Apologies

My apologies to those unable to access the current Amazon.com Countdown discount for Behind the Mountain. I had thought amazon.com was a global market but it seems the discount can only be accessed from within US territory. I can't even see it myself to check it is active though Amazon assures me that it is.

There was no prior notice of this limitation and I think Amazon needs to go back and look at its program design.

In the meantime the book is still a bargain at 3 pounds sterling (5 dollars). So go for it!

 See my brief introduction to the book at wp.me/p11Bag-1hg #storytelling


See also Philip Franses' review of the book at http://wp.me/p11Bag-1hn

CJM

Messi magic -- nail-biting stuff

I'm far from being the only one to say it, but the difference was palpable when Messi, still recovering from his hamstring injury, came on the pitch in the 62nd minute of the quarter finals match with Paris Saint Germain last night. It was like an injection of prozac into his depressed teammates. And a relief to see La Pulga in action after a first half on the bench in which he must have chewed off half his fingernails in frustration.

He didn't have to do a lot and in his inimitable style walked about calmly till the opportunities were delivered. But just with his presence the Barca team which (with the exception of Iniesta) had laboured and misfired during the first half, was galvanised into a demonstration of the slick passing flow which is its trademark. Working together, as they do best, it was still Messi who initiated a path through the penalty area mêlée to Pedro's boot which finished off the winning attack.

With the two away goals collected in Paris, it was enough, and Barca are through to the semis in another record breaking achievement.

Wonderful to watch...

CJM
April 2013

The end of mystery?

Where will it all end? I asked at Christmas on the occasion of the popular protest against Pope Benedict’s denial of the presence of the donkey at the manger.

Well, now we know where it ended. In the first resignation of a pope in hundreds of years.

Popes don’t resign. Such was the common reaction of shock to the event, taking all by surprise. But there was an aspect to this resignation which I haven’t seen commented on, and which gives it a special singularity. Here is the critical part of the Pope’s speech, made on the occasion of a gathering on February 11 during a canonisation ceremony:

Fratres carissimi

… Conscientia mea iterum atque iterum coram Deo explorata ad cognitionem certam perveni vires meas ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum.

Bene conscius sum hoc munus secundum suam essentiam spiritualem non solum agendo et loquendo exsequi debere, sed non minus patiendo et orando. Attamen in mundo nostri temporis rapidis mutationibus subiecto et quaestionibus magni ponderis pro vita fidei perturbato ad navem Sancti Petri gubernandam et ad annuntiandum Evangelium etiam vigor quidam corporis et animae necessarius est, qui ultimis mensibus in me modo tali minuitur, ut incapacitatem meam ad ministerium mihi commissum bene administrandum agnoscere debeam.

Dearest brothers

… After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.

The bold text here is to draw attention to this quite remarkable statement, which presents a lack of strength as a reason for no longer being able to fulfil the papal ministry. This seems at odds with the Christian tradition, in which no man’s strength would ever be adequate to fulfil the enormity of this task in the world. The often declared perception was that such a task could only be carried out with the help of divine strength. By reducing the papal office to the level of a human task, to be achieved with human strength, the pope has, at a blow, taken away a mystery.

As with the humble donkey, no longer present at the manger, so with the divine distillation of an unworldly office. One myth after another, fails and falls under the bleak analysis of an executive, academic mind.

CJM March 13, 2013

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

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

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

'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 ...

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.