I didn’t know what to talk about this week, but time is getting on in the day and as this whole thing is meant to be written and recorded in one hour, i’ve decided to hit record and let words spill out of me, where the next few minutes goes is going to be a much a mystery to me as it is to you.
We could take a left turn here in to ancestral practices and how the commandment to Honour they father and thy mother, so that you may live long in the land is reflexive, and that to live for any amount of time on any land results or even requires you the opportunity to honour any and all ancestors. But i won’t. Instead I will assure you that actually, remembrance is so much more than pinning a poppy to your coat and trothing loudly online about ‘our boys’ and ‘sacrifice’.
A dangerous discourse thats gets more ridiculous and hysterical every year.
So many burly, tough and patriotic boomers stuck in a cultural temporal no man’s land, confusing Chronos and Kairos with the wars of their fathers and the wars of today.
The meaning of that term—gammon,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘is unknown to me. If it means that I grow a little too fervid, or perhaps even hyperbolical, in extolling my native land, I admit the full justice of the remark. I am proud of this free and happy country. My form dilates, my eye glistens, my breast heaves, my heart swells, my bosom burns, when I call to mind her greatness and her glory.”
Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby
Too many are sat behind keyboards curing slowly with age, getting saltier and saltier, wishing they could wash themselves through with the magic ingredient that prevents their heart from rotting. Saltpetre or potassium nitrate – a highly toxic substance that can be dangerous if it is not mixed in the right proportions. It is no longer sold freely as it can be used in bomb-making. Regardless of the state of their souls – it is fortunate for us that the key to roasting a gammon is to soak it in water for 24 hours to remove the excess salt.
When exactly the gammons of this world get placed a bucket labeled ‘reality’ to desalinate them I don’t know. Perhaps the Brexit bucket soon will relieve them of some hubris.
I’ve spoken before on how the media perpetuates and boosts certain narratives. I look around and am aghast at the people, friends even, that have taken up bats and gone out to the fight. I personally question the utility of even engaging in a fight that takes place on a stage, in a ring or perhaps a pit of powers construction.
It is convenient that this discourse is yet again played out online, in the papers and on television. It is not news it’s opinion. Whether one should drown any energy in engaging in this kind of combat these days is an open question. There are at the end of the day just too many fronts. Focus instead on clandestine raids, and other approaches that can make space for voices that can operate as outside or the consensus.
I have a book of sermons by Leslie Dixon Weatherhead (Born 1893 – Died 1976) a methodist priest and minister of the City Temple known for both for its nonconformism and spiritualism. The book is called That Immortal Sea and was first published in 1956. In it there is a remembrance sunday sermon called This Haunted World, delivered just 5 years after the end of the second world war.
Nowhere in it does he he mention the troops, or the army, the military or even the state. Instead he rails against materialism, and the reality of spiritual. He says that we shouldn’t believe that God has stopped talking to us through our dreams.
He talks of how spirits haunt the spirit world that is inside of all of us and everything. And that it is the truth that everyone has had some mystic moments on a mountain, or heard the birds calling on the moore, or slepts by the sea with the windows .
you can find it online as a PDF proppably tho i havn’t looked. Like i said i have the book.
it’s interesting how priorities and the message changes. I assume we all want nothing to do with full face poppy make up, or poppy shaped remembrance ham
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