Tag: stockholm

definition, rationale

at #stockholm the lady

this is where

i’m my best me

and when that happens

is when you leave

and go forward

not backwards at all

and review

what’s happened

and make sure no fall

before the pride

of hubris said

or deeds of foolish

foolish bread

because now it’s time

i found a new personal

to match the business

and the professional

and it will surely be

as you can all see

in #stockholm found

that one day

where this one day

it shall happen

when at the slightest

drop of hat

and more than this

and more than that

i find another person

natural to here

who shares exactly

what i now share with you:

my place and space

is no longer where i was

but has wondrously

become precisely for me

where now i have gone

to stockholm my home

in the strangest of ways

atop it’s true

the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern

of powerful offering

and even greater return

for this is what

an arts-based thought

brings back to us all

as always it ought

in times of teaching

and should and would

and taught by chalk

and never bored

it’s clear by now

and oh how oh how

that where i now am

the best i can be

is beside a new lady

of just fabulous integrity:

#stockholm the lioness

and #stockholm

those lions

and #stockholm the wise

and #stockholm

the pride

and how we were

haughty

and sometimes

quite naughty

but always wanting

in the end

to bend the truth

of life to rights

because here

in this place

i mean i mean

the #sweden i know

everything seems

something

quite slow

and yet

with this supposed

caution

i realise

with real pleasure

that this ain’t

any precaution at all

but rather the sign

of a wisdom so tall

and so it is this

and so it’s been that

and finally

my lady

i found you once more

like rites of other times

of liffey rhymes and stuff

it’s clear that it’s changed

and is now

much more than enough:

the love of true human

for true human atop

the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern

of perspicacities fine

and true veracities grand

where now i sit

happy and content

knowing that soon

i shall rend the world

separate

and differently too

in both the work

and private spheres

for this is now

and this is here:

the love of life

and the love of weird

where all of us find

out of our minds

which sometimes dark

listen out

for that which harks

and so is all we need

it’s true too

to do so good

with flowers bright

as shining would

where our futures

shifting

lift us that soon

as that

which once terrorised

no longer smacks

of high noon

but rather of truth

and those matters

which forsooth

make it right again

to smile straight up

at man and woman

and of genders-all

and funerals

not appalling any more

but simply marking

the rightful passage

of an existence

well spent:

well spent i say

as you and me

once deep believed

could easily be

(and maybe yet

find clearly done

as song be sung

and rhymes be rung)

Kulturhuset Stockholm
definition, design philosophy, rationale

On choosing to be a servant not an enforcer

I am minded to write this poem because of a small and discreet event I attended at Liverpool John Moores University, one evening some years ago.

The event was given by a chief constable of a nearby north of England police force.* The standout stat I remember he offered us was when he wanted to contextualise what differentiates the average experience of a police officer with the average experience of a democratic citizen — and perhaps, in so doing, making it easier for both sides to be less opposing and more conciliatory.

Most citizens, he said, experienced 10 to 11 “life events”: what he meant was serious incidents such as witnessing the horrible injuries of others, maybe their violent passing, one’s own experiences of near-death, and/or perhaps the death of a family member or close friend.

Then he asked the collected audience what they thought the stat was for the average police officer. Not even the attending officers themselves knew how to hazard a guess.

The figure was 400.

It sank in. He let it sink in slowly and quietly, too.

It will never be forgotten.

That is how much the average police officer suffers. And wherever they individually choose to remain servants of the citizenry, not enforcers of the same, is when we have the very best of our societies standing rightfully to attention in front of us.

Just this.

Have a safe day.

(And just that.)

* I also recall the fact that I was once very firmly informed by a community police officer in a suburb of Chester, UK, that whilst the public liked to see the British police as a service, the British police never see themselves as anything but a force.

