Jack Kerouac's Centennial

As chaos reigns throughout the world I am reminded that if literary hero,: the beat writer Jack Kerouac   famous for the way he smashed literary conventions was.alive today, he would be celebrating his 100th birthday. This past Thursday, San Francisco’s City Lights, also a publisher of eight Kerouac books, celebrated this occasion with a packed online event. Other events in significant places in Kerouac’s life, like Lowell, Massachusetts—where he was born—are also planned in the coming days.

It's difficult to say much more  about Jack that I haven't said over the past 13 years of this blog's existence but as I owe Kerouac a lot of debt, an individual who has been a huge influence on me so  have rehashed some of my previous thoughts on him with some extra flourishes in a celebration of his truly remarkable life.. 

Like his character Sal Paradise in On the Road, Jack Kerouac was restless to discover himself in postwar America. His stream-of-consciousness writing style flowed like jazz, encompassing but not always embracing the Beat generation of the 1950s. A writer of spontaneous prose, lover of jazz, idealizer of México and adopter of Zen—Kerouac is a fixture in the United States’ counterculture mythos.

Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.

The shaman of the Beat Generation arrived today as  Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to a  French-Canadian family in the factory town of  Lowell, Massachusettsus USA. 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.
Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school. Reportedly he did not learn English until he was six years old . His father Leo Kerouac owned his own print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown Lowell, and his mother Gabrielle Kerouac, known to her children as Memere, was a homemaker. Kerouac later described the family’s home life: “My father comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes his1920s vest, and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and butter, and with the kiddies and the good wife.”
Jack Kerouac endured a childhood tragedy in the summer of 1926, when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of 9. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac’s writing is full of vivid memories of attending church as a child: “From the open door of the church warm and golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could be heard.”
 Jack would earn a football scholarship to Columbia University, and planned to work in insurance after finishing school, according to the Beat Museum,http://www.kerouac.com/ which goes into detail about Kerouac’s rise to literary and cultural stardom.

Before going to Columbia University  first, he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. So, at the age of 17, Kerouac packed his bags and moved to New York City, where he was immediately awed by the limitless new experiences of big city life. Of the many wonderful new things Kerouac discovered in New York, and perhaps the most influential on his life was jazz. He described the feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: "Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place." It was also during his year at Horace Mann that Kerouac first began writing seriously. He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record and published short stories in the school's literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly.

He broke his leg in one of his first games and was relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season. Although his leg had healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. He spent the next year working odd jobs and trying to figure out what to make of his life. He spent a few months pumping gas in Hartford, Connecticut. Then he hopped a bus to Washington, D.C., and worked on a construction crew building the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. 

In 1942 he left Columbia to join the Merchant Marines completing only one voyage to Greenland before quitting. A few months later, his ship was sunk by the Germans, with many of his shipmates lost. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but lasted less than two weeks before being discharged on psychiatric grounds. He was described as 'restless, apathetic, seclusive', and the shrinks described his 'auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling grandiose philosophical manner'.

After this he then fell in with New York’s literary crowd.

Jack Kerouac wanted to catalog his entire life in autobiographical novels similar to Marcel Proust’s Rememberance of Things Pass.. Kerouac once said ‘I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy”  Kerouac began working toward this goal with The Town and the City. In the novel, Kerouac writes about his family’s struggles with finances and the differences between his life in the town and the city. Allen Ginsberg hailed the book as a masterpiece and with the help of Kerouac’s former professor at Columbia University Mark Van Doren, the book was published in 1950 by Harcourt Brace. Shortly after Kerouac started working on The Town and the City he met Neal Cassady in 1946 and around this time,took several cross-country road trips with him that would later inspire his seminal work, “On the Road.” 

Kerouac produced“On the Road” in just a few weeks, but the novel itself was a long time in the making. In 1947, Kerouac began collecting material for a new novel. In 1948, he described it in his journal: “Two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.” Notes and ideas for the novel filled hundreds of pages of journals, letters, and notebooks. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “These ideas and plans obsess me so much that I can’t conceal them […] they overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers.” Throughout those years of writing Kerouac continued to take cross-country trips with Neal Cassady, and recorded their adventures and conversations.

In late March of 1951, his friend John Clellon Holmes had just finished a novel about the Beats, and he showed Kerouac the manuscript. Kerouac was angry, feeling that Holmes had stolen his subject matter. Kerouac’s wife convinced her husband that instead of stewing about it, he should go ahead and get his own novel written. He began writing on April 2nd and finished on the 22nd. He wrote to Cassady: “Story deals with you and me and the road […] Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W.C. Fields saintliness … step by step in all I saw. […] I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because the road is fast … wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra) — just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs … rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.” 

In 1957, “On the Road” was published by Viking, who had previously turned it down. Viking editors insisted that Kerouac change the names of real people so they couldn’t be sued for libel, so Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty.and catapulted Kerouac to fame as a leading light of the Beat movement The book, like the roads he traveled, embodied Kerouac's marathon urge to create, having been typed on a continuous roll of taped-together paper measuring 120 feet in length so he did not have to stop typing to change paper.  Then, fueled on a cocktail of mind altering substances he unloaded the book in a marathon writing session.

Kerouac considered himself a Catholic writer. "I'm not a beatnik," he once said. "I'm a Catholic." Biographer Douglas Brinkley said On the Road has been misinterpreted as story of a couple of friends in search of kicks. But, for Kerouac, it was a search for God. Every page of his diary had a prayer or a crucifix or an appeal to God to be forgiven.

But bevertheless itt was Kerouac who coined the term “Beat Generation” and the  word“Beat” derived from “beat up” meaning old, used, poor, as in “a beat up old tramp”. 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.

Kerouac alongside his friends, Gregory Corso,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2009/11/gregory-corso-wayward-geniusan.html William Burroughs,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/02/destroy-all-rational-thought.html Allen Ginsberg,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/10/7th-october-1955-allen-ginsbergs-first.html Lawrence Ferllinghetti,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/02/lawrence-ferlinghetti-poet-publisher.html Gary Snyder etc, 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. 

In the six years that passed between the composition and publication of On the Road, Kerouac traveled extensively, experimented with Buddhism and wrote many novels that went unpublished at the time. His next published novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), described Kerouac's clumsy steps toward spiritual enlightenment on a mountain climb with his  friend, Zen poet Gary Snyder,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/happy-birthday-gary-snyder-poet.html. Dharma was followed that same year by the novel The Subterraneans, and in 1959, Kerouac published three novels: Dr. Sax, Mexico City Blues and Maggie Cassidy.

Kerouac's most famous later novels include Book of Dreams (1961), Big Sur (1962), Visions of Gerard (1963) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Kerouac also wrote poetry in his later years, composing mostly long-form free verse as well as his own version of the Japanese haiku form. Additionally, Kerouac released several albums of spoken word poetry during his lifetime.
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 he took it as far as he could go, with  no editing and 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 still accessible.
On my bookshelf at home Kerouacs influence groans on my bookcases, his own works, sharing spaces with others , that were touched by his inspiration. There is something about his tragic, magic life that still resonates, hums, there will always be new connections, outhouses where seeds will forever drift. New poets will emerge, to experience, among the whole wide world, words will dance, impulsively between time, forever and forever. Enthusiasm will be shared, thoughts will be exchanged, and for some the personal will always be political.Passion will ignite.
Jack had a wild  spirit,  but such a dazzling voice, who through his writing  revealed him as a believer in humanity, a dreamer, a doer and an explorer of metaphysical depth. He was however also a recluse, socially awkward, and despite maintaining a prolific pace of publishing and writing, Kerouac was never able to cope with the fame he achieved after On the Road, and his life soon devolved into a blur of drunkenness and drug addiction  that would ultimately destroy him .

After Kerouac’s breakdown on Big Sur in 1960, he returned home to be with his mother in Northport New York.  Kerouac attempted to improve his physical health and continue to work. After Big Sur was released in 1962, which is a chronicle of the time when he escaped to Big Sur, running from the world, and lost in a sea of depression and alcoholism, while trying to cope with  the pressures of celebrity.The novel earned critical success for its realistic accounts of sickness and madness where he rather poignantly reflects on the deterioration alcohol has caused. With the release of the novel, Kerouac began to move up and down the east coast. Kerouac still lived with his mother Gabrielle and together they relocated from New York to Florida in 1960 and from Florida to Lowell, Massachusetts in October 1962. (Gifford, Lee. Jack’s Book pg. 295)
In the late fifties or early sixties, Kerouac switched from wine  to whiskey,  and was also drinking rum at this point, but whiskey was to remain his drink of choice (and that of his mother) for the rest of his life. In Tristessa he had said that he was drinking “Juarez Bourbon whiskey” and that he mixed it with Canadian Dry, while most biographers and friends have recounted his fondness for Johnny Walker Red. During a trip to France, Kerouac began drinking Cognac, and once told Philip Whalen that “Cognac [is] the only drink in the world, with soda and ice, that won’t actually kill you.”
While a preeminent chronicler of America, Kerouac also spent a significant amount of time in Mexico, where he developed a taste for tequila and his signature drink, the margarita.Kerouac’s margarita is far from the saccharine slushie many would associate it with today. The drink is essentially a derivative of the Sidecar, substitute the cognac for tequila, the lemon juice for lime, keep the triple sec and you have it. Shake well, straining into a cocktail glass.After a few of these you’ll feel as free as Kerouac's  prose.

