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Jack took the rhino to an airshow
Thursday, September 04, 2003
directions
they were coming down the tor behind me. their conversation drifted into my consciousness.
"...they must have been travellers." (female)
"what are you talking about?" (male)
"them we saw. either travellers or gypsies."
"same difference. travellers. gypsies. all filth. contaminate the land they squat on..."
the sort of conversation you know happens, but still knocks the breath out of you.
I stopped and pretended to admire the view. let them pass. late fifties. he half-bald in pressed viyella beige shorts, white socks, trainers, stocky, thick-necked, pink meat-eating flesh; she in blue flowery crimplene, pale, aetiolated, hair as if coated in dust, a lifetime of cleaning and cooking his tea.
I caught up with them again at the bottom of wellhouse lane. they were looking the road up and down as if it owed them something. they caught my attention.
"excuse me." the male. perfectly polite and smiley. "do you happen to know where the chalice well gardens are?"
"of course."
the entrance is hidden ten metres along a wall to the right. the other way heads out of town. edgarley. west pennard. pilton. shepton mallet, eventually.
I wonder how far they got before they started arguing about what exactly he'd said, that bloke back there.
they were coming down the tor behind me. their conversation drifted into my consciousness.
"...they must have been travellers." (female)
"what are you talking about?" (male)
"them we saw. either travellers or gypsies."
"same difference. travellers. gypsies. all filth. contaminate the land they squat on..."
the sort of conversation you know happens, but still knocks the breath out of you.
I stopped and pretended to admire the view. let them pass. late fifties. he half-bald in pressed viyella beige shorts, white socks, trainers, stocky, thick-necked, pink meat-eating flesh; she in blue flowery crimplene, pale, aetiolated, hair as if coated in dust, a lifetime of cleaning and cooking his tea.
I caught up with them again at the bottom of wellhouse lane. they were looking the road up and down as if it owed them something. they caught my attention.
"excuse me." the male. perfectly polite and smiley. "do you happen to know where the chalice well gardens are?"
"of course."
the entrance is hidden ten metres along a wall to the right. the other way heads out of town. edgarley. west pennard. pilton. shepton mallet, eventually.
I wonder how far they got before they started arguing about what exactly he'd said, that bloke back there.
Saturday, August 23, 2003
truth and reconciliation
I was brought up a christian, but realised fairly early on that turning the other cheek is nine times out of ten guaranteed to get you twice the beating you'd otherwise have received. obviously, to have been raised a muslim or a sikh wouldn't have protected me from these early lessons in applying God's mediated advice about forgiveness, either, and yet the secular notion of the nobility of restraint, the moral superiority of forgiveness over revenge is strangely pernicious. certainly, a continuing attachment to the ethics of restraint is an essential counterbalance, at the domestic level of parenting and schooling, to the pragmatics of the current realpolitik which seems now to have reverted completely to a level of tribal simplicities that dispenses at a stroke with a thousand years of hard-earned liberalising (not to say civilising) checks and balances.
as long as the great nations persist in behaving like badly-behaved children (and profiting by it) it becomes most important that we parents continue to explain to our own children how and why they should not follow their example.
self-evidently, a violent response to a violent provocation always escalates. there are some cultures (the Irish for one - the SerboCroat for another) whose endless mutual recriminations refer back to an initiating outrage that predates living memory - by centuries, sometimes. clearly, it is possible for the vendetta to become so woven into the tribal consciousness that it becomes almost a self-replicating entity - a sort of non-biological gene - imprinting itself so firmly through patterns of ritual repetition that it becomes a totem of identity. (the northern irish orangemen's annual 'marching season' is a familiar example - it's very difficult for anyone other than an orangeman to identify with his - no women on the marches - 'right' to march along his catholic neighbours' roads banging drums, piping triumphalist anthems, and flourishing the banners and provocative accoutrements that 'celebrate' the protestant 'victory' of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. hatred and revenge are, after all's said and done, nationalism's nectar and ambrosia.)
equally self-evident is the truth that the only right way forward from a perceived wrong is to forgive and forget - the south african truth and reconciliation model as the polar opposite of the jew/arab kill-for-a-kill.
at such times as these, forgiveness becomes a moral imperative, even if forgetting seems, at first, impossible. but it (forgiving) is not something that just emerges, together with table-manners, as part of the domestic didactic package. it may be necessary to experience what it is to be forgiven before forgiveness has any real meaning, and in order to understand how to forgive great transgressions, it may be necessary to have transgressed greatly, and to have been forgiven. there is still much to forgive in the league of nations - no great nation is innocent of collusion in the worst crimes imaginable, of having sealed up a shameful cellar whose walls still ring with the screams of the uncountable innocent.
arguably, it may be possible to transgress so greatly against someone that they become effectively deprived of the capacity to forgive - if the damage done them has compromised their capacity to dissolve the corrosive links that chain the transgressor to the transgressed - in which case they're likely to become enmeshed in that murky, crypto-neurotic state of semi-resolution that's probably far nearer to the truth of most 'reconciliations' - both personal and political - than the sacharine and media-friendly felicities of 'closure' - that despicable hollywood placebo. hatred, after all, is only the twisted and bitter fruit of unwatered love - the hate-object as much a source of (malign, bilious, forever inadequate) nourishment to the hater as the lover to his ravenous love.
