

# Radical!

### Collected verse volume 5 (monologs etc)  
Richard Lung (of website: Democracy Science)

Copyright 2015 by Richard Lung  
first edition

#### Spelling note.

Both the radicals, Bernard Shaw and HG Wells believed in "freedom of spelling." As befits a radical work, I have exercised that right in the monolog of Shaw, as spelling reform was one of his well-known "fads." Otherwise, I have introduced modest spelling reforms into my text.

#### Publishing note on free material in books 2 & 5 of Collected Verse.

Of my five books of Collected verse, both books 2 and 5, have extra free material, currently available on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. That includes the play, on the work of Mother Teresa, for which the author has asked performers to give authors royalties to Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.

However, I have not had access to my Dorothy Cowlin website since 2007 and free public access may not last. So, I welcome this chance to re-publish the Mother Teresa play, which starts this book and is its longest work. (That is as well as re-publishing some partly revised environmental verse.)

* * *

## Table of Contents

Preface

### part 1: Mother Teresa:  
If the poor are on the moon...

act 1. Prayer without action is no prayer at all.  
act 2. We must not drift away from the humble works, because these are the works nobody will do.   
act 3. If people only had more love for each other, our life would be better.  
act 4. People of all faiths say: We want to help.

### part two: Symfonic Dreams

_prolog or announcers preface to two stages._

### stage one: The Impresario Berlioz

inter-mission: Oh memories! Oh Italy! Oh liberty!

### stage two: The Senses of Sibelius

intermission: Father died doctoring, in my infancy.

#### discussion: Sibelius the psychic?

### part three

Chromatic

### Mystic of the mundane

#### the two Ziggies

#### Sigmund Freud recollects:

Jew, get off the pavement!  
In the name of Hannibal  
Copernicus centred the sun  
My own fatherly authority

### glimpses

Thankyou 3x  
(C G Jung)

Loves disciple  
(Leo Tolstoy)

The Lampedusa elegy

Solzhenitsyn

The Long Walk of Slavomir Rawicz

On first hearing Lutoslavski cello concerto

Frank diary

The Manchester air-raids

Battle of Britain anniversary

Satan In The Suburbs

Erdös zero

The exercise of freedom

The Immortal

### part 4: Radical!

preface to: Radical!

#### Millenium

(John Stuart Mill)

I never was a boy.  
She.  
Generally Liars.

#### The Man of Honor

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

#### Traji-komik

(George Bernard Shaw)

Nout on musik akompaniment.

1) A skym of things.  
2) Our ekual importans.  
3) Shaws inferno.  
4) For her money.  
5) Lov leters to leading ladys.  
6) The deth-defying vejetarian.  
7) Fabian falen among diktators.  
8) The Intelijent Womans G'id.

#### Profet of science

(H G Wells)

Wells and tunnels.  
The study and the struggle.  
The profet of science.  
Socialism and the Family(s).  
Utopias.  
A freer world.

#### If democracy means anything...

(George Orwell)

I am no novelist.  
In search of the working class.  
When the truth is not good form (Catalonia).  
Against dictatorship.  
Big Brother and Uncle Tom.  
The two Winstons.

#### the Yorkshire grumbler

(J B Priestley)

Eden End  
because he has to.  
life without remedy.  
Out of the People.  
Theatre Outlook.  
an English trait.  
the other place.

### part 5: live and let live:

Green is history

Jacques Cousteau

Paul Harrison: Inside the Third World

Animal sacrifices

Ten-level hells

### part 6 (essay):   
Michelson & Morley, Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski and a... [  
Statistical Theory of Relativity](radical_split_065.html#statistical)

### notes

### acknowledgments

### after-word

shutting shop

#### guide to collected verse in five volumes by Richard Lung

#### notice of this authors books in the Democracy Science series  
and the Commentaries series

_return tocontents._

* * *

# Radical!

_Radical ills require radical remedies._

### Preface.

Radicals, religious, artistic, political, social, environmental and scientific, are featured here, among a few who are not. Some have offered the radical remedies that radical ills require.

Radicalism is not by itself any more a virtue than conservatism. It is a tonic in societies so conservative that they turn their back on new ideas, however good, that disturb their moral or mental slumbers.

This is particularly true of a complacent country like Britain (or England) which provoked a radical tradition, treated in the title verse narration, Radical!

As far back as nineteen-thirties America, HG Wells observed that the term "radical" could be disparaging. Britain and America have been stably conservative societies that did not under-go the ravages of doctrinaire state control.

Bureaucracy-loving government recently has waged a Prussian rule book war on intelligence and initiative, for an "only obeying orders" Britain.

Western governments, covering for banks gambling away national assets, have allowed another form of relentless state parasitism of the common wealth: "fleecing the lambs" or "socialism for the rich," so-called by one US commentator.

The success of scientific investigation is a harmonising of radical principles with conservative testing how far they apply. This harmony has eluded politics.

This is the intellectual part of the problem to be solved for the health, wealth and happiness of mankind. Scientific method of radical theory and conservative method balances the needs of stability and adaptability for humanity to securely progress. The US provision for constitutional amendments is an early recognition of this requirement.

Besides intellectual solutions to the social problem, there are practical and emotional solutions. The three are inseparable but people will approach them according to how much they are thinkers, doers or feelers.

Obviously, Mother Teresa was a feeling-led radical. A friend and colleague noted that she did not organise. Yet, the way her Mission of Charity gradually extended its organisation was impressive.

And when she was asked about her reading, she said she only had time to read the gospels.   
Not an intellectual, then.   
Yet, her practise showed Jesuses idealistic teachings to be practical and indeed a coherent body of doctrine for a way of life, that must have been thought by a real person, thus confirming not only the teachings but the teacher.

Amongst other things, those teachings broke away from social exclusion or tribalism. Likewise, Mother Teresa showed that religion doesnt have to be sectarian but can work with other religions of prayer and service.

_return tocontents_

* * *

# part 1: Mother Teresa:  
If the poor are on the moon...

#### Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me.

_Based mainly on writings by Ved Mehta, Desmond Doig, Navin Chawla, Eileen Eegan, José González-Balado, Brother Angelo Devananda and Mother Teresa. This play, by Richard Lung, has tried to convey the spirit of Mother Teresa beliefs in action without judging them._

_All author royalties for performances to go to the Mission of Charity founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta._

Dedication: To Nikki, who met Mother Teresa, awarding her play and the players.

* * *

### PLAY with a prolog and a prelude and four acts.

#### General directions:

_For accompanying music -- not an impediment to the dialog -- Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade may be used for the prelude. And the four movements of Beethoven's Eroica used, respectively, for the four acts. I have not prescribed sound-effects. For the sake of realism, back-ground noises, to modern drama, intrude so much that audiences may not hear the dialog._

_In old-style theatre, actors were trained to throw their voices to the gods with complete clarity. Psychology justifies a drama that cuts out back-ground noises, because human attention does this anyway. A play, that keeps down its sound effects, helps an audiences selective attention by reducing fatiguing distractions._

_This approach suits the story of a contemplative mission that is in the world but not of the world. This play could be produced with many more walk-on parts. That would not suit most drama groups. So, multiple parts are indicated for some players. Some actors have to imaginatively become more than one person in the same scene or in a single exchange._

_A few times, I prefered to let a character double, as another character, with reported speech. (The Royal Shakespeare Company flourished many a 'He said' or 'She said' in its celebrated dramatisation of "Nicholas Nickleby.") The cast is reduced mainly to an elemental family of mother, father, sister, brother, etc..._

_Actors, playing many roles, remind us of the mission vision to see a humanised god in every human being. Dialog with Mother Teresa often is suspended by asides from the other speaker to the audience, as if a third actor._

CHARACTERS in order of appearance for the whole play:   
Prolog: Mother Teresa.   
Prelude: Journalist. Vizier.   
Act one: Nun. Father. Priest.   
Act two: Sister. Man. Three children.   
Act four: Brother.   
(Note: Parts may be further combined across acts. For example, one speaker could take the parts of Vizier, Priest, and Man, respectively in the prelude, acts one and two.)

* * *

### PROLOG.

MOTHER TERESA:

### Child of the streets wandering.

Child of the streets wandering,   
put your hand in my own for a home.   
But the child, at the party, scarcely smiled.   
In a little while, she was gone with her smile.   
For days, I sought her in the city.   
She appeared again, I took her with me:   
"Sister, please, follow this child wherever she goes."

Sister sent word to me, 'Mother Teresa,   
into the thoro-fares of Calcutta,   
she goes, to see a woman, under a tree,   
who has brought two stones for company.'   
"Child, child of the streets wandering,   
how is it you would not stay with   
all the beautiful things you had to play with?"

The little one smiled and replied,   
'I could not live without my mother.   
She loves me, like no other.'   
The womans smile was that of her child,   
as she spoke, 'Hearth and home to me   
are these two stones under a tree.   
Children, who are loved, never run away from home.'

* * *

### PRELUDE to the four acts.

CHARACTERS in order of appearance:   
Journalist.   
Vizier.

_Enter_ JOURNALIST:   
The Nizam, His Exhalted Highness of Hyderabad,   
was jewel in the crown of the Mogul Empire.   
The Nizam took over the palace of Kamal Khan.   
On all the panels and walls, he left KK,   
the thrifty Nizam renamed King "Kothi" (Hindu for "house").   
He was surrounded by guards and his private police force.   
Driven out from his confines of marble,   
His Highness yelled: Are we arrived?   
He didnt know whether rare journeys to planes,   
between his five palaces, took two minutes or twenty.

I left the guest house to interview the grand vizier.  
Out of corners and out of door-ways,   
old Muslim bearers salaamed in sonorous Urdu.   
Cautious and sly, smiles vizier Taraporewala   
in white achkan of shark skin over drill trousers.

_Enter_ VIZIER:   
As an autocrat, no-one could contradict,   
the Nizam never learned he could ever be wrong.   
The "Nizam" is Arabic for "order" and his son,   
the Prince was ordered: Sack your harem.   
On birth-days, the king, in court, received presents of girls, like Sheherazade, wiling away the Arabian nights.   
The nazrana was a cash tax on his subjects,   
according to status, to gaze on their god.   
He never paid people himself, so knew nothing's worth: five rupees or five thousand.   
The dynasty kept no accounts, only strong rooms and trunks.   
His father threw the Jacob's diamond in a drawer.   
A servant, while dusting, found it rolled in a handkerchief.   
A sold train-load of jewelry and plate escaped   
confiscation on Indian independence.   
For a gold present of forty thousand rare coins, each worth over a hundred times its face value, the prime minister mustered: "Very good."  
The Nizam, of the nazrana, had gold plate for hundreds but ate just cream and sweets, off tin, on a mat in his room.   
Always on opium, he weighed under ninety pounds.

* * *

### ACT ONE

#### Prayer without action is no prayer at all.

_return tocontents_

CHARACTERS:   
Journalist.  
Nun.  
Father.  
Mother Teresa.  
Priest.

_Enter_ JOURNALIST:   
This journalist trailed from Indias richest man   
to the servant of the poorest of the poor.   
A Catholic official and fellow news-paper-man tipped:   
"Watch this woman. She's quite extra-ordinary. She's going to be a saint."   
Twenty-seven years later, I sought her beginnings, as a teacher, at the Loreto convent in Entally.

_Enter_ NUN:   
Please don't give my name, just mention me as one of her contemporaries.   
There are no legends. Mother Teresa was ordinary.   
She was close to her fellow Yugoslav nun,   
Mother Gabriel, who died in 1974.   
Teresa's heart was set on the work. She said:   
"I couldnt meet God if I didnt do this."

JOURNALIST:   
Ask Mother Teresa about herself and she'd interrupt:   
"That's not necessary. I am not important.   
Write about the work and my people."

Down the road, from the Mother House   
of the Mission of Charity, is a church.   
It happens to be dedicated to St Teresa.   
From Dampremy, in coal-mining Belgium,   
a saintly old man Father Henry told his secrets.

_Enter_ FATHER HENRY:   
I was screwed down here, in charge of the Bengali community.   
Our church was in Entally where Mother was Head-mistress.   
From 1941 to '47, Teresa and I worked together.   
We have this secret. Prayer without action is no prayer at all.   
We want to work for the poorest of the poor.   
We comfort people in hospitals or in bustis, the slums.   
We discussed what we learned.   
Mother's search is an experiment to experience God.   
She got girls from the Sodality of Our Lady to do penance and serve the country and serve the neighbor.   
Hindu and Muslim women wanted to join   
and help the Sodality and social classes.   
Independence was in the air. Mahatma Gandhi said, "Make no laws unless you consider the poorest person you know." It was an inspiration.   
The Archbishop of Calcutta, Monseigneur Perier told me:   
(FATHER as) ARCHBISHOP:   
Imagine that a European nun teaching Indian girls starts an Order to work amongst the poorest of the poor.   
FATHER:   
Your Grace, that plan humanly speaking is impossible, but it is needed.   
(FATHER as) ARCHBISHOP:   
If it is needed then God will bless it.   
FATHER:   
Ferdinand Perier, he died at ninety, invited the Yugoslav Jesuits.   
Their stories home inspired Teresa to serve in Bengal.   
I left Calcutta for a retreat and was told   
I wouldnt find her any more when I got back.   
You see, she still had her secret.   
Then one day a lady in a sari with a blue border comes in.

_Enter_ MOTHER TERESA:  
Do you recognise me?

FATHER:   
I seem to have seen you before.

MOTHER:   
Where is Moti Jhil?

FATHER:  
You should know it well; it is the slum on the other side of your convent wall.   
( _Aside_ : )   
Now Mother de Senacle, from Mauritia, was Principal of Entally and a great protector of Teresa.   
She took twenty girls from Moti Jhil to educate. They were made at home on the verandah   
with a good Sister looking after them.   
After a year only two were left.   
That is why Teresa had to leave the convent.   
Two years, she waited for permission   
to serve the poor outside convent walls.   
Her spiritual confessor, Father Van Exem had her sign the decree in triplicate.

MOTHER:   
Can I go to the slums now?

(FATHER HENRY as) EXEM:   
It's not so simple.   
You now obey the archbishop of Calcutta.   
FATHER:   
In 1948, she was off the train, at Patna,   
the ancient imperial city on the Ganges,   
for the Medical Mission founded by Mother Denger.

(NUN as) MEDIC MOTHER DENGER:   
The convent was once a church with disused cemetary for a garden.   
We slept between tomb-stones under the privacy of mosquito nets.

MOTHER:   
I have no idea where my ideals will take me.   
I shall go and live with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Calcutta.   
From there on, God will direct me.   
My Order will diet like the poorest of the poor.   
On mondays, rice and salt, on tuesdays, salt and rice,   
on wednesdays, rice and salt, and so on.

(NUN as) MEDIC:   
It's criminal. You will all die.   
( _Aside_ ):   
Father Van Exem visited us. Giving a talk, he asked after Teresa.

MOTHER:  
I am here.

(NUN as) MEDIC:   
He failed to recognise her among Indian and Anglo-Indian nurses.   
Nurses, who were her Loreto students, shed tears to see Sister Teresa in the sari of the poor, till they knew why.   
She learned everything. She mid-wifed or cut off a gangrenous thumb, and was splattered in blood.

MOTHER:   
Our Loreto nuns should see this!

(NUN as) MEDIC:   
A 15 year old girl dying of TB wanted to join her mission.   
Teresa confirmed her as an associate, before leaving with a present of sturdy sandals.   
They lasted long and were shared by women joining her.   
The "Patna sandals" signaled their new life of carefree poverty.   
( _Calling back to Teresa_ ):   
You will need all the help you can get, on the streets of Calcutta.   
Someday you ought to visit the governor.

MOTHER:  
No, I could not do that. I couldnt approach a dignitary like that.

(NUN as) MEDIC ( _smiling_ ):   
Not long after, I learned of a slum childrens outing, in the governors mansion gardens, helped by Teresa.

FATHER (HENRY):   
When Teresa returned, our first meal was provided by God.   
Mother didn't want to eat, but I said: "You must." That is like her.   
And their program, it was impossible. At 5.30 they were in church.   
By 7.30 they were on the streets with their bags working in a sweepers colony, visiting the sick, teaching.

MOTHER:   
God wants me to be a holy nun laden with the poverty of the cross.   
Today I learned a good lesson.   
When I was going and going till my legs and arms were paining, I thought how the poor have to suffer to get food and shelter.   
But of free choice, my God, and love for you,   
I desire to do your holy will.   
Give me courage now, this moment.

FATHER:   
Mother rented a small room in Moti Jhil, for five rupees a month.   
Gathering ragged children, her mission began with a prayer, scratching the Bengali alfabet in the ground with a stick and telling nursery rhymes.   
Locals brought chairs, a table and black-board.

MOTHER:   
They are such good children. They want to learn.   
Already more than forty come every day. Now we've got a few benches, we could manage nicely until monsoon time.

_Enter_ PRIEST:   
Teresa is responding to the wiles of the devil.   
I cannot understand why she left her fine work as a teacher for some uncertain effort in the slums.

FATHER:   
Mother, the archbishop demands an apology   
from the old priest who said that.

MOTHER:   
I knocked at a convent to take my meal.

(NUN as) CONVENT NUN:   
You can go round to the back.

MOTHER:   
I was left to eat under the stairs like a beggar  
before going back on the streets.

FATHER:   
Mother took people, dying on the streets, to hospital after hospital.   
When taxis and rickshaws failed, she borrowed a work-mans wheel-barrow.   
Too often, to her distress, she failed to gain them admittance and they died on the streets, where she found them.

MOTHER:   
Cats and dogs are treated better than this.

FATHER:   
From the Yugoslav Jesuits, who inspired her to come to Bengal, one of her strongest supporters said: We thought she was cracked.   
I see another priest, the procurator of a leper mission.   
He told me: "She's a mad-woman."  
( _Addressing Another priest_ ):   
How is the mad-woman doing?

(PRIEST as) ANOTHER PRIEST:   
Make no mistake, the finger of God is there.

FATHER:   
This I already knew. She is a person of Christ,  
an experience of Christ in the poor.   
More girls joined Mother, mostly pupils from Entally.   
The first was Subhasini Das, who became Sister Agnes, taking Mothers Christian name.   
Next was Magdalene Gomes, now Sister Gertrude.

(NUN as) SUBHASINI DAS:   
I have known Mother since I went to school at nine years old.   
We were all disturbed at the news from Father Henry.

FATHER:   
Special permission has come from Rome for Mother to leave.   
God has called her to work for the poor.

(NUN as) DAS:   
Why, when there are so many Loreto nuns, is our Mother called?   
Can't someone else go?

FATHER:   
Nobody can be pushed into work like this. It is the call of God Himself.   
If one is not called by God, one cannot go.

Mother was given, without rent, the upstairs room of a Bengali Christian, whose family was evangelised by the Portuguese.   
He said: "Mother Teresa was sent to us from God. To receive her was a blessing. We received. We did not give."   
Teresa's Sisters were sleeping like canned sardines and praying to get a permanent house.   
Archbishop Perier sent a visiting American, Cardinal Spellman.

(PRIEST as) CARDINAL:   
Where do you live?

MOTHER:   
Here, in this room, Your Eminence.   
This is our refectory. We move the tables and the benches aside.

(PRIEST as) CARDINAL:   
Where is the rest of the convent, where do you study?

MOTHER:   
We study here, too, Your Eminence...  
And this is also our dormitory.

(PRIEST as) CARDINAL:   
Have you a chapel?

MOTHER:   
It is also our chapel, Your Eminence, with the altar behind the partition.

(PRIEST as) CARDINAL ( _beginning to smile_ ):   
I will say mass for you.

FATHER:   
At last, Teresa was offered a small dilapidated house in the Moti Jhil slum.

MOTHER:   
I'll take it.

FATHER:   
Mother you are going to make a big blunder.   
If you live among all those poor demanding people, always demanding, you will disappear.   
That offer has fallen thru, thank God!   
You've been offered another old house.   
But the owner jumped to show its sturdiness and disappeared, thru the floor in splinters and dust clouds, to his death.   
I am meeting a magistrate, Mr Islam, emigrating to Pakistan.

(JOURNALIST as) ISLAM ( _greeting Henry_ ):   
I love you -- you need not look surprised.  
I know the Jesuits well and have studied in St Xaviers.

FATHER:  
How much do you want for your house?

(JOURNALIST as) ISLAM:  
Name your own price.

FATHER:  
A lakh?

(JOURNALIST as) ISLAM:  
That's less than the value of the land the house is built on --  
I agree. I have prayed on this at the mosque ( _tearfully_ ) and decided:  
I got that house from God. I give it back to Him.

MOTHER:  
Father, it is too big; what to do with all that?

FATHER:  
Mother, you will need it all. There will come a day when you ask where to put all your people.   
( _Aside_ ):   
The people of Moti Jhil gathered money  
to start a small home for dying destitutes.  
They provided two beds. And one dies and one survives.  
That was the rule. That is still the rule.  
Others objected to the smell of dying.  
So, they had to close the place.

MOTHER:  
I beg you the good people of Calcutta Corporation for a place where people can die with dignity and love.  
It is a shame for people to die on our city roads.

FATHER:  
The Corporation offered either a house near the Mother House or a pilgrims rest house, by the great temple of Kalighat.   
The rest house was occupied by _goondas_ \-- thugs and loafers -- for gambling and drinking.

MOTHER:  
I choose the rest-house, because the destitutes go to Kalighat to die.  
All devout Hindus in the city wish to be cremated in this sacred spot.

FATHER:   
Permission came in 1952 on the anniversary of Indias Independence.

MOTHER:  
I wish to open in a week, for the Feast Day of the Immaculate Heart.

FATHER:  
This says nothing of the cleaning to be done for _Nirmal Hriday_ or the Place of the Pure Heart.  
The first entrant was a woman I found lying outside a hospital -- the place that denied the dying woman, Mother first picked up.

An early guest, called Charubala had the bad karma of a child-widow.  
She worked for relatives, as long as she could bear it, and then did domestic work, till paralysed and useless.  
She made-up songs for fellow patients.

As expected, there was Hindu opposition to Mothers work.  
One demonstrater threatened to kill the Sisters.

MOTHER:  
If you kill us, we would only hope to reach God sooner.

(JOURNALIST as) COMMISSIONER:   
Of what awful thing is he guilty to deserve such suffering?

MOTHER:  
That is a crucifix. All our order wear one on the shoulders of our saris.

(JOURNALIST as) COMMISSIONER:  
Local people ask the police to remove you,  
for trying to convert Hindus to Christianity.  
I promised to carry out their request.  
Having looked at your work, I shall keep my word, on one condition: that the mothers and sisters, of all protesters, come, day in and day out, to do the same work...   
Nearby is a black stone image of the goddess Kali.  
Here is the living Kali.

FATHER:  
The Police Commissioner did his utmost to protect Mother.  
The threats and the stones kept being hurled.  
Mother picked up a cholera case, no one would touch.   
A priest was dying, in his own mess, outside Kali temple.  
At the rest home, he died a happy death.  
Some say the dying priest speaks of Kali:

(PRIEST as) DYING PRIEST:   
I served the goddess Kali in an idol.   
That nun is the goddess Kali in person.   
_Exit priest_.

FATHER: However, there was no more trouble.  
A mysterious lady appeared on school prize day in Moti Jhil.  
She went from hut to hut in the slums, finding out about Mother.  
The stories made her a staunch helper till she died.  
She served without fuss and shunned recognition.  
When Mother Teresa went on retreat, this lady took charge of the Home for dying destitutes.

Dr B C Roy, Chief Minister of West Bengal, was a giant of a man and powerful. Among capitalist and imperialist ladies, his niece  
was touched by Mothers soul. You find this time and again.   
It is a certain world, a realistic contact with God.  
For the love of God, Mother had visiting senators scrub the floor.

Opposition still awaited Teresa, like the man who told her:   
"I would not help or touch a leper for a thousand pounds."

MOTHER:   
Neither would I but I would willingly tend him for the love of God.

FATHER:  
Looking to start a new leper centre, a co-worker noticed:  
"Villagers are picking up stones. Run for the car."

MOTHER:   
Oh, dear. I dont think God wants us to have a leper clinic here.  
We shall pray and see what he does want.

FATHER:   
Looking for another site, Mother was met with the response:  
"This city district refuses a new Home for the Dying here, even if they are not lepers. It would take away the peace of the neighborhood and reduce our property values."

MOTHER:   
I'm sorry for you people. Later on, you will regret it.  
You have not rejected me, but you have rejected Gods poor.

FATHER:  
Then, there's the lepers self-governing village   
at Titagarh, in the industrial suburbs.

MOTHER:   
At every center, we made the thousands of lepers choose their own leader and their own council, so that we can deal with them all.

(JOURNALIST as) GENT was:

MR BIG

Was Mr Big ever a big man at all  
working in a big government building  
fanned by all the air-conditioning,  
and soothed by answers to my every call?

The staff and the callers were all bows  
when out I came from my big office  
into a big car at my service  
to be chauffered to the big house

for my big family. Then they found me out  
a leper! No more fans, no home, no family.  
Only these young sisters wanted me  
who you see here. They are my people now.

MOTHER:  
A child is the only joy in life of the poor.  
If you remove a child from their home,   
or from those with leprosy, who is going to smile at them and help them to get better?

A mother and father put their three-day old boy between them.  
Each one looked at him. They extended their hands towards him, then they would pull back.   
They made gestures, wanting to kiss their child, and again they would pull back.  
I picked up the baby, and the father and mother followed him with their eyes as I walked away. I held up the child towards them,  
and they kept on looking at him with great tenderness until I was out of sight.  
Because they loved him more than they loved themselves, they had the strength to give him up.  
It is beautiful to see the sacrifice, our leper parents make, for their children, so that they will not be infected and may grow up as normal, happy children.

A wonderful woman scarcely had feet to walk on and she walked more than six miles, with her baby in her arms.  
She said:  
Sister, see, my child also has leprosy. I have seen a spot.

The Sister examined the child and took the smear but it was not leprosy. The woman felt so happy, she took the child and walked all the way back -- she didnt even stop to rest.   
If they come as soon as they see a spot or something, then in a year or two they can be cured.

Last Christmas we had a party for all our lepers.   
Every one was given a parcel of food and clothes and things like that.

FATHER ( _Aside_ ):   
The Sisters possessions are three saris,   
made by lepers, theyve rehabilitated.  
Teresas garment is neatly darned.

MOTHER:   
With government help, we aim to build rehabilitation centres, all over India, for the lepers to lead a normal life, like you and me, where they can feel that they are somebody,  
that they are our brothers and sisters, human beings created by the same loving hand of God.

FATHER:   
Memories are the blessings of God.  
Mother Teresa is the salt of the earth mixing with the earth and enriching it. But she's an obstinate woman.  
She has no organisation. The thing about her is:  
"I belong to you whenever you need me."  
America, Australia, Africa, England, Ceylon,  
wherever she goes, she feels directed.  
Like a tree, her branches spread and give shelter.  
As Pope Paul VI said, this is her universal mission of love.

* * *

### ACT TWO

#### We must not drift away from the humble works, because these are the works nobody will do.

_return tocontents_

CHARACTERS in order of appearance:   
Mother Teresa.  
Sister.  
Man, also as Young man; Man in park; Leper;   
Unemployed man; Anglo-Indian; Old drunk; Dying man.  
Journalist; also as Father.   
Children.

_Enter_ MOTHER TERESA:   
The rich may be "shut-in" by their own wealth.  
In places, we don't have homes for the dying destitutes, many shut-ins homes are really homes for the dying.   
Loneliness is the leprosy of the western world,  
like the London bed-sitter writing letters to herself.

We opened a home in New York for AIDS patients, who find themselves unwanted.

_Enter_ SISTER:   
One of the young men (all are young) is dying.   
But, strange to say, he cannot die. He struggles with death!   
What is it? What is wrong?

_Enter_ (MAN as) YOUNG MAN:  
Sister, I cannot die until I ask my father to forgive me.

SISTER:   
I found the father and called him.   
Then, like a living page from the Gospel,   
father embraced son.

_Enter_ (JOURNALIST as) FATHER:   
My son! My beloved son!

(MAN as) YOUNG MAN:  
Forgive me! Forgive me!

SISTER:   
They clung to each other tenderly.   
Two hours later the young man died.

MOTHER:   
We know now that being unwanted is the greatest disease.  
That is the poverty we find around us there.

SISTER:  
Alerted by neighbors, the sisters arrived at a locked apartment giving off a stench. The police broke down the door to find a woman four-days dead. No-one knew her name.

Residents of the same building know nothing   
about their neighbors, except perhaps their floor -- and they know this only because their paths cross or they get on the same elevator.  
They do not concern themselves with them   
except, perhaps, when the stench of their cadavers bothers them.

Our contemplative sisters, dressed in white and praying the rosary, entered a New York park, maybe, to shake the hand of a man, who looked lonely.

(MAN as) MAN IN PARK:   
Oh, I'm not ready. I'm not ready.

SISTER:  
We are Sisters. Jesus loves you.

(MAN as) MAN IN PARK:   
I am not ready. You have come all the way from heaven, you are angels from heaven to take me. I am not ready.

SISTER:  
Someone said the Sisters have not started any big work, in New York, that they are doing small things quietly.

MOTHER:  
If you help one person, that is alright.  
Jesus would have died for one person, for one sinner.   
We must not drift away from the humble works, because these are the works nobody will do.   
We are so small we look at things in a small way.  
But God, being Almighty, sees everything great.  
We can do little for the people, but at least they know that we do love them and that we care for them and that we are at their disposal.

In an old folks home, we visited, they had everything but everybody was looking toward the door.   
And I did not see one with a smile on their face.

JOURNALIST:  
Mother, you asked to be an air-line hostess.  
Some air-ways gave you free tickets.

MOTHER:  
Indian rail-ways had already given me a free train pass.   
Up till then, I would sleep a few hours,  
by swinging myself into the luggage racks.   
If the poor are on the moon, we shall go there, too.

JOURNALIST:   
Mother bags her air-line sandwiches and goes round the passengers for their leavings, just like the gospel story of the loaves and fishes.  
At the air-port, she's whisked away in a limousine.

MOTHER:   
There had to be some advantage in being Mother Teresa...

JOURNALIST:  
In Calcutta, nuns, in the blue-bordered white saris, go to chapel to pray for a Sister who died of rabies in the leper camp.  
She was a doctor but didnt think a puppys bite needed injections.

MOTHER:  
We take only seven jabs for indirect contact -- it's not so bad.  
One trouble with leper camps is that very sick are mixed with not so sick. So, we rented an isolation hut.

JOURNALIST:   
A leper on a mattress is crying:

(MAN as) LEPER:   
No amount of medicine helps!

JOURNALIST:   
Mother puts her hand to the forehead of the mutilated man and helps a Sister give morphine.

MOTHER:  
The pain will go away.

( _Aside_ ): In the early stages, the disease is not so painful, but people at this stage are in terrible pain.

JOURNALIST:   
What about all of you who work here? Isn't it dangerous?

MOTHER:  
Up to now, thank God, nothing. But we have to be ready.

JOURNALIST:   
Those, who can follow, plead for more food and medicine.

MOTHER:   
Yes. -- Tomorrow -- I will try.

JOURNALIST:   
Crossing herself again and again, surrounded by beggars, the sick and the crippled, she sets off in the ambulance to bring the fallen, by the way-side, to the Home of the Dying.

(MAN as) UNEMPLOYED MAN ( _as Teresa stops at a crossing_ ):  
Mother, I want to find work.

MOTHER:   
I dont know any going. I told you, I can't help.

(MAN as) UNEMPLOYED MAN:  
Please, mother... ( _The ambulance moves on._ )

MOTHER:   
He has five children. We treat him for TB, which prevents heavy work.

JOURNALIST:  
Next crossing, a small boy reaches out. She crosses herself, picking him up. He is for relief rations, at the home of orphans.   
They are nursed, taught, found foster parents and spouses.  
There, a crowd of women wont budge, when she shouts in Bengali: "You must form a line for your ration," doing it for them with coaxing and prodding.   
Mother knows her Calcutta: Hindus, Muslims and Christians come on different days.   
An unsmiling girl stares at her ration card, she cannot read, is from Catholic Relief Services, telling of Food for Peace, free from the People of America.

MOTHER ( _kneels and claps_ ):  
Shiggri! shiggri!  
Quickly! Quickly! ( _for the toddlers to come to her._ )  
Say: Good morning. ( _Inarticulate noises greet her._ )   
Oh, here is a bright fellow with a big grin.  
Naughty, naughty, naughty William. ( _She picks him up._ )   
He smiles the whole time, does nothing else.

JOURNALIST:  
She chucks, under the chin, a foundling   
in one of the cribs. She knows all their names.  
That dying baby was found in a dust-bin.

MOTHER:   
Love that baby while it lives. No child should die in our care without having experienced love.   
I dont care what people say about the death rate. If they die an hour later, we must let them come.  
These babies must not die uncared-for and unloved, because even a tiny baby can feel.

SISTER:  
When Mother last told me to nurse them in my arms, the baby, tiny and frail as it was, pressed against me, before it died.

JOURNALIST:  
A mother pleads for the life of her mongoloid baby facing an operation.   
Teresa touches the childs pale cheek.

MOTHER:   
God has given you this great gift of life.  
If he wants the gift back, give it to him willingly, with love.  
( _Aside_ ): I gave a child to a high-class family.   
The child became completely crippled. So, I said:  
Give the child back to me and I will give you a healthy one!

