Books and Literature, My thinking..., My Thoughts, reading, Writing

FINDING EMILY JANE

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Not sure if I’ve posted this here before but if I have, here it is again

The MC of my unfinished novel travelled to Yorkshire in the early 19th Century and this is something that happened to him there.

The story is mostly told from his perspective but this episode focusses on Emily  Jane and her feelings.

Hope you like it.  It still needs a bit of tinkering but it ain’t gonna get it!

She felt so alone. She was a stranger in a familiar land.

The physical and emotional detachment of her father, spending all day as he did, cloistered away in his study, hating the town that he lived in, bruised her soul. The antiquated morality of her aunt, clattering around the slate floors of the house in her wooden clogs, hating the house she lived in,  offended her sensibilities. The bullying and jealousies of her elder sister intruding into her privacy, hating her creativity  made her bile rise. The memory of the kindnesses of her beloved, departed sister  and the vague, distant feeling of being loved as a baby by her adored but long since dead, mother kept her soul alive. Only the support of her brother, limited as it was by his depression and drinking kept her from going mad.

 She spent much of her time when not writing poems, cleaning and tidying the house; the family noting her fervour as a cleaner but not noticing her attempts to clean away the anger and ill feeling that blighted the building.

Only when out walking over  the moors stretching out from behind the house into obscurity could she feel the freedom of being;  there was a connection between herself and the bleak land.It did not judge, it accepted.

He felt so alone. He was a stranger in a strange land.

He had journeyed to the north of the country in his attempts  get away from the sins he had committed in the south. The physical and emotional detachment he felt, spending all day as he had, sheltered away in his self. Hating the god who treated him with disdain, bruised his soul, the old fashioned morality of his church, stamping  around the slate floors of his soul, making demands that he could not fulfil,  offended his sensibilities. The bullying and jealousies of his inner voice, intruding into his privacy, hating his creativity  made his bile rise. The memory of the kindnesses of his beloved, departed Veronica  and the vague,distant feeling of loving Lady Caroline, his adored, but long since dead, friend, kept his soul alive. Now, there was no-one to support him and stop him descending further and further into melancholy…

 He spent much of his time trying to sort out his mind ; noting his fervour as a thinker but not noticing his attempts to clean away the anger and ill feeling that blighted his life. Only when out wandering into the emptiness  that stretched out from his soul could he feel the freedom of being.

When his travels reached Yorkshire he made his way up onto the moors, as far away from people that he could reach,but even in that isolated place he could smell on the wind the smoke from the factories in the cities, miles distant. 

He took up residence an abandoned house that he found  atop a windswept hill,   When not on a nightime ramble hewould sit on a high backed settle in front of a fire that he made by burning old furniture and even floorboards from some of the further rooms of the house, there being no peat or wood on the nearby moors to use. He would sit with his blanket wrapped around him, fervently trying not to think about his past or indeed anything and to to draw some warmth into his body from the fire During the passing of each day he would look out across the moors, trying to see any signs of life beit bird or animal. he felt that the bleak house and even bleaker landscape,  if not actually accepting  him did not reject him either  and he felt he could be at one with the Spirits of this Land, if there were indeed any spirits inhabiting this wilderness.

There was rarely anything moving to see but he noticed in the distance that there in rain and shine was a young woman walking, almost skipping through the desolation, he could imagine that she were singing as she moved; but what sort of song could she be singing?

When their paths did meet, although he and she were both enjoying their solitude they walked together for a distance. .   They did not speak but both felt a togetherness even in their silence.

They would sometimes meet on subsequent days and when they did she would walk with him, he finding a comfort in her presence that was missing in his life and she finding a companionship with him that was missing in hers.

At the end of one particular walk she asked him if he would meet her early the next day to watch the sun rise and spend to the day with her. He agreed.

On her way to meet him the next day  she walked in the darkness before the sunrise, almost dancing in her happiness, thinking about the future; she joined him at the foot of a small hill. As they were climbing to the top she reached out and held his hand and they walked up the hill so encoupled.

At the top of the hill, whose eastern side was a scree cliff, they stood side by side waiting for the Sun to rise.

She reached an arm around him and pulled him closer.   

she heard an exultation of skylarks rise from the heathland about them and as the birds soared upwards filling the air with their song, a charm that would summon the dawn and  shower the countryside  beneath with the bird’s’ blithe spirit she felt her heart fill with love  and sing a joyful song as  it too soared  with the larks into the heavens.

 A shaft of light from the sun, as yet still below the horizon, illumined some gossamer clouds high in the sky and in them she could see the wings of the angel of love and peace blessing this new day.

