Rising tide on the river

Dulled mercury once
was ocean, now winter tide
nudging river's flow.

El Nervión, December 2011

CJM

A Christmas Story

As a child, I used to go carol singing in our neighbourhood, mainly to raise a little pocket money for Christmas. With a choir-trained voice, I had the advantage of being able to sing, and my efforts were usually rewarded.

            Now on this particularly bitter cold night, I was singing away when the house door opened and a very old man and lady peered out. “That was lovely,” they both said, and invited me in.

            Nowadays, of course, such an offer to a child would be impossible. A SWAT team would be surrounding the house and breaking the door down within minutes. Even then, as all children know from the Brothers Grimm tales, an old lady is most likely to be a witch who puts you in a cage to fatten you up.

            None of these fears was lost on me, but I was extremely cold and the old couple seemed harmless enough.

            They led me into a warm and cosy sitting-room, and offered  me a comfortable armchair close to an open fire. What a relief it was to feel the warmth in my limbs.

            “You must be very cold,” said the old couple. “How about a little glass of ginger wine to warm you up?”

Hey, I was twelve years old, and had never touched anything stronger than orangeade. Where was that SWAT team?

            Ginger wine? Ginger beer? What’s the difference, I innocently thought, and said yes, of course. In moments it was served on a tray with a plate of small cakes. Looking back, I now see it as bearing every resemblance to a glass of absinthe, the green devil. Little did I know what was waiting for me.

            ”A fig roll?”

Fig roll, figgy pudding, Christmas pudding. What could be nicer? “Thank you.”

            It was only then that I noticed the parrot, perched in an alcove on my right hand side. It was huge, bright green, and, more to the point, dangerously free to wander. Which it suddenly began to do, edging its way closer and closer to me with a rather nasty gleam in its unpleasantly close eyes.

            “Drink up your wine!”

I smiled nervously, lifted the glass to my lips and took a sip. A terrible searing sensation filled my mouth and my throat. I knew I was going to die. It was clear that the inventor of ginger wine for his own tortured reasons must have set out to design a drink that would kill off the human race, or at the very least destroy its taste buds.

            The parrot had now hopped on to the back of my chair, and was horribly close to the back of my head. It began probing around my neck with a beak that was enormous, grotesque and highly menacing.

            “Have a fig roll. They’re very nice.”

How could I trust these people now? But there was no way out. Into my mouth went a bite of the fig roll. It was dry, bitter and disgusting. I choked on it. Even the parrot wasn’t tempted. It was more interested in my ear lobe.

            I must have shown signs of panic. “Oh, don’t worry about him. He wouldn’t hurt a flea.” How often in life do we hear that just before the dog bites you! Then, “Oh, it’s the first time he’s done that,” as if it was somehow your fault.

            Now imagine the effect of all this on an impressionable child — a situation which would take the diplomatic skills of the Foreign Office to extract oneself from politely. It seemed I was doomed to die, either of ginger wine poisoning, fig roll inhalation or bleeding to death from a parrot bite.

 I don’t really remember how I got out of there. Presumably the ginger wine made me so daring that I stuffed the fig roll into the parrot’s maw, rendering it harmless, and fled to the door. I recall the echoing cry, “Do come again!” as I stumbled away to safety.

            Children nowadays will never have this kind of adventure. Maybe in my second childhood, though, there’ll be nothing to stop me from keeping up the old customs and go carol singing. But, if I come knocking on your door, no ginger wine, no fig roll. And above all, please, please, lock up your parrot!

CJM

Squall on the ocean

Rain curtains the sea,

Black winds pressing on the storm.

Behind, a rainbow.

 

Sopelana, December 2011

CJM

Doing God’s work – or playing dice? The Wisdom of Einstein

Albert Einstein, it is said, was asked on one occasion whether he carried a notebook to write down his ideas. “Why?” he remarked. “I’ve only ever had one idea.”

However, he did have a lot more pithy and wise things to say, the kind of utterances that stay in your mind. One that I’ve always felt kinship with was the comment that the human mind was far too important to fill up with facts. “I use a library for that.”

Another – and here I come to my point – was his famous proposition that: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” (often glossed as, “from the same thinking that created it”).

We daily watch a capitalist world in unfolding crisis, where Einstein’s kind of visionary clarity is sorely missing. While the phrase “Think the unthinkable” seems to be much on economists’ and financial advisors’ lips, their “unthinkable” comes down to the hedging of outcomes in a world full of nightmare uncertainties. But their vision simply doesn’t go far enough. As Einstein, again, succinctly observed: “Logic will get you from A to B. But imagination will take you everywhere.”

