because when you love unconditionally is when you arrive not at bill gates but at real pearly gates where your place isn't a state of vatican embezzlement but of true affection and amusement and of honest kindnesses expressed like the best espresso you ever sipped being your lips that day on dublin river and so this christmas i hope to find you on stockholm isle and maybe we spend a while together where everyone can see us holding our palms out not in surrender or white flag but in the glorious colours of blue and yellow one a sanctuary from all that is bad and one fighting on behalf of us daily by the minute and to the second never seconded from anything that wasn't a deep belief in the fact that putin is not mad but just entirely and completely bad without redemption and without ascension and only awaiting if some day a justice of a natural kind may be delivered duly: the descent to the darkest embers of unending fires
and so all that's being left for me to say is how much i love you and always shall and if you cannot show yourself now or cannot yet or may not any more then there will always be a time i will find time for you when you can finally hold my hand again and make me the happiest man who ever walked this rock proud and tall and amongst it all because that's what this is all about dearest soulmate of forever where our shared and intrinsic souls our fabulously intertwined souls become arts of the heart and our work then finds itself never-ending
and our life is always of utility now even as distances make the kiss on the lips quite impractical for the moment still one day we may one day say it's time to hug each other in beautiful lacy embrace NOT of the poison-laced juliet or romeo but being just the moments when utterly chilled together on common sofa we end our days in an uncommonly handsome conversation of a meeting of minds and body night after day and in all our joyous beams not of foundation or construction but actually just of sun where your eyes glisten and shine with happiness and mine weep and sob as finally i am accepted exactly for what i am by the only woman who knew what made me right again
just that state out there (if you're ever so lucky and if fortune blesses you and if your life is one of fortunate outcomes and not of war nor conflicts horrific) but that state that one which makes you unconditionally beloved without further recourse to the cruel and without further imposition of those gruels of incarceration i suffered once upon a crime but just a hand again a hand outstretched never clasping or grasping but compassionate and warm and slender-fingered and SO elegantly yours after all
and so i do await that moment one day in the near future when maybe soon and if not then well ... then maybe later you may grace my presence and give me the notion and opportunity to remind you of all that you have meant to me and mean verily still not out of illness or infirmity but simply the veracity of knowing the soul IS where it all lies in truth: a very human redemption ... for us all
there was only one kind of label that ever sounded positive for me during my life. because my parents labelled me and my siblings all our lives. and to our detriment: to diminish us.
labels can be shortcuts to understanding; or they can be machetes to slice a man into the dismembered state he’ll never be able to recover from.
background story:
in 2003 i was labelled and dismembered by the british state: i was judged a paranoid schizophrenic. it was a judgement: perhaps even a judgment.
they incarcerated me for a month and attempted to ensure i believed all was lost. two weeks after leaving my state of incarceration i was working fifteen- to twenty-hour shifts at mcdonald’s. when my social worker had assured me i would be fit for no more than maximum two hours a week voluntary activities for at least two years.
i refused to be cowed by this label: i am not made of the kind of stuff which will.
so as a young democratic citizen who grew up on the battlefield that was his parental marriage and relationship, a life-changing label was also finally applied by the country he had been born to.
nowhere did justice reside in his experience of life.
what happens when the label is right:
the label was wrong: and this i shall sustain to this day. why only one kind of label has sounded at all positive during my time on this otherwise beautiful and precious rock: that thing we call “designer labels”.
even here, they may be tinged with an injustice of sorts: privilege, and so forth. but i am generally generous to these kinds of labels and privileges because they are a form of art: real art. the clothing of human beings in pleasurable and expressive ways might not socioeconomically be within everyone’s reach — but neither is a picasso or a rodin.
what happened yesterday:
yesterday, however, i continued — like a plane’s circling of a crowded airport — my slow approach to the idea of being labelled … only this time in good faith, accurately and professionally competently.
before we continue, i’m not saying this is necessarily my “rosebud”, but as a process to getting closer to fairly starting to unpick my enigma, it’s not a bad place to begin.
second, i’ve been in sweden on and off since just before christmas. the swedish are generous; not malicious. they are watchful; not cautious. they are incessant, though not obsessive, gatherers of data of the world around them; they always know when they still haven’t got quite enough to take a rightful decision. and they are, in the main, kindly and aspirational; not ambitious in a trampling way.
my sister was accused of bad parenting for just about seven years by the english & welsh education system. her two children are super-intelligent: the brightest buttons and shiniest souls i have ever seen. the education law in england & wales makes it impossible for a parent to get a proper medical intervention when behavioural issues show themselves — unless and if the school agrees it’s not bad parenting. for seven years the two schools she had to interface with refused access to doctors. under this law, you cannot get access to a consultant for your own child even via their gp.
