pardon me, Dave, _Davie_ was a typo

L
-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 08 March 2004 10:34
Subject: Re: god, religion etc.


>Generally, Davie, I would just keep shtumm in such circumstances, and would
>be fully glad of Alison's supportive reply; but this is so (softly)
>outrageous and any making of poetry in my text so unintentional, I am going
>to relax my own casual rules and respond
>
>I don't think I mentioned anything about vistas of calm sea, illusory or
>otherwise. I did mention _cold and wet_. I'm talking about very cold and
>fully wet. People drown here - and not just the indigines of Leicester,
>Burnley and Bradford taking their airbeds into the ocean, but experienced
>fishermen who in some places don't even have a quai - and the place is
>prickly with life boats and rescue helicopters. I am somewhat surprised,
>after seeing your posts over a considerable period, to see you _fixing_ it,
>in this way, responding to a post of your invention
>
>I do not believe that it is the norm in Bradford Leicester and Burnley that
>one has no family and friends. I am sorry if that's your condition; but
what
>has it got to do with my conditions and experience or the discussion a huge
>variety of people have been having about religion? I think you overegg it
>with a chicken farm and some.
>
>Nice dinners? Had a good one yesterday, yes. What has that got to do with
>anything? I did something for someone and they fed me. My
>not-sure-what-sort-of-fish-this-is-but-I-going-to-eat-it-anyway fish supper
>charred on a driftwood fire leaves a little to be desired.
>
>I don't enjoy these occasional survival forays. I feel a need to do them
and
>take the rare opportunities that I have
>
>I was not making any tribute to life under the open sky as you seem to
>think; but merely indicating that I wanted to make an extra effort to hear
>particular sounds over a long period. Walls of houses deaden sounds.
>
>I wouldn't think of sleeping rough in Bradford Leicester and Burnley
because
>it would not achieve my aim, which is not to sleep rough - and I don't do
it
>*that rough anyway...
>
>I don't see how conditions in the megalopolis invalidate conditions on the
>almost island of west penwith and on scilly - and you wouldnt find the
>locals in a tent once they've reached teenage. The guy whose field I sleep
>in on Scilly thinks I'm crackers; but then he is a farmer on a small island
>in the ocean and if I were him any chance I got NOT to be open to the wind
>and water I'd take, especially in the three months of the year when even
the
>ferry doesn't run for the inclemency of the weather but he still has to
tend
>his animals and crops
>
>& when I become rich as Seamus Famous I shall live alongside him in a warm
>house and talk my friends (no family, does that mean I am authentic?)
>
>So, Dave, *very interesting but well over the top e.g. "No coasts"? That's
>geography! No deprivation or exploitation and all the other things
>justifiably hinted at. Of course there are no coasts in those towns -
>they're inland
>
>& if you look at a poem I posted here a few days ago, I describe towns as
>cancers which cease to be benign, referring back over a thousand years so I
>mean what are now thought of as quaint etc
>
>pastoral / anti pastoral, i dunno... at the moment I have the wherewithal
to
>be in this area and some energy to go other than the tourist spots; but
>don't assume too much
>
>
>L
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: david.bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: 08 March 2004 00:15
>Subject: Re: god, religion etc.
>
>
>>>i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
>>wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up<
>>
>>Interesting, Lawrence, but pastoral. Sleeping rough, as it were, in say
>>Bradford or Leicester or Burnley, would not be a matter of free running
>>water, except in that one might want to throw oneself into it for
>>termination. No coasts, no illusory vistas of calm sea, no comforts of
>>family, or friends, no nice dinners, no anything at all, except blank
>>mindlost despair, speechtornaway.
>>
>>
>>Best
>>
>>Dave
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>David Bircumshaw
>>
>>Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
>>& Painting Without Numbers
>>
>>http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
>>
>>
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
>>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 6:59 PM
>>Subject: Re: god, religion etc.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jennifer Compton <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: 07 March 2004 17:05
>> Subject: god, religion etc.
>>
>>> I do not feel the living presence of God, god, or gods or anything
>like
>>that.
>>> I do not live in that country.
>>
>>Well, I doubt that anyone does. Those who think they do feel it, would
tell
>>you that it is unmistakeable once you hear it, but so do those who hear
>>voices telling them to do this and that.
>>
>>At lunch today friends and I fell to speaking of E M Forster - it started
>>badly enough with Kenneth Graham and Pan appearing near the end of the
wind
>>in the willows and went on to _the story of a panic_ and _the road from
>>colonus_
>>
>>in the latter the character whose name I have forgotten again has a pretty
>>overpowering experience in a plane tree and then meets people who forster
>>tells us were _ecstatic_, but finds their state merely _commonplace_
>>
>>and though the stories are a little contrived and certainly now of another
>>country in the sense of unavailable as dead, they still speak to me in a
>way
>>which makes the graham drab and contrived and worse -
>>
>> or there's the unbeliever who goes to heaven in the celestial omnibus and
>>panics and leaps out on the bridge shouting _i see london_ and falls
>through
>>it to his death
>>
>>all this by a doubter
>>
>>sometimes, often, i stand in front of the sea and i feel something i dont
>>feel elsewhere apart from cold and wet
>>
>>it is outside the window now and i am glad it's there
>>
>>i miss it elsewhere
>>
>>in the years when i didnt go near it i missed it
>>
>>i'm sure if i got my wordsworth out i'd find words for it
>>
>>not coleridge, i think; not clare, not dh lawrence or thoreau
>>
>>i could sit and watch the architecture of a bird for hours, nasty seagulls
>>being things of great beauty
>>
>>i do not for a moment say i feel any sense of presence when i look at the
>>intricacy evolution has produced - i'll take the blind watchmaker whole
>>
>>but trying, only ever trying, to look out of the human and into the avian
>or
>>whatever, then sometimes, illusory as I am sure it is, I have an
experience
>>of seeing myself in a space with a dimension i do not normally perceive
>>
>>i am not sure what that dimension is but it's to do with where i might
>>stand, an awareness that there is a depth which is not to do with distance
>>but only to do with accepting that it is possible to see from somewhere
>that
>>isnt mine; and therefore from before me and from after me
>>
>>i spend a lot of time here looking at free running water and listening to
>>wind and shall be sleeping rough in its sound when the weather warms up
>>
>>and i will not say that there are spirits in them; i dont feel that; but i
>>listen to their utterance and the sound sustains me and reorients me so
>that
>>i know where some things are better than i did before... until the memory
>of
>>the sounds fades
>>
>>L
>>
>