poliphilo

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I regularly think I've exhausted the potential of AI picture-making, but then something comes along and refires my enthusiasm.

For one thing the tech keeps on getting better. It's been a while now since I had to fuss about hands with too many fingers. And new engines keep coming on line. I've been using one called Flux Schnell- which is German and the cheaper sister of the mighty Flux- which is the Mercedes Benz of Text to Image.

1. The Dollmaker's Masterpiece

2. Dragons' Teeth

3. Our Special Place

4. Men Who Mean Business

5. Ah, So There You Are....

LJ has spotted that I've posted for 99 days straight and urges me to make it up to a round hundred. Well, I never intended not to.

I had a dream in which someone had been badmouthing Putin- and I stepped in to praise him. I think I made some good points but forget what they were. "Why are you doing this?" someone asked. And I answered, "Because I'm a contrarian."

Ailz watched the chef at the Pasargad preparing our vegetarian kebabs. (It's always good when you can see the kitchen from the dining area.) "He sprays on the oil," she says- "And, apart from the haloumi there are very few calories- which is why, every time I eat there, I lose weight."

Good, eh?

That was the fourth time we've been. We're getting to be a bit evangelical about it. We keep taking different people. One person we really need to take is Tara- who is Persian. We want to see if she thinks the food is as authentic as the comments on the website say it is.

This dream is related to the one I posted about yesterday.

I am trying to run a Quaker Meeting for Worship- and all these bright young people have turned up- just the sort of people I keep wishing would join us in Eastbourne- but here's a problem: they just won't shut up. I have explained that worship is conducted in silence but they keep on chatting. So I get controlling, and angry and shouty- and end up throwing them out and slapping this one guy in the face. Most unQuakerly....

And the moral seems to be- and this goes for the earlier dream as welll, "Take what you're given and be thankful."

The way to peel ginger is with a spoon. The rind slips off a treat and you waste far less than you would if you used a knife. I'm peeling ginger because I'm stewing rhubarb and rhubarb and ginger is a classic combination.

YouTube, knowing I'm interested in T.E. Lawrence, punted me newsreel footage of his funeral. It was a simple interment in a village churchyard. No military pomp. No uniforms even. Winston Churchill was there. The commentator- speaking in those nasal clipped tones, reeking of emotional and sexual repression, that no-one uses anymore- called him a "great Empire-builder". Lawrence would have suffered agonies of self-questioning if he he'd thought that anyone would sum up his legacy quite so gibly. The commentator's accent was so pronounced that I thought at first I was listening to someone for whom English was a second language; an Arab, perhaps. Anyway, the sun was shining so they had a nice day for it.

I had reason this morning to take a look at the paintings of Wyndham Lewis. I like them. He'd got the hang of Cubism- and used its lessons intelligently. He also painted excellent portraits. He's been out of favour for ages because he once wrote a book calling Hitler a "man of peace"- an opinion he later revised. His blasting and bombardiering annoyed a lot of people- including the not-to-be-despised academic painter Augustus John- who resigned from the Royal Academy because it had accepted Lewis's portrait of Ezra Pound for its Summer Exhibition. Here's one of Lewis's pictures from the Great War. It's called "A Canadian Gun-pit."

I dreamed that I'd started holding a midweek service at the church where I was serving as a curate. The first week we'd had seven people. The second week hundreds turned up, the enormous cathedral-sized church was full to bursting and the noise was so great that I lost control of the proceedings. But it didn't really matter. The service was now pretty much running itself. A girl in a surplice was giving a dramatic reading of something or other. Was it the epistle? Was it the gospel? I couldn't make out any of the words but she was doing it beautifully, so who cares.....

We ended with a procession round the streets- which I led. As I came back to the building my boss (the vicar) opened the doors for me and I thought, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in."

A busy half a day at the Meeting House. Sergei was servicing the boiler. Ailz was on Zoom with the Nominations Committee. Dawn had brought a fig tree to be planted in a tub in the courtyard, a visitor from Kingston-upon-Thames needed to be made to feel included. So many plates to be kept in spin- and all while radiating good humour and enthusiasm. As people were dispersing after lunch I was thinking, "I'm too old for this...."