As he felt her arm enfolding him he looked down the sheer cliff and sensed a feeling as if he were looking down into a deep pit and that if he were not careful he would  fall into and be swallowed up forever.

They spent the morning together watching the moorland life and she shyly sharing with him some poetry that she had written, At midday she kissed him and, raising her skirt, offered her body to him. She felt that if she took him  inside her she could hold him there and never have to feel so alone again.

As their naked flesh met and he slowly entered her they rolled togetherbut before she could feel him climax inside her the spell was shattered. The whistling of a shepherd in the near distance calling to his dogs, and of the bleating of sheep being herded to Haworth to be fleeced.

Emily and the man quickly dressed  and although they did pass the afternoon  in each other’s company something was lost, something, it seemed,  had been stolen away.

As the sun began to set he saw, away in the distance a grey cloud rising that threatened a storm before too long that he felt would drown him. As they said farewell that evening he agreed to meet her the next morning but he knew he had to  get away from her.

He watched her from behind some rocks the next day as she went, almost skipping in her joy , to meet him, her new hero and saviour.  No birds sang to the dawn that day but the harsh cry of Carrion Crows from the trees around the graveyard greeted her has she returned to the Parsonage and her sister. 

My thinking..., My Thoughts, Politics

Feudalism versus Democracy Pt 2

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So what would my version of a ‘new’ Feudalism look like?

One of the ‘benefits’ of Feudalism was the mutual rights and responsibilities of each social strata and of the commitment to a ‘higher power’ an ‘ultimate power’-God. This belief in and commitment to the authority of the ‘Ultimate Power’ animated Feudalism. Alas there was, as in every human organised system a tendency towards corruption and entropy. some critics of Feudalism claim that as it is founded on heredity there is no real place for it in modern society where Democracy rules. (or so they claim, poor misguided fools!)

There have been a number of instances in history in which a king or leader/Chief was chosen by public acclamation and who had a role to play in Society, if he failed to fulfil that role he forfeited his position and role (sometimes his life).

The Pharoahs in Egypt were able to keep their job as long as they managed through prayer and sacrifice to ensure that the Nile flooded each year and irrigated the land. In pre-Colombian America some Mayan kings could ‘enjoy’ the high life and the adoration of the people of their community as long as they exerted control over some of the features of the geological activity in the area. No control, no kingship. No kingship, no life. The list goes on of ‘elected’ kings. The role of the Leader was to appease the gods to avert calamity or to bring about a wanted/needed event.

The people were all serving or at least aware of the force and strength of Higher/Ultimate Power; the gods.

In my ‘new feudalism’ the Ultimate Power would be ‘The Law’ and all people would live obeying the law. There could be an elected Parliament but it would be bound by the Law, an electoral system that allowed every electors views to be reflected, a parliament that aspired to cater for the needs and cares of all it’s citizens not just a select few. The Government of the day could only enact Laws that had been scrutinised and passed by the House of Commons, no ruling by diktat or committee. The Law would stipulate for how long a Parliament could sit; no snap or surprise elections called by the Government. Constituency boundaries could be altered only by the Electoral Commission and not the politicians.

Citizens would be ‘encouraged’ to take an active role in the fabric of the nation, a nation that plays an active role in the fabric of their lives.

There is a social democracy at work in this Feudalism, not necessarily communism but communialism akin to the aims of the Labour Government of 1945 where all people have their basic needs met by a welfare state and strive to serve the needs of the nation and their neighbours.

Such an idea was not dreamed up by the Socialists in 1945 but actually it’s roots are in Plato’s Republic some few years earlier.

I am not trying to write a manifesto here just to bring up an alternative to the divisive politics of nowadays and the social corrosiveness of the ‘Me Ideology that pollutes our nation/world.

Could such a system work? No not for too long before it degenerates into entropy, but that entropization is brought about by neglect and stagnation in the system but that doesn’t mean that we should not aspire to bring about a fair and equitable society nor work towards it’s inception. The watchword for a functioning democracy is ‘vigilance’.

THINK ABOUT IT

My thinking..., My Thoughts, Philosophy..., Politics, Theology

Feudalism v. Democracy

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Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, believed that a society should be ruled by philosophers because he reckoned that they were higher minded and less likely to be corrupted than ‘ordinary citizens. Alas such a style of government he surmised would not work in practice for it would eventually and inevitably ‘decline into democracy and then tyranny.’

For a a political or social system to work well and fairly does it necessarily have to be a democracy? Winston Churchill opined that democracy was a flawed system but its main virtue was that it was better than all the others.

Feudalism was a system, undemocratic in the extreme with very little opportunity for ‘social mobility; within it every free person had their rights and responsibilities from the lowliest yeoman to the highest King.