“the 400: a poem about service”

i was told one evening

by a chief constable near where i lived

amongst an audience of people good and free

that 400 was the number

which for the rest of us was 10 or 11

being life events

that break our souls

and make us weep with heaps of tears

like babbling brooks

when nothing’s then right

and all is then took

and life is then no longer worth living at all

*

and this chief of big team

was the kindest of souls

and he knew how to roll with the times and the goals

but equally he was clear

what should be made more clear

and this was that police and citizenry both

needed to come closer

not as yoke of law

nor as harness of tough

but just as two parts which completed a whole

*

and so his view of policing

and of law enforcement proudly served

i’ve found in very few places since then

and how

but where i have seen this

is where i am now

which is sweden and stockholm

and where they really must take a bow

and here i have seen

that policing is a team

but where force doesn’t define

the many first few steps

and only kicks in when a blue line protects

the service which otherwise

inscribes the good deeds

*

of a law enforcement and policing philosophy

designed specifically

to deliver a broader humanity

via a society engineered and scoped

to improve what we do to each other

as human beings seen as such

rather than automatically

as monsters capable of horrendous touch

*

and so this is what really floats my boats

much much more than relationships

of a personal sort of love that deludes

because what i need

and what i want

is much much less than to quantify the affection

that baldly a person might feel for my person

and much much more to qualify the ways

we should be treating ourselves society-wide

hiding from nothing

and fearing absolutely no one

as we relearn to live

with the kindest heads and hearts

*

and so i say

and so i say i may

that love of people is a service not a force

and law enforcers who prefer to serve us fully

are worth their weight in gold all told

and so these are the places

where really i want to live and work

and have the deepest of friends and colleagues

never lovers or wife or anything more

because my focus from now on in

is the health of my civilisation

and the democracies i want us to repopulate

as every step we now must take

involves us just choosing … to do good

aside, definition, rationale

now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.

I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.

I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.

I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.

A tangible outcome was this site:

• sverige2.earth

I then went back to the UK for a longer period from August on, and so began to process all that learning.

More recently I created the following site as I looked to transfer Swedish ideas and concepts and ways of thinking into a British context:

• gb2earth.com

I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:

• gb2earth.com/truth/homepage

Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.

I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.

So.

All good thus far.

The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.

In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.

Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.

From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.

A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.

That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.

What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.

From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.

Yeah?

And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.

How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.

Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.

Just this.

Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.

And do take care.

now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL

i spent my life 
as eldest of my family
being the glue 
that meant i wasn't as i could've been

i had to be 
for every sibling and cousin i had
the very best sounding-board 
they ever could have EVER had 

understanding in all respects
accepting all their holes of dark 
seeing as absolutely and utterly fair 
the roles i was assigned so stark

like lairs and dens
of the dragons and monsters 
some of them have been to me 
and you really wouldn't ever believe 

what i have actually seen
and what i have actually witnessed 
and suffered to the extent 
they intentionally drove me mad 

and so all this time 
i found it hard to do more than rhyme
in order to survive 
the cruelty of my 61 years 

visited on me 
and imposed on me 
and painted on me as if into a corner around
my every boundary and residual sound 

as never could i set my limits
and find in time the core i needed 
and just be me for me at all
and avoid the funeral pall 

of man and son 
and father and brother and lover and done
nailed brutally and abusively 
to the cross of quite another 

and so after all that 
it came to 2015  
and all i could do 
was scream silently to myself 

and everyone thought 
again he's going mad 
or maybe he's just bad 
and maybe that was it

when really what it was 
this thing i began to do
was realise that their VACUOUS holes 
like gruyère cheese

had prevented my mentioned core 
of apple-like pleas
ever forming contentedly
so that all i knew how to do 

all this time 
for 53 years of foolishness too
was to impale myself like stake to a soul
in such a way

that their very real madnesses 
appeared mine all that time

and maybe to this day 
most would still find it easy to say 
that what they did to me in 2003
as my whole family stood aside 

and let me suppurate 
as incarcerated foully 
by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty 
and how it did so 

and how it was so
neither good for them nor good for me
as no one ever let me be
neither in 2003 nor EVER since then 

and as my monstrous lover of 2004
then took me to her web 
of evil spidery claw
and the horrible things she then did and said 

as she treated me badly 
and without remission 
and did all those things to me
with zero permissions

i am reminded also 
of the techie folk 
who in 2002 in virtual sense
and right to this day in quite parallel way 

attacked me and my reputation it's true 
as they played their games 
with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation 
for it's only the clever who ever wonder why

and only the foolish 
who can't find it in themselves 
to ever care more than a minimum expression  
for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion 

and so then it's a fast-forward right to today 
and christmas 2023 does approach in its way 
and so now my son is adhd 
and then a sibling that other thing they say