We need imagination, not logic, in our present crisis. As is now all too obvious, the financial events of 2008 never brought about imaginative solutions, only the insertion of buoyancy tanks filled with the same kind of thinking as created the problems.  The true “unthinkable”, of course, isn’t that the euro will collapse, or the Middle East fall into the hands of assertive Islamic governments on the back of the so-called Arab Spring, or Russia or China become the springboard of new conflicts over global resources. No, as Einstein suggests, the unthinkable unthinkable is the thinking that your present thinking can’t and doesn’t even think of. We don’t see much of that brand of novel and imaginative vision, except possibly in the manifestos of the Indignant Ones occupying the centres of financial and political power around the globe.

Without “thinking the truly unthinkable”, how are we to get out of this mess? And what exactly is the nature of the mess? It seems that Einstein had a view on that, too, as while trying to locate the source of the famous phrase quoted above, I came across the following, written by him sixty years ago:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. (from “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, 1949) [my emphasis]

           

Compare this damning analysis with Robert Fisk’s diatribe this week against the international bankers and financial institutions, and it is hard to insert a credit card between them. Fisk, as usual not sparing his punches, declares: “Bankers are the dictators of the west.” Isn’t that going a bit far? No, it seems, not if you subscribe to recent revelations about the tentacles of the notorious Vampire Squid, aka Goldman Sachs, reaching into every nook and cranny of the political and economic establishment. As JamesDelingpole blogged recently:  “ ‘The governments don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world,’ claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago.”

        Others have explored further among the squid’s tentacles with even more disturbing insights.

        In a recent interview with the Sunday Times (November 6, 2011) Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made the appalling joke that GS was doing “God’s work”.  Perhaps this gives one a glimpse into the cynical, value-less landscape in which leading financial institutions now operate, and in which they reward themselves handsomely for failing in the one task for which their “mission statement” (allowing that they have any) might inspire them: namely, to be the unassailable pillars of security and honesty in a troubled and often criminal world.

            I used to say to each of my children, as they grew up and got entangled in the debt society, “Always remember, my child, the bank is your enemy.” I was only half-joking. I believe they now know what I was talking about.

            But even I was not ready for the amoral irresponsibility that currently seems endemic in the Olympian heights of the financial sectors, where doing God’s work reflects the worst human tendencies of the classical Greek divinities: lust, greed, bribery and revenge.

            On God, too, Einstein had a phrase: “God doesn’t play dice”. No, he doesn’t. Gambling is an all too human addiction, played daily, as we now know, by bankers and traders, and paid for by our elected (or unelected) governments.

CJM

           

Wind on water

Over the wide sea
flies a wind, brushing, curving,
a swift with dark wings.

Sopelana, November 2011

The power of silence

Born and bred in this alpine village, nineteen year old Mehdi lost his life at work through a typically brave and generous act. During a routine cleaning of the silo in the woodwork shop, he saw his two young companions in trouble, leaped in to help them and was tragically buried under a mass of collapsing sawdust.

The entire resident population of the village turned out for the young man’s memorial service, some fifteen hundred people filling the narrow street that ascended the hill by the little stone church. A late autumn sun gave warmth to the scene as we waited in silence while the rites were performed.

Afterwards, a way was left clear for the cortège to pass, led by a mountain rescue vehicle with Mehdi’s two fire helmets displayed on the bonnet. Here youngsters like Mehdi join up in their teens for the volunteer fire service. A keen skier, he was also a member of the mountain rescue team and his colleagues were there to pay him honour, lining the road with their trained rescue dogs on leashes.

Something remarkable was present in our gathering. The silence. A silence in which some higher spirit seemed to breathe. The very quietness emphasised the strength and dignity of these teams, who stand by to deal with emergencies of every kind that the mountains deliver. They are used to dealing with tragedies, risking their own lives to save others and to retrieve victims, often in the worst conditions. Mehdi himself was a living expression of this community ethos and as he grew up, took his place in their ranks.

I have always admired mountain people and the habitual, daily strength they develop, living in these beautiful places which hold so many dangers. There is a dramatic tension in those opposites: splendour and danger. Therein, “a terrible beauty is born”, as Yeats put it.

In silence, the beauty appears.

CJM

As water falls

Mere sound of water
upon stone, stone on water,
sounding water, stone.

Lutour, summer 2011

Cascade blown aside
flies not falls, is vapour now,
a moment only.

Pyrenees, summer 2011

Homage to water

Wet sands, slipping waves,
where rims of water trace each
pebble's geometry.

La Vega, summer 2011

The moving shadow
of a cloud sails dark and free
across the ocean.


