I wonder when the point of exhaustion is reached, north of the border. By now, most people know what they will vote tomorrow and many have anyway already voted, casting their die. But some there will be who even now don’t know and may be agonising tonight. They may be the best of all the participants, refusing simplification, exploring all aspects. living the quandary. “The best lack all conviction.” I wish I could sit with them.

I began by enjoying the intensity and vigour of the arguments. I end by suspecting this whole business is a con, a terrible irrelevance and red herring, a diversion and waste of good energy.

We are faced as a race with terrible predicaments, brought on not just by our flawed nature but by our genius. But we don’t know what we do in making the world we have made. We don’t know what to do with us or it, with the future that threatens us, with the Earth we threaten. We are desperate for the answers. We grope around for them.

And yes, the line the “effing Tories” take is a pathological disaster, the obvious response to difficult conditions, but the worst. Compete in preference to co-operate, measure your worth by the size or quantity of your possessions compared to those of your neighbour, cut back on government, cut back on tax, cut back on community, on libraries, on Legal Aid,  on quality, cut back on truth-telling, screw the poor, punish the vulnerable, fear the foreigner. Hooligan and useless answers to our predicaments. A pathological and to a degree an infantile response to things as they are. Things as they are demand the best of our humanity, not this wicked nineteenth century old hat from the southern shires. Things as they are demand co-operation, creativity and adulthood such as humanity has never shown before.

So small wonder a good half of the Scots want clear of the English, who persist in succumbing to these puerile, oppressive, anti-social philosophies and practices.

But will a re-building of Hadrian’s Wall secure their escape ?  It will not. It is just another distraction, as useless as the Tories’ own pernicious pie-in-the-sky. “Independence” secures nothing. It merely absorbs great energy, far better used for real solutions.

I believe this whole and evermore fractious debate has been a huge – and merely destructive – misuse and diversion of generous energy. Whatever the decision, the main result will be a nation split. Tomorrow Scotland may have split from England. But tonight, Scotland itself is split in half, dismantled, distracted.

And, in consequence, further than ever from finding real solutions to the real questions facing all of us – how to shape and harness, nurture and restrain human nature, so that we as a race can live in the world without destroying it and us. Tonight, we on these small islands, on the northwestern edge of Europe, discussing ever greater fragmentation, are surely further than ever from the answers.

This short piece examines the topic of fundamentalism and offers some thoughts on its origins in human nature and behaviour. The piece opposes any notion that fundamentalism is limited to religious faith, or – for that matter – that false or idolatrous worship is limited to issues associated with religion. But there are principles that are common. Here is a link to the piece.

This is the sixteenth and last of a collection of essays called “Fables and Reflections.” The series has been commended by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist who is also author of an important book called “The Master and His Emissary—The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”. This is what he has to say about the Fables : “When I wrote a book about the structure of  the brain and its influence on culture, I did not expect for one minute that it would inspire artists, poets and musicians in the way that it has. I find it deeply touching to be asked by Rogan Wolf to write a brief forward for these clever and  insightful  prose poems – for that is what they are. He feels my book provides a fitting context for them. But their beauty and the imagination that created them are all his. They are full of wisdom that we need very badly to hear. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do..”

Each Fable takes just a few minutes to read. I have been uploading them one at a time, every month or so. The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.

But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.

The series was written in a time of pause after a working life in mental health care. But it is not specifically about mental health. In some ways it tries to offer a few sign-posts for times in which it seems particularly easy to get lost. Above all, perhaps, it explores the issue of what makes community healthy, what secures connection, how are we to live in the world in such a way that neither our neighbour nor our world suffer that we may briefly thrive ? In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude zealotry, the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of being human, the skills of love.

The series is soon to be published in book form.

If you find value in “Fables and Reflections”, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively,  I am happy to e-mail them as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail.  If that is your preference, just send me your address.

Morning, first thing.  Before packing and leaving, I booked some train tickets online, for another journey due in a week‘s time. I hate and still fumble at dealing online. I feel lonely and a bit panicky in the whole robotical procedure, with the pretend friendliness and informality of the words onscreen only adding to my disorientation. Will I disappear down some cyber precipice ? Or fall for some small-type cyber-trick, luring me into spending extra on something which I don’t need at all and will merely add to some senior manager‘s unearned bonus ? I journey deep into robot cyber-space as I click on this and that and record my private details. When the process is over, I feel lucky to have escaped back to Earth and my own human skin. Or have I ?

A few minutes afterwards, I receive an email from the Trainline people. “Great News !” it begins. Great news ? Have I been randomly selected to receive some comfortable pension until I die ? Have the Israelis stopped killing Palestinian children ? Has Cameron offered yet another phoney apology to the cameras, on the advice of his spin doctors ? “I’m terribly sorry for being such a jolly nice chap that I gave my close friend the criminal and liar Andy.orc a second chance.”  No, the great news is that my train journey booking has just been registered ! I am apparently overjoyed. Great news ! I dance click click all over the room.

