LISTENING TO - Abracadabra by Lady Gaga

 After many years of Gaga going off and extending her performing range into jazz and film acting, she returns to her bread and butter. Recent recorded output has been good to patchy. This song, however, is an instant four carat classic, in that it gives a fresh twist to what is really old style Gaga. A heavy club thump of a rhythm, with enough catchy musical phrases to fill four average songs. But here we have just the composite. The video is set up as though it were a competitive themed ball from the 1990's - here the catagory is 'dance or die'. As with all Gaga's best work it operates somewhere just to the left of conventional dance music. Its not just the costumes and dance routines, its in those musical rave breaks where something distinctly more edgy resides. Her affinity for her gay/trans fan base seems undiminished by any of the sort of spineless Trumpian conformity going on at the moment. This song is blissfully confrontational and decadent.

SCREEN SHOT - Perfect Days

After Covid, Wim Wenders was invited to document The Tokyo Toilet project where seventeen new lavatories were to be redesgned by sixteen creators from around the world. What started as a documentary idea eventually became this film. Shot in the Shibuya district of Tokyo where these stylishly upgraded lavatory facilities are. The film features many of them, each one very distinct in its style and strikingly original. He co-wrote the screenplay with Takuma Takasati, and it was filmed over seventeen days. So it has a semi documentary feel, that won it Best International Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards. It is one of Wenders best films, simple in its execution and humanity.

The central character Hirayama, (Koji Yakusho ) works as a toilet cleaner in the Shibuya district. His life is organised and filled with regular routines. He organises the things he needs daily on a shelf by the apartment exit, regularly waters his Acer cuttings, sleeps, reads paperbacks, has a large collection of cassettes, doesn't have a computer, is not on social media and takes black a white photos on an old film camera. He appears to be a cultured man, who prefers to live life entirely as though he exists in another era, whilst he works cleaning these ultra swish paragons of 21st century modernism. He lives a life of quiet simplicity. Extolling to his niece his - now is now, next time is next time - philosophy. But gradually as the film progresses modern life begins to poke its head into his life, to disrupt this carefully maintained equilibrium, Though he has chosen a separate self contained life, a series of encounters awakens a need in him for human company.

This film has often been mistakenly presented as a peon to living a simple zen style life within an urban setting. It is only this in part. It also demonstrates how such a lifestyle can only be maintained as long as you have complete control over your conditions. That nothing ever intrudes to remind you that you could live your life another way if you wanted. By the end of the movie Hirayama is a man who allows himself to feel his own regrets that his life has turned out the way it did. That his chosen lifestyle has protected him from experiencing some of the consequences and pain of his past.

Koji  Yakusho is utterly brilliant in this film, well deserving of his Best Actor award from the Cannes Film Festival. His actual spoken dialogue is sparse. For much of the film he says very little, often just gestures or grunts in response. Yet his open face and expressiveness, tell you volumes about the interior life of the man, his real love of popular music, his silent appreciation for people and favourite places. Every night when Hirayama sleeps his dreams are full of beautiful black and white shadows cast across textural surfaces, with echoing scratching sounds in the background. At the end of the movie Wenders posts a definition of the Japanese term  Komorebi - which means taking delight in light and shadows filtered through the leaves in the present moment. Which reminds you that Hirayama regularly takes photos of light shining through the tree canopy

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

SCREEN SHOT - The Substance

There is quite a lot of Oscar buzz around this film. Demi Moore having already won a Golden Globe for her performance. And you can see why it might garner such recognition. Its a classic case of a female actor being willing to go all the way with not being attractive in a movie, all in the pursuit of truth and authenticity. Demi Moore is central to why this film works, and she is undoubtedly good in it, I remain to be convinced its worthy of being lauded with an Oscar, unless its simply for submitting yourself to the most extreme degrading form of prosthetics imaginable. 

The Substance, is a type of feminist parable, that the Director and Writer - Coralie Fargeat takes to its full gory conclusion. If you've heard that this is body horror, well it certainly is, and it is quite the most toe curling and gratuitously gross film I've ever seen. Though its utterly brilliant in what it does,  I will not be watching it again, nor recommending anyone else to watch it.. Just when you think its reached the peak of Yuck,! you realise there is still half an hour to go, and the Yuck! quotient has only just got started. If you do watch this movie, don't say you have not been warned.