JOURNALIST:  
And the father said:  
"Take my life first, before you take this child!"

Next stop, the house in the slum where she started her Mission of Charity, followed by yelling children.

_Enter_ CHILDREN:  
Hey, Sister, praise be to Jesus!   
_Exit children._

(MAN as) ANGLO-INDIAN ( _A fair man wheezes and cofs_ ):  
We Anglo-Indians, scattered all over this busti, wish to live together.

MOTHER:  
Your old nonsense again. Go to the mobile clinic and ask Sister for cortisone to treat your asthma. Go along.

JOURNALIST:   
An old drunk, in a loin-cloth, clings to her legs, as she takes medicine from the dispensary cupboard.

(MAN as) OLD DRUNK:  
Forgive me for drinking, Mother. I can't stop.

MOTHER:  
Then I can't forgive you.

JOURNALIST:  
She is not stopped a moment from work.  
Last stop, the Home of the Dying, near Kali Temple.  
The patients haunt the streets when able to get up again from beds, too low to hurt themselves falling out.  
The Sisters quickly move round, to take pulse,   
straighten limb to its rest, looking into eyes,   
the mens without expression; the womens wild.

MOTHER:  
Tho too weak to move, yet they can scream.

JOURNALIST:  
A small statue of the Virgin Mary is crowned  
with the golden nose rings of Indian women who died here.

MOTHER:  
Those who had nothing have given a crown to the Mother of God.

JOURNALIST:  
Mother found a dying man, covered in worms, in the gutter and brought him here:

(MAN as) DYING MAN:  
All my life I have lived like an animal in the street.  
Now I shall die like an angel, loved and cared for...  
Sister, I'm going home to God.

* * *

### ACT THREE

#### If people only had more love for each other, our life would be better.

_return tocontents_

CHARACTERS in order of appearance. Mother Teresa. Journalist.

_Enter_ MOTHER:  
The old "His Grace" was right. People hear so much about bad things.  
I carry out his advice to tell The Good News.  
I've been to so many meetings.   
There were important and intelligent speeches.  
I said simple things, even stupid things a child would say.  
But people are longing for those things.

_Enter_ JOURNALIST:   
Say, Mother, please tell us something we will remember.

MOTHER:   
Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.   
Smile at each other.

JOURNALIST:   
Are you married?

MOTHER:  
Yes, and sometimes I find it hard to smile at Jesus because he can be demanding.

JOURNALIST:  
Would you not have wanted children of your own?

MOTHER:  
Naturally, naturally, that is the sacrifice.

JOURNALIST:  
And you, Mother Teresa, how do you feel about yourself?

MOTHER:  
By blood and origin, I am an Albanian. My citizenship is Indian.  
I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the whole world.  
As to my heart, I belong entirely to the heart of Jesus.

JOURNALIST:  
What is your purpose in picking up dying people?

MOTHER:   
Each one is the homeless Christ, no?

JOURNALIST:   
Mother Teresa, you always talk of loving people in Jesus.  
What if I, for example, felt that isnt enuf.   
Suppose I want to be loved for my own sake?   
What would you say to that?

MOTHER ( _smiles_ ):   
Jesus comes in so many forms, so many disguises, that there is no difficulty in loving each person as a person.

JOURNALIST:   
Why did you grant this interview? Did you want people to give money?  
Did you want greater support for your work?

MOTHER:   
I dont make appeals for the work. The only support is providence.

JOURNALIST:  
Then why did you agree to this interview?

MOTHER:  
I agreed because interviewing is your job, and I wanted to co-operate.

JOURNALIST:  
Are you ever angry? Are you ever frustrated?

MOTHER:   
Yes, I get angry -- when I see things wasted that people need, things that could save them from dying.   
Frustrated? No, never.

JOURNALIST:  
There is a foto of you holding a Bengali child,  
showing grief, possibly anger.

MOTHER:  
Yes, I was angry. The child was ill and they left him behind.  
I picked him up and we took him to our childrens home.   
We did everything, but he died in two weeks.

JOURNALIST:   
What makes you feel sad?

MOTHER:  
Things like this. A woman gave me a sick baby, to do our best.  
The child died in my arms. I saw that womans face as she stood there, and I felt the way she did.

JOURNALIST:  
Is not opposition to contraception and abortion  
only creating more misery in an over-crowded world?

MOTHER:   
Abortion is nothing but fear of the child -- fear to have to feed one more child, to have to educate one more child, to have to love one more child. Therefore the child must die.   
Killing is killing even if the child is not yet born.   
To authorize abortion sows hatred in a country.   
If a mother can kill her child, why are we not to kill others, those who get in our way?  
Abortion is a double murder that kills the child and kills the conscience of the mother and the conscience of the society that permits it.

If I had the power, I would open a jail and would put every doctor, who performs abortions, in jail for killing a child -- the gift of God.

JOURNALIST:   
A Court order allowed a mongoloid child to be left to die.

MOTHER:   
Court order or no court order, I would have snatched up that baby and run to where he could be saved.  
I wouldnt care if the police came after me.   
I wouldnt give up that baby.

JOURNALIST:  
Is killing ever justified, for example, in the case of war?

MOTHER: _Silence, shaking her head, no._

JOURNALIST:  
Look, Mother, the Church teaches that war can be justified.

MOTHER:  
I cannot believe it.

JOURNALIST:   
Catholics have to accept that doctrine of the Church.

MOTHER:   
Then, am I not a Catholic?

JOURNALIST:   
Is Christ partial to the poor, Mother Teresa?

MOTHER:  
Christ is not partial. He is hungry for our love.  
To give us the chance to put our love into action, he makes Himself the poor one, the hungry one, the naked one.  
God wants us to love one another, as He loves each one of us.  
So, when we die and go home, he can say:  
"I was hungry, you gave me to eat. I was naked, you clothed me. I was homeless, you took me in. You did all this to me."

JOURNALIST:  
Do you find it easy to carry out your work among the poor?

MOTHER:  
Of course, it would not be easy without an intense life of prayer and a spirit of sacrifice. It wouldn't be easy if we didn't see that Christ continues to suffer the sorrows of his passion, in the poor.

To be able to serve, the Sisters and the Brothers vow chastity (for the undivided love of Christ),  
poverty (to be free to love Christ),  
and obedience (to Christ, so he can use us).  
Jesus put his love for us into action by dying on the cross and making himself the Bread of Life.

At times we would be happy if the poor could live peacefully.   
It is so hard for those deprived of basic needs   
to live in harmony and support their neighbours, and not see them as dangerous competitors, capable of making their misery worse!   
We can only offer our testimony of love,  
seeing Christ himself in each one of them,   
no matter how repugnant they seem to us.

JOURNALIST:  
What is the hardest part of your work?

MOTHER:   
This. If nothing else, publicity has purified me and sacrificed me and made me really ready to go to heaven.  
For each publicity foto, I ask God to free a soul from purgatory.

JOURNALIST:   
What are your views on new books and movements?

MOTHER:   
I can't remember all those things. My mind is on one of two things, God and the Society.  
I have no imagination. I cannot imagine God the Father -- so great. All I see is Jesus.

JOURNALIST:   
Do you feel that the Church, the churches, spend too much on luxuries, when so many people are in want?

MOTHER:  
We are all the Church. We must not judge others but ourselves.  
We must remember that we will be judged on what we have done for the hungry Jesus, the homeless Jesus.

In America, you can be suffocated by possessions.  
Caring for them takes time, leaving no time for each other or for the poor.  
You must give freely to the poor what the rich get for their money.

JOURNALIST:   
How can a merciful God allow such suffering, children dying of hunger, people killed in earthquakes? What can you say to that?

MOTHER ( _softly and meditatively_ ):  
All that suffering -- where would the world be without it?   
It is innocent suffering, like the suffering of Jesus for us.   
All the innocent suffering is joined to His  
in the redemption. It is co-redemption.  
That helps to save the world from worse things.

JOURNALIST:  
You were awarded the Discovery Medal. Have you made any discoveries?

MOTHER:  
I am too small to discover anything -- Yes, I suppose it is a discovery for some that the poorest of the poor, the rejected, the throwaways among us -- they are Jesus in His disguise.

JOURNALIST:  
What does it feel like to be a living saint?

MOTHER:   
I'm happy you see Jesus in me, because I see Jesus in you.  
Holiness is not just for a few. It is the simple duty of us all.  
Holiness is for everyone, including you, sir.   
I need to go to confession like anyone else and I make mistakes even in the placement of Sisters.  
I can make mistakes but God does not make mistakes.

JOURNALIST:  
How does it feel to have won the recognition and admiration of the world?

MOTHER:  
All of us are but His instruments, who do our little bit and pass by.

JOURNALIST:  
You have been called the most powerful woman in the world?

MOTHER:   
I wish it were true. I would use my power to banish war.

JOURNALIST:   
Have you any advice to politicians?

MOTHER:  
I dont give advice to professionals...I would only offer concern that politicians may not spend much time on their knees.  
If politicians prayed a little more, they would surely recognise the pain and injustice within their own systems.

JOURNALIST:   
Mother Teresa, you love people, others regard as human debris.  
What is your secret?

MOTHER:  
My secret is quite simple. I pray.   
The call of God to be a Missionary of Charity is the hidden treasure.   
I have sold all to purchase it. You remember in the Gospel what the man did when he found the hidden treasure -- he hid it. That is what I want to do for God.

We are not social workers but contemplatives in the world.   
We are Sisters in the world, not of the world,  
committed to a life of action based on prayer.

Jesus does not say "hold fast to the world"  
but "love one another as I have loved you."  
You cannot love as he did without prayer.  
Whatever religion is yours, pray together.  
Brothers and sisters, in faith, need to meet God in prayer.  
I asked one of the rich, in Yemen, a wholly Muslim country, to provide a Masjid.   
A Sister who does not pray cannot remain with us -- she might as well go.  
Thru prayer you will believe and thru belief you will love -- thru love you will serve.

The Sisters pray their way, even on the trams.  
They tell me the times for journeys by the number of rosaries they can say.   
In India, there is a great respect for holiness,  
even among the rascals.   
The Sisters are all young.   
They walk so fast, people call them the "running nuns."  
Many Bengalis call them the preachers of love, who do not preach in words.

JOURNALIST:  
Mother Teresa, do you have any profesies for the future?

MOTHER:  
Who am I to profesy? I am nobody. I know only one thing.  
If people only had more love for each other, our life would be better.  
If more people realised that Jesus was in their neighbor, and they would help, things would be much better.   
Every work of love brings a person face to face with God.

We must love one another. That is all Jesus came to tell us.  
"Love me as I have loved you."

* * *

### ACT FOUR

#### People of all faiths say: We want to help.

_return tocontents_

CHARACTERS in order of appearance.  
Co-worker, Eileen Egan.  
Mother Teresa.  
(Journalist as) Walk-on parts: Poor man; Mothers father; Missionary priests;   
Man in Brazil; Old man; Man needing medicine; Beggar.  
Brother (of the Mission of Charity); also as Nehru; Mothers brother, Lazar;   
Castro; Newly wed; Pope John Paul II.   
Sister; also as Woman with baby; Mothers Mother; Afflicted woman.  
Boy.   
First child.  
Second child.

_Enter_ CO-WORKER, EILEEN EEGAN:   
On my first visit for Catholic Relief Services, Mother sensed I was nervous and stopped me outside the rest-house.

_Enter_ MOTHER TERESA:  
I dont want you to go to the Home for the Dying feeling sad.  
Pray and ask God to lift your heart because, whatever you see there, I want you to transmit joy.

CO-WORKER:  
I became one of the Mission Co-Workers  
for the brotherhood of man under the fathership of God.  
Its members are of all faiths and none.  
"Co-workers" was Gandhi name for his helpers.  
They found their ideal of service in Krishna:  
"The man who casts off all desires, and walks without desire, with no thought of a mine and an I, comes into peace."

In a Mother and Child clinic opened in Shishu Bhavan, Tara, meaning Star, told how proud she was of her new sari.

MOTHER:  
Taras mother has a cancer and she is suffering.  
Tara fought with her and struck her.  
I asked the child to come to me. I told her:  
"In forty two years, I have never touched anyone but I shall do to you what you did to your mother."  
She was surprised. She's been an angel ever since.

CO-WORKER ( _Aside_ ):  
No-one, not even a charging bull, doubted Mothers strength of character.  
Arms extended, she put herself between her beloved lepers and the bull, who ground to a halt.  
Every-one said that the bull knew when he had met his match.

MOTHER:  
It is a Calcutta joke that Mother Teresa is always talking about family planning and abortion but every day she has more children.  
We found aborted babies, thrown away in a bucket, and saved some.  
Indian adoption is a near miracle because of caste barriers.

_Enter_ (JOURNALIST as) POOR MAN:  
You people who have evolved chastity,  
you are the best people to teach us family planning because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other.

MOTHER:   
We teach the temperature method, which is very beautiful and simple and our poor people understand.

_Enter_ (SISTER as) WOMAN WITH BABY:  
Mother, about your "Holy Family Planning," I didnt want another baby.

MOTHER:  
Did you not take a string of colored beads to count your safe periods?

(SISTER as) WOMAN WITH BABY:  
Yes, Mother, and hung it round the neck of Kali, and I am still pregnant.

CO-WORKER:  
Well, almost all her people understand.  
The rhythm method of birth control, as a natural method, interested birth control agencies world-wide, after scientific proof of its accuracy.

MOTHER:  
Our people always want to thank the Sisters  
with a cup of tea, or maybe the last thing they have to eat.  
Or they buy a sweet to be ready for the Sisters.  
Then, invitations came from the other side.  
Better-off families would invite the Sisters for tea.   
The simple answer is that the Sisters can accept nothing -- from the richest or the poorest. That way nobody feels hurt.  
Each sister carries a bottle of water to drink in the heat.

CO-WORKER ( _Aside_ ):  
Mother refused a refreshment at eleven at night after going without, all day. With difficulty, she was persuaded to have a drink with lemon in it.  
The Sisters were given an annual treat of ice-cream.  
Mother came in late and tired-out.

MOTHER:  
I'll have some of that ice-cream.

CO-WORKER:  
It was the only time I ever heard her express a desire of her own.

In 1960, after ten years probation in Calcutta, the mission opened a new childrens home, in Delhi, attended by the Prime Minister.   
Mr Nehru got-up out of his sick-bed to be there.

MOTHER:  
Should I tell you about the work of the Congregation?

_Enter_ (BROTHER as) NEHRU:  
No Mother, you need not tell me about your work, I know about it. That is why I have come.

CO-WORKER:  
Mother made an unpopular remark about Indias glamor city.

MOTHER:  
The slums of Bombay are worse than the slums of Calcutta.

CO-WORKER:   
In 1960, Teresa first left India.  
She was invited by the national council of Catholic women.  
Las Vegas city fathers gave their convention free use of a hall.   
The nun in sari and sandals was puzzled by air passengers merriment at her destination.   
( _To Teresa_ ): Well, what do you think of Las Vegas?

MOTHER: ( _looking round and smiling_ ):  
Dewali.

CO-WORKER:  
Dewali: the Hindu festival of lights!  
No Indian would think of holding it all year round.  
Mother took one souvenir.  
In the Nevada desert, meditating on her talk,  
she picked up cactus spines to twine into a crown of thorns.  
Once home, she will place it on the crucified Christ hanging behind the altar in the novitiate chapel.  
On the prairies of Illinois, she stopped at twenty grain bins, part of the American "Food for Peace" program.

MOTHER:  
May God bless you for your help to our poor mothers, our children, our sick and our dying, our lepers.   
I am glad I came here to see this and to meet the good people.

CO-WORKER:  
Teresa saw herself on Malcolm Muggeridge book _Something Beautiful for God_.

MOTHER:  
There she is.

CO-WORKER:  
Would _she_ be ready to leave for the visit with Cardinal Cooke?  
_Her_ is ready to go.

Picking up the book Mother autografed for me, I read:  
One for her from -- She -- God love you and keep you always in His own Heart. God bless you. -- M. Teresa M.C.

Malcolms television interview was followed by donations addressed to "the nun in the white and blue sari."

MOTHER:   
I didnt know how to refuse, without giving offence, Cardinal Cooke offer of five hunded dollars a month for each Sister working in Harlem.  
I could only say: Do you think, Your Eminence,   
that God is going to become bankrupt in New York?...

CO-WORKER:   
The German charity Caritas gave generously to Mothers poor, in gratitude for aid, especially from American Catholics.  
We walked to the archbishop of Frieburg.  
Admiring the preserved medieval drain, I slipped in on my back.   
Mother pulled me up.  
I tell her: "Now that you have picked me up out of the gutter, you are responsible for me."   
( _They laugh._ )  
When the archbishop asked us to sit down, I hesitated.  
Mother motioned me into a green velvet chair.  
I respectfully left walking backwards, leaving chair in sorry state.

In Italy, her brother Lazar Bojaxhiu witnessed   
four young girls received into the Mission.

(BROTHER as) MOTHERS BROTHER, LAZAR:  
Those young girls are so full of happiness   
as they give their lives away. You see how they live here.  
I did not know you before. It is now that I come to know you.

MOTHER ( _laughs_ ):  
You are always a boy.

(BROTHER as) MOTHERS BROTHER:  
When I read about my sister, I ask myself,  
is it my sister saying these things?   
How do you know what you will say at these meetings?

MOTHER:  
It will come to me at the time.

(BROTHER as) MOTHERS BROTHER:  
What faith! What confidence!  
Frankly I had little of religion after I left home...

CO-WORKER:  
Teresa could do so much for others, yet   
the Albanian government stopped her from seeing her mother and sister.   
Religious worship received the death penalty.  
Afterwards, Teresa was allowed to re-open six churches and a mosque.  
She returned to her home town of Skopje to found a mission.

MOTHER:  
You gave the world one missionary. I now return four.

Our father Nikolle never closed his heart nor the doors of his home to someone he knew needed food, shelter, or care.

(JOURNALIST as) MOTHERS FATHER:  
Treat that elderly woman always with love.  
All the more reason in that she is a distant relative of ours.  
But when they are not our relatives, we should always share our bread with those who have none. Never put in your mouth anything   
which you would not be ready to share with someone hungry.

MOTHER:  
Our mother was a holy woman. She did all she could so that we would grow loving each other and Jesus.  
But above all else, she instilled in us the love of God.

(SISTER as) MOTHERS MOTHER:  
To prepare for first Communion, you must avoid every lie.  
Should you tell a lie, your tongues will turn black as coal.

MOTHER:  
One day, when I let a lie escape, I ran to the mirror. It could be imagination but I'm convinced that my tongue looked black.   
Right away, I went to set things straight with her.

My letters told her that I was happy teaching at St Marys High School.

(SISTER as) MOTHERS MOTHER:  
My dear daughter, never forget that the only reason, for your going forth to a country so far away, was the poor.

MOTHER:  
Our first mission, allowed outside India, was in Venezuala.  
Besides works of mercy, the Sisters preach. They lead the prayers; they give out Communion. ( _Smiling_ ) All they cannot do is to celebrate the mass.

CO-WORKER:  
What about confessions? They cannot hear confessions yet, can they?

MOTHER:  
Oh, yes, they hear confessions all the time. ( _Laughing out loud_ )  
They just cannot give absolution.

BROTHER:  
In 1963, Mother Teresa was button-holing priests to start a Brothers Mission of Charity.  
She finally kidnapped me from the Jesuits, as Brother Andrew.  
Meant for some priest long moved on, I received the Catholic Worker newspaper, telling of voluntary service to the poor, a non-violent lay mission depending on providence, founded by Dorothy Day. She met Mother Teresa.

MOTHER:  
Would you be willing to wear our crucifix, Dorothy?

(SISTER as) DOROTHY:  
I will wear it as you do.

MOTHER:  
You are now a spiritual Missionary of Charity. You are one of us.

BROTHER:  
The Brothers in Charity, dressed like the poor, wear a small cross, as the Sisters do, taking up their cross to follow Christ.

In a Brazil city slum, foreign missionary priests shunned the Brothers:

(JOURNALIST as) MISSIONARY PRIESTS:  
Move on. We dont want you. All you do is give the people a wash and something to eat -- and nothing changes for the poor.

BROTHER:  
The Brothers conducted a shelter for homeless and troubled boys wanted by no-one -- except perhaps the police.

A man, of importance in Brazil, wrote to Mother:

(JOURNALIST as) MAN IN BRAZIL:  
I gave-up a high position and wanted only to commit suicide.   
I lost my faith in God and man.  
One day, passing a shop window, my eyes fell on a televised scene of Nirmal Hriday, where Sisters tend the sick and dying.   
For the first time in many years, I knelt and prayed.  
Now I have decided to turn back to God and have faith in humanity, because I saw that God still loves the world.

MOTHER:  
One of our Brothers came in terrible distress.   
He had some difficulty with his Superior.

BROTHER:  
Mother, my vocation is to work with lepers.  
My calling is with the lepers.

MOTHER ( _smiling_ ):  
Brother your vocation is not to work for the lepers, your vocation is to belong to Jesus.

He understood and it changed him completely.

A simple task began the work in Melbourne:  
Please allow me to clean your place, wash your clothes, and make your bed.

(JOURNALIST as) OLD MAN:  
Don't bother. I'm all right.

MOTHER:  
You'll feel better if you allow me to clean everything up a bit.

(JOURNALIST as) OLD MAN:  
Well, you can if you want.

MOTHER: Do you light the lamp in the evening?

(JOURNALIST as) OLD MAN:  
For whom? For years and years, nobody has come to see me.

MOTHER:  
Would you light the lamp if my Sisters came to visit you?

(JOURNALIST as) OLD MAN:  
Yes, I will light it, if I hear the sound of a human voice.

CO-WORKER:  
Mother returned to Melbourne to be greeted as his friend.

(JOURNALIST as) OLD MAN:  
The light you have lit in my life is still burning.

CO-WORKER:  
In Tanzania, one was not supposed to speak of "the poor," so Mother just spoke of looking after "Our People."  
She met Fidel Castro to open a home   
for the poorest of the poor in Havana.

(BROTHER as) CASTRO:  
That is impossible! We have no poor here.

MOTHER:  
Very well, but there must be sick, dying, and disabled people.

(BROTHER as) CASTRO:  
Certainly.

MOTHER:   
Well then, we would like to take care of them.

In 1973, the Indian Sisters were not wanted in Belfast.  
Failure is nothing but the kiss of Jesus.   
Leaving Belfast was a sacrifice - but fruitful -   
for our Sisters went to Ethiopia to feed the hungry Christ.

I once told a patient that: Pain and suffering are the kiss of Jesus.   
They said: Then tell Jesus to stop kissing me!

CO-WORKER:  
In Beruit, the Sisters had their baptism of fire,  
they called "heavy Dewali."   
Making a trunk call to Mother, they asked if they should stay.

MOTHER:  
I listened to them and we talked it over.  
They were willing to stay there.   
Before hanging up, I said: Call me up when you are dead.  
They laughed and went back to praying.

CO-WORKER:   
Back home, Calcutta Co-Workers decided on a childrens Christmas party:  
"How many should we invite and cater for?"

MOTHER:  
What about ten thousand? ( _Stunned silence._ ) ...  
If you can provide the food, the Sisters can provide the children.

(JOURNALIST as) MAN NEEDING MEDICINE:  
My only child is dying!   
The doctors prescription can be got only in England.

MOTHER: The government permits us to store life-saving medicines.   
Many people make house to house collections.  
While we were talking, a man came in with a basket -- right on top was the medicine needed. It was just in the right place at the right time:  
There are millions of children in the world,   
and God is concerned with that little child in the slums of Calcutta.  
He would do the same for you and for me.

CO-WORKER:  
Good fortune blessed us.  
The army gave food to the Mission during the Calcutta floods.  
The soldiers snapped to attention at Mothers orders.

MOTHER:   
We worked day and night cooking for five thousand.  
One day, something told me to turn off the road.  
A village was being swept away.  
We got boats for the dwellers.  
We learned that in two hours, they would have drowned.

I said, to the bishop: I will ask our novices to pray for the pouring rain to stop.   
The novices are earnest. They pray with energy. It will be a strong expression \-- from 178 of them -- in our church, before the Blessed Sacrament.

When I looked out, the rain had stopped   
and there was a patch of clear sky above us --   
yes, I believe in miracles.

SISTER:  
Mother, there is no food. We will have to tell the people we have nothing today and tomorrow.

MOTHER:  
I had nothing to say   
but the government closed the schools.  
All the bread was sent to us and our children  
and our seven thousand ate bread for two days.  
They had never eaten so much bread in their lives!  
Nobody in all Calcutta knew why the schools closed  
but I knew. I knew the delicate thoughtfulness of God.

A Sister telephoned from Agra, desperate for a childrens home that would cost fifty thousand rupees.  
We do not have the money: it is impossible.   
The fone rang again. This time it's from a news-paper.  
I've been given the Magsaysay Award from the Philippines.  
How much is it?   
About fifty thousand rupees?  
God must want a childrens home in Agra.

SISTER:   
A cyclone hits a small group of islands every year.  
One woman was thrown into the River Meghna.  
Getting hold of a python, the good python pulled her to another island and left her safe on dry land. A fisherman rescued her three days later.   
Even crocodiles saved a few people.

MOTHER:   
How wonderful are the ways of God!  
Even the fighting and flooding in Bangladesh was a blessing in disguise for bringing out the best in the Indian people, going without, to help the refugees.   
Children, too, brought an onion or a spoonful of rice.   
Four thousand fed daily at Shishu Bhavan or they would not eat.   
They offered to go a day without food so the refugees might eat.

The Indian government permitted religious women from fifteen congregations all over the world.  
Their Sisters all wanted to share a life of poverty and prayer with the Missionaries of Charity.   
After six months, each Sister expressed her gratitude.

SISTER:  
I have received much more than I have given   
and I will never be the same person.

MOTHER:  
We saw terrible sufferings and need in Bangladesh.   
And there is such bitterness and hatred.   
Perhaps if they believed they were cared for,   
and felt loved, they could find it in their hearts to forgive, which is perhaps their greatest need. I think only this can bring peace.

Once, Calcutta had hardly any sugar for our abandoned children.   
A four year old Hindu boy heard this.

_Enter_ BOY:  
I shall eat no sugar for three days -- I want to give mine to Mother Teresa.

MOTHER:  
How much sugar can a child of four eat? A small cup full.

BOY:  
I have gone without sugar for three days. This is for your children.  
_Exit boy._

MOTHER:  
A child got a piece of bread from a Sister.  
I saw that child eating slowly, crumb by crumb:  
I know you are hungry. Why don't you eat the bread up?

_Enter_ FIRST CHILD:  
I want it to last longer.  
I am afraid, when the bread is finished, I will be hungry again.   
_Exit first child._

MOTHER:  
The child next to him was not even eating.  
I thought that he had finished his bread.

_Enter_ SECOND CHILD:  
I'm very hungry, but my father is sick  
and I think he would love to have this piece of bread.  
_Exit second child_.

MOTHER:  
The poor are a great people!   
They aren't asking us to feel sorry for them.  
They deserve our love!

When our sisters found a starving family,   
the woman gave half our rice to another starving family.  
One family was Buddhist, the other was Muslim.  
I was not surprised she shared. I was surprised she knew.

We have come a long way.   
The people of Calcutta have come to know and love the poor.   
No-one is left to die on the road...  
I have seen children pick up and take old people from the street...  
People of all faiths say: We want to help.   
They are willing to touch the poor, no?  
That is the beauty of the work.

I tended a dying woman from the streets.  
When I put her in bed, she took hold of my hand.  
With a beautiful smile, she said only "Thankyou" before she died.   
She gave me much more than I had given her.  
She gave me her grateful love.   
I examined my conscience and thought I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself, by complaining of my woes.  
But she had courage and she had love to give to me, instead of keeping it for herself, instead of being focused on herself.  
These are admirable things!

(BROTHER as) NEWLY-WED:  
We got married two days ago. We decided not to have a wedding feast and not buy wedding clothes. We saved for you to feed the people.

MOTHER:  
Why did you do that, when going without wedding clothes and a feast is a scandal in a rich Hindu family?

(BROTHER as) NEWLY-WED:  
Mother, we love each other so much that we want to obtain a special blessing from God by making a sacrifice.  
We want to give each other this special gift.

MOTHER:   
Isnt that beautiful? Things like that happen every day.  
Now we feed more than nine thousand in Shishu Bhavan every day.  
All those houses, 257 I think, a hundred and twenty in India.  
Look what God is doing with nothing.  
People must believe that it is all His, all His.   
We must allow God to use us.   
I am more convinced of the work being His   
than I am convinced I am really alive.

CO-WORKER:  
After Mothers first school, institutes followed by the thousand, not forgetting the new Vatican house, next to the Audience Hall,  
where Pope John Paul II would help with the serving.  
He presented her with the key before she could ask again.

In 1975, the Silver jubilee of the Mission of Charity was celebrated right across religious lines: There were not just the Christian churches --  
Armenian, Protestant, Methodist, Assembly of God, and Mar Thoma.   
Also, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Parsis and Muslims joined in.

MOTHER:   
When we won the Nobel prize, the media descended like vultures. --   
But even vultures can be beautiful.  
Quickly, people are coming to realise that sharing, sharing and the works of love are really works of peace.

(JOURNALIST as) BEGGAR ( _at the door, shouts_ ):  
Mother Teresa! Mother Teresa!

CO-WORKER:  
A beggar holds out his days bowl of coins, amounting to a rupee or two, kissing her hand when she decides to take it.

MOTHER:  
He gave everything he had. He probably wont eat tonight.   
I value this gift much more than I value the Nobel prize and all the other awards that I have received.

We need to learn from the beautiful that is in everything --  
A poor person is able to pass days without eating.  
Would we have this capacity?   
They are a people full of life, who, incredible as it seems, smile, have hopes, are able to lead a purer life, that is nearer to God.   
The beauty is not in poverty but in the courage  
that they show by still smiling and having hope.

(SISTER as) AFFLICTED WOMAN:  
What can afflicted people such as me, with cerebral palsy, do?

MOTHER:  
You can do the most. You live with Jesus on the cross every day.   
You pray the work with us and help give us strength.

(SISTER as) AFFLICTED WOMAN:  
We can never obtain complete happiness on earth, for happiness is found only in heaven.   
And we cannot obtain it if we give in to our despair.  
We are fortunate to have a share in Christs cross.

MOTHER:   
How happy I am to have all you sick and suffering co-workers.  
Often when the work is hard, I think of you -- and tell God -- look at my suffering children, and for their love, bless this work.  
And it works at once. So, you see, you are our treasure house -- the power-house of the Missionaries of Charity.  
You are the faithful branch sharing in the passion of Christ.  
Each Sister and Brother, you are twinned with, sees you as a second self.  
May the Lord keep you in his heart, the only place we can be together.

My Suffering Co-worker went thru so many operations, I begged:  
Please dear Lord, don't shower your gifts   
quite so quickly upon her!

As well as you Co-workers and Suffering Co-workers of Charity,   
I am asking permission of the Holy Father to found a new congregation of priests, the Missionary Fathers of Charity.  
They are to be a spiritual link to our Mission of Brothers and Sisters, and the Brothers and Sisters Contemplative...  
I dont think I will start anything more.

(BROTHER as) POPE JOHN PAUL II:  
Mother, let me be the first priest to join your congregation.

MOTHER:  
Holy Father, do you remember my request for your special dispensation, that I might tell all the Cardinals and Bishops that you have told me I must not attend their invitations?

(BROTHER as) POPE:  
I'll think about it.

MOTHER:  
I present Sister Nirmala as the new Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity.  
I am completely free now.

(BROTHER as) POPE:  
You still remain the foundress.

_Copyright © Richard Lung.

Author royalties for performances of this play should be paid to the Mission of Charity founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta._

Return to start of If the poor are on the moon

* * *

## Symfonic dreams

_return tocontents_

#### _Prolog or announcers preface to two stages_

_The 1860s was the decade that saw the death of Hector Berlioz and the birth of Jean Sibelius. Berlioz the romantic anticipated neo-classicism and Sibelius the classicist began as a romantic nationalist.  
Berliozes late work Beatrice and Benedict discards his imposing individual style for a classical purity and lightness of touch. Sibeliuses early nationalist works are influenced by romantics like Tchaikovsky. With the third symphony, a spare or austere structure takes over._

_Neville Cardus thought Sibelius the most original composer since Berlioz. Robert Layton agrees: "Both Berlioz and Sibelius are profoundly original composers, self-forming, uncompromising and new;" They were masters of arrangment, whose forms followed the orchestral stream of music, like a river that brings its own bed. Forms did not shape their music. Their music shaped its own forms._

_The different artistic worlds they created were as deeply controversial as they were personal. Hector Berlioz and Jean Sibelius both dreamt the first movements of symfonies, no-one else was to hear. These works represent the lost dreams of the two composers. Berlioz, after Shakespears Macbeth, would deem the dream of life, itself, futile. Berlioz found filosofy vain._

_The aging Sibelius was filosofic about the falling away of his composition powers and retained a lively interest in speculating about the unknown, or the lost dream of some other existence._

* * *

## stage one:   
The Impresario Berlioz

Berlioz works from which passages might be played before each of the 14 sections:

1) The Infancy of Christ (e.g. The Shepherds).   
2) Francs Juges overture.   
3) Funeral and Triumfal Symfony.   
4) Viola symfony, Harold In Italy (e.g. from tempestuous final movement).   
5) Opera, Benvenuto Cellini (Demons in the Collosseum).   
6) Roman Carnival overture.   
7) The Damnation of Faust (e.g. Pandemonium).  
8) Fantastic Symfony (dream adagio).   
9) love adagio, Romeo and Juliet.  
10) From the Requiem.  
11) Te Deum (Childrens chorus).  
12) Beatrice and Benedict overture.  
13) Queen Mab scherzo, Romeo and Juliet.  
14) From The Trojans e.g. instrumental interlude.  
The end: close in silence, or, the overture Benvenuto Cellini (up to its entirety, depending on how much time you have to play with. Superbly conducted by Colin Davis and perhaps the BBC Welsh Symfony orchestra).