The bag I use when I'm weeding- it's a big heavy duty canvas thing (Ailz bought it for my mother and she never used it)- has disappeared. I think it blew away the night before last. That's Eastbourne for you. Windy city. When I get a replacement I won't be leaving it lying around but shut it away in the shed.

Yesterday I put a body warmer on over my jumper. Soon I'll be wearing padded shirts. This morning the temperature has dropped into single figures.

It ain't summer any more....

The Globe Theatre has posted clips of Roger Allam as Falstaff. He's very good.

And I love how the configuration of the Globe allows for the big speeches- the ones where the character is thinking aloud- to be delivered at the audience- almost as if they were in conversation- which I think must have been how they were done in Shakespeare's day.

But

In the comments people are bandying about the phrase "greatest of all time" and that always makes me bristle.

In this case "all time" is a matter of well over four hundred years. How can we possibly know which of the noted Falstaffs- from Kempe to McKellen- carries off the palm?

Within living memory Ralph Richardson and Anthony Quayle have made the role their own. More recently we've had great Falstaffs from Simon Russell Beale and Anthony Sher....

And then there's Orson Welles' magisterial performance in Chimes at Midnight- the greatest Shakespearian movie ever made.....

We were at the Pasargad again- this time as members of the gang that ran the now defunct Death Cafe.

The Muslim couple (British Indians) had been on pilgrimage since we'd seen them last- on the desert route between the Imam Ali shrine in Karbala and the Imam Husayn shrine in Najaf (both in modern-day Iraq). All along the way, they said, local people came out of their villages to offer free hospitality to the pilgrims. They traveled in a group of over a hundred with a couple of English-speaking Imams acting as guides. In Najaf, they saw not only the tomb of Husayn but also the tombs of Adam and Noah. Is there anything quite like this in the Christian world? I don't believe there is.

We parted with a resolution to meet up again in December. I hope we do....

Chap I was listening to yesterday was saying he thinks most of the things people see in the sky and identify as UFOs are this-worldly, black budget aircraft. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he was right.

It's almost certain that the military has technology it's not owning up to-that's a long way in advance of the stuff it does own up to.

And the more I lean towards the theory that the so-called aliens are not so much coming from other star systems as from other dimensions (whatever that means) the less it seems likely that they'd need nuts and bolts flying machines to get around in.

I rang a couple of older Friends yesterday to see how they were. Both have serious issues with their health. Both are in their 80s.

I find myself slipping into the role of minister to the congregation. I find I can't help myself. Once a bloody priest always a bloody priest.

We went to the Pasargad with Elisa. I ate too much. There was a looped video playing on the screen at the far side of the room- an aerial glide around a sun drenched harbour town. I asked the woman who waited on us (she may be the proprietor) if it was someplace in Iran and she said, "No, I think it's probably Corfu."

I looked up the meaning of Pasargad the other day, because I like to know such things. It turns out to be the name of a place- a rural province or district or county in Iran- big in size, small in population- chiefly notable (for outsiders at least) for containing a remarkable ancient monument that locals reverence as the tomb of Solomon's mother and archaeologists are pretty sure is the tomb of Cyrus the Great.

مقبره_ی_کوروش_هخامنشی_پاسارگاد.jpeg

So, why were we fighting the Turks in the Great War?

Turkey and Great Britain were not traditional enemies. During the Crimean War we and they had been members of an alliance that went up against the Russians.

So far as I can make out, the reasons for the war with Turkey were these:

1. The Ottomans had cozied up to Germany in the hope that Germany would supply them with the know-how and technology that would lift their fading empire into the modern world. And the Germans were our enemies.

2. The Russians and the Turks had been at war more or less continuously for hundreds(?) of years. and the Russians were now our allies- and we needed them to keep the Germans occupied on the Eastern front.

3. A winnable war in the Middle-east would give us easy propaganda victories to set off against the bad news coming out of the war of attrition in Europe.

