The Sack of Rome

 ‘The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals’, c.1890 by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1847–1926)

I somehow doubt that the Vandals were nude.  The Romans and Greeks famously despised them because they wore trousers.  However, the Teutonic and Celtic tribes would have been just as bisexual as the Romans, the Greeks and the Persians.  Hostility to gayness is a Christian/Abrahamic notion.  Man's natural state is bisexuality.

Invictus

Invictus

BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Out of the night that covers me, 

      Black as the pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 

      For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 

      I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 

      My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 

      Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 

      Finds and shall find me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

      How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate, 

      I am the captain of my soul. 

From Poetry Foundation

(Invictus is Latin for unconquered)

Cadit gladius

The sword falls.

I'm to finish work on 14th of July.  My overwhelming emotion is relief.  But I am angry too.  My boss refused to give me redundancy (severance) pay.  We agreed instead that I would work until the end of September, which is (as my mom used to say) better than a slap in the face with a wet fish.  But then he discovered that by law he has to give me long-service leave, which is one week for each year that you've worked for your employer.  And I've worked for him for 12 years.  So he then said that he couldn't pay me for 3 more months and also give me the long service leave I am entitled to.   So I am to finish in 2 weeks time, but will be paid up until the end of September.  His meanness and parsimony are extraordinary: I know how much I bring into the firm, and I know how I helped build up the firm in the early days.  I was so angry when he told me this that I left the office immediately and went home.

I don't know who is going to do the work that I used to do, and who will look after the clients.  Since I like some of them, I worry.  From now on, though, they're his problem.

I'm on leave this week, and already feel more relaxed than I've felt for ages.  When you're totally focussed on your work, it's hard to write, because you don't have the emotional or physical energy to create.  Making up a world and the people who inhabit it takes emotional energy.  And I've been so determined to do a good job at work that I concentrate hard on what's happening in economies and share markets.  When I write I often run scenes and chapters through my mind.  How will the plot develop from now?  How will this character interact with that one?  When I'm working, I'm concentrated on doing my job properly, not thinking about my characters and their lives.  Well, that's over!

So, I've started writing again.  I'm writing 200 words a day of Majorca Flats.  And already my mind is filling with new plot developments, new episodes, and ways to bring all the story threads together.  It feels wonderful!

This beach at the hamlet of Walkerville, is a 35-40 minute drive from our new house.  I'm looking forward to visiting it often.

Scapha

Sed fugit

Heath Ledger

... would have been 37 yesterday.

atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

.

Compassion

Compassion (Latin cum=with, passion = suffering) or its Greek-derived equivalent sympathy (syn = with, pathos = feeling) shouldn't really have anything to do with right and wrong.  When somebody is suffering, it's irrelevant whether it's their own fault or not.  That's hard to do, actually.  When someone has caused their own strife we are inclined to feel less sympathy for them.  And yet, if we were the ones suffering, wouldn't we still want to be comforted?  Wouldn't we want those we love, our friends and family, to just give us comfort and support, even knowing that our travails are our own fault?  And if we would like that, how can we refuse it to others?

According to Frans de Waal, whose thoughtful, thought-provoking and eye-opening book (The Age of Empathy) I have just reread (for the third time), we are hard-wired to empathy and sympathy.

Some quotes from Professor de Waal:

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.


Sympathy and compassion are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They are what makes us human, and allow our vast human tribe to survive.  The hyper-competitiveness of the standard male model is dysfunctional and destructive, both to those who believe in it, and to the rest of us. We--our society--need something better.  I once thought that gay men, having had to come to terms with the fact that they are not (according to society) "real men", would have reinvented masculinity to tone down the selfishness and competitiveness and lonely struggle that straight men have to endure.  Alas, it's not happened.

I loves ya

Omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori.
Haec sat erit, divae, vestrum cecinisse poetam

Ryan Kwanten Begged for 'True Blood' Gay Sex Scene

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.  Times change, and we in them change too.

Who would have thought that a straight actor would have asked for a "gay" sex scene?  My generation still bears the scars of the intense homo-hatred we grew up with.  But younger people shrug off these taboos, indeed, welcome a chance to do something different.  Which is as it should be.  Note though that there are still the hate-filled comments from the unhinged brain-dead in the comments sections below the articles.

Read more here and here.

Ego te semper amabo

It's Official: Cane Toad to rule Australia

It's official.  Australia will become the first country in the world to be ruled by a cane toad.  Tony "Cane Toad" Abbott has become Oz's new PM.

O tempora!  O mores!

Facilis descensus Averno

by Roberto Ferri

Facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras.
hoc opus, hic labor est.

Easy the descent to Hell

night and day lies open the dark door of death

but to retrace your steps and escape to the upper airs

this is the task, this the labour.

The South Country

A lost thing could I never find,
Nor a broken thing mend:
And I fear I shall be all alone
When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me
Or who will be my friend?


From the poem The South Country, by Hilaire Belloc (1870- 1952)

This painting I found in this intriguing blog post.  Although the painter is familiar, yet his name escapes me.  Quam senex sum.

ElvenSword

I shall in a day or two start posting chapters from ElvenSword to my website.  I'm doing some very substantial editing and rewriting, so I will only be able to post a chapter a week.


Meantime, you might enjoy this item about an Xbox game which features gay sex and gay pillow talk.

Tempora mutantur et nos in illis.  How the troglodytes must hate this!

Gerunds

A gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns.

The Writing on the Wall

The orange line shows expected the expected global temperature rise is we had kept carbon emissions at 2000 levels. Of course, emissions have risen since then.

O tempora, o mores.  [From Grog's Gamut]

Hate the sin, love the sinner

It was Gandhi who said this, in his 1929 autobiography.  It's not actually in the Bible, believe it or not.  But a famous Christian (St Augustine, in 424 a.d.) did say something like it : cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, which means, roughly, with affection/fondness of men and hatred of vice.

In practice, many, many people struggle to love the person and hate the sin.  Because we cannot help ourselves judging.  Sad, isn't it?  The worst is when people hypocritically do horrible things to others while saying that they are doing it with love.  People like the gay haters, who consistently simply can't see how their view of us is entirely devoid of love, that it on the contrary reeks of profound and vicious hatred.  They pay lip service to God is Love, and Judge not Lest ye be Judged, but in reality are quite unable to see that their own position is profoundly unChristian.