Tuesday 31 January 2017

Farewell, Goodbye -By Robert Fullarton copyright 2017

Farewell, Goodbye
-By Robert Fullarton copyright 2017

Breakfast in the Hofburg
Down the haunts of Klimt
And cafe soirée moments
Lunch under the lime trees
And the Charlottenburg’s
Prestige
here one moment
On the celluloid
Gone into the pits
Of the Verdun
Dreaming of those citron
yellow white nights
Magnolia and egg shell green
Fantasies
Books and symphonies
Imperial orchestras
Spectres and classes
Come and gone
The world of Tolstoy
And Rachmaninoff
The émigrés
Migration to Gog and Magog
Coffee was taken in the final hour
Bellow the Topkapí
By the Bosphorus
In the final hour of the night
A beast released from the earth
And a third of the world turned to blood
A beast released from the sea
And a third of the earth was covered in hail
Fire made of steel
But the whole of the earth was burning
And the memory set ablaze
The columns of those poignant
Moments are buried long since
Beside the monarchs

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Sunday 29 January 2017

Upon riots and self righteous anger -Robert Fullarton 2017

Upon riots and self righteous anger
-Robert Fullarton 2017



With great weariness, with a weary heart, with a sentiment of great disillusionment, disgust, feeling alienation, anger and frustration do I look on the world. My how the world has become this playground of ideologies, of hateful politics that have spread in elongation out into other areas of the spectrum. I thank God that I can just go walk along the river and look at the wildlife, I can play music, and go outside the popular rhetoric or popular mainstream tirade that I hear day in and day out upon the airwaves of the melancholic and depressive media.

One becomes blue in the face, at the rigamarole of self-righteous declarations that one hears upon the airwaves or upon the news stations. Some great facade has been built upon looking good, but ignores the deep philosophical and spiritual questions and responsibilities that are fundamental to all ages and societies.

I agree with women's rights, and with women being treated with respect and fairness but my do I loathe it when former victims or groups use labels, use memories of our collective past to become the bullies and the tormentors.

Its very easy for a victim to become the oppressor, when one manipulates guilt to full capacity and in such you come full circle. I cannot stomach the sight of aggressive feminism turning militant, when reasonable debate, when reasonable discussion and restriction of pride is removed, we have sheer base anarchy and in fact this is the snapshot and the candid exposure of the hearts and minds of what men and women can do when they dont get what they want. Men will use whatever excuse they can to give right to brute force, to sheer hatred and violence and call it justice, or paint it to be democracy or paint it to be enlightenment, but the mobs that loot shop windows, that burn out cars and attack those who stand opposed, show's their true colours, as the very enemies both within and without that display what humans can and will do given sufficient means to do so.

Upon the collective guilt, let us state that 70 years of slow subtle, nuanced guilt has been advanced in time from the conservative democracies of Europe to the liberal government of the European Union. The difference been pre and post ww2 Europe is immense, it is like two different continents, two different planets in time. After many powers collapse the anarchic element of man comes out to play. When the tectonic plates move in earth shattering movements, the anarchic movements seek to come out from hence the tiniest thread between the divided earth. We have see this before, from after the 1815 congress of Vienna we had 30 years of revolution, coming hence from radical philosophies, from Hegel and Marx, what was once the form of man, the shape of society, had been dented and the certainty had been removed to the uncertainty of the monarchies, of ruling classes and state church. These revolutions were in full swing through the continental uprisings, demands and rebellions that spread throughout Europe in 1848.

I must add that the collapse of the 4 great European dynasties in 1919, Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov and the House of Osman were suffice for the go-ahead to happen, where long sought utopias, were put into practice, where the cogs of the machine (the workers were the pawns for the intellectual emigrés of Russia) were the means by which the "prophets" of the new utopia could overthrow their rulers, with promises, with all the benefits of living, with ideological brotherhood and "peace". All who did not agree with the practical use and the repercussions of the "utopia" were to be crushed!

Of course this has been the result, in the tried and tested nightmares that came about, with the deaths of their adherents, it takes the whispers of such promises along with the twisting and repression of information for such to ignite in the hearts of the youth, whose militancy is not only alive in the islamic camps of ISIS, but alive in the destructive, McCarthyesque pursuits of the campus grounds of the western world (though these extremes are polar, they are both vitriolic, both intolerant of those who oppose them and are controlled and maintained upon the restriction of information). Youth in revolt, for what? What has been achieved and what is being achieved with all the yells and riots? I have seen such taboo and stigma over race and sex, where the ideologists demand to place more attention on what has already been known or been attended to.

They like to remind us who is a "white man" or "who is a black man" with negative connotations of course. There is a retrogressive trend to try and smelt one's tradition, to further weaken the beliefs and structures of state which our forebears were a part of. The witch hunts continue in this unfree world, where ideologists like to pretend that they are justified in their "righteous anger" against big-government, against establishment, and against those who have a different belief system to them, the bellicose, utter vitriolic bile that spews forth can be disturbing, with mob rule, mob mentality, mob force and so-called mob justice. Who are these so-called social justice warriors? So many feel good about themselves by judging others, upon "mighty" high horses of "social justice."