Llanes, summer 2011

Watching water

We all love to do it. Watching water in flow captivates us with its infinite variety of movement. We go miles to see a waterfall. We picnic by a mountain stream. Something deeply instinctual lies at the heart of our relationship with water, above all in its natural environment.

Yet, as a direct result of our own criminal carelessness, humanity, over the next fifty years, will almost certainly experience an acute shortage of fresh water for consumption and irrigation. And this, together with a surfeit of sea water, as ocean levels rise. Both of these problems arise from squandering, mismanaging and generally abusing the one vital resource without which life on Earth is impossible.

While the problem of water shortage will be huge for countries already facing progressive desertification, by 2050 it will be problematic even for countries such as Switzerland where shrinking glaciers are reducing the storage and replenishment required for a steady water supply. In their turn, Greece, southern Spain, and wide tracts of Australia and south America are threatened by falling river levels and rising salinity in groundwater resulting from poor land and river management.

A deeper understanding of water is essential for our survival, and not just water as a chemical compound (which in itself is mysterious), but in its cycles and behaviour in relation with the rest of nature. We also need to recognise water as a carrier of life and memory. Sensitive studies show that it bears the imprint of what it travels over and through, and “remembers” the influences that are brought to bear on it. Here I am thinking of the studies of researchers like the Japanese Masaru Emoto, Andreas Schulz in Tübingen, Germany, the Herrischried Institute in the Black Forest, and others.

What is at stake here, where the boundaries of current science and technology fade into more subtle realms, is the issue of water quality. The “organics” of the future will have to pay close attention to the intimate link between water quality, food quality and human health, as the fertility of our productive lands deteriorates even further. Anecdotal evidence sugggests that irrigation water proceeding from hydroelectric and desalination plants lacks the generative power of water that has passed through a natural cycle.

Pioneers in water quality research include the Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger, the flow expert Theodor Schwenk and the inventor of the Flowform John Wilkes, who died in March this year. In each case, their wisdom – and warnings of future disaster – arose from closely observing water and its behaviour in the style of research which the eighteenth century poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “delicate empiricism”.

Goethe also referred to water as “the blood of the earth”, a phrase picked up by the title of Allerd Stikker’s book on water resources, an account which ends with the poetic declaration, "Seeing water, being water, I feel part of Creation. I am not alone."

In the same spirit of “seeing”, I will continue to drop into this blog my own occasional close observations on water, in haiku form, as homage to water.

CJM

A shocking headline

After my rapturous comments on the Barcelona team win the other day, I must pin my colours to the mast. I'm a Roger Federer fan and have never in my life anguished or triumphed with any other sportsman/woman in quite the same way.

So you can imagine my horror to see the recent newspaper headline: Is the Mighty Fed in Decline? I quickly scanned the article, and was relieved to find that it had nothing to do with the Supreme Sportsman. It was about the slipping of power away from the US Federal Reserve Bank, obliged for the first time in this difficult world to explain its actions to the American public.

CJM

No Other Gods Before Me

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Exodus 20) Such was the admonition of the God of the Old Testament, a god who, Nietzsche confidently told us, is now dead. But as we know, natura abhorrat vacuum, and there is strong evidence throughout human history that worship is wired into our genes. What then, has come to replace God as the object of our veneration and sacrifice? Why, ‘It’s the Economy, stupid!’ as Bill Clinton was reputed to have pinned up on the wall of the Oval Office.

Once you look closely, the similarities between religious belief and economic belief are frighteningly similar – in the same way that some ingenious commentator found striking parallels between George W. Bush and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

To begin with, the actual practice of economics relies on unquestioned dogma which is founded on the pattern: A (advisor to the present government) learnt it from B who is now safely in a zimmer frame, who learnt it from C, who has long been dead.

This sequence of transmission, ensuring that current economic policy will always be out of date and ineffective, was pointed out to me when I was a young journalist covering summits in Paris. It was satisfying later to find the same theory applied to scientific revolutions in general by Thomas Kuhn. The crux of his thinking was that a couple of generations of academics had to die off before there could be any significant change in the current ‘paradigms’ (for which read ‘dogmas’). In the case of religious institutions (of whatever stripe), we are talking of rather more generations, of course.

A further similarity with religion exists in that fundamental economic concepts (while purporting to be scientific) have no basis in reason. Take, for instance, a key tenet of economic policy: ‘sustainable growth’. Already back in the late 1970’s Albert A. Bartlett, professor at Boulder, Colorado, argued cogently that those who believed in indefinite growth were the modern-day equivalent of Flat-Earthers. Even earlier, Kenneth Boulding, JFK’s environmental adviser is quoted (New Statesman) as saying: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’ And has anything changed since then?

