A Blog is Born

A child in the womb hears nothing but its mother's heartbeat, muffled thunder, and feels her pulse and its own pulse and is warm and cosy with its mother's blood flowing through its veins and associates all of its feelings with warmth and happiness. Then it is born. It becomes aware of its own faculties, its senses, and learns to interact with its environment, through these, at first wordlessly, then it learns to speak. The child is happiest when at one with the world, and realises that.

When a blog is born, it goes through similar stages. There is, for the blogger, a (steep) learning curve. The blogger learns about the (blogging) environment and himself at the same time and his purpose is that the one (himself) should be in harmony with the other. I am on that learning curve. Through mastering technicalities the blogger learns mastery of the self. All must be effortless. When is something not hard? When it is easy. When is it easy? When you know how. When do you know how? When you understand. The purpose of my blog is the promotion of understanding.

We are on this journey together.

Each life story is the journey of a soul.

David

Dublin Damnation

Wed 11/11/09
Wed 11/11/2009

To A Certain Person and everyone else

Hi,

My blog now has thirteen posts on board, the most recent being one suggested by you.

What I am doing and saying and writing appears an inchoate, formless mass up to this point.

My blog is evolving, and so am I, along with it.

Bishop discovered, put away, two books on blogging, one of which we have now a second copy, but it may be returned to Hodges Figgis, he has a good relationship with them, because he buys many books there.

This appears to be the case.

When you start a blog, you must get it connected (to the outside world).

Your idea of submitting it for an award is a good one.

It seems to be the case that there are several awards and several directories, to which people go, and to which a blog should be connected.

Then, the blogger (me, in this instance) should read other blogs, leave a comment on them, and point back to my own blog.

By the quality of ones comments one is judged. If people find you

readable, they will want to read more.

Here is an insight.

If you want to be listened to, you must listen to others.

Tell Oominor I said she does not need to reply to my agency request, I must learn that (some) people mean what they say.

Your brother, whom I call Skywalker, made some pertinent comments, which I have taken on board.

As regards that insight above, someone else said it first, in these words 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.

We must discover truths for ourselves, but we may share insights.

As regards getting the whole hang of this blogging thing, I understand things in terms of principle (there is no other way), once you have grasped the principle everything else is obvious.

We do not understand in terms of what but of why. Explanations given

in materialistic terms are not explanations. A (very) good book on

blogging remains to be written.

First comes an overview, then a judicious mixture of what and why, this is difficult to explain, it is an attempt to explain explanations themselves.

What is always, and should always be treated as, subservient to why.

What serves the purpose of why. Purpose is paramount. Or, to

put it another way, there must be a reason for our actions. Poor

teachers put what first, thinking, if they think at all, that knowing is understanding.

I will leave you on that note.

David

Its So Easy

I was speaking to ACP on the phone. "I have a joke for you", I said. "Is it suitable for children?" he asked. After a slight pause, I said "Yes" (not all my jokes are). "Hold on, I'll just turn the speaker on", he said. (ACP has three children, the eldest is ten).
"Are they ready?" I asked. "They're ready", he said.

"I'm going to tell a joke, or rather two jokes," I said. "They have the same theme, which means subject. In the army, the soldiers are asking for compensation, which means money, for going deaf from firing guns. That should be a joke, but it isn't. Here is the first joke.

Half the army haven't put in for deafness claims. They haven't heard about it yet.

That was the first joke, here is the second one.

Soldiers were queuing up to have their hearing tested for their deafness claims. The first one went in, and the officer asked him to close the door, and, when he did he said 'You're not deaf, send in the next man'. The next soldier came in, and the same thing happened. On his way out, the soldier said to the next man 'He's very clever. Don't do anything he says'.
So the the third soldier went in, and the doctor said 'Close the door'. 'Close it yourself,' the soldier said'.

"Did they get it?" I asked ACP. "They got it", he said.

The title of this post is taken from a Buddy Holly song - 'People tell me love's for fools, so I here I go, breaking all of the rules' - then the the refrain - it's a lovely, easy going song.
It's easy to blog, it's easy to write, when you get the hang of it. As I said in my 'How to Write' piece, as you feel, how you feel.

My brother just asked me what I was doing. "Blogging", I said. "You're learning by doing", he said.