Foot-note:

Les Francs Juges was an opera, of Berliozes radical youth, about the people setting up their own courts of justice against the judicial oppression of the ancien regime.   
The young Berlioz was acting like a musical free judge, when he shouted out, during pauses, against bowdlerised performances.

Berlioz songs were premiered by his second wife, Marie, whose mother looked after him, in his last years.

* * *

## The Impresario Berlioz

1)

A new symfony ghost-marched thru   
my sleep. I knew that it would call   
for massive augmentation, tormenting me   
with the thought of more performance debts.  
The following night haunted me with its score   
unscrolling before my minds eye.   
I resisted rising to the temptation   
letting it be for ever forgotten...

By the mountain glaciers to La Côte St André  
where Hannibal swept aside the Allobrogi  
and Bonaparte was received ecstaticly  
from first exile, I heard from an oak grove,  
on the wavering wind, the peasants   
of the plain chant the Litany   
of the Saints to bless their harvest.

Out of a childs worship at Sunday Vesper  
as innocent as The Infancy of Christ  
came my first and last loves: the elder girl   
Estelle, that star beyond reach,   
my mother teased me for adoring  
and music, she disowned me for pursuing.

2)

This humane doctors son abandoned   
medical studies to frequent the opera,   
as of Les Francs Juges, shouting, in a pause:   
Who has dared to correct Gluck?  
In late years, I was to court little enuf   
ridicule for seeking out Estelle,   
as a widowed matron, compared to   
the music criticism of my "grotesques."

By then a yellowed laureate, I could not bear  
to escort a damoiselle, however it was urged  
upon me, this Amélie was a superior woman.  
Her name engraved was to confront me after  
I fell asleep on a tomb in Montmartre.  
No-one had told me she was dying.

3)

To hear Beethoven Symfony Five, I entreated   
my dear first teacher Lesueur. Leaving the box,  
he was too shaken for his hat to find his head,  
he shook with a curious smile: "Leave me be.  
Such music shouldnt be written."  
Dont worry, master, there's not much danger it will.

The young man's mad, Beethoven has turned   
his brain, examiners said. The fifth attempt   
at subduing my art to the genres they expect  
found me barricaded among other candidates  
inside the Institut doors, riddled with bullets,  
rattled with grapeshot. Women screamed.

In the lulls, swallow shrills missiled all ways   
thru the air. Cannon balls raked the Pont   
des Art from a battery in the Louvre,   
captured with the blood of the masses,   
who spurned theft or crime of any kind  
in their Funeral and Triumphal   
Symfony of the July Revolution.

Rouget de Lisle welcomed my arranging   
The Marseillaise, I sang with a band,   
surrounded like bears at a fair, til invited   
onto a first floor of the Galerie Colbert.  
The crowd kept stubbornly silent.

Confound it all -- sing!  
As if a mass choir had trained in that   
confined space, it resonated a giant:   
Aux armes, citoyens! dumbfounding   
our little band like thunder-clapped sparrows.

At my concert of leave with the Prix   
de Rome (where Mozart was news)   
my intendeds mother professed not   
to have known what a composer I was!  
Spontini made a present of his portrait:  
"Greet my beloved country for me,   
my dear Berlioz, speak to her sometimes   
of her grateful son, Spontini."

4)

Out of the Gulf of Genoa,   
the snowy mountains stabbing blasts   
bowled us over, beam-on in full sail.  
The skipper was hypnotised   
by the preying breakers. White with spray   
slobber, as from a devouring boa,  
the passengers, frozen to the rigging,   
yelled for a young Venetian Corsair   
among them to take command!

Crew rushed the main-mast. A gust,   
creaking the hull like an old nut-shell,  
flooded hatch-ways, crashing stashed gear;  
banging barrels aroll on the bridge.  
Arms bound in cloak against useless swimming.  
Fire in a wool bale! Hands to the pumps!

5)

I was saved for this life, that a letter,   
long-delayed from my fiancées mother,   
admonish me not to commit suicide.   
Her daughter had married a magnate,   
for the comfort of her old age.  
Deserting Italy, against the terms of my prize,

rage bid me throw myself out of a coach   
off a head-land onto the breakers below.  
My betrayers would be on the look-out for me.  
I had myself measured for a maids out-fit.  
My plan to render, to mother, daughter   
and new husband, surprise service - revolver!

Just over-come your next frenzy,   
I bargained to keep body and soul within   
lifes magic circle, like Benvenuto Cellini   
bounded upon by demons conjured   
into being, one night in the Collosseum.  
My cross-dressing French farce hangs fire...  
I plead with relatives to vouch-safe their girl,  
promising to treat her most tenderly.

6)

Rome to Tivoli is a road of orange groves  
and rain-bows over smoking chasms   
and caves; young harvesters "Hey there,   
gentlemen, give us a sous. What's it to you?"   
Sparrow-hawks and kites nest in the guard-house   
of Hadrians villa. Today, I write to you

from Mount Posilippo, in the vine-yard  
on Virgils tomb, and make out thru the mist,  
on a lightly rippling sea, the isle of Capri.  
Most books I admired were on the Papal Index.  
To shield Roman virtue, the papal censor sent   
for as many foreigners, as nations I'd tour:

an English man, German, Dane and Swede,  
a Russian, Bohemian, Spaniard and Irish.  
None could translate my Chorus of the Shades   
from an unknown language of the dead,  
I made up, for it to become, at last,   
Pandemonium in The Damnation of Faust.

7)

Vesuvius crater five hundred feet deep,  
an island volcano rose off Stromboli  
to disappear, as lava almost brims at our feet.  
The lights of fisher-men sow a field   
of glow-worms. In the pitch blackness,   
blinding flashes; rocketings, to the stars,   
cascade burning necklaces onto the cone.

In a ballet of sparks, fiery serpents exhale  
stifling sulfur, turning our heads from the heat.  
Trembling torches guide witchy peals of lafter  
and screechy voices over infernal rattlings.  
Fire on the waters, fire in the sky, fire   
down the mountain-side, in rivers to Pompeii.

In the evening breeze, its antique theatre   
sings airs along the deserted tiers.   
They howl, weep, sigh their chorus   
to Vesuvius roaring out a pouring plume   
that fills the sky, a crimson neck-lace of lava   
lying majesticly on her exhausted breast.  
And over, on the bay of Naples,   
lies the plume of the crescent moon,   
in a deep enchanting silence.

_return tocontents_

8)

Oh memories! Oh Italy! Oh liberty!   
Oh poetry! Oh damnation! I have to review   
the Opéra Comique! Let Schumann call me   
"the terror of the philistines."  
On my return from the wilderness

of the peninsula, Paganini heard   
my viola symfony Harold In Italy.  
He wished to protect me, from enemies   
of ability, with a sensational gift.  
Anon wrote: "Why dont you blow your head off?"

Paris fell in love with an Irish actress.  
Shakespears Juliet played dumb to this   
"mad" composer: "Beware that gentleman   
with the eyes that bode no good." But  
a go-between saw her to my return concert.  
Serenade sequel to the Fantastic Symfony,   
The Return to Life sent her into a dream  
leaving the hall like a sleep-walker.

9)

Harriet broke a leg and pleaded to delay   
marriage till her career on the mend.   
Her hunch-back sister, after the Hunch-back   
of Notre Dame, cast me as a villain  
wishing she could throw me out the window!

Like Weber Invitation to the Dance   
(in my orchestral score) Berlin beckoned,   
as part of the Rome prize. I was off   
with a young girl, escaped from a monster  
who bought her like a slave! Pass-port ready,  
Harriet came to stay me. And friends drew lots  
to look after the poor fugitive.

Failing a "respectful summons" of parents,   
ashamed to consent to an actress bride,   
the wedding was left the British embassy.  
Harriet told me control myself, before so many  
witnesses and friends, including Franz Liszt.  
But it was Harriet who shed the tears...

10)

Our village honey-moon was at Vincennes.  
Out-side the city walls, ancient cannon   
in the park, slept in the sun, with hens   
nesting in their mouths. I appealed to   
George Sand for a play with a plot needing   
an English woman who spoke bad French.

Henriette, when well, was first to encourage   
my work. Destroying herself with drink,   
she went wild over Marie. This singer   
herself waxed jealous as a prima donna   
to perform my songs first. I once fled   
Maries uneven renderings. She found out

my refuge. She would toss head to command:  
"Hector, my cape! Hector, my gloves!"  
My memoirs were not a confession   
but a friend once extracted from me   
rueful admission she had a hold on me.

As Heinrich Heine would say of his last years,  
Henriettes bed turned into her open grave.  
When her grave-yard was moved, she was   
re-bedded: "Come away!" I was warned,   
as the coffin broke on her golden hair   
for a Requiem to forgotten glory   
on the Paris stage.

11)

A life of Columbus was announced, and   
caught in its sweeping net, I saw it all   
in a glance. My heart contracted in despair   
at its tragic grandeur, concerned friends   
would deride, if they knew why. Louis,   
my son, rose to the rank of naval captain  
dying on duty in a far-away place.

(A Le Havre woman claimed she bore his child.)  
"Dr Noir" of Java medicines might have saved   
Nanci, my elder sister, from cancers   
slow torture to death. Nor was spared Adele:   
We loved each other like twins.   
My lifes tale was as for Macbeth.

12)

I was Frances judge of musical instruments  
at The Great Exhibition. A tree of sparrows   
were astonished to be trapped in a vast cage   
of girdered glass. In the danger to exhibits   
of their panic dashes, they were massacred -  
all but one, I startled out of a Seville cannon,

and fed on biscuit crumbs given me   
at the Charity Childrens Service.  
Disguised in a surplice, with part-song,  
I was smuggled into the organ loft.  
From the depths of St Pauls, their voices flew   
a million black-birds round the dome.  
So, the Te Deum got a childrens chorus.

With Montgolfier balloon for my podium,  
let our first aeronauts, whose croak, quack   
and bleat ensembles mimick, trail anchor  
over-turning, catching-up cue-missers stands;   
let spring Conservatoire bars on my concerts.  
Pass over all the posts that passed me over

while my grey parrot lisps: Cochon!   
Cast off the living of critic, that sowed  
dragons teeth, settling scores against my scores.  
Opera houses give me pleasure of not going in  
like Beatrice and Benedict love-hate relation.

13)

Up in the gods, clouds curtain the uproar  
reduced to strains of a Queen Mab scherzo  
as I am borne away in my gross aerial coach   
out of critics sight could not comprehend  
scale of endeavor, more than Pacific islanders  
could see Captain Cooks incredible ship.

Niggardly ministers cancel commissions,  
making me snort like a whale!  
Heaven harp shall be my sky-ships company   
to kneel down before and embrace.  
An entourage of covered harps covered

my change of shirts, bathed in perspiration,   
conducting, with castanet-chattering teeth,   
a mass assemblys musical shock waves,   
at the Festival of Industry   
in a Paris ware-house of giant machines   
like skeletons from before the deluge.

14)

Airborne, I'll tour Germany again  
adding the harp to those orchestral by-words  
Hanover, Weimar, Dresden and Brunswick,  
Karlsruhe, Frankfort and, not least, the Leipzig  
conducted by Mendelssohn, so addressed:

"Great chief, We promised to exchange   
our tomahawks; here's mine! It is rough,   
yours is simple. Only squaws and palefaces   
like ornamental weapons. Be my brother!   
and when the great spirit has sent us   
hunting in the land of souls, may   
our warriors hang our tomahawks together   
over the door of the meeting-house."

During the eighteen forty-eight wave   
of revolutions, a musician advised to adapt   
a folk tune for Pesth. He begged not   
to be named, when news reached Vienna,   
The Hungarian March left a trail of up-risings.  
I condemned it to The Damnation of Faust.

All the banded ranks, from Berlin royals, down,  
saluted me as a marshal of the baton.  
Yet, I reviled all "great warriors," just short   
of Bonaparte, even as my sledge,   
following our poor Grand Army, shook   
and bruised me like beans in maracas  
over the ice crests of the Russian steppes,  
a frozen ocean ride to Moscows  
kindliest reception of this French-man.

Soldiers, spread over both hemi-sferes, lie   
in the mud; wracked by wounds and hunger,   
camped in the woods; rocked by sharp winds;   
trying to sleep, woken by cannon fire.  
What a miserable race of idiots and wild animals!  
I'm still ill. To the devil with life and death!

Among Siberias suspended animations,   
may lie a pre-historic lark, the size   
of an eagle, that Heine likened to my airs.  
This Hector and The Trojans score are lost  
as any fabulous empire of the Orient.

At the gates of death, these ancients believed   
they saw the future. The music of the future  
waits to be revived with a renewed crash  
of Berlioz brass, a hundred years on.  
I see the darkness and hear the silence.  
They are finally going to play my music.

* * *

## stage 2:  
the Senses of Sibelius

_return tocontents_

Possible musical interludes to sections:

1) Pelléas et Mélisande suite, first movement, At the castle gate (BBC The Sky at Night theme).  
2) From start of the fourth symfony (which I suspect was inspired by his black monks nightmares).  
3) Relaxed beginning of the second symfony.  
4) Finale of seventh symfony, or Voces Intimae, string quartet.  
5) Pohjalas daughter. Fourth symfony continued.  
6) From awkward solo passage in the violin concerto!  
7) From start of the Karelia suite.  
The end: finale of the fifth symfony.

* * *

## the Senses of Sibelius

1)

The call of the crane is the leitmotif of my life.  
For days they take-off south in full cry  
that echoes thru-out my being.  
Every spring, thru the pine and birch stands  
to the lake of Tuusula, I welcome them, where  
s snow-drops are in choirs of children at prayer.

At four in the morning, the southern sun visits,  
room by room, his fugitive shade of clear green  
that must have belonged to an earlier age.  
And brings the factory starlings siren mimickings:  
When will you break the silence of Järvenpää,  
master, by the silent lakes of Finland?

My heart goes out to the migrant flights.  
Once, they were so late, on Christmas Eve,   
a flock of fifty swans swept over our house.   
Out of the stillness, the heart of the world  
brushed by, in a heavy rush of wings.  
They blessed me with my best Christmas present.

Yes indeed I am composing, even tho  
I have not published for a long time.   
Many sketches went in the study stove   
of a fire imp, who rolled up symfony eight  
into parchments of soot, without a look.  
My wife stayed out of the room.

2)

In the dark, blue hands reached out after me.  
The shroud of the aurora borealis haunts.  
When guests were stranded by storms   
and snow-falls, my boyhood was packed-off   
to the arctic of the attic, that Leyden jar   
attracting static strikes at my slumbers.

Always a door opened into the earth.  
Black monks emerged carrying a coffin,  
coming so close as to touch my face, woken,  
soaked in sweat, besides myself with fear,   
as symfony four opens a growling plain chant   
interrupted by a nerve-striking chord.

Folk lore bears witness to black monks   
or white ladies against back-ground contrast.   
Experiments with minute electric seizures  
on the temporal lobes of the brain   
excite awe and terror in recurring dreams   
or prompt the deja vu, I was prone to.

An unknown force beyond my control  
has been acting upon me, day and night.  
Dont worry my wife about it.  
No, it is not at all like my vision at Versailles  
in chamber where a king was paid court  
with stench of death also in attendance.

In the house at Järvenpää, at Lakes End,   
from my distant window, Lake Tuusula shines.  
Weight of water aggravates earth tremors  
along fault lines of tectonic stress,  
unnoticed, generate piezo-electric power   
that infiltrates the under-world of the mind.

3)

Certain I apprehended their playing,   
the world over, my wife Aino watched me   
growing restless; I would turn on and tune in   
to radio waves (that Sensitives are their own   
receivers for) and lo! a symfony   
or a tone poem of mine took to the air.

A vision of my symfony three is banks   
of fog drifting down the English coast.  
In my favorite chair in the library  
the opposite wall transformed to a shore.  
The waves sighed and sun warmed my face.  
Two girls, talking in English, walked by.

They say Sibelius could subdue a lion   
with a look, that pictures show glance back   
with piercing gaze like a considerate eagle.  
A New York cabbie took my travels  
down a dead-end street to a cellar café.  
A likely hood, on watch, was weighing me up.

I leapt and ran without a backward glance.   
From drawing room audience to a pantomime,  
Aino was transfixed by a strangers eyes   
made unable to complete her mime.  
Sworn allegiance to my art would not admit  
love at first sight for my future wife and muse.

I was a child of the changing seasons.  
I sank with the sun to its lowest ebb,  
carrying about a match-box of moss  
to remind of the woods and bare earth  
I embraced and inhaled. I buried myself  
in a winter picture and could smell snow.

Old painted house wall changed into a score.   
Hypnotists teach transpose the senses  
to train psychics. Tribes choose shamans   
for their fluent minds. The unluckiest people,  
who cannot contemplate beauty of a tree  
except for cutting, are in control now.

I tried exotic dishes, like birds nest soup.  
I sensed new town corners to tobacco shops.  
Winston Churchill sent me his cigar brand.  
My pleasure to believe I knew the smoker:  
Each individual deep down is universal.   
Scents dancing waters were made music to.

Sleeping in the vapors of Eau de Cologne,  
an old man dreams human eras of strange   
civilizations in breath-taking landscapes.  
I kept a rousing red silk by my bed-side.   
Every note has a color to match:  
just don't insist on lists; I tire of that game.

_return tocontents _

4)

Father died doctoring, in my infancy.  
The women had me put others first,   
always. The courtesy, they instilled,   
would not let forget any annoying lapse   
of manners: once, I walked to the door,   
not the gate, my high-ranking father-in-law.

Folk suspected being secretly teased  
by my straight-forward manner of always   
wanting to meet you with open arms.  
I proposed a friends marriage, that thrived.  
Later renown singled me out as a broker  
and go-between for every eccentric scheme.

This public figure was advised against   
being seen with certain queer folk.  
But all were people and of much interest.  
Kitting a tramp out, in bowlered pin-stripes,  
I drew poor Aino to the window:  
Look, there goes Sibelius!

How amusing had my devout elders heard:  
"Christ must have been a wonderful man."  
More was I like the company of publicans  
and sinners, Jesus was rebuked for,  
than the imitation of Christ.   
Too drunk to know concert from rehearsal,

I conducted symfonies of hilarity.   
Hob-nobbing with nobles or into wild parties  
in Berlin, a Finnish allowance was raised   
to the toast of my Bohemian youth:  
"Let the blue moose roam the mountains,  
Let the wild geese eat the barley."

Late, in a remote café, a stranger warned:  
foreigners doped and robbed here.   
This prodigal son of Swedish-speaking folk   
had to sell or pawn all but a tattered dress   
suit and dirty shirt to reach Stockholm   
where friends helped me home.

My spirits lifted with the white gulls soaring   
chorus from the red granite isles of Finland   
in their climb out of the Baltic blue.   
On tour, I owned to passing ravishments.  
Ladies, that courtesy required me to recall,  
wrote of young love to this old celebrity.

Our sister Linda fell mentally ill.  
Hospital banned me. Taking her to my home,  
in an artists retreat, I was still  
riding the shock waves of her, after she left.  
Doctors didnt share my belief  
all aches and pains come from the mind.

After the Ancients, Maria took alarm  
for her son, at recurring dreams of disaster.  
My brother dissected alcoholics brains  
Christian kept dreaming: Give up your bouts.  
The family empathy moved him to psychiatry.  
Seven years, a throat tumor barred smoke and drink.

5)

Wonderful trances assuaged my cravings.   
From the Kalevala, the abode of heroes,  
the seer Väinämöinen seeks the under-world   
wizardries of old. His travels last test fail  
to make a boat from a broken spindle, so  
Pohjolas daughter disdains descend her rainbow.

Mists emblazon sails to the mast pines  
in blinding golden fire-ship sun-sets   
thru mountain crests in squalls of hail.  
Forests thicken in the failing light.  
The murmers of their motions cannot be read.  
Clouds crowd over a lake disturbed.

Swedens poet in spin-drift on the rocks,   
winds pour out sorrows to a starless night.   
No note is sustained from the Imata rapids  
or winds in the trees over lakes and moors.  
The wilds orchestras play no piano pedal.  
Orchestral pedal, I wrote in sustained parts.

Asked my advice to young composers:  
Never write any unnecessary notes;  
every note should have a life of its own.   
Berlioz devised shorthand for his Requiem,   
pressured of brain by in-rushing ideas.  
Dizziness with such tempests of the mind

brought about bewildering mood changes.  
Poor Aino could scarcely cope with me.  
Weingartners orchestra mutinied:  
my psychological symfony stopped violinists  
in mid-passage, thinking themselves lost   
or off-course, under an evil enchantment.

Koussevitsky told Boston, he would keep on   
playing symfony four till they liked it.  
Concert-goers desert after each movement.  
Scandinavia calls this the Barkbröd symfony  
after the bitterness of having to mix grain  
with the bark off the trees in famine years.

6)

All my life, I have done nothing but evil.  
I worried less about youthful misdeeds  
than musical juvenilia coming to light.  
Bottomless stupidity sold my copy-rights.  
Valse Triste and Finlandia enriched publishers.  
Artists should never have families.

We had five daughters. And Aino called me  
her only son, helpless if generous as a child.  
House-keeping allowance she had in plenty  
when I happened to have any funds.  
I insisted on marrying as an artist  
and no house-tamed middle class man

but spared no expense to be a dandy  
and let my wife dig the garden.  
Uncanny ineptness dismissed distractions:  
all fingers and thumbs for the simplest chores,  
I played, to a fair standard, the violin   
concerto finale, a "polonaise for polar bears."

At fifty, I dreamt I was a virtuoso of twelve,  
violining to the vibrations of light and sound   
and nerve, from my roamings in the woods.  
As I am about to draw the curtains, I look up  
and am reminded how absurd it is  
to think we are alone in this city of stars.

7)

I was keen to fly the Alps with Finnish pilots   
fetching Italian planes. Nothing can go wrong,   
they assured. The net of events held me back.  
Both planes exploded over the mountains.  
A higher power must have protected me.  
There will be a sensation when I get to heaven:

What's he doing here? On a paper chase   
of awards? A ninety-year old complained   
she'd no thanks for staying chaste. Certainly   
not from me. I looked pleased to be a host.  
Globe-trotters gifts and the gifted turned up.   
But simple folks problems were closer to heart.

How childish to think our little brains   
could know all, I knew when young, morbid   
and sickly. And told friends, to their affront:   
Long would I out-live them all!  
The spirit-rappers were worth a tease.   
I wondered if one, long dead, could see us.

My secretary was stunned by concerned call  
when only his wife knew him to be laid-up.  
He agreed with Aino not to show letters   
to a ninety-year-old on long-awaited   
symfony eight, whose first movement,   
like Berlioz lost work, came in a dream.

The secretary looked at worrisome post.  
I asked with disquiet what was the message.  
"Just a well-wisher," he bluffed with remorse.  
A commission, wanted in nearly no time,   
Funeral Music for organ, almost a last work,  
Aino agreed might be from symfony eight.

I cared not music but love incomplete.  
Each day, of no return, mattered more.  
My last months no more took a shine to folk,  
so often remarked, as I shrank within myself.  
Give me the loneliness either  
of the Finnish forest or of a big city.

One night, when new to my garden, trioed   
a curlew, wood-pigeon, and cuckoo out of tune.  
At final quill stroke to symfony five,  
like a scroll of freedom, unrolled in the skies,  
twelve swooping swans, triple-circled our home   
before fleeing with the season end.

* * *

### discussion:  
Sibelius the Psychic?

_return tocontents _

Santeri Levas writing a personal memoir   
of Jan Sibelius, tho not supernatural,   
certainly came about by a freak of chance.

To show how well qualified she was to become   
Sibeliuses secretary, a young woman tried   
perform one of his works on the type-writer  
and succeeded in ejecting the carriage!

Contemplating this feat, the family decided   
new approach to their recruitment problem.   
His well-known distaste for speculating on art   
made the new secretary, Mr Levas,   
a diligent note-taker of their conversations.

When he found out about the scribbling,   
Sibelius said he understood that, only asking   
he not publish about him, til after his death.

Sibelius was no intellectual.   
He never composed for forms sake.   
The early romantic, after Tchaikovsky,   
gave way to a spare classicism.   
But his works structure only became clear   
to him after composing.

He was of those who claimed merely to be   
a medium for divine inspiration.   
Such artist are like psychic mediums   
for revelations to the natural world.

Did even Jesus write down his teachings?   
Imagination led the intellect.   
He talked in parables, tho he did explain   
to his disciples, when they asked.

Christ advised speech from the heart,   
when the time came, not stilted rehearsal.   
His insights were said to dumfound   
questioners trying to catch him out.

Nor was Sibelius single-minded.   
His restless thoughts threw out associations   
his secretary found hard to follow   
but marveled how he homed-in on issues.

Hector Berlioz spontaneously envisioned   
whole life of Columbus caught   
in a network of space and time.   
Computer theories of the mind distinguish   
"parallel processing" and linear thinking.

Sibelius had absolute pitch and saw   
a color parallel for each note.   
But he was impatient with system   
and wouldnt pair all notes to colors.

Hypnotists train psychic ability by crossing   
preconceived barriers between the senses.   
Unstructured minds are prone to altered states   
of consciousness like dreams or trances  
believed germane to extra-sensory perception.

Symfony four suggests a tone painting   
of dreamt black monks, whose touch occured   
in charged atmosfere, affecting the brain.  
Hypnotists calm subjects with the scenario  
of his vision of calm sea on a sunny beach,   
like US intelligence tests for "remote viewing."

The police worked with psychic detectives   
claiming visions of crime. They don't tolerate   
interference with their investigations.   
Primitive tribes view sensory and mental   
fluency, that moderns regard eccentric,   
as signs of holy men with second sight.

Christ taught a life of spontaneity:   
Consider the lilies of the field...   
Take no thought for the morrow.

Young Sibelius did not.   
Even his craving for tobacco and alcohol,   
that nearly killed him, may be significant.   
Primitive tribes count these holy substances.   
In moderation, they induce numinous states,   
tho addiction is harmful.

Sibelius not only indulged the senses.  
His senses reacted to subtle energy forces.   
So sensitive he was his own radio receiver.

One unknown force, he owned to feeling  
was likely energy generated by subliminal tremors,  
aggravated by heavy body of water.   
This sensation may have caused comment   
his secretary found too funny to resist:  
I'd build hotels in Finland for millionaires  
from lands living in the fear of earth-quakes.

Visitors remarked on his radiant vitality   
or aura you could almost sense shine,   
only dimmed in last months before death   
aged ninety-two. Radiant health may help   
others, in healing touch or laying on hands.

Kirlian fotografs show a bodys electro-  
magnetic field, strong in healers.   
This could be the forgotten meaning   
of the solar halos of saints, in old paintings.

Christ felt the power go out of him,   
and asked who touched him to be restored.   
He replied to her:   
Go in peace, your faith has cured you.  
Medicine effects cures by cause and effect.   
But every new treatments test has to allow   
for so-called placebo effect of a faith cure.

To doctors disbelief, Sibelius said   
all aches and pains came from the mind   
(after all, their signaling station).  
Santeri Levas saw low spirits set him back.

Hypnosis has proved effective substitute   
for pain-killers needed in operations.   
Maria enthused Christ was divine.  
Studies claim, like spontaneity, belief   
aids powers psychic. Maria had profetic   
dreams of danger to her son or his health.

Russian research into dreams subconscious   
alerts diagnosed and forestalled illness.   
Bible profets, with faith-healing powers   
and precognition, were among many.  
Christ urged both spontaneity and faith.   
Faith in Providence is that God will   
look after one to lead a care-free life,   
taught in the sermon on the mount.

Many argue this wisdom not practical   
while a covetous species degrades the planet,   
the people who only value a tree for chopping.

The value Sibelius placed on spontaneity   
and faith, in his art, is shown   
towards younger contemporaries:   
It is important to modern musicians   
we dont doubt their integrity.   
Their diverse path-breaking   
signifies more than the work of the great   
composers who come along later   
to unify all the trends.

Faith in providence and in other people   
parallels the two commandments,   
Christ answered were most important:   
love of God and, following from it,   
love of thy neighbor as thyself.   
Christ answers how many times   
do we give someone another chance,   
by seventy times seven.

Sibelius could never shun folk,   
to save all the bother.   
However often disappointed,   
he believed in them still.

Nor did he tell the so-called truth   
about folk, when an excuse to condemn:  
Judge not, and you will not be judged.   
Levas was treated with gratitude, never   
instructed or given so much as a cross word.

He maintained that his love of humanity   
remained composed in his features   
to the hour he died.   
After all, to believe in people is to love them,   
for their own sake, without calculating   
advantages of knowing or not knowing them.

Spontaneity, faith and love recall   
the Biblical virtues, faith hope and charity.   
Sibelius gave encouragement and hope.   
Confidence in others was returned by them.   
Hans Eysenck identified three qualities   
conducive to psychic ability:   
spontaneity, belief and extraversion.

The term extraversion comes from Jung.  
Extraverts are those turned-on to others,   
unlike the worried and neurotic.   
Mental illness is too imprisoned   
or pre-occupied by personal problems,   
to be receptive to others needs.

Sibelius had the personality profile   
of a psychic, whether or not he was.   
The Catholic church had a functionary,   
since regretably abolished,  
The Devils Advocate, played by Alec  
Guinness from the Howard Spring novel.   
His job to refute a candidate for sainthood.

Possible psychics have their devils advocate.   
First step to sainthood beatifies the candidate.   
The first step to recognising a psychic   
questions whether that person is a sensitive  
with extreme sensory acuteness   
and mental versatility. The evidence,   
for Sibelius the Sensitive, is compelling.

Sibelius talked about uncanny experiences,   
not all documented. Skeptics could refute   
every psychic event of Levas memoir.  
Sibelius family thought Maria and Jan   
confused imagination with reality.   
That under-estimates their inter-relation.   
From bible times, people of repute had visions.

A below-average number of passengers   
traveled in New York trains in accidents.  
Odds were over one hundred to one   
against chance, perhaps a rogue statistic.   
Premonitions may be not quite superstitions  
that a rationalist age once thought them.   
Psychic ability may be good intuition.   
Intuition is itself mysterious guess-work   
defies attribution to known senses.

* * *

## part three

_return tocontents_

### Chromatic

The Eroica portends the clotted clay  
manufactories of the industrial  
revolutions somber grandeur.

Cannon skyward chimney salvoes.  
Movements first and last resurrect   
color red from dried to living blood,

Brahms First took to other end  
of the rainbow: forest-fire indigo  
clouds in a sky of fugitive blue.

Movements by turn, epochal, wistful,  
spritely and compulsive, Beethoven  
Seven was the sunniest out-break

of brassy brilliance from his latest affair.  
Genius as far beyond us as god-head  
snubbed every-ones humbled gratitude.

Much better, he claimed, was the Eighth,  
that grey metronomic gambol  
without Haydn joie de vivre.

Scholars may wrong-foot this but let's guess  
the Sevenths tribute, to his lady,  
was what Ludwig fell out of love with.

* * *

## mystic of the mundane

_return tocontents_

_(Section one is spoken by the zeitgeist or spirit of the age, a show-man to Sigmund Freud, who speaks after the first section.)_

1)

### the two Ziggies

Why'd you toyn down Goldwyns hundred tousand nicker  
to be his movie minder, on lovers of the ages?  
Only we Yanks on Clark campus ever honored you as doc.  
You say, your five-year old daughter, dying of diptheria,  
asked what she wished for most in the world,  
set an Arabian Nights quest out of season  
for a strawberry, that made her cof out seal of fate.

Taking an alpine meadow in your stride   
onto the world stage, facing Hollywood blizzards   
of custard pie fights, zig-zagging ziggurat mounts,  
past land-slides of crocodile charges head-on,   
know then, in the new world there's no tabu  
on a totem pole, brandishing tomahawks round  
under-mind layers of Aztec grotesques.

When the belly-dancers of Little Egypt stole his show,  
Ziegfeld made social butterflies of the ladies  
whose touch alighted on his strong mans biceps.  
Ziegfelds friends called him Ziggy, too.  
By Nirvana! You are the two Ziggies  
in a zen koan of the unconscious mind.  
Zigismund, the zeitgeist will be your zany.

So, shake a leg, Ziggy, for the Ziegfeld follies  
flourishing your homburg and cane.  
Tap-dancing tap ash off your zeppelin cigar.  
Shoe-shuffle a pack of the Zohar tarot  
if you play right those Zener cards of long ago  
to pick the Papess for a leading partner.  
The republic is feminine on the astral plane.

Ziegfeld is glorifying the American girl  
in a cabarets sequined revue --  
no, I no say: academys seeking review.  
To daub us posters that make the joint  
kind o' glamorous, we near hauled over the Atlantic  
that li'l heart-broke guy in Paree saloons  
(wheer t'big lasses nooadaes cum frae Yorkshir).