For Feudalism to work successfully it had to acknowledge that there is a greater and higher Truth than ‘experience’. Call that Truth ‘God’ if you wish, but even God has his responsibilities as well as his rights.

If God created the Universe out of ‘nothing’ then said Universe exists/subsists in the mind of God. For the Universe and all that is in it to continue God has to hold it in his mind all the time, if he forgets the Universe it will cease to exist. That ‘remembering’ is God’s Responsibility.

If God created the Universe out of ‘something’ then the only ‘something he could have used was of himself. The Universe is part of him for there is no ‘thing’ existing beyond the boundaries of God.

It is therefore also God’s responsibility to maintain himself in a continual state optimum equilibrium and ‘health’, for if his health lapses then the universe that he has created diminishes and fades away, it declines into existentialism, atheism, entropy. Chaos.

It is the responsibility of the Universe to award God praise and glory, not because God needs it to survive but because the Universe needs God to remain in relationship with it to survive; without that the Universe stops existing.

God cannot stop loving the Universe but the Universe (the sentient part) (us) can choose not to accept or acknowledge God’s love and he cannot force it to love him (you cannot force or demand someone to love you, that is tyranny and abuse)

Feudalism in its ideal state replicates that hierarchy, that synergy, that symbiosis if you will. Democracy does not.

Can a case be made for, not a return to the Feudalism of old but for a new Feudalism?

Think about it.   

My thinking..., My Thoughts, sychic phenomena

A Game of Hide and Seek

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Somehow a mischievous Spirit had got through the psychic defenses that my Medium friend (actually by now she was my wife) had built around our house. It was not an Elemental just a nasty little bugger. It could not get out of the house because the defences we had built kept everything in that is in as well as preventing anything outside from getting in. The entity was rattling around inside the house from room to room disrupting everything and generally making a nuisance of itself.

We had to cleanse the house, to dispel this Spirit, but how could we do that? After consultation with another Medium who specialised in Rescue Work we set about the task. Now, a Spirit cannot wander through walls and other obstacles. it gains entry through doors, windows and other portals so we resealed all the entry points of the house; doors windows etc then began to cleanse each room. We started with the bathroom (Yes, we had sealed all the plugholes in the sink and bath, we even had psychically sealed the loo) We then cleansed and ‘purified’ that room, the SpiriThinTt was forced to flee through the door into our Utility room, we then sealed the bathroom door so that it couldn’t go back in there. We systematically cleansed and sealed each room in turn, all the upstairs room, reception rooms, kitchen, hallway until all that was left was one downstairs bedroom, we sealed the door to that room so that there was no escape for the little blighter, he was trapped.

Our plan was to unseal a window then cleanse the room so that the Spirit would leave the house, outside were waiting for it Spirits/Angels who would transport it to the Spirit Plane. We started to cleanse the room but before I could unseal a window to let it out it was gone! Where could it be? In the room was a built in cupboard/wardrobe, he seemed to have gone in there but I couldn’t sense him in there!

The Friendly Spirits told us (they told my wife actually) that the Spirit was heading up the chimney and that they were waiting for its arrival and they would help it when it emerged on the roof.

We cleansed the cupboard and sealed the door and the Sprit vanished. I wonder if he shot out of the chimney like a cork out of a pop gun but it was caught by the ‘Angels’ and taken away; we never heard from it again.

A Spirit can only gain access though a portal of some sort, it cannot pass through walls but the entry point does not have to be a current one so if you see a ghost walk through a wall it is passing through where a door used to be. The built in cupboard in our bedroom was where a fireplace and chimney had been which is why our visitor was able to use it.

Think about it.

My thinking..., My Thoughts, sychic phenomena

THAT’s HER IN THE CORNER THERE.

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There is a type of ghost or spirit, call it what you will, that is attached to, almost a part of, a feature or place. The Spirit is not tied to the place having died through a traumatic Passing such as a murder or other type of violent death nor is it resisting moving on to the Spirit Plane by haunting a place; it just ‘is’

In Ancient Egypt such a ‘presence’ was called a ‘Ka’ and frequently inhabited statues and the such, it did not ‘haunt’ or wander around weeping and wailing, it just ‘was’ These Spirits still exist.

Such Spirits often remain unobserved or unnoticed, which is how they see themselves; just a part of the fabric, rather like, I suppose, a brick would see itself as part of the fabric in a wall. These Kas may be all around us we don’t know and trying to find and contact one would be very tiresome because they don’t want to be contacted…why would a brick in a wall want to talk to you?

