Gregory Dark Books

World First – And at 60!!!

2010-05-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

To have one book published on a birthday may be thought of as being
fortunate; to have two is prodigal; to have three is positively orgiastic.

On 24th August 2010, Gregory Dark will be indulging in just such an orgy. Exactly one week later, he will be 60 years old.

We can find no other instance in history of an author having three books published on the same date.

“I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a birthday since I was 29,” Dark confesses, “particularly not any of the 10’s. I’m not looking forward either to my 60th. But this tri-publication does take the sting out of it. It is by far the nicest birthday cake I’ve ever had. It certainly beats the Hell out of the triple by-passes being ‘celebrated’ by so many of my peers!

“No, it certainly wasn’t planned – by anything, that is, except for happenstance. There was a delay with one book, the second and third were already scheduled to be published close to each other: they’re different kinds of book. There was quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing. I was probably getting quite fractious. One day, John Hunt (my publisher) simply said, ‘Why don’t we publish them on the same day?’ I don’t think at the time he had any idea of my forthcoming birthday. He’s not a sentimentalist in that way ... Well, not in any way that I know of.”

As Dark has just said, the three books are different from each other: ‘Man of the New Millennium’ is the third of his ‘Millennium Trilogy’. Its sub-title is ‘A search for us in an age of me’. That search embraces politics, economics, psychology, philosophy and spirituality, contained within a gentle story of a four-way love affair – perhaps, even a five- or six-way love affair.

‘Charming!’ is a book for young people – of all ages! It is the biography of Prince Charming, the story ‘they’ don’t want you to read. Its sub-title is ‘If the glass slipper fits ...’

‘Titus and Roni’ are two novellas which, like good one-act plays, are independent pieces, but where, in conjunction, one further illuminates the other. ‘Titus’ is the diary of a grandfather held hostage by terrorists with his grandson; ‘Roni’ accompanies the 24 hours in a mother’s life before her son’s execution. They are both tales of inspiration and hope.
At the heart of all three books is the urge of humanity for humanity – but, then, it would scarcely be a book of his without such an urge!

' A Blog Oasis ' Week 9

2009-09-13T04:56:00.000-07:00

" We all know that the world’s in a bad mess
And such causes the most of us sadness:
It stems from the creed
That good comes from greed –
And that, friends, is nothing but madness. "
Gregory Dark

I enjoy limericks. Those at the beginning of these entries are designed, maybe, to have a little bite to them; those at the end are designed only to amuse. The aim of ‘A Blog Oasis’ is not to be instructive. Rather its thoughts are meant as aids to your own cogitation or rumination or meditation. They are there to be read and pondered – absorbed or not, according to what such pondering advises you. I chose them because they have all, in their own ways, helped me, particularly when (as I frequently do) I find myself wondering about whether I am making the most of myself, whether I am living the life I would like to live.

No-one in the history of man has ever, I suspect, been able to do that entirely, and I write for those, like me, who are still searching and exploring. Those who have already found have scant need of most literature, and none at all of mine. If you are still searching, though, just maybe, some of these words may help in your quest.
The comments I have written to accompany the quotes are not invariably analyses of them. Often they are divergent thoughts spawned by the original.

I wrote ‘A Blog Oasis’ originally for a daughter. To avoid using the cumbersome, and tiresome, ‘he or she’, I therefore tended to use feminine pronouns.

“There,” she reflected, “I shall find peace; and at my age, is not that happiness?”
Stendhal, ‘The Chartreuse of Parma’, chapter 2

Speech is a horribly inexact form of communication. Always there are, at least, three versions of the same sentence: What I mean to say, what I do say, and what you hear. Often the disparity between the first and the last is so enormous that the independent witness could wonder whether they were indeed parts of the same conversation. Even the written word is penned with more or less ineptitude and is read by anyone who is not a saint with a left-luggage office of prejudices, preconceptions, ignorances and peculiarities.