The starting point of the film is an actor Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) a one time Oscar winner, who now earns a living as a TV fitness goddess. But she is touching fifty+ and the network drops her in pursuit of someone much younger. She finds out about The Substance, which if taken produces a younger version using your own body. Things start to go awry once Sparkle's younger body version, Sue (Margaret Qualley) takes over as the TV fitness guru. Even though there is meant to be an alternating seven days on meds and seven days off, Sue starts taking liberties and the relationship between them deteriorates. This is the relatively sane half of the movie. I wont go any further than that, because the film works best if you really don't know were its going to take you next.

The Substance makes its nods to a number of horror classics, The Shining, Carrie, The Fly. The fundamental story line being a feminist riff on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The ending has echoes of The Elephant Man. So this is a modern morality tale about the lengths women are expected to go to, in order to be still considered, not just attractive, but viable as a human being. Denis Quaid is superbly slimy and abrasive as the TV Executive Harvey, all fake suntan, snakeskin suits, who just wants women to smile beautifully, and has a fetish for boa feathers. All the men in this movie are ciphers for one sort of male entitlement or another. So, male representation here is deliberately cartoonish and consistently one dimensional. But then this is a film that is very very far from being cinema verite.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

ARTICLE - Constantly Reimagining The Ineffable

In the aftermath of the Buddha's death, his followers were divided amongst themselves on how they should memorialise him. The Buddha believed his legacy was his teachings. If they were going to honour his life they could do nothing better than fully practice them.

The contentiousness was focused around the Buddha's relics. Who from the broad range of disciples would be allowed to have a relic and to construct a stupa to house them in? Because the demand was high, it was clear not everyone could have one. There followed a rather shameful tussle, literally a power struggle, within the strong factions that existed within Buddhism - monks and lay practitioners, the poor and the rich, the spiritually literal and the more metaphorically minded.

This proved to be just the beginning of two and a half thousand years of debate over, not just how you could inwardly imagine the Buddha, but outwardly represent the state of an Enlightened being. Making any image of the historical Buddha might completely misrepresent what he was, who had been born in Lumbini in the 5th or 6th century BC. As time progressed and there were no people living that could remember the Buddha, how were you to communicate what a Buddha, what an Enlightened person was like?

Relic containing commemorative stupas set the precedent. Stupas became a primary way to represent the Buddha. A spiritually inflected elemental symbolism being introduced into its architectural structure. Stupa's were the first real attempt, post the Buddha's death to grapple with the question - how do you represent not just the historical Buddha, but Buddhahood itself, of Enlightenment as a quality within the universe to which you could aspire? The first response was paradoxically the best one - to make it abstract. 

Venerating the historical Buddha was clearly not what The Buddha wanted, becoming the focus of a personality cult ran counter to his teachings. Hence during the first century after his death, there are no representational figurative images. The Buddha was to be suggested not by presence, but by absence - the empty throne - the Buddha's footprints - a riderless horse - the bodhi tree - the Dharmachakra wheel. You were visually being urged to sit where he sat, walk the way he walked, follow what he taught. Its as though the imagery was speaking to you, and saying -Look he's not here anymore, what are you going to do? Go away and practice wholeheartedly. 

And maybe this would have been how it would have stayed, had not Alexander the Great briefly conquered parts of the north western edges of the Indian sub continent. The influence of Greek Hellenistic art on representations of The Buddha, with its realistic emphasis on the spiritual imagination, cannot be underestimated. The classic Rupa form and styling, of The Buddha dressed in artfully pleated clothes and top knot, comes completely to define how an Enlightened being was to be represented. 

There would not be another comparable representational shift in Buddhism until the emergence of the Mahayana in the 1st century BC and later Vajrayana 5th-8th century CE. When folk stylings drawn from ethnic Hinduism and later exotic Tibetan and Chinese influences, vastly expanded Buddhist imagery, its archetypal symbolism, Cosmic Buddhas, Mandalas, various peaceful and wrathful forms of Bodhisattvas, alchemical spirits, demons and nymphs. You name it, it was all given visual form. 

