The world that isn't a world

There's nothing worse than seeing a blog that's been abandoned but is still 'out there' (well, there is actually, but...); it's not like a run down house but more like a home that has suddenly, inexplicably, been vacated. You roam around in the house and see all the familiar things: references to books, music, the odd tale of heartbreak or current anxieties that will seem terribly dated if considered in the passage of time..it's all there bar the person himself/herself. You don't know if this person has moved on to a new city, divorced, developed some terrible illness or even died. All you see is the outer shell, the fragments of a life, and you try to reconstruct some meaning out of it, like an archaeologist. A world that isn't a world any more.Freaky.

The importance of the living word, for Christ's sake!


P.J. pointed me to this:

To be whole-
now, or again,
to know the divine healing,
that which is known by blood-blood's faith
as by the bloodfall.

Carried by silver and star and reflection.
To be healed, if there's disease
Those plants we know by older names:
Boneset, selfheal, thoroughwort,
tansy for bitterness
Or the healer's milkweed: Aesclepias...

~~~

'In 1977, after the death of Henry's father, a lab researcher noticed that he kept in his wallet a handwritten note to himself-'Dad's dead'-to anchor his recurring feeling of absence'.
---Mike Jay, LRB.

~~~

After writing that one thing we would definitely not see after the horrific crimes in Ohio would be a questioning of the role of men in (sexual) violence there has been a spate of really informative and balanced articles in the Guardian doing just that. Not a kind of man-hating diatribe or anything much to do with testosterone but the more interesting (and perhaps important) point about cultural attitudes. How many degrees away from 'normality' is perversion? Is it, actually, a matter of degrees or are there fundamental distinctions here?

Some of the Guardian articles: here and also here