If hindsight is the only exact science, semantics must be one of the most inexact. As a writer, words are my tools and I can get quite prickly (in case you hadn’t noticed!) if they are misused. But my pique will not stop ‘chronic’ being understood generally as ‘very serious’, nor ‘petrified’ as ‘terrified’ nor ‘precocious’ as being ‘cheeky’. But then Shakespeare would be surprised today by what ‘naughty’ has come to mean, or ‘cool’ or ‘wicked’ or … or … or.
Happiness is a word for which a million people would offer up a million different definitions. I’m going to understand it as a core acceptance of oneself and one’s lot. And I believe such cannot be obtained without peace.

I don’t think such peace need be bought at the price of accepting the lunacy and injustice of the world. But I think it is possible to rail against both, and strive to change both, without such compromising the peace at one’s centre. I don’t have that peace, but I have (I think) tasted it. And I have seen it: in the Dalai Lama, for one.

What say, sweetheart, we search today for a bit more peace within ourselves? Who knows, maybe if we all sought today for a bit more of such peace, maybe the world would become a bit more peaceful!

I have been accused of writing from a higher moral plain, or considering that I do. I really don’t believe that to be true.
I write because I wrong.And I wrong because I’m human. This is not original sin, but original fallibility. There has never been a person born without such fallibility, nor will there ever be one. If we were sensible, we would recognise that as being one of the very many things which unites us all.I write because I continue to wrong.
And because there is that within me capable of grievous wrong.

I write because it’s always seemed to me that, if I suffered from eczema, the consultant I would want to see would be a dermatologist who shared my complaint, rather than one blessed with a baby’s-bottom complexion.

I would love to be able to claim that I have meditated my way into spiritual enlightenment, or that God whispers to me why His mysteries are so mysterious. But I haven’t and He doesn’t. I do spend a lot of time in thought and reflection. But I fear more of this is day-dreaming than concrete cogitation.

I write because I have wronged.

In microcosm I have made a fair amount of the mistakes of which man is capable, and have committed most of the sins, vices and peccadilloes that are on offer – occasionally (it must be said) very enjoyably! I write because I continue to wrong.
I’m no poacher turned gamekeeper, I’m merely a poacher who’s studied quite a lot about game-keeping, who am in awe of certain gamekeepers (and utterly appalled by others!), and who keeps thinking that game-keeping is really such a good idea that one day I really should give it a whirl. If only life wouldn’t keep on intervening!
I keep wondering when I will finally be old enough to learn from my mistakes; and am now old enough to know that I probably never will.

Far from claiming any kind of high-ground, therefore, I accept that I write from a position deep in a chasm. I do stand in judgement. But it often ill behoves me when I do so.

I write because, yes, I am capable of grievous wrong.

I do have to stand in judgement of the likes of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. I try to remember Gandhi’s enjoinment to hate the crime but love the criminal. And I accept that I know neither Mr Bush nor Mr Blair (nor do I have the slightest desire to do so) and am thus condemning the criminal from a position of ignorance. Sometimes, though, the crime has such enormous implications, one simply also has to condemn the criminal. If its acorn is poisonous the oak must be.

I feel I have to stand in judgement of these two men. I feel we all do. Because their actions have threatened, and continue to threaten far too many of the things for which they are demanding of others that they forfeit their lives: democracy, human rights, civil liberties, free speech and indeed the whole species and planet. And in a way which I am sure history will deem to have been considerably more dangerous than the threat posed by al-Qaeda. But I must also accept that, had I sought (and obtained!) such office, there is that within me quite as capable of abusing power as egregiously as these two men have done. I hope I might have stopped short of the excesses meted out by, let’s say, Mugabe or Amin or Cecescau or Pinochet. But, you know, in the right circumstances, I’m not even too sure about that.

And that’s why I so passionately believe in the concept of free speech and democracy: the world needs to be protected from people like the me I could be.
So, no, I do not write from any moral high-ground: my strength is only my weakness.

