pinterest.

Beauty in deed.

Captured in a net.

Beauty in a jar.

Beauty pinned.

Beauty defined.

Beauty giffed.

Simulacre of beauty.

Morbid cabinet.




Made for display: flight tagged, sized, analysed.


Diversity decoration.

Curious, avid, acquisition, curate, possess, knowing.

Knowing naturalists, we are (not).

Naturaliser (Fr)

Il s’est fait naturaliser français.

Importer d’une autre langue un mot ou une expression

Empailler un animal mort ou conserver une plante, de façon que cet animal ou cette plante gardent leur aspect naturel.

L’Afrique renferme plusieurs espèces d’animaux qu’on ne pourrait naturaliser en Europe.

Is it safe?

@telliowkuwp pic.twitter.com/Z37nVunrQ0

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 30, 2016

Yes it's very safe (not).

"To love is to give what one doesn't have." J. Lacan.

We have love, we have nothing, IT is all.

We may not possess it, we may not keep it, we may not avoid its pain.

We are pierced in our hearts, mortally wounded, disabled, made unwhole.

We grasp for a light.

We become transfixed in our reflections...caught in an illusion of illumination.

Electrified, in the artificial light, we remain in the dark.

We remain pinned here, quaking, flapping, trembling.

"What is it that you want?

Say something!

Say something! Tell me what you want!"

What a thrill!

We are on the edge of our seats...in safety (not).

Faith it's a desperate leap...

pic.twitter.com/Bs9rxMTS7M

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) May 1, 2016

Any words? 

Make them count...(selon).

"Mon Roland, mon Roland." 

Ecrire le deuil. Roland Barthes.

@Nsousanis 'Tis an exquisite corpse with no deadline. pic.twitter.com/7gRB3AF7li

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 30, 2016

'Tis an exquisite corpse by deed.

No time lost?

I bend over to blow out the candles.

The horizon once appeared so hazy as to seem irrelevant. 

A whole dream life beckoned...

Not a moment to spare.  

No time to lose...

Rip open the present.

I breathe life into inanimate toys.

No time lost.

I studied my image in the mirror.  

I detected a glint of youth unchanged.

They were my father's eyes pearing out from mine,

A subtle surprise to be thus metamorphosed.

There I had been.

There he appeared.

No time lost.

I spoke with my sister upon my birthday.

They had erased the theatre set of our childhood.

It was nowhere to be seen.

She was sad.

I laughed as provocation to the paultry property developers.

Fuck them all!

"The bastards can do nothing to destroy our play." 

"It was never concrete."

I thought.

No doubt they saw potential for a quick return.

There was no time to lose...

Let them accumulate.

Time is ticking.

No time lost.

Their reality counted for naught.

Our reality lives on despite our loss.  

This dreamt reality is ever present.

While we breathe...

No time lost.

I know I should be doing something "productive".

I was never so disciplined as to give up to should.

Should is no escape.

No time lost.

I breathe in the time's passing.

I feel the tiredness.

I feel the blood throbbing instants in my fingers...rested on the keys.

I hear the clac, clac, and the dog that sighs.

No time lost.

I fell upon an interview posted by Torn Halves.

It featured an author, Darian Leader, of a book entitled: "What is madness?"

Indeed, what is madness?

I should be "productive".

I know that.

It's engraved in my body, this, their madness.

We shall be productive.

We shall tally our time on that blasted spreadsheet...

Were this a blasted heath?

Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds...tick, tick, tick, tick, tally.

I count up the candles.

No time lost.

I take a long intake of breath, I blow them out.

There it is I am accumulating.

We live to accumulate.

These will be our monuments.

We build for loss.

Were this cumulus?

No time lost.

One last breath, our ashes to the wind.

No time lost.

What I write reeks of cinders.

This is mourning meaning.

There is a joy in abandon yet...

No time lost.

I write, I pause...

I am gone.

This is loss.

There is a clock ticking.

The chest lifts folds in my sweater no more.

The dog is hidden under the sofa.

The cat is wrapped in on itself.

It sleeps.

A clock ticks.

My daughter arrives, her cheek frozen against mine in embrace.

No time lost.

No time lost.

No time lost.

Time is not money.

Time is not money. 

It was this thought which came to my mind after a conversation with Terry Elliott and Daniel Bassill.

I noted a Vialogues of that meeting, entitled "Breaking down walls, opening minds.." here for future reference...to return to.

https://vialogues.com/vialogues/play/27019/

I thought to myself that I would have an hour.

I looked up at the time.

It was way over an hour.

I had the impression that we had been speaking for ten minutes.

I had to go.

"Where did Monday go?"

Part of my childhood had died the week before.

Was there life on Mars?