assuming the possibility of forgiveness, however, what does it actually mean?
does 'I forgive you' mean simply 'I release you from the threat of revenge' for example? or does it mean 'I absolve you henceforth of your burden of blame and guilt'? the former is the version the child understands - the latter is the evolved, grownup version - the hard one. to forgive someone is to assess the genuineness of their contrition, to accept it, and to release them of their share of the burden - for them, of remorse, for you, of pain. it is to accept that the one seeking forgiveness has come to understand and partially share the pain their actions have caused, and to allow him or her to divest themselves of that encumbrance - to proceed, enlightened, forgiven.
remorse, however, can be simply (cynically) an expedience - the effectiveness of a courtroom apology is often a reflection of the quality of the performance - and it is here, when the apology is perceived to be transparently insincere, or, tougher still, when there is no apparent contrition at all, that the notion of forgiveness becomes most personally challenging.
again and again, it is with astonishment and profound respect that one listens to or reads the always quietly spoken victim of some atrocity - terrorist or simply criminal - pronouncing their forgiveness on the often unidentified perpetrator of the violent act that has broken their heart. it is as if, in these moments of personal apocalypse, a door of perception is opened to some people, randomly selected by tragic happenstance, to reveal the absolute truth behind the moral relativism of the notion of forgiveness.
god willing, it will not have to come to this for more than a tiny fraction of us, but it is for us to listen and learn from them the necessity - the absolute necessity, if there is to be any progress in our efforts to secure a peaceful future for our descendants - of drawing that line in the sand that says, this is where history ends - beyond this all is forgiven.
I was brought up a christian, but realised fairly early on that turning the other cheek is nine times out of ten guaranteed to get you twice the beating you'd otherwise have received. obviously, to have been raised a muslim or a sikh wouldn't have protected me from these early lessons in applying God's mediated advice about forgiveness, either, and yet the secular notion of the nobility of restraint, the moral superiority of forgiveness over revenge is strangely pernicious. certainly, a continuing attachment to the ethics of restraint is an essential counterbalance, at the domestic level of parenting and schooling, to the pragmatics of the current realpolitik which seems now to have reverted completely to a level of tribal simplicities that dispenses at a stroke with a thousand years of hard-earned liberalising (not to say civilising) checks and balances.
as long as the great nations persist in behaving like badly-behaved children (and profiting by it) it becomes most important that we parents continue to explain to our own children how and why they should not follow their example.
self-evidently, a violent response to a violent provocation always escalates. there are some cultures (the Irish for one - the SerboCroat for another) whose endless mutual recriminations refer back to an initiating outrage that predates living memory - by centuries, sometimes. clearly, it is possible for the vendetta to become so woven into the tribal consciousness that it becomes almost a self-replicating entity - a sort of non-biological gene - imprinting itself so firmly through patterns of ritual repetition that it becomes a totem of identity. (the northern irish orangemen's annual 'marching season' is a familiar example - it's very difficult for anyone other than an orangeman to identify with his - no women on the marches - 'right' to march along his catholic neighbours' roads banging drums, piping triumphalist anthems, and flourishing the banners and provocative accoutrements that 'celebrate' the protestant 'victory' of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. hatred and revenge are, after all's said and done, nationalism's nectar and ambrosia.)
equally self-evident is the truth that the only right way forward from a perceived wrong is to forgive and forget - the south african truth and reconciliation model as the polar opposite of the jew/arab kill-for-a-kill.
at such times as these, forgiveness becomes a moral imperative, even if forgetting seems, at first, impossible. but it (forgiving) is not something that just emerges, together with table-manners, as part of the domestic didactic package. it may be necessary to experience what it is to be forgiven before forgiveness has any real meaning, and in order to understand how to forgive great transgressions, it may be necessary to have transgressed greatly, and to have been forgiven. there is still much to forgive in the league of nations - no great nation is innocent of collusion in the worst crimes imaginable, of having sealed up a shameful cellar whose walls still ring with the screams of the uncountable innocent.
arguably, it may be possible to transgress so greatly against someone that they become effectively deprived of the capacity to forgive - if the damage done them has compromised their capacity to dissolve the corrosive links that chain the transgressor to the transgressed - in which case they're likely to become enmeshed in that murky, crypto-neurotic state of semi-resolution that's probably far nearer to the truth of most 'reconciliations' - both personal and political - than the sacharine and media-friendly felicities of 'closure' - that despicable hollywood placebo. hatred, after all, is only the twisted and bitter fruit of unwatered love - the hate-object as much a source of (malign, bilious, forever inadequate) nourishment to the hater as the lover to his ravenous love.
assuming the possibility of forgiveness, however, what does it actually mean?