" 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

"Blog Oasis" - Week 8

2009-08-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

"All that’s needed for evil to smirk
Is for good men to do nought, so said Burke:
An adage of yore.
The moral to draw?
That that Burke was really no berk!"
Gregory Dark

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
Franklin, Benjamin, quoted in
‘Taking Liberties’ by Chris Atkins

Shhhh! Now, I don’t want to say this too loudly, and this is strictly between you and me, but I’m not an absolute believer in democracy. First of all, I know of nowhere where it is actually operative. And secondly, much like Churchill, I think its greatest virtue is that it’s preferable to any other alternative – at least, that we’ve tried thus far.

The problems, even with the ‘democracy’ as practised, are manifold. As a philosophy, one of its central faults is, frankly, that it’s wasted on the people. There used to be a rather witty breakdown of the English national press and its readership. “‘The Times’,” it went, “is read by the people who run the country; ‘The Financial Times’ is read by the people who own the country …” and so on in a remarkably accurate analysis until it arrived at ‘The Sun’ which is read, so it suggested, “by the people who don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.” Sadly, there is considerably more truth to that than I, as an idealist, find comfortable to recognise.

The political apathy today is enormous, and needs much more space to address than these few words. But, as with so much of today’s realities, that apathy is only a larger and more sinister development of that there has always been.
Remarkably few people are that bothered about free speech or civil liberties … about ‘liberty’, in fact, at all, in any abstract sense. Under the governance of Messers Bush and Blair we witnessed a totally unparalleled erosion of that liberty. Protests rarely rose above a whisper. And were almost totally ignored by a press and the broadcasting media, all of which should be in the vanguard of that protest.
Benjamin Franklin may well be right. Perhaps people today don’t deserve either liberty or security. Certainly what they have of both is a beggar’s rations. Perhaps people don’t deserve democracy either. But because they don’t deserve it does not countenance withholding it. Liberty and democracy are not rewards, but rights.

Let us commit today, poppet, to maintaining human rights and civil liberties – whether or not we believe people ‘deserve’ them. Millions of people died in the Second World War to preserve just such liberties as are now being stolen. Surely we owe those sacrificed lives a little of our emotional energy.

"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 7

2009-08-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

" Love is central to every religion
It provides hope and gives us our vision;
But in our secular world
The word is now hurled
With something quite close to derision."
Gregory Dark

" When one tries to rise above Nature, one is liable to fall below it. "
Conan Doyle, Arthur

Now, don’t get me wrong: I know I lack the intellect of a Bertr and Russell or an Albert Einstein – or probably of their lesser known cousins, the remarkably stupid Albert Russell and Bertrand Einstein. But I do like to think there’s the odd bit of grey matter rattling between the two old ear-drums. It therefore appals me, how many years it was that I believed God and religion inseparable. I thought, because so much of so many religions was clearly so evil, that all those who took an interest in matters spiritual were either bad or mad. When I was again prepared to consider metaphysical matters one of my first ‘spiritual’ advisers suggested that all I needed know about God was that I was not He. Which is still, now I think about it, pretty much the lump sum of my knowledge of Him – or Her or It or them or him, with a small ‘h’.

It’s a pretty simple notion. It’s therefore so much more of a shame, and a bit perplexing, that as a species we seem unable to take it on board.
It seems to me that one of our most besetting vices, as a species, is our arrogance. The worst of which is that such arrogance is not completely unfounded! In a whole host of ways, we have triumphed over Nature. We are now able to fly, and to breathe underwater; we have even been able to escape from our own planet. But this ingenuity seems to have sired a rather unappealing cockiness, if not hubris. We are the masters of the planet, that hubris seems to tell us, and Nature is only there to do our bidding.

We continue to build major metropolises on geological fault-lines, to raze vast tracts of natural wasteland, to feed livestock fodder at variance with those animals’ natural diet and charged with chemicals, likewise to douse our fruit and vegetables, even to change the globe’s weather patterns and tidal flows, to poison our rivers, our oceans and our fish. And we do all of this confident that, whatever redress Nature takes, we will overcome it. Because we are the master. And we have been shown time and time – and time – again that we’re not. And that we can’t.
Today, my darling one, let’s just say to ourselves, let’s do one thing to atune our lives more to Nature, and do one thing less to spite her or to prove our mastery over her.