In the 1970s I lived in a flat in Ilfracombe in North Devon, the flat was part of a Victorian house (my living room and bedroom were 2 halves of what was once a ballroom!). As I grew accustomed to living in this flat I felt that I could detect a supernatural presence in one corner of the living room. It was not haunting or intruding in any way, I am not sure that it was aware of my presence at all or if it was aware it did not give a fig for my being there. It just ‘was’

I made various attempts to let it know that I knew that it was there but with no response. The old guy I had met on Flatholm Lighthouse had been curious, worried and interested in what was happening, this Spirit was not, it was just there.

My clairsentience enabled me with a bit of effort to detect that the Spirit was an old lady from the Victorian era (inasmuch as I could sense that she had been there for a long time) but that was all I could ‘see’. Like a statue she just stood there.

I called on a Clairvoyant friend of mine to try and contact the woman for me (since I couldn’t have a dialogue with this woman because I couldn’t hear or see her how I expected her to respond to my contact I don’t know. Did I expect her to dance around the room in the shape of the word ‘hello’ so I could detect her?)

My friend, a Spiritualist Medium, was able to see the woman and could talk to her but she did not get any reply (I hadn’t spoken to the Spirit just to the corner of the room where she was)

The Ka of the lady remained in the corner for a time and did not trouble me at all, although my friend and I did refrain from any hanky-panky in that room from then on.

There came a time when with the help of a Psychic circle we were able to get some sort of conversation going with the Ka and we found a way of putting across to her that there was a welcome and restful place waiting for her on the Spirit Plane.

There was still no reply or response from the woman but she did begin to fade and eventually disappeared.

lighthouses, My thinking..., My Thoughts, sychic phenomena

Not so spooky but creepy goings on on a Lighthouse

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The ghost that I met on Flatholm was the only psychic event I witnessed connected to Lighthouses but there was another occasion…

When I was transferred to Les Hanois Lighthouse in the Channel Islands I the Principal Keeper gave me the usual look around the place, familiarization with the equipment and was given the history of the place:

During the war lad the Germans occupied the Channel Islands and they put a squad of soldiers on the Hanois and left them out here for months. One of the Jerries hated it so much that he got depressed and shot himself in his bunk…the bunk that you will be sleeping in tonight…

There was even a hole in the woodwork of the bunk which I was reliably told by the PK was caused by the bullet after it passed through the soldier’s head.

A lovely tale which I relayed to new arrivals over my time out there. I don’t think that it was absolutely true but I was glad a little while after I arrived when I was able to move to a different bunk!

Books and Literature, My thinking..., My Thoughts

Spooky Goings on

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A number of years ago I was working on Flatholm Lighthouse on an island in the Bristol Channel. From this lighthouse we kept a watch on an automated Lightship some 5 miles away, we did this by observing her position on a radar screen every hour or so. The radar equipment was sited in an old store cupboard attached to the Engine Room.

Whenever I checked on the radar, especially at night, I felt that I was not alone in that room, there was a presence there of someone full of curiosity and wonder as to what I was doing in that room and what the machine I was looking at was. All this made me feel uncomfortable and discombobulated and a bit chary of going in that shed.

It then occurred to me that there was a presence in that shed that felt as uncomfortable as me.

I was what is called ‘Clairsentient’ I couldn’t hear spirits like someone Clairaudient or see them like a Clairvoyant but I could certainly feel their presence. I did some research and probing around that room and met in a corner of it the Spirit of a man standing there feeling very confused and worried about what was going on. I know he had been dead for a long time from before the Lighthouse was electrified, he may have been a Lighthousekeeper, that I am not sure about, but for some reason he had taken up residence in that shed and avoided the rest of the Lighthouse complex. I suspect he felt safe in there and by staying there could avoid contact with all the modern gizmos around the place, he had been able to do that because the shed had only been used as a glorified broom cupboard for decades and he was in there on his own.

The turmoil and upheaval of putting the radar machine in there caused the old boy much distress and when it was fully installed his solitude was destroyed and he spent his time cooped up with this machine of which he knew nothing and understood less. It was no wonder he cowered in the corner while this bleeping, flashing monster dominated the room and his life.

One night while I was on duty I crossed over to the shed to check the radar. I explained to the room and thereby the man what a radar machine was and how it worked, I told him it was nothing to worry about and wouldn’t hurt him and over that duty period and my next night watch I explained it all again and even told the old guy how to look at the screen and how to identify what he saw there.

I’m not sure of how much of what I said he understood but from then on the disconcerting feeling of fear and confusion that had filled that shed evaporated and I felt no qualms about going in there again.

My Thoughts

The New Me is the Old Me part 2

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So one of the purposes of my last post was to write something in a time limited fashion. What I wrote was not in deathless prose but I did ‘complete’ it in a relatively short time.