Kerouac was aware of his alcoholism and his experiences which made up the text of Big Sur explain how the man was not coping with his problem.  In the following passage, Kerouac explains alcoholism. “Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head…you can kill with a few drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there’ll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you’re chemically overloaded and you’ll have to sleep it off but can’t sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in-Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares (nightmares of death).” (Kerouac, Big Sur pgs 74-75).

  Big Sur was the last novel that would make up the Legend of Duluoz collection although the author would continue to write about his youth in future works.
In Big Sur Kerouac concludes the novel with a detailed account of his nervous breakdown. “Masks explode before my eyes when I close them, when I look at the moon it waves, moves, when I look at my hands and feet they creep-Everything is moving, the porch is moving like ooze and mud, the chair trembles under me” (Kerouac Big Sur Pg 200).
In the following  paranoiac passage, Kerouac explains a premonition of his death.: "But angels are laughing and having a big barn dance in the rocks of the sea…Suddenly as clear as anything I ever saw in my life, I see the Cross…it stays a long time, my heart goes out to it, my whole body fades away to it.(Kerouac Big Sur Pgs.204-205)

Throughout his troubled  life Kerouac made an effort to learn about other cultures, but the projections and language he uses are nevertheless within a white framework. He like a lot of beat writers mistranslated ideas, symbols and words to suit their own needs, creating a parallel literary reality. Artist Medinltz says that Kerouac helped “Perpetuate negative and, at the same time, romanticized racist stereotypes.” There are many scholarly papers that fortunately, have been written about this. that you  can search for and read online and elsewhere.

He married Edie Parker in 1944, but their marriage ended in divorce after only a few months. In 1950, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, who gave birth to his only daughter, Jan Kerouac, but this second marriage also ended in divorce after less than a year. Kerouac married Stella Sampas, who was also from Lowell, in 1966.

 Though Kerouac was married, his wife describes his isolation after marriage.  “It was bad for Jack, living in Florida. He had no real friends. In Lowell, Jack was…as isolated as he had been in Florida. Though she (Kerouac’s Mother) was fairly incapacitated by her stroke he was still operating under the stern eye of Memere.”
With Kerouac’s mother sick, the author attempted to continue his writing.  Between March and May of 1967, Kerouac wrote a reworking of the period of his life he covered in The Town and the City called the Vanity of Duloz . In February of 1968, Kerouac was told by his friend Luanne Henderson that Neal Cassady had died in Mexico City.  Henderson spoke of Kerouac’s reaction after hearing of Cassady’s death “Afterward, Jack liked to pretend he didn’t really think Neal was dead, even telling interviewers from The Paris Review that Neal would show up again someday and surprise everyone.”
After resettling in Florida by 1968, Kerouac settled with his wife and together they tried to take care of the author’s ailing mother. Jack wrote very little during his final year and would rarely leave the house. Stuck in a sad exile,this  mystical breath had grown tired, what was once beautiful  had begun to  drift towards bitterness.

Jack was not immortal, although for me his words are, and he left this planet on October 21 1969, at only 47 years of age, related to alcoholism from an abdominal hemorrhage.  

After his death he left us with a  rather complicated legacy but  nevertheless Kerouac’s influence on literature and culture is still felt  very  strongly today. Artists including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band’s greatest influences, and .writers like  Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing too,

 Kerouac’s iconic status shows no signs of letting up. All his books are still in print and his masterpiece On the Road  remains a defining work of the post war Beat and Counterculture generation, it appears on virtually every list of the 100 greatest American novels. Kerouac's words, spoken through the narrator Sal Paradise, continue to inspire today's youth with the power and clarity with which they inspired the youth of his own time

There are two types of people in this world; those that ‘get’ Kerouac, and those that do not. I am in the first category, of course, so  happy birthday Jack, your impact continues to be felt , your satori breath released , and your legacy today is stronger today than ever ... om  switchin on.... tomorrow's dawns chorus echoes,anesthesising 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.blessed be you in golden eternity., and as Jack said "Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven  now." 

 A passage from On the Road, though written about others, may describe him best: "I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!"

Happy 100th  Birthday, Jack.Kerouac.

 

 How to meditate- Jack Kerouac

-lights out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a ‘I-hope-you’ or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes-and
with joy you realize for the first time
‘thinking’s just like not thinking-
So I don’t have to think
any
more’

Woman - Jack Kerouac

      A woman is beautiful
       but
          you have to swing
          and swing and swing
          and swing like
          a hankerchief in the
                                       wind

149th Chorus - Jack Kerouac

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 - Jack Kerouac

The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the Void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, Lice, Lizards, rats, roan
Racing horses, poxy bucolic pig tics,
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 - Jack Kerouac

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 - Jack Kerouac

Left the Tombs to go
  and look at the
  Millions of cut glass-
-a guy clocking them,
as you look you swallow,
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 - Jack Kerouac

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

Jack Kerouac: I'm Sick of Myself...I'm Not a Courageous Man

 A rare interview of Jack Kerouac in French (with english subtitles) for a Canadian television channel in which he explains how he came up with the name that described the literary movement of his generation... the Beat Generation. Kerouac also talks about the differences with the beat generation and the Bohemians and when asked about himself, he admits being sick of himself, although he does think of himself as a great writer...

Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show  1959

 

 Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road

This 28-minute recitation was apparently recorded on an acetate disc in the 1950s but thought lost for decades. It re-surfaced during the late 1990s. Enjoy.

You may also like this playlist "Music in On The Road." https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ...

Tibetan Uprising Day 2022

 

Each year on March 10th, Tibetans and allies around the world commemorate Tibetan Uprising Day and remember the courageous Tibetans who took a stand against Chinese imperialism. It is a symbol in Tibetan history, marking the day in 1959 when tens of thousands of Tibetans  rose up in protest against China’s occupation of Tibet. This revolt was preceded by several deliberate acts of the Chinese which deprived the Tibetans of freedom to follow their religious practices, customs and traditions.The all-enveloping subjugation, discrimination and harassment resulted in pent up frustrations amongst the peaceful Tibetans which burst out in the form of an unprecedented uprising.

 63 years after the first uprising, Tibet’s culture is in peril with more than 800,000 Tibetan children separated from their families and at risk of losing their connection to their native culture. The destruction of Buddhist monuments and the crackdown in Drakgo has been likened to the Cultural Revolution. Dozens of Tibetans who have spread news about this tragedy have been arrested. 

The vast landlocked Tibet is a region in Central Asia inhabited mainly by the Tibetan people. For thousands of years Tibet was a self-governing, independent entity with its’ own language, script, costumes, traditions & religion. Being an independent Buddhist nation in the Himalayas, Tibet had little contact with the rest of the world. It existed as a rich cultural storehouse of the Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings of Buddhism.Religion is a unifying theme among the Tibetans, as is their language, literature, art, and world view developed by living at high altitudes, under harsh environments.

After  Chinas newly established communist government  took over Tibet in 1949- 50, in an invasion of unprovoked aggression, a treaty was imposed on the Tibetan  government acknowledging  sovereignty over Tibet  but recognising the Tibetan governments autonomy with respect to Tibets internal affairs. But as the Chinese consolidated their control, they repeatedly violated the treaty, nut since it was signed under duress anyway  the agreement was already in  violation of international law. In open resistance and with simmering resentment growing it led to the first major popular uprising against ChinsesE rule. 

On 10 March - in Lhasa in 1959, the Dalai Lama was supposed to attend a dance troupe performance, but he was told he could not bring his bodyguards.Fearing his abduction to Beijing soon thousands of Tibetans surrounded the Norbulinka summer palace of their spiritual leader, in order to protect him from being taken away by the Chinese army. From Tibet then aged 23 he reached the safety of India having escaped on foot disguised as a soldier in a gruelling 15- day journey over the Himalayan mountains, traveling by night and hiding by day. where he has maintained a government-in-exile in the foothills of the Himalayas ever since.

On March 12, 1959, two days after the National Uprising Day, thousands of women gathered on the ground called Dri-bu-Yul-Khai Thang in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa. This demonstration marks Tibetan Women’s Uprising Day. March 12th was the catalyst that sparked the Tibetan Women’s Movement for independence.

Tibetan rebels launched an attack on March 19, but Chinese troops captured the city on March 25.The uprising was vastly outnumbered and met with extreme force, and brutal suppression, some 87,000 Tibetans were killed, and some 100,000 fled as refugees.resulting in the beginning of increasingly harsh  Chinese rule over Tibet.Members of the Dalai Lama's bodyguard  remanng in Llasha were disarmed and publicly executed  or arrested, and monasateries and temples around the city were looted or destroyed.

The Chinese government dissolved the Tibetan  government headed by the Dalai Lama on March 28, 1959, and the Panchen Lama assumed control of the Tibetan government on April , 1959. The Malayan government condemned the Chinese governments use of military force against the Tibetans on March 20, 1959, and Prime Minister Nehru of India expressed support for the Tibetan rebels on March 30, 1959. 

Prior to its invasion, Tibet had a theocratic government of which the Dalai Lama was the supreme religious and temporal head. The Chinese media routinely try to illustrate a narrative of oppression  being commonplace in Tibet  before their invasion and painting the Dalai Lama  as a terrorist and dangerous seperatist to justify their occupation, stating they freed the pEople of Tibet from "misery" and " slavery" under a feudal serfdom controlled by the Dalai Lama and his followers to try and distract us from the human rights abuses that China committed.Though it was no Shangri-La like paradise not only are their contradictions in this false narrative of serfdom and oppression that China likes to portray, most scholars have soundly rejected it and are moving away from this idea. 