Midday.  Motor-way service station half way up England. It is a multiple franchise, a whole circle of retail outlets, some of them with big names, clustered round a central atrium full of café tables and seats. But what about acoustics ? Did the architects forget about securing our ear-drums, in their concern for emptying our purses ? The amplified voices of around a hundred travellers, many of them children, bounce around the domed roof, accompanied by frantic vacuous music over the PA system. Instantly, we decide that we need to grab some sandwiches, have a quick pee and then out, fast.

At the till, a cashier delivers her question, “do you need a bag ?” For the nth time that day. Then she hisses something very intense sideways to a colleague at the second till. They are both probably still teenagers. “Do you need a bag ?” asks her companion, addressing the customer in front of her, before hissing sideways back.

Escape with sandwiches and hurry to the gents. In the men’s urinal, I pee to the same frantic loud music as out in the foyer, only even louder here, as the speakers are closer. Then there’s a sudden furious roar behind me as someone starts to dry their hands under the dryer. It’s like a jet engine starting up. Then another starts.

Hurry out through the atrium – that shriek machine and echo-chamber, those market hooks, lures and shoddy, useless knick-knacks – and into the car park. Head for the car, on high alert for other escapees around the car-park, who have started driving away before us. Return to the relative peace of motorway speeds.

All the above is plain reportage and it happened in one day, exactly as described. In a sense, though, it is also all happening all the time.

Conclusion.

I propose that the above succession of small incidents in a single day of inland travel offers an indication that our way of life is out of hand and heading (at motorway speeds and deservedly) for utter breakdown across a broad front.

Perhaps I should add that the end of this particular day offered more sanity to us travellers than the earlier parts. We arrived in working countryside in the north of England, real fields, real harvest, real tractors – and the slower pace and greater quiet associated with those things. It was a calm and balmy evening and a woman, perhaps lonely, was watering her lush garden, guarded by a rather lovely setter dog. A cyclist was out alone in the lanes, riding fast, feeling the evening air on his skin, under those huge skies, getting back in touch with self and other.

That evening, in that place, was productive of the following thought. How about, after the referendum on Scottish Independence, we hold a referendum on whether or not the North of England should be self-governing as well ? The people smile at you up here, as if you are human. They have manners. It feels a bit like a foreign country, not having supported the Coalition Government to any significant degree, nor having benefited from it at all. On the contrary. The whole area seems to be altogether more sane and more civilised than the constituencies further south.

And then what about Cornwall ? What reason has Cornwall to remain part of the United Kingdom ?

And having got this far, let’s export this foreigner-making principle and suggest de-uniting the United States of America, for instance, turning all those states into separate countries, each with its own frontier, closely guarded with armed drones, barbed wire and bayonets. Why not ? Let’s really promote this idea.

Or take it further in other ways. For instance, how about every street in every nation becoming a separate country ? All those lovely frontiers, closely guarded with armed drones, barbed wire and bayonets ?

Actually I live in a Close, not a street. About thirty people live there, all ages and several ethnicities. We of the Close have been inspired by the Scots who want to say yes and – equally sick of Davey-boy and his horrible crew of Oxfordshire hooligans, toffs, liars, tax-dodgers and persecutors of the poor – we want to say yes as well. And for  months now, at nights, I have been creating a frontier around our Close, using a tenon saw. I am sawing us into separation and very soon now I’ll have finished. And then we’ll push the severed Close on wheels to the Wandle, a mighty rolling stream that passes nearby, and we’ll launch the Close onto the waters and sail it down to where the Wandle disgorges into the Thames, beside the Wandsworth Council public tip ; and thereafter we’ll head for the Thames Estuary and onwards, east to the North Sea, hoping then to be swept north by the tides, following the route of the Spanish Armada. And after that, we shall apply to join the EU and will buy a few fireworks with which to defend our national integrity.

Easy. As easy as joining UKIP, As easy as blowing bubbles.

This short piece explores the experience of being trapped in a category. Here is a link to it. In this case, the category is a medical one, medicine being a benevolent discipline which means only well. Yet still it can be painful and debilitating to be put in a box, even a benevolent one, and coping strategies are needed. The piece becomes a short reflection on what is fact, how to establish fact and how to preserve it.

This is the fifteenth of sixteen essays called “Fables and Reflections.” The series has been commended by Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist who is also author of an important book called “The Master and His Emissary—The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”. This is what he has to say about the Fables : “When I wrote a book about the structure of  the brain and its influence on culture, I did not expect for one minute that it would inspire artists, poets and musicians in the way that it has. I find it deeply touching to be asked by Rogan Wolf to write a brief forward for these clever and  insightful  prose poems – for that is what they are. He feels my book provides a fitting context for them. But their beauty and the imagination that created them are all his. They are full of wisdom that we need very badly to hear. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do..”

