Daniel Nanavati's Blog

Sometimes we do silly things. I am reminded that people working in the TV industry get paid for making us do nothing. Their whole lives are based around the fact that for a period of time they can make us sit down and watch. Whether it is the trendy way they show us the news of the world with irrelevant music to a show of people making fools of themselves. Yet, conversely, the Government wants people to be productive and creative because it is those things which generate the ideas that make the things other people want to buy. No doubt the people who made the TV are right up there as the most productive and inventive people on earth.

Everyone needs to wind down, it doesn’t do any harm to relax. I recall though my professors at University relaxing by reading light literature (crime novels) which helped the brain to wind down whilst still engaging it. I also recall one of my teachers telling me the size of a TV in a house is in inverse proportion to the people’s intelligence.

Screens are everywhere but the TV screen seems to me to be the least productive one we use and we overuse it. The greatest way to celebrate the Olympics in London is to turn them off and get outside with your friends and play some games. To want to watch other people running around whilst you eat yourself to an unhealthy body … bizarre.

I have always followed animal rights and animal charities and was interested when the lemurs became popular, in how human beings ascribe darkness to the ugly and good luck to the beautiful. I was interested today listening to American biologists talking about extinction events and how we interact with the animal kingdom.

 The point that struck a chord with me was that in following popular ideas of what is beautiful, cuddly and wide eyed and in putting resources into helping those survive we actually do nothing to maintain the balance of nature, which is all about Eco-systems. Eco-systems can cross whole continents and indeed the entire world and these cuddly animals we try to keep alive depend upon the whole as much as we do.The emphasis should be in keeping populations alive around the world, all the species in a group of animals, all the small invertebrates and others that filter water and pollinate crops and so much more.

We are, say the biologists, cutting the limb off behind us upon which we are sitting and we are endangering the health of our own fresh water and food resources by not knowing enough about how human habitations unbalances the whole of nature.  A thought I agree with wholeheartedly.

We are so selfish we are killing ourselves.

I hear on the BBC radio, though not on the mainstream news programmes, a few more people bemoaning the system and how we place all our lives into making money. I am glad some more people think the way I do I am just sorry it took the collapse of countries and a banking crisis for them to realise. There is however no use in being paid to appear on shows and moaning about money, the only way to change is to start living a fruitful and modern life without using money and the only way to do that is for people to come together and start money-less societies.

And barter is not the option, people must change their focus from getting something for each and every thing they make and realising they are making civilization. We must get away from this narrow focus on personal trading and create a focus where we are all working to gain greater knowledge and what we do is as important as what everyone else does. One of the tragedies of the financial system is the way it classes work and therefore people and makes one worth more than another. Obviously ludicrous and detrimental to harmony in society but oh, so human.

We take as much delight in looking down on each other as we do in making a few million.

You are old, father William

“You are old, father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head

Do you think, at your age, it is right?

“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,

“I feared it might injure the brain;

But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,

Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,

And you have grown most uncommonly fat;

Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door

Pray what is the reason for that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,

“I kept all my limbs very supple

By the use of this ointment one shilling a box

Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak

For anything tougher than suet;

Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak

Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his fater, “I took to the law,

And argued each case with my wife;

And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,

Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose

That your eye was as steady as ever;

Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose

What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”

Said his father. “Don’t give yourself airs!

Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs.

Exit signs? They’re on the way out!

Black Beauty? Now there’s a dark horse!

Velcro? What a rip-off!

Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.

Eric Bristow asked me why I put superglue on one of his darts. I said you just can’t let it go can you?

I saw this advert in a window that said: “Television for sale, £1, volume stuck on full.” I thought, “I can’t turn that down.”

I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again

Conjunctivitis.com – that’s a site for sore eyes (this year’s Lafta winner)

So I said to a Scottsman ‘did you have terrible spots as a kid?’ He said ‘ac ne’

Do you ever get that when you’re half way through eating a horse and you think to yourself, ‘I’m not as hungry as I thought I was’

Lotteries are about money and winning. And since most of the world has no money I am forced to resolve all I can offer is that we are actually, all winners. It is impossible to define self-awareness and self as necessary in as far as the million decisions taken by human beings since the beginning of our evolution lead to our self-awareness and births, but these decisions are not definites until taken.

