Rachel Corrie was killed 9 years ago today in the Gaza Strip in Palestine on March 16th 2003, trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family.
She was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer whilst undertaking nonviolent direct action. Her name has not been forgotten and carries on being an inspiration to solidarity activists around the globe. Today we remember her.
Borders are the gallows
Of our collective egos
Subjective, lines in sand
In the water, seperating everything
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National blood painted persuasions
Here's my song for the free
No, it's not about praise and publicity
Coprotocracy, what a hypocricy
Aristocracy verses democracy
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National blood-painted persuasions
The king is dead and now
We're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise
We're merely covering our feet
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
Fear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit condemnations
National blood-painted persuasions
Tear is the cause of seperation
Backed with illicit conversations
Procured by constant condemnations
National bloo-painted persuasions
The king is dead, and now we're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise, we're merely covering our feet
Your gods are dead and now we're dancing in the streets
As the waters rise we're merely covering in defeat
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
I never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
Never let you go
' the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time the one's wo never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars in the middle you see the bluecenter light pop and everything goes Awww!' - Jack Kerouac.
Today is the birthday of visionary, iconclastic writer and poet, Jack Kerouac. The shaman of the Beat Generation . Born 12/3/22 of a French-Canadian family in the factory town of Lowel, Mass, U.S.A.
Variously called the Beat Generations apostle, poet, hero, laureate, saint? Through his own life story he created a work of fiction .Soared so high, that in the end unfortunately found his own human skin, then found himself out of his depth in bottled delusion, where the burning ship had become his own.
In his life, he had been part of a culture and people , who burned like meteors. Jack Kerouac was the Beat Generations very own mythologiser, he and his band of brothers helped redeem a bit of America's soul. His legacy, like that of the Beat Culture, still alive, still relevant, still taking root.
Along with his friends, Corso, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ferllinghetti etc, he paved a way for a whole host of dreamers searching for risk, some form of adventure. Colouring our worlds with their crazy visions, their minds in revolt, searching for future's possibilities. Hand in hand with rebellion, against the conventions of the times.
Jack Kerouac in his eighteen books and many others under Jack's influence were to me important epiphanies on my own path of self discovery. He taught me about "Spontaneous prose." - writing without revising....... He called this " a spontaneous bop prosody." which is a bit like a jazz musician taking an improvised solo, and taking it as far as he could go, no editing , no pause of breath. Sometimes what is left, has no meaning, a void, but often their is a glimmer, that spells hope, that can become endless, can run off the page, infinite but accessible.
On my bookshelf at home Keroucs influence groans on my bookcases, his own works, sharing spaces with others , that were touched by his inspiration.
Their is something about his tragic, magic life that still resonates, hums, their will always be new connections, outhouses where seeds will forever drift. New poets will emerge, try to experience, the whole wide world, and words will dance, impulsively between time, forever and forever. Some might go out to the garden and pick lunch. Enthusiasims will be shared, thougyhs will be exchanged, and for some the personal will always be political. Passion will ignite. Jack was not immortal, though for me his words are, he left this planet on October 21 1969, 47 years , his search for inner lamentation cut tragically short. Still yearning for his mother, but lost in a catholic guilt, that had always consumed him. Stuck in sad exile, his mystical breath had grown tired , what was once beautiful had begun to drift towards bitterness.
So happy birthday Jack.....your impact continues to be felt....satori breath ... om switchin on.... tomorrow's dawns chorus echoes, anethetizing the sky.... sentences littered with wild perception, language as a spell that leaves us forever hooked. In human existence our contradictions will abound, freeze framed, on the road to nowhere. Kicks joy darkness.
William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, 1953
Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kerouac,
Greeenwich Village, 1957.
Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show 1958.
A freewheeling Kerouac
interviewed by Fernando Pirano
Kerouac: The movie (1985)
Their are numerous pages and books devoted to Kerouac and the Beats , if you look you will find what your looking for, the searching is part of the journey.Here's a wikilink, better than nothing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_kerouac andsome of his poetry
POOR SOTTISH KEROUAC
Poor sottish Kerouac with his thumb in his eye
Getting interested in literature again
Through a mote of dust just flew by
How should I know that the dead were born?
Does Master cry?
The weeds Ophelia wound with
and Chatterton measured in the moon
are the weeds of Goethe, Wang Wei,
and the Golden Courtesans
Imagining recommending a prefecture
for a man in the madhouse
rain
Sleep well, my angel
Make some eggs
The house in the moor
The house is a monument
In the moor of the grave
Whatever that means
The white dove descended in disguise?
WOMAN
A woman is beautiful
but
you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a hankerchief in the
wind
149th Chorus
I keep falling in love
with my mother
I dont want to hurt her
=Of all people to hurt
Every time I see her
she's grown older
But her uniform always
amazes me
For its Dutch simplicity
And the Doll she is.
The doll-like way
she stands
Bowlegged in my dreams,
Waiting to serve me
And I am only an Apache
Smoking Hashi
In old Cabashy
By the Lamp
2111th Chorus
The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the Void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, Lice, Lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in and out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one mind
AND THEN THEY GOT HIM
The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
In a big barrel
Stunk but Good
163rd Chorus
Left the Tombs to go
and look at the
Millions of cut glass-
-a guy clocking them,
as you look you sawllow,
you get so fat
you can't leave the building
-stand straight,
don't tip over, breathe
in such a way yr fatness
deflates, go back to
the Tombs,
ride the elevator-
he tips over again'
gazes on the Lights,
eats them, is clocked,
gets so fat
he can leave elevator,
has to stand straight
and breathe out the fat -
-hurry back to the Tombs
242nd Chorus
The sound in your mind
is the first sound
that you could sing
If you were singing
at a cash register
with nothing on yr mind-
But when that grim reper
comes to lay you
look out my lady
He will steal all you got
while you dingle with the dangle
and having robbed you
Vanish
Which will be your best reward,
T'were better to get rid o
John O'Twill, then sit a mortying
In this Half Eternity with nobody
To save the old man being hanged
In my closet for nothing
And everybody watches
When the act is done-
Stop the murder and the suicide!