What we see around us, as practised by our leaders internationally, is a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes so far removed from sanity that it makes one roll one’s eyes. The barometers of GNP, the measure of the output we generate as a nation, and thus supposedly of our wellbeing, have in practice no bearing on the quality of our lives. As has often been pointed out, the commercial activity stimulated by a major disaster shows up as a positive in economic statistics. The levelling of the Amazonian rainforest for the production and export of soya adds a huge plus to Brazil’s balance of payments. Short-term exploitation and consumption rule because these are what, on the current model, the Economy demands so as to 'thrive'.

So this is the new religion. Our god Economy will be lord over all. He/she must never be upset and to this end must be kept 'stable' and 'sound'.  A depressed Economy will be unhappy, and so every effort must be made to stimulate him/her if this is the case. But beware, equally, of overheating, this makes the god very uncomfortable and even menacing. If this arises, all of us have to tighten our belts in an act of propitiation. Sacrifices must then be made.

But at what human cost? Here our leaders seem to take Inca kings as their role models, in terms of the human victims needed for the appeasement of the god Economy. We have it straight from the lips of the great Labour reformer, Anthony Giddens, who was adviser to Tony Blair at that crucial moment when we still believed in a Third Way and may even have voted for a theoretical kind of socialism with a human face. Years later, Giddens, writing in The Independent in 2007, expressed the article of faith beyond doubt: ‘Ensure the economy is strong. Securing greater social justice depends upon a robust economy, not the other way around.’

Ah, so bring on the Five Year Plan, move the peasants into the factories, house the ignorant b--s in thirty-storey tower blocks. Social justice will follow, inevitably.

No, there was no Third Way; there never was. Even Giddens admits he had stopped using the phrase because it was 'so widely misconstrued'. Ironically, the financial institutions were already on the road to their almighty crash (and our ruin) even as Giddens wrote that piece in praise of chancellor Brown and his 'sound' economic management. We were lured into the temple of progress, only to find ourselves worshipping and grovelling to the same old god, Economy. The priesthood, which is to say, the bankers, continue to stand in their pious protected circle, and intone the same old anthems.

CJM

'They play football the right way'

Not my words, but those of Alex Ferguson, after seeing Barcelona give his Manchester United team 'a hiding' in the UEFA Champions League final last night.

I don't watch football much, but this was a match not to be missed, and the fluid and deft play the Barcelona team displayed was both extraordinary and memorable.This is football a million miles away from the shirt-pulling, 'if you can't tackle them, push them over' tactics that we observe weekly on our screens. Seeing Lionel Messi run with the ball will remind some of how it was years ago with George Best, when he really was at his best. But this was never a one-man show. To watch the intuitive interplay between those gifted mid-field players as they worked their way up the pitch to produce the inevitable strike, nineteen times in all, should be a lesson in humility for all the Premier League overpaid and overrated teams for whom their car collections, court injunctions and overtanned WAGs appear to be the main focus of their lives.

This was far, too, from the bad-tempered semi-final exchanges with Real Madrid where the spirit of Mourinho ruled rather than that of Guardiola. Mourinho's lip-curling comment after that defeat that the Barcelona team couldn't be beaten because they were 'too nice' was telling in that it said more about him than anyone else. It has to be said that in comparison with Barca on that occasion, the Real Madrid team seemed like a crowd of delinquents.

To their credit, Manchester United played a clean game, not Mourinho style, and it was an event where for once, being the exception rather than the rule, football could truly lay claim to be 'the beautiful game'.

Though not as beautiful as tennis, of course ...

The evidence of blood

¡Que no quiero verla!

“I don’t want to see it!”

This was the anguished and repeated cry of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, in his famous lament on the death in the bullring of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in 1935.

Dile a la luna que venga,
que no quiero ver la sangre
de Ignacio sobre la arena.

Tell the moon to come,

I don’t want to see

Ignacio’s blood on the sand.

This last week, whether we wanted to or not, we’ve been forced to witness blood in two major events, two contexts, very different yet perhaps redolent of each other in forcing the question: Has anything much changed in human nature in the last thousand years?

The first event I’m thinking of was the parading of John Paul II’s blood through St Peter’s basilica in Rome on the occasion of his beatification. The other was the parading (as one might see it) of pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s blood (and maybe that of his wife) staining the floor where he was killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Some may find it inappropriate to bring these two images together, but  I’m struck by their synchronicity. I’m equally gobsmacked, in the famous Chris Patten phrase,  by the awesome incongruity of both.

What on earth does the Catholic Church think it is doing, in this century, in taking a glass phial of a man’s blood extracted during his final illness, treating it so that it will not coagulate, mounting it in an elaborate silver monstrance, then processing around with it held high in the air like some precious relic. Ah, I see, it is a precious relic. So precious, indeed, that there are three more just like it preserved in safe places just in case this one should go astray.

