Remembered Bliss is already one of my most treasured possessions

Remembered Bliss is already one of my most treasured possessions I must confess that when I used to see some of these poems when Sebastian was alive, as at odd times I did,  I didn’t rate them at all highly. ...

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Tolle’s pain-body

 When Sebastian kept on and on about how wonderful Tolle is I stubbornly resisted him, perhaps itself an example of what Tolle calls the pain-body.  It means an addiction to sadness.  It says so much more than the social...

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The enigma of Darwin most poetic of souls (2) Natural Selection.

The particular way in which Darwin presents Natural Selection to us involves even greater ambiguities than those implicit in his presentation of the Struggle for Existence.   Ostensibly he was exposing Paley’s mythical and metaphysical designing Deity and replacing him...

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Wonderful Wonderful Ted and Sylvia

(I've had to cut out all the quotations  because of copyright issues.  But this blog is much better readc with a copy of Hawk in the Rain and Birthday Letters by your side.)The two great English poets of the...

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Not like one who loses but one who wins

Canto XV of the Inferno is one of my favourite passages in all of poetry.  In it Dante meets his old paederastic schoolteacher, Brunetto Latini.  In the gloom  Brunetto scarcely recognizes him,  shading his eyes ‘like an old tailor...

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The Catholic position on abortion is fully in line with contemporary science.

 At the earliest stages of pregnancy the future body that the zygote will acquire has not yet developed.  But the complement of genes that will govern and direct that development is fully present from the moment of conception.   It...

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Woe! Woe! Have mercy on us we are sinners, turds…

 Woe! Woe!  Have mercy on us we are sinners, turds, worms, but as the dust of the earth in thy sight.  They mean other people of course.  So fed up with bishops.  Here we are committing the worst evil...

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Genesis and Original Sin

 Genesis  and  Original Sin Original sin is, as the name suggests, to do with origins.  What were those origins?  Science can tell us.  We and the chimpanzees split off from a common chimpanzee-like ancestor only six million years ago.  A...

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It’s paedophiles wot done it.

 Projecting a guilt which cannot be faced outwards onto others is a well documented psychological condition.   Such is the case in regard to  society’s current obsession with paedophilia.   Paedophilia is a dreadful scourge, for children who are unfortunate enough...

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When you see pictures of Tony Nicholson’s pain racked face your heart bleeds…

When you see pictures of Tony Nicholson’s sad and pain racked face your heart bleeds and it must provoke the question: surely in a humane society should we not allow such a sad person to end his sad life? ...

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