Where is True North Now?

I mean for the moral compass by which to live. Until recently the magnetism by which I oriented was as clear as the clock-face of time. Hands moved imperceptibly but the hours were there and people I knew mostly agreed and affirmed that we all saw much the same consensus world. The pivot on which the hands were set ( the unmoving centre) was mySelf, the entry point to which all else related. That Self was pinned in assumed liberty; to think, to act, to laugh, to be unwise, and above all to disagree. As long as it did no harm ( that was not liberty but license) there were no constraints; not in its essence. Any constraints were circumstantial, probably financial, or intrinsic, like my age for which I take full responsibility. I do not attend to healthy eating, or obligatory exercise, once smoked too much and still drink in moderation but I bear the consequences gladly, mea culpa. My unwisdom celebrates my liberty.

There were other components to liberty, mostly the belief that I lived in a civilised country essentially, which civility rested in assuming that smaller liberties were sacrosanct. Its imperfections and injustices had redress, its inequalities were recognised, and in the words of my birthplace ‘Alles sal regkom’ was ultimately implied because its humanity sought to grant liberty to all. I believed it had noble aims, although many not yet achieved. That was the centre of the moving hands of my vicarious daily doings. Nothing perfect but au fond good. As good as the air I breathed without thinking about it; a ‘given’, the basis of existence.

Almost overnight that world is gone and with it the Self that took them for granted. I now have to face the fact that they were not granted, or only on loan until the decision to remove them served a deeper purpose. Like feeding a slave until no longer required, and found un-sellable.

Air is now depleted through masks, ( as effective against a virus as chicken wire is against a mosquito), affection curtailed in its expression, humanity rendered abject and obedient. My kin now demand my surrender and acquiescence. Since I am a recovered, I now have natural immunity, but I am also severely anaphylactic; acquiescence (for no gain whatever) is likely to kill me. But if I resist it is I that am selfish. Those who put the value of their holidays above my life (or their own future freedom)  have not merely censure to beat me with but the State, and its army of outrage. Elderly women who once smiled and moved on are now beady eyed for the exposed nose.

Sometime ago I wrote a piece called ‘Covida, My New Companion’. Its tag-line was ‘A disease of ruthless truth’. In those innocent days I still believed ‘Rona’ was accidental, the ruthless truth was what it revealed about myself, my friends, and conditional friends, the ease with which I had accepted the generosity of life itself, the better uses I should have made of it- all that self examination was purging. If I recovered I would better honour life’s riches.

It came, as I saw immediately, with an ‘intelligence’. Unlike other viruses (and I have had most of them) this ‘thing’ was not biological. It did not wrestle with temperature, just took it up the scale and left it there, nor inflammation, nor raise my pulse or heartbeat. It took over authority and catapaulted me and my febrile body to the floor of that authority. It played matron and ticked off the inadequate protests with an indifferent shrug. It was in absolute control and would exercise that control until it decided whether I was ready for the morgue, or might be permitted to swab the floor, wring out the sweat, and totter back to vertical,  while it moved on and took over another; ‘next’. Next, next.

All those many ‘nexts’ I now know were exaggerated. Just to keep the fear alive. Doctors were paid a premium for Covid-attributed deaths and autopsies were forbidden. The profession followed by most of my family who believed in the Hippocratic Oath was grubbily getting a premium for falsifying. Now only one witness needed for certification to hasten disposal, and nurses sacked for whispering that many wards were empty.

Yet now the undertakers admit to turning off their fridges because business was so slow. They are humming now for the vaccine deaths, and promising business will boom even better in the autumn.

Now that I know it was a carefully patented bio weapon, with a patent number registered, along with the patented vaccine cures for shareholders, all that makes perfect sense. I recognised the difference from the beginning. The difference though, makes all the difference. The resolution I framed, sobered and contrite, now lies in shreds, the purpose left to me, will not reach the world that was. That is over.

But more than ‘over’. Even that past is destroyed (along with every illusion about nobility) together with its history. All those ordinary ‘good guys’ the valiant in mud-caked boots, conquering evil intentions  and dying in trenches, were all along the naïve fodder for those planning this plandemic. They assassinated presidents, silenced holistic doctors, murdered dissenting voices, ridiculed any who waved a warning signal, and to keep its impetus going arranged bogus deceptions like 9/11 or the capture of bin Laden or the moon landings—and we believed it all!  Yes I believed all of it, swallowed it, if not whole, nearly whole. Because trust was essential to Self. Those we elected would care for us! We had given them their power.