Why cant the rigamarole and the record player change over for once, why cant bleating social commentators talk about something different for a change, on gardening, on wildlife, Blues, music, on matters, that are deep and truly affecting, and take the labels off. If only we could deliver social justice to say the homeless, the elderly, the sick, those in the hospices and those suffering from the blight of mental health. Or fight the drugs epidemic of Dublin! Why cant some people just stop trying to change the world with their cries of victimhood, with their thought policing, with their utopian belief that we can all live together without differences and without the repercussions, not everyone believes in this system, and people need to accept that pie in the sky utopia does not work, because there are those who do not want this to come about, and more importantly will violently destroy it given enough power to do so. Of course the problem is made worse, with many illustrious figures having descended from their ivory towers to "moralise" and endorse their pie in the sky utopia.

Man in his vision for destruction, has created some truly awful nightmares and called such "progress."

I loathe politics and I just believe that the rigamarole and ideologue that is ongoing for both sides of the divide, can breed contempt for fellow man, and put people into camps of them and us! The thoughts and reality of loving one's enemies is a far cry from what we see these days in the world we live in. How I wish that I too could love my enemies, and my how I want to do so, but I know how wrong I can get things, my mistakes and how I know that I must change to be a more patient, more loving and less selfish individual, we initiate this in hearts and we do so by Faith in Jesus Christ. I have been inspired to write this partially by reading Dostoyevsky's Karamazov Brothers, but it was true in his day and is true in ours, that violent political reactionaries need to be changed in the heart first, and then the mind, as theirs is the deep rooted diagnosis of man's thirst for power. It is on the question of existence, who is to govern us and how do we live in turn. Christians believe that true governance is given by God and lived out in perfect love and the sacrifices of pride and weakness for strength to come again!!

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Friday 6 January 2017

On Social Reform -Robert Fullarton Copyright 2017

On Social Reform
-Robert Fullarton Copyright 2017

While Marx wrote the communist Manifesto in Brussels of 1848 and Engels wrote of the horrid working class conditions of the poor in Britain, there was there was Anthony-Ashley Cooper, a great reformer, tackling the conditions of the poor, through legislation, to fight against child labour, lower the working hours of the poor and to give rights and adherence to those deemed to be insane and were sent off to the insane asylum. While Marx sought the end of all religion and to wage effectively a war on the upper classes, men like Cooper were fuelled by the passionate words of Jesus Christ in their century to give hope to those whom society had rejected and deemed to be unfit! Cooper too was the 7th Earl of Shaftsbury who used his position to pass legislation and give breadth of vision in the House of Lords. The vision of such compassion extended to men like Henri Dunant who was inspired by the impetus of his devout Calvinist upbringing was moved to feel horror and pathos under the conditions of war at the bloody battle of Solferino and in consequence there came the Red Cross, to grant dignity, and care to the sick and dying. Same too could be said for William Booth whose  "army" of salvationists went out unto the streets to bring food and comfort to the poor and the hungry. The Society of Friends (the Quakers) through the 1840's have remained in my minds as being part of the very few who gave alms and food through their soup kitchens to the starving people during the Irish famine! Today we see the homeless crisis (and I would rather call it the great drug epidemic) and we must examine the impetus, the reason, the motive, the altruistic mercy and power behind such action. It is not the violent roulette of the revolution and the pistol of violence that changes men, (it postpones and suspends their interest until violence resurges again, because men WANT MORE), change the heart and you have changed the entire body, work one mind at a time, through kindness to the sore points and fallacies of men and you make a great example, it comes down to the thought we all posit in time, "what kind of a world do we want to live in." Marx was wrong and has been proven wrong. Its is not for the suspension of power and transfer of power from one class unto another, it is not about the destruction of one group of peoples, but about untapping the peace within all men, by discovering the order which all men below answer to from above. Let us once again examine the roots of the radicals who spoke with, comforted and gave hope to the "untouchables" of the world, and we can see the life of Christ in emulation, carried by the exemplars of great men and women, these "little-christs" who carry a revolution of change and hope without violence and malice beyond the understanding of the ordinary mind!

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Monday 2 January 2017

The Strawberry Beds -by Robert Fullarton 2017 Copyright

The Strawberry Beds
-by Robert Fullarton 2017 Copyright


I have this image
from my youth
a distant memory
from the fog

Where the Green hills fold
into the wandering water
where Green hues, pastoral plains
unearth a work by Constable
of the English Summer of antiquity

Below the Bridge
there was a vista
where I never went
and will never go

But my mind is searching
and my heart is wanting
for a home unspoilt,
imperishable, upon a solid rock

The tumble down cottages,
these many mansions
upon the untroubled waters
where men live out their
dreams upon an unfolding canvass

The Pilgrim
beholds heaven's centre
but is obscured at the gates
to the lower circles
where green ethereal dreams
have been obscured
with concrete prisons
and the pearly rivers
are going brown

At my desk I begin to frown
to think it has been confiscated
spoiled and lost
but my determined heart
seeks with a determined will
the reservation of this past
to make it cast and make it last
for ever more.
and ever and ever
in the dye that's cast
in these determined dreams
for the future

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