The Buddha's archetypal form had always been multi-faceted, simultaneously historical, symbolic and cosmic. All Buddhist imagery, however we couch them, remain inaccurate facades behind which the ineffable state of Enlightenment resides. Imagery acting as a means through which to connect with the state of Enlightenment, as simple conduits, orientating us towards where the ineffable may be. Beyond any concept, mental construct or visualisation we may hold of it.

Buddhism is not unusual in having this initial tendency toward aniconism, to not allow representations of its founder, of God, or of an Enlightened person. This is common among many religions, whether theistic or non-theistic. Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Taoism all hold differing levels of antipathy towards the representation of God or whatever it is they consider transcendent and ineffable. At some point words, imagery and metaphor all fail them, they become as though struck dumb. In some, making an image of God or divinity becomes itself a sinful act, punishable by death.

Christianity, emerging as it did out of Judaism, undoubtedly inherited its disapproval of graven images. Idolatry being frowned upon. In the years immediately after the crucifixion, its unlikely any image of Jesus was produced. There is certainly no mention of it, and none have been found. The focus, as in Buddhism, was on promulgating and inculcating his teachings in new disciples, in new places. Symbolism in the form of the fish and the cross provided a unique sense of identity, of Christian unity in the often harsh circumstances of persecution, where you were obliged to be secretive about your faith.

As currently understood, its not until the 2nd century that specifically Christian imagery begins to be found. Even if that sometimes is based upon a very strange amalgam of Christian and Pagan beliefs. What is portrayed with regularity in this period are particular illustrated scenes from the life of Jesus, and this maybe because these were used as a teaching aid. Specifically Christian iconography, as we understand it, does not really begin to blossom until the early 3rd century BCE, just prior to Constantine making Christianity the Holy Roman Empire's established religion. Constantine's adoption of it, certainly turbo charges the production of church imagery. Images of Jesus, his family, disciples, saints and piously devoted rulers start to appear. God's presence, if indicated, is through visual symbolism, a radiating explosion of lines, from which the holy spirit in the form of a dove sometimes emerges. By the Renaissance, God can be explicitly portrayed by Michelangelo as your archetypal white bearded man, as a person just like us. But this is all prior to The Protestant Reformation where the prohibition on graven imagery reasserts itself.

These ups and downs in the use of imagery within Christianity all fall within the cataphatic tradition, that promotes positive encouraging statements, affirming and confirming beliefs. There is a law of attraction, that art can visualise the divine presence, extol a person's sainthood and portray good works as an inspiration to others. That the painted figure of the Virgin Mary can literally form an intercession between you, Jesus, and through him with God. But behind this there has also been the apophatic tradition, where Christian mysticism frequently finds a home. This says, that all visual imagery and the metaphors that are used to speak about the qualities of God in the cataphatic tradition, are false presentations of what the ineffable nature of God is. That God is essentially unknowable via the use of our minds eye. God's true nature is hidden beyond all this imagery, beyond what the power of the imagination can describe in words or visually. And finding union with this unnameable apophatic God is actually the real purpose of the Christian life of devotion, prayer and practice. Though the ineffable is beyond being described, portrayed or implied through metaphor - beyond our imaginative intellect - it can be 'known.'

It appears to be part of human nature to need literalistic imagery. This can help guide and connect us with religious practices and goals, providing a sense of purpose and direction in our spiritual life. In a Buddhist parable from the Lotus Sutra, The Magic City, a group of pilgrims are undergoing an arduous journey to the Magic City, only their guide appears to know in what direction it is. Many of these travellers have moments of huge doubt, some struggle, rebel or fall by the wayside. When the remaining travellers get to where the guide said the Magic City would be, they find nothing. The guide tells them he lied to them in order that they would stick with him on the journey. There is no Magic City. The moral being, that how we imagine what our religious goals are, will only take us so far. Beyond which continuing to be goal orientated becomes an obstacle, an impediment to making further progress.

Imagery then, could be seen as 'the necessary lie', a skilful means, that helps you aspire to move towards objectives that are greater than you can currently envisage. When you are travelling towards where the ineffable is said to be, its helpful to believe you know where you are going. We forget that we do need to constantly reimagine what the ineffable looks like to us. Even if, ultimately, where you are heading is unreachable or unknowable through ideas of making progress, of tangible goals, of actually physically travelling anywhere. 

