What matters?

 

Penguin Cafe

I went to see them at the Howard Assembly Rooms last night. A wonderful adventure but that isn't the point at the moment. They played an old number, 'the sound of someone you love who's going away and it doesn't matter'. You can hear everything collapsing, rhythm going, melody going, key going, sense going. And then it picks itself up and starts all over again. 

'It doesn't matter' doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, it means it doesn't have a material effect on my life.

Women's lives had a material effect on the economy in the UK in World War 1 and so they started to matter and women, eventually, got the vote.  Black lives matter in the same way - the question is, do black death's hurt? Does the death of Queen Elizabeth II hurt? Does it even matter?

I don't think I agree with John Donne:

No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.

simply because I cannot envisage 'each man'. Even if what he says is true, I could not bear to be diminished to that extent.

'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House' Audre Lorde

 this has taken me 3 days and  now it's as clear as it will ever be.

Cover: Detail from Threads of the Past, Inspirations for the Future by Dindga McCannon

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. iv). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

I found this in Reni Eddo-Lodge's 'Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race'.

Why is it in my head now? I think cos of what I've been reading and conversations I've been having.

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 104). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

I'm not sure I understand that sentence. When it was published in 1984 Audre Lorde  was a professor and the essay was her response to her participation in a conference in New York.

She defines herself as a Black lesbian feminist - is that an expression of differences or similarities. She mentions 'tools' in the context of 'a racist patriarchy'.

She advocates interdependency (between women) as the way towards change. 

There was a sticker on a bin on the Dewsbury Road that said something like 'racism is a product of capitalism'.

by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone , so as to create .... for all of us a community .... where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

the back of my Labour Party Membership card.

which seems to deal with plurality and interdependence.

Audre Lorde also says that the demand for the oppressed to explain to their oppressors their existence, needs and  differences is an old and primary tool which diverts the oppressed's energies and keeps them preoccupied with the concerns of those in power.  But isn't trying to 'dismantle the master's house' also an exhausting diversion, and preoccupation with the concerns of those in power. 

 Can her essay title be used to say you cannot use the tool of capitalism - competition  - to dismantle capitalism. 

And, perhaps, (I am thinking as I write) unless capitalism is replaced by socialism, we cannot achieve that ideal community. The problem is that those currently with the power to change the system have a vested interest in not changing it. Audre Lorde is dead. If she wasn't would she want to widen out her aversion to a 'racist patriarchy' to capitalism? Would she object to a three word definition of herself as privileged published academic?  

Silence is a tool used by those who feel powerless

but is it a useful one?

It might, if she didn't spend a book giving her reasons, explain Reni Eddo-Lodge's title.

It might explain why people, why I, write online.

We don't feel listened to when we talk. 

Talking is a waste of hope:

that we have something worth saying,

that our voice, though unique, resonates with the rest of humanity

We write in hope: 

that we will get whatever out of our heads, 

that our words, flung out there where we can see them are somehow more real than when they are racketing around inside

that because they are more real someone might notice them.

It might make me feel better but does it serve any purpose? It's a bit like the community discussion groups (master's tool) so popular under the last decade or so of Conservative governments. I might make the time to try and find out what they have achieved other than making the participants feel heard. And thereby distracting them.

Maybe.

Trying to use silence as a tool might explain why people don't vote.  

In the run up to the 2019 election, people-in-the-street interviews on the news kept saying, "I've always voted Labour but this time I thought I'd give Conservative a try".  The  Conservatives had formed the  Government for the previous 9 years. Maybe they assumed the Conservatives would form the Government again and that if they had a Conservative MP then they would benefit. Maybe the feeling was that their MP somehow had the power to make their voice heard,  their existence valued, their needs met, their differences respected. 

Maybe it did. According to Liz Truss, we'll have to wait till 2024 to find out if those constituencies that swung stay Conservative or swing back.

2024 is a hundred years since the first Labour Government.

Since 1924,  there has been a Labour Government for 33 years and a Conservative government for 64 years. If I trawl back to 1834, the first Conservative government, the 64 is increased to 99 years. 

Conservative is the default Government in our consciousness, capitalism the default mode of thought.

How to not dismantle that but build a different house?

Ah, the sweet serendipity of life

 

See the Sold Out sticker? I got the last seat.  

It will be the first time I have been out in the evening in years - not counting dog walking, that is.  

If I hadn't heard Kathryn Tickell on the radio, if I hadn't been listening to the radio, if I hadn't had LISTEN on my list, then I would never have got onto the Howard Assembly Rooms site and had 'Penguin Cafe' jump out at me. 