" A wise marmalade cat of Edinburgh
Spent all her days licking her furgh.
Said she, “My dear surgh,
Ýou too could purgh
If you took problems just when they occurgh!”
Gregory Dark

'A Blog Oasis' Week 6

2009-07-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-07-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

“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

2009-07-12T06:42:00.001-07:00

“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

2009-07-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

Blog Oasis Week Two

2009-06-29T11:05:00.001-07:00

We all know that the world’s in a bad mess
And such causes the most of us sadness:
It stems from the creed
That good comes from greed –
And that, friends, is nothing but madness.
(Gregory Dark)

But, since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on - as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Sick or well, at sea or shore;
While we’re quaffing,
Let’s have laughing -
Who the devil cares for more?
Byron, George Gordon, ‘Lines to Mr. Hodgson’

Byron called his time an ‘age of cant and humbug’. I dread that our time be called an ‘age of can and won’t’. We can do it: can build a better world, can protect the environment and the people living in it, can secure the future whilst enjoying the present. We can, but we don’t. Let’s start to change that, heh? What do you say? Let the cry of our age be that we can ... and that we do.

Having said that, of course, the wisest people are those who can ‘wear life …’ (as some sage once advised) ‘… like a loose garment’.
I have been told that the Dalai Lama, asked to encapsulate his advice to the American nation in one sentence, responded with: “Stop taking yourselves so seriously.”
Two sterling bits of advice. In whose quest laughter is a mighty tool.
Much of what happens around us is absurd; much of what happens to us is absurd. The person who can recognise that is not only wise, but blessed.
The tougher life gets, the greater the need to laugh.
An ex-prisoner, a friend of mine, said of life behind bars that he was always in tears. “But,” he added, “half the time, those were tears of laughter.”
The French say that a day without wine is a day without sun. Well, a day without laughter is like a week … like a month without sun.
This is what Arkona has to say about laughter in ‘The Prophet of the New Millennium’ – yes, I know this is self-publicity gone mad! I suppose I should apologise, but instead I’m going to allow you to mock me!
‘“If we laugh to earth ourselves, that is healthy; if to exalt ourselves, sick.
‘“If we laugh in pain that is healthy, at pain it is unhealthy and unwholesome.
‘“If the laugher emanates from love, it is a healthy laughter; if from hatred it is toxic.
‘“If we laugh to scorn the torturers, that is healthy; if we laugh that we may become a torturer, that is depraved.
‘“When the jester mocks us he helps us. When he mocks our neighbours he debases us. When he mocks us he denudes the barbarian; when he mocks our neighbours we become the barbarian.”
Let us make a commitment together, you and I today, to find something about ourselves or our situation to laugh about.
But let not the laughter stop us from doing. Rather let us use it as a spur to do more!

Moaned the girl to the vicar in Leicester
All men could not fail but moleicester.
Said he, “Surely you jeicest.”
Then he fondled her breicest,
And tickled her thigh. And then bleicester!
(Gregory Dark)

Blog Oasis Week One !!

2009-06-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

‘A Blog Oasis’ is not designed to be instructive. Rather its thoughts are meant as aids to your own cogitation or rumination or meditation. They are there to be read and pondered – absorbed or not, according to what such pondering advises you. I chose them because they have all, in their own ways, helped me, particularly when (as I frequently do) I find myself wondering about whether I am making the most of myself, whether I am living the life I would like to live.
No-one in the history of man has ever, I suspect, been able to do that entirely, and I write for those, like me, who are still searching and exploring. Those who have already found have scant need of most literature, and none at all of mine. If you are still searching, though, just maybe, some of these words may help in your quest.
The comments I have written to accompany the quotes are not invariably analyses of them. Often they are divergent thoughts spawned by the original. I have revised my words since I wrote them for Lyubov, but they remain true to the spirit of the original.
I wrote ‘A Blog Oasis’ for a daughter. To avoid using the cumbersome, and tiresome, ‘he or she’, I therefore tended to use feminine pronouns.

+++
Week 1:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare, William, ‘Hamlet’, I, 3.