We bring mo-rality to the Folies Bergere  
with our cleaned-up act of zose naughty Frenchies  
follies which I may not mention, Moll Flanders says,  
as Windmilling chorus girls show their posterities.  
Why, Mr Ziegfeld white-washed in milk baths  
his future first wife, an imported French beauty  
to make her a star in the Milky Way.

Drink champagne out of a Freudian slipper.  
Drain a swimming Cleopatra cocktail  
of grown women to toast as true babies  
in the flying scale of Ziegfelds zinc tub  
on the pharoahic day of jujment  
weighing naked soul against your inky plume  
plucked from a fan of dancing feathers.

Cheers to auditions in free association!  
Einstein, too, would have been in his element  
when offered three weeks to do the Palladium -  
no heist of that nice little number on the atomic scale.  
That Albert, the adored, you told to his face  
you knew he didnt think much of your theories.  
Deist or atheist you'd both some self-belief.

Alone in your study, turning a rustle of papers,  
does the still crowd of Egyptian antiquities whisper  
the worshipping beast-mens dawn chorus of mind?  
Under the lotus capitals of Karnak, by the water-line  
crocodiles hump-eyed spyings thru the papyrus  
that sacredly mummified them in the lost classics,  
had the nicotine-embalmed taken cocaine before you?

Did slave-drivers driven by psychopathic ambition  
leave local descendants dumb-struck allusion  
to Cheops and Chephren as Philitis the sheep-grazer  
in the shadows of the river-mirroring pyramids?  
Did Dead Sea scroll copper pin-point buried gold  
by the fleeing followers of Akhnaton  
from old gods who over-threw the solar divine

of Moses monotheism left command Hebrew slaves?  
By a Thutmoses staff of hypnotised snake  
thrown down into hissing sinuous motion  
as patients snake-staffed with inhibitions  
were bid lie on your psychiatrists couch  
throwing down their neurosis emotions  
hissing animal defiance of your notions?

Riddle-reader, of once lion-maned Sphinx zodiac sign  
in ancient priestly interpretation of dream-boats,  
when princess and maids found (so they said)  
cot floating in bulrushes to lifes lost flight  
by those three faceted cairns to Orions Belt  
on the Nile in the skys star-heralded flood,  
does Ra still ferry Osiris the souls of the dead?

### Sigmund Freud recollects:

2)

'Jew, get off the pavement!'  
Fathers beheaded new hat rolled in the mud.  
"And what did you do?" Demanded this indignant sparrow.  
'I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap.'  
Vengeance on the Romans, Hamilcar made his son swear  
on the house-hold altar, inflamed my twelve years.

Hannibal and Cromwell were the great under-dogs  
who turned the tables on their mighty oppressors.  
Almost from the start, I was top of my class,  
unlike Albert Einstein, the lazy dog,  
so-called by his math teacher Minkowski;  
unlike third degree Darwin and "mediocre" Pasteur.

But I was a Jew in anti-semitic Vienna,  
my pass-over, to stay in poorly paid lower posts.  
Not thirty, I burned my boats of published papers,  
those sails in the wind to a respectable career.  
The Romans wrested the seas from trade rivals  
turning Semitic Carthage into a symbol for ghettos.

Mankind remembers this lost and destroyed tribe  
in the doomed triumf of their invading from Spain  
to Italy over the alpine ridges of chasms.  
I admired alone courage to question conventions.  
Hannibal of the Alps blinded with Oedipal snow-glare  
for raping the mother of cities home-land.

I traveled little closer to Rome than Trasimeno  
where inner voice told him: Thus far and no further.  
The eternal city drew me for the antiquities  
I collected of pagan Europes civilization,  
digging below the grave-yard sky-line of crosses  
that offered no salvation to my humiliated race.

The Romans dared not confront and could not defeat  
the African unknown monsters of rampage.  
Prudes fought and never forgave my daring  
to marshal the unknown monsters of mind  
in fallic symbols of war elefants  
vengefully charged on erotic repressions:

A woman my patient made improper advances  
as if a knickerbockered Victorian table  
were to show a leg impatient for love,  
for once in my theoretical expositions  
among those troubling the sleep of the world,  
I admitted was all we really yearned for.

_return tocontents_

3)

In the name of Hannibal was Rome forbidden no more  
of me humbled to become as Adlers disciple  
playing politics before my old teacher.  
For sheer rudeness, he put up a resistance  
but allowed the Minister had been turned against me  
and advised: counter-transfer his loyalties.

To a mutual friend, the dispenser pretends  
he knows not referees often recommend Freud  
the neurologist of European repute.  
Applying again came to nought so like a memory  
with a devious life of its own, whose demon knows  
he would crumble to dust in the light of day.

Another influential woman would not rest  
till she found out the politicians wish  
for a picture, three months loath her aunt was   
to part with. Suddenly a form was put   
under the Emperors pen to burst   
the psychic abcess of prejudice.

Like release from a crippling habit   
of fear, to face a former trauma,  
she burst into my room with a shout:   
Ive done it! "Eureka!" yelled Archimedes   
when he thought how to displace a base fraud.  
Followers began gather round "Herr Professor."

Raised to a higher level of consciousness  
even passers-by showed more respect.  
The childrens friends voiced their envy.  
And the desired result, my practise picked up  
now under a title of academic importance.  
Men wake to a dream of symbols.

4)

Copernicus centred sun, not earth, on our attention.  
Darwin showed man is not so special a species.  
Lords and masters, we are neither, of the universe,  
creation, nor our own minds, adds psycho-analysis  
encroaching yet further on our naive self-love  
that sleep-walks thru the Hindu sages dream of life.

Victorian gentlemen were deemed noble in reason  
and ladies angel guardians to their off-spring  
in a garden of the unfallen at play -  
until "Joy" annexed to sex the merely sensual,  
as more than pubic hair do body shaves undress  
for dinner-gown bosoms or sports skirt thighs.

In the Malleus Maleficarum, Devil worship  
resembles regress to childhood erotic stages.  
Oral women fatten against sex harrassment.  
Some prisoner of a solitary home stages  
a despondent protest in lapsed toilet training,  
as caged zoos bring-out bored creatures aberrations.

In Introductory Lectures To Psychoanalysis,  
after all the digging into the minds tangled roots,  
I admit that the mentally ill need love!  
My papers confirm on the Austro-Hungarian side,  
casualties of the mind, shell-shocked soldiers.  
Thanatos, the death-wish must rule humanity.

We spoiled children wont rest for pleasure  
becoming so desperately tired,  
a contrary longing for sleep builds up,  
til most final rest, we know of, is craved.  
Our very greed and discontent drives to desire  
destruction of never satisfied appetites.

Never did I experience the oceanic feeling.  
Religion is an illusion of ancestor worship  
whose rituals are a guilty obsession  
with infantile wishing the patriarch dead   
to possess the mother. You think me blinder   
than Oedipus in spiritual awareness.

Yet curing his complex is a christian redemption  
told from the view-point of one made to feel guilt  
for being born of Jesuses tormentors.  
The analyst is a puritan iconoclast  
who hears confessed thought-obsessions  
with forbidden gods, the patient dare not know

but in ritual symptoms for symbols  
of a wilfully forgotten body language.  
If fatherly succession returns a death-wish,  
man has only himself to redeem from sin  
in no divine plan that can ever be proved,  
therefore irrelevant: "the lie of salvation."

5)

My own fatherly authority was challenged  
for psycho-analysis, that parliamentary   
diagnosis by dialog with the patient.  
Parliaments are courts of appeal for patience  
of the people to transfer votes of confidence  
to reasons representatives of the unconscious

up-heavals of contrary wishes from the mute   
masses. But partisans shun treatment,   
in debate degraded to "a bloodless civil war."  
Every case history poses revolution  
when being listened-to is no longer enuf  
and therapist cannot salve emotional conflicts

by the suffrage that he be seen their solution.  
Divine right of kings is mere metafysics.  
In the line of Oliver, Thomas Cromwell was   
most zealous of headless servants to the Prince.  
King-killer Cromwell pondered the vacant crown  
held in awe by the people for a regal father.

The royal mob beheaded the Protectors corpse.  
Parliament replaced by his personal rule  
defeated the purpose of its armys victory.  
But the able general let back Jews to England.  
I envied brother-in-laws emigration  
and even named my second son, Oliver.

What progress we are making!  
In the middle ages, they'd have burned me.  
Now they are content to burn my books.   
Plato records: the sea swallowed Atlantis  
in a single dreadful day and a single dreadful night.  
So long, the Gestapo held Anna, her fathers daughter.

They insisted I sign a reference for good treatment.  
I asked to add that I could heartily recommend   
the Gestapo to everyone, and left   
as if Thanatos chased me and my family   
out of Vienna to London, like the flight   
from pharoah of Joseph the dream-tellers tribe.

* * *
_return tocontents_

## glimpses

### Thankyou 3X

(CG Jung)

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  
I wept, before the bier, my due.

Never dared I so declare my treasure.  
Too imposing was he in stature  
and coarse as a peasant,  
wise as a magician.

Tho I could never admit it, even  
to myself, I lapse into relief  
this mountain-side before me all my life  
gives way to the vale of my decline.

I was scarce of age when I tracked  
the Channel. I never looked back.  
There they vote come five rolls round the sun.  
Here in the cantons democracy runs

all the time. Tho not for women  
when I arrived. But doctor women   
were conspicuous among his audience.  
One told in a sentence the life sentence

upon me impossible I control:  
the jutting skull, that caged the soul,  
repulsed a mate, and slipped the minds  
he had the pick of, to evangelise.

His family repulsed, you ought to know,  
what tales I had to tell before I go.  
I raised no rumors of ill repute.  
But in a working life at the Institute

it would have been strange had I not  
been welcomed once to his redoubt  
that fabled tower by the Geneva shore  
raised and inscribed with his own labor.

Living the whole man becomes the mage  
of the image. When the winds and the waves  
run high without the walls, flames roar on  
the hearth logs. Stirring the cauldron

in the shades dance, he stands in his robes  
for a spangling of spells to throw.

* * *

### Loves disciple

(Leo Tolstoy)

Dorothy says, "I see things when I'm out with you."  
In hushed excitement, I held still her shoulder  
and pointed, down in the grass, at the trunk-  
snuffler, whirling gyroscope biceps  
for some patent digging machine.  
Nor was the mole, that gave us such delight,  
working the air with a worn dynamo.

Loves disciple fled in secret from his estate  
to lose himself on the ocean  
of the rolling Russian plains.  
Old Tolstoy was put-up to end his days  
at a little rail-way station,  
whose box office attracted new motion pictures,  
tho only hand-writing went thru the motions  
of keeping to his life time-table.

Tunneling into manuscript, by the ream,  
"Going smoothly," he confided in a dream.  
On the spiritual journey of his life,  
this waiting room was but a stop,  
to and from we know not where.  
His calling was literature  
but his passing was poetry.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### The Lampedusa elegy

In my remote retreat from college  
and a career, I scrambled instead  
for the jumble sales. An old man there

recognized a fellow connoisseur,  
or bookworm, and gave me The Leopard.  
I have hated the weight of books.

Now as I, too, enter into old age  
and its infirmities, the author speaks  
to me with a renewed poignancy.

The Leopard was poised to be a War  
and Peace of the Risorgimento.  
Fragments surfaced to this posthumous novel.

If the tale lapses between set pieces,  
it doesn't matter. We have the high-lights.  
A novel, of epic high-lights, fits

its own image of the disappointing marriage,  
whose honeymoon resembles those  
overtures that survive their operas.

The Italian Tolstoy is a romantic Tolstoy.  
Lampedusa, like his fellow aristocrat,  
Tolstoy, allows his family name

to appear but once in the whole novel.  
This minor due was free of irony, that  
the Russian sage thinks impious before God.

But I laft at the fancy that his pearl grew  
round a grain of reference to a Tolstoy.  
Less a laf at him, than at authors as scribes.

Tolstoy writes with an Olympian detachment  
of the classical Enlightenment.  
Heaven has many mansions. And so do

the aristocrats, with leisure to roam  
amongst all the passions, low or high.  
Deaths onset provokes the detachment

to make us both "old and uselessly wise."  
Modesty is becoming: The Leopard has  
added a twig to the family tree.

He won acclaim in science for predicting  
a passage of the no longer immutable  
heavens. Even the heavens are crumbling

like the stately homes of a class in decline.  
The Copernican revolution heralds,  
around Europe, the nationalist revolutions.

The heavens may crumble but we will learn  
the new world order under which they crumble.  
Things must change so that things can stay the same.

* * *

### Solzhenitsyn

Denied writing material, even imagination  
must become a zek, at best pacing out verse  
in cells of brain, as our own jailor from sense.  
Did freedom really begin for Solzhenitsyn  
in last moments of silent communion

with wife and three sons in Vermont  
after twenty years within that camp-wire  
perimetered American dacha?  
Unreal would be smiles, off a plane  
that scanned infamy of the Kolyma,

where children pick the blueberries  
with the litter of human skulls.  
He commits airport concrete reality  
to the papal kiss at a hands remove  
at the reception, an orthodox priest attends,

and intones a funeral toll over one third  
of his country folks political murder.

What else is real? His womans embrace  
on trans-Sib before her flight ahead.  
Even so, on his whistle-stop tour,  
"Stay and talk with us," he cannot  
(unless in his writings) as a patient entreats

and makes plaint: "The great man comes and goes."  
He asks one autograf hunter to not force away  
an old man aggrieved at turn-coat turn-keys  
of old local bosses, and tolerates his freed books  
being brought to sign like a peace treaty.

Worry ambushes an Asiatic hosts young face  
looking into the camera that hears out a hecklers  
blaming him the Wall fell before One Word of Truth  
(tho we failed heed that Solzhenitsyn of his day,  
Kravchenko, call the West to economic democracy.)

A snap-shot recaptures him at a zeks reunion  
arm in arm, holding a festive demonstration.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### The Long Walk of Slavomir Rawicz

One human being we eight met in all  
of Siberia and that was one too many  
for our peace of mind. Likewise, the melodious  
bear, we kept up-wind, scratching his head  
as he twanged a tree trunk. We sneaked across  
the trans-Sib rail-way. A stray of Buddhists  
turned their backs and prayed, as for the dead,  
when ignorantly we entered the Gobi desert.

Of my country, the runaway girl, we adopted,  
never complained to the end of her strength, and ours.  
The older man, who offered her America, said:  
I think she was happy while she was with us.  
We were all far gone but we all mourned her.  
A gallant fellow soldier could go no further.  
We rested in a cave and one of us stayed.

And in the barren Himalayas last barriers  
to the Indian foot-hills, the Abominable  
Snowmen made no move from the pass.  
We had to climb back, and lost another soul,  
only hearing our path-finders last gasp,  
leaving just four of us, who almost followed  
into a breath-taking drop out of sight.

In army hospital, Calcutta, they told me  
I slipped half my bread in the pillow  
no matter the number of loafs shown me.  
On the second night of my screams and ravings,  
I rolled up my bedding, like an ant  
under a leaf, heading for the door.  
Four orderlies had to haul me back to bed.

The other year, nineteen-forty,  
I never saw the other prisoners,  
in the Lubyanka and Kharkov fortress  
modernised, like the medieval tortures.  
But I heard the howling madness  
and vibrated to the shots. Was drugged at last  
into signing an unseen confession.

Nor did the violence stop in the plush red  
court to prove a half-Russian Polish officer  
must be a spy: the sentence, twenty five years.  
In unstringed shoes, holding on unbelted pants  
I stood, ignored, amidst smokes blown on lafter  
to the chit-chat of holidays and families.  
(I last saw my wife on our honeymoon,

the reception broken-up by Nazi tanks.)  
Once solitary Soviet prisoners wedged in trucks.  
Men turned to a likeness of the plank walls.  
We found out who was dead at each stop  
when they were turned out with our dung  
and buried in snow mounds on the permafrost.  
A fortnights nightly sneakings thru Siberian towns

drew us by a cattle train, like ours,  
of women and children, who startled  
when the cry went up: they were our folk.  
Our captors gravely told us the rule of silence.  
At Irkutsk sidings, machine-gun mounted  
lorries led a chain gang of five thousand,  
mainly Poles and the clannish Finns.

Even the lice dropped-off in the winds.  
Halts were called to unshackle and unclothe  
the corpses. Due north along Lake Baikal  
across the great ice roads of the river  
Vitim and the Lena, blizzards built snow-  
men creeping into ever higher drifts.  
Under snow-sagging wires, we stopped.

A telephone pole climber plugged in a hand-set.  
A tribe of Mongol Ostyaks were commandeered,  
our chains now tied to reindeer sledges.  
We political prisoners, they called  
the Unfortunates: "We are your friends always.  
Always men who are young and strong  
and hate slavery have tried to escape."

A thousand mile trek later, into a labor  
camp palisade to build our own barracks,  
a dignified colonel addressed us, followed  
by his eager shadow, the political officer.  
I mended the colonels plundered Polish radio.  
His wife was the only woman in the camp.  
She wore plaited hair, Russian halo style.

Her family were of the old guard  
killed by the Bolsheviks. Beneath the strains  
of Winter Daydream, she held my look,  
and said: Do you ever think of escape?  
(when her husband away and not to blame.)  
On her conscience a first theft, an ax-head -  
with seven bags of provisions to stash.

Seven in-mates waited for a snowy night  
blanking out the south-east watch-tower.  
Between guards rounds, we scaled the fences  
and the trenches. A Latvian land-owner,  
who slung logs on his shoulder, slung us over.  
We almost despaired of pulling him up.  
Trailing a sheep-skin to throw dogs off the scent

we rushed the clearing into a forest loom  
of pines weighed under mantles of white fur.  
The light never quite left the night sky  
and not till late morning did I let them stop  
to cut a snow hide as much from Siberias sighs  
as the human chase. And tho we might  
never see the sun all day, moss grew  
on bark sheltered from the northern blast.

* * *

### On hearing Lutoslavski cello concerto

Auction chalk scrawled under the table.  
Homeworked fingers scratched chocolaty paint   
off the slacking polygon corners  
fielding a failed writers fony war.

Mum and Dads old gift transistor  
day-blue cased the speakers silver-mesh  
thru dust-cloud traffics summer thunder.  
Before the fall-to way down the stair well

listlessly lying on an attic bed.  
An orchestrated fire-works throws  
tonal onslaught to blossom in the tread  
of chaos creating form out of echoes

from a chant in the Warsaw ghetto  
on my first hearing when staccato  
patterns coming all ways fell into place  
in their synchronised sonic displays.

* * *

### Frank diary

In this love-shy world,  
other boys laf apart  
the would-be sweet-heart,  
of a fourteen year old girl,

who regrets he's replaced with ease.  
The story covers snap shut  
on the people of the book.  
Leaves rip from the trees.

The shelfs, shutting those families  
in a secret attic, failed to prove  
books are the shield of the Jews.  
Raiders left, on the floor, Annes diary.

Tho freedom was snatched from her,  
love, first, claimed its own,  
if living within confines of stone  
to chafe and charm the dwellers.

High windows, in a foto come to light,  
light her smile like a pupil-teacher  
before expanse of table, lesson over,  
not free to leave but ready write.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the Manchester air-raids

( _as told by Mr Harold Ward, statistician and author_ )

(We got to it by way of Shude Hill  
whose address was on a pencil passed  
by a traveler from the watch trade  
in my parents road-removed shop

when I was seven, and where I loitered  
as a student around the book stalls.)  
That cobbled space used to be the Shambles.  
<Oh, Manc had them as well as York?>

Most were destroyed during the war.  
(His placid manner betrayed a moments temper  
before settling down to tell his tale.)  
There were two heavy raids on Manchester.

There were many, of course, but these were the worst.  
On the second night, the Germans had to turn back  
because of mist settling. They couldn't have  
got back or landed otherwise.

<I bet it wasn't 'arf a racket.> \- Oh, yes.  
(Lolling his head on an invisible pillow  
with the forced sleeplessness back upon him  
trying to rescue an ear at a time.)

But on the first night you must have been able  
to see the fires fifty miles away.  
<Yes, Hull boomed and glared to the Wolds.  
There's a church nearby?> \- The cathedral,

only a small one but very old.  
<The one cordoned from the traffic?>  
Yes, it's a wonder that wasn't destroyed.  
They were aiming at Victoria station.

They got it, in point of fact.  
(At this aside, he disengaged his pipe.)  
The German navigators were extremely skilled.  
They found their bearings at the reservoirs

out-side the city. – They didn't have RADAR then.  
Where we lived, you could hear them turning  
at these reservoirs in the moon-light.  
You could never see them – You knew: turn west

for Manchester. Otherwise, they'd probably have  
got our area. (Both laft heartily  
at this happy escape.) Then they plotted  
the target and marked it with flares. And all,

the bombers had to do, was aim in this margin.  
The next morning, the buses couldn't get in  
to the center for the craters.  
I had to get out and walk

for perhaps two and a half miles.  
So we went in – wondering  
what it was going to be like  
(pausing in his tremulous humor).

Hoping that the office was still there.  
<Or hoping that it wasn't still there?>  
(At this interruption, a slightly testy:)  
Yes, whichever the case may be.

(Regaining his sense of awe  
with a touch of Lancashire accent:)  
There wasn't a window in Market Street.  
And you know those tailors dummies, smartly

dressed, were scattered all over the street.  
And the soldiers were out with fixed bayonets.  
<There wasn't any looting?>  
No, there wasn't any looting.

(He rejoined quicker and quieter.)  
There was everybody in their bowler hats  
and umbrellas, walking over these dummies  
careful not to step on any of them.

(His manner suggested a foxy tip-toe.)  
And of course it was dark at four o'clock  
in winter. So we all decided to go  
early, or else, with the black-out

we couldn't have found our way  
to catch the bus from the home side  
of that crater in the middle of the road.  
Some people didn't bother to come in

at all next day, with what little time  
there was left in the working day.  
And there was no water –  
it had been rained on the fires all night.

Most destruction was caused by fires spreading  
especially from roof-top to roof-top.  
So, buildings had to be guarded.  
Well, I reckon they started more fires

than they put out – what with cigaret ends  
and the like. That Sir Robert Peel House  
in Peel Street - it was named after him -  
of great historical value - beautiful architecture -

that was burnt down - and there was no bombing  
there that night. At the time, they said  
it could have been put out, if some-one had  
been there with a few buckets of sand.

* * *

### Battle of Britain anniversary

in camouflage green and close  
formation curling low  
as smoke round chimney pots  
of King Street corner banked  
a hurricane and a spitfire

passing by my barred and sloping  
cockpit of an attic window  
for a grand view on the pilots  
clearly seen in their freedom  
to up-lift like a deliverance

* * *

### Satan In The Suburbs

He rang to say he liked some of my stuf -  
tho he wasnt daft enuf to say what -  
and why should we not stage a musical?  
Cockney Lionel Bart, I was knocked out  
a man his age would want to play new games  
and foned for Bertrand Russell, the works.

I peered out later when a lorry came.  
I couldnt believe any-one could be  
that prolific. So much was beyond me.  
I tried reading Satan In The Suburbs.  
Basicly, it had already been made  
as Damn Yankees. Each to his own trade.

And so, we less present you, than disturb  
never-more "the lost Bertie and Bart show."

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Erdös zero

"Erdös number one" published with the most  
prolific collaborator in mathematics,  
less productive, only, than Leonhard Euler.  
"Erdös number two" published with an Erdös one.

A rank three published with a rank two.  
The Paul Hoffman bio of this Hungarian Jew  
pronounced Erdös: "air-dish," my father said:  
"err-desh" as "to err is human" and Bangladesh.

Abdus Salam also was a prodigy at math  
which was how he was found in Bangladesh.  
His foundation in Italy helped others  
from poor countries to help their home-lands.

Young Erdös said Gödel neednt read Leibniz.  
A colleagues verse rhymed Erdös with Kurdish,  
as about the only people he'd not worked with.  
Erdös failed to find they had a math journal.

Of mathematical parents, and wifeless,  
was The man who loved only numbers.  
Earlier fotos with children show him beaming.  
He called them epsilons, the Greek letter

mathematicians use for small quantities.  
Tho good in their company, Paul never himself   
really grew up. He was always a mothers boy.  
War lost many a fathers influence.

He was not allowed to tie his shoelaces  
til of an age into double figures.  
From an upstairs window onto the street,  
his mother demanded what was he doing

with that girl. She was Pauls friends friend.  
His mother was likable, as well as dominating.  
He always took her with him, the bio says.  
So to say: his mother always took her son.

Paul, gloomily crossing campus, was asked  
what was the matter? He missed his mother.  
Reminded this was five years on, he knew.  
He threw himself yet deeper into his vocation.

He's asleep at lunch or in a group foto  
as if he hadnt heard. The math went on  
like dolfins that sleep only half their brain.  
"Property is a nuisance." He lived from

a suit-case on tour to tap others brains.  
He kept himself solvent enuf to meet coleags  
with earnings from journals and prizes.  
And gave away the rest to the worlds woes.

A seventeen-hour day began at the door-step,  
like so: Happy Christmas. Let n be the number...  
At four in the morning, he would rummage  
about the kitchen. His mother did everything

for him and he expected everyone else to.  
The noise hinted that his hosts got up  
to do mathematics. One mathematics couple  
built extension for his visits. He would ask

the woman some problem then interrupt  
to try and re-formulate the maths his way.  
In her frustration at his bad manners,  
she would vow never to work with him again.

Yet Erdös was the ambassador of mathematics.  
He set people questions with rewards,  
starting at five dollars, grading the prize  
by difficulty. He could judge ability

so he knew just what level of problem to set.  
He advised a graduate against his thesis.  
The young man had cause to be grateful.  
Twenty years on, the problem still wasnt solved.

The man who proved Fermat last theorem  
happened to know right branches of study  
and worked long alone to win a prize.  
Ironically, a hole in the closet solvers proof

drove him to seek help to plug the leak.  
Erdös prefered problems that didnt need lots  
of specialist knowledge. He best liked solutions  
"straight from the book," Gods manual

that carried immediate conviction.  
Two mathematicians, to their immense pride,  
in some forty pages, proved a theorem,  
noticed on a black-board. Asking what

the notation meant, from a field he didnt know,  
he wrote a few lines proof straight down.  
Erdös would be satisfied if his findings found  
no use for another five hundred years.

* * *

### the exercise of freedom

Away from the baton charges of rights demos,  
after their clean sweep of the Olympic sprints,  
the stand to attention to the national anthem  
shunned in protest against the Vietnam war.

Three African Americans without permission  
at ease on the podium, as a world stage  
for all the eloquence that silent defiance  
can muster to embarrass their government.

Just think of the discrimination they stood  
to have heaped upon them, as a result,  
in the exercise of freedom. But think of the heat  
generated to bring that break with tradition

so that no-one need think twice about relaxing  
for medals like those civil young sportsmen.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the immortal

_"He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of dos and don'ts for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don't be aggressive. Do be honest. Don't be clinical, don't try to force her into anything; don't talk down to her, she hates that. Do be compassionate, don't forget that she's been through a lot with these cells, do have patience."_

_Quoted from "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot._

Henrietta slaved for her kith and kin  
of Clover migrants, put-up even  
on the landing of the home-house -  
all planks and drafts, a wooden barn in the woods.

She teased them about needing wives  
and girl-friends. Eight came give blood  
and clear the toxins from her body  
strapped down to a hospital bed

from the Devil of Pain itself  
thrashing her on the floor again.  
She looked the same but for her eyes a-tellin  
she wasn't gonna be alive no more.

When she was reunited with the earth  
the heavens shook with her tormented spirit.  
Her body burgeoned into a nebula  
going nova from a galaxy of cancers.

And a scrape of her skin grew  
into a multi-billion dollar business.  
Cursed for taking samples, Pittsburg  
make-and-mend magician George Gey

took great pains to incubate cultures  
he gave away. A partner in research  
with his wife Margaret, such were  
the folk who made America great.

HeLa chromosomes don't diminish  
til their cells can divide no more and die.  
Such cells test drugs against mortal stress  
of virus, pollutant, nuclear radiation.

They've been fired into outer space, and thrive.  
Cells hitch flights on swirling dust motes.  
Cell cultures supposed spontaneous cancers  
were just HeLa cell contaminations

even as the search for profits  
contaminates the search for knowledge.  
Remember where ones bounty comes from.  
HeLa no Helen Lane but Henrietta Lacks.

The Lackses were unaware they gave blood  
for genetic markers of the HeLa cells.  
Doctors did not alert, always, the few  
who are walking fortunes in anti-bodies.

And the profession cries wolf to the courts.  
A girl obsessed to know of Henrietta,  
Rebecca, with the shelves of files, was grilled:  
You are white? The Blacks distrust, of how

they'd been left in the dark, stood her up.  
With a shock of deja-vu, the lettered clock  
tower thru a Baltimore hotel window  
she sees, as she reads of, in the first report.

Henriettas daughter Deborah warned:  
Girl, you in for one hell of a ride!  
And called her Boo like a daughter.  
She charged Rebecca against a wall

with brothers suspicions: Who paying you?  
The only time Rebecca lost her temper  
Deborah marveled she was human, after all.  
And told them: Go get your own reporter!

A hospital for the Negro insane archived  
the pity of the beautiful elder sister,  
a wild girl, perhaps from deafness, given  
that family trait of cousin inbreeding.

A favorite cousin held Deborah still.  
His gospel singing was a lullaby  
for a mind distraught, with the burden  
of knowledge about mother, about sister.

The road to Clover is lit only by the day.  
Rebecca is lost in that waking daze  
you are no longer where you used to be.  
She picks a little brick and plaster

left from main street in the stubble.  
Deborah dreams heaven will be like  
Clover county, where she came from.  
Clover town is gone to heaven for her.

* * *

## part four:  
Radical!

_return tocontents_

#### preface to: Radical!

Mill, Doyle, Shaw, Wells, Orwell and Priestley.

Here is a fresh look at six writers in a great radical tradition. Much of interest about them is not well known and they all still have much of importance to tell us. These monologs are something of a ghosts gallery because, for the sake of completeness, they are assumed to know more than they could have done in their own lifetimes.

Anachronisms are not new! Shakespear play Julius Caesar has a clock. However, I have tried to minimise this unnatural or supernatural knowledge to avoid too much confusion of the audience. For example, a quotation from Alan Ayckbourn is described as from a future playwright.

With regard to these radical writers in general, much information comes in tit-bits from a wide reading of works by and about them.

#### John Stuart Mill

Occasionly, you get a biografer, who makes up for his heroes deficiencies with a master-piece of compensation. Thus, Thorstein Veblen and his America, by Joseph Dorfman, is a work of compensating empiricism.

The standard biografy on J S Mill and the utilitarians, is a master-piece of compensating humor. An encyclopedia article said it was "too highly coloured." I suppose it was deemed that a work of scholarship had no business to be so entertaining.  
Packe, M. St. John, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954)

J S Mill, 1806 – 1873, filosofical radical and democrat, who first drew-up bills in the British parliament for womens suffrage and proportional representation as personal representation, nowadays known as the single transferable vote (STV) and essentially the system chosen by British Columbia Citizens Assembly.

Not till the millenium, bringing three favorable Scottish and Welsh reports, and a fourth partly and possibly so, did transferable voting even make local elections, in land of Mills fathers.

STV has been used since the 1920s, in Ireland, where Mill, advocating a free peasantry, was offered parliamentary seat, he was not yet able to accept, for financial reasons.

The recent Irish constitutional convention over-whelmingly endorsed STV in the country with the most experience of it, at every level of government.

The monolog on John Stuart Mill gives a clue to the vulnerable human being behind the man with the relentless power of logical thought to change minds and the world. It was said of him in parliamentary debate that he could state his opponents case better than they could themselves.

History records that Carlyle refused payment for the firing of his manuscript, but it is evident from Mills letters that his remonstrances did succeed in changing Carlyles mind.

His appreciation of others viewpoints, such as Coleridge conservatism disconcerted some of his radical friends. Mills own writings are lessons in how to make reason the engine of reform.   
They are a much-needed antidote to the long fashionable advertising psychology of animal instinct and conditioning as a means of turning the public into hedonist consumers of products and policies.

Mill began the first great impetus for parliamentary reform into a thoro-going democracy. This struggle remains frustrated to this day. Successive radicals, especially Wells, were more or less influenced by Mill.

#### Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The shortest portrait, on Doyle, departs from the subjective narrative for the more usual objective account.

One of the two girls, who pretended they had seen fairies in their garden, confessed in old age to the childish deception. (The other woman could never quite bring herself to do so.)   
Her explanation, why they had not owned-up, was that Doyle had such a great reputation. It would have been a disgrace to make a fool of him.

By the way, CS Lewis says in a brusque aside that, as a matter of fact, he didnt believe the tale. This implied, quite rightly, that such a harmless fancy was not to be made much of. Children do make things up. Their playful imaginations may run away with themselves.

The movie goes with that, rather than the prosaic truth. It is no doubt special effects laden immeasurably beyond some little girls rather obvious-looking paper cut-outs.   
And I am more disposed to give it a look, which my initial prejudice detered me from doing.

World-wide fascination with Doyles detective shows no sign of abating, with both dramatised re-makes and pastiche.

A Doyle fantasy is the original of dinosaurs on "The Lost World."  
Some forgotten works, available from Project Gutenberg, are also worthy of attention.

His novel, "Beyond The City," on womens suffrage is, to my mind, more acute than "Ann Veronica," Wells scandal success, which kept it in print, despite being, as Arnold Bennett immediately observed, one of his lesser works.