does 'I forgive you' mean simply 'I release you from the threat of revenge' for example? or does it mean 'I absolve you henceforth of your burden of blame and guilt'? the former is the version the child understands - the latter is the evolved, grownup version - the hard one. to forgive someone is to assess the genuineness of their contrition, to accept it, and to release them of their share of the burden - for them, of remorse, for you, of pain. it is to accept that the one seeking forgiveness has come to understand and partially share the pain their actions have caused, and to allow him or her to divest themselves of that encumbrance - to proceed, enlightened, forgiven.
remorse, however, can be simply (cynically) an expedience - the effectiveness of a courtroom apology is often a reflection of the quality of the performance - and it is here, when the apology is perceived to be transparently insincere, or, tougher still, when there is no apparent contrition at all, that the notion of forgiveness becomes most personally challenging.
again and again, it is with astonishment and profound respect that one listens to or reads the always quietly spoken victim of some atrocity - terrorist or simply criminal - pronouncing their forgiveness on the often unidentified perpetrator of the violent act that has broken their heart. it is as if, in these moments of personal apocalypse, a door of perception is opened to some people, randomly selected by tragic happenstance, to reveal the absolute truth behind the moral relativism of the notion of forgiveness.
god willing, it will not have to come to this for more than a tiny fraction of us, but it is for us to listen and learn from them the necessity - the absolute necessity, if there is to be any progress in our efforts to secure a peaceful future for our descendants - of drawing that line in the sand that says, this is where history ends - beyond this all is forgiven.
Monday, August 11, 2003
music for healing
cathy b's offer was timely: she's been studying spiritual healing and wanted a practice body to work on. I remembered the last time (the only time) I'd experienced this, so didn't hesitate.
she worked on me for about forty minutes, a week last Sunday - eight days ago. knowing that she'd probably like to have some specific 'targets', I'd selected from my various pains the most intrusive - right shoulder, right knee, left ankle, and that pesky point between the shoulder blades that's been my achilles heel (strange but true) for a long, long time.
well, gentle reader, I don't know how to break this - but, since you're asking - nop, no more pain. now, of course I know that, except in chronic conditions, minor injuries that incur pains like that are self-limiting, and that there have been other contributory factors - I've not been taking my daily climb up the Tor for the last week, for instance, and mel and the boys have been away since last Wednesday, so it's been very relaxed here. but still (quick real-time self-diagnostic - right shoulder - aches, but not badly; right knee - painless; left ankle - painless; back - painless) a recovery's a recovery, and I have no doubt the cathy effect played a significant part.
I shall beg for more - and this time maybe I'll direct her towards the deeper psychic anguish (on second thoughts, I don't want to be responsible for the effects of the corrosive feedback from all that).
one tiny problem: how, discreetly, and without offence, to persuade her that that CD of appalling pastiche Chopin (edited and 'improved' by The Tranquil Hippy™) has to go!?
its teeth-grinding inanity acted like a tethered deranged madman throughout, so that one part of my consciousness was constantly engaged in trying to filter it out. I saw her (too late!) take it out of a jewel case entitled 'Music for Healing' and began to scream.
silently.
wrong! how can they get it so wrong?
am I utterly mistaken in supposing that people who are attuned to the chakras and the delicate equilibrium of the cosmos and who can sense others' imbalances through their fingertips and assist them towards health and at-oneness with the universe with a discreet psychic nudge here, a gentle thought there, ought to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, music, and on the other, excruciating bilge!? I mean, silence would have been fine, sigur rós good, labradford acceptable. but the endless, endlessly tacky drivellings of that moron-on-a-stick with his tacky piano and tackier synth - just what is this? it's some patronising fuckwit capitalising on a culture infested with patronising fuckwits who have no more sense of aesthetic discrimination than the parasites on an axolotl's turd, that's what it is.
healers of the world unite!
you don't have to buy in to the package - the kit they flog at those psychic trade fairs where wafty hippies drift around in a haze of patchouli and the dominant colours are all Steiner-approved. your gift is your own - it doesn't have to be supported by anything other than your own confidence, and the trust you engender in your patients. there are some, doubtless, for whom 'Music for Healing' works - it will insulate them from the buzz of their lives and memories for a while, whilst your sensitive hands hover over their bruised auras. but these are injured people - their antennae have been damaged in the maelstrom of life - to them, anything you provide is good. you, therefore, have an obligation to provide good, nourishing music - if you feel that 'background music' is necessary at all - rather than this pulped cardboard.
music, after all, is a healer of itself - a very effective one.