All's well!
I am the Guard
Where man has not been to give them names objects on desert islands do not know what they are. Taking no chances they stand still and wait quietly excited for hundreds of thousands of years.
Alone
If you are mortar it is hard to feel well-disposed towards the two bricks you are squashed between or even a sense of community. Ivor Cutler's kitchen domain.
Poems reprinted from A Flat Man Trigram Press 1977.
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for - but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more drudge and idler - ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses.
The above poem written by James Mc Millan was written to celebrate the movement for women's rights and was first published in American Magazine in 1911, and is closely associated with the Lawrence Textile mill strike of 1911, where the above picture was taken. During this strike, which was in protest of a reduction in pay, under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World ( The Wobblies) and led primarily by the women workforce, the women mill workers carried signs that quoted the poem, reading 'we want bread and roses too.' It has since become an anthem for labor rights, and especially the rights of working women, across the globe.
' . . . life demands that the duality in men and women be freed to function, released from hate or guilt. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion; subjection excludes mutality. Only through this duality in each can a man and a woman have empathy for each other. The best lovers are men who can imagine and even feel the specific pleasures of women; women who know the passions and vulnerabilities of the penis - triumphant or tender - in themselves. Without empathy, men and women, husbands and wives, become tools of each other: competitors, rivals, master and slave, buyer and seller. In this war the aggressions of the wholly ' feminine' woman are just as destructive (mostly to the male) as the aggressions of the wholly 'masculine' man. For centuries the need to prove this image of masculanity has lain at the root of death: the killing of self and others in the wars of competition and conquest; the perversion of humanity itself. We need each other's qualities if we are to understand each other in love amnd life. The beautiful difference of our biological selves will not diminish through this mutual fusion. It should indeed flower, expand; blow the mind as well as the flesh. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, anew breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both. We could both breathe free.
Well spring is well and tuly in the air, time when certain senses awake, the season too of our 'mad march hares'..... boxing, prancing, dancing, having it large. The female of this species is superfecund at the moment, so the males get a bit frustrated, and tend to bounce around the female erratically, its the ritual of fertility, and of course desire is in the air, but for the lady, when she stands on her hind legs - no means no. To us humans they can seem to look crazy, demented. No madder than your average human being though.
Witnessed by those that walk the veil. Long have they been seen as mysterious and sacred to us, for some messengers of the underworld, they come and go as they please.And long have they been invested with mystical property, I for one find them enchanting.The hare in mythology crops up, time and again across the globe.
It is perceived to be solitude and remote.They're mostly silent. seen as the last light fades from the day. and enjoy the darkness.Active at night, a symbol of the intuitive, and fickleness of the moon, an unpredictable creature. It is seen as sacred to the White Goddess/mother earth.
The constellation Lepus was named for the latin word for hare. It's located below the constellation Orion,which was named for the hunter in Greek mythology.Orion has often been depicted pursuing Lepus with his hunting dogs Canis Minor and Canis Major.
The hare was originally linked to the ancient Germanic Goddess Oestara (oestrous cycle) or Eostore (Easter) who was said to rule over spring and the dawn. Oestara, who brought on spring late one year as she was nursing a dying bird back to life by changing it into a hare. Thereafter the hare was revered as a magical shapeshifter.
Celtic myths often told of shapeshifting hares. The great warrior, Oisin was said to have wounded a hare in the leg while out hunting ne day. The hare fled into the undergrowth and Oisin followed only to find a woman inside with a cut to her leg.
The hare was also regarded as the solitary keeper of ancient places .with ability to guide spiritual transmigration upon death. Wherever hares roam the Sidge are close by.
In Saxon times there was a cult of the hare and then christianity came along and suppressed this cult and the hare totemic values were replaced with the safer images of the easter bunny and the easter egg.
Hares that were seen to be acting oddly were also thought to be shape-shifting witches or 'were-hares.'
It was also said that if one crossed your path, it was seen as a warning of imminent danger. Sailors apparently , thought of them as unlucky, but for others a hare's foot was seen as a symbol of luck, but I wouldnt recommend hunting them for any purpose, long may we have them around.
Can dissapear quite quickly, here one minute, gone the next. Swift and nimble, at full speed can get up to 40 miles per hour.They tend to come out around dusk, graze and play all night, and go to bed about dawn. Because of their shyness, don't like to attract to much attention, but if you catch a glance a beautiful sight to behold. They live in a small depression in the ground called a 'form' above the earth, and will often be found in open fields.
Who knows could be at a tea party somewhere or if you look out this week, you might be lucky enough to see one or two , leaping over the moon.
' The common sort of people suppose that hares are one year male and one year female. . . . yet hunters object that there be some which are only females and no more, but no male that is not also a female, and so they make him an hermaphrodite.' -
- Edward Topsell , History of Four-footed Beasts 1607.
March of the Mad Hares represents the art of Professor Ralph Skelton, done in the printmaking process called, intagilo. His animal images represent the individual cages in which humans hide and the surreal landscapes that exist within each individual.
Imagine if London was controlled by the military and you had to go through specific checkpoints to go to school, go to work, visit your friends, or got to hospital.
This award winning seven minute video, brings the shocking reality of Palestinian life in the West Bank uncomfortably close to home.