I do realise that this kind of thing didn’t disappear with the Enlightenment, but I'm amazed that the Church authorities think it still appropriate for the modern world to engage in such shows. Didn’t it occur to them that the blood of the intended saint, tucked away quietly, might have been left to coagulate and liquefy miraculously through its own inner power? Then there could indeed have been something unusual and worth parading around with, like the blood of San Gennaro in Naples.

Blood is emblematic, yes, and powerful, the spilling of blood even more so. The poet Lorca could not bear even the sight of his friend’s blood on the sand. So one wonders at the reasoning in the US administration which allowed video of Bin Laden’s bloodstained bedroom to be circulated, while not releasing pictures of his dead body -- too gruesome to show, says President Obama.

We will see whether this sleight of hand persuades anyone who thinks otherwise that Bin Laden was just a gangster to be shot down, Dirty Harry style. The sheer ugliness, bloodiness, destruction and confusion of the death scene, captured on camera, will seem to sympathisers to speak more of a crime than of legitimate, official justice. To them, the blood shed here will indeed be seen as the blood of a martyr.

The reality in both events, of course, is that over the centuries we have not progressed much in how we do things. Stage-managed piety rules in Rome, dressed up to the nines. Elsewhere ugly violence is still the answer to ugly violence.  Superior weaponry and terrifying machines of obliteration, as in the future world of Terminator, are what the West contributes to the art of conflict. But with all their space age technology, the ultra-élite SEALs apparently still have found no bloodless way to victory.

So will the official US images of Bin Laden’s blood on the carpet achieve the desired effect of “proving” his death? I think not, any more than the elevated phial of the dead Pope’s blood will convince any sceptic of his sanctity.

And, with Lorca, I can frankly say, in both instances, “¡Que no quiero verla!”

CJM

After mountain rain

After mountain rain
a crystal drop is captured,
stilled, in cup of green.

CJM, Gave de Lutour, April 2011

A Pyrenean cascade

Water's fall, sun-filled,
silver, diamantine, tumbling
broken but as one.

CJM

As the season changes

Lace dresses the sand,
worked by the wind's fingers, flung
by a far-off storm.

CJM

Larrabasterra beach, Spain, April

The antidote to turbulence: standing still

As World Tai Chi/Chi Kung Day approaches again (April 30), a moment to reflect on standing still.

One might find the above title a statement of the obvious. But it's the kind of 'obvious' that you come to only after a long period of searching, and then, as in the famous T.S. Eliot quote, you see where you started from 'for the first time.'

In practice -- and here I really am talking about practice, daily practice -- there are many different ways of making standing still a regular part of your life. For instance, a friend of this blog speaks eloquently of 'quiet sitting'. The habit of pausing in the rush of life to stop and actually 'look' at something is a kind of standing still in miniature. I tried to express this a while back in an article for the International Herald Tribune (2005/8/12), as a reflection on the 'potatiness of potatoes' and, in its essence, the very heart of poetry.

The particular standing still I'm concerned with here is a chi kung practice known informally as 'hugging a tree', more formally as zhan zhuang, and associated with the teaching of Master Lam Kam-Chuen. Master Lam insists that it is not a meditation, and indeed one shouldn't try to 'meditate' while doing it. If done correctly, your body will find the right posture for itself and the benefits will flow, literally, for the whole exercise is about promoting the flow of chi --  essential energy -- in and around the body.

For those sceptics who find it hard to recognise the presence of a force which modern science cannot capture and measure, I can assure them I don't need science to prove the sensations of energy experienced in doing this practice. Any practitioner of chi kung or tai chi can vouch for its awakening of a force field in your hands and limbs, with a feeling of electrical flow and a tangible sense of compression between the hands especially. Followers of the Stévanovitch method, La Voie Intérieure, begin by sensitising themselves to the movement of chi from the central energy point of the body, the dan tien.

My own practice of tai chi is now Chen style, where I have had the good fortune to follow seminars given by the grand master Chen Xiaowang during his visits to Europe. Chen Xiaowang starts each session with fifteen or twenty minutes of standing still, after which comes the practice of the form. There is no doubt that from this short period of 'grounding' arises a more conscious and deliberate activity in the movements of the form itself.

There are various obstacles to the successful practice of zhan zhuang. The first is its utter simplicity, and therefore the modern mind with its thirty-second attention span finds it hard to embrace extended inactivity in a disciplined way, and least of all as a regular practice. Another is that you have to be very centred on your own body and work through the various tensions that emerge as you extend the period of practice.
 