Each Fable takes just a few minutes to read. I am uploading them one at a time, every month or so. The idea behind this approach is that people running all day just to keep up, are more likely to read them in short doses and at intervals.

But for those who prefer them all at once, here is a link to the sixteen together.

The series was written in a time of pause after a working life in mental health care. But it is not specifically about mental health. In some ways it tries to offer a few sign-posts for times in which it seems particularly easy to get lost. Above all, perhaps, it explores the issue of what makes community healthy, what secures connection, how are we to live in the world in such a way that neither our neighbour nor our world suffer that we may briefly thrive ? In a sense you can say that, in exploring the constituents of community here, and at this time of strain and fragmentation, frantic materialism and crude zealotry, the series asks and discusses what are the binding and redemptive skills of true human connection, the skills of being human, the skills of love.

The series is soon to be published in book form.

If you find value in “Fables and Reflections”, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply pass on this blog address, or, alternatively,  I am happy to e-mail them individually as attachments to people who would find that easier. I am already doing that for some people.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail.  If that is your preference, just send me your address.

Last week-end, on Saturday 21st, mid-summer’s day, there was a demonstration in London involving 50,000 people. They were demonstrating against the “austerity cuts” of the UK’s Coalition Government. The police reported no arrests. It started just outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House and finished just outside the Houses of Parliament, two places closely associated with free speech and accountability, essential elements of a living democracy.

The word “demonstration” means literally “a showing.”  But a “showing” can only be truly accomplished if it is seen. There have to be witnesses present who broadcast reliably what was before their eyes. Then there has to be an audience available who want to listen and understand.

By that measure, the event on mid-summer’s day almost never happened, whatever those 50,000 people must have felt and seen and heard, whatever their reasons for being there under the mid-summer sun. For no newspaper except The Guardian seems to have reported the demonstration. And the BBC seemed to have been looking away from its own doorstep. How ? Why ? What is happening at the BBC ?

(A short and rather scant film without commentary went up on the BBC London website some time during the following day for a few hours, almost as if in apology. Here is the link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-27962963 But I think my question is still valid. What is happening at the BBC ? Et tu, Brute ?)

A demonstration of 50,000 people in the capital is an event that matters across the nation. But it is possible that this failure to report it matters even more, its implications dire. The demonstration was a protest against disgraceful things being done to the poorest and most vulnerable members of our Society, by our own government, with our apparent assent. We need to address and face up to what is being done to our own people. This lack of notice by the media leaves them yet further cast out.

Thank you, The Guardian. Here was an example of a genuinely Free Press doing its work, recording and publishing issues that matter to us all. The work looks to be getting lonely.

Here are some links to more of the Free Press, doing lonely good work on behalf of our integrity :

http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/open-letter-to-bbc.html

 http://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/bbc-and-press-ignore-massive-demonstration-against-austerity-in-london/

And here is some short film of the event, I assume taken by a bystander : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrwt_bcKmYI

I wrote “Travels of the Last Emperor” at different times over a period of around twenty years. It is made up of five poems of varying length. This spring 2014, a friend filmed me reading them in Mallorca, in an old monastery on top of a hill. You  can access the film here on You-tube. To make it as visible as we can, we have also put it at the top right of this site’s home page.  There it will stay put, as this post heads downwards. The film lasts for about half an hour. I feel it more or less speaks for me and I take real pleasure in it. I hope that people will give it their time.

You can find the written text by clicking here on the title :  Travels of the Last Emperor.

What is the poem about ? It centres on an historical figure, the last Emperor of Byzantium, who died defending the walls of Constantinople, when at last it fell half way through the fifteenth century. Constantinople was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine and replaced Rome as the Empire’s capital. From this more eastern centre of gravity, Byzantine gradually replaced Roman and Greek replaced Latin, but for centuries through the Middle Ages, an essential Roman inheritance and foundation and continuity remained beside the Bosporus. The last Emperor’s death brought the Roman/ Byzantine story finally to an end, while making possible the great Islamic city of Istanbul.

But I suggest that the main point of the poem is not in its historical details. Its significance belongs in the present. Like the walls of Constantinople, that great medieval city, capital and archive of a way of life become slowly insufficient, our own walls no longer hold good. Our children are not safe here. We endanger them by staying as we are and living the way we do. We must seek a new City, a new way of being, which will nurture the Earth and offer hope to our children.

Therefore, the last Emperor, fox between fences, is also a kind of pilgrim, a King Lear disinherited and in search.

Is Barak Obama another last emperor, horrendously beset, seeking new shapes among the ruins, routes to a future  ?

Or maybe the image of the emperor bereft of his city applies to each one of us. For it is the fact that, in this era, all of us were born to a world that no longer exists. In my own lifetime, the world has changed many times over. The walls keep falling. The emperor keeps wandering.