The subject of a piece may be absolutely anything, anything that evokes a feeling. Writing is the transmission of feeling, as is music.

I am learning by doing.

Learning The Game

This is my first post to be typed directly into the blog. I had been either writing them into a word processor or writing them as e-mails, and then cutting and pasting to the blog. A Certain Person (ACP for short) said they are meant to be typed in directly. It certainly saves a lot of hassle, cutting and pasting, and editing out of addresses and so on. Instead, go directly to source, and then the blogger has charge of layout as well as wording.

ACP, when I gave you that name I said you are 'often' right, 'usually' (more often than 'often') would be more correct. Sometime, I will go back and change that word.

The title of this post is taken from a lovely Buddy Holly song. I would like my posts to be as good as a Buddy Holly song.

Transferring from a known environment into the unknown should be done whole heartedly, go all the way, it is so much better and easier.

My writing method is to either write by hand on to paper, or directly at the keyboard, as now. Either way produces satisfactory results.

In Maeve Binchy's book on writing, someone says if you don't enjoy your work, why should anyone else.

My next few posts will be pasted and edited from e-mails, but they will be the last. Thanks, ACP. (Tell me, what is the significance of 'Labels', as distinct from the title of a post? I have given this post the title 'Learning to Blog'.)

David ****

The Truth Defined

This post is referred to in my previous post ‘The Truth Is Coming’, which should be read first, to put this in context. See also ‘Talking To Myself’, which enclosed both that and this post as well.

D

14^th October, 2009.

(Peter, Van Gogh, Leonardo – note, your name is bracketed with the greats).

Peter,

You ask what is truth, pointing at the handle of a cup. What is the truth of that handle? The truth of that handle is the truth of all handles, that it possesses the quality of handleness. If it serves the function of being a handle, then it is true, then it is worthy of being called a handle. The truth must be put first, both by the designer and the maker, then it will serve its purpose, which is to satisfy the user. Its truth does not reside merely in the fact that it is (we have all seen bad handles). To be is to be true, all else is false.

The truth is all pervasive, and its other name is God. The denial of truth is the denial of God. Heaven in a grain of sand – William Blake. Inanimate objects, not man made, serve their purpose merely by being. We, however, are self aware and can choose, as Hamlet said, to be or not to be.

Our purpose is to serve the truth of being, by being true. True to the material from which we are formed, which is all we know and are, to find and seek the truth in that world and universe, and give expression to it in how we are and what we do and make, which is ultimately what we make of our lives. We choose how we are, what is immaterial, we may be a road sweeper.

Our true purpose is to serve the truth, by being a true cup handle, metaphorically speaking. When quality is put first, quantity is ennobled, and quality and quantity are one.

Everywhere, the truth is denied whereas the truth is the meaning in an apparently meaningless universe, of which we are a part. The truth is that which we must seek and seek to convey, in our words and our actions. By being true to ourselves, we are true to others. Be true to your materials.

I hope this is of some use.

As an artist, you should be concerned with the bigger picture (joke, but many a true word is spoken in jest).

Everywhere, everything is treated as meaningless, but that is not to say that it is meaningless, merely that the truth is denied. Quality is treated as non-existent, whereas it is what we all seek. The symbol is not the thing symbolised, but the truth is when they are one. We can but try.

Seek, and ye shall find. When a person goes to an art gallery, he is seeking truth, although he may not know it, in the form of a painting.

I got up out of bed to write this.

You ask a worthy question, the question of all questions, what is truth? The truth is not a what but rather a how, and the answer is when how and what are combined.

Next time, perhaps you will ask a greater question, why?

The answer will be one and the same, in so many words, in a manner of speaking.

Yours speechlessly,

David

PS I could have said, did you eat rat poison for your breakfast this morning? It would not have been true food if you did. Now you know what the truth is.

D

The Truth Is Coming

14^th October, 2009.

Dear (young lady),

Enclosed find a letter I wrote to a friend of mine, an artist, a painter, a long time friend. He is a good artist and a good friend, with some sort of mumbo jumbo philosophy which I have not tried to understand, which he does not often bring into a conversation, but which appears to be totally off the wall and meaning, if it means anything, that nothing means anything.