4. The Ottoman Empire was collapsing anyway and we could see there were territories to be snuffled up.

None of these seem sufficient reason for killing thousand upon thousands of people.....

When his mind wasn't busy with devising strategy and running about on camels, T.E. Lawrence allowed thoughts about the futility of what he was doing to rise up and further complicate the self-hatred he already felt. Insofar as he was a soldier he fought, insofar as he was a loose cannon he knew he was engaged on an exercise that was both wicked and pointless. He didn't believe in the Arab revolt (neither did most of the Arabs) and he knew he was a fraud for preaching and pursuing it.

These chaps playing dress-up are T.E. Lawrence and the American journalist Lowell Thomas.

Thomas did more than anyone to create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia. He wrote a book and devised a smash-hit multi-media show that toured the world. Lawrence told friends that he had nothing to do with any of Thomas's enterprises but this was patently untrue.

Witness this photograph- which was taken not in the Middle East but in the garden of Thomas's house in London- where Lawrence was a frequent visitor.

Arabia was just one incident in their lives. Both went on to do all sorts of interesting things. Lawrence wrote bestsellers, worked as a diplomat under Winston Churchill, served in the ranks of the RAF, helped develop high speed launches to be used in Air Sea Rescue and knew just about everybody who was anybody in the '20s and '30s. He died in 1935 when his motorbike came off the road in what may have been an accident and may have been murder.....

Lowell Thomas became a force to be reckoned with in print, radio,TV and film. Something I read said that at the height of his career he was probably the best-known journalist in America.

What gets me about this image is how young they both are.....

Ailz bought a toy stuffed lion from the Tip Shop. It's a bit bigger than the cat but roughly the same colour. It sprawls under the table in the hall in a sphinx like pose- front legs, extended- and everytime I go past I think it's going to reach out a paw and have a dab at me.

She calls it Clarence and I call it Lenny after the leonine TV stars of our far-off childhood....

Edith Sitwell is Blakeian. Her poems, like the Prophetic Books, are mythological, bardic, circling- like jazz- round certain ideas/images/words: They are profound and gorgeous- and they've dropped right out of favour.

They didn't jive with the kitchen-sinkery of the later 20th century. Nobody's fault, just a ripple in the history of taste. I think they will come back.

They should.

I'm working- slowly and with attention- through a collection she put together at the end of World War Two. It's called The Song of the Cold.

And in the poem titled "Eurydice" there's a line I have loved ever since I first came across it fifty years ago and have quoted in sermons and conversations and blogs. I knew it was hers but not where it came from and am thrilled to have finally pinned it down. It goes, "Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest."

Five pictures

1. The Maestro

2. What took you so long?

3. Starlet

4. Two WiseMen

5. Man of the Moment

There has been scaffolding in the courtyard of the Meeting House for as long as we've been going there- which is two years now. This week it was removed- and the coutyard looks bare without it. Also shabby. The scaffolding was so in-your-face that you hardly noticed how the metal window frames were rusting and garden furniture decaying. Mind you, the building as a whole- inside even more than out- needs refurbishing and redecorating. We have a lot of jobs in hand but, as always with Quakers, things are moving ever so slowly....

I turned off the computer, got up from the desk- and found I was groping my way in the dark. The cat was at my feet, but I couldn't see him; and only knew he was there because he was talking to me. It was 8.30 p.m.

I know that Autumn has been creeping up on us. I've been ticking off the signs: a fallen leaf blowing in through the door, the dying off of the Michaelmas daisies, a friend serving up an apple and blackberry crumble made from fruit picked in her garden- but yesterday evening it felt like it had jumped out of a cupboard at me and gone "Boo!"

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poliphilo

March 2026

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Picture Diary 55

One Hundred Straight

Low Cal

Unsuccess In The Ministry

Three Unconnected Paragraphs And A Picture

Success In The Ministry

Plates In Spin

Change Of Season

Four Centuries WorthOf Falstaffs

On Pilgrimage

UFOs

Once A Priest

Pasargad

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Playing Dress-up

Lion

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Picture Diary 54

Rusting....Decaying....

Boo!

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