'A Blog Oasis' Week 6

"Life, liberty, happiness’s pursuit:
These were held by hist’ry’s astute
To be inalienable rights.
They are not just sound-bytes
To be assumed when conditions all suit."
GREGORY DARK



" Clever people are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights! "
Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Beyond Good & Evil”, ‘Maxims & Interludes’ – 178

People are not gods. Almost what defines us human beings is our fallibility. Liturgical ‘infallibility’ is not an indication of spiritual strength, but weakness.

I have a huge respect for Winston Churchill. He did lead a country – as opposed to spinning the fact that he was leading a country. And he did lead an isolated Great Britain in one of the very few wars which hindsight would deem to be necessary. The war was over by the time I was born. Nonetheless I was in the queue that passed Churchill’s coffin whilst he was lying in state. I felt I owed him at the very least those hours of my life. That does not mean, however, that my respect is blind. The bombing of Dresden, his stand against Indian independence and his handling of Britain’s General Strike are merely three of a whole catalogue of events in which he erred on the wrong side of sense or propriety or justice.

When we won’t hear censure of those we respect we actually demean them. And Nietzsche is right: such compromises both their human rights and ours. Theirs because, in seeking to make such people more than human, we actually make them less than human.
The denial of our human rights is twofold: firstly, if we create role-models of paradigms, we always have to fall short of them. The expectation of which must (however tortuously) lead us to being less than we might otherwise be. And secondly, because, if respect demands that those for whom we have it are super-human, we are respecting myth not reality. When – as inevitably they will – our paradigms totter from their plinth, we are thus setting ourselves up either for denial or disappointment.

There were some remarkable people in the 20th Century, remarkable: Gandhi, Marie Curie, Einstein, Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mandela, King, Mother Teresa. But all these people had one thing in common: they were people.

Let’s make that commitment to ourselves today, sweetheart, to let people be people. Surely humanity is better served by the influence of remarkable people than by unremarkable saints.




"Th’ archaeologist was somewhat frustrated
When brought a splinter in water aerated.
“I did not say ‘fizzy’,”
He said in a tizzy.
“I said, ‘Get the wood carbon-dated!’”
Gregory Dark

'A Blog Oasis' Week 5

“Life is suff’ring,” said the Buddha, forsooth:
It’s the first, and the key, Noble Truth.
It means already we’re sore;
Of pain we do not need more –
That’s like giving more acne to youth!
Gregory Dark




God’s grace is not evinced in the beauty of a rose, but in the perception of the rose as beautiful.
Gregory Dark
I’ve been racking my brains, trying to remember what it was occasioned this thought. Without success. It is a good thought, though, wherever it came from – and … yes, yes … though too I say it myself. Its meaning is not quite ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, nor does it quite rephrase Wilde’s beautiful thought that until you see the beauty in something, you haven’t looked at it closely enough. It’s both of those, my thought, plus another variation of the Zen conundrum – which I have to confess is no conundrum to me!: If there is no-one there to hear it, does a falling tree make a noise?
In man’s development, quite as significant as her invention of the wheel was her appreciation of the beautiful. In many ways, it was more significant.
And that appreciation is being eroded.
Shop roses today certainly still look pretty. Where did their smell go? Fruit today becomes prettier to the eye and blander to the taste. And, in common with all the rest of our food, is heavily contaminated with toxins. Including the so-called ‘organic’. There is now so much contamination in the world that nothing can be uncontaminated. Blue whales are now toxic, so are maggots. Pregnant women now contain so much poison that, in the United States, were those toxins contained in any other receptacle than a human body, such receptacle would not be allowed to cross state lines. We seriously don’t think this should give us pause for thought?
Vested interest is bulldozing us into believing that that which suits them for us to believe is beautiful is indeed beautiful. There is so much potential out there in the world just withering on the vine. We now want our popularity to be as instant as our coffee. If a tv show today isn’t immediately popular with an audience it is pulled. ‘Cheers’ today would not have survived its first season. Nor would ‘Neighbours’. The popularity of jiving does not make ballet redundant, any more than photography invalidates the painted portrait.
Bucks have probably always been held in higher regard than beauty. But that malaise has today become a pandemic. Unless we start protecting beauty, the beast of bucks will devour it. Totally. We start protecting beauty by recognising it.
Let us today, my oh so precious one, reclaim beauty. Let us not be bamboozled into believing McBeauty is real beauty any more than McMuffins are gourmet eating. Let’s find someone we can share beauty with – we can share real beauty with. Let’s look at a truly beautiful sculpture, or gaze on a truly beautiful sunset, or hear some truly beautiful music. If we start to appreciate what is truly beautiful, we will start ensuring that the truly beautiful will also be there for your children.