There seems to be a peculiar belief abroad that all we need to do with life’s axioms is to know of them; that, if we do, it must follow that we live by them. As if knowledge of a diet will, by itself, help us to shed weight.
Spiritual axioms are phrases that are capable of enhancing the quality of life. Mostly the goals they describe are unattainable and their value exists not in living by them but in trying to live by them.
They are, however, certainly not goals which are there for the thinking of them. They are skills. And like any skill they require practise and a certain amount of application. Both the joy and the value of most skills are in the journey and not the destination.
Of nothing is this more true than in this, possibly the greatest piece of advice ever given by a father to his offspring: ‘to thine own self be true’.
It may only be a phrase of six words, but it contains a lifetime’s worth of struggle.
For one thing, one’s ‘own self’ is not a constant. Just as my body changes over time so do my brain, my soul, my beliefs – everything. So being true to myself requires of me not the speed of a downhill skier but the agility and awareness of the slalom skier.
But it is, my darling, a wonderfully useful yardstick. And, when I brush my teeth at night, though I can use it as a scourge for those occasions when I wasn’t true to myself, this enjoinment is more useful as a bouquet: It enables me to cheer myself – especially on those occasions when (as it usually does) it has taken courage to be true to myself.
However miserable the rest of the day, if I can go to bed with that to cheer about, that day will eventually have been sealed as being a good day.
Let us make a commitment, you and I, that today we will recognise that we are worth being true to, and that we owe it to our worthy selves to be true to them.
+++

I have been accused of writing from a higher moral plain, or considering that I do. I really don’t believe that to be true.
I write because I wrong.
And I wrong because I’m human. This is not original sin, but original fallibility. There has never been a person born without such fallibility, nor will there ever be one. If we were sensible, we would recognise that as being one of the very many things which unites us all.
I write because I continue to wrong.
And because there is that within me capable of grievous wrong.
I write because it’s always seemed to me that, if I suffered from eczema, the consultant I would want to see would be a dermatologist who shared my complaint, rather than one blessed with a baby’s-bottom complexion.
I would love to be able to claim that I have meditated my way into spiritual enlightenment, or that God whispers to me why His mysteries are so mysterious. But I haven’t and He doesn’t. I do spend a lot of time in thought and reflection. But I fear more of this is day-dreaming than concrete cogitation.
I write because I have wronged.
In microcosm I have made a fair amount of the mistakes of which man is capable, and have committed most of the sins, vices and peccadilloes that are on offer – occasionally (it must be said) very enjoyably!
I write because I continue to wrong.
I’m no poacher turned gamekeeper, I’m merely a poacher who’s studied quite a lot about game-keeping, who am in awe of certain gamekeepers (and utterly appalled by others!), and who keeps thinking that game-keeping is really such a good idea that one day I really should give it a whirl. If only life wouldn’t keep on intervening!
I keep wondering when I will finally be old enough to learn from my mistakes; and am now old enough to know that I probably never will.
Far from claiming any kind of high-ground, therefore, I accept that I write from a position deep in a chasm. I do stand in judgement. But it often ill behoves me when I do so.
I write because I am capable of grievous wrong.
I do have to stand in judgement of the likes of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. I try to remember Gandhi’s enjoinment to hate the crime but love the criminal. And I accept that I know neither Mr Bush nor Mr Blair (nor do I have the slightest desire to do so) and am thus condemning the criminal from a position of ignorance. Sometimes, though, the crime has such enormous implications, one simply also has to condemn the criminal. If its acorn is poisonous the oak must be.
I feel I have to stand in judgement of these two men. I feel we all do. Because their actions have threatened, and continue to threaten far too many of the things for which they are demanding of others that they forfeit their lives: democracy, human rights, civil liberties, free speech and indeed the whole species and planet. And in a way which I am sure history will deem to have been considerably more dangerous than the threat posed by al-Qaeda. But I must also accept that, had I sought (and obtained!) such office, there is that within me quite as capable of abusing power as egregiously as these two men have done. I hope I might have stopped short of the excesses meted out by, let’s say, Mugabe or Amin or Cecescau or Pinochet. But, you know, in the right circumstances, I’m not even too sure about that.
And that’s why I so passionately believe in the concept of free speech and democracy: the world needs to be protected from people like the me I could be.