Anyway, yesterday I was sitting alone with him in his kitchen talking about I don’t know what when I must have used the word “truth” and Peter asked “What is truth?” This more or less floored me, coming from an apparently intelligent man (did he want a true answer?) Then he pointed at the most trivial object to hand, the handle of a cup, and asked “What is the truth of that handle?” I may have mumbled something like “It is a handle” and then a few larger ways of looking at truth were raised and the subject was dropped, Peter apparently having won the argument (his argument being there is no truth and his argument being false because if his argument is true then there is truth).

I am not a slot machine. I don’t (always) provide instant answers. The truth comes dropping slow, to paraphrase a poem by W. B. Yeats. The answer, or an answer to Peter’s argument came to me in the early hours of the morning, and I wrote the enclosed.

I asked a friend of mine, a working-class man, a craftsman, to read it and I asked him did he understand it. He said “Yes”. He said “If he (Peter) doesn’t know what truth is now, he will never know,” or words to that effect.

The reason I asked that friend whether he understood the letter is twofold or, possibly threefold. First, I want my words, written or spoken, to be understandable by absolutely anyone. Second, I am from the middle, or upper middle class sector of society and there is a danger I might express myself in a way understandable to the class from which I spring, but not to others, or so I feared.

However, as a child, I found that, when reading a very well written book, such as the Sherlock Holmes books, words new to the reader are understandable from the context. Words truly used are clear, as to meaning. Third, Christ expressed himself in words understandable to a child and no one should express themselves otherwise.

****

About two hours have elapsed since I wrote the above words, I had my lunch and did something with my brother on the computer. That was at home, now I am in a hotel. Its virtually empty, being eleven ten p.m. in the off season. I had exhausted the above topic, anyway.

I want to say something about class, social class, which raised its ugly head some while ago in these pages. It is artificial, manmade and meaningless. Someone wrote about Jesus and social class. His father was a carpenter, that is the skilled working class. He worked as a fisherman, that is a rung further down the ladder, unskilled work. He had a friend who was a prostitute, the lowest of the low. He went to a party, that was middle class. What may be said in sum? Class meant nothing to him.

Oscar Wilde said there are only two kinds of books, good books and bad books. The same may be said of people. The theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, of whom you may or may not have heard, said “People are not equal, they are complementary”.

Finally, finally this letter to you seems to be coming to an end. Why did I decide to send you the enclosed letter? This afternoon, at this hotel, I was outside at the outside tables (it was a fine day), I still had not sent the letter to Peter, and I thought you might like that letter. Something about you, something about how you responded or did not respond when I used the expression “A cross to bear” on the phone to you recently. Also, you have something about you, genuineness, which is always a pleasure to meet.

There is a saying, “What everyone knows is wrong”. To an old friend of mine, I said “Suffering is good”. “How else do we learn?”, he replied.

On that note, goodbye for now,

Love (Uncle Aesop)

When I spoke on the telephone to the young lady to whom this letter is addressed she said she was in a hurry when she read it and thought ‘love’, the second last word in this letter, was ‘ coming on a bit strong’, (nothing about the content). I composed several letters to her defending love, inside or outside of quotation marks, but sent none of them. I may post one to her and on this blog, as the spirit moves me.

Young people typically are busy, busy, busy. What is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?

D

A Tortured Soul

(The word 'Loon' here is an internal family joke. When we were young, we had a family of that name living in out gatelodge, and we told L'Innomable that he was not really a member of our family, because he was the only one with fair hair, he was a Loon).

Don’t Be A Loon

.

.

My brother is a tortured soul, his response being to torture the soul of others. The tortured becomes the torturer. L’Innommable (the unnameable), as I call him elsewhere, has divorced himself from his original family although he does not agree with divorce. He, and we, should remember what our uncle said, There is a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best of us.

.

Billy, come home.

.

At least, ring your brother in England before he dies, speaking to his wife as well, why not. She has uncommon common sense. When I ask you to ring your brother, I don’t mean wring his neck. Aristocrats have the privilege of being hanged by a silken rope.

.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

.

I will let Johnny Cash sing my last words for me, Come home, come home, its supper time.

.

Your loving brother,

.

David (****)

.

(The above has been sent to the man himself, and I don’t mean The Man Upstairs, although it may have gone via Him).