 Please look at the links to see it in original form almost a decade ago ....... |
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One of my favorite pictures of the little brother who died this day last year 2006. Although things are more resolved this year, we still hurt and we still miss him. When I go home tonight there will be no little white tipped paw reaching to pull the door open. Just a partner and the television. I am glad that he is no longer struggling but I still miss him.
Excerpts from:
………..Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal. What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning” and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity...……
………...Lest this should seem too rhetorical a conclusion for our professional men of science, who are mostly trained not to believe anything unless it is worded in the jargon of those writers who, because they never really understand what they are trying to say, cannot find familiar words for it, and are therefore compelled to invent a new language of nonsense for every book they write, let me sum up my conclusions as dryly as is consistent with accurate thought and live conviction.
1. Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.
2. Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.
3. Remember that an illness is a misdemeanor; and treat the doctor as an accessory unless he notifies every case to the Public Health authority.
4. Treat every death as a possible and under our present system a probable murder, by making it the subject of a reasonably conducted inquest; and execute the doctor, if necessary, as a doctor, by striking him off the register.
5. Make up your mind how many doctors the community needs to keep it well. Do not register more or less than this number; and let registration constitute the doctor a civil servant with a dignified living wage paid out of public funds.
6. Municipalize
7. Treat the private operator exactly as you would treat a private executioner.
8. Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.
9. Keep the public carefully informed, by special statistics and announcements of individual cases, of all illnesses of doctors or in their families.
10. Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words "Remember that I too am mortal."
11. In legislation and social organization, proceed on the principle that invalids, meaning persons who cannot keep themselves alive by their own activities, cannot, beyond reason, expect to be kept alive by the activity of others. There is a point at which the most energetic policeman or doctor, when called upon to deal with an apparently drowned person, gives up artificial respiration, although it is never possible to declare with certainty, at any point short of decomposition, that another five minutes of the exercise would not effect resuscitation. The theory that every individual alive is of infinite value is legislatively impracticable. No doubt the higher the life we secure to the individual by wise social organization, the greater his value is to the community, and the more pains we shall take to pull him through any temporary danger or disablement. But the man who costs more than he is worth is doomed by sound hygiene as inexorably as by sound economics.
12. Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
13. Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.
14. Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up. This means that your mother must have a good doctor. Be careful to go to a school where there is what they call a school clinic, where your nutrition and teeth and eyesight and other matters of importance to you will be attended to. Be particularly careful to have all this done at the expense of the nation, as otherwise it will not be done at all, the chances being about forty to one against your being able to pay for it directly yourself, even if you know how to set about it. Otherwise you will be what most people are at present: an unsound citizen of an unsound nation, without sense enough to be ashamed or unhappy about it.
Hello …
After a long absence I am again going to write to you all. Even though I am feline I watch your history as humans with interest – and sometimes amazement!
On my nightly travels I often see men and women sloping around the streets. They seem to be like me, hunting. What I cannot understand is what they can be hunting for! So I have watched and thought. I even tried to make friends – winding my body around their legs, hoping for them to bend down and stroke me – to make contact with another living creature. But they seem unable or unwilling. Their eyes are blank until something, or someone, strikes their interest. Then, I am afraid.
So I talk with my human friends. And they do not want to talk with me. Perhaps because this is something they fear as much as they are attracted to. This is the Darkness. This is Seduction. Those who walk on this path are feared & in fear, genderless, powerless, separate, the Enforcer, ordinary, standing in the dark, alienated, sexless - but wielding the harsh reality of potential violence. They are the Beast within us, beyond us and in Mind. Frozen time in a moment - extra-normality. Fear in a glance - a bitter pill with a sweet taste. Glancing back I see his job is done and she is gone with the others - and his job is done. He is where he wants - alone.
He walks. The darkness is around him as he passes through the street of life. He feels feared and yet he is in fear of something nameless. He, or is it she, sees himself as without gender and without sex. He is ordinary, small with a balding head and a slight growth of hair shadowing his chin. He stops, stands in the dark, smelling the air. He feels a presence that alienates him. Someone looks out of a window and seeing him shivers as they shut the drapes. But he does not notice them.
He feels powerless in the experience of this presence, this feeling that threatens to overcome him - to enter him, freezing his soul. He feels arousal at its might even while he struggles to preserve his integrity.
The Beast is within and time is frozen in a moment of extra-normality. He becomes aware of his skin, sleek and soft against his clothing. Fear inhabits a small corner of his mind but on his tongue - the Beast's tongue - it tastes like blood. A bitter cordial with a sweet taste.
In a moment his job is done and she is gone with the others. Glancing back, the Beast senses me and turns slowly to examine the space where I might be. As it turns, the flesh slips away into the smoke of the cold air reaching the warmth. There is a strange sweetness filling the air.
I am invisible, but yet it is aware of me as I watch, repulsed by the shiny pearl of bone and the straw-red muscle. For moments we are joined in an unholy marriage of Watcher and Watched.
But as he starts to move I see that he is only a man with a balding head and stubble on his chin. And I am alone.....
moggi, 2000