History is a little like glue drying, you never know its shape until afterwards. And this birthing and life brings with it a strong idea of self that would not exist but for who we are … so how exactly does that work? How to millions of accidents bring about such a strong idea of individuality?

I think this is part of evolution and how the brain works on our self-awareness. Our idea of being alive, our idea of self, is actually not that strong it just seems to be. In fact it is so weak that many people have huge psychological problems because we are not born with an idea of self, we develop it over our childhoods. From impressions and decisions and experiences.

Then we add to that characteristics inherited from our parents and a will to survive and our being named and having a language and slowly it dawns upon us that we are … who we are.

 An evolved accident.

After two years of editing and the trials and errors of digital publishing, we finally published the five volume series of Shänne Sand’s work and this week, it all seemed worthwhile when this review, her first, was published in America: -

Midwest Book Review, Oregan Bookwatch May 2012:

“We collect our thoughts, and it may be some time before we let it all be known. “Fidelity is for Swans” is a memoir from Shanne Sands as she puts forth her experience in other forms of writing to create a more comprehensive work of poetry. A strong addition to any literary poetry collection, “Fidelity is for Swans” is a fine and much recommended pick.”

John Taylor

www.midwestbookreview.com

 

Like all the the financial crises across the ages, several of which have devastated whole countries and the fiscal policies of the later Roman Empire contributed to the demise of a thousand year reign, is due to human greed over money and the power it brings. Private property is after all, after taking into account a certain amount of privacy, the deliberate withholding of power from others. I heard once someone suggest every citizen should be allocated a certain amount of land on birth but that wouldn’t work to-even-out society as land needs to be tended or worked and lots of people today are completely ignorant about husbandry and not even vaguely interested in growing their own food.

The sadness is whatever happens the result will be more money-making and that has always been the root of the problem for the system, relying upon continual growth, is broken at core but no one has the intellect or bravery to think of another system to run society.

Whatever Greece decides to do and whatever effect that has on Europe and the world money will always bring crises and our grandchildren will have theirs as we have had ours. There will of course eventually come the end of the empire and the picking over the bones by the barbarians who take over.

Covering Wings

Love! Love! Your tenderness,

Your beautiful, watchful ways

Grasp me, fold me, cover me;

I lie in a kind of daze,

Neither asleep nor yet awake,

Neither a bud nor flower.

Brings to-morrow

Joy or sorrow,

The black or the golden hour?

Love! Love! You pity me so!

Chide me, scold me–cry,

“Submit–submit! You must not fight!”

What may I do, then? Die?

But, oh my horror of quiet beds!

How can I longer stay!

“One to be ready,

Two to be steady,

Three to be off and away!”

Darling heart–your gravity!

Your sorrowful, mournful gaze–

“Two bleached roads lie under the moon,

At the parting of the ways.”

But the tiny, tree-thatched, narrow lane,

Isn’t it yours and mine?

The blue-bells ring

Hey, ding-a-ding, ding!

And buds are thick on the vine.

Love! Love! Grief of my heart!

As a tree droops over a stream

You hush me, lull me, dark me,

The shadow hiding the gleam.

Your drooping and tragical boughs of grace

Are heavy as though with rain.

Run! Run!

Into the sun!

Let us be children again.

In writing a new story I had occasion to look up the diet of the soldiers in the American Civil War. It wasn’t the foods themselves that interested me after a while, nor the difference in diet between the two sides, but the fact that the officers had better and fresher food than their soldiers. I am reminded that oysters in the Victorian age were the easy food of the poor because they could be harvested free but sometime in the twentieth century they became a desired food of rich people. So laws governed their harvesting and were too expensive for the poor to buy.

There are some exotic foods I am sure but I am surprised that soldiers, a group of dangerous men, would allow their diet to be lower than their commanders.  Until I realised that camaraderie has its limits and that armies are deeply social structures.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before because how could a country’s army not reflect the social order in the country? But it still surprises me that a group of men – and today women- who are all chancing their lives together – should still maintain not a hierarchy of command which is always needed, but a social hierarchy and that the poor should always find themselves eating food their richer commanders wouldn’t touch.

I hope things have changed.