The trenches for this current and final war are the buried freedoms to think, and the dead in them are the valiant dissidents, the flag over them is now the triumph of Pfizer or Moderna waved by Bill Gates, the Clinton Foundation and the carefully engineered Great Reset of the Davos Club. Here comes the trumpet-herald Blair, never slow when a war is on offer. How does one even grasp that every country, its governments, its medical practitioners, its elected legislators, its dancing nurses, have all been complicit in the great deception? The final curtain for humanity? The murder of the useless eaters, and the deplorables; all of us.

That message is not an easy sell, but to save a few I try: To universal contempt. ‘With an intelligence like yours how could you believe in….???’

It does have its comic side. The pantomime villains like Claus Schwab who comes out of central casting as the CEO of S.M.E.R.S.H, the dwarf called Fauci who has been polishing his sickle at all that planned murder for decades, the clown called Bojo who walks on to ruffle his hair in that endearing way, and the wooden men called the army of ‘experts’ with names like Whitty and Vallance who keep their faces sombre despite their investments turning more than a pretty penny. Their absurdity makes persuading the sleep-walkers more difficult. Who can take any of them seriously? Trouble is most of my kin all do. For they are still my kin, and part of me, even though they shun this alarmist interpretation as the raving of a lunatic. C’mon man!

Where is there for any ‘Self’ now to stand?

Who would a writer address? My fond memoir epistle to those I loved, the world that was innocent, is an epistle to false belief, unwarranted assumptions, because the Self that took their measure was deceived by cynical narratives. I saw Israel as the heroic rescue from the desert by dedicated kibbutzim; now I know it was a trade to get a bigger war, and delivered by a man whose country it never was. Thereby to ensure the ferment of the Middle East forever. Money makes the war go around, the war go around…

 Lockdown for me has been a new education that has shown me that nothing I believed was true. Almost nothing is left standing except the miraculous beauty of the natural world. There was, in my later life, a deeper measure of truth, but the beauty of the world was precious, because shared. That illusory beauty tied me to my fellow man., to pour a glass as the garden burst open, and the roses scented the evening air. Could anyone write a poem to artificial intelligence, or celebrate the contemporary Tesla, Elon Musk?  Now Colleges of Music must forget Mozart or Beethoven and programme minority composers, and orchestras are disbanded for want of diversity: Even a meticulous score is now ‘too white’! True. Bring on the skin drums and the penny whistle.

I can still jive to a penny whistle but it’s not enough.

The past was largely illusion, but an illusion that gave rise to glories of genius; music, literature, painting, architecture: The present is grotesque. So grotesque that we have no resources to comprehend it. But this incomprehension has been carefully seeded by diversions and depravity. It is all so obvious now.

To watch the citizens who once fought incendiary bombs from the rooftops, who slept in shelters but still went to the music halls through the blackouts, who danced a frenzied Charleston, smoked like chimneys and bartered eggs for silk stockings is almost unbearable. Those that turned out for factory whistles and assembled tanks that rolled down ramps already firing, while the men they loved died like dogs, because they believed. Believed in the nobility of freedom from oppression. Yes; they were duped, their generosity exploited to their death and the same people were responsible, or their fathers were. Your country needs you! They signed up to give the illusion of liberty for an interval, and I thank them for that deluded vision for most of my blessed life. I owe them. Big time.

Now the undistinguishable Lowry populace scuttles in masks, and exposes its arms for a suicide shot, and wears a badge to prove it! They were all my friends and I cannot reach any of them. To them I am unhinged, to me they are deaf, blind and obdurate. They want to go to Benidorm. I want to recapture and secure liberty. With clarity of vision we could do it, together. The power of ‘no’ is all we need, but we need the ‘all’ to say it.

Most of the world is still saying ‘yes’ and even children cannot breathe

Author: philipparees

A writer ( mostly narrative poetry) of fiction and non-fiction. Self publisher of fiction and Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God (Runner-up Book of the Year (2013), One time builder ( Arts centre) Mother of four daughters: Companion of old man and old dog: One time gardener, lecturer, wannabe cellist, mostly enquirer of 'what's it all about', blogger and things as yet undiscovered.