As an antidote to turbulence, nothing better than standing still could be recommended, surely? And if this quiet and undramatic practice is a personal path to good health and a strong and balanced body, as Master Lam says in his smiling and relaxed way, "What could be more important?"

CJM
PS. For more on tai chi and its history, see my IHT article.(2006/06/05)

Images of absurdity

In the eastern province of Saudi Arabia where I worked for a time, there was a newsagent's shop. Passing by,  you would regularly see the censor sitting by the pavement outside, going through a pile of western magazines or newspapers and blacking out parts with a highlighter. One day I stopped and asked him to show me what he was obliterating. Mostly it was photos, or parts of photos, showing feminine flesh or intimacy between men and women. The magazine thus censored could safely go on sale.

I offer this as an image of absurdity, the kind of absurdity that you would think must implode sooner or later under its own weight. Nothing so intrinsically ridiculous can last, surely? For me, this image of the Saudi censor sweating through his pile of Time magazines sums up the whole glitch in the relationship between the Arab world and the modern (western) world, as an internal issue.

I'm not talking here about the famous 'clash of civilisations' which may or may not bug international diplomacy and which depends on simplistic differences of identity in inevitable conflict.  I'm thinking more about the complex tapestry of daily realities of life for ordinary people in many Arab countries -- societies which have now erupted into revolt. This upheaval is nothing more nor less than a revolt against absurdity, and in itself has nothing to do with Islamism or any other -ism.

The existential problem for the average Arab citizen can be seen as the tension between what is desirable and what is permissible or attainable. Education is a defining factor here. With education, naturally, expectations of what is desirable rise in a young person, and as they do, they can come up against blocks and obstacles which seem increasingly to be without rhyme or reason: in other words, absurd. Now the whole point of education, as one of my teachers used to say,  is to enable you to become aware of the absurd.

My students in Tunis were already, some years ago, seething with the anger that only absurdity can generate. After independence, Bourguiba had laid the foundations for what was to be a 'modern' state, to all intents and purposes shaped on European principles. Education to higher levels and women's rights were essential flagstones. But what was promised by these advances was in practice not delivered, the reality being one of  much personal suffering and frustration for those who lacked the necessary family connections or influence. Educated way beyond the capacity of the market to employ them, and in a culture where jobs went to the favoured, not to those with ability, an increasingly youthful population had no framework to express their resentment.

The point here is that you cannot, without absurdity, create a state that pretends to be modern and democratic and then not deliver the essential elements of that democracy. Just as you cannot sensibly import and distribute Time magazine with half its images blacked out.

In the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid last December, against a background of 14 per cent unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, a graduate aged 26, set up a fruit and vegetable stall because he couldn't find a job. Then the police confiscated his stall because he was selling without a permit. Out of sheer rage and hopelessness, Mohammed set himself alight with petrol and died later in hospital.

I knew plenty of young men like Mohammed, frustrated by absurdity, even gifted academics who had Masters or PhD's from the USA or Europe and who, when their student visas expired abroad, had to return to Tunis to take jobs way below their intellectual ability.

Ironically, one of the Mohammeds I knew, an intelligent and aware man with a doctorate from the US, was the son of a greengrocer. He used to say to me that seven families ran the country and without some door or link into that privileged elite, you could hope for no advancement. His father's humble status didn't qualify him.

I like to think that Mohammed Bouazizi, too, was the son of a greengrocer and that, when all else failed, he simply went back to what he knew from his childhood.

So let it be said that the son of a greengrocer lit the fuse that ignited a revolt throughout the entire Arab region.

CJM

Of cabbages and kings

It was autumn 1977 and I was in the beautiful city of Isfahan for a conference. A colleague joined me at breakfast one morning and began by saying, 'I had a fascinating conversation in the hotel bar last night with a fellow who claimed he worked in intelligence.' 'And what secrets did he have to tell?' I prompted, already harbouring doubts. 'Well, he said that within eighteen months the Shah would be out of power and Russia would invade Afghanistan.'

Needless to say, these were not common predictions at the time, least of all in diplomatic circles, and sounded rather far-fetched. But I had reason to reflect on the first of these prophecies a day later as it happened that the Shah was visiting the city, and I watched the royal motorcade sweep by at something approaching the speed of light. For those who had eyes to see, this was not the behaviour of a king secure in the love of his subjects. We knew that there had been street protests over the past year, ferociously put down, and we had also been told that every university class had its informers, and that secret police watched over everything. Even children in school were encouraged to denounce their parents for criticism of the regime. But it was the speed of the ruler's passage through the city that made me think the very centre was unravelling with fear.