It was on the radio in that purple painted bedroom of mine.

I might have been ten.

It, a spaceman, had been closed in a wardrobe.

I was fifty three now.

Time is not money.

It is at times a simple calculation.

Poverty is not a state to aspire to.

I looked around the bare walls.

Space swallowed me in a ten metre square.

There seemed little reason to walk from one end of the box to the other.

My head beat against the walls inside my head.

I had to go.

I couldn't stay still.

Life wouldn't let me.

No matter what you or I say.

Time is not money.

I found myself in a one metre square box, selling dreams in printed boxes.

Time wasn't money.

I did what I could to call time on poverty.

Day after day, I sold little paper boxes and received a little paper envelope with little paper money.

There were a few coins.

It was barely better than poverty but it felt like a way out.

I felt I had achieved something.

There was something about freedom about not allowing oneself to think.

Oh, the pleasure of absent-minded, soulless busyness!

It felt like success!

Get high!

It was barely better than poverty but it felt like a way out.

How can those in extreme poverty know joy?

Is it joy to accept our little lot?

A way out. 

There was a reason to redouble efforts to find the way out.

Love was it.

Poverty with sunshine was an improvement.

Of all the very limited choices open to someone who doesn't speak the language, teaching one's language seemed the most attractive.

A choice not open to those with the wrong language.
A choice not open to those without the right education.

(Would cleaning boxes at night and sleeping while the sun shone have felt like an improvement?

Would love be enough?

For how long?)

How long can absent busyness feel like liberation?
How long can absent hedonism feel like life?

Time brings acceptance.
Does time bring acceptance?
Who cares for time - those who don't count?

Time is not money.

This is not the post that I intended to write.

It was to be something quite different.

It slipped out.

Day after day when I want to write nothing...

I end up writing this.

This is madness.

How does one find meaning in one's existence?

Is it by accident?

Is it like this -  an accident?

I am at peace to write.

I glance over at the clock.

Time is not money.

I am just an English teacher.

I should know my place.

"Don't start getting ideas above your position."

I know there are others who seem quite content with such a lot.

Are they lying?

The rest are none of my business.

I am a fragment of their, of my fragmented existence.

Surely not even a speck.

Two hours here, two hours there, make merry, it shall not last.

Time is not money.

While it lasts...

Take your little paper envelope.

"Now hush!"

I shall not just take.

Time is nothing.

So what is money?

I will be at peace.


Timepiece.

"Safety Last!"

Harold Lloyd Clock Scene from "Safety Last!" 

(source  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_Last!)

The film opens in 1922 with Harold Lloyd (the character has the same name as the actor) behind bars. His mother and his girlfriend, Mildred, are consoling him as a somber official and priest show up. The three of them walk toward what looks like a noose. It then becomes obvious they are at a train station and the "noose" is actually a trackside pickup hoop used by train crews to receive orders without stopping, and the bars are merely the ticket barrier. He promises to send for his girlfriend so they can get married once he has "made good" in the big city. Then he is off.

He gets a job as a salesclerk at the De Vore Department Store, where he has to pull various stunts to get out of trouble with the picky and arrogantly self-important head floorwalker, Mr. Stubbs. He shares a rented room with his pal "Limpy" Bill, a construction worker.

When Harold finishes his shift, he sees an old friend from his hometown who is now a policeman walking the beat. After he leaves, Bill shows up. Bragging to Bill about his supposed influence with the police department (when in reality he merely knows that this particular policeman would not arrest either of them for a harmless prank, since Harold is an old friend of his), he persuades Bill to knock the policeman backwards over him while the man is using a callbox. When Bill does so, he knocks over the wrong policeman. To escape, he climbs up the façade of a building. The policeman tries to follow, but cannot get past the first floor; in frustration, he shouts at Bill, "YOU'LL DO TIME FOR THIS! THE FIRST TIME I LAY EYES ON YOU AGAIN, I'LL PINCH YOU!"

Meanwhile, Harold has been hiding his lack of success by sending his girlfriend expensive presents he cannot really afford. She mistakenly thinks he is successful enough to support a family and, with his mother's encouragement, takes a train to join him. In his embarrassment, he has to pretend to be the general manager, even succeeding in impersonating him to get back at Stubbs. While going to retrieve her purse (which Mildred left in the manager's office), he overhears the real general manager say he would give $1,000 to anyone who could attract people to the store. He remembers Bill's talent and pitches the idea of having a man climb the "12-story Bolton building", which De Vore's occupies. He gets Bill to agree to do it by offering him $500. The stunt is highly publicized and a large crowd gathers the next day.

