Schism in the Church?

Every town and community in Spain has its Belén, its Christmas crib, whether grand or modest. These are often works of art and ingenuity, with their moving figures, waterwheels turning, water streaming, and every clever device you can imagine. The best of them are shown every year in exhibitions throughout the peninsula. Many places, like Pezuela de las Torres in the Community of Madrid, are famous for offering a richly colourful live crib scene with local people as the essential figures.

The essence of the Belén is to capture the life of the village, or pueblo, the simple working background into which the child Jesus was born. The shepherds, the farmworkers, the harvesters, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the baker, are all a part of this charming and detailed display, including the domestic animals which are so central to the village way of life. Along with the arrival of the Tres Reyes, the three kings, this simple representation of the event of Christmas, is probably what most survives of the original meaning of the festival in the popular culture.

Now Pope Benedict, in a moment of bizarre intellectual hair-splitting, has announced in his new book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, that the homely myth of the stable, with the donkey or mule, and the ox, those emblematic presences which give colour and life to our carols, is without historical foundation. There was no donkey, he says, there were no oxen standing by.

At least, this one detail is what has reached the general public, arguably through media misrepresentation of the Pope's thesis, while it is clear that his text acknowledges the presence of the animals in the crib tradition.

Still, the grassroots protest in Spain against the reporting of the Pope's words, which figured prominently in the national news, had to be heard to be believed. For days, the topic dominated conversation in the street. Every bar, restaurant or public place with a tradition of mounting the crib, insisted with fervour that they would not change their ways in spite of the papal view. The universal response, with typical Spanish forthrightness, was, "Well, I'm blowed if  I'm taking the donkey away ..."

 The point of real interest here is the popular response to what might, in another age, have been shown more respect. On such minor disputes do great schisms feed. And I truly wonder where this will all end....

CJM, Spain, December 23, 2012

A song for the end of the world

What more fitting for the end of the world, than Leonard Cohen's exquisitely ambiguous Halleluyah:

"And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue but Halleluyah."

CJM
December 21, 2012

Tide on the swollen river

Swollen waters butt
the incoming tide, the race
whirls into black holes.

CJM
El Nervión, December 2012

King Abba: a review by Simon Robinson

Simon Robinson of www.transitionconsciousness.org has posted a generously favourable review of my philosophical fantasy King Abba which concludes:


"As well as a flowing plot that starts off as a gentle brook but gathers pace to rushing rapids, the chapters are littered with thought-provoking dialogue throughout. We are asked to consider what kind of reality we ourselves are living in ...

"The prose is poetic, never heavy, and the plot constructed to continually arouse one’s curiosity as to what will happen next in the adventure of the characters’ lives. It can certainly withstand very favourably next to Sophie’s World, while also being distinctly different in flavour, and I certainly hope it gains the recognition it strongly deserves."

See also the first (five-star) review on amazon.com which comments: "Well written and a great read, this kept me - and my 12 year old - hooked from beginning to end. It would be fabulous for a young adult or parent/teen book group choice."

The Blue Flower -- a sign of the times

I forgot to mention sooner that Resurgence magazine did an attractive presentation of my poem "The blue flower", in its· Issue 272 • May/June 2012, with a full page image of a blue Himalayan poppy.  (See below the poem posted for this year's International Poetry Day.)

Splendid though this was, it did not coincide with my own experience of the blue flower, which took place on my walk across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, hence, "the pilgrim's friend." The roadside plant which so delighted me on that walk was the common chicory with its sky-blue flower and its complex pattern of petals, so varied as almost to appear haphazard. And yet, with all that variety, as Brian Goodwin would have said, the plant "emerges" in its full identity and character.

Synchronicities being what they are, the poem was one of those which "arrive" in the mind, and I had no idea at that time about the Romantic symbolism of the blue flower, even less that the common chicory is cited as Novalis' inspiration for the dream experienced by his character Heinrich von Ofterdingen. All of this came to light afterwards. It may be said, then, that I only came to understand the poem fully some time after writing it.

There is now no doubt in my mind that the experience of the flower on my long walk on "the hard road", and its special meaning for me on that journey, were an echo of the Romantic tradition which we are, in our own times, meant to rediscover. Only some new assertion of our belonging with nature and our longing for beauty, can bring us back to our true humanity.

CJM, December 11, 2012

Cichorium intybus

This doesn't do justice to the radiant blue of the flower, but does show the complexity of the petal arrangement.

