“The fact that it would devastate her was the reason I had to leave home”.

Clive James (reference to his mother in an interview)

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Bertrand Russell

This post is work in progress over a few days and this sentence will be removed when finished.

WEATHER. Locally anyway, the weather this year has been topsy-turvy to say the least. Anyone who thinks global warming doesn’t need the most urgent attention should learn about feeedback loops - and then tremble; (one needs, in particular, to understand why bubbles form on a glass of still water taken out of the fridge). Driest April (so no April showers) on record. Made some hay in April - unheard of. Late frosts in May then decimated my spuds. Then a crazy wet summer that got critical for farmers by mid August and then a prolonged dry and warm Autumn that helped the land recover a bit. Christmas is coming and there are lillies up 1 foot in the air and it wont be long till the daffodils are blooming; blooming Christmas daffs darnit. In the past fortnight it has got so wet that the land is nearly flowing away and everything just looks “rinsed”.

DOGS. Two of my dogs have had major problems. I know they are “getting on” but its still horrid when illness strikes. Jester got prostatitis so had to lose his “jewels” but he got better with feminisation and antibiotics - now he is a bit overweight and sleeps a lot - not the same vim to him. Discovered that Joe, who had limped for a long time, had a nasty lump in his groin. Bryan skillfully removed it - seminoma probably and should be OK. A few weeks later he got a cough, ataxia, temperature and was diagnosed as having a prostatic abscess some 7 inches in diameter!! He went down hill prior to intended surgery and I brought him home to die, moribund, bringing up blood, etc. I changed his therapy and treated him like a patient on an HDU. It took a while but he slowly got better. He now has little relapses (he gets wobbly and his urine goes alkaline) but antibiotics have worked on each occasion and I now think he gets recurrent urinary tract infections and that his huge “prostatic abscess” was in fact a chronically distended bladder.

CATTLE. Had a good enough year talking to themselves about eating grass outside and haylage inside. Never had haylage before but there have been no complaints so far. Ninety percent heifer calves this year and ninety percent bulls the previous year. Go figure.

COMPUTERS. It was lovely to get hooked up to wireless broadband (Ciaracom transmitting from the Bawnboy end of Slieve Rushen), since we are too far from Ballyconnell to use the telephone lines ADSL. This hobby of mine is beginning to get out of hand. Too busy and charging a lot just seems to encourage people. “There’s nowt so strange as folk” - and that’s a fact. I’m reminded of a story my mother used to tell about a couple that set up a fish shop in Cavan after the war. It was a resounding success. It closed after about three weeks. When asked why they closed down the reply was: “You couldn’t stand it. There was people coming in here morning, noon and night bothering us for fish!”

There is nothing to look at any more,
everything has been seen to death.

Oh we’ve got to trust
one another again
in some essentials.

Not the narrow little
bargaining trust
that says : I’m for you
if you’ll be for me.

But a bigger trust,
a trust of the sun
that does not bother
about moth and rust,
and we see it shining
in one another.

Oh don’t you trust me,
don’t you burden me
with your life and affairs; don’t thrust
me
into your cares.

But I think you may trust
the sun in me
that glows with just
as much glow as you see
in me, and no more.

But if it warms your heart’s quick core
why then trust it, it forms
one faithfulness more.

And be, oh be
a sun to me,
not a weary, insistent
personality

but a sun that shines
and goes dark, but shines
again and entwines
with the sunshine in me

till we both of us
are more glorious
and more sunny.

When I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak
his so-called science on me
and reduce me to the level of a thing.
So I said : Good -morning ! and left him.

Only man can fall from God
Only man.

No animal, no beast nor creeping thing
no cobra nor hyaena nor scorpion nor hideous white ant
can slip entirely through the fingers of the hands of god
into the abyss of self-knowledge.
knowledge of the self-apart-from-god.

For the knowledge of the self-apart-from-God
is an abyss down which the soul can slip
writhing and twisting in all the revoltions
of the unfinished plunge
of self-awareness, now apart from God, falling
fathomless, fathomless, self-consciousness wriggling
writhing deeper and deeper in all the minutiae of self-knowledge,
downards, exhaustive,
yet never, never coming to the bottom, for there is no bottom;
zigzagging down like the fizzle from a finished rocket
the frizzling falling fire that cannot go out, dropping wearily,
neither can it reach the depth
for the depth is bottomless,
so it wriggles its way even further down, further down
at last in sheer horror of not being able to leave off
knowing itself, knowing itself apart from God, falling.

What makes people unsatisfied
is that they accept lies.

If people had courage, and refused lies
and found out what they really felt and really meant
and acted on it,

They would distil the essential oil out of every
experience
and like hazel-woods of Autumn, at least
be sweet and sound.

And the young among the old
would be as in the hazel-woods of September
nutting, gathering nuts of ripe experience.

As it is, all that the old can offer
is sour, bitter fruits, cankered by lies.

A man should never earn his living,
if he earns his life he’ll be lovely.

A bird
picks up its seeds or little snails
between heedless earth and heaven
in heedlessness.

But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life
song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed
warmth
and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping
and fluttering and being birds.
- And we, we get it all from them for nothing.

My soul has had a long, hard day
she is tired,
she is seeking her oblivion.

O, and in the world
there is no place for the soul to find her oblivion
the utter darkness of her peace,
for man has killed the silence of the earth
and ravished all the peaceful oblivious places
where the angels used to alight.