As we now know, both of these barfly prophecies came to pass by the end of 1979. By the end of January 1979 the Shah had fled with his family to --  interestingly -- Egypt, which is now inviting comparison with that final year of imperial rule in Iran. Diplomacy and intelligence at the highest level are yet again, it seems, taken by surprise. Who would have thought, a year ago, that Mubarak would now be out of power and hidden from sight in his Sharm el Sheikh villa? Well, if you had been in the right bar in Cairo on the right evening, you might have met someone with the vision of what was to come. Perhaps diplomats don't hang out in the right bars.

Who would have predicted, though, a year ago, that all those despotic kingships from Bahrain to Tunis, most of them built literally on sand, would now be simultaneously trembling or already fallen? Yet, for those with eyes to see, the signs have been there ... (to follow)

And on that note:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

On a lighter note

Recalling the famous statistician's experience at the dinner table, reminds me of the Principal's wife who faithfully attended all her husband's duty dinners and made conversation with a wide range of experts on all subjects. However she had a slight tendency to malapropisms, along with enough sense of humour to confess her lapses.


On one occasion, being told by her neighbour that he was an orthodontist, she apparently spent the rest of the meal asking him questions about birds, which the poor man was at a complete loss to reply to.

CJM

Turbulence (2)

Sure enough, it wasn't long after the Japan earthquake and tsunami that voices started coming out of the woodwork declaring that the hand of God had dealt us this timely reminder of our wicked ways. The end of the world is nigh, therefore repent and be saved ...

What relief it must be for many, then, that mathematical evidence in at least nine (presumably the most civilised and educated) nations, strongly indicates that religion is hurtling towards extinction. These findings were reported to the Physics and Society Forum of the American Physical Society.  'Physics', as we know, in spite of having an Uncertainty Principle at its very heart, is commonly seen as the sole dispenser of truth in the modern materialist world. 'Dynamical systems theory' doesn't have quite the same ring to it -- as an eminent Oxford scholar once pointed out, to say you are a mathematician or statistician at a dinner party is a real conversation killer.

But leaving aside the question of nature as the mirror of divine wrath, there is a long tradition of belief -- and not only esoteric -- in humanity as participant in the work of creation. Creation is a troublesome word, though, and along with scaremongering notions such as 'design' and 'purpose' can drive happily logical and well balanced followers of Richard Dawkins into seizures of anxiety. So let's leave these provocative terms aside and turn to the idea of 'intention' which surely will not upset anyone. After all, we get up every morning with intentions, wait on the platform intending to catch the train with its driver who intends to stop for us today, as he or she did yesterday and the day before, and equally will tomorrow -- we hope.

Yes, hope and intention are inseparably bound up together. It's hope that gives meaning to our intentions. Our very hope for a better world prompts us to act with the intention of working towards a better world. As Gary Lachman points out in his new book, the Hermetic tradition, as opposed to the Gnostic tradition, sought to bring higher knowledge into the world as creative work. In this  tradition, as also in the Christian notion of 'stewardship', both our personal and our collective actions are carried out in a spirit of optimism that such a 'better world' can exist and that we can somehow participate in making it a reality.

This is the true message of the chaos and devastation in Japan: that we can still, in Kipling's words, though surrounded by a world in ruins, 'stoop and build it up with outworn tools'.

CJM

Turbulence (1)

Those prophets of great change around the potentially awesome date of 2012 -- see, for example, Daniel Pinchbeck's troubled account -- must be quietly reflecting that it's all shaping up as expected. Not only are entire societies and regions in turmoil, the planet itself seems to have stored up all those millennial events that never happened in 2000 and is dishing them out with ever greater intensity. If ever there was a time in history for humankind to pause and consider deeply how it goes about its business, surely that time is upon us.

Two extremes of image have impressed themselves on our consciousness through the upheavals of the last month. On the one hand, the sheer scale and fervour of protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, following on from events in Tunisia and subsequently throughout the Arab world. At the other extreme, heart-rending pictures of the devastation inflicted on Japan's north-east by a truly millennial earthquake and tsunami, the total wreckage of homes and livelihood, the displacement of half a million people, the shock of loss made even more unbearable with the grim uncertainty of a possible nuclear disaster still hanging over Fukushima.

Something unites these two extremes, namely the ennobling quality of humans to join together in creative endeavour to, as Arthur Koestler used to say, lift themselves up "by their own bootstraps". We saw this self-organising potential in Cairo as the thousands gathered there in protest built up, as it were, a microcosm of the society they yearned for, without rancour, oppression, intolerance. All worked together regardless of race, religion or tribal loyalty, to make their tented city a well-run community. The Egyptians themselves were proud of this achievement, and drew attention to it as proof of the depth and sophistication of their society.