Tibetans since the invasion were treated as second-class citizens in their own country. They are routinely kicked out of their homes and sent to townships so the government can ‘develop’ occupied spaces '. Over 6,000 monasteries have been destroyed and those that have survived are not being used by monks, but ironically, are used as spiritual attractions for – mostly Chinese – tourists while they tighten Tibetans’ religious freedom. Areas that were once spiritual spots and pure nature are used as nuclear waste sites. Worst of all, Tibetans do not have freedom of speech, religion or movement. Many passports have been recalled and the borders are closed, trapping Tibetans in the country as their culture and land diminishes.Chines replaced Tibetan as the official language, Despite official pronouncements, there has been no practical change in this policy. Secondary school children are taught all classes in Chinese. Athough English is a requirement for most university courses, Tibetan school children cannot learn English unless they forfeit study of their own language. In addition the Dalai Lama says 1.2 million people  have been  killed under Chinese rule, though China disputes this. 

 

The international community has since reacted with shock to the events that have ocurred in Tibet. The question of Tibet was raised at the U.N General Assembly between 199 and 1967. Three resolutions have been passed by the General Assembly condemning China's violations of human rights in Tibet and callIng upon China to respect their right including their right to self determination. 

The following website https://tibetuprising.org/  is a useful one to view a timeline of Tibetan resistance over the decades. Large scale protests across Tibet took place in the 1980s and in 2008, as Beijing prepared to host the Olympic Games. China's  response left 227 dead, over 1,000 injured and 6,810 in prison.  Some have since been released.  Some are still behind bars.  Some didn’t live to tell the tale. A few not only survived until release but then evaded surveillance and managed to escape into exile.

At least 155 Tibetans, young and old, monks and nuns, have self immolated since 2009 calling for the freedom of Tibet and the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama..With no end in sight to the Chinese occupation of their motherland, the Tibetans have been forced to choose the path of self-immolations as an individual form of non-violent protest to highlight their plight and sufferings. The gravity of the present day situation can be understood from the recent action of  Tsewang Norbu, a 25 year old popular Tibetan singer attempted self immolation on February 25 in front of the Potala Palace in Llasha and was subsequently reported dead,  taking the number who have self immolated to 158.

Usually, protesters on this day end up in detention. Some known as potential protesters are also arrested in advance as a cautionary measure, simply meaning that innocents are imprisoned in absence of any crime. In some cases, Tibetan protesters in Tibet have been also shot on spot. Even Tibetans residing abroad are routinely locked up in some countries before March 10, on the pretext of avoiding disturbances between the host countries and Chinese Government.  Yes, March 10 is the most restricted day in Tibet. Several thousand of Chinese security force are usually sent throughout Tibet Autonomous Region. To cope with this, young and educated Tibetans have adopted new strategies to combat Beijing’s policies, always using non-violence. They of course use social media, a toll that reveal itself to be effective and efficient in waking up consciences in the world at large

Recent evidence shows that there has been a significant increase of Tibetan political  prisoners since the protests, and torture has become more widespread than ever. In 2015, Tibet Watch put the testimony of seven torture survivors in front of the UN. Voices that China tried to silence now told tales of barbaric cruelty and incredible bravery.  They told of the unbreakable spirit of Tibetan resistance. Please see the following link for more details www.tibetwatch.org/blood-on-the-snows 

At the moment the citizens  of Tibet do not have anything that resembles any form of basic human rights. Children and adults can dissapear at any time. To practice their religion means they will face prison, torture and death. The people are prevented from displaying their banned flag, or in joining mass protests, but Tibetans still assert their desire for freedom in the face of severe repression. 

Today this struggle  is being carried forward by a generation of Tibetans whose parents and even grandparents do not remember a life free of Chinese rule. Tibetans’ spiritual leader has pleaded with the Chinese government to make Tibet truly autonomous so people can have freedom of speech, religion, and movement. The Tibetan people should be allowed to retain their right to protest and allow their struggle and dscontentment with China and its illegal occupation and continued mistreatment of Tibetans to be recognised.Even though the plight of the Tibetans does not seem to garner the media attention it once recieved todays anniversary still marks  years of oppression and exploitation.The fact remains that China still occupies Tibet in much  the same way that Western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth century occcupied large parts of Africa and Asia. Chinas claims to have ' liberated 'Tibet rings hollow,and the continuing Tibetan resistance represents a legitimate important call for self-determination. 

 Despite being stripped of virtually all freedoms of their identity, Tibetans have continued to preserve their rich and diverse culture and traditions. The struggle is still not over yet. Tibetans are still fighting for basic human rights, such as the freedom to practice their religion, follow their own religious leaders, learn their own language in schools, being able to openly speak Tibetan, and live freely in their own country. 

On this annual day of resistance and hope for the Tibetan people, I pay tribute to the extraordinary courage of Tibetans resisting in Tibet, and all Tibetans, past and present who have courageously resisted China’s violent colonial rule I  urge citizens around the world to join me in calling for an end to China’s occupation of Tibet, stand in solidarity with the Tibetan people, to show them that they are not alone and that the world is responding to their calls for freedom . Call our governments to action to challenge China's repression in Tibet and to unite in action to help resolve the Tibet crisis, and hold Xi Jinping and the Chinese government accountable for it extreme and violent policies against the Tibetan people, and .commit to securing the promise of human rights and religious freedom for the people of Tibet and support their ongoing  struggle. 

International Women's Day 2022: Break the Bias

International Women's Day (IWD), celebrated on March 8, is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The women's day has been celebrated for well over a century, with the first one in 1911.

The day marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Significant activity is witnessed worldwide as groups come together to celebrate women's achievements or rally for women's equality.

Marked annually on March 8th, women's day is one of the most important days of the year to celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness about women's equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity and fundraise for female-focused charities.

International Women’s Day has a rich history dating back to the 1900's  when  women across Europe and America were finding their voice. That wanted and demanded decent jobs, better pay, and the right to vote or hold public offices, for their emancipation. It was out  of this air of dissatisfaction that International Women's Day was born. 

At the beginning of the 20th Century women across Europe and America were finding their voice. That wanted and demanded decent jobs, better pay, and the right to vote or hold public offices, for their emancipation.Women's oppression and inequality was spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change It was out  of this air of dissatisfaction that International Women's Day was born.

In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. A year later Russian refugee, labor organiser, and journalist Theresa Malkiel serving on the women’s committee of the Socialist Party of America envisioned a more active role for women within the movement, she declared February 23, 1909 “National Woman’s Day.” New York socialists celebrated with a meeting of about 2,000 people in Manhattan.

“The very first observation of our national Woman’s Day,” recalled activist Meta L,Stern three years later, “proved so successful that Woman’s Day became generally accepted as an annual Socialist holiday.” Along with May Day, she explained, the day stood “for new hopes and new ideals; the abolition of wage slavery and sex slavery; the coming of a freer, better and happier manhood and womanhood.” In 1910 at the Second International,  a world wide socialist  congress held in Copenhagen, German Socialist  Clara Zetkin  tabled the idea of an International Women's Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women's Day - to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women's clubs - and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament - greeted Zetkin's suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women's Day was the result.

Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in Denmark in 1911, International Women's Day was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

 Originally called National Woman’s Day, the monumental annual celebration spread across the world (officially celebrated in 1911), but it was Russia who unknowingly set the March 8 trend and helped spark a revolution. When tens of thousands of women converged in Petrograd, Russia to mark the holiday—as well as demand an end to World War I and protest food shortages—the demonstrations  turned into a massive strike. Within hours, 100,000 workers, including men, walked out on their jobs to join the demonstrators.
The movement grew to as many as 150,000 striking workers within a few days. Eventually, even the Russian army joined the marchers, withdrawing their support from the Tsar Nicholas. It was the beginning of the Russian Revolution.
After World War II, the holiday picked up steam, and lost many of its associations with socialism and radical politics. As the women’s liberation movement swept around the world in the 1970s, the United Nations designated 1975 International Women's Year and celebrated the holiday for the first time. Two years later in 1977, designated March 8 International Women’s Day, and, in 1996, began to adopt an annual theme for every year. The first theme was "Celebrating the past, Planning for the Future."The International Women’s Day website https://www.internationalwomensday.com/ has announced that this year’s theme is #BreakTheBias.The organisation is calling on people to “imagine a gender equal world” which is free of biases, stereotypes and discrimination against women. Whether deliberate or unconscious, bias makes it difficult for women to move ahead. Knowing that bias exists isn't enough. Action is needed to level the playing field. Research shows that gender equality will bring benefits for the whole of society, from healthier and safer communities to economic success and stronger democracies.

The UN’s theme is “gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow”. It is focusing on advancing gender equality in the context of the global climate crisis. 

“Continuing to examine the opportunities, as well as the constraints, to empower women and girls to have a voiWomen are considered among the most vulnerable groups to the climate change effects due to socio-economic disparities, but also as climate champions since climate action is strengthened by their presence and leadership.  Therefore, ensuring the sustainability of the future requires eliminating constraints to participation and increasing opportunities for women to contribute.ce and be equal players in decision-making related to climate change and sustainability is essential for sustainable development and greater gender equality,” the UN said.“Without gender equality today, a sustainable future, and an equal future, remains beyond our reach.”