Henri Bortoft and "the dynamic way of seeing"

Those who have arrived at Henri Bortoft's new book, Taking Appearance Seriously, must accept the risk that after reading it, they will never "see" things quite the same ever again. The book is a challenge, arising from Goethean thought and so-called continental philosophy, to all our neuronally embedded habits and "attractors" -- to invoke Allan Combs' nice mapping of chaos theory on to psychology. For a start, once you have read the book, you will probably before too long, once the floodwaters have receded, want to read it again.

Floodwaters? Yes, water played a significant part in the emergence of Henri's thought and teaching. A key image lies in the phrase "upstream". He uses this notion vividly in his exposition of how to dissolve our clotted habits of thought in perceiving events and language, nearly all of which arise in our consciousness as if "downstream", that is, already formed, patterned, without doubt or challenge. His own vision of "upstream" thinking came upon him as he was about to give a course for which, he suddenly realised, he was totally unprepared. He was standing on a bridge over a stream, lost in dismal thought about what he was to do, looking down the flow of the river. Then he turned and faced towards the descending waters for a few moments and then, suddenly, in a flash of inspiration saw how different was the experience of looking "upstream" at the waters not yet arrived but already arriving. With this single insight, he realised he could explain the difference between perceiving events and language as they come to us, and accepting them as already givens.

With this beautiful philosophical insight, poetic in its force, we have a tool with which to begin to become aware of our own habits of thought, our own tame acceptance of language and concepts which we have perhaps never questioned, and our own lack of real  dialogue in communicating with others. These are all themes which I explore through the questing figure of young Prince Fion in my book King Abba. Fion starts from the problem in his mind, inspired by looking around him at the vast palace library, that, although we speak of "knowledge", we have no real idea of what it is or where it comes from. Surely it must have existed somewhere before it arrived in all these volumes, he says to himself.

 This is the starting point for a hugely important journey, one that beckons to all of us.


CJM, December 10, 2012

King Abba around the world

 Henri Bortoft's review of King Abba has been posted on a Facebook page dedicated to Bortoft enthusiasts by Simon Robinson, who is a consultant and lecturer in chaos and complexity theory, innovation, creativity and sustainability. He is a member of BCI (Biomimicry for Creative Innovation) and lives in São Paulo, Brazil. He is also editor of the web page http://transitionconsciousness.wordpress.com/about 

For the post of the review, see:

www.facebook.com/HenriBortoft

 Bortoft's ideas, his exposition of phenomenology and hermeneutics, and his interest in Goethe, were all fertile ground for my approach to the writing of King Abba. In particular, I was interested in creative ways of perception, the struggle against ossified mindset, and a direct path to knowledge through experiential and sensory involvement in what we observe. My original interest in this, of course, came from writing poetry which I see as a pure form of experience rendered beautiful. The haikus which accompany this blog, which I have called Homage to Water, all arise from this aesthetic principle. King Abba's aim is to help young people arrive at their own realisation that much of what they learn and inherit as knowledge has to be relearned through their own soul experience.

More on this to come.

 CJM, December 9, 2012

King Abba:a review by Henri Bortoft

I have read "King Abba" with much enjoyment. I think it is beautifully written, and therefore a joy to read, but also it kept me wanting to know what was going to happen next. ... It gradually begins to dawn on the reader just what a difference there is between the artificial environment which is ultimately a product of intellectual reason - but is mistaken for reality - and the genuine reality of the living world that we encounter through the life of the senses, and we cannot help but see this reflected in the way we are living/not living today. For this reason alone, apart from its sheer enjoyment value, I think it would be very good if this work were to be published today. So when can I have the next volume please?

Henri Bortoft author of The Wholeness of Nature and Taking Appearance Seriously (Floris Books).

Details of King Abba can be found here.

King Abba has arrived!

I have been very fortunate in my years as editor to work with exceptional and bright people dedicated to refashioning ideas in science and philosophy. We are going through a time of enormous change in our western culture, and the old paradigms no longer stand the test of time. Many of our accepted practices and beliefs have brought us, and our planet, to a place of extreme vulnerability and dire ugliness. Tragically, we have mostly been unaware of the damage we have been causing, and those voices that called for change were mostly ignored. Governments and institutions that should have been protectors of society and landscape, have played into the hands of commerce and short term profiteering.