9 thoughts on “Where is True North Now?”

  1. No worries. We had a 117 degree (F) day a couple of weekends ago. Little problems evaporated. If there’s anything left of normal it’s quantum to me now.

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  2. Hi, Philippa – I find the mask episode (masquerade, if you like) interesting. I don’t at all mind wearing one, or keeping at least 6 feet distance from the Other (the farther the better, actually). Or from myself, for that matter. I’ve made it longer than a year now without a sniffle, let alone a flu; though the question of causation is of course always in doubt – maybe it’s been the increase in beer quotient. In any case, I’ve no interest in returning to normal, particularly not one, as you point out, that’s an “illusion” to begin with (who feels deflated must have been a balloon?). As for Beethoven and company, times change, and life moves on. Anyway, I have always preferred the freedom of jazz and the blues. I remember standing in line with my parents waiting for the polio vaccine. That was a different century, when one did what one’s parents said. Now one does what one’s children say, if one does anything at all. And I don’t miss the large concert halls nor the big arena venues, the one so sacrosanct you can barely breathe, the other full with a herd of rock hyenas. You’re alive, and there’s no cure for it, Kafka said. As for the very rich, Hemingway put that one away here, in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936):

    “He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”

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    1. Joe, Many apologies for failing to reply to yours of three weeks back. Truth is WP only has a now defunct email address so I got no word of it. Grateful to John Dockus for questioning why I had not had the grace to reply to you! So here a reply is but no more sincere for having been nudged! The new nudge is to alter my address with WP!

      I agree now about the constipation of those citadels of superiority ( concert halls) but then I always felt that which is why I built an alternative with food and wine as important to its atmosphere as the music. It must have been different for Mozart and Beethoven when the social settings were certainly ‘formal’ but formality was the only context, and for the privileged with servants ,boredom must have given them extra elan. I was moved by a few ensembles that played in different rooms virtually with amazing precision and coherence! A string quartet achieved without signals demands a deeper instinct. There are not many examples of discipline and dedication left! Young instrumental artists are certainly among them.

      When I told my violin teacher daughter that robots were going to replace us all she said she would be interested to watch a robot do her job.

      I feel about people in masks ( outside or driving alone particularly!) as I do about those who have never smoked, don’t drink that they are risk averse and more important to themselves than life is! Don’t get me wrong, their freedom is more important than what they do with it, but a certain heedlessness usually makes people congenial.

      More generally, the piece above was prompted by a sense that there were liberties worth preserving, and the ease with which they have been curtailed and abandoned is deeply depressing, Yet where I do concur is over the triviality of all those things that BC (before Covid) seemed authoritative. The groveling of the esteemed universities to the BLM (or Chinese) agendas, the subservience of what I thought noble institutions like the British Library and the Royal Society has now stripped out all the certainties which had hitherto never questioned.
      But what remain, re-valued, and much more dependable are friends! So thanks Joe.

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  3. I’ve always been a skeptic at heart but now I’m veering towards cynicism towards which I thought I would never sink. So much sinking that I feel somewhat numb. In the words of Dorothy Parker ‘what fresh hell is this’ – beautifully articulated Phi, glad you’ve brought out your scribing sword.

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    1. Dorothy Parker has always been a firm favourite, not for her cynicism but for her brutal honesty. My pitiful sword has been blunted over the past eight months of using it in every walk of life, history of concealments, politics of duplicity, but above all the recognition of humankind’s innocence that rendered us all gullible to every narrative that suited the few, the very few and very rich. Now we tremble literally on the brink, I do believe. Thanks for making your presence known Susan. (I visit Plet every morning because my screen is filled with a reminder!)

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    1. So good to hear from an old friend! I am interested in the sudden burgeoning of plants thought dead, survivors of the winter that don’t usually make it. Maybe they know something I don’t? I am crawling in the direction of creativity again and this was just an offloading of despair. Best to you.

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  4. … The present is grotesque …
    I agree with you there.
    Best stick to your ‘No.’
    I love looking at flowers. A friend said recently, ‘If I look at flowers I look into eternity.’

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