When a drunkard shows "The Law" (the policeman who was pushed over) a newspaper story about the event, the lawman suspects Bill is going to be the climber. He waits at the starting point despite Harold's frantic efforts to get him to leave. Finally, unable to wait any longer, Bill suggests Harold climb the first story himself and then switch his hat and coat with Bill, who will continue on from there. After Harold starts up, the policeman spots Bill and chases him into the building. Every time Harold tries to switch places with Bill, the policeman appears and chases Bill away. Each time, Bill tells his friend he will meet him on the next floor up. Eventually, Harold reaches the top, despite his troubles with a clock and some hungry pigeons, and kisses his girl. She continues to believe that he's general manager of De Vore.

Image Credit. 
http://maudit.tumblr.com/post/8008943407/during-the-famous-clock-tower-stunt-harold-lloyd

What is it good for?

There are heated rooms containing paper relics.









There are shelves stacked high.

Noone goes there.

Perhaps they could save on the heating now?

I read through twenty pages of an academic's bibliography.

I couldn't concentrate.

I opened another tab.

News: KKK - Kim Kardashian Kimoji.

It broke the App Store.

1.99 $ you get a butt emoji.

That was worth knowing, I thought.

I opened another tab.

"When it comes down to it, what are unversities really for?"  screamed the article.

I thought that was a good question.

"Universities shouldn't be glorified providers of workplace training" it started.

I agreed...in part.

It made work sound rather vulgar.

Isn't a university a work place? I thought to myself.

"The reality is that work experience - and only that - will teach work skills. Universities needn't bother."

One of the skills that the author suggested as important to learn at university was exam technique.

I wasn't sure that I could agree with that.

I left the classroom.

I met the students on the car-park, talking about their studies.

"We have spent two years just memorising theoretical stuff for exams." they said.

"We haven't actually been able to put any of what we have learnt into practice."

I asked them if they had ever had a dialogue with teachers about what they were learning.

"What good would it do?" they asked.

They coached kids on Saturdays.

I opened another tab:

"My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me."   

I wondered what the students paying £9,000 considered that they were buying.

I wasn't too sure what the answer would be.

I opened another tab:

"In a fake online class with students paid to cheat, could professors catch the culprits?"

Nope!

The professors were unable to detect the cheats who passed with an A grade.

I thought of the archives and the floppy disks on the shelves.

Somewhere else, Kim Kardashian broke the App store.

Duralife.

Born.

Unplugged.

Energy flows…
Look of sudden shock.
Charge down to only 36%!
No mains cable available to hand.
Review notice: “Back up of data recommended!”
See small print: “No refunds, No guarantees, No exchanges.”

There be dragons.

Refuge...

I am tired of community. 

I pack my bags and head South.  

I am sitting here contemplating uncharted territory, listening to crickets.

Peace at last.

I am vigorously avoiding definition, rules, shoulds, ethics, responsibilities...

Sod them all!

The warmth of the sun on my back and the chirping of unseen birds will suffice.

I unfold a map, observe the landmarks, note lines of contours and choose to ignore them all.

I look out to space, out on the margins;  tangled lines lead out to mythological realms.

I write, out of desire...

Out there (?) is smooth space.

Out there (?) dwell dragons...

Out there (?) their unseen, unwieldy forms, arouse my imagination.

I can see dragons now.

Nobody can deny their existence.

Nobody will fight my dragons.

Somebody might chortle at a crudely drawn creature but not even ridicule will dismiss their imaginative reality.

Diving for cover...

I dive underground and am immediately entangled in resistant, unthinkingly, vigorous, rhizomes, weeds.

I valliantly, rationally, struggle, cut, thrash, burn.

DIE will you?

The more I gesticulate, the more I dig, the more they proliferate. 

Unseen bloody weeds!

Reading matter?

I pick up an opened copy of Mille Plateaux...sod it!

I throw the volume into a trash can.

OUT voluminous, tubered frustration!

Its sheer size, its reams of words, takes up most of the can.

It is impossible crap.

It is now real rubbish to be recycled. 

HA! HA! HA!

Dense, repellent, dark, dragon-infested shit.

Shit will make for good fertiliser...

Let it bleed...

I watched the pin-prick of crimson gradually spread out to become an ugly bleeding blotch on the sheet.

I couldn't quite comprehend that the stain belonged in me.

As the blood crept up the bedclothes, I was suddenly afraid.

What if I were dying?

I was feverous, I was not quite conscious of what was going on...

Ringing for help seemed like a sensible thing to do.

How wrong could I be? 

I imagined that they would somehow comfort me. Wasn't that what they do in hospitals?

A nurse appeared, she looked at the stain.

She didn't seem to take any notice whatsoever of my fear.

Without a word she disappeared and came back with unidentifiable instruments.