You only have to read "The Magic Door" to see why Scotland is a nation, and, say, Yorkshire, of equal population, is not. Doyles intense pride in his countrys literary heritage is evident from start to finish. And it is some heritage.

#### George Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw was mostly in reaction against democratic principles. Shaw down-played even the limited success of Mill, getting himself elected once as an MP.   
For instance, in his play, Major Barbara, Shaw held parliament in considerable contempt as a talking shop, but he had no interest in attempts to make it more representative and hence more balanced and reasonable.

Shaw play, You Can't Be Too Careful, begins by snobbishly dismissing Mill as out of date. When Mencken says you might search in vain for ideas page after page in Shaw plays, this one is a case in point.

Of the monologs, the one about Shaw is perhaps the most successful because most in character. Even when the narrator reveals himself as other than he seems, the real Shaw might have done as much in some other context.

A revisionist Shaw who departs from the Russian Communist party line seems unhistorical but there is indication of it. In the preface to To True To Be Good, Shaw regrets what he perceives amounts to a failure of the Soviet system to be a genuine experiment, in that its command structure could be matched office for office to the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

After I read the early verses of this monolog to a writers circle, Dorothy Cowlin spoke-up that it was from Shaws own sayings. Dorothy knew her Shaw.  
When she first invited me, she said Shaw was her favorite playwright, but corrected herself, with some misgiving, that Shakespear was.

On our country walks together, she would occasionly quote Shakespear, a nature poet, like herself. I think that settles her preference.

However, not all my "tragi-comic" monolog is derived from Shaw, even in the early verses. In fact, the odd joke, in the Shavian manner, drew a laf from the audience, who felt secure in the knowledge that the remark came from the great wit, GBS, and not myself.   
That was an irony, I think, that Shaw would have appreciated.  
"I suppose your words are as good as mine." Shaw would say, when actors got his lines wrong.

_return tocontents_

#### HG Wells

HG Wells has been by far my favorite writer. His social background is the one I best understand. Wells as a sociologist was my student rebellion from my social science course.

(I didnt know, til recently, that Wells had sought academic position as a sociologist. I think it a great blessing that he didnt succeed. It leads me to suspect that Wells didnt know the extent of his own genius, that had no need of the prop of a state post.)

In many respects, my political views deeply sympathise with his own.

A bibliografy, of electoral and economic democracy, is on my web page, "World peace thru democracy. HG Wells neglected third phase."

Wells writings on electoral reform are scattered thru-out his political essays from 1914 onwards.

In relating political economic democracy to scientific method, I have commented in a way consistant with Wells own ideas.  
The last section makes much use of "A year of prophesying."

Time and again, on the internet, I have promoted Wellsian aspirations: the anti-speculative 1940 Declaration of Human Rights. This to prevent governments allowing bankers to gamble away a countrys livelihood. They did so, around 1930, (as described by Catherine Bailey, in Black Diamonds). And did so again in 2008 credit crunch.

The Sankey Declaration also sanctioned "voting methods that give effective expression to individual choice."

This is answered by the HG Wells formula of "proportional representation by the single transferable vote in large constituencies."

For all that, the mans personality is so far removed from my own, his vitality and conviviality so far in excess of my own, his spirit must remain alien to me, tho this narrative stretches to the private life of the public figure.

The personal passages are largely drawn from "Experiment in Autobiography" including the posthumous third volume, "HG Wells in Love."

I seem to remember reading that Wells said he had never met anyone who liked his book, The World Set Free.   
Its fame rests on profesying the "atomic bomb" in 1914. But its politics is as profetic as its fysics, for mentioning both the Single Transferable Vote and the Recall.

British politicians are currently determined to renew the planetary life-threatening Trident ultimate deterrent.  
But MPs have done all they can to avoid any threat to their job-security by STV.  
So, it may be fairly said they are more afraid of effective elections than nuclear apocalypse.

They are the ultimate "idiotes" in the ancient Greek and classic scientific sense of the word for people who put their own interests before the community (of their nation or the world).

#### George Orwell

George Orwell was given the least time and struggled perhaps the longest to establish himself as a writer and was already dying before the sensation of his last two satires that made him Britains most successful political writer in the 20th century.

One list of most popular books of the century showed them only pushed into second and third place by Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Of course, these lists tend to be biased, towards recent sensations, by short memories and short lives.

Had Wells died as early as Orwell, his best political writings would have been lost. Had Orwell lived longer, a fuller and more positive program of Democratic Socialism likely would have been forthcoming, enuf perhaps to make the Right fall out of love with him.

RG Collingwood, the filosofer, in his Autobiografy, tells of his holiday in Spain during the peaceful election, won by the republicans, and lyingly vilified by the British Press.

"Coming up for air" is an early comment on the rubbishing of the resources of the country-side, as a lost arcadia.

As for this books passion for fishing, Leigh Hunt, on Izaak Walton, sided with the fish!

English writers sense of humor was a "besetting sin," to Orwell. But Priestley cherished it as "an English trait."

#### JB Priestley

Like Orwell, John Boynton Priestley knew he didn't have the talent of Shaw or Wells, but he did believe in a genius for hard work. And Priestley certainly had that.

From youth, the theatre was his consuming passion. His novels, especially the more important ones, have theatrical themes. Some were adapted into plays, regarded his real strength by the critics, and made into movies.

Like Shaw, the arts in general were his preoccupation. Like Shaw, he played the piano. He also painted, whether or not there was "Love among the artists." And like Shaw, he was a professional critic of the arts.

He did write on working and living conditions, too. He was struggling to earn a living at first and that didn't leave much room for politics.

An innocent pudding face, as he called himself, volunteered to nearly get himself killed in the First World War.   
Yet, it took the dire threat of the Second World War, to get a political program out of him, Out Of The People. This certainly was radical if largely rejected by history.

But it has been observed that the post-war Attlee reforming government was a vindication of Priestley, who, like Wells, wanted to discuss war-aims. Asides, to that effect, in his broadcast Postscripts, won the war-time argument with Churchill, who wanted to concentrate on winning the war, without discussing its after-math.

In his obituary of Shaw, Priestley responded to the stock praise that he was the last of the giants, with the observation that he was the first civilised man. He meant in his personal relations, not his orthodox sovietism, which Priestley deplored as detracting from his earlier reputation.

A biografy of Priestley called him the last of the sages. He called Shaw and Wells "my elders and betters." Yet Priestley was the elder and better of the Fifties Literary Left, apparently influenced by him.

The age of television seems to have glared out intellectual leadership, which must be by definition radical to lead, rather than just follow tradition.

Having read nearly all Priestleys books, I can qualify the claim by an expert that only one or two would last. He didnt say which.   
The Good Companions would certainly be one of them. Its period success makes it significant in British social history. Beyond that, is the classical restraint of tone obvious from the start, a light detachment surviving into the romance.

The follow-up realist novel, Angel Pavement, lacks the wandering freedom of the talented touring company. In contrast, the hemmed-in life of a city clerk, without the self-sufficiency of a talent, has only courtship in mind.

There-after, Priestley novels decline in distinction for a while. But certainly half a dozen, and more like a dozen of the authors works, are fairly special. Most of them are indicated in the verse narrative.   
A good many more are enjoyable reads that dont have to be classics.

And I would watch Priestley plays, especially the super-natural or time plays, if they were shown more.

HG Wells and JB Priestley both stood for the university constituencies, which were too conservative, to elect them.   
The transferable vote of proportional representation was not enuf to represent much difference of opinion in usually only a two-member constituency.

In a readable anthology, Priestleys wars, its left-wing editors dismiss the abolished university constiuencies as anachronisms.   
Actually, specialist representation like this, but in larger educational constituencies, giving really proportional representation, should be part of the vocational representation of the nations division of labor in the second chamber.

These six writers were, in various ways, radicals, the latter five more or less knew each other as such, but that was only a link road on the journey of life. They log the arts and the sciences, personal desires and the mystery of life.

* * *

# Radical!

_return tocontents_

## Millenium

(John Stuart Mill)

### I never was a boy

Career women keep names, like the poor of old.  
Wife Milne thought herself no common Scot.  
She followed the Pretender, with pretensions  
of her own, that had resentful neighbors know  
she would be called Mrs Mill. Meanwhile  
the family cow kept from starvation.

A curtain cornered warmth and window  
where James was ordered to his books.   
Edinburgh, London, a volunteer, confirmed  
King George: "a very pretty corps...indeed."  
In Benthams grounds, without warning, Jeremy  
knocked companions to their knees to worship

at a Milton shrine. Friends he begged, in tears,  
forget his youth taught chess or harpsichord  
to the ladies but could not court them.  
Peacock of the East India Company recalled,  
in Crotchet Castle, MacQuedy, son of QED,  
who'd given birth to a demonstration.

"I never was a boy" but John Stuart Mill.  
At three, seeing father smile on a letter,  
I pretended Bentham scrawled: Why have   
you not come and brought John with you?  
Beyond the ghost walk of Benthams pile,  
you could scratch the deers behind their ears.

Bentham and James Mill mapped out Johns life.  
James put eldest son first into speaking  
ancient Greek, making me curious to know  
what it all meant. Not till of age, did I find  
Greek democracy tried thirty years since,  
over the Channel, and follow French politics.

There are no fotos of me as a child.  
At twenty and Benthams intellectual heir,  
I edited "The Rationale of Judicial Evidence"  
that found-out "faultless" British law to be  
an adjunct to the Conquest, like boasts  
British government is the envy of the world.

Personal tuition of younger siblings  
taught me to be an intellectual teacher.  
Sister Harriet was told she could have  
taken a Cambridge Senior Wranglers degree.  
Mary worked in ragged schools among vagabonds.  
Her son robbed an office till, I repaid.

I sent daughter Minnie to Bedford College.  
Half my estate sponsored women scholarships.  
Brain-storms twitched an eye, while I spoke.  
I made-up storms and marches on piano.  
To the end, I recalled the airs composed  
from singing to myself songs of Walter Scott.

Once I dared ask: Would I be satisfied  
to arrive in utopia? My answer had me  
fall into a weariness with the world, I knew  
too well in Byron. Only Wordsworth, the poet  
of unpoetic natures, redeemed me, his verse  
in every Lakeland turn of the poets hill-side home.

Linnaeus charted the changing colors  
of the flowers with the seasons.  
To Caroline Fox, a calendar of odors.  
March blows laurel; April, apple blossom,  
violets, furze, wall-flower and broad-leafed  
common willow; May, night-flowering stocks

and rockets, sweet-briar, lilac, laburnum,  
hawthorn, seringa; June is for hay,  
bean-fields, climbing roses, mignonettes  
and Portugal laurel; come July  
honey-suckle, meadow-sweet, acacia,  
lime, Spanish broom, double myrtle, pine.

Then, in latest autumn, creeping clematis.  
I unhooked Caroline Foxes dress  
from a briar. Help is a friends alchemy  
that turns an annoyance into a pleasure.  
At seventeen, I spent a night in prison  
for pamflets "to married working people."

I re-read the classics and found no chivalry.  
Mercy was a Christian innovation,  
I deplored to see over-turned, in so much  
as hunting hares, and shunned the races.  
When my dying hours are by the doctor paced  
tame nightingales will follow from tree to tree.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### She

On a woman I had never looked  
til seconded, to the wide-eyed Mrs Harriet Taylor,  
apostle of Shelley, to improve her mind.  
Good for a fusillade of Victorian titters  
was this doting over one on my arm  
encumbered by a husband and tribe of three.

In the palatial vaults of the East India   
Company, I stiffly listened to Roebuck  
remonstrate my attentions would do mischief.  
In my posthumous Life, he would learn  
I still esteemed him and his work.

James Mill accused this son of being  
in love with another mans wife.  
I offered to make my life "obscure  
and insignificant" for "les beaux yeaux."  
Harriet rejoined: "By all means pursue  
your brilliant and important career.  
Am I one to choose you to feel so reduced by love!"

When Mill came in carriage with Mrs Taylor,  
Carlyle saw things had come to a crisis  
but not of the sort he expected. We're told  
the maids fire consumed Mills old papers,  
that hid one script of The French Revolution.  
Relieved they'd not eloped, Carlyle refused pay

tho he later gave way under entreaties.  
John Taylor regrets, as always, to differ  
from his wife. All justice and honor to her.  
But, since she'd asked: No, to his sorrow,  
the bad taste of Mills dedication,  
of Political Economy, would be no boon.

Harriet inspired the out-standing success  
of the chapter on workers representation.  
But she knew: "The desire to give and receive  
feeling is almost the whole of my character."  
My worship didnt make her feel worthy  
to keep her economics notes for me.

I attacked filosofers who made oracles  
of tradition, as I made an oracle of Harriet,  
who saw in a flash from the heavens  
the laborious trail of my logic on earth.  
She spun me round to communal property,  
capital punishment and public ballots.

In the public ballot of marriage,  
to the widowed Harriet, stalked unease  
we were properly wed. My name was cramped  
on the register, having fill-in initials   
J S. Could we go back and do it again?  
She reined-in my honey-moon from common sense.

I did, after all, dedicate a work to Harriet.  
My best known essay is the memorial,  
of our partnership, we worked and re-worked  
together. On Liberty defines democracy  
by seeking to maximise individual freedom  
thru tolerance of all but anti-social action.

The second of my younger brothers, George,  
dying of consumption in the Caribbean,  
naively wondered why we married  
against our principles. His friend Haji  
unwisely exposed Georges letter  
to his mothers priggish temper.

And inflamed my over-weening pride   
in my wife. My sister, Mary chronicled  
my impossibly touchy rejections of kin.  
She appealed, by the only feeling that seems  
remaining to you: "your love of your wife,"  
how likely this course to make her happy.

On rest-leave, in Florence, I wrote Harriet:  
Tho we never deny each others wishes,  
I dread to disappoint again when she sees me.  
Following step-daughter Helens trial tours  
on stage, my mind ran to large railway stations.  
At York, sleepless dreams on animal nature

required, just before I awoke, the cure  
of writing like Richter that not until  
an egg is fed on broth can you expect  
here the whole truth of nature unfolded.  
That night of dreams, I sat at a table d'hôte  
with a woman. A sincere friend and a sincere

Magdalen, extolled the young man, opposite,  
misquoting "an innocent Magdalen."  
I answered: Best to find both in one.  
The woman said: No, that would be too vain.  
I broke out: Abstractedly good and admirable  
not thinking of ones own paltry self-interest.

The classical lands walked-off consumption.  
Harriet infected, I offered to take her  
to her brothers in Australia. Traveling  
France, in stages, to prevent bleeding,  
she was over-come by congestive cold.  
Our doctor was called-on desperately.

I laid-out my little fortune,  
saved for retirement with my wife,  
in donations to Avignon Mayor and pastor.  
Lost in a sycamore and mulberry avenue,  
the hornbeams screen a wisteria-hid trellis  
to a nuns hermitage, the Revolution seized.

The fatal room in the Hôtel d'Europe,   
furnished view, beyond nightingale spinney,  
on the cypresses privacy to walls of the dead.  
Marble-mount railinged gravel pathed  
roses, myettes, willow, laburnum, ash.  
Spindle trees, laurel hedged violets, pansies,

jasmine and honey-suckle. A white block  
of Carrara marble, unveined, cannot bleed.  
Helen warned Haji attend the opening  
of their mothers shrine. An hour a day  
I gardened or talked to guests, given pause  
at that wonder of the imperial world.

In time, Helen received the adulation  
lavished on her mother. Asterisks in  
the Autobiography censor no presidential  
expletives or secret service directives.  
They cover-up only the naked veneration  
of too naive a religion for common composure.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### generally liars

Yes, I would stand to be Westminster MP  
but would not buy a seat by paying expenses.  
Instead, I donated to working class candidates.  
Nor would I serve constituents local interests  
but votes for women and Mr Hare system  
of Proportional, as Personal, Representation.

The Almighty Himself had no chance, said one,  
on such a program. A placard quoted:  
The working class are generally liars.  
At a meeting, I was asked if I published that.  
"I did," I admitted to resounding applause.  
And a working man, Mr Odger replied,

they wanted friends, not flatterers.  
I talked workers out of revolt, against a ban  
on free speech in Hyde Park, the army at hand.  
Quoting defiance of a hell-fire God, placards,   
read: "to hell I will go," led into Parliament.  
We talked-out Tory bill against park meetings.

The House failed second Hare system, at first.  
My speeches on parliamentary reform  
explained the democratic principles  
of the balance of power put into practice  
by this Personal Representation  
and not anonymous party choices.

In 1870, one Commons debate started  
a lost cause, till waverers, afraid of ridicule,  
were turned, to win the womens suffrage bill  
a second reading – and introduction  
as a cause célèbre each following year  
to pass in the next half-century.

Original thought must not expect an income  
but System of Logic mass sold in cheap editions  
and long was the universities standard text.  
If nought else, The Westminster Gazette  
helped Canadian democracy, and opposed,  
with the working class, The Slave Power

in America and its civil war.  
Criminal proceedings against Governor Eyre  
brought anonymous letters for the brutalities  
in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population  
from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial,  
up to threats of assassination.

Independent Liberals joined to defeat  
the Extradition Bill making Britain  
an accomplice to political vengeance.  
So-called for saying the Great Reform Bill final,  
Finality Jack Russell teased his son  
Amberley: Was he nearer to his Millenium

by a visit to Mill? Mill was god-father  
of Bertrand Russell, his third child.  
Kate Amberley hoped he would take after  
the filosofical radical and democrat.  
Young Bertrand ecstasised over Newton  
Principia, whose title graced his own great work.

* * *

## the man of honor

_return tocontents_

Another Sir Walter Scott, of feudal pretensions  
even the Victorian, Macaulay derided,  
Conan Doyle was some social climber  
who didnt think a knighthood good enuf

for him, til "the Ma'am" told him otherwise.  
George Edalji, of early Parsee Indian settlers  
in Britain, bore also the snobberies of the age,  
his minister father tried patiently to defuse.

Wrongful imprisonment of an innocent man  
left the Home Office do its best not to admit  
its mistake, tho that harmed the good name  
and legal practise of George Edalji.

Arthur rages at their incompetance  
and inconsequence. He makes you want to cheer.  
Arthur becomes the man of chivalry  
he always wanted to be. It redeems wholly

the fixation with his familys heraldic status.   
He takes not a moment to put his sense of honor  
before being agreeable to the Establishment.  
Those guilty of the "Outrages" against animals,

about the Edalji parish, are not brought to justice  
by backward and prejudiced policing.  
Whereas Doyle clues after the worst offenders.  
A local poison pen was at last convicted.

There's no stopping a youthful maturity.  
His doctors practise dies for want of patients.  
No matter, he wiles away the time writing   
a detective, the public wont let him kill off.

Doyle the "sportesmann" is a role model for youth.  
In a tour de force of an alpine climb  
the blue snows of dusk lie vertigineously  
before the fairy-lit village in the valley.

The world is at his feet. When his wife has TB,   
he tracks a Swiss micro-climate in England  
to build a fine house amongst hills and trees.  
And a mono-rail in the garden: it is a testing age.

Of his Affair, the bachelor secretary thinks  
how husbands get bored with their wives.  
Doyle rigidly adheres to his code of honor.  
No up-set to his wife from the least intimation

of his secret admirer must be allowed.  
After her death, to his bemusement, she blessed  
the woman, was his mistress, as her successor.  
She never got bored with her older husband;

patted her hair, like a girl, and ran to meet him.  
She tells of research into all the details  
for his historical fiction, sharing his belief  
that they were his real work as a novelist.

For the cause of Spiritualism or Spiritism,  
as he called it, Doyles favorite medium booked  
the Albert Hall. There was bound to be someone  
in so large an audience recognise the stage

description of a forebear on the other side.  
"In the land of mist" is not so much fiction  
as wishful thinking. His father painted fairies;  
he believed-in two girls mock-ups in the garden.

Spiritism was one case Doyle did not solve.  
Days before death, he toiled office stairways  
to plead for state sanction. He could have given  
no more moving testimony to his convictions.

* * *

## traji-komik

(George Bernard Shaw)

_return tokontents_

#### Nout on musik akompaniment

Ekserts to span the wandering atencon from a simply riten but informativ monolog. Thys sujestcons ar ma'd with a viw to the importans of musik in Shaws l'if and work.

1) from Richard Strauss: Till Eugenspiegels.

2) Beethoven Choral Fantasia (leading into a militant out-break).

3) from adajio of Schumann sekond symfony.

4) Wagner: Master-singers thym.

5) from first movment of Haydn symfony 49, La Passione.

6) from Wagner Twil'it of the Gods (instrumental pasaj, played on tv, in 1979, to Voyager One pikturs of Jupiter).

7) Mozart adajio and f'ug marks the trajik turning point in Shaws l'if, as an apolojist for his ideolojy seizing total power, witc totaly korupts.)

8) f'ug finale from Shostakovitch forth symfony, he apolojised for, to the Soviet rejym.

The end: from Elgar 3rd symfony, witc Shaw enkurajed him to r'it, and witc was kompleted and performed by an "under-study" som siks and a half deka'ds after the komposers deth.

* * *
1)

### a skym of things

I never ga'v kountenans to the glaring suspicon  
that I m'it be the ilejitimat son  
of my mothers liv-in Svengali, Vandeleur Lee.  
The real is'u is invacon of privasy. It sankcons  
the pety tyrany, that ma'ks a prison of the houm  
for its sanktity, and barbarians of the Englic.

I helpt Frank Harris r'it my biografy  
in his last years, wen he nyded the money.  
Frank was just the man to fl'i this k'it.  
But I told him of som long-forgoten soul  
hw biterly komplained I had ruined him  
for just this rejekting the story:

born on the rong s'id of the shyts.  
I kan resist anything but temptacon.  
The temptacon to kreat a sensacon remained  
my amazing l'iknes, so-kaled, to Lee,  
on a group foto, rekoned the klincer.  
M'it yu not sy me in fathers pikturs?

How striking is the lwk owners hav of their pets.  
But they are not presumed their natural tcildren.  
We resona't to hw we ar with  
and that naturaly cows in our fa'ses.  
I wud identify with Lee, the musican  
of unorthodoks methods that worked.

The ancent Gryks used masks or personas.  
Often enuf, our own fa'ses ar masks  
to present, to the world, the fabulus Being   
yu now sy befor yu: George Bernard Shaw.   
With a beam of universal benevolens,   
I paid a tramps bwts but kontrived

to kut Amerikan beging-leter riters.  
I kudnt ta'k umbraj Frank Harris was agrieved  
at a skym of things leting kreaturs l'ik me,  
that krawl betwyn heven and earth,  
snatc litl sukseses  
fundamentaly of no importans.

2)

### our ekual importans

Wenever I entered a rwm of gests  
I always joined the novis, most il at eas,  
hw was myself befor advansment.  
From the gods, a play of m'in was bwed  
at kurtain kal: I agry with yu, Sir.  
But wat kan we tw do against so many?

I told William Archer he nydnt wory  
about riting a play al of Archers.  
Being him, they al wud be interesting.  
We kan be l'ik uon another, mor or les,  
bekaus at hart we realy ar al the sa'm.  
Our ekual importans was the Republikan basis

of my micon on platform, in play-hous,  
even as the Deprecon of the eityn-eitys  
taut me popular revolt was a fars.  
This worldly self, hws spirit visits yu,  
in the best Shakespearian tradicon,  
was proud to be but a down-start Shaw

of nobl pretencons on my mothers alowans.  
By the t'im I atcieved world renown, plainly  
uon Iric-woman saw my tcief klaim to fa'm  
in lejend we Shaws ka'm of the Macduffs,  
the Macduff, no les, of Shakespears Macbeth.  
Ther's no romans in geting myself born a Shaw,

rather than a Lee, to ma'k me a Macduff:  
after few hundred years, even direkt   
desendants may not pass on a singl jyn.  
The snobic Shaw in me wud be no navie  
folowing Mama folow Lee to Dickens London  
known from boyhud reading the atiks old serials.

A deka'd of riting novels left me frayed slyvs   
disg'ised by pruning, and that siuts moulding   
toper saged l'ik my morale. At last,   
in new klouths, and left aloun with a woman,  
she threw her arms round me. I let her,  
being kurius to know wat it was l'ik.

3)

### Shaws inferno

Miss Florence Farr, al worldly ekspertys,  
knew kindly how to put a man at eas.  
A Don Juan in Hel, I wakst kontrary  
with her, as Marthas skolding of Mary.

In delayed respons to this profet Shaw  
preatcing harmony with a h'ier law,  
she sout Vedantist seklucon in Ceylon:  
This worldly l'if kannot last the eons.

Waved fer-wel, I komplained to Mrs Pat,  
Florence was tw agryabl. At that  
I was r'it, if oposits do atrakt,  
given al this non-konformist atakt.

Adikt, Janet Achurch rebeled from k'urs,  
her gud fylings, for me, tried to end'ur.  
She wud giv al to sy her husband win,  
I replied, roundly revealed her basest sin.

And I was surprised she didnt l'ik me!  
The delayed-eksploding Ellen Terry,  
as in al things, kapably had her say  
to Shaw in Purgatory asking the way

to the nearest monastery, that was not on  
for me but Florence to the Farthest uon.  
Tirading at Florence, I did my best  
to mor savaj efekt than ever posesed

jelus Jenny Patterson to asault.  
I konsiliated Mis Robbins fault  
for making my inter-view into a syn.  
Had word got round to ma'k vent her splyn?

4)

### for her money

The imposing na'm of the Fabian Sosiety  
opened dors and opened famus mouths,  
we surprised, armed to the tyth in the new truth.  
Haldane did be-seatc burly Mr Shaw h'id him  
from Fabian asailant, Sidney Webb,  
author, with Beatrice, of Industrial Demokrasy.

Webb and Haldane joined Labor first government.  
Fabian frends matced me with an Iric devoty,  
taken away, on a world tour, to be mised.  
Ellen read the souls douts I lovd my frend.  
In skript I tresured l'ik the Lluteral Psalter,  
only she matced my riting - out-matced me -

hinting the simplest stail is the best:   
klearly not my then verbos humor   
of The Pickwick Papers. Ellen replied:   
Yu klever peopl ar so sily, not knowing   
wether or not yu'r in lov. Fansy,   
not knowing! She at least knew wat she knew.

As Charlotte kompromised her Victorian rep'ut  
by nursing me, laid-up and egzausted,  
the seremony twk plais by default, somwat.  
This Shaw in Heven sta'j of my Div'in Komedy  
saw the marid man glory, as a superman,  
in sakrif'is artists must ma'k for their art.

W'il on the platform, my politikal sta'j,  
Charlotte was cown-off, marid "for her money"  
by, as my first pres leter s'ined, "No jentlman."  
Her midl a'j ma'd a peril of tcild-birth,  
not to mencon the fobia against union  
al tw komon in that a'j of inosens.

I agryd to not konsuma't the betrothal.  
By then, I knew a liv-in mistres wud not work.  
I kud not be kontent under the tyrany of seks.  
My w'if cered in the romans of wel-fer,  
helping found The London School of Economics.  
For the first t'im, I loved som-uon mor than myself.

* * *
_return tokontents_

5)

### lov leters for leading ladys

Living with my gryn-eyed milionaires  
spared hundreds of lov leters for leading ladys.  
Tho I warned her at uons of this v'is,  
it skandalised Mrs Patrick Campbell  
wen I lifted our idylik after-nwn  
for an interlwd to The Apple Cart.

Glamor in a woman is revelacon  
of Gods presens to ma'k a man worcip:  
She for God, he for God in her.  
Janet Achurch, an arkanjel with purpl wings,  
nyd not strugl for her least efekt, as I had to.

If yor dauter must akt my St Joan,  
parents, put her into kyping cop.  
I prided myself a gud womans tailor.  
L'ik Moliere, I konsulted my kuk  
hw estyms prima donas as filthy rags  
kompared to the great author they interpret:

A lady'd not let her skirt fal betwyn her knys.  
(That's how the houl part was played.)  
How did I sy into the soul of a woman?  
I lwked at my own. That is the trik of it.  
Reading Mrs Campbell my flower-girl play,  
"Yu rout this for ME," she rajed. "I kan hear yu

mimiking my vois." With an asumpcon  
of dignity, she deklared herself flatered.  
She'd try to get a play out of Sir James Barrie  
befor krosing the road to my pla's, for sa'm,  
this off-stage herouin of cow bisnes risk.  
Charlotte stormed in at my korting her.

6)

### the deth-defying vejetarian

Never was popular play based on les  
promising a kaus than my Pygmalion  
against klas aksents to put folk in their pla's.  
At Socalist mytings, self-taut working men  
pronounsed words, as they lwked in print,  
erning ridik'ul deserved for absurd spelings.

Thys indoktrina't mindless konforming:  
Freidom of Speling cud be our moto  
against this bar to the komunity of leters.  
Beatrice Stella tested my wil: If I a't byf  
ther'd be no stoping me. Meat-eating is  
canibalism with its heroic dic omited.

I was suposed the deth-defying vejetarian.  
Sying myself in the miror, I cannot believ  
the kreatur befor me ends evolucon.  
Uon day, we cal lern to liv off frec air  
to a tremendus a'j, rekreated  
by plesurs of mind rather than body.

Betwyn rehersals, my flower-girl deklared:  
With my brains and her lwks we ot hav a son.  
Wat if it had yor brains and my lwks!  
Stellas fotos did no justis to her alur.  
In old a'j, l'ik a batl-cip, sinking,  
she desperatly fired on al wud-be reskuers.

Tw tikets wer sent Churchill and a frend -  
if yu hav uon. Winston kudnt atend first n'it  
but wud kom on the sekond - if yu hav uon.  
The "dragl-tailed gutersn'ip," the fonetican  
set-out to elok'ut for a garden party,  
Eliza, in Kings Englic, stil swering "bludy,"

was theatrikal skandal sukses of Europ,  
n'intyn-fortyn, as if the word wer wors   
than the koming wars listles beast of blud.  
Mrs Campbell got a konsoling leter.  
The riting tcaplain cud hav herd "the vois  
of thy sons blud krieth to God from the ground."

The Kaiser and Kitchener kompet for a milion  
mor men down slauter-hous guters of trences.  
W'i dont the women r'is up and say:  
If yu go on kiling our sons, we wil ref'us  
to ber any mor babys until yu stop?  
But the women ar as stupid as the men.

7)

### Fabian falen among diktators

From n'intyn-seventyn, be kauconed  
witc GBS did speak his mind. Lenin kaled me  
a gud man falen among Fabians.  
This gostly vicon is a reviconist Shaw  
hw rejects himself with vehemens:  
Shaw was a Fabian falen among diktators;

I, hw warned Chesterton he wud be   
the defender of al infamy under Liberal   
or Katholik mask. To my aplaus, wer kruced   
houplesly inefektiv parliaments   
ma'd me want to abolic politikal partys  
of disonest karirists, not I aloun loath.

If yu do twenty minuts work in twenty years,  
yu may hav to do twenty years work in twenty  
minuts - witc kud be a very bludy bisnes.  
I ekskused Facist murder of Matteotti,  
not failing to mencon the trains ran on t'im.  
I viewed Nazi smacing-up of rival partys

with synikal tolerans, but douting the wisdom  
of being paid by big bisnes not to own it.  
Stalins forsed kolektiv farming and sta't steal  
by jenos'id realy did "ekstermina't" the pwr   
and only to spred poverty to survivors.  
As Litl Red Riding Hud sized Grandmas featurs,

my red-blinkered visit, to the Kremlin,  
lost Stalins "plesantrys" in his, I suposed,  
inkompetant interpreters fr'it-tcatering tyth.  
I hailed the Nazi-Soviet pakt as a master-pies  
of diplomasy, wen it suplied invacon  
of Mother Ruca, turned-to by a tyrant terified.

I dignified the Soviet purjes as Military  
Komunism, remarking: Wat a komfort  
to know that if we kil twenty milions or so  
of uon another, we'l non of us be mised!  
I was huma'n towards animals in Ruca,  
wen I denounsed Pavlov vivisekcon of dogs

as the seudo-siens of a skoundrel -  
and uon man frei to speak his mind of the rejym.  
I loved my neibor as myself. But al  
my famus virt'u, towards personal enemys  
as wel as frends, was held out not to viktims -  
singly or in milions - of my ideolojy.

8)

### the intelijent womans g'id

The worst thing yu ever did, I jujed  
William Archer reviw of Major Barbara,  
as elejy for a yung socalist orator,  
on sundays under railway brijes,  
hw saw the l'it, after his vestry-mans  
new brwm was thrown in the poling kloset,

to adopt Andrew Undershafts gilotyn retorts.  
Cusins, the Greek profesor, atrakts the idealist  
and the realist Shaws, for his detatcment  
from spa's and t'im: this is Shaws gost.  
Archer tcalenjed Man and Superman as jumbl  
of untested ideas, waced up around the od

huma'n out-krops, with no system of thot.  
But ten years befor Lenins Jerman eksport  
to Ruca in a sealed train, I also believed  
in ekual inkoms, and put my ka's, later,  
in The Intelijent Womans G'id to Socalism  
and Kapitalism. Sovietism and Facism

wer aded with my apolojetiks.  
Even Lenin with his New Ekonomik  
Polisy fel bak on self-relians.  
I folowed his reading of Marxist doktrin  
that a klasles sosiety must be imposed,  
kuietly knowing that frei elekcons wud be

ended. I never ansered my own admicon:  
oficals may be no beter than bisnes-men  
at serving the publik interest. The is'u waited  
on East Europs socalist sta'ts to kolaps.  
They lakt oposicon to tcek korupt ekstryms  
of the Stalinist triumf in unekual inkoms.