'Music for Healing' is neither.
cathy b's offer was timely: she's been studying spiritual healing and wanted a practice body to work on. I remembered the last time (the only time) I'd experienced this, so didn't hesitate.
she worked on me for about forty minutes, a week last Sunday - eight days ago. knowing that she'd probably like to have some specific 'targets', I'd selected from my various pains the most intrusive - right shoulder, right knee, left ankle, and that pesky point between the shoulder blades that's been my achilles heel (strange but true) for a long, long time.
well, gentle reader, I don't know how to break this - but, since you're asking - nop, no more pain. now, of course I know that, except in chronic conditions, minor injuries that incur pains like that are self-limiting, and that there have been other contributory factors - I've not been taking my daily climb up the Tor for the last week, for instance, and mel and the boys have been away since last Wednesday, so it's been very relaxed here. but still (quick real-time self-diagnostic - right shoulder - aches, but not badly; right knee - painless; left ankle - painless; back - painless) a recovery's a recovery, and I have no doubt the cathy effect played a significant part.
I shall beg for more - and this time maybe I'll direct her towards the deeper psychic anguish (on second thoughts, I don't want to be responsible for the effects of the corrosive feedback from all that).
one tiny problem: how, discreetly, and without offence, to persuade her that that CD of appalling pastiche Chopin (edited and 'improved' by The Tranquil Hippy™) has to go!?
its teeth-grinding inanity acted like a tethered deranged madman throughout, so that one part of my consciousness was constantly engaged in trying to filter it out. I saw her (too late!) take it out of a jewel case entitled 'Music for Healing' and began to scream.silently.
wrong! how can they get it so wrong?
am I utterly mistaken in supposing that people who are attuned to the chakras and the delicate equilibrium of the cosmos and who can sense others' imbalances through their fingertips and assist them towards health and at-oneness with the universe with a discreet psychic nudge here, a gentle thought there, ought to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, music, and on the other, excruciating bilge!? I mean, silence would have been fine, sigur rós good, labradford acceptable. but the endless, endlessly tacky drivellings of that moron-on-a-stick with his tacky piano and tackier synth - just what is this? it's some patronising fuckwit capitalising on a culture infested with patronising fuckwits who have no more sense of aesthetic discrimination than the parasites on an axolotl's turd, that's what it is.
healers of the world unite!
you don't have to buy in to the package - the kit they flog at those psychic trade fairs where wafty hippies drift around in a haze of patchouli and the dominant colours are all Steiner-approved. your gift is your own - it doesn't have to be supported by anything other than your own confidence, and the trust you engender in your patients. there are some, doubtless, for whom 'Music for Healing' works - it will insulate them from the buzz of their lives and memories for a while, whilst your sensitive hands hover over their bruised auras. but these are injured people - their antennae have been damaged in the maelstrom of life - to them, anything you provide is good. you, therefore, have an obligation to provide good, nourishing music - if you feel that 'background music' is necessary at all - rather than this pulped cardboard.
music, after all, is a healer of itself - a very effective one.
'Music for Healing' is neither.
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Solaris
Watching Soderbergh's and Tarkovsky's Solaris back to back last night was a sharp indicator of just how far and how long 30 years has come to be.
I'm fairly shocked to find that I much prefer Soderbergh's remake - and not for the obvious technical reasons (it's a fairly faithful, if compressed - from 3 hrs to less than 2 - version of the 1972 original, replacing clunky old Russian fx with state-of-the-art digital) - but because Soderbergh has extracted from the still-tortuous narrative precisely the spiritual/psychological core that drives it (and indeed drives all of Tarkovsky's work). In reality, this secularisation (or perhaps agnosticisation would be more precise) of Tarkovsky's take on Lem's novella about the disturbing first contact between a sentient planet and the inhabitants of an orbital research station should drain it of meaning, but, curiously, it achieves the opposite. Soderbergh's Solaris is undeniably, and unusually, about something - it addresses fundamental questions about the nature of love, about its power for both redemption and (Lazarus-literally) resurrection. but this (Solaris II's) 'love' is, crucially, erotic - unburdened, that is, by the shame and the guilt and the sense of sin and sufferance and atonement incumbent on Christians in general and the congregation of the Russian Orthodox Catholic Church in particular.
Poor Andzrej never got past that - it's why he's a genius, after all, because he had to struggle with his personal demons in that historically fertile shitscape of cultural oppression characterised in the Brezhnev era of the CCCP by religious intolerance on the one hand, and international cultural brinkmanship on the other. The Mosfilm minders were perpetually engaged in censoring Tarkovsky's wilder flights of cinematographic fancy for fear that his multi-layered metaphors might transgress the humanist/rationalist party line (such as it was - it was forever being argued, never agreed - perhaps the only actual manifestation of the principle of permanent revolution that ever worked).
Oddly, though, they let pass one of the best wet-T-shirt scenes in cinema history - Hari's revival after killing herself by drinking liquid oxygen. There are three thoughts on why they might have done this: a) it's alright because it falls into the high art s&m box - a secular version of that perennial gay icon - St Sebastian of the Hedgehogs - and as long as it looks painful, and there's blood coming out of her mouth and nose, then that's OK; b) they thought it might be medically instructive; and c) after two interminable hours of slow pans across ponds and still-lives and paintings, and ponderous philosophical conversations of the like of "perhaps we are here to perceive, for the first time, humans as a purpose for love" (hmm - it's got to sound better in Russian) - they'd all either dozed off or snuck out to the bar.