now it might occur to you to think maybe my sister didn’t know the truth about her own children. she doesn’t claim to, either. she never has. she did know that she didn’t have enough tools to deliver on the sacred joy and duty of being as good a parent as she wishes to be always.
i do have to say at this point, however, that she is a qualified psychologist and counsellor under uk systems, various. she does therefore have some privileged understanding and critical capacity in the areas of knowledge in question. the schools in the uk didn’t care. that only made it a more bitter pill for her to choke on.
how and why sweden is different:
she and her family emigrated to sweden a couple of years ago. her children, and wider family therefore, are now being supported and enabled more in a year than seven in the uk.
she has had to accept that to unlock this support a labelling process for her children did have to proceed. but here the process has striven mostly all along to evidence its trustworthiness: that is, its desire to be trusted by all stakeholders involved. in the uk, my experience showed that the british are prepared to use mental health tools as weapons of an undemocratic security infrastructure.
this is why i am now ready to be labelled:
you might immediately say: “surely RElabelled.” but no: you would be wrong. i wasn’t labelled: i was attacked, taken out and dismantled over decades by a security establishment that didn’t like the truths they knew pretty soon i would begin to deliver on in respect of their incompetences, multiple. if, that is, i didn’t have my capacity to bear intellectual and sociopolitical witness undermined profoundly first.
the time i’ve been in sweden is the first time — the very first — i’ve ever been in a country where this hasn’t been the desired end i’ve sensed.
and this is why — in such an environment — i am now fully ready, aware of all the potential consequences — to be labelled duly and compassionately by a nation-state of compassionate and proper citizens and professionals.
because what this will unlock is surely, now, worth its weight in the most precious substance known to humanity: the truth.
there are two questions i’d like to discuss in tonight’s post. the first as per these screenshots of a previous post earlier today:
in the second image above, i allude to “zero trust” versus “total openness”. and then add, in an addendum written after the original post, that trust is the secular term we have been constructing for a while in the absence of a more religious faith.
‘only thing being that faith presupposes a universal deity of irreplaceable goodness (that’s the deal; why it’s safe to have faith), whilst trust is what we far more imperfect humans do with each other — equally imperfectly.
from one of my own presentations on a “natural justice”, quoting from various guardian newspaper stories
relativism — but not what you’re thinking jim
i think a bit of what is happening is something to do with relativist approaches to criminal justice and law enforcement. and i’m not talking about populist rubbishing of 1960s post-modernist belief systems.
i’m saying that, actually, the defence lawyer’s right — and even obligation — to defend someone they’re pretty sure is guilty relativises since time immemorial the concept of absolute truth. and if you don’t like the word “absolute”, how about we say “core”?
i don’t even mean universal truth. i think i already mentioned on these pages that i sensed a profound difference between the ideas of absolute and universal. this evening, someone encouraged me to explain. and being forced to do so in this way served to clarify my own thought with great utility.
the difference between universal and absolute truth
i ended up using the example of the roman catholic church and my mother. for her, her church is part of a wider community of christians. and she is, in the main, well disposed to these other churches and their own manifestations of such christianity. even so, for her the catholic church trumps them all: in this sense, it holds out for a wider humanity the universal truth that is its teachings.
meantime, many others of other religions, whilst subscribing to similar concepts of an all-seeing god, would beg to differ re my mother’s universal positioning of her church.
from their point of view, i’d argue that — more objectively seen — my mother’s truths were what i would now begin to define as absolute truths: that is, particular to a set of circumstances, and criteria clearly too. but NOT universal for everyone.
and if we apply these two concepts to the criminal justice and legal systems?
apply this explanation to criminal justice and to the legal system: you then get a different view of what a “core” truth in such contexts might after all look like.
forget the debate between a relativised reality or no. forget the naughty 1960s versus the tarnished but ever so real 21st century.
let’s move, instead, into the scenarios of universal truth (applicable one hundred percent to all human beings) versus absolute truths (always context-specific).
from reality-agnostic defence lawyers to criminal justice and legal systems with absolute and core truths
in this sense, from the totally reality-agnostic defence lawyer’s position, where core truth simply can’t exist in the debating chamber that is the court of law such professionals usually operate in, we may slowly begin to put together a new set of ai tech-driven validation systems: systems which may, after all, begin to recover our capacity to deliver these absolute and core truths i am differentiating.
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