SCREEN SHOT - Gladiator 2

It's a Ridley Scott movie. So this sequel to Gladiator from 2000, twenty five years ago, is a somewhat overdue follow up that manages to tick all the right blockbuster boxes. Huge sets, strikingly staged moments, battle scenes and gladiator fights. If there is one thing that Ridley Scott knows how to do in spades is please his audience. Plus gathering a very respectable ensemble of actors. He obviously hoped to lure Russell Crowe back to do some flashback type moments, because the film is littered with edits of him from the first movie. This does highlight one of the failings of this movie, that it does rely too much on basking in the glory that was Gladiator. 

From the first movie Scott has brought back Connie Neilson, and gives a cameo role to Derek Jacobi apparently simply in order to kill him off spectacularly. So there is a nod to continuity between the two films. Gladiator 2 is certainly much much bloodier than its predecessor, hands are lopped off, heads are sawn off in front of your eyes, so there is a huge amount of more gratuitous violence. But the structure of the narrative is basically another spin of the same story arc, but with a fresh set of actors, which is something Scott appears to do with some regularity, if you look at Alien and its recent prequels.

What Gladiator 2 has in spades is grandeur and spectacle, it takes the first movie and turns the dial up a few notches. Booking Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal to play the two central leads was a good move. Both are still on an upward career trajectory, so appearing in this blockbuster will do both of them a lot of good in terms of the future films they get offered. So far Mescal has triumphed hugely within smaller scale independent films. But here he takes on a bigger character who has to appear to posses the same leadership qualities as his dead father ie Russell Crowe. I think Mescal does just about hold his own, using his lower vocal register more, looking more haggard, toning down his geniality and charming twinkling smile of his. And of course he's done the now ubiquitous bulking up, learnt how to ride a horse, and be flashily lethal with a sword. 

The real star of this movie is Denzel Washington, who steals almost every scene he is in. The character he plays Macrinus, an ex slave, now slave owner and gladiator owner, who is now using or creating unstable situations, through which to climb the greasy pole to political influence in Rome. Denzel plays Macrinus with all the intelligent charm you'd expect, but with an undertow of menace and manipulation of people to advance his own power. His is the only acting performance that truly grabs the movie and makes it entirely his own, in the same way Crowe did in the first movie.

This is a more than satisfactory and efficient sequel, one that fulfills most of your expectations of it. It is a bit mechanical in the way it lovingly recycles its tropes, which I think does prevent it from being as majestically a great movie as its first iteration. It has its weirdly off kilter moments like the gladiator fight with seemingly 'genetically' modified apes. But Mescal buffed up and in armour, what's there not to like?

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

SCREEN SHOT - Evil Does Not Exist

Drive My Car from 2021 won the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars for Rysuke Hamguchi. It was an ode to loss, love and grief, that was a slow, three hour elegaic movie that nevertheless managed to pack a huge emotional punch. His follow up Evil Does Not Exist, released in 2023, though only a hour and three quarters long, is equally quiet and measured in its pace, with a strong environment versus economics narrative.

The film opens with a very long continuous shot,as though we are walking through a forest of trees looking upwards. This cuts abruptly to Hana, an eight year old girl in the forest. She's the daughter of Takumi, a widower who describes himself as being a bit of an odd jobs man. He smokes cigarettes, chops firewood, collects stream water for the local restaurant and is devoted to his daughter. The mountain village he lives in appears peaceful. You get the feeling that everyone moves there to get away from modern urban life. Here they are just allowed to be.

Two representatives, a man and a woman, from a glamping firm hold a meeting in the village hall. They're making a presentation about the proposed development of a glamping site higher up in the mountains. All the villagers have concerns, mostly related to sewage from the site. Takumi points out that where they propose to site their septic tank is guaranteed to pollute the stream that brings water into the village. Plus, why is the tank of insufficient size to meet the camps needs when at full capacity? The couple cannot answer these questions, they are not responsible for making such decisions. They are merely the face of the company, they promise rather unconvincingly to take their concerns back.

In a subsequent zoom call with the glamping company's owner, its clear the operation is being run on a shoestring, is dependent on getting government subsidies, and hence is unwilling to make the changes the villagers request. But maybe they could pursued Takumi to become the site caretaker, then they might be able to get it passed the villagers. They return, but during the course of this there is an unexpected, mysterious turn of events.  