At its first Western release, Tarkovsky's film was hugely applauded - a more 'intelligent' 2001 - but, somehow, those plaudits seem to ring now more than a little of cultural élitism - a jaded and threatened intelligentsia (where are they now?) 'discovering' the exoticism of the paradoxical - a faraway culture in which the poetics of cinema still obtained - behind the iron curtain! The truth is that much of Tarkovsy's version seems, now, almost absurdly over-extended and self-indulgent - a historical quarry for the fine art student, but ass-numbingly tedious for all but the buffiest film buff.
In the end, both Tarkovsky's and Soderbergh's versions subscribe to the same myth - one of the most tenacious and therefore the most enduringly consolatory. Soderbergh's, ultimately, is no more credible, but strikes me as the more honest. (Plus you get a three-second flash of George's nekkid bum - not my thing, but hey.)
Watching Soderbergh's and Tarkovsky's Solaris back to back last night was a sharp indicator of just how far and how long 30 years has come to be.
I'm fairly shocked to find that I much prefer Soderbergh's remake - and not for the obvious technical reasons (it's a fairly faithful, if compressed - from 3 hrs to less than 2 - version of the 1972 original, replacing clunky old Russian fx with state-of-the-art digital) - but because Soderbergh has extracted from the still-tortuous narrative precisely the spiritual/psychological core that drives it (and indeed drives all of Tarkovsky's work). In reality, this secularisation (or perhaps agnosticisation would be more precise) of Tarkovsky's take on Lem's novella about the disturbing first contact between a sentient planet and the inhabitants of an orbital research station should drain it of meaning, but, curiously, it achieves the opposite. Soderbergh's Solaris is undeniably, and unusually, about something - it addresses fundamental questions about the nature of love, about its power for both redemption and (Lazarus-literally) resurrection. but this (Solaris II's) 'love' is, crucially, erotic - unburdened, that is, by the shame and the guilt and the sense of sin and sufferance and atonement incumbent on Christians in general and the congregation of the Russian Orthodox Catholic Church in particular.
Poor Andzrej never got past that - it's why he's a genius, after all, because he had to struggle with his personal demons in that historically fertile shitscape of cultural oppression characterised in the Brezhnev era of the CCCP by religious intolerance on the one hand, and international cultural brinkmanship on the other. The Mosfilm minders were perpetually engaged in censoring Tarkovsky's wilder flights of cinematographic fancy for fear that his multi-layered metaphors might transgress the humanist/rationalist party line (such as it was - it was forever being argued, never agreed - perhaps the only actual manifestation of the principle of permanent revolution that ever worked).
Oddly, though, they let pass one of the best wet-T-shirt scenes in cinema history - Hari's revival after killing herself by drinking liquid oxygen. There are three thoughts on why they might have done this: a) it's alright because it falls into the high art s&m box - a secular version of that perennial gay icon - St Sebastian of the Hedgehogs - and as long as it looks painful, and there's blood coming out of her mouth and nose, then that's OK; b) they thought it might be medically instructive; and c) after two interminable hours of slow pans across ponds and still-lives and paintings, and ponderous philosophical conversations of the like of "perhaps we are here to perceive, for the first time, humans as a purpose for love" (hmm - it's got to sound better in Russian) - they'd all either dozed off or snuck out to the bar.At its first Western release, Tarkovsky's film was hugely applauded - a more 'intelligent' 2001 - but, somehow, those plaudits seem to ring now more than a little of cultural élitism - a jaded and threatened intelligentsia (where are they now?) 'discovering' the exoticism of the paradoxical - a faraway culture in which the poetics of cinema still obtained - behind the iron curtain! The truth is that much of Tarkovsy's version seems, now, almost absurdly over-extended and self-indulgent - a historical quarry for the fine art student, but ass-numbingly tedious for all but the buffiest film buff.
In the end, both Tarkovsky's and Soderbergh's versions subscribe to the same myth - one of the most tenacious and therefore the most enduringly consolatory. Soderbergh's, ultimately, is no more credible, but strikes me as the more honest. (Plus you get a three-second flash of George's nekkid bum - not my thing, but hey.)
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Requiem for a Dream
I'm in two minds about it - it's an undeniably brilliant movie, and I think it deserves cult status, but I think it's bad art - Hubert Selby Jr's writing's never taken me anywhere useful - to me it's just a druggy cocktail of surreal misanthropy and mishmashed Freud - and Aronofsky's take really doesn't lift any higher than the fairly banal level of pharmaceutical critique once you've filtered out the surface effects (hey kids, look what drugs and the absence of effective parenting has done to our generation!) - but thank god for a total absence of any hollywood gloss at all. relentless high-gloss dystopianism good / featherweight moral redemption bad. but in the end I think I'm really a very old-fashioned kinda arts-consumer - I need my art to replace the bad it excoriates with something healing, not just expose and cauterise.