Against this background, I wrote King Abba, a philosophical fantasy for young people, equally for any thoughtful person unhappy with current values and practices in science, technology, economics and government. My aim was to open up questions which are not often asked in our educational system, and introduce doubts and queries where we take so much for granted as if there were no other way of seeing things. As so much of what we accept is actually absurd, there is a comic element in the book, too. It can be seen as a satire of our times and our present society. The book is written as an adventure story, but stops now and then (more than conventional publishers would like) to ask questions.

King Abba is now published as an e-book, and details can be found here.

Autumn rain

Round pools of leaf-fall,
yellow, orange, under trees,
rain returns to earth.

 CJM
Green Park, November 2012

Dill in autumn mist

In the morning mist
feathery green stems are bright
with ten thousand beads.

CJM
Swiss Alps, October 2012

Low tide on the strand

Sand where wavelets flowed
is lamina of sunlight
mirroring the sky.

CJM
La Vega, summer 2012


Slipping back, the sea
furls with each incoming wave
a moment, subsides.

CJM
La Vega, summer 2012

Watching at Windows

She is punctual.

She turns the corner at 3.05.

Bent forward in a stride

that has no grace;

her gaze inward,

there’s no reading of her face.

She never smiles

as if that might delay her.

Always the same deliberate pace,

unhurried but not slow,

arm swinging wide,

hair moving side to side.

Winter and summer

only the clothes change,

her square cut style the same.

And then she’s gone.

Somewhere a bus or train

awaits her now,

a mother, husband, friend …

Who knows

where she comes from

where she goes.

But …

She is always punctual.

And alone.

For any writer, the city offers daily possibilities of conjecture, fleeting portraits of people as they pass. A girl in a red hat becomes the heroine of a short story or a novel. A snatch of conversation overheard  between two people on a pavement becomes the seed of a drama. An artist that I knew of used to sit at his window and watched a street where people passed and were gone in less than thirty seconds, then he tried to capture the character of that person in a sketch.

For the writer, at least, these portraits are a thousand times more rich, ambiguous and lasting than a photograph, which I say with the greatest respect to the art of photography which I both love and admire in its own right. But the imagination has its own rules, and captures “photographs” altogether more subtle and malleable which have the potential to flower into totally conjectural worlds.

The creative openings of these non-encounters are multiplied endlessly if you see the same person in the same place at a certain time, and this is what I have tried to capture in the piece above. The repeated sighting of an unknown person simply lends more and more mystery, more and more questions arise, more and more imagined scenarios present themselves to be played with in that garden of musing where creativity lives and works.

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías enjoys this creative conjecture in a thread running through his Negra Espalda del Tiempo, where a girl and a man seen regularly from his window at a bus stop below become more and more involved in possible histories, both known and unknown.

Puede ser esa mujer que veo desde mis ventanas en este amanecer que me encuentra despierto, esa mujer no muy joven que espera el autobús con su temprano cansancio y a la que hoy se ve sonreír levemente …

Just a hint of a smile can open the treasure chest of inquiry and speculation, a process in which the writer can come to know his or her “character” better than they know themselves.

 

CJM June 2012

Late snow in spring

Snow on plum blossom,
white on white, is crystal flower,
crystal droplet soon.

CJM
Swiss Alps, April 2012

“Art, maths, science, poetry, jazz, billiards” ... and football

I just plucked this selection of words out of the first commentary posted by El País’s Ramon Besa in the early hours of the morning after Barça’s solid victory at Camp Nou  over the Madrid team Getafe (result 4-0). Art, maths, science, poetry, jazz, billiards – all contributing, as his article proclaims, to El partido perfecto del Barça (Barça’s perfect game).

I don’t think I’ve ever read such an ecstatic piece of writing about sport. Besa was clearly still on a high at that hour (his piece the following evening was more measured and analytical), having admitted that it was impossible to take your eyes off the pitch during the game in case you missed some exquisite detail of the play.

I managed to see the last fifteen minutes or so, and caught the virtuoso dance performed by Messi as, finding his way to the goal blocked, he turned about and went off on a meandering course right to the side line and back again, defenders left reeling behind one after another, and so found his way again to the goal mouth to deliver a shot just deflected by Torres’ head.