The look of the instruments made me more afraid.

Her silence, and in particular her rictus terrified me.

When I saw what she was planning to do, I mustered all my strength to shout.

"No, no, stop."

It was too late.

She killed the person that I had been.

She killed the youth that I had had that night.

I knew that I was effectively dead. 

How does one live when one knows one is dead?

I was half alive and I came home.

Nobody would have guessed, but I knew.

To the outside world perhaps I appeared sad.

Death is not sadness.

How do you live after death?

I went through  many metamorphoses over the years, I was like a snake shedding its skin.

Shock at trauma was my first noticeable state.

I couldn't even put words to my distress.

Shock was replaced with a refusal to accept that what had happened was my reality.

This was all a nightmare. 

I would awake from this nonsense.

The nightmare was resistant.

My father said,

"You have been through hell."

He was wrong, I lived still in hell.

I was consumed with rage, with hatred.

Why me?

Didn't they realise that I had a life to live?

How could they have got everything so horribly wrong...the bastards.

How do you sue doctors?

How do you make them understand the suffering that they have caused you?

I will find a solution.

I exhausted myself in my monomania.

There must be a way out of this situation.

I will find a competent doctor,  a man, a woman I can trust.

Each new attempt to be cured was met with hope, euphoria at the idea that I had been clever enough to find the real expert amongst the quacks.

Each time, the energy spent on the idea of a cure was drained out of me when the promise of rebirth came to nothing.

I found love, how could I trust?

How can you trust someone when you are no longer the person that you love? 

I felt always as if I was cheating. I was sure that people would realise that I was simply wearing a mask.

I was doing my best to wear my mask.

My mask of me. 

My mask of me before the rictus.

I felt always that they would discover my truth.

I was undead, I was unmeritting of love.

I refused to love myself, the self that I had become.

Let it bleed

There is still a part of me that is undead.

I will not let the hope of life die.

The memory of what I was has dimmed, but I can go back there now without fear of paralysis or pain.

There is still all that I am, all the rage, all the love, all the fear embodied in this stain of life.

I am learning to accept suffering as part of my story, a part of my story that I can repaint to show a light.
I am learning to accept suffering as part of our story, a part of our story that we must repaint to show a ligtht.

Let us rage over our lost youth, our lost stories, our lost loves.

Let us bleed our life over blank sheets.

Let us weep.

These sheets are tagged with our humanity.

Let it bleed my friends, it is that which binds us.

Let us laugh out loud at this madness.

Laughter gives us strength.

While we may...

I remember seeing a man with AIDS, homeless on the streets, he was brandishing a banner.

"Why not me?"

I got the joke.

Our nature.

It is the tranquil immersive nature of this image which captured my attention.

I shall sit here a moment.





I was up early this morning, I saw the beauty of the sunrise behind the Puy de Crouel.

I captured it, I tweeted it, I saw it favorited by someone in Illinois.

Where is Illinois?

I haven't quite got used to the rythm of Thursday mornings.

I am unused to having time on a Thursday morning.

I am savouring the freedom of emerging connections which slowly spark from some place somewhere.

There were the early morning exchanges with Maha and Maxime, on their blogs, the shock of Susan's story of a twelve year old boy.

I am taken into this deeper pool of empathy.

I am learning quietly, but apparently with little constraint.

Terry and Keith and a rooster are speaking to me from a moment last week. 

I can feel my mind wander from time to time with the rhythm of our conversation.  I dip into the stream.

I am catching my breath, what was that? What was that I hear myself say?

"Time is short."

"What will be our message at the last clap?"

 "What can we acquire?"

We are talking of, we are talking of...

"COMMUNION"

How on earth did I ever hear myself say that word, live?

I was live on air, on Youtube.

I have that tendency to run ahead of myself, I lose the signal.

I recognise my lack of patience, I recognise my hastiness.

"I am hasty, too hasty chaps."

It's a Thursday morning I have a moment to shut up and listen.

This reminds me of Mariana Funes and our exchanges.

We are speaking, we are connecting now in silence.

Terry captures angels so well.

I want to tell my captured self to shut up and listen to Terry.

Being connected to angels, all these guardian angels around us, watching over us.

It is a great image Keith, a great image. You are right.

Am I lurking now, am I lurking next to tranquil pool, on a Thursday morning?

Are we children of eternity?

How are we to be framed?

Terry reminds me of a poem I wrote to a Tunisian friend and poet.

He is right, he is so right, we need to feel the sides, the constraints, our cultural frames.

I know this.

I know sitting here.

I am being written by my friends.

I am being written by unknown people I will never see.


Our nature
This has meaning for me, now, sitting by a pool.

I see my life flowing out, flowing past and I am content.