On one level this is an eco-parable, but it also presents to you a small closely knit community that knows everyone in it well. There maybe rough diamonds, but they'd be prepared to help anyone. The people from the glamping company are like fish out of water and always appear disingenuous. There is a clash of cultures here. The title Evil Does Not Exist appears in retrospect to be ironic. Because something nefarious does emerge, though it comes from an entirely unexpected direction. A melancholic and subtly haunting movie, that has hung around in my imagination for a long time subsequently.

CARROT REVIEW 6/8

 

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 123 - Change Is A Foot

As I have written in a previous Article on my blog, I have been exploring ways to limit or curtail how much I interact with social media. For many years I have focused primarily on writing for this blog and posting links to them on Facebook and Twitter. This has pretty much remained my way of engagement. Its been a simple way to communicate to old friends and acquaintances, who I rarely see to speak to, about what is currently going on in my world. Also, its been a practice, a way to hone and improve how I write about my experience, the things I read, see, hear and appreciate. That is what Cornucopia as a blog site has been for.

How to get the best and avoid the worst of social media is an ongoing learning skill. As the various social media channels have proliferated, there has been just too many to realistically engage with them all. Unless, of course, I wished to spend my every living waking moment staring at a plasma screen mediating each minute fluctuation of emotional experience in time. Which I do not. 

Over the last year it's become clearer how much social media is increasingly manipulated for personal gain and political influence, and by turn its manipulating us, perverting and undermining democracy for its own ends. I deleted Twitter last year. I have only posted my blogs on Blue Sky and Facebook since then.. But The Tangerine Emperor's inauguration and all the Tech Oligarchs lined up in an obedient row, plus Zuckerberg's abandoning of fact checking, means my continued use of Facebook now feels on borrowed time.

As with most things it's about about finding the level of engagement I'm comfortable with - between complete removal and never being off it. I generally take time to assess whether I really want to take a particular course of action, whether that is appropriate, whether I will be closing off a still useful channel of communication, boycotting Facebook simply to make some stand that no one knows nor cares about, except for me.  I do feel the current zeitgeist demands something more than deploring the current state of affairs.

It would be much simpler to cut off social media altogether.  I'm always a bit reluctant to take the absolute puritan path, however deceptively clear ethically that might initially appear. Besides there would be a loss for me. I find writing for my blog quite satisfying and the loss of its direction and purpose, would I sense be quite significant to me. Today, I'm sensing this issue may eventually prompt a wider review, a rethink of my whole approach and raison d'etre for writing a blog in the first place. 

Practically my blogs reading audience, for what it is, is small and scattered widely across the world. It varies widely between 2,500 to 8,500 views a month, my best ever month was 24,000 views when something weird starting happening in Singapore, to then be followed by Hong Kong. Without social media's ability to connect, this number of views would inevitably dwindle. Though I do try to keep my ego stroking in check, it is satisfying to feel I am writing to connect to an audience, however minuscule, not just posting into an amorphous cloud and hoping for the best. I am as yet not fully settled upon a particular course of action with regard to Facebook. But this is only a matter of time for consideration.

You could however help me in bypassing Facebook by doing one of the following:~

By becoming a follower of my blog, directly through the Cornucopia blog.

https://vidyavajra.blogspot.com/

The Follow button is in the side column near the bottom, just above the Counter.
You'll then be notified whenever there's a new post on my blog.

Or simply follow me on Blue Sky, if you are already on there. 

I will continue posting links to this blog on Facebook and Blue Sky until I settle on a course of action.

ARTICLE - The Luddites Were Right All Along

During Covid I stopped buying from Amazon.  I bought what I could from local bookshops, and transferred my music purchasing largely to Apple. Yeah, I know they're not really much better, but I'm not prepared to reacquaint myself with Vinyl. It brings back terrible teen nightmares. How many copies of Hawkwind's Doremi Fasol Latido  did I try? Never found one where Brainstorm played without skipping all the way through, as though someone had applied an avant-garde scratching technique on the master disc.