This year’s theme aims to emphasise the vulnerabilities of women all over the world due to climate change-induced catastrophes. It also acknowledges the contribution of women climate activists for their efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Two important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – climate action and gender equality – also align with this year’s theme.

According to the UN World Prospects 2019, “The population of females in the world is estimated at 3,904,727,342 or 3,905 million or 3.905 billion, representing 49.58 percent of the world population.” 

The latest data from the UN shows that 80% of people currently displaced by climate change related natural disasters are women and girls. The trauma, disease and poverty left in the wake of these disasters will impact generations to come. Women are more likely to experience domestic and family violence in the wake of a natural disaster. Such statistics show that women and girls who constitute half the world’s population are further threatened by gender inequalities in the face of climate disasters. These threats are looming in the form of the disproportionate distribution of all socio-economic opportunities.

 Climate disasters negatively impact the health of women as they usually lead to malnutrition and lack of healthcare facilities. There are numerous reasons for the unequal distribution of health facilities for women during climate-led emergencies. Climate calamities destroy infrastructure, which includes hospitals and clinics. Healthcare resources are diverted to meet the requirement of those who are directly affected by the disaster. As a result, the reproductive health issues of women are neglected in low-income countries. Similarly, floods and droughts destroy agricultural land, increasing poverty risks for farmers. Such emergencies cause poverty risks and ignore the nutrition of adolescent girls and pregnant women, which create long-lasting health issues for them.

Purple, green and white are the colors of International Women's Day. Purple signifies justice and dignity. Green symbolizes hope. White represents purity, albeit a controversial concept. The colors originated from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the UK in 1908.

Today we celebrate the gains  women have made and to  keep on calling for the changes that are still very much needed.There have been many strides for women since the first IWD in 1911, but we still have a long way to go.

From a persisting pay gap to attacks on reproductive health, the fight for gender equality isn’t just a women’s issue, it’s a human rights issue. Women are still not equally represented in business or politics, girls facing sexual objectification from an early age,  girls told  to shrink themselves make themselves smaller. Women still forced to flee domestic abuse,  others facing honour killing, a practice that allows family members to murder women for dishonouring their families, by refusing arranged marriages, removing their faith or for simply dressing in ways considered inappropriate. I also note that the basic needs of most Palestinian women are daily being violated by Israels's ongoing occupation and siege. The siege in Gaza a contributing factor in one fifth of maternal deaths in Gaza.
Yet  contrary to Orientalist  misrepresentation, women have been at the heart of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa. At the moment in the region of Turkey and Kurdistan women are being politicised in a long struggle against theocratic totalitarianism, inspiring us in their fight for emancipation and freedom.
So today as I observe International Womens Day, I stand up for all women still trapped by injustices, still suffering from abuse, at the end of the day I believe the women's struggle is a struggle for the freedom of all people, recuperating the fair value of people over things. I recognise the practice and theory of mutual support that women have laid, that are the foundations of social change that we must keep building. Women who recognised the tactical necessity of standing and working together, lest they be destroyed individually, women who put to shame the ridiculous notion of  a 'women's place'. Their struggle is ours too. I acknowledge all those  who have been persecuted, jailed, tortured, simply for being a woman. Especially those who are among the most vulnerable in this present moment of time - the refugees. 
Let us also celebrate the  powerful women who've fought dictatorship, risked their lives to fight climate change and led mass movements for justice across the world, we cannot let their contributions go unnoticed today and every day. As Audre Lorde said "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her hackles are very different fro my own,"

In accordance with its #BreakTheBias theme, IWD organisers are asking people to pose with their arms crossed in an act of solidarity  as a symbol of their commitment to calling out bias, dismantling stereotypes, and rejecting discrimination and inequality.

Separately, the UN is hosting a virtual event which will explore how women across the world are responding to the climate crisis.

Speakers at the event include primatologist Jane Goodall DBE, climate justice activist Maria Reyes and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson. You can sign up for the event here.

In London, IWD will be gathering to raise awareness of gender pay inequality.

Under the UK’s Equal Pay Act, paying women less than men for the same work is prohibited. However, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that a pay gap between men and women persists, with men earning 7.9 per cent more than women in 2021.

On Tuesday, IWD will be staging “a public act of resistance” outside some of London’s biggest businesses. The meeting point for those who wish to take part is the Duke of Bedford monument, Russell Square from 8am. Find out more here.

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive .A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge women's equality.

Individually, we're all responsible for our own thoughts and actions - all day, every day.We can break the bias in our communities.We can break the bias in our workplaces.We can break the bias in our  schools, colleges and universities. Collectively we can all #BreakTheBias  and say no to unacceptable patriarchal narratives.

Saturated in Darkness

Words fail me, I don''t really understand anymore

Time passes, and the world  gets darker every hour,

As the bombs fall, shattering the sustenance of light

Now is not the time to allow indifference to consume,

Tomorrow brings the ache of sorrow to many hearts

The cries of desperation, as dovetails of peace dissipate,

From Gaza,  Kurdistan, Yemen and the Ukraine

Voices echoing in unison, a despondent refrain,

People keep praying to a malfunctioning God

As the Lords of misrule and chaos take charge,

While different lands are rained upon with missiles

Peoples lives blown apart, the earth stained with blood,

A 100 % death tax delivered upon innocent souls

Children left grieving for their parents and vice versa,

I will join the chorus and condemnation of the horror

As the evening implodes, get drunk to numb the tears,

Deserting my feelings of rage, will release a slow dance

Beyond  the oracles of despair, to assuage inner torment,

In the morning will wake, point clear fingers of blame

Profiteers of war and the power mad, who carry no shame.

 

Remembering the Towering Figure of Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg Marxist theorist, philosopher and economist and revolutionary socialist activist  was born on March 5, 1871 in the part of Poland under the occupation of imperial Russia. Her parents were Jews. She was thus born with two “disabilities”: a national minority and a Jew. She would acquire more “disabilities” as she advanced in her revolutionary career. 

A disease in early life kept her in bed for a whole year. It was wrongly treated as tuberculosis of the bone and caused irreparable damage leaving her with a hip deformity that left her with a limp for the rest of her life..

Rosa was a very intelligent child and could read and write by the age of five. At school she was always top of the class.She had her primary and secondary education in her “homeland” and became an activist Marxist as a teenager.From  a very early age, Rosa had a deep revulsion for humans' inhumanity  to other humans. For her, this went along with a deep  love for humanity itself, fascinated by natural science and art as well as politics. 

When the revolutionary group she joined was crushed, she was smuggled to Zurich in Switzerland. She attended the University of Zurich from 1889 to 1897 and came out with a doctorate degree in Political Economy. Her doctoral dissertation was titled The Industrial Development of Poland. From Zurich Rosa Luxemburg came to Germany where her reputation as a brilliant Marxist had preceded her. It did not take long for her credentials to be confirmed. She was not introduced. Rather, she introduced herself—in a particularly audacious manner.

By the time Rosa Luxemburg arrived in Germany, the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) had been established not only as the largest socialist party in Europe and in the Second International of Socialists but also as the party with the largest concentration of frontline Marxist theoreticians anywhere. 

In 1898, after marrying Gustav Lübeck to obtain German citizenship, she settled in Berlin where she joined the SDP a committed revolutionary, Luxemburg campaigned with Karl Kautsky against the revisionist  Eduard Bernstein, who argued that the best way to obtain socialism in an industrialized country was through trade union activity and parliamentary politics.

In 1903 Luxemburg,Leo Jogiches and Julian Marchiewski formed the Social Democratic Party of Poland, As it was an illegal organization, she went to  Paris to edit the party's newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza (Workers' Cause). The arrival of Felix Dzerzhinksy helped the movement to grow and together they formed the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. While in Paris she became friends with Jen Jaures and Edouard Marie Vaillant, Marxist leaders of the French working-class movement. 

At the Social Democratic Party Congress  in September 1905, Luxemburg called for party members to be inspired by the attempted revolution in Russia. "Previous revolutions, especially the one in 1848, have shown that in revolutionary situations it is not the masses who have to be held in check, but the parliamentarians and lawyers, so that they do not betray the masses and the revolution." She then went onto quote from The Communist Manifesto :

 

"The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they had a world to win." 

 

 Her faith was a socialist idea  that  combined the powerful passion of both mind and heart. She devoted herself to the cause of revolution,and its preparation. She lived and breathed its fire, with selflessness and devotion, in every waking moment she dedicated herself to its cause.  Standing bravely up for freedom with a  strong powerful intellect. An individualist, she formulated her own ideas, using her own words to energise and radicalise the people and bring about a socialist revolution.  She argued that 

 

" The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become. The chief form of bourgeois revolutions, the fight at the barricades, the open conflict with the armed poor of the state, is in the revolution today only the culminating point, only a moment on the process of the proletarian mass struggle."

 She followed no leader, was no ones puppet and when  she criticised Lenin,  it was in relation to dictatorial aspects. She said

 

 " Terror has not crushed us. How can you put your trust in terror."
 

She quoted Leon Trotsky saying

"As Marxists we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy." She went on 

"All that really means is: We have always distinquished the social kernal of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the steel shell of formal equality and freedom - not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy - not to eliminate democracy altogether....... but socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land, after the foundations of socialist economy are created, it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the Socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses, it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the political training of the mass of the people."