Such good football demands good writing, and here prize-winning Besa delivered a delightfully well written piece, defying exact translation, written in the grip of euphoria and enthusiasm. Look out for the extended geometry metaphor. Here is a taste of it:

El arte es un misterio y como tal se muestra en situaciones insospechadas, como ayer en el Camp Nou, en una noche desapacible por el frío y el agua, ante un contrario que tiene por costumbre responder o negar al Barcelona como es el Getafe. No parecía el mejor día para arrancarse a jugar al fútbol y, sin embargo, a Pep Guardiola le dio por juntar a Iniesta, Messi, Xavi y Busquets y los azulgrana se marcaron una actuación excelente, a ratos excelsa, tan precisa que merecería ser interpretada por un matemático si no por un poeta, nada que ver con la épica futbolística y, en cambio, muy propia de la mejor estética.

Los triángulos y las paredes, el rombo y el cuadrado y las elaboraciones y las combinaciones se sucedieron como repertorio de una ciencia exacta. El fútbol del Barcelona fue de salón. Muy técnico, riguroso con el cuidado del balón y, al mismo tiempo, con momentos de una admirable improvisación. Igual que la mejor banda de jazz. La noche fue tan solemne que no se reparó ni en el marcador ni en la clasificación, sino en el compás de Busquets, el cartabón de Xavi, el lápiz de Messi y la luz de Iniesta. Había que mirar al campo, se imponía no perder detalle, convenía memorizar cada jugada desde que se supo el once titular.

Art is a mystery and as such it arrives unannounced, as it did yesterday at Camp Nou, on such an unpleasant night, cold and wet, with Barcelona facing a rival like Getafe with a record of being able to respond and frustrate. Not the best day to throw yourself into football, yet Pep Guardiola chose this evening to bring on Iniesta, Messi, Xavi and Busquets, and the azulgranas put on an excellent show, at times superlative, so precise that it would need a mathematician, if not a poet, to interpret it, in practice nothing to do with the story of football but rather to do with the highest aesthetic.

The triangles and the lines, the rhombus and the square, and the workings and combinations succeeded each other like the repertory of an exact science. Barcelona’s football was exhibition standard. Highly technical and controlled in handling the ball, and at the same time with moments of admirable improvisation. Like an excellent jazz group. The mood of the evening was so in awe that no attention was paid to the scoreboard or to the rankings, but all were fixed on Busquet’s compass, Xavi’s set square, Messi’s pencil and Iniesta’s lamp. One had simply to watch the pitch, it was vital not to miss a single detail, each sequence of play demanding to be remembered, knowing this was the first team in action.

International Poetry Day

The Blue Flower

You are the pilgrim’s friend,

Moment of bright beauty

Along the hard road. You’re kind,

Offering a restful harmony

That’s served by sun and ground and air.

Yet still we cannot tell

Your silent purpose here.

Your fleeting passage of a day

Remains a mystery. We’ll find

Your meaning at the hard road’s end.

C.J. Moore,

October 2009

Who could do such a thing?

Tragic and violent events, and there follow the inevitable questions, from opposite ends of the world … Who could do such a thing?

In southern Kandahar province in Afghanistan, following the massacre of sixteen villagers allegedly by a US soldier, the bodies of dead children are taken in a truck to the NATO military base down the road, and a mother, Gul Bashra, shows reporters the body of her two-year-old who was among those gunned down. She asks: “Was this child a Taliban?”

Samad Khan, a farmer from Balandi village, lost his entire family, eleven victims including women and children. "This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act," Khan is reported as saying: "Nobody is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and women." (Global News, March 11)

            Now, in the US, forty-four years after the atrocity at My Lai, the Vietnamese village where up to some 500 women and children were slaughtered by US units, the debate centres again on the mental stress suffered by young men sent into chaotic combat environments, where at times the rule of “free fire zone” operates. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is invoked here as the explanation of euphemistically termed “out of character” behaviour.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk, always challenging, hurls into the fray: “I'm getting a bit tired of the ‘deranged’ soldier story.” (March 17) He quotes “a remarkable and highly significant statement” from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days before. Allen told his men that “now is not the time for revenge” for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in the riots provoked by the Koran burning incident in February. They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back."

Fisk concludes that the general knew only too well the mood of his men following their comrades’ deaths. Indeed, Charlie Company had had similar losses, five soldiers killed by booby traps, previous to the infamous slaughter at My Lai on March 16, 1968.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the BBC correspondent Hugh Schofield asks, of this week’s murder of three children and an adult at a Jewish School in Toulouse: “…what prompts a man to turn a .45 pistol on a three-year-old? Or to pursue an eight-year-old girl into a schoolyard, and put a bullet in her head?” A “deranged far-rightwinger”? he speculates.