AND

Looking at the Howard Assembly Rooms showed me that they have turned the ground floor into a cafe called Kino where they serve  cheeses from George and Joseph, who sell the cheese (old Winchester) that was so wow in 'Howl' in York, where we ate when we went to see the Van Gogh experience.

So there's another adventure in the making - eating somewhere new.

Not very big adventures but that is why I need to have them, before my idea of an adventure becomes switching from watching old star trek on Netflix.

And it was easy to remove the pages - just turned them into draft.

Back again

Why? 

Mebbe because it's September and schools are back so it's one of my four or so New Years

I'm starting by trying out the different font styles.

Then I've got to remember how the label system works. - click on 'no matching suggestions' in Labels drop down to find my list

Then, and I've got down to 'Normal' font style, I will get started (once I've worked out how to save this as draft) - click on the arrow next to Preview button (is that the current word?) to find Save.

Over breakfast I made a list: 

ADVENTURE

LISTEN                                                         lunchtime concerts

LOOK                                                            try this new gallery

READ                                                            find some online magazines - maybe get a subscription to a paper one for my birthday - that will make me think 

                                               

ASK                                                                Somewhere over the years I've accumulated a list of questions 

RESEARCH                                                    Look up the answers

Now I need to remember how to add websites - (can't understand what the nofollow means but it seems desirable not to allow creeping) click on link icon.

I had forgotten, until I tried getting these pics in a line how hard I find it to paste pics in blogger.

Stuff still to do

• get rid of the pages and somehow incorporate them so they're not lost cos I don't like the way they work.
• find that list of questions
• add 'how does air pressure work?' to it.

It's been too long

so I am leaving this one and starting another. Why, dunno really.

It has been sooooo long

that I can't remember the fonts or even how to work the buttons but I was looking for oven baked celeriac crisps and came across 'part of the main' and it made me want to start again.
I'm not sure about the crisps, I think I might enjoy dipping my greasy finger in a salt cellar as much.
But I enjoyed to blog. It made me wonder, as the ones I enjoy do, if lack of self-consciousness is a talent or a style.
Delia's celery and celeriac soup was a good start for my this week big lunch cook and used up the celery from the veg drawer which was starting to freeze - I think my fridge might be bust.
So, I'm eating soup and wondering if this is a way of putting off proper writing, but it is less frustrating than playing Klondike.
Now I'm wondering about the way this site capitalises. It did Klondike, see it's done it again, but won't do the start of sentences.

To every blog a picture or a pithy quote

Not sure if it's necessary or will happen but today's has 3

One

This is a photo of Susan from Christmas 2014:

Two

This is the picture I did in Jan 2015 on one of the canvases she and Diz gave me for Christmas:

I've started by updating the Science page

Susan said she has no interest in theoretical physics. “It doesn’t matter how things work,” she said, “It just matters that they do.”
She is the intelligent one.
It’s taken me from 4L to sixty-six to realise that modern physics, by which I suppose I mean theoretical physics is just another branch of dialectics.
And am I right and does it matter?

I don't know, I just know it niggles at me.

Three

And this is how I reworked it this January:

Shetlands - still here

Diz has been and gone, we got some OK walking, but not photographing, weather.  We went into Lerwick and met a woman who even knits sleeves in the round - the most perfect fairisle I've ever seen.  She also used a knitting belt - a sort of pad that she stuck her fourth needle in to hold the weight of the knitting.  It's also supposed to keep the tension even.  They sell them at Jameison's but I didn't see them - just found them on the website.  It was the least friendly shop (the other wool shop was more like a wool shop - it sold loads of acrylic and so Diz could get herself something to knit) but had a fantastic range of Shetland wool.  Maybe they weren't so friendly because they were recovering from wool week, when they held classes in the shop every day. 

This is a pic from their blog of Oliver giving a talk on how they grade the wool.  I think it amazing how it gets from the mucky stuff  on the sheeps backs to knittable.

 

These are quite clean looking sheep, maybe because they are in a field, not on the moor.  Susan dubbed it the sick sheep field because there was always at least one of them lying as if it was never going to get up again.  They are in(memo to self, must photo sheep faces) the running for the title of ugliest sheep in Shetland but they do have lovely thick wool.

Diz and I also made a visit to Frankie's and I tried their steamed mussels.  They were lovely.  They also had something called saucermeat on the menu, but we didn't try it.

 

Then when I went into Ollaberry shop on Thursday, there it was:

 

And I'm now full of saucermeat stew.  It's a shetland speciality.  It tastes most like beef sausage, but not the same.  I made meatballs out of it and we - Angel and I - both enjoyed it.  We spent the morning up the tanner's track playing crofters.  She was sniffing along the sheep tracks and I was jumping streams that weren't there two days ago, but it siled it down last night.