and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true 
and my younger relations both clearly that and good
and even two others  
who claim to be hyper-sensitive

when really all they acted out 
was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish 
for all their multiple decades and years ...
and so we do come finally to the VERY first 

being me two decades before the worst 
when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for 
and one of utterly beastly yore
as i was assigned a violent assessment

of a ridiculously inexact psychosis 
when if all the above
had come fairly to light first of all
then first i wouldn't have been without my core

and second the family 
both sibling and parental
and so wider and much more 
wouldn't have fucked me about

as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet 
drugged to the eyeballs 
by a country caring only to treat 
a clever man like myself 

as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside 
like evil mischief 
far and wide 
because dear cousins 

and siblings 
and children 
and wife and my life 
that's what you did to the man i should've been

whilst once i defended you all 
as i tried desperately 
to be that thing you all needed me to be 
when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me 

but people JUST LIKE YOU
who needed far more support 
than i ever would 
being far more support than a crutch to a cripple 

and so as we come close to 2024
i realise with joy in no way a trickle 
that i need care for none of you any more at all
because what was broken 

and splintered 
and hurt
was not my job you see
to make complete in the end even then 

because i was far less damaged all that time 
than you and yours and those you claimed were mine 
and i was far LESS incomplete 
and far less unseated

and far less nailed 
to that cross i mentioned before 

when talking of awful loss 
and the cost of not talking 
to each other as we might've done
and the idiocy of hiding 

behind the unassessed
and never embracing 
what actually you all were 
in respect of something that could have been 

a completely beautiful diversity 
to treasure and measure 
against all other benchmarks 
where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity 

and so this is where i now 
found myself at last
with no right at all 
to cast any stones 

yet equally no duty remaining 
to ever help out 
anyone insane enough 
to want to stay 

as a member of this sad sad tribe
incapable of realising any of you in time 
that the very reasons 
you refused to defend me

were precisely the reasons why
you should've protected me
and precisely why no longer 
there's any point in my trying 

to work with and for 
absolutely any of you
in health and sickness 
or any condition left to me

nor in any kind of frame   
where being together
could've been a worthy test 
of a humanity hugged close 

to a seafaring bosun
of chests of mysterious 
pieces of infinity 
where once upon a time 

it was me that was seen 
to be the really crazed guy 
when it truth 
it's me who finds himself now catapulted 

into a place of truthfully righteous change
because family for me 
now irreversibly wanes 
as we all become 

as diverse as each other
thus meaning right on 
i am finally released
from ever being again your necessary brother
aside

for amanda and eric

you might meet out of blue skies 
of firm and gorgeous splendour 
a man like eric 
and count yourself lucky 
to have lived long enough to know 
that ruing a life lost
ain't gonna go nowhere fast 

because the ways of seeing 
of eric's perspicacity and thinking 
like quicksilver of mercurial planet 
lead to you realise 
that even berger may find his match 

and you could know when amanda 
that on engaging with a mind and head
of fabulous furniture 
you'd see the #whirled is something 
quite clearly true and beautiful:
not only to be pleasured
but honestly treasured 

as the repository of wisdoms 
learnt and innate both it's a fact 
and where the human factor
cracks the #streetcryptography 
of the humans that do cruelty

as some of us do humanity:
really naturally 
and as casually as a kiss
blessed of deep wish 
and desires unfolding gradually 
which is actually what i sensed 
as two people seemed to want 

to get close to me 
in ways i had forgotten years ago 
involving true aspirations
to human relations 
where only good might ultimately result 

and so hurtling through my universe
i begin to taste flavours 
which i had neglected to savour for ages
and recall and roll around my mouth 
as if the tongue of intellect 
mutates all of a sudden 
into one of true love

for there is a #whirled out there 
and maybe even for me 
where the cruelties 
of #startup's diabolical unicorn 
might be replaced with female zebra clean 