Witnesses of the event commented that the aggressor was of athletic build and movement, and in his pursuit of the little girl, when his firearm jammed, he took out another gun and shot her in cold blood.

As we now know, the same gun was used in other fatal attacks, only days before, two of the three victims being soldiers in uniform. According to latest reports, the suspected attacker has been identified as of Algerian origin, with some criminal history of violence, and claims to be a mujahideen acting to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children. He clearly has some background in weapons training and was linked to a group recently banned in France for its “armed struggle” internet messages, a group which has openly sought to recruit “soldiers” familiar with martial arts and rapid response. Cold blooded revenge here seems  to be the dominant motive. “Deranged”? Or just dedicated and ruthlessly efficient?

There is something missing. In the Afghan case, no one is asking the bigger question: Who could do such a thing? Fisk is right: the real issue is not the “madness” of a rogue soldier. If that were so, he points out, the mad soldier would be killing his own side, not going out at night to a nearby Afghan village. Nor is the event in Kandahar province simply a matter of revenge for the loss of comrades in arms. Revenge can take many forms without going down the path of mass murder.

The answer we are evading is that soldiers could do such a thing, precisely because soldiers are trained to kill.

The expert in this field of study, strikingly called “killology”, is Lt Col David Grossman, a US army psychologist whose books on the subject are supposed to be required reading by the American military.

In an interview, Grossman plays down the significance of post traumatic stress disorder which he says is a condition from which the sufferer can recover with suitable treatment. At the same time, he points out that a high proportion of combat soldiers suffer from its effects to some degree. So we may look upon PTSD as an occupational hazard for the military. It is not a coverall explanation for all excesses of behaviour.

Where Grossman puts the emphasis is on the training that soldiers undergo prior to combat, the very training that overrides their civilian norms and inhibitions for the military requirement of killing. He outlines the several stages that recruits are taken through in order to be able to kill on demand. These include brutalisation, desensitisation, different kinds of emotional and reflex conditioning, and adopting aggressive role models to imitate.

            Without this programme of psychological transformation, young men from normal civilian backgrounds would be unable to take the lives of others, except perhaps in emergencies of self-preservation.

            In an alarming extension of his ideas, Grossman points out that the very same programming is built into aggressive video games which inure youngsters to any compunction about aggressive acts and “kills”.

            What we must conclude is that, where such training is effective, homicidal acts  -- what we now call “war crimes” -- can potentially be carried out regardless of who the victims may be. Women? Children? No matter. We dehumanise in order to "take out", as the phrase goes, whether as US "kill teams" in Afghanistan, or as British soldiers using "gollies" for target practice in Aden. We micturate on the bodies of the dead since we no longer have any human connection with them as people.  So now, perhaps, we can answer the question, Who could do such a thing?

The answer was all too plain to the mother of a US soldier accused of killing civilians at My Lai, who is said to have remarked: "I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer."

CJM

March 2012

Leo Messi -- The best ever?

The best ever -- Pep Guardiola's estimation of Leo Messi, after that record display of five Messi goals last night in the match between Barcelona and Bayer Leverkusen (result 7-1). As Guardiola says, "we just try to make sure he gets the ball. After that our task is done."

You had to see it to believe it, and remain stunned while watching, a paralysis that seemed to affect the Leverkusen defenders more than once  -- here a straight run across the goal with a flick of the left foot, there a lob or two over the opposing goalkeeper's head, now a swerve round the goalie's outstretched arm and leg, then,  most outrageous of all, having trounced several defenders, Messi sent the ball angled slowly right across the goal mouth to trickle in from the post while players on both sides could only stand and wonder.

It must be said, too, that the first part of Guardiola's comment is just as important, and tells the whole story of Barca's success. Their work as a team is remarkable, their passes rarely fluffed, and most important of all, their skill in controlling a ball once received, is a pleasure to watch. Their 70% possession of the ball is due entirely to teamwork. Messi, with his characteristic modesty, plays that game as well as he plays the superstriker, and with him, as with his fellow players, the ball goes always to the man with the best chance, whoever it may be.

Heartfelt thanks to Barca for bringing skill and elegance back into football, rather than the all too common shirt-grabbing delinquency that defies the rule book and aims to cripple rather than outplay.

CJM
March 2012

The Royal Knee

Should a blog dedicated to absurdity, amongst other matters, dwell on a subject as serious as the length of  the Duchess of Cambridge's skirt?