Yet I cowed ther's no raconal ka's w'i,   
or by how mutc, uon person cud be paid mor  
than the nekst, for jobs don - or not don.  
Works must be val'ued as personal kalings  
uon kan ta'k pr'id in, with art or siens.  
Sins we depend on eatc other, al hav the r'it

to ra't uons skil in popular markets.  
Firms l'ik Breakajes Ltd skuander.  
A basik inkom kud racon resorses  
helping pys be ma'd on populacon limits.  
Tho yu no longer believ in the Day of Jujment,  
in truth, every day is a day of jujment.

* * *

_HG Wells plays croquet with JM Barrie at Stanway in Gloucestershire in the 1930s.  
First published on my website. By kind permission of the copyright holders._

* * *

## profet of science

(HG Wells)

_return tocontents_

### Wells and tunnels

Morlocks came upon me below stairs.  
At Up-Park the servants traveled their time   
away to and fro the mansion grounds   
thru tunnels with airing wells, the time

traveler found. The Invisible Man less out   
the way than those scurrying creatures  
under-ground like giant insects, gate-crashed  
from the module of First Men In The Moon.

Folk fled in confusion canyons of New York,   
their tail-backs breaking for the great plains.   
Not HG Wells, of The War Of The Worlds   
but, confusingly, Orson Welles broadcast

how a falling star left smoking asteroid   
tunnel into the earth and – sensation! -   
is grating open: cue the pick-up, listeners   
not to know a jar unscrewed over the pan.

* * *

### the study and the struggle

I'd excelled at biology in my first year  
taught, just in time, by the aged Huxley.  
Charles Darwin had listened behind  
the curtain, while he finished lectures.

Huxley passed in my first dissection class  
as I cut the wrong artery in a specimen.  
Now I am my own specimen, I beware  
further hemorrhage, laid-up for months

helplessly as on a dissecting table.  
Turning into a rebel, I'd failed my degree.  
Here continued literatures seduction  
from set studies, that was the death of me

as a scientist but was to let me  
forget the part of being mortally ill.  
The most dismaying moment of my life,  
sick, and wanting pass water, I passed blood.

Foul play, on the field, crushed a kidney.  
Exit, to a chorus of school-boy jeers.  
To stop a cheats pay-cut, I taught again  
too soon, in the cold, and coft blood.

I learned to dread its taste. Consumption  
was pronounced, as of a death sentence  
but time confirmed other diagnosis.  
I re-took my degree on an external course.

Once a pupil-teacher, I taught students now.  
There, in clandestine trembling, I embraced  
and kissed my future wife. Kissing good-bye  
the secure job, I'd thought beyond reach

I eloped with Jane, so named after many trials  
at re-christening Amy Catherine Robbins.  
I was already married to cousin Isabel.  
Innocence made her a tearful marriage bed.

The hearts delight was not the minds  
companion of a lodger by candle-light,  
in his coat, with wrapped feet in a drawer.  
An under-fed and shabby crammer, I was

desperate not to fall in with the People  
of the Abyss. When, in an act of self-  
abandonment, from the Darwinian struggle  
for survival, I threw myself in.

* * *

### the profet of science

Holed-up in digs, I wrote at full stretch,  
in my small long-hand, into the dawn  
unperturbed by gossip over the fence  
that Jane and I were living in sin.

Teeming with Morlocks, the abyss beckoned  
as I re-wrote once more The Time Machine.  
One reviewed "Mr Wells is a genius."  
The disheveled time traveler is back

in his drawing room of friends, to tell:  
Time is the fourth dimension of space  
I have journeyed to its Earthly limits.  
Ten years on, Einstein made this notion,

kicking around since my student days,  
the measure of special relativity.  
Observers co-ordinate their relative motion  
in space-time to know the same laws of nature.

In later life, oh, had I been at the debate  
with Einstein on Haldane filosofy  
to see a kitten gazing up for the first time  
at a large soap bubble just out of reach -

a rubbery bubble that refuses to iridesce  
or burst for any much startled paw.  
My pre-Great War novel, to Frederick Soddy,  
foretold "atomic bomb" eruptions

of energy from radio-active matter.  
Szilard took out secret patent on nuclear   
chain reactions, "for I had read HG Wells."  
Leo Szilard then prompted Einsteins letter

warning President Rooseveldt of "The Bomb."  
Einstein apologised to the Japanese people  
for its use against them. His opposition failed.  
He'd rather have been a plumber.

A month off death, I answered reporters,   
on Hiroshima: "This could finish everything."  
The World Set Free, foretold "the sun snarers"  
fusion first megawatt, in Oxford, 1991.

Early in the nineteen thirties, forty or  
fifty years before they became a topic,  
The Work, Wealth And Happiness Of Mankind,  
named alternative energies: force, electricly

transfered, of water-wheels, wind-mills or   
tides; first foto-electric cell, portentious  
as Hero engine; using earths internal heat,  
and heat difference in layers of ocean currents.

All combustion sources are vanishing sources.  
Planet spin must become mans sole dynamo.  
Even in old age, I felt, late tho it was, like   
the little boy who doesnt want to go to bed.

Animal, vegetable and mineral wealth,  
such marvels and grotesques as elefants,   
whales, and gorillas may be lost for want  
of world control over predatory waste.

Bible profesy had man stand upon the Earth   
as on a foot-stool to reach the stars,  
life-times away under the light speed barrier.  
We would have to get there by the back door.

Characters I disliked were teleported  
by none too good-tempered Men Like Gods.  
Men will have to become like gods, immortal  
as the progress of science, to keep up with it.

All the progress of the nineteenth century,  
scattered and poorly funded, without training  
the population, staggered the mind at what  
properly organised research might achieve.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### socialism and the family(s)

For life, "Journalist" was on my pass-port.  
This means of escape from my class  
fed the sexual urge that would have waged  
constant war on an ascetic pledge to research.

Nor were my political ambitions helped  
by passionate followings of liberated females  
(liberated by me) that gave Fabian Nursery,  
of young socialist recruits, a whole new meaning.

My family politely asked after, I asked  
"Which one of my families do you mean?"  
My fussed-over and suppressed novel  
Ann Veronica was one of these new women

like that other intellectual, Cleopatra.  
In my own small way, I, too, became a legend.  
Whether "Ann Veronica" found her soul mate  
I dont know. She had my child allowance.

(I proposed state Endowment of Motherhood.)  
And another man was on hand to spare her  
Edwardian disgrace for unmarried mothers.  
I sent a friend to "Mr and Mrs West."

Was he in for a surprise at Rebeccas consort.  
By the 'forties, visitors to The New Statesman  
pegged coats with mine as an afrodisiac.  
David Low drew me with a skip in both steps.

My charmed life, with women, disliked claims  
few memorable females adorn my books,  
until demanding Dolores - the trouble-maker -  
who only deaths peace could free of herself.

I drew my picshuas of Janes adventures.  
Jane backs to the wall of our house on the shore  
as waves take on her pert and snub profile.  
Jane, flourishing absurdly piled hair-do, stands

in back-to-back contest with domed J M Barrie.  
Fearless but town-bred Jane packs-up our picnic  
from the gentle, if gawky, attention of cows.  
Jane and I under the tangerine tree

that fruited once in seventeen years  
as the pair of us swelled and wizened  
to leave a lonely little pair of tangerines.  
She'd not quite make their due in 'twenty-eight.

We tried the specialists then the eccentrics.  
Shaw complained the funeral was ghastly  
not least with HG howling and sobbing.  
I'd called her pet names; "Bits" to remind her

how small she was. She laft or she wept or  
she teased, too. Like any working man to his  
Missus, I used to hand over earnings  
she turned into investments I'd not guessed at.

Self-portraits render my put-down reproach.  
Catherine snaps as her own woman looking   
less thru a Wellsian camera than at you.  
She was mother, secretary, house manager.

Our week-end parties influxed a traveling show  
of all the talents, admirers and audience.  
A writer moved house to be near the flying fun.  
I made-up new games I could win, ball games -

my father held a county cricket record -  
or demon patience. (A demon surely drove me.)  
Our charades made children of the dignitaries.  
Writers lamented the loss of my conversation

that cultivated all classes and grew stories  
as my father Joseph Wells gardened.  
Dreams wrote my scientific romances.  
I dined the worlds minds at my club.

* * *

### utopias

Life's a scramble and will be for hundreds of years.  
My idea of the Great State was service by all  
doing their quota of maintenance work  
for basic needs of food, warmth and shelter.

My mother slaved for us in the usual hovel  
thoughtlessly designed by male architects.  
Hardest jobs should require shortest service  
to leave all free as possible for their callings.

But feudal paternalists took over  
Socialism as Bismarck did in Germany.  
The Fabian Society tortoise with raised fist  
was well named after Fabius the delayer.

Insiders or infiltrators of the state they were.  
I lampooned the bureaucratic mind as wanting  
to replace leaves with green-painted tin shades.  
They were averse to popular appeal

for a mass British Socialist Society led  
by an elite I rather absurdly called the Samurai.  
That doesnt make me the artillery man  
in The War Of The Worlds or William Clissold.

Shaw, who had not shied speaches, advised  
stand up, breathe in, and speak out to the back.  
But I insisted on knuckling down on a table  
and squeeked into my droopy moustache.

Unconscious mutter: "Will that be all, madam?"  
heard by GBS, he threatened the mulish  
drapers assistant in me, that he would cry out  
for a farthing paper of pins.

Bernard Shaw said I shared Karl Marxes want  
to be the only pebble on the beach.  
Marx had no vision of the future,  
thinking utopias unscientific.

His social science was a mechanical motion  
of the masses in a tide of history  
that individuals could do little to change.  
Communism as such is a passing feiz.

General laws, Marx sought to emulate,  
matter less as life becomes more individual.  
The values of human choice are scientific facts.  
Their marriage in the imaginative literature

of personal utopias or types of society  
is the distinctive method of sociology.  
As elites have changed history, so do they  
in my future fantasies. But I am not they.

I tried Russian Communists on Free Speach.  
Well-fed university youths in rolled-up sleeves,  
aping British proletarians, shook fists at me,  
early malnutritions bow-legged figure of fun.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### for a freer world

Party gangs "PR" scoundrelly impostures   
the sane method of voting by Proportional  
Representation with large constituencies  
and the single transferable vote.

The advantage of this method is not a matter  
of opinion, but a matter of demonstration  
of its merit and of the fatal and  
incurable mischiefs of any other method.

If President Wilson had a purpose  
to make the world safe for democracy,  
I outlined a democracy to make the world safe.  
"The war that will end war," the Great War

turned into a petty peace. I detested militarists  
but backed German offer to negotiate peace,   
the Allies rejected, thus failing to set   
a civilised example in international relations.

The Outline Of History foresees Parliament  
Second Chamber broaden its interests  
to proportionally represent all occupations.  
Democratic range of experience would research

the fairness, to all walks of life, of laws passed  
in the First Chamber. General laws, reviewed  
by all special interests, is scientific method  
of political theory in economic practise.

My Charter of Scientific Fellowship said  
"As freedom to teach, opportunity to learn,  
and desire to understand, are essential  
for the extension of knowledge,

the democracy of science accepts  
the principles of progressive civilization..."  
A World Brain would collect and distribute,  
to all, our whole cultural inheritance.

What were British war aims in nineteen forty?  
A Declaration of Human Rights to match   
extensions of state power with personal  
freedoms, "electoral methods giving

effective expression to individual choice."  
The Sankey committee heeded leading   
thinkers. Discussion groups round Britain  
sought one hundred thousand draft copies.

I didnt want the idea dismissed as Wellsian.  
Unknown to me, it went by the Wells debate  
for the Resistance in occupied Europe.  
Mussolini paper Il Popolo attacked it.

I guess we had a secret friend on the staf.  
For, with a pretense of ridicule out-right,  
he published the whole declaration.  
My supposed friends made no pretence

to think much of ideals. Churchill huft   
about pious platitudes and then negotiated   
The Atlantic Charter, when Shaw ceased   
to agree with him. Tories shunned the moral

precedent that influenced the UN Charter.  
Tho Churchill found the tank among my stories  
Orwell sneered at my cavalry-mans notions  
the Germans were fully stretched by 'forty-one

and that the war had come home to roost.  
This Cockney spent last years in the Blitz  
the cinema envisioned in Things To Come.  
What are the great ideas of our time?

Birth control of the destructive pressures  
on the eco-system from over-population.  
Educating world citizens in world history  
and service to the commonweal.

Democracy rescued by personal PR  
from slavery to the party managers  
into direct relation with those his vote elects.  
World regulation, of currency liberated

from speculators and debt entanglements,  
and of transport and staple products,   
to lift the weight of private profiteering   
and nationalist sabotage...

These are just possible achievements   
for mankind. The outlook is dangerous   
and on the whole dingy til they are attained.   
But no political party in the world

dare do more in office than fumble   
and prevaricate about any of them.  
Civilization is a race between   
education and catastrophe.

* * *

## If democracy means anything...

(George Orwell)

_return tocontents_

### I am no novelist

Eric Blairs halting talk unimpressed a girl.  
I did take the trouble to think while I spoke.  
A woman at the ex-patriates club deserts  
an Imperial police-man. In a nights torment

he even perceives her for what she was:  
as shallow as the whole colonial culture.  
His suicide sets the sun on my ideal of Empire.  
Burmese Days set the sun on my purple prose!

A Clergymans Daughter smells the entombed  
in summer amidst the thinning congregation  
before her genteel poverty finds itself  
on the road and picking hops. George Orwell,

named after the river, padded the story  
from reports in search of the working class.  
This early novel almost followed to destruction  
another I regreted not having salvaged.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying is the fashion  
for lower middle class homes. This mock  
heroics is not of Cervantes. I snapped: English  
writers sense of humor is their besetting sin.

This novel has a life-denier saved, not doomed  
by a woman. The anti-hero is determined  
to be more depressed than the Depression.  
His girl-friend gives herself to him, when down.

The corrupt puritan is perversely satisfied  
by not enjoying her. Failed poet sells jingles.  
Weak men are not redeemed by willing women.  
Juno, to The Paycock, was a heroic stoic.

Priestley one-liner on me: too much of a misery.  
I belittled Angel Pavement as holiday reading.  
My official list suspects Priestley of being  
a fellow traveler. No love lost on the Left.

I tried to characterise a pleb but still   
he was, like myself, privately educated.  
He sometimes, not often, feels nothing more  
than the husk of wonderkind, blessed in sleep.

Coming Up For Air seeks boyhood passion   
for fishing. An arbored deep, the haunt of pike,   
like primeval monsters, was drained and tipped   
for a site, a local uneasily admits.

* * *

### in search of the working class

Down And Out In Paris And London,  
catering. Any washer-up will recognise  
the hectic hotel atmosfere behind the scenes.  
Back in England, I didnt join the ranks

of the unemployed like the Jarrow March.  
I tagged along with individuals, finding out  
how they came to be down on their luck  
as these aimless souls disturb the summer dust.

A hungry man, I urged, dare not take  
a bottle of milk, at an empty premises  
Shabby folk cannot rest without being  
moved on as another "street-corner loafer."

The spike is the last place they would rest up.  
Accent made me a "gentleman" fallen on bad times.   
Much displeased at the misguided  
decency, that made me, the pitier, pitied.

Mr Polly turned literary on Penny Dreadfuls.  
For recreation, I essayed on cultural trivia,  
the strip cartoons in the boys comics  
with their naive imparting of prejudice.

But I opposed all stripes of thought police.  
Frank Richards wrote grateful letter, I saw  
in Billy Bunter, among chums, an immortal.   
Such sloggers escaped literary notice.

Hard labor robs of creative leisure.  
An agitator, on The Road To Wigan Pier,   
drew energy from a childless bitterness.  
Down the mines, travel along low galleries

was an exhausting torture to my six-foot two.  
The comfort of my departing train viewed   
a womans misery amongst the endless  
house rows, as she tried to unblock a drain.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### when the truth is not good form (Catalonia)

The Depression was hopeless. Republican Spain   
offered a fight for a workers government.  
Communists took in most foreign volunteers.   
I was put in a small anarchist brigade,

Marxist on class but not taken-in  
by a "withering away of the state"   
under socialism. No boots fit my size.  
And the trenches got my throat shot thru.

Capitalist deregulation weakens the state.  
Anarchist riots, against global commerce   
when leaders meet, part the ways between   
anarchists, political and laisser-faire

economists. Orwell, my pseudonym   
favored the deregulated muse   
with a good word for modernist poets  
tho most of them went politicly wrong.

Spain made me believe socialism possible.  
Reared amidst race and class distinctions  
as a natural order, I found in Barcelona  
a liberating absence of flunkeyism.

Better a city run, in working class drabs,  
than all the gaudy charms of royalism.  
The Catalan region retained its values  
in the Mondragon worker co-operatives.

A future playwright says: "Put three English men   
on a desert island and within an hour   
they'll have invented a class system."  
The worker, selling a left-wing periodical,

called me: Sir. I grinned: Good old England.  
I'll be called Sir George Orwell now.  
Political scientists approve ambivalence  
over dogmas that divide a community.

Homage To Catalonia chaptered British  
papers defame the regime. That spoilt   
the form, I agreed, but truth came before  
either political or esthetic expedience.

RG Collingwood on holiday likened  
the republicans election to a carnival.  
Puppets of the Russian monolith, waged   
a war within a war against other Leftists.

The Left detested my name for exposing  
communist tactics, as if that to blame  
for their self-defeating consequences.  
My poem The Crystal Spirit holds out hope

lost in last illness. "No bomb that ever burst   
shatters the crystal spirit" ends a tribute   
to Spanish comradeship. Every word,   
I've written since, was against dictatorship.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### against dictatorship

Animal Farm is pre-figured by Aesop fable  
The Kingdom of the Lion. This squib too hot  
to handle for four publishers. One demurred  
at the betrayers of the revolution as pigs!

My mock "Marxism for Infants" came of age  
as parable in childrens library sections.  
I aim to write prose clear as a window pane.  
As Geoffrey Chaucers Chaunticleer parodied

the chivalrous romances, so for the romance  
of the revolution. Our love of animals  
delights in their naive joy at liberation  
from the farmer - an impossible idealism,

we still regret being betrayed, step by step,  
with the lafably illogical but self-serving  
after-thoughts like: All animals are equal  
but some animals are more equal than others.

We pity the poor dumb animals, so easily  
confused and deceived, like electorates  
of the "inattentive," as Wells called them.  
The pig dictator is the archetypal Napoleon.

His henchmen, Squeelers informers cowe  
the public, as in any nasty police state.  
Devastation of invasion heaps sorrow  
upon sorrow on the Russian experiment.

More than this homely satire was needed  
to spell out the peculiar horror  
of the twentieth century slave state,  
the arrival of a tyranny

more monstrous than the world has ever known.  
The feudal ideal of military subservience  
suppresses all enterprise and brain-washes  
the masses with production propaganda.

John Locke asserted the right to revolt   
against government at war with its people.  
1984 shows governments crush this right.  
A global triopoly perpetuate the old ruse

of foreign wars to crush dissent within nations.  
Self-righteousness prevents self-correction.  
The world religions of a brotherhood of man  
are replaced by worship of the Party.

Big Brother is all-knowing and all-powerful  
as a god. Big Brother is Watching You.  
He is never wrong and always to be obeyed.  
Mystifying policy changes are covered-up

by destroying old news, so unreason  
can never be exposed. No-one learns.  
If democracy means anything, it means saying  
things that other people dont want to hear.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Big Brother and Uncle Tom

A once imperial patriot joked there was life  
in the old dog, yet, of the protestant faith.  
Catholic writers of sentimental miracles  
should grow-up. I was surprised by the usual

left-wing scenery in Graham Greene novels.  
I invented doublespeak down-grading  
Uncle Toms Cabin as a good bad book -  
that I intended to rival in influence.

Harriet Beecher Stowe sought, in Christ,  
equality for race, also women, even children.  
My humanist pessimism may be  
no nearer the truth nor as robust a faith.

Stowe makes a positive and compelling case  
for emancipation, her story full of incident  
and vivid characters drawn with humor,  
seeing the points of view of the villains.

My villains are irredeemable  
parts of a self-maintaining party machine.  
Their ideology is oligarchy for its own sake.  
Uncle Tom on the plantation gulag dreads

to lose his immortal soul, more than life itself,  
as Christ admonished. But Tom is admitted  
to be a moral miracle. We are not up to  
the test, such as Christ prayed to have put off.

Pain is more powerful than pleasure.  
The lovers will betray each other.  
In 1984, on Airstrip One, Room 101  
the terror state rests on the reality

that we are ruled by our weakness.  
The Last Man, with common poetic feeling  
for nature or courtship, broken in spirit,  
is shot in the back, end of story.

I was a satirist not a novelist.  
Violating freedom of the individual  
removes the knowledge of the sacred,  
that is conscience, to leave nothing sacred.

The sacred, in some sense, heaven exists.  
As the reformed atheist CS Lewis said:  
It is more important that heaven should exist  
than that we should get there.

* * *

### the two Winstons

Big Brothers victim is the authors butt   
on bathos of the English class system  
with common Smith calling their son Winston.  
Is Winston Smith, Winstons Myth? Churchill

warned of socialists creeping controls, like   
New Labours Prussian rules and Soviet targets.  
Lewis has That Hideous Strength of a statist  
win make Britain seem to have lost the war.

Churchill wrote that with bolshevism,   
Russia had sunk into barbarism.  
Lloyd-George regarded Churchill morbid  
over that most mortality-inducing regime.

Called a war-monger against Hitler,  
Nancy Astor also said: Winston, if I were  
your wife, I would put poison in your tea.  
Nancy, if you were my wife, I would take it!

Churchill, a failure and yesterdays man.  
Orwell, a struggling nom de plume Leftist,  
unpopular with the Popular Front.  
Men of the wings against the dictators.

Correctives not representatives of their age.  
Churchill Operation No Hope was his state   
funeral. When the sniveling was all over,  
as Simon Schama sneers, is pure Orwell.

* * *

## the Yorkshire grumbler

(J B Priestley)

_return tocontents_

### Eden end

I mourn Lost Empires, old music halls  
gone with the patriotic pride they blazed.  
My home town, provincial yet cosmopolitan,  
has choral societies compete to put on

The Messiah ever earlier before Christmas.   
Amidst the bales of the Bradford wool trade,  
I come under a life-long spell of the arts,  
rubbishy people like actors, vaudeville,

and, propping up reality, The Magicians.  
I behold the three graces in three sisters  
and am warned from projecting on them  
before they shock me back to my senses.

Bright Day alludes the Shakespearian moral:  
it is the bright day that brings forth the adder.  
Adders slip thru the heather we walked.  
I will request my ashes be scattered

on my beloved Yorkshire moors.  
There is already a serpent in the garden  
that will Eden End with the Great War.  
A clairvoyant predicts a monstrous future.

She is no mere novel sensation  
but taken from life. I always had time  
for an intuition of the scheme of things  
beyond our religiously observed routines.

Acute social tensions rack the Golden Age  
before The War, Edwardian business-men  
deny will happen. An Inspector Calls  
about trouble at t'mill. No factory inspector,

the trouble has gone far beyond that.  
He probes the cast about a dead young woman.  
All their failures, towards a fellow  
human being, stoke a heated argument.

As they turn back to the inspector  
they are met by an empty rocking chair.  
One fantastic touch transforms the caller  
into divine jujment on all our consciences.

This volunteer saw one tenth of soldiers  
so life-denying or recalcitrant, only  
a great religious teacher could turn them.   
(They were "socially adjusted" in the trenches.)

I heard, thru a partition, some upper crust  
from the officer class didnt think much of me.  
I wrote mock-seriously of The Enemy  
less as German shells, that buried me alive,

than monsters of the English class system.  
Veterans were reticent about the Great War.  
Survivors were offered Oxbridge scholarships.  
It's noticed I said even less about that.

* * *

### because he has to

My novels confound Bradford with Huddersfield  
as Bruddersford against litigators  
(a species of legal alligators  
bred in the swamps of English law).

The amateur writes when he likes to.  
The professional writes because he has to.  
I never revised my working class production  
line, tapping away with two fingers

on the type-writer, a man of letters.  
Quality control is no blessing to the journalist.  
I kept myself in harness almost to  
the end, when sometimes I let myself off.

My first wife was dying and I was struggling  
with the bills. The last thing I felt like doing  
was writing. Yet my work was none the worse  
for how I privately felt. A famed actor praised

my Falstaff critique. A dramatic bent showed  
before I entered theaters by the stage door.  
A ramble of a show-business jaunt  
follows Fielding and The Pickwick Papers.

Pictures of puppies or kittens, captioned   
The Good Companions, are sentimental debris   
from the sensation of Priestleys big novel,  
cued a post-war boom in light entertainment.

This director of a novelist is laid-back  
to watch patiently from an audience seat  
removing his pipe for few quiet interruptions.  
Later novels suggest striding around, growling.

A critic reprimanded this Priestley trait:  
Why didnt I write more like - Dickens.  
He had some fire-side mirage of the master.  
But I was suitably flabberghasted:

Dickens! Dickens, of all people, Bernard Shaw   
said turned him into a revolutionary.  
Dickens, like Defoe, novels renewed himself  
re-growing his childhood point of view.

Angel Pavement walked few chances into  
a nobody of a clerk looking for a partner.   
He sees the cinema queues all neatly paired.  
A flirt almost fatally obsesses the youth.

Her father, who deals him some ruf justice,  
is one of my dubious characters  
without the usual amiable side, a Shadow,  
of this JB Priestley, in the Jungian sense.

The clerk learns from the adoring but ignored  
office girl that glamor may be cosmetic.  
Their coming together, this author claims  
the best days work in their lives - or the worst.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### life without remedy

Modern women were not the troublesome   
creatures in the time-consuming courtships   
of my youth. But I deplored the harm   
of modern male aggression to women.

Like Bernard Shaw, this playwright developed  
a passion for an actress, who learned how  
to have a passion for someone else.  
A Priestley play asks: why are our lives long

enuf to make mistakes but not long enuf  
to remedy them? If all the world's a stage   
must it be tied to the same script  
with no time after time for a revision?

A re-union finds couples were not married  
legally. When We Are Married resembles  
the time plays, whose characters start over,  
except they dont have their youth back;

nor any illusions about their partners.  
Rueful reckonings of the marital state ensue.  
Author royalties allowed a world cruise  
to be re-cycled in print-form to the

industrial masses. My travel book wonder  
at chromatic strata of the Grand Canyon  
was foretold by a dream scenario  
so to say: I Have Been Here Before...

English Journey regards Birmingham, for size,   
remarkably lacking in civic architecture.  
I professed to discern any at all, only  
by glimpsing one of its streets at an odd angle.

Two Tyneside working class habitations  
I summed-up as dormitory towns.  
Back home, in Rain on Godshill, I bemoan  
but for the German armada of bombers,

Chamberlain wouldnt have to travel  
to Munich to keep away the monsters.  
A German refugee and a vaudeville comic  
reduce to stock players in that novels movie.

Like Churchill, I fumed on smoke and drink.  
Like Chesterton, naively I praised spirits  
as raise a cold adjudicator to non-sense  
dire warnings not to Let The People Sing.

I found Chesterton lacking in the fantastic  
drollery he preached. Manalive, he was not.  
I conjure up the castles in the air  
of the Romantics to demolish with problems

of how to pay the bills and find ones next meal.  
Priestley, the realist kept romance in check.  
Chesterton, the romantic kept reality in check.  
He and I spread our talents much too thin.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### out of the people

The brilliance of Daylight On Saturday  
comes after all week in a war-time factory.  
A playwright can handle this confinement  
and forbidden zone to middle class novelists.

Factory pay frees women from service.  
Women gained status, twice, from war work.  
The people share the liveliness of production.  
And I can tell the difference between good

and bad management for industrial relations.  
The solver knows when to let his mind wander.  
A casualty in the machine shop  
is witnessed with a moving solemnity.

No doubt, a West Riding burr to war-time  
commentary must be JB Priestley.  
Into the nineteen sixties, regional accents  
made an amusing novelty in tv reports.

Pensively low-key war-time radio talks  
achieved a simple poetry on the boats  
that rescued much of the British army  
and the Free French Forces from Dunkirk.

I was to be much exasperated thru-out  
later life from strangers who admired these  
little talks but knew nothing else of my out-put.  
I liked criticism with not too much sugar.

An old grumble that the prime minister  
stopped my broadcasts, leaving the field  
to the likes of Lord Haw-Haw. Maybe   
it was because I was promising too much.

HG Wells had the nations war aims stated   
in the Sankey Declaration on Human   
Rights, which fore-ran the UN Charter.  
The Priestley manifesto, Out Of The People,

joined Labour Left with Liberal policies.  
Plutocracy hid behind feudalism.  
I wanted the English class system scrapped.  
Churchill would have had apoplexy.

A plan is curiously un-English and unlike  
that literary rambler, Priestley myself.  
My program called for state control beyond  
even the Attlee government, but balanced

by English Regional Councils, and liberal   
form of Proportional Representation.  
I was a vice-president of The Electoral  
Reform Society for the democratic

method, championed by the social liberals  
Mill and Wells. Wells and I failed to make   
university MPs, by transferable voting   
but in mere two-member constituency.

* * *

### theatre outlook

Theatre Outlook blamed commercial pressures  
on the drama. Star-struck audiences see   
movie actors in the flesh, raising receipts  
by thousand pounds a week - a small fortune.

I characterised these playgoers as enemies  
because film stars got the parts regardless  
of whether they were most suited to them.  
This inequity of the star system persists.

I would dispossess the rich for the theater  
people. As naively as the Shaw I decried,  
I thought how packed Russian theaters were.   
(Stalin was Churchills old comrade in arms.)

Flash color of post-war actors flaunted  
the class system in evening dress take a bow  
to austerity audiences, in black and white.  
The side-stage prompt, in cleaners head-scarf,

symbolised the coming fifties assault  
on stage from Wesker kitchen sink dramas.  
I lectured in the Soviet Union  
like HG Wells and Arthur C Clarke

author ambassadors between hostile blocs.  
The authorities published Priestley  
when favorable and censored when not.  
I was implicated in half truths worse than lies.

Literature and Western Man tells the printing   
press was suppressed almost upon invention.  
Power has its intuitions. It's reasonably stated  
no young man could read as much for work

of this scope. Less reasonably, I claimed all  
main writers within. (Not Tolkein and Orwell!)  
Ambience or Agenda urged the gesture   
of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Have you noticed, comments one of my   
light-weight novels, that since we stopped  
believing in Hell, we are hell-bent on  
a Hell on Earth? Yes, I was impatient

with disarmament details (before Reagan  
and Gorbachev agreed "Trust and Inspection").  
My small profesies were pirate radio  
and a university of the third age.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### an English trait

Amidst post-war rationing, my contribution  
to Festival of Britain was Festival At Farbridge,  
my most determinedly, relentlessly   
funny novel of observational humor

in the small change of human relationships.  
Biografer, Susan Cooper thought it almost  
as funny as Lucky Jim, echoing sentiment  
towards Hurry On Down by John Wain.

I wasnt going to plead: Who made the jokes   
first? but just told her, over pipe-smoking   
shoulder: You over-rate that novel.  
All three Leftists want to get the girl.

The lead is another dubious character  
(with a dubious cause) a bit of a charlatan  
and an actor. His lot raise money to burn  
on fire-works - a less than inspirational

repeat of bonfire night - despite objectors  
(in authority, as usual) against the waste.  
This is defiance for its own sake.  
Kingsley Amis in The Old Devils: "Of course

he's a charlatan but he's a charlatan   
with flair." doesnt flatter my influence:  
As The Good Companions dancer shocked   
her song-writer suitor: You're so feeble.

Jung tracked a Trickster personality stage  
thru all societies, a resort of youth  
before maturity is accomplished.  
Each generation challenges the established.

John Osborne rants, against England, make  
Priestley rhetoric seem substantial.  
We gave it our lives, before we had a life.  
My combative moods were always mellowed

by humor, I cherished as an English trait.  
Many biografies found me objectionable.  
As the Yorkshire Grumbler, me and my   
regiment grumbled our way thru the century.

* * *

### the other place

"Jolly Jack" didnt care what critics made  
of his repute. I wished my best be read   
two hundred years (as Shaw defined "immortal").  
At table, against Shaw and Wells, my elders

and betters, I jujed Mussolini a buffoon.  
A Priestley expert let one or two books last.  
Literature degrees, American colleges taught   
during my lecture tours, are not real jobs.

Each venue produced someone who'd thrown   
away his youth like dirty dish-water.  
I projected, on Wells, art without real science.  
Yet my arts grounding was broad. Piano

play banished nagging tunes from my head.  
In old age, on rural painting holidays,  
complete with beret, I joined Marie Hartley   
and Joan Ingilby of The Wonders of Yorkshire.

I'm Jack of All Trades and master of none.  
John Braine told authors: Diversify or perish.  
In my murder mystery, Salt is Leaving,  
the amateur sleuths method didnt guess

the criminal by the kind of hard evidence  
that would hold up in court. He pondered  
little over-reactions, an unnecessary  
remark trying to distract from a clue...

My Wellsian collection of science fiction  
comes from The Door in the Wall. For me,   
you may suspect it is a stage door.  
The narrator stumbles thru The Other Place,

entranced. He finally forces his way back.  
The inhabitants are appallingly changed,  
reflecting his own changed state of mind.  
Aldous Huxley has mind-changing drugs open

The Doors of Perception to Heaven and Hell.  
The Magicians drew, from me, poetic fantasy.  
I thought poets the best people. And wondered   
why musicians bothered with us writers.