Possibly her  believe in democracy is what failed her philosophically, nevertheless the questions she posed still worth looking at today. She also wrote 

 

" the revolution is the sole form of war, and this is also its most vital law - in which the final victory can be prepared only by a sense of defeat.".

 

" workers blood should not be shed in defence of the capitalist system"' 

 

Rosa Luxemburg was prophetic in her warnings against the evils of imperialism, nationalism, and militarism.She warned that there would always be new wars as long as imperialism and capitalism continue to exist:

 

“World peace cannot be secured by such utopian or basically reactionary plans as international courts of arbitration composed of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic agreements concerning ‘disarmament’ … ‘European federations’, ‘middle-European customs unions’, ‘national buffer states’ and the like. Imperialism, militarism and wars will not be abolished or damned as long as the rule of the capitalist classes continues uncontested.”

She warned against nationalism as a mortal enemy of workers and the socialist movement and as a breeding ground for militarism and war. 

“The immediate task of socialism”,

 she wrote in 1916, “

shall be the intellectual liberation of the proletariat from the domination of the bourgeoisie as manifest in the influence of nationalistic ideology.”

Her warnings were prophetic, insofar as some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century—from the First to the Second World War and beyond—were committed in the name of nationalism, national hegemony, “national defence”, “national vital space”, and the like.

As a leader  of the radical wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), since 1899,she had  became an important figure in the world socialist movement, and became involved in the international organisation of workers, however  she broke with the SPD however  after it supported the imperialist drive towards war. She campaigned adamantly against the war , attempting to whip up general strikes and circulating anti-war propoganda She did so alongside comrades who, in every country, had a clear understanding of who benefitted from the slaughter of millions of young  people on the battlefields.

Because of  her relentless socialist agitation during the terrible First World War , she was imprisoned for it's duration, but after Germany's defeat she was released, and with her friend Karl Liebnecht,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/08/karl-liebknecht-german-revolutionary.html  formed the Spartacus league, and  she assumed the leadership of the radical independent socialists. Her will and her desire was to see an end to all exploitation and oppression.

She herself took part  in  revolutionary events , recognising the need of a revolutionary party, which could unite and give a lead in a revolutionary situation, seeing  socialism as a movement of the proletarian masses that should emphasise unity and equality rather than highlight the oppression of any particular group, with an undogmatic commitment to an unfinished notion of freedom that still appeals to many people today. 

In November 1918 after four years of war, German society crumbled both at the front at home, and a revolutionary fervour swept the land, the working class took to the streets in a series of strikes and the navy mutinied. though critical with some demands of the revolutionary movement, Rosa threw in her lot with her comrades, believing that she could not simply wait on the sidelines.  After the revolution failed  subsequently on January 15, she  and some of her  her comrades were arrested, including Karl Liebnecht,  Rosa was shot and dumped in the Landweher canal, Berlin.by right wing troops  opposed to the revolutionary movement that swept through Germany in the wake of the First World War.

Famously on the evening of her murder almost certainly knowing that her fate was sealed she wrote.

 '"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built... Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am , I shall be!" 

The murder of Rosa and Kark re-ignited the communist revolution, four months of bloody upheaval followed. Rosa's body was later found and buried, together with Lienbnecht, in Friedricsfelde Central Cemetery.

Today her ideas can be pressed into many meanings. There is a feminist Rosa, an anarchist Rosa, then there is a red Rosa, but she remains an icon in the truest sense of the word,  Long may Red Rosa be remembered as a strong defender of internationalist revolutionary socialism. 

She had determination by the buckets and a steely willful commitment. A combatant who strove for peace. who did not hesitate in her beliefs,  to speak and proclaim with her own independent reason her own opinion. For that alone I respect her. Her indelible mark has been left on the world,  who combined ideals with action , her struggle had always been to make  all humans lives better, which she worked towards with every fibre of her being. Her passionate life still stands as a beacon to those who have chosen to take up the many battles she waged.  Here is poem written by Bertolt Brecht in 1920 about Rosa.

About the drowned girl - Bertolt Brecht 

As she drowned, she swam downwards and was borne,
From the smaller streams to the larger rivers,
In wonder the opal of the heavens shone,
As  if wishing to placate the body that was hers.

Catching hold of her were the seaweed , the algae,
Slowly she became heavy as downwards she went,
Cool fish swam around her legs, freely,
Animals and plants weight to her body lent.

Dark light smoke in the evenings the heavens grew,
But early in the morning the stars dangled, there was light,
So that for her, there remained too,
Morning and evening, day and night.

Her cold body rotted in the waters there,
Slowly, step by step, god too forgot,
First her face, then her hands, and finally her hair
She became carrion of which the rivers have a lot.

When the Music Stops: Yemen, Art and War

 

With world attention focused on Ukraine, Gulf despots are also getting away with wanton aggression- with British support,  For over half a decades the people in Yemen have known nothing but war.. More than half of Yemen’s population  continue to face the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, unable to access food for survival, and the rate of poverty and hunger is increasing every day.

Eight million Yemenis will likely lose all humanitarian aid in March unless urgent funds are delivered, United Nations officials have warned, amid an escalation in a long-running war that last month caused the highest toll in civilian casualties in at least three years.

 More than 650 civilians were killed or injured in January by air raids, shelling, small arms fire and other violence, “by far the highest toll in at least three years”, according to UN figures.

Yemen has been at war since 2014, when the Houthi rebels took control of much of the country’s north, including the capital, Sanaa, forcing the president to first flee to the south and then to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led military coalition entered the war in March 2015, backed by the United States with the aim of restoring President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to power.

As is the case in Ukraine, The world must not forget Yemen a crisis that continiues to threaten millions of lives , that shoes no signs of abating., Potential disruption to global wheat supplies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine is raising concerns that war-torn Yemen's hunger crisis and food price inflation could deepen, with some Yemenis rushing to buy flour.

The World Food Program (WFP) this week said the Ukraine crisis is likely to further increase fuel and food prices, especially grains, in import-dependent Yemen where food costs have more than doubled in many areas in the past year.

Russia and Ukraine account for about 29% of global wheat exports and interruption to that flow is pushing up global prices.Conflict and inflation in Yemen have pushed millions to the brink of famine. Despite  years of destruction, ordinary Yemenis are still hoping for peace.

Against the might of arms dealers, warlords and militias, two talented survivors of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis still hope for a better future. Declassified spoke to Saber Bamatraf, a pianist, and Shatha Altowai, an artist. 

The couple fled to Scotland to escape threats from Yemen’s socially conservative Houthi rebel group; and now live just an hour away from an arms factory that supplies Saudi Arabia and profits from the devastation of their hometown. 

 

Producer/director: Phil Miller

 

All music courtesy Saber Bamatraf - https://saberbamatraf.com/ 

 

Paintings courtesy Shatha Altowai - https://www.shathaaltowai.com/

https://declassifieduk.org/yemen-the-war-the-world-forgot/

Celebrating the Life and Work of Welsh writer Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 - 15 December 1947)

Arthur Llewelyn Jones better known by his pen-name, Arthur Machen, was an influential Welsh writer of supernatural, occult and mystical stories. Born in the tiny but historically important town of Caerleon, Monmouthshire on 3 March 1863 , Machen was the son of a Anglican clergyman John Edward Jones and his wife, Janet. The shortened form of Machen, which Arthur used for most of his life, was a surname from his mother’s side of the family. He grew up in Llanddewi Fach, a rural parish outside of Caerleon, where his father was vicar. The area had a rich history intertwined with Welsh myth and folklore. The earliest legends of King Arthur placed the seat of his kingdom not in Camelot but in Caerleon. The landscape would influence Machen’s future work in fantasy and weird fiction.

He was a great enthusiast for literature that expressed the "rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown" that he summed up in the word ecstasy.

His main passions were for writers and writing he felt achieved this, an idiosyncratic list which included the Mabinogion and other medieval romances, François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those writers who failed to achieve this, or far worse did not even attempt it, received short shrift from Machen.

Machen's strong opposition to a materialistic viewpoint is obvious in many of his works, marking him as part of neo-romanticism. He was deeply suspicious of science, materialism, commerce, and Puritanism, all of which were anathema to Machen's conservative, bohemian,mystical, and ritualistic temperament.

Machen moved to London in the early 1880s. He did not immediately attempt to establish himself in Fleet Street. Instead he lived on little and spent his time wandering and exploring the city. He observed the strange juxtaposition of old and new, as Victorian development encroached upon the often dilapidated remains of ancient London.

In 1881, shortly before moving to London, he published Eleusinia, a poetic treatment of the Greco-Roman mystery cult. He published his second book, The Anatomy of Tobacco, in 1884. This was a whimsical appreciation of pipe-smoking. Through his publisher, George Redway, Machen was hired as an editor at the magazine Walford’s Antiquarian. During this period he undertook several translations from French literature, including a multi-volume edition of Casanova’s Memoirs, and produced his first novel, The Chronicle of Clemendy.

Although he came from a middle-class background his career was never less than difficult, and in a long life he was invariably troubled with economic problems, sometimes being one step ahead of poverty.

In 1887, at the age of twenty-four, Machen married a young music teacher named Amy Hogg. His father died the same year, leaving an inheritance that allowed Machen to write full time. He had developed a mature style of prose by the end of the decade. His writing reflected a sense of nostalgia and an interest in supernatural and occult themes.Most of his life was spent in London and the south-east of England, but Monmouthshire, or Gwent, remained a psychological presence, and was an important part of his imaginative vision. This remained for him ‘the enchanted land’ (Far Off Things 8). 