"and why not?" she might ask
as amanda often does these days 
but not to leave the question 
sitting balefully 
at the top of the baldnesses
that constitute money's 
overwhelmingly male predilections 

instead my friends it's this:
amongst us three people metamorphosing
and perhaps this being a reality
into friends who could treasure each other
into a differently deep infinity 

an eric of shameless diversity 
and crackling thought 
when anything but ought 
and an amanda of sudden insight 
almost shamefully brought to light 
in the creeping sense of:
"what right did i have ever 

to ever have that idea ... ever?"
but then she recapitulates as she now should
because growth is the order of the day 
and she's learning quickly
that the world needs to hear

what she has to say for sure
oh lordy yes
and absolutely without interference 
and just the raw of her reality
as eric then chimes in 
with impossible opinion 
which nevertheless never fails 

to fit the facts they are ...
and then there's me my friends 
for this is my hope
let this not be a dream at all at all again
and even if it must be and even if it is

even so let us awake to each other 
tomorrow let's say in the morning 
a "god morgon" even too
and over coffee begin to show the rest 
how we might really right 
this torn and awfully leaking vessel
which will be the #whirled we want to remake
aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

smotherland? how DARE you …

i have been racking my brains: what’s so different here in stockholm? why does the concrete feel so human? why do the humans feel so different? why is there such a sense of purpose — even when the purpose is not to be all that purposeful?

what does make it happen, after all? something tangible, i ask myself. something i can point to and show you how.

and so i realise, just now, two things which become quite clear for me. one i experienced one summer, decades ago in the northern spanish city of burgos: a continental climate and hot even 800 metres up. at least during the day. so everyone left the city in summer: to climes where you didn’t survive the weather but could thrive instead. the seaside, maybe. yep. there for example.

but i had to stay behind for work that july. and suddenly i had this sense of being at one with my environment. what was it? what was different? what had changed?

it was easy once i tumbled to it: everyone had taken their cars with them. not just that they weren’t there to drive them around: the cars themselves weren’t there to intervene in the visual landscape, and distract and divert and impact on your psyche, even when only subliminally; and then again, even hurt some of us because of a still undiscussed neurodiversity … and all as a result of their deliberately engineered capacity to attract our attention inescapably with covert ingenuity.

here, today, then, in central stockholm, there are two things which tangibly make me feel at home. the first is an absence; the second being a presence.

the absence, first:

  • no cars. very few anyways. no need for cars. just people using their legs. do you remember legs? remember what that was about? no. not the clutch and the accelerator. the pavement and the kerb and walking the line … and the dance.

the presence, second:

  • so many young people and children and elderly and other. and a young man with a boom-box, and then the coffee-drinkers on the terrace across the road smiling in recognition of their own youth, perhaps; and smiling, all the same.
  • and then bikes galore and bio-diesel buses, and trams and stuff, and within five minutes walk an underground and a commuter-train network.

so: this is purposeful living which liberates not suffocates. and don’t believe the anglo-saxon right-wing when they say sweden equals “smotherland”. what they say when they do … it’s utter bollocks.

more than any country i’ve been to, this is an intellectually, emotionally and socioeconomically free society. even today. even after everything we’ve all been through. even after what they think they have lost to a better past.

imperfections? for sure.

on the scale of other countries flaws and injustices? no way, josé.

just one example from the uk to illustrate. many years ago, foodbanks arrived to ameliorate real pain. a conservative minister even praised the fact: community coming together. she (i think she was a she but she only voiced what all her party, mainly men, also preferred to assert) … well … she could’ve said how terrible that they were needed in the first place. but she didn’t.

last year in the uk of johnson & co, it was warm-banks for those who couldn’t afford both food and central-heating.

and so this year, gordon brown, the ex-british prime minister, informs us of hygiene-banks: for those in the uk who already share toothbrushes, can’t buy toothpaste, and who find that sanitary products for women just ain’t something they can contemplate:

so DON’T tell me “smotherland” EVER again, when you discuss the fact of sweden and its ways of seeing and doing stuff. because if you do, if you dare to, you just really have no idea what you’re saying … no idea whatsoever.

and that’s a tangible fact for sure.

as tangible as the weekly death tolls that add up year after year, at the hands of the gun-holders who terrorise good american citizens in the name of spurious constitutional rights.

definition, design philosophy, rationale

“upskilling” human beings in the ways of the machine … again? i don’t THINK so

introduction

i just got a message from microsoft (linkedin) which asked me to consider and/or explain how what i was about to post (what you see below in the screenshots) related to my work or professional role.

why nudge in this way

is this a stealthy attempt to remove the ambiguities of #arts-based thinking patterns from contaminating the baser #chatgpt-x instincts and what they scrape?

