The River Wye and Purple Loosestrife

White Loosestrife

 Once when the purple loostrife was blooming along the River Wye I walked from Chepstow in Monmouthshire to Prestatyn in either Flintshire or Denbigshire. When I reached Prestatyn I didn't have the money for a busfare home so I walked back to Chepstow and then west to Cardiff.

 Those were the days when Baxter was a gleam in an Abdominal Aorta's eye. Ivan Ivanovitch was a character in a short book written by a disgraced Soviet artillery officer, and oddly enough Bobby's origins are buried in 1970's attempts by Soviet Intelligence Officers to use machines to comb through the billions of words of information in multiple languages collected from thousands of eavesdropping devices. 

 The route I took from Chepstow to Prestatyn followed or attempted to follow, the track of a ditch the son of Thingfrith, a descendent of Eowa by the name of Offa, had ordered dug across the Western borders of Mercian Land. Offa was a hard nosed bitter, money grubbing, son of a bitch who became Paramount Chief of Mercia, or King of Mercia, after a series of tribal wars and a bunch of assassinations of people with names like AEthelbald, not to be mistaken with AEthelbald of Wessex who was buried in Sherborne Abbey in Dorset.

 The ditch is called Offa's Dyke, I wouldn't put it past the son of Thingfrith to engage in that sort of thing, which would explain why he put his Queen on one of the gold coins he had minted for use in toadying up to the European Christian Bigwigs so the Arch Bishop of Cantebury would make more effort to be nice to Mercians......

 The point is that once upon a time I was a fan of Alfred of Wessex and his capacity for myth making, this admiration required me to examine the Mercian claim to have produced the First King of the English. And yes! Of course it's true, in my own pursuit of an aura that would engage  those distant days with a sense of purpose hithertofore I had failed to share with the English, I had spent far too many hours with the Battle of Maldon, a poem about real men of genuine Saxon heritage having the crap beaten out of them in Essex by Vikings. 

 Rightly so, as everyone should know, no one is whole until they have lost.

 And lo it was Godrick son of Odda who stole his lords splendid horse and ran from the fight. Saxon men thought their Lord was engaged in a cunning strategic withdrawel. The damned Vikings pretty much wiped them all out, but being Saxon and not Mercian everyone died incredibly bravely.  No news that I can remember of Godrick son of Odda's fate.

The Grand Conjuring Trick Called The Authentic

Dtain Field Rain Tree

 Saint Monday. Marx's core definition of Alientation isn't about feeling lonely, it's about Structural Separation. His argument went on to suggest that the Industrial Machine alienates, or separates us people from the Product, from the Act of Production and from Nature. As a result the earth and its creatures become resources to be optimized.

 This comforting and simplistic view from Marx, all rather fell apart when the Early Soviet Union decided to optimize the week by doing away with the weekend. Everyday a work day, a worker's day off spread across Stalin's Week, this way the machines never went idle. Why no one had ever thought of it before was a mystery to the cocktails and brunch crew.

 And yes, in the barcodes of industrial man, Authentic has become a certified destination you can buy with a credit card after you've got your half a sourdough loaf wrapped in plastic.

 There again the Eastern Dionysus was Shiva. Shiva was a long way from  being a home owner on Mount Olympus. He was the rythmn of creation, preservation and destruction. His authentic was Lord of the Cosmic Dance, when he stopped dancing the cosmos vanished.

 To Marx, Dionysus was probably an opiate and Shiva a savage who didn't understand why Hegel was upside-down

 

 

An Authenticity Issue

Some Clouds

 Ok Chaps! Let us proclaim a reality. Hark the Herald, and I'll quote the following:

 "When the elite strip-mine the shared purpose of a society, they don't just impoverish the lower echelons; they isolate themselves. They lose the capacity for authentic human connection because they view everyone else as a data point to be liquidated or an asset to be acquired."

And this:

 "Once you are that isolated, you become terrified. You realize, at some subconscious level, that you are a naked emperor sitting on a pile of stolen grain."

 Yes indeed, profound agonizing loneliness is not a security problem, it's not an excuse to violate the weak without consequences, it's not an excuse to buy an island, contemplate a Utopian Village with hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and obedient help.

 A subject we addressed in the prose essay "Beaky Cap, who the hell are you kidding!"

While we are Livestock let us remember the silence and peace of a library

Milkweed leaf in morning sun

 We're still high on Black Darren, nudged up against the iron binding pigments of Red Darren, staring across the Olchon River, contemplating Offa's Mercia. Of course we are restless, this time it has to do with the Acting Witan of Mercia, their declaration that Middlesex, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are Mercian lands, and the general unease of our understanding that the genuine business minds of the Industrial Revolution emerged from King Offa's Tamworth. Good solid men of sense, none of this wishy-wash of the cidar drinkers in the south who reckoned it was someone else's job to drove pigs.

 More recently our optimizing industrialists have learned to bypass the conscious mind  "The data-highwaymen discovered that the quickest way to keep a human eye glued to a glass screen is not to offer them a calm, balanced, worked example of macroeconomics or historical nuance. The fastest way to unlock the brain's attention center is to trigger a primal, somatic spasm—fear, tribal outrage, validation, or lust. The fantasy world isn't a grand ideological project! It’s a global cash-crop harvested from our nervous systems."

 Hear me now. Digital Highman want your attention, your peace and your sanity, it's a magic mushroom or a hen-bane they feed us. And guess what? Most of us are engaging the rush, we give them our devotion and give the Highwayman what he wants from us.