Nationalism and patriotism divide people, cause problems between nations, encourages racism and xenophobia and is used by cynical politicians in order to get themselves elected.
People, all the world over, are the same. The differences between them are the result of cultural brainwashing.
You can take a baby from any race or culture and bring them up in a different culture and they’d be the same as the others in that culture.
This is one of my books that nobody buys or reads. The title was a silly construction. One day I will put it out with a different title. What the hell…………………
Preface
This is the ultimate sixties book – an ‘On the Road’ for the British Underground with all its sex, drugs, dreams and music; those times of crazy people high on life and mad for experience – when anything was possible.
It captures that idealistic naïve impossibility permeated with vitality and careering love and dreams, the wild rush for adventure without a thought for the future because it was going to last forever.
– Seemingly forever changes!
It spans continents as it trips its way through time, space and mind in a mad rush to discover life and experience or die trying.
Now was all there was and it had to burn, burn, burn or it was dead.
In the days of dope and poetry, where the world was ripe for changing, there was a mystical buzz of unity. In the shadow of an establishment that stood for war, prejudice, work, isolation and the rat-race with all its status-seeking power games, racism and slow death signified by getting the lines straight on your lawn, Jack’s cackling laughter and bright eyes, death-defying madness and care-free attitude showed there was an alternative.
Maybe dope was never enough and when we grow up it is time to put aside childish things where they are confined to our dreams and memories. But somewhere out there Jack still lives where it is real.
We did change the world!
Opher 16.8.2014
CHAPTER 1
I remember the first time I met Jack. Although he was a small guy he filled the room with the exuberance of his soul. He possessed that thin, haunted face with that aura of electricity running through his bones, long blond hair to his waist, blue eyes and the mad laugh of a hyena on amphetamine sulphate; his whole being throbbed with life. As he talked his body and hands were animated with a super abundance of energy – jig-jig-jig, bob, dart and cackle. He was never still. Jack was high on living. Every second counted. You could see those glinty blue eyes were constantly peering into the depths of the universe and sucking meaning out of the mundane. To Jack everything had meaning; everything was alive, and Jack sucked that sense right out of everything and filled himself with it. I watched him from the side of the room with amazement. I had never witnessed anyone so vital. There was madness to it. I was drawn to that madness. He devoured the world and sucked it in until it seemed he would burst with it. He was so full of ideas and visions that he had trouble containing it. It welled up in him and threatened to choke him with its intensity and he just had to let it out or it’d kill him. It burst out in a crazy torrent. He didn’t so much talk to you as spout forth out loud in some ecstasy as his mind raged.
Man, he thrilled to it.
Yet people reeled from it. It was too big for them to handle. They had no answer to it. There was no room for them to get a word in. It cascaded over them like a tsunami of passion and they found themselves floundering in horror. It was too much they desperately tried to escape before they were buried.
All around him people retreated.
Yet Jack was oblivious. For him they did not exist. They were empty vessels, echo chambers, into which he allowed his thoughts to gush just so’s he could see them coming back at him.
They had to be thrilled by it too. They had to see it. It was so wild. It was so real.
You could see it in Jack’s wild evangelical eyes. He wrestled with the entire universe and would grapple it into submission with sheer energy. He was so full of it. He wanted to find out what it was all about and wrest every last moment out of it. He had to know. He had to experience it. He wanted to get to the bottom of everything. He needed to tell you all about it and find out what he knew, what you knew, and how to solve the riddles of all time. Nothing was holy. Everything was holy. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered. Life was a paradox. It was all straightforward. He clutched a battered copy of Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy’ in his hand and waved it under your nose to emphasise a point. With anybody else it would have been pretentious bullshit but somehow with Jack it was real. The book was thumbed ragged. He quoted from it. He was stimulated by it as if it was a drug. He wrestled with paragraphs and wondered at others. Every page was an epiphany. He was amazed by it.
Surely everyone was as consumed by the wonder of this mad journey? Surely they had to know?
Unseen
Unseen on the drifting breeze
The scent of death from a common sneeze.
Isolating from our trusted friends.
Gouging a wound that never mends.
A situation so badly managed,
Leaving a crater as big as any war.
With damage to the economy
Threatening to leave us forever poor.
Opher – 21.7.2021
I find it incredibly depressing to see how the country has suffered under the twin impact of Covid and Brexit as this disastrous government has overtly channelled huge sums of money to its wealthy benefactors while decimating public services and ordinary people.
All this nonsense about levelling up as they gaily award multimillion pound contracts to their friends.
All these lies about a prosperous future and Global Britain as they ferret away the spoils into their bank accounts, tie us up with red tape, decimate trade, throw away jobs, take away our job opportunities abroad while telling us how great this oven-ready disaster really is.
Now we can look forward to the decades of austerity as average Joe Soap picks up the bill for these years of Tory lies, sleaze and incompetence.
Our mental health is suffering.
The Mystery of History
The mystery of history
In rocks, stones and shards.
Captured in legend
By mystics and bards.
The wisdom of ages.
The lives that are long gone.
Remembered in the landscape;
Revered in poetic song.
Standing in the circle
With the setting of the sun.
Breathing in the ambience
From days when all was one.
The warmth of the stones,
Full of memories and hope;
A living reminder –
The dreams of human scope.
All the mists of time
Now shroud reality
From a distant age
When nature was divinity.
Close to the seasons
Though hard, cruel and true.
When life was simple
And we knew what we should do.
Now in the age of plastic
Where change is the new god;
Where cash is the gospel
We live far from the sod.
Communicating with electricity
Across the wastes of space.
We seem to own everything
But have lost our sense of place.
Opher – 8.7.2021
Fresh back from Cornwall, having stood in the Stone circles, visited coits and Iron Age villages, with a sense of wonder.
Connecting to the past.
Looking out from those rugged places it felt like I was looking through the eyes of my ancestors.
Life was hard but they were in tune with nature and felt at home in the land.
This modern world is all plastic and speed but lacks any connection.
I feel at home in a stone circle. The stones have warmth.
The Truth
The truth is usually grey.
It doesn’t stand up to the light of day.
What appears to be absolute
Rapidly falls into fierce dispute,
As the truth falls prey
To political decay.
We glean our truth from a source we trust
But the best of sites are rarely just.
Too many spoons prodding the pie
Taking more than their share from both you and I.
They twist the truth to fit their lust
And usually believed and rarely sussed.
The truth is what they want to pervert.
Seeking the gullible to convert.
The first casualty of war it truth
The second casualty is always youth.
Their aim is to subvert;
To facilitate the maximum hurt.
The truth is usually grey.
It doesn’t stand up to the light of day.
What appears to be absolute
Rapidly falls into fierce dispute,
As the truth falls prey
To political decay.
Opher 19.8.2018
I wrote this for all those people who take their news from all those fake sites out there on the web, busy pushing their propaganda: for those who take the mainstream news as gospel; for those who really believe that they have the only handle on what is really going on.
This is tribal.
This is all lies.
A healthy cynicism is the only defence.
But none of us are free.