more than personally, quite intellectually i think it’s wrong — in a world which needs lateral and nonconformist thinking — to define, a priori, what a thinker who wishes to shape a better business should use as a primary discourse.

because this discourse may include how much we follow or no the traditional way of framing information: where we state what we will say, say it, and then summarise it, we fit the needs of machines and people trained to think like them.

art should be used to communicate in any forum

‘truth is, when we choose a precise ambiguity (one forged out of the arts — not the confusions — of deep communication), where such ambiguity and the uncertainty it generates may in itself be a necessary part of the communication process’s context — and even content — what value ever is added by telling the speaker and/or writer they are ineffective?

in any case, the public will always have the final vote on this: and if you prefer to communicate in such ways and be not read, why not let it happen?

why choose this kind of nudge to upskill writers in the ways of the machine?

using automated machines to do so, too …!

so what do YOU think? what DO you?

me, what follows is what i want. what no one in tech wants to allow. because i’m not first to the starting-line: i’m last. they decided it didn’t suit their business models decades ago. i decided i didn’t agree. and i still don’t. and neither should you.

on making a systemically distributed intelligence and genius of all human beings … not just an elite

aside, definition

why NOT to thrive too?

yesterday evening was ace. where i’m staying someone new came for a week. i was told he was #finnish, and was asked by the host if i could hang around to receive.

it was downtime for me yesterday: i was needing some respite from all the thoughts i’d been having.

the new guy is young, brainy, sharp, kindly — and not #finnish at all, but #spanish. i spent the whole long evening speaking in #castellano with him, and it was fab: i realise how much i know about #spanish culture, and the bad memories just refused to surface on being with a good person from the country which i see now i’d also created so many good memories out from whilst there.

i also saw my #teaching and #enabling #skillsets kicking in. it was really interesting, communicating with him about our differing and similar perceptions of the worlds that overlapped around us — and then again, the worlds we each enjoyed which didn’t overlap. (as a by-the-by, and after the vibes of last night, i’d now like to explore mentoring quite seriously, if anyone who might facilitate this is reading these lines. i listen well face-to-face in a way maybe my writing gives lie to. and i make and communicate #polymath-style connections quite robustly and vigorously. both could serve newly arrived others to #sweden really well.)

he had actually been to #finland quite recently. and i have been in both #sweden and the #uk on and off since last december; that is, just before christmas.

‘much to praise in #scandinavia. very much both of us liked already.

we covered a lot of ground: he’s here on a post-#spanish master internship at #karolinska. and i told him of the 10,000 startups in #stockholm. and i explained how ignorant of another world i’d been all these years. and i said how moving from one country to another might not only be a question of building on existing abilities but also recognising the job and work roles would have not only differing descriptors but maybe even different goals and desired outcomes: even different philosophies.

we also spoke of the importance of philosophy more widely in everything — here, especially #tech (he studies and works in the field of #biology): worlds we all these days find ourselves inhabiting.

and finally he helped me satisfactorily resolve a conundrum which had led a friend of my father’s back in the 1960s to commit suicide. if i remember rightly, the friend had been a biochemist: and was involved in the study of cellular will — that is, whether at cellular level the idea and fact of free will can be detected.

it pushed my father’s friend over the edge; the philosophical challenge being that maybe whatever you chose to do would be impulsed inevitably by something external to yourself. no free will, then … anywhere, ever, at all.

young ismael, the spanish intern and researcher’s name, reminds me of fernando torres just a little bit. and he defo scored a goal or two when he explained to me the fact that a healthy cell to remain healthy can neither be #dependent nor #independent. it suddenly laid it out clearer than clear for me the reality that in a completely different time had served to kill my father’s friend: cells do indeed have free will; and they exert it to survive … even if nothing else. and what they must choose in order to survive in this way is what gordon brown said once about #interdependence: it’s the only thing worth pursuing, tbh. neither needy nor downright may you in all intellectual sincerity be. simply conscious of the collective you form a part of which always, always must be posited around the actions of individuals.

and so if cells, why not us?

and if us in order to survive, why not in order to thrive too?

https://m.allfootballapp.com/news/EPL/LIKE-A-MODEL-El-Nino-Fernando-Torres/2617229