I was undogmatic about life after death.  
My essays and plays speculate: the field is   
open. I doubted death an easy way out  
for wicked deeds; no more easy than life.

If my type-writer was a conveyor belt   
to pay-checks, life is no conveyor belt   
to death. Twice in my life - as novelist   
and broadcaster - national celebrity

honored me with a place in history.  
My novels out-look remained theatrical.  
I sought to create mind-expanding plays  
constructed with care the audience follow.

* * *

## part five:  
live and let live

_return tocontents_

### Green Is History

#### _Versed sample mainly of A Green History Of The World by Clive Ponting._

In "love of power... thru greed and ambition...  
violent fanatics" professed public vision  
"to win the prizes themselves.., their one standard...  
the pleasure of their party" still answers

since Thucydides of city states long ago.  
Gathered food is not to water, store or hoe.  
More births meant more arms and hands  
against natures death toll and raiding bands.

But fruits of the wild will only support  
thinly spread tribes of nomads and their sport.  
Land-owners took power over folks lives  
forcing them move to a few city hives.

The priests social ladder controled labor squads  
building grandiose temples up to the gods  
In sacred precinct of Uruk was found,  
on baked clay tablets, the first true script,

in the poems of a priestess, unbound  
from prime use to keep track of fairly strict  
rations, while tracking that star-specked  
shell of heaven, ever rolling on seed-

time. Displays of wealth, rival cities decked  
themselves in, drew bigger armies to feed.  
Watch-towered walls grew of enormous girth.  
War leads to more central control and dictate.

Army chiefs took-over by right of birth  
in a palace on a private estate.  
A class system of nobles, commoners  
and slaves, made law, was to freedom averse.

Gentle seepage, into under-ground springs,  
tree-felling, in the hills, to violence brings,  
with muddy flood, mass drowning, buried port.  
Blocked water-course spills marsh, to court

the malarial mosquito, while sky-laked  
clouds cease form over soilless and sun-baked  
wastes. The land that's left is to irrigate.  
Records, of more barley than wheat, relate

to salt-water table rise til "the earth  
turned white." Like weakened beasts, this dearth  
was preyed-on, where the ancients ancients stirred  
to the cock crow in Mosul that could be heard

in Basra. From earliest history  
the worlds deserts were a man-made folly.  
Arabian star charts had most opportune   
formed since Babylon a record unsundered

til navigation for deserts of the moon.  
The Third World, til into nineteen hundred,  
was the whole world, for short lives of famine  
and plague. Few and disease-prone plants fed

just enuf, dully, if weather stayed fine.  
Europes rulers took half the food, poorly stored.  
Thru the Black Death of one human in three,  
England and France fought hundred years war.

Leaders in Beijing had to over-see  
grain, to builders and armies Great-Wall wide  
defense, by one thousand two hundred miles  
Grand Canal: a million mouths more in file.

The Khmers lake-fed Angkor forest temples.  
China, most literate culture, for example,  
nine plus in ten times, for two thousand years,  
on record, had famines in one province

at least. In the Roman empire, six men  
owned half North Africa. Cicero then  
decried "so utterly stupid" British slaves.  
Rich-quick plantations and mines were graves

left by imports for a revived Europe  
killed natives self-sufficient ways with crop  
choice, not risked by one pest, in each niche  
of gardens, orchards, small-scale water-reach.

Hand-tending and terracing reduced soil  
disturbance. Natives had land but not toil.  
Aztec millions, shrunk from twenty-five to one.  
The paternal Inca, made puppet, scorned: __

_You Christians made us slaves. You took our wives  
and daughters...our property, burning lives  
and tearing us with dogs._ Foodless, a quarter  
were left, diseased, their llama flocks slaughtered.

North American Indians were forced West  
in series of broken treaties that pressed  
them to reservations, on a trail of lost  
lives, till, to desert, this sub-class was tossed.

Like Pacific islanders, they were distressed  
by alcohol, disease, suppressed cultures.  
Like Aborigines, who did not grasp land  
owning, they were killed, degraded, banned.

Gold empires south of the Sahara,  
theocracies of Ghana, Kanem, Zimbabwe..,  
slavery wrecked. Racists made peasants scratch  
as landless labor, forced have cards to catch

them with, and passes hold them to a job  
to pay hut and poll tax (cost Thatchers job).  
Import duties, against natives, the more  
made massively unequal incomes for

settlers, with fall in locals numbers.  
In nineteen sixty-seven, the rumblers,  
of officials, found out genocide  
by disease of Brazil Indians. To hide,

too, Indonesian pressure of living,  
on the outer islands tribes, became killing.  
Bolivar revolution "plowed the sea."  
Conquistador politics stopped-on

great houses serfs born to debt-slavery.  
New World plantations of sugar, cotton  
and tobacco all rapidly exhaust  
the soil. Needing many hard workers there

spread the use of slaves West, as partly forced  
Civil War. Southern States gave way to share-  
croppers. Hands stayed landless in West Indies.  
Fewer controled sugar, moving from land-

lords to mill owners to firms. Oft absentees,  
South-east Asian lords or rice mills command  
were financed for low-wage plantations, let  
the peasants, to compete, fall into debt.

_return tocontents_

Britains tea is as cheap as its labor.  
Poor workers barracks and high price stores  
mean companies alone can risk finance  
long-term schemes like tropical tree plants

of coconut, oil palm, sisal, coffee,  
rubber and cacao. Bananas cost fee  
of planting, transport, fridges. Big firms bossed  
market and supply, to small-holders cost,

at mercy of world price fluctuation  
in a few- or one-product nation.  
Export facilities but drained its growth.  
Ghana and Guinea cheap energy sources, loath

firms were to use, for smelters, and to build  
processing plants that filled the Wests coffers.  
For all the new land in the world impressed  
more's broken, some by land "reform" givers.

The pine moth infests China new forest.  
Erosion is why the _Yellow_ River.  
Fifteen billion tons a year of top-soil  
are lost in the US, old Soviet Union,

China and India, from half the earths crop-soil.  
'Thirties Great Plains drought, to dunes gone,  
raised, far east, choking black-outs blowing in.  
By the Seventies, the States missed highly

one-third their soil. Dust, from plowing in  
China can be detected in Hawaii.  
Jungle, with no way thru, two millenia  
ago, is the Thar desert in India.

"Stones grow in fields" of Haiti "green island."  
Less than forty years halved the tropics stand  
of South America, South-east Asia  
and, causing chronic drought, West Africa,

so afflicting below the Sahara.  
Forest is burned down in Amazonia,  
to squander a medical treasure house  
of species, for vast ranches cattle browse

quickly to ruin. Settlers are welcome,  
to fend-off land reform. More pollution   
from Brazil, China and India, in grandiose  
projects, prescribe Earths fatal over-dose.

China Great Wall of trees stay the Gobi;  
Vietnam greens back from war; paddy fields  
most efficient of farming inputs grow by  
fifty times. Modern cereal farming yields

at best twice the energy that we eat:  
to fertilize, kill pests and run machines  
are ever rising costs. Factory meat  
uses two to three times the energy it gleans.

This becomes twenty times, to have fish froze  
for mans plate. To process and move around  
food takes three times the energy that goes  
to grow it. All food produced, and to mound,

in the industrial world devours more wealth  
than it makes and fails to conserve soil health.  
Rich importers of wheat export famine.  
Half Earths food, the modern quarter dine.

One quarter their grain feeds less, for meats.  
A quarter of all US food no-one eats  
for waste at some stage. Half the human race  
under-nourished, four hundred million face

stunted lives and health risks. Forty million,  
year on year, hunger or its ills kill on,  
like three hundred jumbo jet crashes a day,  
half the passengers, children, falling away.

All twentieth century famines faced withheld  
food: Russia, the thirties and nineteen twelve,  
Bengal, 'forty-three; eighties Ethiopia,  
the Sahel and the Horn of Africa...

Over one billion folk lack basic needs  
like food, drink and housing, their lifes sum  
half as long. Earths poor seven in ten pleads  
to fifteen per cent of personal income.

Industrial countries poor four in ten gets  
sixteen per cent national income. First  
two hundred firms wrest one-third the planets  
wealth. The biggest boast turn-overs to worst

nearly all Third World nations. In their strong  
market position, they dictate the ware,  
made and sold with frills, that wont last long,  
are costly to run and you cannot repair;

to hook on maintenance bolsters profits.  
Tv adverts show no falser profets.  
Each day, over half mankinds foul water  
takes twenty-five thousand to the slaughter.

Indonesia on fire needs Czech kids gas masks.  
Dead lakes, scorched trees tracked acid rain.  
Poison detergents waste power for gain.  
Silting dams cost fertilizers leach into taps.

Near Paris, five per cent only, of eight  
hundred species, that suffered a sad fate  
from pest killers, did crops harm. They kill  
twenty thousand folk and make badly ill

three-quarter million a year. Skin wont heal  
from cells burn the living waters for their meal.  
Of seventy thousand chemicals, plus  
a thousand a year, half are dangerous.

Cousteau thought aggression wont sustain  
eras-lethal "atoms for peace." Three-mile  
Island cost a billion dollars to contain.  
Some hundred thousand, from Chernobyl pile,

grow most sick or lead lives cancers shorten,  
and for ten thousand square miles no-one goes.  
Chemical plant leaks, in Bhopal did for ten  
thousand, blinded and maimed twice those;

laid one hundred-twenty Rhine miles bare.  
New York nine million tons yearly drastic  
sea dumping adds to lifeless hundred square  
metres toxic sludge. Five million plastic

holders a day, thrown from ships, did lie  
for one million sea-birds a year to die.  
Rise in sea levels and glacier retreat  
matches a half per cent rise in the heat

and the air increase in green-house gases.  
From both poles, the ozone hole advances.  
Global warming at least three degrees clears  
any in the last hundred thousand years:

Trees may not adapt to such fast climate  
displacement, blowing too dry or too wet.  
Drowned isles, fertile deltas and plains, floods  
in the growing seasons and reduced goods

mean famines, migrations, hates out-break.  
Man in nature must give as well as take.  
Man's his own war prisoner, like caged Lorenz,  
the psychologist observed by rodents.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Jacques Cousteau

_Human society is too diverse, national passion too strong, human aggressiveness too deep-seated for the peaceful and war-like atom to stay divorced for long. We cannot embrace one while abhorring the other; we must learn, if we want to live at all, to live without both.  
Jacques Cousteau._

In the cool cabin of the schooner  
over a sheen of captains table  
Jacques gives a briefing  
in his nice French accent

telling me personally of what they hope  
to find out on their latest sail.  
No sooner said than done  
usually with a back-flip over-board

into the transparencies of under-water   
filming. It is a family jaunt   
and I am kept informed  
how each member of the crew is getting on.

I feel like the ships mascot.  
I was just a juvenile then long ago  
and I don't remember the quests  
they were on, just as they could not

know the planetarium they found  
a two thousand year-old computer  
masterpiece of mathematical mechanics  
likely of the Archimedes workshop

but I got the message of the way   
they sought things: These are a happy   
confident and dynamic people  
and they are our friends.

* * *

### Paul Harrison: Inside The Third World

Too many children are reared, that some live  
to look after parents with less to give.  
Cut and burned forests, and less fallow fields,  
heat up diseased swarms, addicting yields

to fertilizers and insecticides.  
No shade, no moisture, no roots, land slides.  
Floods, cyclones, earth-quakes, eruptions beset  
over-farmed soil, turning to desert, grows debt,

bought-out small-holdings and tied folk.  
Tractors lay off hands, too poor to poke  
water tables, sunk by electric pumps.  
Costly machines store wealth in bigger lumps.

The rich own state power and job placers,  
cheap workless labors starving strike-breakers.  
Subsidies, for bribes in cities favor,  
push down farm prices, so landless labor

swells urban mobs, force state about-faces.  
Global firms need but few Third World bases  
to swamp sweated crafts-mens local produce  
fails laws for big business, given credit use

and official aid. The system harasses  
bare-foot business-men of the helpless masses  
who house themselves and exchange perks.  
Second-hand tooled self-taught skills work

resourceful re-cyclings great potential,   
viewed a nuisance, like their shanties. When shall  
they get amenities? License denial  
rates extortion, break-up and movings trial.

Greedy wasters world-war on nature, thru  
poor nations "leech cities" ruled by the new  
elite, indulging arms and other show spends.  
Social climbers defer to them. Youth trends

against parents, ashamed of their cultures.  
Tourists feed servant, thief, and whore futures.  
Reaction may stress womens low status.  
Neglect of urchins breeds social traitors,

fend for themselves and against rival "firms."  
Extended families pay school-boys worm  
their way into connections. If this saves  
one from poverty, exams teach to be slaves.

While mass hunger cripples hand and brain.  
Cures for wealths ills fail world health to sustain.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### animal sacrifices

They were too well meaning to show their feelings,  
to the immovable powers-that-be,  
the distinguished professionals she went to

with the secret videos of her job at the camp.  
But you could tell they deplored it, just  
by the way that laid-back vet tried to say

something positive about the hellish place,  
then made technical points, like an officer  
picking-out "sloppy" turn-out on a parade --

tho parade is the last thing the vivisecting  
parasites want to do with their work of shame.  
The masters, the victims throw their affection on,

are standing iron bars that muzzle their snuffling  
innocence in cell walks round a concrete earth.  
And the consultant consulted, on the animal howls

of the damned, betrayed no emotion  
beyond a twitch in the face, at the betrayal  
of trust from puppies poisoned for profit

in the name of objective scientific experiment.  
If nature is human enuf to test to destruction,  
for our survival, we self-destruct.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### ten-level hells

_"Unless the government tacitly guarantees that taxpayers' money will somehow cover the many contingencies and risks, private finance will not build new nuclear plant. The Government will be too preoccupied, devoting all its political will to the slowest, most expensive, narrowest, most inflexible and riskiest option. The most damaging cost of nuclear power is its opportunity cost."_

_Walt Patterson._

Three-Mile Island was a level 5 emergency.  
And, had we been told, the Windscale blow-out.  
The milk poured away, the cattle slaughtered.  
You, too, would be discreetly geiger-counted

but no doubt out-right slaughter was frowned upon.  
In a sturdy British determination to turn over  
a new leaf, Windscale was re-named Sellafield.  
A leak was fined as criminal negligence

for up to eight months in 2005.  
Sellafield notched-up a level 3 emergency.  
Chernobyl threatened thermo-nuclear reaction  
with millions of casualties and a continental

river system poisoned twelve thousand years.  
Chernobyl threatens still some unofficial  
10 level Hell, not a mere 7 maximum,   
like Dante Inferno, as world experts struggle

to contain the sarcofagus practicly for ever.  
The atomic salvationists fear for when  
the lights go out. At least the old hell-fire  
sermons tried to keep folk out of Hell,

not in it, as the only way to keep warm.  
Neither reason nor ridicule will move them:  
The false profets, of the fission utopia,  
the fissiofiles fall-out Rain of Terror.

Cancer rates and costs of Chernobyl worst  
its return to the Stone Age, some pretend  
fission averts. British plants already flake out.  
The fault-prone over-budget Finnish reactor

like some gargantuan beast tries to bury  
its waste, as if it will be safe for ever.  
The crust of Gaia gets its radioactive fix:  
States become pushers of fission addiction.

Like Finland, Britain abounds in natural forces.  
The Carbon Trust proposed 8 tidal barrages.  
Nuclear France built tidal plant in the sixties.  
Britain, with the best tidal resources, currents

and waves, built nowt: No low impact lagoons.  
Wind and sun complement as power sources.  
Solar power will lighten the carbon foot-print.  
Big government small minds starve ingenuity.

Gordon Brown says nuclear power is "clean"  
not counting the carbon-intensive uranium  
mining, extraction and infrastructure,  
concrete laying for plants and waste storage;

"secure" if eight hundred nuclear police,  
merged with a larger force, and screwed to   
existing stations, stay lucky; and "affordable:"  
not quite the hubris of "too cheap to meter."

The propaganda of atomic energy  
found its level at a perpetual motion machine  
fraud: the unlimited energy from fission  
an unlimited liability of radioactivity.

Fission energy hasnt turned an honest penny  
in half a century, given a Total Energy  
Audit of all the hidden costs and health  
and safety and security imperatives.

_return tocontents_

Small Is Beautiful. Big Is Subsidised.  
Even big government will prefer fusion energy.  
Fission consumes also energy in housing  
and sustaining personnel. Then, the plants cost

to run, maintain and decommission, leaving  
that sword of Damocles, the waste disposal.  
And centralists depend on the national grid  
which wastes a third of energy it transmits.

"Clean, secure and affordable" -  
for three hundred thousand years?  
Unless Gordon Brown is God, he knows not.  
The God delusion is not the delusion of Gods

being but the delusion of being God.  
Power corrupts, power deludes to corrupt:  
even laws of nature are deemed suspended.  
This lost touch, termed "villa sickness" afflicts

the powerling in the presidential palace.  
If Goddo says fission energy is clean,  
secure and affordable, Goddo has spoken.  
British Energy was sold between states.

Drawing from a well of public money,  
France alone, besides little Lithuania,  
is mainly nuclear. Parasite politics sells-out  
Britains future to build more Ten-level Hells.

French spokesman wrestles with English.  
Is it beyond a state firm to send one fluent?  
Someone like their director of publicity,  
one Andrew Brown, and he brother to the PM

as well! Not to mention those friends of Gord,  
present and past chairs of atomic agencies  
included, the so-called nuclear cronies,  
the Tories waved thru, after a Green show

to vote blue for. Blairs heir, Cameron puft  
he'd put a wind-mill on the sand-castle  
of number ten, which shows his priorities.  
Labours Cameron the chamelion goes

pro-nuclear again, once Labour ditched plan   
for renewable energy, after the poll, that farce.   
A state of jobbing lawyers dodgy dossiers  
brings back nuclear power "with a vengeance"

or sends scores of thousands to their deaths  
in foreign wars and disturbs the peace.  
Old dogs of politicians rehearse  
the old cold-war ploy of nuclear power,

with heads in the air over super-carriers  
and under the sea with submarines.  
Their arsenals and dumps terrorise the future  
with time bombs of radioactive devastation.

The global self-promoters plot and fancy  
the people too poor to rule the new order.  
If anyone ever thought that democracy  
should give way to "merit" or technocracy,

fission energy shows that a rule by genius  
can become a genius for idiocy   
in the classic Greek sense of the word.  
The campaign-finance scandals announce

the age of Pay-master politics.  
Such science, as owes its success to honesty,  
is both a democratic and scientific method:  
STV-PR needs be for all official elections.

Science requires first chamber political laws  
checked in economic practise by the nations  
division of labor, elected in the second  
chamber, for Equality of Lobbying.

* * *

## part 6: Michelson & Morley, Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski and a...  
Statistical Theory of Relativity.

_return tocontents_

  * Fore-word
  * A slight compass error: the Michelson-Morley calculation.
  * Statistics as useful tool and essential principle.
  * Geometric mean prediction of Michelson-Morley experiment.
  * Statistics of circular functions and the Interval-derived light speed caldera.
  * Times arrow and space-time curvature in a probabilistic Interval.
  * The Michelson-Morley experiment takes Einstein lift for gravitational waves.
  * References with notes on my Democracy Science site.

### Fore-word.

This 2007 essay was an attempt to popularise my amateur findings in fysics, in so far as I understood them myself, being increasingly speculative towards the end. The essay leaves out any maths. That can be found on my Democracy Science web-site.

For all my undoubted misunderstandings, I was much more immersed in the subject when I wrote this unpublished essay in 2007. Re-reading it has served as a reminder to myself of my thinking then.

### A slight compass error: the Michelson-Morley calculation.

This is an introduction to how I stumbled onto a statistical theory of special relativity (SR). I did not go looking for it. I came to it from another field of study, scientific method of elections, which is another story. I only mention this because it must have been this different point of view that made me notice what I call "a slight compass error" in the history of modern fysics.

A Slight Compass Error is the title of a novel by Sybil Bedford, also a biografer of Aldous Huxley. In early life, a woman departs ever so slightly from her intended course in life. It is only a slight compass error.   
But the moral is, that like a compass reading, not quite truly taken, by the time she is old, the small divergence, from her intentions, has steadily grown. She finds herself hopelessly adrift from her destination in life.

A technical achievement, comparable to the ancient Greek planetarium attributed to Archimedes in his Syracuse workshop, the epochal 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment was designed to measure drag effects on the speed of light, bounced with a mirror, back and forth and cross-ways, with respect to a given motion.

At the time, the velocity of an "ether" was believed in, because of the need for some universal medium for light waves, just as water and air etc are mediums for waves. In effect, earth motion stood in for the ether, perhaps, as the motion of a boat stands in for the relative motion of a river bank.

Michelson and Morley calculated the respective times taken by a light beam split into two return journeys, at right angles to each other. They estimated that, on average the light beam going directly with and against earth motion, or up and down stream, so to speak, took slightly longer than the light beam with a cross-stream journey.

But their experiment showed that light took the same time either way. However, Einstein theory of special relativity made the constant speed of light a basic condition. As a consequence, every point of view had to accommodate itself to light speed constancy, yet still make sense in terms of each others observations.

But first of all, the Michelson-Morley calculation had to be corrected in line with the Michelson-Morley experiment. This was done by multiplying the head-and-tail-stream journey by a contraction factor, so that it was no longer calculated to take longer than the cross-stream return journey.   
This contraction factor is named after Fitzgerald and Lorentz, two fysicists who independently thought of the correction.

Simply putting in a correction like this, to amend a mistake, is bad science, if it does not lead to any new understanding of the fenomenum in question.   
In the jargon of science filosofy, it is called an "ad hoc" assumption, meaning that it is just a prop to stop the structure of ones argument from falling down, like a badly constructed building. An ad hoc assumption does not follow logicly from the basic principles, which are supposed to deduce a comprehensive explanation of some subject.

When young, I noticed several apparent similarities between a subject I was studying, transferable voting method, and special relativity. (This is found on my recent web page: Relativity theory and election method.) I thought that an analogy might be drawn between the two subjects, in statistical terms.   
For a long time, I didnt realise that both subjects are basicly statistical systems, anyway. Eventually, I did notice that the contraction factor has the same form as a geometric mean, which is a statistical average.

This is where "a slight compass error" comes in. The Michelson-Morley calculation averaged the return journeys with the arithmetic mean. This is the average most familiar to everyone.   
If a footballer scores an average of one goal per game, it does not mean he scored one goal every game. It means that sometimes he scored more, sometimes less, but on average, he scored at that rate.

Say, over a season of twenty-four games, he scored twenty-three goals. One game, he may have scored a hat trick, and another game, two goals, some games he went goalless. But to get the average you divide total goals scored, say, 23, by total matches played, say, 24. That gives an arithmetic mean of almost one goal per game.

Michelson and Morley did the same kind of averaging. They took each return journey as a sum of two journeys back and forth, or cross-ways both ways, and divided by two to get the average. Using the arithmetic mean gave them different times for the two journeys of the light beam split at right angles and reflected by mirrors.

But the arithmetic mean is not the only kind of average. In statistics, different kinds of averages are used to represent different patterns of data.   
Had Michelson and Morley used the geometric mean, a differently calculated mean or average, they would have found this way, of averaging the return journeys, gives the correct prediction, that the times taken by the cross-stream journey and the head-and-tail stream journey is the same.

The geometric mean of just two values is taken by multiplying them and taking the square root of the multiple. (If there were three values, the cubic root of their multiple would be taken, and so on.)

The geometric mean is the average used when there is an acceleration in the value of a range of data. For instance, savings that benefit from compound interest, accelerate in value. (We dont realise this because inflation devalues the cumulative effect.)   
If you only earned interest at simple interest rates, you would use the arithmetic mean to estimate average capital over a period. Simple interest does not give interest on anything but the original capital invested, so the same percentage interest keeps yielding the same amount of interest.

In short, arithmetic mean averages a constant rate of accumulation but geometric mean averages an accelerating or increasing rate of accumulation.

### Statistics as useful tool and essential principle.

_back to thisessay start._

Statistics was given a bad press. One should not under-estimate the power of words to give a bad name to the good.   
The converse is also true, by the way. Words can also give a good name to the bad.

There is a beautiful example in my own line of study. ("Proportional representation" covers a multitude of sins, by way of party list systems corruption of its first principled invention, as the quota-preferential method, independently by Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare.)   
But that is another story.

Back in the early nineteenth century, mathematicians needed a way to assess the accuracy of astronomical observations. When astronomers take measurements of the positions of planets or stars, they do not exactly tally. There are discrepancies where human error creeps in. Mathematicians wanted a way of knowing the exactest readings to make sure that observations indeed fitted in precisely with fysical theories such as Newton laws of motion.

Pierre-Simon Laplace and Carl Friedrich Gauss, two of mathematics finest, independently came up with a way of looking at observation error systematicly, so it could be allowed for and minimised. This entailed collecting a range of more or less discrepant observations of an event, that would cluster about an average observation, that could be deemed the most accurate.

There is a way of testing the truth of statisticly assessed accuracy. A large group of people can be individually asked to guess, say, an order of tallness between several people who differ only slightly in height. Individuals will make slightly different estimates. But taken as a whole, their guesses will average out to a remarkably accurate assessment.

When Gauss drew a cluster of observations as a graf it had a bell shape. The dome of the bell, representing the most average observations, is most likely to be true. The outward curves of the mouth of the bell represented the much fewer observations most astray from the main mass of sightings, and therefore most likely to be in error.

Now this curve has been called the Gaussian error curve. But this is to name the curve after its outer wings of most probably erroneous observations. The Gaussian curve might just as well have been named the Gaussian accuracy curve, after the central mass of the domed curves most probably accurate observations.

Observe the power of words. Statistics, the collection of data for determining accuracy of observation has become associated instead with a second-best sort of approximation from errors of observing far distant objects.

Also in the nineteenth century, fysical measurements on the very small scale, as well as the very large scale, contrived to give a similar sort of second-best status for statistics.   
When gases were believed to be masses of very small particles in motion, it was deemed they obeyed Newton laws of motion, individually. As it was impossible to measure all those millions of inter-actions individually, Clerk-Maxwell could only apply the laws to average or representative effects of all those individual collisions combining as a mass.

Albert Einstein is the classic example of a fysicist who regarded statistical explanation as incomplete compared to deterministic explanation. Yet no-one, in his hay-day, used statistics to greater effect in fysical explanation.   
Bose-Einstein statistics is of the collective behavior of particles classified as bosons. Two of Einsteins three 1905 papers were statistical treatments, namely of Brownian motion and the foto-electric effect.

The third 1905 paper was on special relativity, which Einstein deemed to explain motions proximate to light speed without abandoning Newtonian determinism.   
He abandoned Newton notions of absolute space and absolute time. He abandoned the ether, a cosmic medium for light waves to wave in, and its supposed absolute velocity. But he replaced these absolutes with the new absolute of the speed of light, which no massive bodys motion could ever reach.

It is perhaps fair to say that light speed has been regarded as definitive. Statistical means of fine-tuning its value have to be used but are considered to be only tools to determine a unique measure.   
A statistical theory of special relativity, however, shows that light speed can be regarded as an average, implicit in the mathematics of high energy fysics, and not merely to take into account observational errors.

A mainly former attitude to statistical laws, as second-best approximations to individual determinations of events, may be likened to a mainly former attitude among democrats to representative democracy as a second-best approximation to classical democracy of self-representation.

Einstein reservations against statistical explanation are well-publicised. But it's unfair to attribute them to personal prejudice. When statistics got into mathematics text-books, it was as an after-thought, typicly clagged on as the last chapter. In other words, it was treated as a secondary tool, without any logical place in the structure of mathematics.

I can remember when going to college to study social science, regarding the statistics course as not as potent as mathematics like the calculus, from which scientific theories of discovery had been made.

Einstein was influenced by Mach principle in formulating his theory of relativity. After all, Mach believed that a fysical body should be relatable to all the other bodies in the universe, to explain its behavior. If you want a universal explanation, you must put what part of it you seek to explain, in the context of the whole.

Machs influence on Einstein shows the power of words to mesmerise the greatest of us. Because, Mach principle can be regarded as statistics by another name. Statistics collects any spread of data and represents it in terms of its most typical item or average. Statistics is the kind of logicly self-contained mathematics needed to practise Mach principle, which is a self-referal principle.

Mach principle properly recognised as a statistical principle might have led Einstein to look for statistical characteristics to the mathematics of special relativity, just as he found statistical explanations in his other two 1905 papers.

### Geometric mean prediction of Michelson-Morley experiment.

_back to thisessay start._

The statistical nature of high energy fysics might have been discovered as far back as 1887, when Michelson and Morley conducted their celebrated experiment.

In 1802, Thomas Young conducted a classic experiment that showed light has wave properties. Young experiment sent a light beam thru two slits. The recombined light showed up on a screen as a series of alternating bright and dark fringes. These are the light equivalents of the crests and trofs of two water waves that combine to heighten the crests and deepen the trofs.   
Where waves combine out of fa's (phase) or out of step, the crests and trofs cancel to produce a flat surface.

Fysicists assumed that if light was a wave, it must be formed in a medium, just as water waves are formed in water, and sound waves are formed in air. They called this medium the ether. And being universal, they assumed it had a universal or absolute velocity.

The Michelson-Morley experiment was designed to find this ether velocity by calculating the effect it would have on the velocity of light, going with and against the ether, as compared to the calculation for the same light beam, partly split off at right angles, to move crossways and back with respect to the ether.

When Michelson and Morley calculated two return journeys at right angles to each other, it was practical to take the averages of each back-and-forth journey. So, they took averages in the way that all of us, including experienced statisticians would naturally do. They took the average which statisticians call the arithmetic mean. For a return journey, add the two velocities and divide by two to get the average velocity over the whole journey.

The trouble is that the Michelson and Morley calculation produced a slower time, for the light beam to go head and tail wind to the supposed ether, than it took for the other part of the beam to go the same distance cross-ways and back.   
That's a trouble because the actual Michelson-Morley experiment contradicted the calculation by showing that light took the same time to go the two return journeys at right angles to each other.

To make up the difference with experiment, fysicists effectively had to rig the calculation, by putting in a so-called contraction factor. Heading into the supposed ether wind was supposed to have a contraction effect.   
But they were only making up the story as they went along. They werent arguing from first principles. They just put in a correction for an unforeseen occurence. They were only pretending to know what they were doing.

Nevertheless, the so-called contraction factor still offered a clue as to what had gone wrong, if its mathematical form had been recognised. But there was no reason anyone should look at it as an existing formula. It seemed to be just the odd amount by which the Michelson-Morley calculation was made to match with experiment.

AccidentIy, I came across the contraction factor as an already known kind of formula. I was trying to see special relativity in statistical terms, because that would help me to compare it with another subject. It doesnt matter here what the other subject was (election method). I didnt realise then that statistics is basic to both subjects. But the exercise did give me the feeling that I had seen the form of the contraction factor somewhere before.

Eventually, I went back to my old teachers book on statistics, which he co-authored. This was Statistics for Business Studies, by Gregory and Ward. This was an elementary text, which I never thought would lead me to any original scientific discovery, and I didnt expect to make any such in natural science, which I never qualified in. Yet I only had to do the simple algebraic operation, that is called factorisation, on the contraction factor, to realise that it has the form of a geometric mean.

Factorising is learnt in school. It means changing the contraction factor into two bracketed terms multiplied by each other. One of the bracketed terms is the speed of light plus a given velocity of an event. The other bracketed term is light speed minus the same given velocity. These two terms are in effect the upper and lower limits of a range of velocities above and below light speed.

The business of statistics is to average a range to find its most representative value somewhere in the middle of the whole range. One way of doing this, the usual way already mentioned, is the arithmetic mean. That works by adding the two terms defining the range and dividing by two. If you were to do that here, the arithmetic mean would turn out to be the light speed.

But the geometric mean works by multiplying the two range terms and taking their square root. And that gives the so-called contraction factor.

Even my old statistics text-book spoke rather dubiously of the geometric mean, as one of the possible averages by which to represent a set of data. So it is not surprising that the contraction factor as geometric mean went unnoticed by fysicists or anyone else.

And it still took me quite a time to further realise, that if you average each Michelson-Morley return journey with the geometric mean, then the light beam takes the same time on both journeys, giving the correct prediction for the Michelson-Morley experiment. Then, you dont need to put in a contraction factor, which is essentially correcting for the absence of a geometric mean calculation for the return journeys.

### Statistics of circular functions and the Interval-derived light speed caldera.

_back to thisessay start._

What then is the difference between the arithmetic mean and the geometric mean as averages? Well, the arithmetic mean is suitable for representing data that shows a constant rate of change, like velocity or speed in a given direction. Whereas, the geometric mean represents or averages a set of data, which shows a changing rate of change, like acceleration, which is positive change of velocity.

We know from Galileo and Newton that a body in uniform motion in a straight line will continue at its regular velocity unless acted upon by an outside force. Steady velocity in a circle, like a moons planetary orbit, may be the combined effect of this inertia in a straight line and a force, such as gravity, pulling the moving object towards the center of the circle, which is the planets center of gravity.

Gravity is an example of an accelerating force. In general, we can say that circular velocity has such a component of acceleration. Where any range of data shows an acceleration in value, the geometric mean is the suitable average to find its most typical value. And it so happens that the averaging of circular motions, say in four quadrants of ninety degrees at a time, may be done by finding geometric means of such rotations.