I'm in two minds about it - it's an undeniably brilliant movie, and I think it deserves cult status, but I think it's bad art - Hubert Selby Jr's writing's never taken me anywhere useful - to me it's just a druggy cocktail of surreal misanthropy and mishmashed Freud - and Aronofsky's take really doesn't lift any higher than the fairly banal level of pharmaceutical critique once you've filtered out the surface effects (hey kids, look what drugs and the absence of effective parenting has done to our generation!) - but thank god for a total absence of any hollywood gloss at all. relentless high-gloss dystopianism good / featherweight moral redemption bad. but in the end I think I'm really a very old-fashioned kinda arts-consumer - I need my art to replace the bad it excoriates with something healing, not just expose and cauterise.
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
The Flag
The only country in which I feel comfortable with the national flag is Denmark. There, the sight of that long, festive red and white banner floating ubiquitously from every other garden pole invokes nary a hint of chauvinism. On the contrary, it indicates the same sort of confident pride as the family crest - a polite, emblematic nod at history - no more, no less. No Danish civilian would ever dream of saluting the flag. Absurd idea! It’s just an atavistic totem, with no more contemporary significance than the star on top of a Christmas tree.
All isms lead to conflict, none more so than nationalism, but there's still clearly a lot of concern - especially in the US - amongst those people who vigorously opposed the recent illegal invasion of Iraq not to appear 'unpatriotic.' Obviously, it's very easy for the apes to point and jeer at the parades of protestors and call them 'traitors', but there's really no point in proudly holding up the flag and claiming that you can be a patriot and still oppose your government. Evidently – George has spoken to Donald and Donald has run it past Amoco - you can't. You’re either with them or you're a traitor in their eyes.
The important thing is to recognise the distinction between your government and your culture. I, for example, love my country, but despise the stubborn residue of hereditary influence (the aristocracy) and the fatally-ingrown class-system that enabled such socially catastrophic events as the twelve-year hegemony of Margaret Thatcher: she and her kind (amongst whom I now, shockingly, include Poodle Blair) represent, to me, the unacceptable underbelly of the society that produced the abolitionists, the trade unionists, the Quakers, the Beatles, Monty Python, Radiohead, tea-bags, and fish and chips.
Nationalistic pride - and patriotism - is what governments prefer a passive electorate to feel in lieu of thinking - and of challenging their authority from a position of informed debate. Patriotism is obedience. And, since nationalism has to be kept simplistic in order to retain the lowest common denominator of social attention, the flag becomes fetishised as a venerated icon of - what, exactly?
The assembly hall of my old school was decorated with a dozen or so moth-eaten old flags - nothing compared with the shrapnel-shredded festoons of faded regimental banners that proudly lined the choir of the Cathedral, where the Founders Day service was traditionally preceded by the annual ritual of parading the cadet corps flag and having it re-blessed by the incumbent bishop. The connection couldn't have been more clearly reinforced: church>flag : god>country.
In such a war-loving culture as the US, to be perceived as unpatriotic becomes a sort of secular blasphemy. Burning the flag is an affront as heinous as (more heinous than?) spitting on the cross.
In the UK, the union flag - the union jack - was appropriated long ago by the far right: it is now a symbol of racism, xenophobic insularity, anti-semitism, homophobia, and gut-fascism. There are some in the US who are still trying hard to believe that their flag 'represents' something noble and right - something to do with 'freedom'. Fine - as long as you believe that 'freedom' means having bartered the right to choose between fifty labels on the same box containing the same product for the right to voice your opposition to a barely legal authority that serves only the wealthy.
The barbers pole and the three flags of the US, the UK and Denmark share the same basic colours for the same reason - they both refer back to a time when blood-letting was considered a normal way to solve internal problems in the body and the body-politic.
Denmark has moved on.
Time for us to do the same.
Monday, July 28, 2003
"The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallise around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct, and revise, our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognises are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas "memories" and, in the long run, that is a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory - it is part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction."
Susan Sontag, of course. there are more extracts from her new book, Regarding the Pain of Others here.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
the florid evolution of gratitude
thanks (cheers)
thank you
thank you very much
thank you very much indeed
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it - I'm/we're very/terribly/awfully grateful
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it - I'm/we're very/terribly/awfully grateful - you really shouldn't have bothered
thank you very much indeed, that's awfully kind of you, I really appreciate it, I'm terribly grateful, you really shouldn't have bothered, you know.
thanks (cheers)thank you
thank you very much
thank you very much indeed
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it - I'm/we're very/terribly/awfully grateful
thank you very much indeed that's really/terribly/awfully kind/good/thoughtful of you - I/we really appreciate it - I'm/we're very/terribly/awfully grateful - you really shouldn't have bothered
thank you very much indeed, that's awfully kind of you, I really appreciate it, I'm terribly grateful, you really shouldn't have bothered, you know.