The landscape of Gwent he regarded not only as the place of his boyhood dreaming, but also a means by which the universe beyond the obscuring veil of our perceived ‘real’ world might be glimpsed – one in which Keats’ notion that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ was an objective and eternal law.

In the 1870s, archaeologists began to uncover remnants of Roman settlements in the region: stonework and pagan idols, As a boy, Machen was intelligent, reserved, and solitary. Fred Hando, in his volume of local history, The Pleasant Land of Gwent, attributes Machen’s interest in the occult to an article about alchemy that he read in an old issue of Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, when he was eight years old. Hando elaborates on Machen’s youthful reading habits: “He bought De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater at Pontypool Road Railway Station, The Arabian Nights at Hereford Railway Station, and borrowed Don Quixote from Mrs. Gwyn, of Llanfrechfa Rectory. In his father’s library he found also the Waverley Novels, a three-volume edition of the Glossary of Gothic Architecture, and an early volume of Tennyson.”

By the time he was sent to study at Hereford Cathedral School at the age of eleven, he showed an interest in history and literature. His family wanted ro send him on to Oxford, where his father had studied, but they lacked the resources. Instead, he decided to pursue a career in journalism.

Machen’s own grandfather, who had been the vicar of Caerleon, was a well-regarded local antiquary, who had discovered Roman stones in his own churchyard. The sense that strangeness and the supernatural permeated the very land would remain with Machen. That countryside with its Roman ruins and fairy glens would reoccur often in his fiction.

Machen’s style is of a uniquely Welsh variety. His works frequently cite those of his fellow countrymen, including George Herbert, who published a book of religious poems in 1633. The storied and ominously beautiful Welsh landscape is a frequent setting for Machen’s writing, particularly his childhood home in Monmouthshire, a county in southeastern Wales of significance to Celtic, Roman, and medieval history.

Gwent was of much greater importance to Machen than an imaginative playground that he could populate with reincarnations of long-dead apocryphal creatures and ghostly spirits. From his earliest days, he was haunted by an apprehension that nature was supremely indifferent to human fate. So while the landscape of Gwent remained a site of great beauty for Machen, it also evoked within him tremendous terror and an overwhelming sense of his insignificance. 

The first and last chapters of his Far Off Things detail a series of long walks the young Machen frequently undertook from Caerleon out to Wentwood, or to the hills just north of Newport, or out towards Usk or Caerwent (we might debate whether or not he was a ‘great’ writer but he was most certainly a great walker) during which he recalls falling into ecstasies of joy and awe at his surroundings. Here Machen recalls one such walk:

I saw everything in something of the spirit in which the first explorers gazed on the tropical luxuriance and strangeness of the South American forests, on the rock cities of Peru, on the unconjectured seas that burst upon them from the peak of Darien, on the wholly unimagined splendours of the Mexican monarchy. 

This brief excerpt evidences the hypnotic rhythms of Machen’s prose, his incantatory invocation of place names that possess their individual magic and mystery, and his immense imaginative power. While nature might have been indeed indifferent to Machen, his responses to Gwent were of an intense engagement that verged on the religious in its passionate intensity. Reconciling the natural beauty of his native Gwent with the terrors it also inspired in him formed the dialectic that would shape almost all of Machen’s fiction, as he notes in Far Off Things, his work ’had all been the expression of one formula, one endeavour. What I had been doing is this; I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realise my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent’.

In a letter Machen describes his obsession with the eerie scenery behind the rectory where he lived: “From the windows one looked across a strangely beautiful country to the forest of Wentwood, above the valley of the Usk. Beneath this forest, on the slope of the hill there is a lonely house called Bertholly, and to my eyes and imagination this house was a symbol of awe and mystery and dread.” 

Machen paints a similar picture—one “written to fit Bertholly”—in the opening scene of “The Great God Pan,” which describes the view from a rogue surgeon’s unsettling house-turned-laboratory: “A sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills.”

It was in the 1890's that Machen found his true voice in the form of a series of weird tales – notably The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Imposters (1895), along with a variety of unsettling short stories. These texts established his reputation,

Like Thomas Hardy, Machen responded to the spiritual power and antiquity of the British countryside. His fantasies are often set in medeival England or Wales.Machen’s life was a grind for economic survival, a struggle with the material world, but his writing was a reverse proposition, an engagement not with dull facts but with the world of the imagination and the liminal spaces where reality intersects with the unknown. Machen’s project was to reach through or beyond what is known to postulate a series of encounters with that hidden otherness. As Guillermo de Torro remarks in acknowledgment of the author’s influence on his films, Machen was a fabulist who tried to show a ‘reality invisible’ (The White People viii). and paid the Gwent mystic this tribute: 

 ‘Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realise that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or perverse we can be, somewhere in the long forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering – and ready to embrace us all’.

The visionary reality he found was dichotomized: sometimes he imagines a mystical landscape, a weird psycho-geography based on the intense natural beauty of Monmouthshire and the Vale of Usk, which is the source of spiritual sustenance; and sometimes he makes contact with an ancient and threatening evil inspired by a malign Celticism or Classicism. The first of these recalls the visionary Romanticism of William Blake and Samuel  Palmer, while the second is concerned with the workings of paganism and its capacity to disrupt the everyday working of what is accepted as reality, a notion heavily influenced by the supernatural stories of Edgar Allan Poe and R.L Stevenson.

Machen, brought up as the son of a Church of England clergyman, always held Christian beliefs, though accompanied by a fascination with sensual mysticism; his interests in paganism and the occult were especially prominent in his earliest works. Machen was well read on such matters as alchemy, the kabbalah, and Hermeticism, and these occult interests formed part of his close friendship with A. E. Waite. Machen, however, was always very down to earth, requiring substantial proof that a supernatural event had occurred, and was thus highly sceptical of Spiritualism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, his disapproval of the Reformation and his admiration for the medieval world and its Roman Catholic ritualism did not fully tempt him away from Anglicanism—though he never fitted comfortably into the Victorian Anglo-Catholic world.

Much of Machen’s work was produced after the end of Victoria’s reign and is outside the scope of the Victorian Web. However, some of the author’s best writing was done in the 1890s and is often linked to the Decadence and developments in occultism such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; his treatment of sexuality and what at the time were considered depraved states of mind also link his work to the late Victorian notion of Degeneracy. Inspired by Roman paganism and Celtic magic – with the evidences of Romano-British culture existing in the form of ruins in his home town – Machen was popularly understood to be one of subversive writers of the time.

His place within the Decadence is most clearly expressed in the publication of his first success, The Great God Pan (1894), which was issued in John Lane’s ‘Keynote’ series in a binding and with a pictorial title-page designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Associated with Lane, the publisher of The Yellow Book and the foremost publisher of the avant-garde, and with Beardsley, the most challenging artist of the Nineties, Machen has been placed by some critics a proto-modernist, stretching the limits of Victorian propriety.

 

The Beardsley title-page for The Great God Pan 

A version of the story was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with "The Inmost Light") in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific, because of its decadent style and sexual content; but it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Machen’s story was only one of many at the time to focus on the Greek God Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was possibly inspired by the poem "A Musical Instrument" published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends "... the great god Pan" 

His novella The Great God  Pan developed the panic and lust traditionally associated with Pan into existential and sexual horror. creating a truly terrifying vision of the god Pan. He presents the strange investigations of Dr Raymond, who performs brain surgery on a young girl, Mary, somehow releasing Pan into the modern world; later, it is revealed that the debauched Helen is Mary’s daughter, and is fathered by the god. Machen writes Helen’s body as a conduit which, in acting as the interface between mystical evil and the material world, is dissolved into an amorphous shapelessness, the sign of mental and spiritual collapse. The narrator is transfixed with horror as he watches her death throes: 

The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness …Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve.

Machen’s The Great God Pan is more generally a text of Decadent uncertainties as the Victorian age entered its transition into the twentieth century. HP Lovecraft, a contemporary of Machen’s, lauded “The Great God Pan” in his 1926 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” saying: “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds.” Machen’s amazing writing is emblematic of the collapse of certainties and the blurring of identities to create an epistemological confusion. The effects are destructive and unsettling.The main opponent Pan is never seen, but his influence looms over the events incomprehensible and undefeatable except in the short term. And that, in the end, leaves the readers with nothing but an inexorably growing sense of panic. The story scandalised the Manchester Guardian when it was published in the late 19th century.

This terrifying tale of occult miscegenation was recently, declared by Stephen King to be “one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language.”

 The Inmost Light' is one of Arthur Machen's most disturbing stories. The plot involves a doctor's scientific experiments into occultism, and the vampiric force instigated by his unrelenting curiosity regarding the unseen elements. A large and glorious gem-stone is the vampiric mediator; soaking up the soul of the doctor's wife; in the place of her spirit a demonic energy too-terrible-to-believe enters, transmuting her brain into that of something "not human".

The White People is another Machen great story, with a young girl’s diary leading us deeper and deeper into a world of strange pagan cults and ritual magic. It’s this story where we get some incredibly evocative language as the young narrator crawls through the wild countryside into a land of faerie hill where she undergoes a proto-Lovecraftian exposure to mind-warping forces.