The issue is clearly of some importance and concern to the Queen, as press comments in recent months have revealed and now revived. Some have even toyed with the almost treasonable thought that the young royal's dress sense errs more towards the WAG than the WAP (easy to work that one out ...).

However, as the Queen knows from her long experience, knees have a role to play in a royal setting only when they are being bent in respect. Elsewhere they have no place. She is right to be concerned. The human knee is not an aesthetic object; it is a highly complicated articulation with various knobs and dimples, which does not even suggest beauty or elegance. For that very reason, one royal knee is never to be hung over the other, a posture which only emphasises its knobbliness when exposed.

Models on the catwalk and film stars on the red carpet, dressed from head to lower thigh in highly expensive gear, simply fail to realise the sheer awkwardness of their knees as they lurch along or stand in homage for the cameras, apparently oblivious to their peculiar lumpiness for which there is no cure except to cover up.

So on this I have to side with the Queen. Lower the hemline, Kate, and spare your knees' blushes.

CJM
March 2012

Spring in Edinburgh

The collar doves are mewing in the high trees. Daffodils are like garlands along the verges of the canal, yellow, white and blue crocuses colour the parks, and the sheltered stone-walled city gardens are bright with snowdrops and primula. Green stems of tulips push up from the earth and each day as I pass, I see they have swollen a little more. The rhododendrons are fat with buds. Soon the bluebells will come into their glory and then the delicate lily-of-the-valley.

All above, that unmistakable and wondrous northern light fills the vast vault of the skies.

CJM

Edinburgh, March 2012

Snow on trees

Snow pencils the trees
delicate white, copying
life with frozen lines.

CJM
Switzerland, February 2012

The mountain in winter

From dark, cthonic rock
purity of ice suspends
each earthbound drop.

Chemin suisse, février 2012
CJM

How to start a revolution

A favourite song of mine is “Papa, cuéntame otra vez,” by the Spanish singer Ismael Serrano. “Dad, tell me again,” goes the lyric, about the heady days of 1968 in Paris, when youth poured on to the streets in widespread protest against cultural tyranny and inspired others to resist the power of what Isma colourfully terms “dictadores oxidados”, rusted dictators such as Franco.

But the note of the song is pessimistic. Where are the gains now? One kind of tyranny has been replaced by another and it seems as if all the promise of that Paris spring has blown away like dust. I was in Paris myself for “le petit mai” of 1970, and it was all too plainly already a subdued echo of the original student-worker uprising two years before.

Yet we are in a long-term game here, and the truth is that we are still living in revolutionary times. Some have compared the present shaking of the branches right down to the roots of our political, economic and social inheritance, to the upheaval throughout Europe in 1848.

Of more promise is that now we see emerging a new dynamic of resistance, looking back not to the bloody clashes of the past, but promoting a radically different and nonviolent manifestation of people-power. The special interest of these new principles is that they arise from the thinking of two men who, in themselves, could hardly be seen as revolutionaries.

Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy and Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous, between them have provided manifestos for change without violence on an international scale, and they are already producing widespread results. The focus of each is different, but their combined appeal to a universal sense of "enough is enough" has  fuelled and inspired movements and strategists around the globe.

Both have said, in different ways, that the end-game is not the destructive overthrow of regimes or rulers. Such results, like the downfall of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt, deliver great joy to the oppressed, but leave a potentially dangerous vacuum after them which can simply fill up with more of the same under a different name.

No, the real aim of this approach is not to overthrow rulers, but to change how rulers behave. And in Hessel's view, not only blindly short-term rulers, but the entire culture of politics and big business in an unholy alliance of self-interest.

I thoroughly recommend Ruaridh Arrow's recent documentary about the work and ideas of Gene Sharp, which is inspirational. Here is a link to the trailer, but try to see the complete film, shown this week on the channel current.com.

So Ismael Serrano need not feel so disappointed now. Los indignados of the 15-M movement and of Democracia Real YA, are back on the streets in Spain, fillling the squares of dozens of cities, and if they follow Gene Sharp's advice, they will not give up.

Turning tide

Gliding landwards, tongues
of sea, cream-edged, enfold each
silent, rounded rock.

La Vega, January 2012

CJM

Sweet sadness is upon me -- again

It's that time again. The hours of daylight, unnoticeably, are getting longer, but the human feeling is of entering the worst of winter, and spring seems far away. And with all that, we are approaching the anniversary of the "saddest day of the year."