Instructions for Life (the Dalai Lama's Millennium Message)
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson
3. Follow the three R's:
Respect for self
Respect for others
Responsibility for all your actions
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great relationship
7. When you realise you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it
8. Spend some time alone every day
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It's one way to achieve immortality
15. Be gentle with the earth
16. Once a year, go somewhere you've never been before
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it
19. Approach love and cooking with the same reckless abandon
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Monday, June 09, 2003
Fourtet : Rounds : Unspoken (track 6)
It's very late. Practically everyone's staggered off home. The pissed-off drummer starts to thrash out a desultory rock 'n' roll riff. In the smoky cone of light thrown beneath the one green-shaded lamp, the slumped pianist begins picking out an extended phrase - it's mournful, elegiac, and about to turn obsessive, as he repeats it, over and over, riding the choppy crests of that marginally inappropriate rhythm. It's a bit Keith Jarrett, a bit Edmund Hopper, a bit amateurish, a bit brilliant. The drummer, there in the shadowy corner - sister? lover? wife? - some story. We're all past caring. A naff old wind-chime tinkles in the breeze somewhere. What breeze? It goes on just a bit too long. Inside the pianist's head: clouds, a name, something overheard, the smell of lilac - a long time ago - what was it - on the tip of - gone. Back to here. The wordless now. The chime, the drum-riff, the piano. Really late. Time to go.
It's very late. Practically everyone's staggered off home. The pissed-off drummer starts to thrash out a desultory rock 'n' roll riff. In the smoky cone of light thrown beneath the one green-shaded lamp, the slumped pianist begins picking out an extended phrase - it's mournful, elegiac, and about to turn obsessive, as he repeats it, over and over, riding the choppy crests of that marginally inappropriate rhythm. It's a bit Keith Jarrett, a bit Edmund Hopper, a bit amateurish, a bit brilliant. The drummer, there in the shadowy corner - sister? lover? wife? - some story. We're all past caring. A naff old wind-chime tinkles in the breeze somewhere. What breeze? It goes on just a bit too long. Inside the pianist's head: clouds, a name, something overheard, the smell of lilac - a long time ago - what was it - on the tip of - gone. Back to here. The wordless now. The chime, the drum-riff, the piano. Really late. Time to go.
Friday, June 06, 2003
more #
with astonishing speed, my friend Chris replies: "the '#' symbol is the 'hash sign', which is i think a popular
corruption of the original 'hatch sign' (good old Oxford English
Dictionary). the sense of hatch is to mark or score (think
tally) hence the use as indicating number."
of course!
and even a fairly cursory Google search reveals that this subject has been fairly extensively explored many times and in many ways by many people - there's an entertaining if slightly splenetic commentary here for example, and a very learned newsgroup exchange on the 'octothorpe' aspect (see how quickly we adopt the lingo) here.
the relationship with number is clear - probably goes back a very long way.
less clear is its function as a game (our noughts and crosses is obviously a relic of something much older) - which has nothing to do with counting, or as a musical notation: how did this 
further, what relationship, if any, do these usages of this fairly universally occurring symbol have with the Chinese pictogram for 'well', as used in this diagram of the constellation Ishuku?
hmmm
*scatches head*
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
memento mori
the only thing that matters is to be young.
well - not too young: your average seven-year-olds still aren't quite achieving those levels of fiscal autonomy that trigger the standard economic indicators (sweet ole things, economists - translates: spoilt rich kids still aren't quite spoilt and rich enough yet - keep spoiling!).
however, to have to admit to being more than oh, twenty-five years old now is to acknowledge (bites trembling lip, lowers eyes to shuffling feet) that the door to the only truly cool club in town is forever henceforth barred.
it's a cruel but delicious sport to us tiresome mediaevalists - almost as much fun as bear-baiting - spotting that expression of desperate anguish stealing over the face of the high-rolling young dude or dudette who's about to 'celebrate' that disqualifying birthday. it's an expression that's going to be wrapped up in a rictus of denial for the next twenty-five years, as the realisation dawns that all that precious youth has been squandered, and that, from here on in, it's going to cost an awful lot of time and trouble to sustain the ghastly mockery of a resurrection of all that wonderful youthful stuff that they took for granted way back then.
sad.
there has to be a better way of dealing with the ageing process than denying it, and yet it's clear that vast swathes of aspirational-but-deluded human beans have walked, open-eyed and open-walleted, into the gilded Hall of Lies that is the cosmetics industry and committed a combined financial resource large enough to rescue the entire planet from hunger and disease to the entirely futile effort to suspend time and undo a few of the principle laws of physics - like that neat one of Newton's that says that gravity attracts everything - apples, breasts, facial skin...
someone has to say it: hey, cher, michael, ivana, arnold, et al (long list) - you don't look young and beautiful, you look like a waxworks dummy! this further flaunting of your obscene and utterly undeserved wealth on a completely wasted attempt to elevate yourselves yet further above the little people makes you look quite RIDICULOUS! you'd be better advised to stick your head inside a brown paper bag inscribed with the words "PITY ME"!
what happened to dignity?
what happened to pride?
seemingly, it does need iterating, since the lesson is not learnt: there are seven ages, people - seven (see below) - and nothing - nothing at all - can prevent the human frame from progressing steadily from one to the other. anyone aged forty who needs to mimic the appearance or behaviour of a twenty-year-old is just a sad sucker living in la-la-land.
