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
Wednesday 30 March 2011
Monday 28 March 2011
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:
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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".
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".
Wednesday 23 March 2011
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
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
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
Thursday 17 March 2011
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
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
Saturday 5 March 2011
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:
La Bohème Act 1
CJM
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!
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!
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
Thursday 3 March 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)