Yet Machen’s engagement with an imagined world projected some positive messages too. Essentially a visionary Romantic, the author invokes a dream-world of idealized landscapes, largely modelled on his memories of Monmouthshire/Gwent converted into a version of paradise. Though sometimes threatening – as in the ‘The White People’ (1899) – Machen is at his most profound when he constructs an alternative to the mundanity of everyday life.

This approach is exemplified by ‘A Fragment of Life’ (1899). In this suggestive text Machen traces the dull lives of the Darnells’ petit-bourgeois life in London, only relieved by Mr Darnell’s discovery of a sort of transcendent countryside that ultimately leads the couple to regeneration in the landscapes of ‘Caermon’, a thinly disguised version of Caerleon, and the site of the character’s childhood. The conclusion embodies Machen’s belief that literature should not be realistic but invoke ‘ecstacy’ and ecstatic states (Hieroglyphics) with the aim of re-engaging the wearied urban soul with the spiritual sustenance of nature and the purity of a pre-industrial, ancient world. Drawing on his own experience in routine employment, Machen creates a complex balance between the ordinary details of metropolitan life and the poetic visions of a new life. His writing is transformed into prose poetry when he describes the landscapes of the new home:

they were in the heart of a wilderness of hills and valleys that had never been looked upon,and they were going down a wild, steep hillside, where the narrow path wound in and out amidst gorse and towering bracken, and the sun gleaming out for a moment, there was a gleam of white water far below in the narrow valley, where a little brook poured and rippled from stone to stone. [‘A Fragment of Life,’ The White People 219]

This sacramental lyricism stands in stark contrast to the gruesome details of Helen’s shimmering metamorphoses, and the contrast between the two encapsulates the range of Machen’s achievement as he strove to re-capture the mystical meanings obscured by Victorian materialism, or distorted by the pretentions of science.

Throughout the First World War Machen was a patriot giving his full support to the war in Europe, believing that the Allied forces were fighting a just war against the evil German Empire.His most famous piece was wriiten during this time ‘The Bowmen’ (1914), in which he imagined the archers of Agincourt rising up to protect British troops in the trenches; in an age of deep anxiety, and with unrest growing even before the first year of conflict had come to an end, some believed it to be a true account based on soldiers’ testimony, and it was the source of the legend of the Angels of Mons. sparking a whole series of myths  and giving hope to thousands of soldiers in battle.

The story caused a sensation and was published in a collection of wartime fiction, which sold very well. Machen was encouraged to turn his attention back to creative writing, publishing a series of stories capitalizing on this success, most of which were morale-boosting propaganda, but the most notable, "The Great Return" (1915) and the novella The Terror (1917), were more accomplished. He also published a series of autobiographical articles during the war, later reprinted in book form as Far Off Things. During the war years Machen also met and championed the work of a fellow Welshman, Caradog Evans.

Machen’s synthesis of mythology, horror and fantasy was popular, and he enjoyed some benefits from the rise of spiritualism and occultism in the aftermath of the Great War, with much of his fiction being reprinted; but his later years could barely be described as any more secure than his early ones.

Machen’s rise in the literary world was cut short by a scandal that did not really involve him. The Decadent Movement was widely repudiated in the mid-1890s when Oscar Wilde was put on trial for sodomy and gross indecency.In 1921 he published an obituary of his former editor at The Academy, Lord Alfred Douglas. In the obituary he alluded to the homosexual affair between Lord Alfred and Oscar Wilde, which had been the cause of Wilde’s trial and disgrace. Awkwardly for Machen, Lord Alfred was not, in fact, dead. He sued The Evening News. Machen was fired. He responded to his exile from Fleet Street with a quotation from the Psalms in Latin: “Eduxit me de lacu miseriae, et de luto faecis” (“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay,” in the King James Version). 

One has to wonder whether he sabotaged his own career intentionally, or at least subconsciously. Machen continued to write over the next decade but did not publish. Fortunately, he still had his inheritance to live upon. He also gained a basic income from journalism and from work as a publisher’s reader.

From all I've read, Machen was a fairly reserved man, but also one who liked people. He especially liked observing all different kinds of folks out in the streets of his beloved London and, especially, in pubs. Arthur was also a man who, while able to live quite frugally when circumstances required it, liked good food and drink when he could afford it.

As the turn of the twentieth century approached however, Machen suffered a terrible loss. After a long illness, his wife, Amy, died of cancer in 1899. Machen was overwhelmed with grief and it plunged Machen into the depths of despair and like Dickens before him he took to making long and rambling walks through the city at any hour of the day or night.

During these walks he would stare at buildings and streets, conscious that there were hidden lives and meanings lurking behind what were seemingly ordinary places and façades. Looking beyond the ordinary was a practice that informed many of his stories, in many ways the beginnings of psycho-geography as a concept in writing.

Psychogeography originated in 1950’s Paris with Guy Debord, the creator of the avant-garde group, the Lettrist International. Debord’s own definition is as follows:  “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”  Debord himself said that the definition had a “ had a “pleasing vagueness” which is rather convenient considering the wide range of situations the term has been applied to. which is rather convenient considering the wide range of situations the term has been applied to. He attributes the invention of the term to “an illiterate Kabyle” in his essay Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

While the term originated in the 1950’s, figures such as Blake, de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen were all responsible for an imagining of a city that had a spirit of place, and looked for ways to experience what were familiar surroundings in new and insightful ways.

The term "psychogeography" is used to illustrate an array of ideas, from ley lines and the occult to urban walking and political radicalism. At its heart it unveils the story of a place by wandering through it and looking for clues and connections that will tell its history. Machen was a pioneer of this before it was ever given a name: He explores the by-ways of London where things happen that you can't explain.

Friends encouraged Machen to recover from his devastating loss by cultivating his spiritual life. Through Arthur Edward Waite, he joined the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Though Machen shared the group’s interest in the Western Mystery Tradition his own spiritual awakening was leading him in a different direction.

Machen was a lifelong Anglican Christian. Following the death of his wife, he experienced a religious epiphany. He would later write that during the “autumn of 1899-1900 . . . the two worlds of sense and spirit were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from the inward and spiritual grace.” He was a high churchman who favored the catholic inheritance of the Church of England over the reformed inheritance. But he identified the catholicity of Anglicanism with a Celtic Christianity that predated the arrival of missionaries from the Church of Rome.

He found other ways to work through the heartbreak of Amy’s death as well. In 1901, he made the perhaps unexpected—but to anyone who knows the healing potential of theater, not surprising—decision to become an actor. He joined Frederick Benson’s theater company. Touring and performing gave Machen a source of optimism and confidence, which spilled over into the rest of his life. Though previously extremely reserved, he now became more outgoing and gregarious.

Four years after Amy’s death, Machen married for the second time, to Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston. Purefoy, as she was called, was a fellow member of Benson’s company. The couple frequently toured with the troupe and enjoyed a rather bohemian lifestyle. It was a long and happy union and the couple went on to have a son and daughter. Hilary and Janet.

He travelled all over the country, acting but also picking up snippets of fact and fantasy to turn into stories. His acting career came to an end in 1909 and his series of autobiographical writings began with what was probably his masterpiece, Far Off Things, in the final years of the Great War.

Purefoy encouraged Machen in both his faith and his writing. In 1906, at last, he published a collection of old and new pieces, The House of Souls. The following year, he published his masterwork  The Hill of Dreams in which a young man recalls a childhood in rural Wales filled with sensual visions from earlier times,and a quest for beauty through literature, love and dreams. It is widely regarded as Machen's finest lyrical work.

The eponymous Hill of Dreams is a ruined Roman fortress where the young Lucian Taylor saw visions of an erotically pagan otherworld. As he moves to London the visions become an uncomfortable force, a web drawing him in as a spirit dwelling within him gains more and more power. 

How much The Hill of Dreams is spiritual autobiography is disputable, there can be no doubt however that Lucian’s experience in some way mirrored Machen’s. His precarious early life in London became the template for his stories; characters are frequently a hair’s breadth from death by starvation, the streets and modern inns, and the monotonous suburbs and labyrinthine rookeries that Machen endlessly patrolled were the settings for his abominations. Industrial smog and petroleum naphtha street lamps light the path to Hell, and the keys to Its gates are held by unwitting drunkards, prostitutes, street artists and tramps.

In other words it is not just the nature of the horror that makes it so effective, but where it takes place:

‘As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman and yet it was not human…. as I saw that face at the window, with the blue sky above me and the warm air playing in gusts about me, I knew that I had looked into another world – looked through the window of a commonplace, brand new house, and seen hell open before me. ‘

Unlike Dickens, Machen specialised in the unexaggerated mundane; Machen’s descriptions do not enliven what is seen, as in Dickens, rather they deaden it, in this lies the fear. The otherwise rather unsuccessful Novel of the Iron Maid perfectly evokes the mood:

‘Before me was the long suburban street, its dreary distance marked by rows of twinkling lamps, and the air was poisoned by the faint, sickly smell of burning bricks; it was not a cheerful prospect by any means, and I had to walk through nine miles of such streets, deserted as those of Pompeii. I knew pretty well what direction to take, so I set out wearily, looking at the stretch of lamps vanishing in perspective: and as I walked street after street branched off to right and left, some far reaching, to distances that seemed endless, communicating with other systems of thoroughfare, and some mere protoplasmic streets, and ending suddenly in waste, and pits, and rubbish heaps, and fields whence the magic had departed. I have spoken of systems of thoroughfare, and I assure you that walking alone through these silent places I felt fantasy growing on me, and some glamour of the infinite. ‘

This is the spiritual location of Machen’s adventure. In infinite streets anything can happen – anything must happen eventually. Those who criticise Machen’s overuse of coincidence proceed from a fundamental error; trying to interpret his writings according to a theory of realism that Machen despised. The events in his works progress as in a nightmare. There is a sense that when his characters wander aimlessly they are part of a hidden process. That whether they choose streets left or right, secluded courtyard or crowded pub, they are progressing down an unalterable path to the heart of the mystery. In an infinite labyrinth everywhere is the centre; Machen’s London as a whole partakes of the mysteries that occur within it.