' A BLOG OASIS '

2009-06-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

I was a lousy father. Probably I still am. But I didn’t want my daughter ever to mistake my ineptitude for my not loving her. I realised when she was fourteen that in four years’ time she would be coming of age. (Yeah, I’m really bright in that way!) I spent much of those intervening years compiling the quotes and thoughts which together form what I have now called ‘A Blog Oasis’ (and her eighteenth birthday present!).
I have been persuaded that ‘A Blog Oasis’ can serve a wider audience than just my daughter.
Shortly, therefore, we are going to start publishing these on this blog-site. Weekly, to begin with.
The quotes weren’t, and aren’t, designed to form a ‘philosophy’, nor are my words that accompany those quotes – nothing that grand. The intention of both was, and is, merely to provide, yes, an oasis: a place within the increasing freneticism of today’s world at which you can sit to get in touch with that most precious of the world’s treasures – you. A ‘spiritual' oasis, if you like.
‘When I use the word “spiritual” I mean basic human good qualities. These are: human affection, a sense of involvement, honesty, discipline and human intelligence properly guided by good motivation. We have all these qualities from birth; they do not come to us later ...’ The words belong to the Dalai Lama, from his ‘Book of Wisdom’. I use the word ‘spiritual’ in exactly the same way.
‘A Blog Oasis’ is not designed to be instructive. I lack the arrogance to be a teacher. I seek to be an educator’s assistant: someone who helps the actual educator, who is you, to ‘draw out’ (the literal meaning of education) from within you the potential there is there and that is busting a gut (sometimes not metaphorically) scrabbling to get out.
The thoughts and quotations in ‘A Blog Oasis’ are meant to be aids to your own cogitation and/or meditation. I chose them because they have all, in their own ways, helped me in my consideration of whether I am making the most of myself, whether I am living the life I would like to live. No-one, I suspect, in the history of man has ever been able to do that entirely. But, just maybe, some of these words may help you in your quest to do so a little better.
I am indebted to Lyubov, whose birthday present this was. It requires a special person to allow others a rummage through her private correspondence. But that is only one of the very many ways in which Lyubov’s specialness manifests itself.

The first part of 'A Blog Oasis' will be posted on 21st June

Gregory Dark - An Introduction

2009-06-02T15:58:00.001-07:00

Written by - Anne Piper Publicist to Gregory Dark

Gregory Dark has been described as combining the worst excesses of Lord Byron, the Mahatma Gandhi ...
and Homer Simpson.

Of Anglo-American heritage, Gregory has written, directed and produced in theatre, cinema and television ; has assisted both James Bond and Edward Bond ; has survived working with sharks, crocodiles, black mambas... and a few directors more dangerous than any of these. However, in recent years Gregory has given his time to his work as an author.

Gregory Dark was born on 31st August 1950. Forty-seven years later Princess Diana would be killed on that date: and, of course, eleven years previously on the same day, German troops had massed on the Polish border. Both these events would have a significance in Greg's life.

When Gregory was 6 months old, his father, John, moved the family to Kenya. He had done his National Service there and had fallen in love with the country. John took courageous stands against a pervading racism which infected the ex-pat community there at that time. But the Mau-Mau weren't to know that! Following an attempt on his sister's life, the family returned to " Blighty ". His father's passionate hatred of racism, and Greg's first brush with terrorism would also be significant in his later world-view.

The sights of his childhood, the experiences of his adulthood, his relationships (good and bad) and his ability to use all with complete openess and honesty have led him to become the writer that he is today. A writer who not just questions the world in which we live, but who asks us to do the same. A writer who is not afraid to write about the real world, not the world we are encouraged to see by those in authority. A writer who knows man's faults, man's excesses and man's ability to make mistakes, but still encourages that "man" to believe in his rights to have a say in the world around him, and decide his own path.
To find out in more detail about Gregory Dark please visit www.gregorydark.net

Gregory Dark - In his own words !!

2009-06-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

To find out more about Gregory the author, and the person, please watch this short film.