Easter

Easter

Woke up naturally at 8:15. Straight up and showered then back to bed for toast & marmalade, paid for shoes & top on eBay, read Femail (Mail online womens section) and played Solitaire. You will have realised by now that Solitaire is an addiction. I don’t even like it. I don’t know why I waste so many hours playing it. It may be that, whenever I win, I get a sense of that personal power and success I lack in my life. If only I could feel it in more productive ways.

10:33 Brushed teeth and dressed in grey jeans, black & grey striped l/s t-shirt & black Converse basketball boots to tidy and do laundry. At 1:30 J___ made me a cheese & bacon sandwich which I ate while we watched an episode of “Shaun the Sheep”.

While tidying I tried to think of it as like playing a game of Solitaire, aiming for that sense of satisfaction in “winning”. It didn’t take long though, for the fatigue to send me collapsing back into bed after only a very small amount of housework.  I had to consciously fight the sense of failure. Played Solitaire for ¾ hour while lying down. ^[1] Would have been far better to have used that time stretching my brain constructively, by reading or becoming fluent in, say, French.  But my brain struggles too.

Slept for two hours then read “The Accidental Tourist” until J___ called me for dinner.  Ate it downstairs while watching “Poirot” then watched the last episode of “Waking the Dead”. I watch a lot more TV than I used to although even that is fatiguing.

I found this particular entertainment disturbing. I get caught up in “Waking the Dead” but when its over and I analyse what I have watched, I am much more horrified at the filmmakers and at myself than the contents of the programme. The last ever episode of this series was about a serial killer who had a chamber where he tortured dozens of young boys for months before murdering them. It bothers me that someone imagines such horrors, writes about them, people act them out and we watch them to entertain ourselves for an hour or two. It doesn’t matter how often we say, “It’s only a film”, we are training our brains not to react to torture and murder. “Waking the Dead” became more and more horrific as time went on. The storylines and the visual images had to “evolve” to keep us entertained. By the end of the series a single murder committed on the spur of the moment is so commonplace as to be boring hence a 9 year old child who has been so abused, he burns other children with cigarettes and pokes peoples’ eyes out, and the episode mentioned above.  If studies haven’t already proved that exposure to TV violence desensitises us and increases our toleration and acceptance of it then “Waking the Dead” must do so.

I am not in favour of censorship. I am in favour of freedom of choice, freedom to exercise our personal power. In this case it would mean acknowledging the appeal of watching what we know to be vicious and violent events, realising that becoming blasé about them is not conducive to a gestalt of happiness so choosing not to watch them.

I think we are continuously evolving, not just physically. At present I observe four levels of “spiritual” evolutionary co-existence:

[1]      Those who revel in performing violence

[2]      Those who revel in observing violence but who are sufficiently aware of its societal consequences to inhibit themselves from performing it (until Authority gives them license to validly unleash their pleasure in it through capital punishment or war^[2] )

[3]      Those who acknowledge their fascination with watching

violence, who may be aware of their own power to perform violence, but who consciously choose not to participate in it in any form because they cannot logically justify it

[4]      Those who find violence in any form repugnant

At level 2, working on 3, I am obviously not a highly evolved being.

Today is Easter Sunday. I have enormous respect for Christianity and its many great-minded and great-hearted followers (none whatsoever for fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise). And while I think that Jesus said all that needs to be said in the most intelligent way possible, I’m sad to say that Easter means nothing to me.  Sad because I cannot know how good it must feel to be able to face the worst disappointments and miseries with a solid belief that you are loved, never abandoned and everything will turn out for the best, even if you won’t understand  why it is so interminably wretched until after your soul departs this “mortal coil”.  In my dealings with religion, I have seen oppressors, repressors and egomaniacs take something beautiful and twist it into ugliness for their own selfish gain.  This is general primitive, unevolved human nature which one would expect in the Power Halls of politics but it is peculiarly out of place in the religious arena, albeit dishearteningly commonplace. “By their fruits you shall know them” indeed.

Anyway, back to Easter, the child of paganism disguised with the new mask given it by the Christian Church. Worship of the goddess Ēostre or the semi-god Attis or the Son of God Jesus . . . all of these seem equally primitive to me. I can see a case for celebrating the vernal equinox,  sans sacrifice,  human or otherwise, as long as we are fully conscious of what we are celebrating and appreciating . . . the departure of long, cold,  dark, miserable Winter and the arrival of warm, light, joyful Spring.  That does not necessitate dancing naked around Castlerigg Stone Circle or encouraging our children to stuff themselves with hare or egg-shaped chocolates until they are sick (a literally poisonous state of affairs that makes both them and the manufacturers fat). As for Wiccans and their celebration of Beltane next Sunday, all I would say is, “Have fun and don’t take yourselves too seriously.” At least they take human responsibility for the care of planet Earth seriously.

[1]         The second main cause of death in ME/CFS sufferers (suicide being the first) is heart attack. Research has shown that the mitochondria which supply energy to the cells, fail in ME/CFS. The heart muscle therefore cannot work properly so cardiac output is low. When lying down CO is acceptable but standing, the sufferer is in borderline heart and organ failure.

[2]         Some societies include public beatings as valid occasions for unleashing the pleasure in observing violence. I think TV programmes like Waking the Dead are modern versions of the amphitheatres of Ancient Rome.