think - it's obvous - there are, at any one time, QUITE ENOUGH 20-year-olds in the world to fulfill the natural function of the 20-year-old - to strut around as if they owned the place and were going to live forever and scorn the appearance and opinions and musical tastes of anyone over the age of thirty. to wish to be locked into an endlessly looping reprise of that state is to risk a host of uninvited and unwelcome visitors - psychic as well as physical - gate-crashing such a feast of fools, as well as to have to listen - forever - to oasis and j-lo. think hard. think very hard.
you can't help feeling a tad sorry for them, though. I mean, when you've spent your entire mature life denying that you're growing older, imagine the trauma of having finally to accept that no amount of further stretching, tucking, stapling, stuffing, or re-shaping is going to alter the fact that your innards are reaching their genetically-allotted sell-by date (brought forward, more than likely, by all the toxins you've introduced in order to adjust the exterior bodyscape) and that, short of achieving some kind of total body-replacement therapy (that has to include muscles, nerves, blood vessels, glands, and skeleton, as well as vital organs, eyes, ears, teeth, and hair) you're going to continue to deteriorate, at a vastly accelerated rate thanks to your having destroyed your 'natural' self-repairing processes, until you .......
(NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it cannot be.
I'm rich, I'm famous, I'm supremely powerful, I'm recognised wherever I go, I'm on TV practically around the clock, I've appeared on many many charity telethons - and this was not a cynical but absurdly easy way to get my face associated with good deeds in front of a captive audience of millions who thenceforth would love me even more and buy whatever the merchandising guys decided I needed to sell at the time - no - it was damn hard work - far worse than getting up at dawn day after day and breaking hard-baked soil into tilth for twelve hours at a time with the nearest water-supply a three-hour walk away. no - I did it to help put a smile on the face of those poor starving - but splendidly cute and photogenic - little refugee kids.
I can do whatever I want.
I can have whatever I want.
I can't ...
not yet ...
I'm not ready ...
not yet ...
to ...)
...... DIE!
yup - fraid so - at the end of all this is ...
'twas forever thus, because - contrary to everything it says in the glossies and on TV, we are all
MORTAL.
and in truth, whether or not we choose to understand what that means determines whether we are alive or already dead, since the lesser death of ignorance and denial is the only option for everyone who is afraid of being alive - really alive.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav'd a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.
(As You Like It; ActII.Sc.vii)
Friday, May 16, 2003
strange weather lately
a few timely words from one of the very few humans the rhino stands in total awe of - God Bless You Mr Vonnegut.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
cynics v sceptics
I used to argue that I was a sceptic, not a cynic, because I used to regard the one as demonstrating a positive, and the other a negative take on the world. I think I still am, but in order to fight my corner I have to bend my own definitions somewhat.
(definitions)
the sceptic interrogates all 'official' information about the world with suspicion, on the lookout for the lies, the hypocrisy, the deceit, from a position of moral rectitude - in other words, the sceptic believes in a fundamental human inclination to decency - to right behaviour, or behaviour in line with his or her understanding about truth - which is consistently attacked and undermined by the controlling agenda of the authorised establishment.
the cynic, on the other hand, is the pallid, gollum-like creature that emerges at the other end of the tunnel when his faith has been fatally eroded by experience: he or she has learnt that there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of this righteous expectation of a glimmer of truth emerging out of the self-serving mouths of these various organs of control, and has come instead to expect to be lied to.
I think the reason why I still can't say that I've completely moved over to the cynics camp is that I still get angry at this - especially at such a time as this when all truth has been seen, yet again, to be equivocal grist, minced in the grinder of the basest imaginable nationalistic chauvinism.
the actual differences between Sadam Hussein and his supposed nemesis are awfully slight: the America of George Dubya is not a bastion of democracy - its current leader rigged the elections to win the race, and couldn't give a monkey's tit what the rest of the world thinks about his petty vendetta with the man who bested his daddy. he simply has the power to do this - first to pulverise the rubble of Afghanistan in search of one man (who was never found) - and now to run rampage through an already sanctions-ruined Iraq in search of another (who will - almost certainly with covert connivance - survive to a ripe old age in luxury somewhere - the Crimean peninsula, perhaps - or the Hamptons) - and no-one can stop him.
yet.
the anti-war movement still has plenty of energy left to run. Iraq, clearly, is a basket-case - we're going to be mopping up the blood for generations - no hope now of preventing that. but what seems to have happened is that a whole new generation of young Americans (they especially, but the same sense of outrage has been experienced in the UK) have been politicised by this in a way that hasn't happened since Vietnam. there's a real feeling of overwhelming anger and dismay coming from across the pond at the realisation that certain sorts of administration - the ones that get elected when the proper checks and balances fail for want of attention - will only ever act on behalf of the suits and the uniforms. as long as these same young people can be persuaded to vote next time, George and his despicable team of yoiks and yahoos will be taking a walk.
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