Why does that matter? I hear you ask. It matters because I became so engrossed in my novel that I lost all track of urgency or deadlines; I also tried to create an artistic atmosphere in the narrative that reflected the absence of personality of the Protagonist and provided no point of sympathetic contact between the reader and the Main Character, what I was creating was a long rambling story with no ‘excitement’ or interest. Hell it was boring! But I became so engrossed in the novel that although I had ideas for short stories I tried to fit them within the novel instead of leaving them as stand alone structures. I lost all sense of beginning, mounting narrative and ending; the three act structure of a story line.

I tried to set my self word count targets for my writing day and sometimes I achieved those targets but not in a meaningful way. I could not say at the end of my stint at the word processor that my narrative had progressed or developed in any way, all I could say was ‘I have written x number of words today’.

This has taken me two hours to write so I am going to call it a day now and write another blog post next week.

My Thoughts

THE NEW ME IS THE OLD ME.

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I

I have realized after a long time of trying, that as a writer I can’t write novels, so I have stopped writing the novel that I have spent the last umpteen YEARS on. The project actually began as a short story but like Topsy it just grew and grew. It started one day in 1986 when I was travelling on a train from Newcastle to London when I got it into my head to write a short story about a vampire so I penned a few pages and worked on it for a few months after I had got off the train. Then I put it aside for a while, too long a while as it turned out. I hadn’t written ‘The End’ at the completion of the story (a habit I later adopted to tell myself to not write any further) I decided that the story needed a prologue so I wrote one as an introduction to the action, the prologue took the reader back 500 years to the birth of the vampire and then from a short prologue it grew into a life story. It wasn’t a full biography but a series of episodes from the vampire’s life concentrating on 100 year intervals. 

The premise of the story was that a vampire was not the debonair lovable rogue that hung around with his blood sucking chums as portrayed in modern occult novels but was a lonely despicable parasite that fed on the life force contained in human blood.

The story was about the final days of the vampire as he finally faced his mortality, something he had been trying to run away from for years. I would explain more about it but it is an episode that I am working up into a short story so there’ll be no spoiler here!

My forte as a writer was/is in short works, flash fiction, humorous satire/piss taking and essays and so that is what I am going to get back to doing on this blog and other selected sites.

My novel is not dead, I shall strip out some of the good scenes and rewrite them in other formats; flash fiction, essays and the like which I hope you will enjoy. So watch this space folks!

To be continued…

My thinking..., My Thoughts, Philosophy..., Self help

BEING WHAT YOU WANT TO BE

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I was reading a post on Facebook a little while ago where the poster was trying to give comfort to people with depression and anxiety by saying that they needn’t be too harsh on themselves as they did not choose to be so affected by their emotions. A nice comforting sentiment but not totally true.

Depression is called the illness of the past because we become depressed about something that has happened to us. Anxiety is the illness of the future because we become worried/anxious about something that is going to happen to us ‘We think’ .

Anger is the illness of the present as we become agitated about something that is happening to us in the here and now.

In my experience both as a Therapist and a sufferer of depression it is by our own choice that we endure it ,and the same goes for anxiety, it is our choice to put up with it.

The best, although difficult way to treat these inflictions is to accept that you’ve got them but to decide that they are no longer helping you, thank them then ask/tell them to go.

Depression is a reaction to an upsetting or distressing event and as such shuts down the brain and body to give you the chance…to force you to take the opportunity…to withdraw from life around you and to sit quietly whilst your mind works out how to cope with the outcome of the negative event that you’ve just experienced. The process of the mind adjusting to the loss takes about 2 weeks; not 2 weeks from the tragedy or whatever but 2 weeks from the time you tell yourself, or behave as though, you are depressed. Some people, most people can stay in the depths of depression for years by continually reminding themselves that they are depressed. Stop saying it, stop behaving like it, and it will go within 2 weeks.

Anxiety is trying to protect us from danger and threat, particularly from a threat that may take us off guard. It pays special attention to our peripheral vision, physical, social and psychologial, where. it assumes, threats lurk around and loom over us.

The reasoning for this is that if something is in our central vision, dead ahead of us, we can work out how to deal with it , either fight it or run away from it (interestingly in the jungle and other wild places lions , tigers and other carnivores know that only food runs, so flight is not a real option, we would have to find a more effective way of dealing with the danger.

We can do this by bringing the ‘threat’ or anxiety provoking situation into our central vision ; focus on it, although doing so could increase or sense of harm in the short term once the object is in full view it becomes less of a threat and becomes a problem which we have to deal with.

To be continued…