The Japanese, too, have displayed an impressive dignity in their response to immeasurable destruction and loss. Those less affected by the disaster have come together to help those most in need. We have seen no hysteria, no ranting, no searching for blame. Sadness and composure reign in the land of the dispossessed, a land which, from their current perspective, must seem lost for good.

CJM

Sunrise

There are rather abstract lists in diaries, calendars and ships' tables called Sunrise and Sunset, where specific times are shown and change by some two minutes a day. Here in the high mountain valley (at a magical 1111 metres) I have a different measure. Every notch and peak in the surrounding mountains is like the markings of a clock, and you watch the sunrise shifting along its annual trajectory, with the rays striking, slanting, each morning in a slightly different place. It seems that many ancient and indigenous civilisations in the Americas used mountain peaks and dips in the same way as markers of the sun's annual passage. Naturally, when the sunrise reaches the end of its run on the horizon, its point of stop-and-return -- the solstice -- this time and place can be marked in the very landscape. This is how you make a calendar of stones.

The sun not only rises higher and  higher daily at this time. It also comes nearer to you. A week ago I would not have had the sun in my eyes at this morning hour, around 8.15. I've been watching its brightness, though, for days as it crept across the grassy slopes, nearer and nearer, earlier and earlier, finding its way towards me with its blessing of resurrection after a long winter.

Needless to say, you don't have to live at the top of a mountain to live through that same warming moment in springtime, when the sun's rays arrive to brighten a windowsill or a patch of wall or a pillow. Think of the joy expressed by Puccini's music as Mimi sings of how her poor attic room high up in the city is the first to be touched by the returning sun:

Vivo sola, soletta
là in una bianca cameretta:
guardo sui tetti e in cielo;
ma quando vien lo sgelo
il primo sole è mio
il primo bacio dell'aprile è mio!

I live by myself, all alone,
in my little white room.
I look upon the roofs and the sky.
But when the thaw comes,
the first warmth of the sun is mine,
the first kiss of April is mine!

La Bohème Act 1


CJM

World Book Day 2011

Books have shaped my life, as reader, writer, collector, lover, and it's impossible to let World Book Day pass without contributing something.

The aim of the event is to encourage children to read, perhaps even to write (I sent my first manuscript to Frederick Warne Ltd at the age of seven) and so I have thought deeply about which book I knew as a child which went on to inform my adult life as well. The answer would have to be Homer's Odyssey, which I was introduced to at the age of eleven and read in an abridged children's edition, probably the one published by Dent at that time. My imagination was swept away by the colourful intensity of the story, of the courage and strength of the hero battling his way back home through every type of danger, both natural and supernatural.

Such a story as this represents the classic "hero's journey" to which modern thinkers like Joseph Campbell and Carl Gustav Jung attached such importance as allegories, even psychic frameworks, of our personal development. But as a child, of course, you know nothing of this. You drink deeply on the images, the passions, the suspense, as the elemental gods strive between themselves either to destroy you or to lift you up and bring you home safely. Life and death, loyalty and betrayal, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, all of these are present, all of them dimensions of being which you are destined to pass through in your time on earth, and some of which, even as a child, you already recognise. It was probably the shape given to my mind and imagination by Odysseus' adventures which led me to cast myself on the ocean, both figuratively and literally, at numerous times of my life. A book such as this, if the child absorbs it psychically, will help that youngster to be a survivor through the challenges, pain and hardship, as well as the risk-taking, that lie ahead as we grow into maturity.

I see no deficiency in introducing a child to an abridged version or re-telling to launch them on this path. One that I can recommend, partly because I happened to edit it myself, is the version called Homer's Odyssey by Isabel Wyatt (Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2009) which came to me as an unpublished typescript among papers found after her death. Isabel Wyatt was a wonderful storyteller with a deep sensitivity to the classical mode of epic narrative, and her style gently reflects the sounds and rhythms of an older age. Let a child into this world and they will begin their own hero's journey.

False spring

Where sunlight touches
frozen ground among the trees
a single primrose.

 I wrote this haiku-style a couple of weeks ago at a time when it seemed winter was over. Within days other primroses and wild flowers had shown their colours.

Now we are in deep snow again, and the flowers are hidden, something that happens often in an alpine winter. Snow can arrive any time up to Easter. The miracle is, and over the years I have never ceased to wonder at it, that the open flowers can stay buried for weeks but will emerge intact, beautiful, fulfilling their promise.

I had never noticed till just now that the words promise and primrose are almost-anagrams.

CJM

Starting a blog

The aim of this blog is twofold: to bring both my published and unpublished work together for a wider audience, and to observe, celebrate and otherwise mark arising Moments as seen from the top of a mountain. More will follow soon.
CJM