OR MAYBE NOT!

… is an American English phrase from the 1950s. The truth is, that when many are tested, they discover that they are not ‘tough’ at all. But hollow men … and women! They profess true love or solid friendship, they boast solidarity to a cause, but when it’s time to stand up for their cause, they ‘cool’ off. They were never really passionate about something, or someone … it was all show, as we say today.

I like the way Shakespeare puts it in ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’ (1599)

BRUTUS Thou hast described
A hot friend cooling. Ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforcèd ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith; 
But HOLLOW MEN, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle,
Low march within.
But when they should endure the bloody spur,
They fall their crests and, like deceitful jades,
Sink in the trial. Comes his army on? 

And of course, T S Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ from 1925

We are the hollow men
 We are the stuffed men
 Leaning together
 Headpiece filled with straw.

But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lonely and unending pilgrimage …

Yes! A lonely and unending pilgrimage!

SPIRIT. Is there a God?

AHASUERUS. Is there a God?—aye, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice
Was heard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound;
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power …

Unending? Not really – you just walk away from him.

“I need a theatre” wrote W B Yeats in 1916.

In 2020 I need a film!

I want to share these words again by WBY: “Being sensitive, or not knowing how to escape the chance of sitting behind the wrong people, I have begun to shrink from sending my muses where they are but half-welcomed … Yet I need a theatre … I desire to show events and not merely tell of them … and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion. My blunder has been that I did not discover in my youth that my theatre must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against the wall. (W B Yeats – Note on ‘At the Hawk’s Well’).

I cannot send my muses where they are not welcome at all!

Lola lived 5,700 years ago in what is now Denmark. Her image, created with the help of DNA taken from a lump of chewed birch pitch, suggests that fair-haired Scandinavians are a modern phenomenon

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ancient-human-lola-given-face-thanks-to-stone-age-chewing-gum-3qhqxflsg

Can’t believe it’s four years since this front cover

And 88 years since the first SANTA COCA COLA … Haddon Sundbolm started working on the iconic character in 1931 …

MY SON AND GRANDSONS LIVE IN SYDNEY … TODAY, ONLY 2 MINUTES ALLOWED IN THE SHOWER!

The two main Australian parties— centrist Labor and the rightwing Liberals—are BOTH RESPONSIBLE for Australia’s water crisis.

A report from the Australia Institute has revealed that dozens of large dams have in fact been constructed in recent years, but not for the public good.

Martin Scott writes: “The recently constructed dams in the Murray-Darling Basin do not help drought-stricken towns, struggling small irrigators or the wider public. They are built with taxpayer money on private land mainly for the benefit of large corporate agribusiness like Webster Limited”.”

I never imagined that back in the 1980s, the discovery, and subsequent theft of, half-a-millennia old Northern European ‘stag carvings,’ would become a core event in my personal story over many decades.

‘My’ fugitive stag took me on a quest that led to Goddess, or what Goethe calls the ‘Eternal Feminine.’ Together, ‘she’ and I toured European culture, past and present, exploring social, cultural, theological and philosophical ideas within my spiritual heritage.

Much of what I saw was a ‘Waste Land’. I even thought at one point that I would be stuck in “rats’ alley.”

Poetry helped save me. Beauty became my redemptrix.

And much to my surprise, the record of my adventure ended up not as a prose poem but a screenplay. A film flirting with the world of arthouse and high concept films!

But only flirting.

The ‘Fugitive Stag’ is an exciting adventure story with broad audience appeal.

And a tagline supplied by one of the greatest writers of all time, the Russian Dostoevsky – “Beauty will save the world.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gut-instinct-leads-enterobiotix-scientists-to-a-microbiome-wonder-drug-8fw8k0t3d

Faecal transplants are one of the great hopes of medicine. The microbiome, the diverse populations of microbes living in our guts, has been linked to a range of diseases. 

A front man for the age-old God of Violence and War

He had nothing to do with the real Jesus, who was his antithesis.

This ‘god’ goes back at least 3,300 years ago to Zoroaster and his mythical world of ‘goodies-and-baddies.’ The ‘god’of superheroes, be they Jewish, pagan, Muslim or Christian. The god popularized in the third century A.D. by Mani.

Mani, the patron saint of today’s media and its world of the epic battles between good and evil, or as Jesus would have it, baddies-and-baddies.

745 years after his death. Mani rules the Media. O.K.!