The Americans call him van Gogh
And his art sells for truckloads of dogh;
‘Twas not always sogh
At his very first shogh
Did anyone buy him? God, nogh!
Gregory Dark

'A Blog Oasis' Week 4

“Love thy neighbour,” enjoined Christ the Lord –
A phrase we should roundly applaud:
We’d be saved so much grief
If we espoused that belief
And not think it one better ignored.
Gregory Dark




"Let everyone sweep in front of his or her own door, and the whole world will be clean."
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

So much great thought is expressed so simply. The first time I read this, I thought, “Well, of course. That’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying.” But the obvious sometimes does need saying. If you are a passenger in a car hurtling towards a precipice, you know the driver is aware of the situation – it’s quite obvious, for God’s sake. You may, however, still feel the need to say something like, “Excuse me, old chap. I don’t mean to be pushy or anything, but I was wondering whether you may have happened to notice that imminently we are going to be plunging to our death”!

When I started thinking about this advice of Goethe’s, I also started to realise how redolent it was of Christ’s invocations: that it should be he who is without sin who should cast the first stone and first to remove the mote from our own eye.

But Goethe’s words have got a wider application even than that. The world will not be a peaceful place until its inhabitants are at peace. And they will not be at peace until they are at peace with themselves. And they will not be at peace with themselves unless they allow others to be at peace with themselves.

Altruism is only a selfishness that works. A naked selfishness does not help you. It helps only those who seek to control you.

Let us make a commitment, sweetheart, you and I together, to look at something in ourselves or about ourselves that could make us better people.



Her fiancé was born close to Gloucester;
He was a roué, a cad, an impoucester;
He conned her and boucester,
And then double-croucester –
But, thank God, he finally loucester.
Gregory Dark

'A Blog Oasis' Week 3

The world is now right on the skids
‘Cos it forgot the adage which bids
Us recall, with our birth
We don’t inherit the Earth:
We hold it in trust for our kids.
Gregory Dark

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Lawrence, D.H., ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, opening line
In fact, most of the ages of history have been tragic ages. Some merely more tragic than others. One of history’s most devastating tragedies indeed is that we, as a race, seem not to have realised that. In large part because we have failed to learn that lesson, today’s age is quite possibly going to be the most tragic of all – until tomorrow’s, which might well be its last.

We’re doing precious little today we haven’t been doing since time immemorial. Throughout history the privileged few have luxuriated at the expense of the impoverished many; we have all (in one way or another) been exploiting Nature’s resources and our fellow-man; we have taken rapaciously and given miserly; we have mistaken the specious for the special and the gaudy for the valuable. Politicians, throughout history, have been self-seeking and corrupt; priests have been self-seeking and venal; magnates and generals self-seeking and ruthless … And we? We have been self-seeking and compliant. Our only difference today is one of scale. And of reckoning. There is a day when chickens come home to roost. I fear such a day is today. Or tomorrow.

The tragedy of our age is so manifold that it is almost impossible to recognise the scale of the tragedy. Perhaps that’s why – still today – we refuse to take it tragically.
But it does also seem to me that this age is one equally of boundless opportunity … of a potential without limits. If we are to survive today’s tragedy we will need solutions so radical that many of the evils which we have historically harboured as a species will simply have to be addressed. Either that or we perish. Certainly in terms of anything we have heretofore known as civilisation.

Let’s find one thing in ourselves today, sweetheart, one fault we need to address. Let’s start preparing ourselves for a radical change in our society and our world.


“Rookies,” barked the sergeant from Wycombe,
“It’s not never, sir, into shape I can’t lycombe.
I begins treating them finer
Than Dresden bone chiner.
But when that do not work, sir, I kycombe!”
Gregory Dark