Anyway, I have prided myself on not making any sort of rapprochement with Amazon. Until the Husband informed me Amazon owns most of the world's business website providers, and we have one of those. So I can't completely wash my pre-soiled hands of the ubiquitous bell end that is Bezzer. And there was I thinking I could pour my saintly purity over you like a bucket of green slime. But that just goes to show how hard it can be to put distance between you and the Internet. In the space of twenty years it's become inescapable, for good or ill.

When Musk first started trumpeting about freeing free speech on Twitter, I stopped actively using X marks the spot. Driven into a complete frenzy of activity to discover how to delete it once his unholy alliance with The Tangerine Emperor became all too painfully apparent. I mean two more emotionally stunted individuals you could not find to play dictator with each other. The richest man in the world behaving like a teenage stoner, who surfs on Ketamine. Yeah, he's so impressive.

At The Tangerine Emperor's inauguration we saw Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg all in a row, each eagerly tugging the forelock to this soon to be Ruler of All the Americas. Expanding soon into an autonomous territory near you. Fancy a bit of blatant colonialism anyone? We're not going to stop Putin or Netanyahu, so everyone just join in the land grab. You'd be foolish not too.

Facebook/Meta/Instagram. Yep, they are very much under consideration for the next chop. You know, the process of deleting a social media account is truly naff, a convoluted hard to memorise sequence of drop down options. Why isn't there just one delete your account here button? Well that's a stupid question once you start to really think about it. So far Google has kept its face out of publicly associating itself, but who knows what it's doing in private. No-one can afford to keep their brown noses clean, apparently.

This week's tech war intervention from China, sort of stuck two fingers up to the US Tech Bros over AI. With rumours abounding that an AI machine has already replicated its own AI machine. We are entering the territory normally occupied by the most apocalyptic of science fiction novels. Why are we being sold a future that no one wants? Because there's hills of money in them there hills, and who ever gets to the top of them first gets the really big Ka Ching. We are just the ones being sold an AI friend that hangs around your neck and can have conversations with you about how best to commit suicide.

A punk band from Yorkshire, apparently

At the moment I'm toying with the opinion, that after over 200 years of technological progress - 'maybe the Luddites were right all along'. They''re overdue a reappraisal. Look out for -  the return of Luddite riots, Luddite mass trashing of tech servers and infrastructure,Luddite street attacks on anyone remotely resembling a Tech Bro, or wearing unfeasibly even teeth and spray tan. People, as ever, just generally fighting back by indulging in breaking things without rhyme or reason. Its not a great tactic I know, doesn't really change anything, but its chaos or subservience. I can see folk trying to ease themselves off their tech habit by throwing their phones into guarded safes overnight.  Compulsory removal or trashing of all algorithms on all social media? Why not, when can we start? 

Tech-No-Puritanism is here. I am currently limiting being on my phone to a maximum of two hours a day. Most days it's under one hour. Taking this on as a personal discipline does free up time. If I want to do a serious amount of writing, then I power up my laptop. Once you start getting a grip on yourself, you realise its not that hard to put the clocks back.

Going completely 'Tech Naked' is pretty much impossible. But maybe there will be another way to be cleansed of our obsession with 'cat porn', like an electronic brain wipe. Everything is simply too available, too convenient, cheap and in your hand 24/7 to break our addiction altogether. But just imagine if you will,  a spiteful burst of solar wind or some genius hacker finding a way to pull the plug on it all, and there was suddenly no tech working, anywhere in the known universe. After two minutes of frustratedly throwing phones at a faux plastered wall, then twiddling with their stress balls, what the fuck might happen? 

A LEGIT OBIT - Marianne Faithful

Very easily in her early life she was written off as Jagger's muse by lazy music hacks. Once she'd dug herself out of her drug dependency habit, she made herculean efforts to forge her own career, in theatre and most prominently in the world of music. Collaborating with many people, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Metallica to name but four. She sought out cutting edge work by contemporary artists, that would suit a distinctive characterful voice roughened by smoking to a beautiful touching fragility. She brought a depth and world weary skepticism to much of what she did. Her live performances most resembled old fashioned louche cabaret. She played up to her past reputation and parodied it. Rerecording As Tears Go By, many times, each time updating her relationship with a signature song with which she would be forever associated. I will certainly miss her not being around anymore. A person of great individuality and strength has passed, and an exemplar par excellence of how to take agency over your life. Here is one of my favourite tracks by Marianne Faithful - Strange Weather, it demonstrates just what she could do with a great Tom Waits song.