This event need not be as miserable as it sounds. It's an opportunity, as my Herald Tribune article suggests (see link above), to bask in some of the most beautiful love poetry of the creative soul from cultures all around the world.

Sadness and the human spirit are perpetual companions. Some have proposed that this nostalgic resonance that we all feel has a legendary source in the banishment from the Garden of Eden. There was a glory that we once knew, and "all our journeying", as T.S. Eliot put it, is to recover the lost paradise that was our beginning.

We find the same nostalgia for "recollection" at the heart of Romantic poetry and painting in the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth's Intimations of  Immortality - "trailing clouds of glory do we come" - to the soulful mystery of Sehnsucht and Erinnerung pervading German art. That urge to recall, with a sense of "insatiable longing" that tells us we are not complete, are the very foundation of sadness.

But letting sadness go by without being drawn into it to the exclusion of all else, will keep us going till spring. Here, too, as my article points out, the Chinese still have the last word, with their sensible proverb, "You can't stop birds of sadness flying over you, but don't let them nest in your hair."

CJM

Captureland: a novel

The images in the holiday brochure are irresistible: sun and sand of tropical beaches bordered by palms, washed by translucent seas, where lovers amble hand in hand along the edge of the water. What could be more blissful? Where do I sign up?

 When you arrive, of course, you'll find that the deserted beach has serial hotels hogging the shoreline, while busloads of star-struck lovers arrive and leave daily as the great wheels of the tourist industry churn without end.

There will be a hidden world, too, mostly unseen by the visitor, in the the surrounding towns, villages and countryside. This wider local population remains out of sight, especially in the hotel formula known as “all-inclusive” (which should really be termed “all-exclusive”), the average visitor getting only a fleeting glimpse, on arrival and departure, from the windows of the airport bus. They may take note, briefly, of townships, ghettos, shanty-towns, the ramshackle effects of poverty, dust and dirt, run-down vehicles, and neglected infrastructure.

 Maybe, too, they’ll catch sight of areas of fine villas with enclosed gardens displaying high-profile security protection. Some of this extreme contrast may remind them of the troubling and chilling depiction of Rodrigo Plá’s excellent film La Zona (Mexico, 2007), where slum and rich condominium sit side by side.

            But the bus will soon pull in past the gate-keepers and into the walled paradise of the beach hotel. During the visitor’s stay, those “other people” of the parallel world of the slums and townships will remain visible only in the form of the myriad waiters, bartenders, cleaners, cooks, laundry servants, and so on, who silently keep the great ship of leisure steaming along.

Then, after the holiday in paradise, the visitor will return home via the same rapid bus journey to the airport, none the wiser about the greater landscape of the country they have blessed with their foreign currency.

            What of the impact of such tourism on all those workers, and on their lives? What of the impact on their families and communities, back in the ghetto homes where they live, and where they return at night? What of the impact on local agriculture and resources, traditionally based on providing for local needs, and unequipped to deal with the vast daily appetites of the thousands upon thousands of invading hotel guests?

            Captureland, my novel written for young people, but equally for any inquiring person, takes a look at this other unexplored world beyond the hotel gates, with its shanty-town communities built on land seized by squatters (hence “capture land”).

In the story, based on true events, a young white boy comes to work in a Caribbean beach hotel but soon finds himself allied with a group of black friends in their daily fight for survival amidst poverty, injustice and violence. We see the parallel world now through his eyes, as he shares the joys and hardships of his breddren, born and raised in the ghetto but with an irrepressible spirit and zest for life.

I wrote most of this book on site, in the Caribbean, where after a whole lifetime of travelling without incident, I was mugged within twenty-four hours of my arrival. The telling of the story, then, has a certain edge to it – which doesn’t take away from my exploration, and admiration, of the deeper customs and values of traditional communities faced with the ruthless and insatiable demands of the modern consumer world, otherwise known as "Babylon".

The book will in due course be available through Amazon, but there is an opening 25% discount until January 31, 2012, on all orders from Lulu (see link above and order using code LULUBOOKUK305). An e-book version is also available from the same site, and eventually Kindle, etc.

CJM

           

Sea-surge

High rearing seas leap,
curl, shatter on foaming rocks
with thunderous blows.

Punta 'l Pozu, January 2012

CJM

Breakers in the bay

Sunlit, radiant white
chargers, racing to shore, toss
silver manes of spray.

Santa Marina, January 2012