Why would we wish to find geometric mean rotations of circular motion?   
Well, this involves a form of mathematics so basic that it is taught to primary school children as part of the foundation of mathematics. The name for it is circular functions, which are described by complex numbers. These are a so-called real number combined with a so-called imaginary number. The names dont matter. They just represent two co-ordinate axes at ninety degrees to each other, for the special purpose of mapping any position on a plane.

That is the grafical meaning of complex numbers. Their significance for algebra is that any equation, to whatever power you raise its variables, has a solution in terms of complex numbers. In this respect, complex numbers may be said to complete the number system. That is why they are so basic to a childs mathematical education.

When I thought of applying Mach principle, as an essentially statistical principle, not only to fysics but to mathematics itself, then a statistical treatment of complex numbers was necessary. It seemed necessary to show that not only the fysical universe must be self-representative but also the universe of numbers must be self-representative. Every number should be expressible as a representative average of other numbers, and this condition should also hold for every complex number.

For instance, an imaginary number is the geometric mean rotation of the dimension of real numbers, considered as a range, comprising the positive and negative x-axis. The converse is also true: a real number is the geometric mean rotation of the range of the y-axis of positive and negative imaginary numbers.

An average is by definition the average of a range. Generally, in statistics, the range has two dispersions which are found by subtracting the upper end value from the average and by subtracting the lower end value from the average.

To find the geometric means of complex numbers, meant multiplying two complex numbers and finding their square root. Four complex variables, in terms of x and y co-ordinate pairs define the four quadrants of a circle.

It turns out that the geometric means, of two such successive complex variables, at right angles, in the quartered circle, are in terms of the radius of the circle, at one of the four positive and negative x- and y-axes.

In other words the geometric mean radius is a vector, which has both magnitude and direction. The magnitude is the length of the radius and the direction is its position on one of the four co-ordinate "compass" points (east, south, west, north) of the circle.

It was also possible to find the dispersion of each geometric mean radius by subtracting the radius from each of the two range complex numbers, that were used to derive the geometric mean.   
Tho each geometric mean radius had two different dispersions, when these two dispersions were added to give the total dispersion of the mean, the inequalities in each part always canceled, so that each side of the dispersion contributed equally to the over-all dispersion of any geometric mean radius.

So, it turned out that the geometric mean radius of a circle implied a dispersion, which extended equally from the circumference of the circle to the center and from the circumference to another circle twice the radius of the geometric mean radius.

This turns out to be useful, because circular functions are essentially the mathematics used in special relativity, called Minkowski Interval. This gives different observers an agreed space-time measurement of an event.

The Interval grafs as the constant radius of a circle, whose co-ordinates are, like the Interval itself, in dimensions of distance. One dimension marks an observed objects velocity multiplied by time and the other dimension marks light speed multiplied by time.

One of these two dimensions is imaginary, which, under the operation of the Pythagoras theorem, means that their squared values are subtracted (rather than added) to give the square of the radius, being the square of the Interval.

The observers particular time and velocity measures differ according to their relative positions to an event. Whereas, the Interval is the constant space-time measure for all observers of a given event in uniform motion.

Differently measured positions, by different observers with regard to the same event, are graficly represented by different positions, on the x & y co-ordinates of the circle, that graf as different triangles, whose hypotenuses all have the same radius, which is to say, the same Interval or collective space-time measure of the event.

It only needs a slight mathematical adaptation to replace the constant Interval with the constant light speed as the radius.  
Then, a geometric mean radius becomes the speed of light, with a dispersion of from zero speed, at the circle center, up to as much as twice light speed, describing the outer circle of twice the radius, previously mentioned.

From this modified Interval, different observers local time and velocity measures, take on a new statistical meaning, as different dispersions from the geometric mean light speed.

The circle of geometric mean light speed is like a caldera wall of light of infinite height, which no massive body in our universe can surmount. Equally, the outer wall of this so-called caldera, implied by the statistical dispersion, is an infinitely high barrier against any faster than light motion becoming slow enuf to reach light speed.

Never quite meeting, the two walls may be called the tardyonic or slower-than-light barrier, and the tachyonic or faster-than-light barrier. According to this caldera model of the light barrier, tachyons or faster-than-light particles may not be observed in our cosmos. This is in line with current thinking in fysics.

But it is conceivable that the strange effects of quantum fysics might experimentally infer an outer tachyonic wall to our cosmos, never quite meeting our inner tardyonic light barrier.

A caldera is the cauldron of a volcano left after an explosive eruption. It makes a big bang which is bound to make one think of the cosmology known as the Big Bang. Current evidence suggests a cosmic bang that has produced an infinitely expanding universe.   
And one speculates that perhaps another universe created from a lesser bang might not be infinitely expanding. And correspondingly, the light barrier of the caldera, produced by the lesser bang, might not have been infinitely high as a result.

You wouldnt expect to observe tachyons in our cosmos (this side of the caldera of light). At light speed, time theoreticly comes to a stop. Above light speed, time starts going backwards. Tachyonic signals could send messages back in time, creating temporal paradoxes. History could be undone, but the consequences could remove the possibility of the message being sent back in time. The event you were warning against was prevented, and so it never happened, and so you never knew of it, to warn against it.

### Times arrow and space-time curvature in a probabilistic Interval.

_back to thisessay start._

The equations of classical mechanics and relativity are time-reversible. In principle, any mechanical action can act in reverse. This is not in accord with our experience of time going one way. We cannot undo what has happened in history, tho we may seek to undo some continuing ill-effects of an event.

Another branch of fysics, thermo-dynamics does offer an explanation in accord with experience of time generally going one way. It admits in principle that all mechanical events are reversible. But thermo-dynamics invokes our highly ordered expectation of the way events will occur as giving us a sense of time flowing in one direction.

We dont expect disordered states to spontaneously re-organise themselves. Accidents will happen but unaccidents most probably will not. Thus, we can speak of time having a direction to a very high degree of probability.

A statistical theory of special relativity allows this more realistic view of time to be taken into account. The contraction factor is a part of the Lorentz transformations that allow different observers to translate their local space and time measurements of a velocity event. A version of the contraction factor is also implicit in Minkowski Interval, which describes a commonly observed space-time. And this can be straight-forwardly re-written as a commonly observed geometric mean space-time.

As we've seen, each geometric mean has a dispersion. And the interesting thing about all the dispersions of the geometric mean Lorentz transformations and the geometric mean Interval is that their dispersions practicly disappear for the low speeds found in classical mechanics and which describe our familiar everyday world.

In other words, the space and time values of classical mechanics dont appear to be averages, because they have no apparent dispersions to be averages of. Even supposedly deterministic classical fysics is implicitly statistical.

Coming back to Minkowski Interval, written in the dimensions of a unitary space-time. The three dimensions of space are calculated in terms of Pythagoras theorem in three dimensions. But we can re-write the three spatial dimensions in the form of a generalised geometric mean for, say, three pairs of values to a range.

When we expand this generalised geometric mean Interval, using the binomial theorem, we reproduce the conventional Interval as the first two terms of a binomial distribution. In statistics, the distribution measures the relative probabilities of an occurence out of a total probability of certainty for the whole distribution.

So, for instance, the first term in the series, of a probabilistic Interval, stands for time, which has a probability of nearly one or certainty for relatively low speed velocities, found in our familiar reality, because everyday velocities are negligible compared to the speed of light.   
This assumes the thermodynamic concept of time as a "probability vector." That is times arrow has both size and direction.

The probabilistic distribution of the Interval, on lines of the contraction factor, algebraicly factorises, where the arithmetic mean of the two factors, gives the speed of light.   
The point is that binomially expanding the generalised Interval produces a series of terms starting with an arithmetic mean term and ending with a geometric mean term. Intervening terms gradually change from greater or lesser combinations of the two kinds of mean.

The conventional Interval, found in the first two terms, is on the arithmetic mean end of the distribution. It describes a flat space-time. But the other end of the distribution, with its geometric mean end term, and near approximations thereto, suggests geometry of curved space-time. That, however, is a subject for general relativity, describing how mass bends space-time.

A binomial expansion of space-time might extend from flat to the limits of curvature, even to micro-cosmic extremes, where space-time is supposed to break up at sub-Planck scale level into a "quantum froth."

However, I must admit that - simple in principle tho it is - I know too little mathematical fysics to have done more than give the most inadequate (binomial or other) expansions into more or less flat or curved geometries as successive terms in a statistical range.

A geometric mean in the Michelson-Morley experiment suggested a consequence from general relativity. Namely, Einstein Equivalence principle of acceleration to gravity. A geometric mean is of a non-uniform range of values, implied in a light beam or laser return journey in the earths direction and against the earths direction. This could be interpreted in terms of unequal gravitational effects, which might, in principle, decohere the back and forth laser beam, from gravitational bending on the head-and-tail journey, if such an effect were not too fine to measure.

### The Michelson-Morley experiment takes Einstein lift for gravitational waves.

_back to thisessay start._

If the geometric mean does apply to the Michelson-Morley calculation, this has a consequence for the experiment. Einstein Equivalence principle should apply to it. This principle states the equivalence of two apparently different observational points of view. That is the frame of reference in which an event is accelerating and another frame of reference in which the same event appears rather to be under the influence of gravity.

This is illustrated in Einsteins famous thought experiment of the accelerating lift in outer space. A man inside would float free in the lift, far away from all gravitational masses, until it started accelerating, when he would be pinned down to the floor, as if the power of gravity had re-asserted itself on him.

A light coming thru a window in the lift would in principle take time to reach the other side. By its exit time, it would be slightly below its entrance level. The outside observer sees this as an acceleration effect. The insider sees it as a gravitational effect on the light ray, pulling it down slightly, as it pulled him down wholly to the floor.

This gravitational bending of light was a prediction of the general theory of relativity, once all the difficult mathematics was resolved to make the prediction exact. In 1919, it was tested by Arthur Eddington and team during a solar eclipse, showing the deviation of star-light passing close by the mass of the sun.

I thought of extending the lift scenario, so the light ray, thru the lift window, is reflected by a mirror. (This was my own "reflection" on the subject!) At the time of reflection, one could imagine, the lift being oscillated, in the other direction, by an outside "spring" attached to the roof. The exact mechanism doesnt matter. The point is to imagine the up and down effect, so that the light ray on its reflection is also bent but the other way, forming a loop of light back and forth across the lift.

I got the idea from the bent light ray being like the fundamental upward vibration, of an oscillator, to which there would be a corresponding downward vibration.

The insider doesnt see himself oscillated. Instead, he might imagine being bobbed up and down on a gravitational wave in the fabric of space-time, caused, say, from a super-nova explosion.

This brings us back to the Michelson-Morley experiment where the correct geometric mean prediction implies an acceleration effect on the head-and-tail stream journey. This should be equivalent to a gravitational effect.

Nowadays the light beam is a laser, consisting of perfectly coherent light waves of one wave-length and therefore one color. But the back and forth waves should decohere with each other, if there is a non-uniform or acceleration effect on their mutual journey. Equivalently, there should be a slight gravitational loop caused by their contrasting back and forth journeys, tho much too slight to measure with known technology.

Presumably, light going with a massive body is energised by the gravitational sling-shot effect. This has been used to speed satellite probes, like Voyager, on their way. Light energisation cannot increase its constant speed but only increase its frequency, correspondingly compressing the light wavelength.

The light beam in reverse is de-energised by moving against the massive bodys gravitational pull, This beam has lower frequency but longer wavelength.   
These two lasers, or beams of coherent light on the same wave-length, in opposite directions, with opposing gravitational effects on their energies and therefore wavelengths, should decohere.

In principle, there shouldnt be decoherence of the laser beam on a return cross-stream journey, provided the two cross-ways motions really are acted upon neutrally with respect to some great mass.

The (gravitational) energising of a laser, increasing its frequerncy and correspondingly narrowing its wavelength, to maintain the constant speed of light, is known as "blueshift," because blue light is more energetic with a shorter wavelength.

The gravitational de-energising of a laser is the famous "gravitational red-shift" of light to a longer wavelength.

This wavelength shift of light is often compared to the Doppler effect. Nigel Calder, in Einsteins Universe, describes this as the "hee-haw" sound.   
When a sound, like a train whistle, approaches at speed, this compresses the sound waves, to a higher pitch (the "hee" part of the sound. When the train passes, the sound is having further to travel, spacing out the frequency with which it reaches the ear (the "haw" part of the sound).

### References with notes on my Democracy Science site:

When I wrote, in 2007, of a gravitational wave effect, in terms of the Michelson-Morley experiment, I had heard little or nothing of the LISA project, which is a modified version of this experiment on a solar system scale, large enuf to measure gravitational waves. Tho, I dont know whether the NASA professionals reasoning, in principle, much resembled the ideas in the previous section.

A summary of the work I did on this subject, after this essay, is given in the opening section of my fysics web page: Laser Interferometer Satellite Antenna (LISA): Interval prediction of different beam times.

Using the Minkowski Interval, I gave my own (vector) working that predicts different laser beam times between a triangle of satellites of the LISA experiment.

The Minkowski Interval, which has a geometric mean form, also can be used to calculate the correct prediction for the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Recently, I featured a new world-view, no less: Science is ethics or "electics." A new metafysics and model of reality synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.  
That page has a little very simple arithmetic.   
Likewise, the page after it: Relativity theory and election method.   
The latter page revisits the Einstein lift.

_back to thisessay start._

* * *

## notes

_return tocontents_

#### The Lampedusa elegy

Based on the novel, The Leopard: by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

#### Solzhenitsyn:

Zek is Russian slang for a Soviet political prisoner. Nearly all of this account is based on the BBC documentary of the Solzhenitsyn familys return to Russia.

#### The Long Walk of Slavomir Rawicz:

Based mainly on earlier parts of The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz.  
It occured to me this story would make a good movie and I wrote this narrative verse well before the movie was made.  
Likewise, I wrote and published Loves Disciple, long before the Tolstoy movie.

#### the Manchester air-raids

Mr Harold Ward was my statistics teacher when I was a student.   
I came-up with this remembrance late in my friendship with Dorothy Cowlin (another teacher and author). And she recognised me with charming surprise, from my odd impertinent interruption in the story.  
For, I had told her very little of my former life. I only felt able to go back, after she died.

In the second book of this series, Dates and Dorothy, most of the verse dates or chronology would have been new to her. Tho she does crop-up by a curious accident of proximity, in connection with a maths teacher, in the verse: a slip of the pen.

In that book two, there is a section of poems about our friendship, mostly also written after she died.

#### Satan in the Suburbs:

from a cutting in The Times c 1970.

#### Green is history

Much of Pontings compendium of ecological disasters needs up-dating. But the specter of humanity living beyond the planets capacity is, if anything, more real than ever.   
Human over-population may peak and decline, meanwhile human devastation, nuclear and chemical and genetic-engineering pollution threaten a crash, leaving possibly a permanently damaged planet of sickness.

#### animal sacrifices:

Source: the British Channel 4 series, Countryside Undercover.

#### Ten-level hells:

Nobel prize sharers the International Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore both thought fission energy did little against climate change, while creating dangers it couldnt solve.

The World Conservation Union meeting in Bali, as part of the UN climate convention, announced that solar power is the best technology for lowering the carbon footprint.

The quote from Walt Patterson appeared in Earth Matters. (Autumn 2008. Friends Of The Earth magazine.)

The Mail reported on Labour government "Nuclear croneyism."

The Independent On Sunday, 2008, revealed the ramshackle state of Britains nuclear power stations.

"Lovelock is wrong on nuclear energy" (because he neglected the Total Energy Audit.) PR Rowland MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC. Life Letters, The Guardian.

Robert Kyriakides, The Energy Age. On the fact that nuclear power is not carbon-neutral, and on the huge medical and financial costs of Chernobyl, and on atom plants officially having seven emergency alerts (more like ten, if they were fully acknowledged).

Small is beautiful, big is subsidised: how our taxes contribute to social and environmental breakdown, by Steven Gorelick, Helena Norberg Hodge.

Ten-level Hells was written before the Fukushima nuclear accident, another level seven emergency, officially the most serious possible out-break.

There was a most unedifying determination, in the mass media, to down-play Fukushima. A lot of self-willed people of influence were not going to be put out of conceit with themselves, by any further evidence of their catastroficly dangerous folly.

In february 2015, Japanese tv explained how the Fukushima emissions of radioactivity were worse than had been thought.

This book has been a celebration of radicalism but nuclear power is an example of the unmitigated evil of radicalism without proper conservative, or conservationist, checks.   
The yeilding of beliefs to the evidence is the essence of scientific method, indeed of civilised manners and a tolerable existence of progress thru co-operation.

Nuclear power was made possible by breaking the law of responsibility for ones own actions. No private firm would under-take nuclear accident insurance, or epochs-long responsibility for safely disposing of radioactive waste. So, all the uneconomic hidden costs were pushed onto the public: Private profits at social costs.

Evidence of the harm of radioactivity was vetted or suppressed. Alice Stewart found out that the unborn baby could die even from X-rays, so that there was no safe threshold for radioactivity.

Nuclear power plants depend on permitted emissions of radioactivity.

Stewarts investigations into nuclear workers health was stopped by the US government. In Britain, the secret autopsy, on nuclear workers, confirmed the secretive nuclear industrys determination to put its own interests before the public interest.

Nuclear power is the spin-off and accessory to nuclear weapons. For instance, Enenews alleged that the US government secretly broke the law by allowing Japan nuclear weapons, under cover of Japans nuclear power program.

The British governments determination to renew Trident poses one more threat to life on earth, turning the planet into a miserable basket case, if not worse. This is the Nuclear Winter scenario researched by Carl Sagan and other scientists.

* * *

## acknowledgments

_return tocontents_

Thanks to the following publications which featured verse included in this volume.

#### Cadenza:

Chromatic

#### Psychopoetica:

extract from early version of The Senses of Sibelius

#### iota:

further early extract from The Senses of Sibelius

#### Pennine Platform:

Loves disciple (in hard copy)

#### Shine Journal:

Loves disciple (on-line)

#### Sentinel:

Solzhenitsyn

#### The Southern Pacific Review:

Against dictatorship (one of the verses on George Orwell).

Some of the environmental and humanitarian pieces, at the end of this volume (re Clive Ponting, Paul Harrison, Mother Teresa & verse on Animal Sacrifices) currently on my site: Poetry and Novels of Dorothy Cowlin.

I have not had access to this site since 2007 and I don't know how long it will be freely available to the public. I have taken the opportunity here to make changes but the Mother Teresa play didnt need revising. Apart from slight modifications, one passage was versified (Mr Big).

* * *

## after-word

_return tocontents_

Most of the main works in this volume already have prologs or prefaces, so that it doesnt need much of an after-word. Still, a host should show his guests to the door, or the gate, when taking their leave, hopefully, from a worthwhile invitation.   
Please spread the good word and write a review, if my writings have been as happy an encounter for you, as so many writers (and composers) have been for me.

Whatever people think of my five volumes of Collected Verse, I have drawn deep to supply them with experience from earliest childhood to pension age. I also have read and researched, all the more for my enthusiasms.

I have revised time out of mind. Poets do. Me, too. I have done the work, not to perfection but to some demanding standard. Tho, there will always be let-downs over-looked, especially when publishing a lifes work in a limited space of time.

I was happily unaware that this Collective verse in five books would take up to a year. Firstly, I had to find out, if I could self-publish an electronic book.

I was thinking of a poetry booklet. Then I learned that the economics didnt justify it. So, I worked out that I could collect up to five full length poetry books, from my life-time of writing.

I was not prepared for the required revision and improvisation, as well as arrangement, of the poems.   
I made good progress, til about half way thru the five books, I was feeling somewhat over-whelmed. Nor did I get off lightly with book four, as I hoped, having done some preparation work for publishing an SF booklet.

This book, the fifth, kept me revising, on average, as long as the others.   
The longest work, the play, had been done efficiently.

The other works, including the monologs, or one-man plays, generally had to be given a working over.

The following closing poem was written, partly with the hard-ships of my parents in mind, and partly to the friend, whose influence made possible these volumes.

* * *

### shutting shop

The night is sultry,  
the migrants on the move.  
In clutches, they patrol  
as tranquil as the time of sleep  
they close-on in their murmurs.

The pub, over the road, called time  
over an hour ago.  
The shows called curtains, every one.  
Out they've poured with no-where to go  
but us and our mortgage.

The displays and open door  
invite them like a dream.  
Passing-by in mellow mood  
they stop and consider, pointing.  
We inch closer to redemption.

The local Bobby good-naturedly  
appeals by now for closure  
as an over-protective parent tells  
the child to do what he is about to.  
Lights out. Up with the blind.

And, I believe, you are shutting shop, too,  
after a long and tiring day  
to a welcome rest, at last.  
And so, my dearest friend -  
about time - this is for you.

* * *

## guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung

_To contents_

#### The Valesman.

_Published on 3rd august 2014._

#### Dates and Dorothy.

_Reader-sets-price at Smashwordshere, in epub format _

#### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

_Published on 14 november 2014.  
_

#### In the meadow of night.

_Published on 26 january 2015.  
_

#### Radical!

_Published on 3 march 2015.

Reader-sets-price at Smashwords in epub format here._

_The author intends that all five books of collected verse will become available from Smashwords eventually._

For further publication details, please consult: Collected verse of Richard Lung.

_If you read and enjoy any of these books of collected verse, please post on-line a review of why you liked the work._

_While preparing this series, I made minor changes to arrangement and content of the material, so the descriptions of companion volumes, at the end of each book, might not always quite tally._

* * *

### The Valesman

The first volume is mainly traditional nature poetry.   
(160 poems, including longer narrative verse in section three.)  
The nature poet Dorothy Cowlin re-connected me with my rural origins. Many of the poems, about animals and birds and the environs, could never have been written without her companionship.

The unity of themes, especially across the first two sections, as well as within the third section, makes this volume my most strongly constructed collection. I guess most people would think it my best. Moreover, there is something for all ages here.

1. How we lived for thousands of years.

Dorothy thought my best poems were those of the farming grand-father, the Valesman.

2. Flash-backs from the early train.

More memories of early childhood on the farm and first year at the village school.

3. Trickster.

Narrative verse about boyish pranks and prat-falls.

4. Oyh! Old Yorkshire Holidays.

Features playtime aspects of old rural and sea-side Yorkshire.

* * *

### Dates and Dorothy

Book two begins with eight-chapter review of works, plus list of publications & prizes by Dorothy Cowlin.  
(Seven of these chapters are currently freely available as web pages.)

This second volume continues with the second instalment of my own poems, classed as life and love poetry.  
The Dates are historical and romantic plus the friendship of Dorothy and the romance of religion.  
169 poems plus two short essays.

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:  
1. dates.  
2. the Dorothy poems.  
3. loves loneliness loves company.  
4. the romance of religion.

The hidden influence of Dorothy, in the first volume, shows in this second volume. The first two sections were written mostly after she died. Thus, the first section, Dates, reads like a count-down before meeting her, in the second section, as prentice poet.

She was warmly responsive to the romantic lyrics of the third section. This was reassuring because some originated in my twenties. (I gave-up writing formal poetry during my thirties, to all practical purposes. There were only about three exceptions.) These surviving early poems, like most of my out-put, under-went intensive revision.

The fourth section probably stems from the importance attached to religion at primary school. Here humanitarian Dorothys influence only slightly made itself felt by her liking to visit churches.

The prelude review of Dorothy as a professional writer is freely available, at present, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin.   
Nearly all the text is there, except a preface and last section, which I didnt up-load before losing access to the site in 2007.  
The fotos, I took of Dorothy, are published for the first time.

The continued availability of my Dorothy Cowlin website is not guaranteed, so I welcome this opportunity to publish my literary review of her work, as an extra to volume 2.

* * *

### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

The third book is a miscellaneous collection of 163 poems/pieces, with the arts and politics the strongest themes, as well as themes found in the companion books. There is also a story in section one, and a final short essay.

1. with children  
2. or animals  
3. never act  
4. the political malaise  
5. the lost  
6. short essay:  
Proportional Representation for peace-making power-sharing.

"A boot boy in the Great War," in the first section, is a sort of verse novela and dramatic poem with an eye on the centenary of the First World War. The idea stemmed from an incident related by Dorothy Cowlin (yet again). Her uncle was stopped flying a kite on the beach, because he might be signaling to the enemy battle fleet.   
No kidding!

In this miscellany, previous themes appear, such as children, animals and birds. Verse on the arts comes in. Ive organised these poems on the WC Fields principle: Never act with children or animals.  
The fourth section collects political satires from over the years. The fifth section reflects on loneliness.

This volume is classed as of "presentatives" because largely about politics and the arts, with politicians acting like performing artists or representatives degenerating into presentatives on behalf of the few rather than the many.

However, the title poem, He's a good dog..., hints how eccentric and resistent to classification is this third volume. This title poem is based on a true war-time air incident. The good dog is also derived from a true dog, whose own story is told in the poem, the bleat dog (part of the free sample in volume 1).

* * *

### In the meadow of night

The fourth volume is of 160 poems and two short stories on the theme of progress or lack of it.

part one: allure.

The allure of astronomy and the glamor of the stars.

part two: endeavor.

The romance and the terror of the onset of the space age and the cold war.

part three: fate.

An uncertain future of technologies and possible dystopias. Ultimate questions of reality.

This fourth volume is of SF poetry. SF stands for science fiction, or, more recently, speculative fiction. The verse ranges from hard science to fantasy.  
The literary tradition of HG Wells and other futurists exert a strong influence.  
Otherwise, I have followed my own star, neither of my nature poet friends, Dorothy and Nikki, having a regard for SF poetry.   
Yet science fiction poetry is a continuation of nature poetry by other means.  
This may be my most imaginative collection. Its very diversity discourages summary.

* * *

### Radical!

Volume 5 opens with a play about the most radical of us all, Mother Teresa: If the poor are on the moon...  
This is freely available, for the time being, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. (Performers are asked to give author royalties to the Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.)

The previously unpublished content consists largely of fairly long verse monologs, starting with artistic radicals, in "Symfonic Dreams," which is a sequence of The Impresario Berlioz, and The Senses of Sibelius.

Next, the intellectual radical, Sigmund Freud, followed by short poems on a sprinkling of more great names, who no doubt deserved longer. (Art is long, life is short.)

The title sequence, Radical! is made-up of verse about John Stuart Mill, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, George Orwell and JB Priestley.

Volume five ends with an environmental collection, largely available on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. However, those available verses have been more or less revised.  
Should that website close down, I hope the green verses and the Mother Teresa play can still be obtained in this volume five.

* * *

## Notice of this authors books in the Democracy Science series.

_To contents._

### Book 1: Peace-making Power-sharing.

The first, of two books on voting method, has more to do with electoral reform. (This, the second is more about electoral research.)

"Peace-making Power-sharing" features new approaches to electoral reform, like the Canadian Citizens Assemblies and referendums. I followed and took part in the Canadian debate from before the assemblies were set-up, right thru the referendums.  
This was a democratic tragedy and an epic in the dashing of idealistic hopes.

Some developments in America are reviewed.

The anarchy of voting methods, from the power struggle in Britain, is investigated over a century of ruling class resistance to electoral reform.

A penultimate chapter gives the simplest way to explain transferable voting, on to the more formal treatment of a small club election.

The last chapter is the earliest extant version of my work on scientific measurement of elections (in French).

Peace-making Power-sharing

_from Smashwords in epub format:here free._

* * *

### Book 2: Scientific Method of Elections.

Book one has a last chapter in French, which is the earliest surviving version of the foundation of the sequel, Scientific Method of Elections. I base voting method on a widely accepted logic of measurement, to be found in the sciences. This is supported by reflections on the phiosophy of science.

The more familiar approach, of judging voting methods by (questionable) selections of basic rules or criteria, is critically examined.

This author is a researcher, as well as a reformer, and my innovations of Binomial STV and the Harmonic Mean quota are explained.  
The second book has more emphasis on electoral research, to progress freedom thru knowledge.

Two great pioneers of electoral reform are well represented here, especially speeches (also letters) of John Stuart Mill on parliamentary reform (obtained from Hansard on-line). And there is commentary and bibliography of H G Wells on proportional representation (mainly).

Official reports of British commissions on election systems are assessed. These reports are of Plant, Jenkins, Kerley, Sunderland, Arbuthnott, Richard, and (Helena Kennedy) Power report

The work begins with a short history on the sheer difficulty of genuine electoral reform. The defeat of democracy is also a defeat for science. Freedom and knowledge depend on each other.   
Therein is the remedy.

#### Scientific Method of Elections

_now free from Smashwordshere._

* * *

### Book 3: Science is ethics as electics.

Political elections, that absorbed the first two books in this series, are only the tip of the iceberg, where choice is concerned. Book three, in preparation, intends to take an electoral perspective on the social sciences and natural sciences, from physics to metaphysics of a free universe within limits of determinism and chance.

* * *

## The Commentaries  series

_To contents_

Commentaries book one:

### Literary Liberties

Literary Liberties with reality allow us to do the impossible of being other people from all over the world, making the many worlds theory a fact thru fiction.

This book of books or illustrated reviews span fiction, faction and non-fiction.  
It goes some way to substantiate the belief of Benedetto Croce that history is the history of liberty.

I only wrote reviews of books that I appreciated, so that I could pass on that appreciation to others. It must be admitted that I went with novels that looked over horizons confined to family values. (Family is, of course, a basic trial of liberty, compromised by obligations to partner and children.)

Likewise, these reviews themselves need not be bounded by the horizons of literary criticism but reach out to solutions for the problem novel or the non-fiction book with a cause.

In promoting others writings, I hoped to promote my own, or rather the liberal values that inform my writings. It took a lot more preparation than I had anticipated. This is usually the case with my books.

Literary Liberties is the first of a short series of Commentaries. This author also has a Democracy Science series. The series of Collected Verse was the first to be completed.

_Available free from Smashwords:_

_Literary Liberties_

* * *

Commentaries book two:

### Science and democracy reviews

A book of books, on science, mainly physics, and democratic causes old and new. This is an edited and up-dated version, from my two web-sites, with new material.

As they separately pursue their shared ethic of progress, scientific research and democratic reform conduct themselves as two different journeys, both here followed, as the evidence mounts that they depend on each other to meet the stresses that survival poses.

I have drawn on my experience of life and books, in discussing the following works.

The physicist, John Davidson under-took an epic investigation into the mystic meaning of Jesuses teachings, as for our other-worldly salvation, supplemented by a revelation in non-canonic texts of the gnostics.

The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876 autobiography of the "moral force" Chartist and author of the famous six points for equal representation.  
Organiser who anticipated the peace and cultural initiatives of the UN, such as UNESCO.

Jill Liddington: Rebel Girls. Largely new historical evidence for the role especially of working women in Yorkshire campaigning for the suffrage.

"How the banks robbed the world" is an abridged description of the BBC2 program explaining fraud in corporate finance, after the 2000-02 Dotcom bubble burst, destroying the investments of ordinary people.

David Craig and Matthew Elliott: Fleeced!  
How we've been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers and how much they've cost us.

The political system fails the eco-system.  
Green warnings, over the years, by campaigners and the media, and the hope for grass roots reforms.  
From Paul Harrison, how expensively professionalised services deprive the poor of even their most essential needs. And how even the developed countries are over-strained on this account and draw in trained people from deprived countries.  
Why society should deprofessionalise basic skills important for peoples most essential needs, whether in the third world or the "over-developed" countries.

The sixth extinction  
Richard Leakey and other experts on how mankind is the agent of destruction for countless life forms including possibly himself, in the sixth mass extinction planet earth has endured in its history. Why world politicians must work together to counter the effects of global warming.

On a topic where science and democracy have not harmonised, a few essays from 2006 to 2010, after "nuclear croneyism" infested New Labour and before Japans tsunami-induced chronic nuclear pollution. There's a 2015 after-word.

Some women scientists who should have won nobel prizes.  
Lise Meitner, Madame Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell, Alice Stewart, to name some. Reading of their work in popular science accounts led me, by chance, to think they deserved nobel prizes: no feminist program at work here.

Julian Barbour: The End Of Time.  
Applying Mach's principle, to Newton's external frame-work of absolute space and time, both in classical physics and to Schrödinger's wave equation of quantum mechanics, by which the universe is made properly self-referential, as a timeless "relative configuration space" or Platonia.

Murray Gell-Mann: The Quark and the Jaguar.  
Themes, including complex systems analysis, which the reviewer illustrates by voting methods.

Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe.  
Beyond point particle physics to a theory of "strings" that may under-lie the four known forces of nature, and its material constituents, thru super-symmetry, given that the "super-strings," as such, are allowed to vibrate, their characteristic particle patterns, in extra hidden dimensions of space.  
Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality.  
A survey of the more extravagant physics theories that have invoked many worlds or a multiverse..

Lee Smolin: Three roads to quantum gravity.  
Reviewing the other two roads (besides string theory) namely black hole cosmology and loop quantum gravity. All three approaches are converging on a discrete view of space and time, in basic units, on the Planck scale. General relativity's space-time continuum is being quantised, rather as nineteenth century thermo-dynamics of continuous radiation was quantised.  
Lee Smolin: the trouble with physics.  
Impatience with the remoteness of string theory and hope for progress from theories with more experimental predictions. How to make research more effective. Smolin's scientific ethic. Reviewer criticises artificial divide between science and ethics.

Free from Smashwords: _Science and democracy reviews_