FINISHED READING- Woolgathering by Patti Smith

This is a thin volume of poetic recollections by Patti Smith intricately detailed and evocatively written. The subject matter gathered from scraps and fragments of her own memories of her life, from childhood or adulthood. Portraits of friends, dreamlike pub crawls, nursing her younger sister Kimberley, family gatherings, all coming in and out of focus in an associative, often oblique, manner. 

Woolgathering then, demonstrates the meaning of the concept itself, its a cluster of amorphous recollections that roll along like fascinating tumbleweed. It has no linear narrative, nor necessarily thematic links. Stories simply pop up out of nowhere. Through the command of her language and use of imagery you can almost smell the grease of, she takes you through events as though you were a fellow participant. Breathing in its human dust and the improvisation of lives. It can appear like these are distinctly unreal fantasies thrown up by her fertile inagination, imbued as they are with Smith's own uniquely embroidered manner of expression. But she assures us they are 'written just like it was'. Suffused on ocassions by a childlike, almost innocent abroad, viewpoint.  

It's a short book, and I wasn't sure at first about it's episodic rambling character. But as I read further into it, I did become fond of these colourfully written earthy vignettes about an often longed for and lost style of life. Her upbringing within it, the rough edged lives and the brittle tensions that coexisted there. This book casts an eccentric charm that gradually wove itself into my affection.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

READING ALOUD - Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

This is only one of many stand out poems in Dream Work from 1981. A collection of quietly insightful poems, each with a strong connection to land, animals, birds, in which environments both outer and inner collide and merge in unexpected ways. Wild Geese has become increasingly popular. because of this unusual synthesis of landscape and optimism, its call to reinvigorate the human spirit. Oliver may not be the most gifted reciter of her own work, but her unassuming manner of delivery is somewhat characteristic of her poetry. Slowly captivating your heart with the gentlest of sentence structures. Reminding you that wild geese respond to their nature and the world surrounding them in ways that perhaps we have too easily forgotten. The way we feel about ourselves and the world is a transitory self obsession, that deflects the clarity of our perceptions. Yes, we despair, but the wild geese they are heading home. Our problems is we do not know where' home' lies anymore, so reorienting our sense of purpose is confused.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

ARTICLE - Awareness & Applying an Appreciative Eye

 After two months of writing in a Gratitude Journal I have decided to stop. I learnt through doing this about the nature and process by which you may arrive at gratitude. As a practice I think it has made me aware of the need to express one's gratitude more vocally in person, when it is an appreciation of someone, or what they have done for you. Just writing down that I'm grateful, has felt on such occasions simply insufficient as a response. This article is by way of a conclusion, with how I am now viewing gratefulness.

Gratefulness, is not a perception, its an outcome, its a feeling that arises within you. This arrives because we have looked, and we have seen, truly seen something. Having become aware of it, you more fully appreciate its value, for what it has given you. Depending on the depth of our appreciation, we may feel an up-welling of gratitude. For how something or someone is embellishing and enriching your life. This is the fullest purest form of what gratefulness can be.

It is not about you picking up a cup of tea and saying to yourself 'I will feel grateful for this'  At times the journal did feel clunky like that. It can seem a confection, the contrivance of an outcome. My writing in my Gratitude Journal was always likely to be tainted with artifice of some kind. Behaving as if merely by the act of writing something down gratefulness would develop, it is a bit of a conceit. In its most natural form gratefulness rarely arrives that way. This doesn't necessarily undermine the purpose of my writing about it.  Intended as it was, as an action that would stimulate thought and awareness. But it has also highlighted the limitations of keeping a journal, as a practice. 

By writing about it, I was forced into analysing it, and that easily became like performing a scientific dissection. That may also act as an attunement, a tuning in to gratefulness. But that doesn't in my experience make you more grateful necessarily. If it could encourage you to identify then express your gratefulness, publicly and vocally, this would only ever be a good thing.

I've come to a conclusion, which once I reached it made perfect sense. so much so I wondered why I hadn't seen it sooner. But once I did, I realised I didn't necessarily need to continue the Gratitude Journal.* Everything starts with looking, becoming more aware. It is probably more effective to cultivate a deeper awareness of things, of others, of reality, first and foremost. Out of which gratefulness may or may not emerge. Looking back this is what the Gratitude Journal has largely been, an exercise in developing awareness and applying an appreciative eye.

Like any other experience gratefulness is a multi-facted conditioned event. It depends on the quality of your perceptions primarily, followed by the degree of ones own sensitivity and ability to express one's feelings and responses. It is in many ways very similar to happiness, you cannot consciously make yourself happy. Likewise, you cannot make yourself grateful by force of will, you can only create the conditions for it.

Things arise and cease all the time. What arises and what ceases changes the nature of our conscious experience. The quality of our awareness, of our appreciative eye, of what we see and the way that we see it, within the surrounding conditions in which our lives are taking place, forms whatever will follow. One consequence would be gratitude.

Its like seed planting. We can have the seed of an idea, to be more grateful, say. And we plant it in the ground of our conscious awareness. Depending upon how we tend to it thereafter, it may or may not grow into a fully fledged plant that forms blossom. Planting it in soil does not in itself guarantee it will germinate. We mostly have to travel hopefully, keep watering and tending to it, but surrendering the outcome to whatever. This means we should never stop encouraging ourselves to be more grateful as we proceed through our lives. Every now and then it will arise and take you completely by surprise, but Hey! - you will be more than ready.

*I have since converted my Gratitude Journal, at least for the foreseeable future, into an Awareness Journal, written of course with an appreciative eye.

FINISHED READING - Consolations & Essentials by David Whyte

After feeling enthused by watching an interesting You Tube conversation with David Whyte, I bought Essentials - a compilation of his poetry mainly, and Consolations - a series of short pieces exploring the meaning and ramifications of words. There is much to be admired here. The perceptiveness, the clarity of expression plus the desire to stretch our conceptions, to reveal another way that we could view aspects of human nature and understanding. There is usually a suggestion of a spiritual undertow to most of his poetry, and that spirit suffuses everything else too. In Consolations he extols - the virtues of hiding aspects of yourself - the usefulness of procrastination - that a genius is something we all have, its not just really talented individuals. His piece on the word Despair,whilst acknowledging its a difficult experience, also reminds us that it will pass, if you let it, resist grappling, fighting or wallowing in it. To just allow despair to gradually ease and transform itself. In all of his Consolations he is ever so gently challenging.

David Whyte is primarily known as a poet, but is also as an inspirational speaker, a social and spiritual commentator, plus being a consultant and lecturer on business leadership. Though it is clear he has trained in Buddhist practices, he writes in a way that is accessible to all comers, theist or atheist, and even those who don't really care either way. He tries to connect our lively most grounded experience to something that proffers a degree of palliative wisdom. Studiously avoiding the often trite sentimentality of self help and well being gurus. He is ploughing a particularly distinct and well developed furrow here. The writing in Consolations can sometimes feel like light therapy for the alternative thinking classes. His challenging or adjusting of perceptions occasionally veering into being a poetically infused version of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

You can definitely have enough of even such a very good thing. Don't get me wrong, there is much to be praised and enthused about in both these books. He does have incredible richly succinct reflections, all expressed in a simple paired back and unfussy way of writing, whether its prose or poetry. There is, however, something about the tone of the Consolations, which makes them feel as though they're all written on the same emotional level. Well adjusted, but perhaps leaning a bit onto the 'beige' side. I found myself eventually tiring of his style of writing. I think I wanted more oomph or grist in them. Something they seemed to indicate they might be capable of offering, but fell short of. In the end, they tended to blend into this huge glutenous lump of beautiful insightful stuff. That remained difficult to digest, even when I paced myself by deciding to read them aloud just one piece per day.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8  - Essentials

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8 - Consolations

QUOTATION MARKS - Joy by David Whyte

"Joy may be made by hard-won,
practised achievement
as much as by an unlooked for,
passing act of grace
arrived out of nowhere;
joy, to our consternation,
is a measure of our relationship to death
and our living with death; 
joy is the act of giving ourselves away
before we need to or asked to;
joy is practised generosity."

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte
Published by Canongate 2014