A new purpose appeared in his writings from the early 1900s onward. His interest in Celtic Christianity and mysticism came to define his work. He began to write for The Academy, a conservative literary journal, run by Lord Alfred Douglas, in which Machen explored the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, placing them in the context of Celtic Christianity. Machen’s writings on religion emphasized ritual and the imagination. During this time, he translated his interest in the Holy Grail to fiction in the novel, The Secret Glory, about a young orphan who achieves salvation and martyrdom on a modern quest for the Grail.

In 1937 he was asked about his views on the Spanish Civil War by the editors of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. The vast majority took the side of the Popular Front government but Machen, was only one of five authors who supported the fascist leader, General Francisco Franco. He wrote that "Arthur Machen begs to inform you that he is, and always has been, entirely for Franco." 

This opinion reflected how much Machen was out of touch with political life. In all, 131 writers opposed the fascists. This included those writers who dominated cultural life at that time such as W.H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, Hugh Macdiarmid, Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West, Ethel Mannin, Rose Macaulay, Edgell Rickword, Laurence Housman, Victor Gollancz, Cecil Day-Lewis and A. E. Coppard. 

Anthony Powell, the future novelist, often saw Machen during this period. Powell wrote about it thirty years later: "When I was a boy I used sometimes to catch a glimpse of Arthur Machen in St John's Wood, with his longish white hair and Inverness cape, every inch a nineteenth century literary man... a type, I think it would be true to say, now entirely extinct."

The novelist, Frank Baker, was a regular visitor to the Machen home: "This exuberant and always jovial pair ... never seemed old; and although with beautiful courtesy they were always able to make us feel we were their contemporaries, they were completely at ease with our own years. In his outward person Arthur presented both the great man of letters and the actor-manager of bygone times: a black topcoat with an ulster cape over his broad shoulders; black wide-brimmed hat; a round and very solid head with brilliant blue eyes, and a tonsure fringed by the silky white hair... Everyone who knew Machen is agreed that he was one of the last great conversationalists... And Mr Machen's views were always strong; or, if he had no views, he would lead into an anecdote, the laughter would be fine, another round of drinks would be called for, tobacco reliit, and you were ready for the next act... the tenderness, the all-enfolding gusty humour, the Rabelaisian rumbustiouness which made up the greater part of him very soon came bubbling out." 

In 1943 an Appeal Fund, supported by George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, Max Beerholm, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Frank Baker, T. S. Eliot and Water de la Mare, raised enough money to keep the Machens in reasonable comfort for the remainder of their years.In old age he was regarded as something of a personality; bridging Victorianism and the new age.

His wife was buried on April 3, 1947 and he was interred on the 17th of December of the same year, two days after he died at St. Joseph's Nursing Home aged 84.in Amersham, Buckinghamshire,  a final destination in sharp contrast to his origins in rural South Wales.The Latin text carved in the shape of a cross on Arthur’s grave:  “Omnia exeunt in mysterium” means  “All things pass into mystery” 

An almost-forgotten and neglected  figure for too long, Machen rich body of work has received increasing attention in recent years  as readers discover him through writers he inspired. Machen is often reduced by many critics as a mere peddler of arcane mythology and occultist fantasy, but if you look closer at his best work it is clear that his ambition was to write novels that would reify those same joys, terrors and awe he had experienced on his childhood walks along the lanes and hillside pathways of Gwent. His stories disturb and perturb us long after we have read them not only because they feature Gothic staples, such as ancient curses and satanic evil, but because they reawaken our suspicion that reality is something that we dimly perceive and always fail to understand. He engages his readers on an emotional level.

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges observed:  ‘Literature is a game played with words – words are the stock elements – but we should not forget that in the case of masters, and Machen is one of them, this game of algebra and chess reflects an emotion’. 

Arthur Conan Doyle called Machen a genus, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats  and H,G, Wells admired him. Fascinating mystical and artistic practically everything Machen wrote in the 1890s had the touch of genius, and this even applies to his non-fiction, Machen is a significant writer whose work has  had a considerable impact on the development of horror and supernatural fiction.

S. T. Joshi sums up his influence, noting how he was ‘a harbinger of a kind of golden age of weird writing’ and offered exemplars for the writing of Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare and H. P, Lovecraft . All of these authors built on Machen’s interaction of setting and character, developing the psycho-geography that is central to his fantastical merging of landscape and psyche. Machen has been equally influential in the development of the more visceral physicality and body-horror of twentieth century horror; his descriptions of fluxing bodies and grotesque encounters has become a mainstay of the genre, and his work admired by modern practitioners such as Stephen King. Film too has responded to his dream-worlds. As noted earlier, Guillermo del Torro pays homage to the Welsh writer’s dislocating effects, and there is undoubtedly an echo of Machen’s grotesqueness in the bizarre body-horror of del Toro’s acclaimed fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)   which was influenced by Machen’s tale ‘The White People’.

As one of the genuine voices of Anglo-Welsh literature, Machen deserves to have a more visible profile and to be remembered as a master of occult horror alongside those who came after him (though it is worth noting that he would have strenuously, and with justice, resisted the idea that he was simply or solely a horror writer). 

Alongside others mentioned Machen admirers have included the film director Michael Powell, Jorge Luis Borges, Hitchcock’s regular composer Bernard Herrmann, J.B Preistly, Mick Jagger, Stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, plus the comic genius that is Barry Humphries and the sadly missed Mark E Smith, of the Fall  who named their 2000 album The Unutterable ,from the master and said: “The real occult’s in the pubs of the East End. In the stinking boats of the Thames, not in Egypt. It’s on your doorstep basically.”

Machen's disturbing stories have also had a far-reaching influence on generations of post-war writers, such as Paul Bowles.Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker and Alan Moore, who have all drawn upon Machen for inspiration in their own novels, stories,which their fans have been content to enjoy without necessarily feeling compelled to pursue Machen’s distinctive note of weirdness back to the source.

It has always amazed me that Machen's work is so undervalued here in Wales. Although Machen was known by serious horror buffs and students of London's occult literature, his work had sunk into relative obscurity compared with horror writers such as H P Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.
The problem with Machen for Welsh critics is that he doesn't fit comfortably into the realism-dominated, Welsh writing (in English) canon. He is a one-off, an outsider. Add to this a snooty attitude from academia towards genre fiction in general (horror stories aren't real writing are they?) and you begin to understand why Machen's work has slipped into the margins in Wales.

It's a shame because he has written some of the best short stories in the English language. I personally think his work is incredible.  At least with the surge of interest in psychogeography over the past years, Machen seems at last to be getting the attention he deserves. Machen's belief that the British landscape retains the imprint of those who live in it has inspired writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd to explore London's psychogeography too.

Machen's legacy is protected by the Friends of Arthur Machen, an organization with an international membership and the source of modern scholarship on this unusual and challenging writer. The society publishes a journal, Faunus, and a regular newsletter, Machenalia, and in 2005 issued John Gawsworth’s biography of Machen, written in the 1930s.Within the fellowship you will encounter interest in mysticism, in the occult, in both paganism and Christianity, in the decadence of the 1890s, in the mysterious landscapes of Gwent and London.

If you’d like to read something by Machen, project Gutenberg has a number of his stories for free,you can't go wrong with any of them.Many years after his death Arthur  Machen still deserves our attention.https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/389

Given the length and breadth of his career it is somewhat surprising that almost no recordings of him exist. In 1934 he wrote to friend Montgomery Evans, “nor do I imagine that the B.B.C. has heard of me.”

He did eventually record at least one program for the BBC in March of 1937. A three-and-a-half minute fragment of the broadcast survives. It may be the only surviving record of Machen’s voice. On the program he discusses Charles Dickens, of whom he was a great admirer. It is a remarkable treasure for anyone who loves Machen as I do. Listen below..

 

 

 Bibliography and sources

Machen, Arthur. The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. London: Simpkin Marshall, 1915.

Machen, Arthur. Far Off Things. London: Martin Secker, 1922.

Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan. Online version published by Project Gutenberg.

Machen, Arthur. Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstacy in Literature. London: Grant Richards, 1902.

Machen, Arthur. The White People and Other Weird Stories. Edited with an introduction by S. T. Joshi and with a Foreword by Guillermo Del Torro. London: Penguin, 2011.

 Machen, Arthur. (1924) The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering. London: Martin Secker.

Sweetster, Wesley; Goldstone, Adrian. (1960) Arthur Machen. Llandeilo: St Albert’s Press.

Valentine, Mark. (1995) Arthur Machen. Bridgend: Seren Books.

Wilson, A.N. (June 6, 2005) “Angels were on his side,” The Telegraph. London. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3617433/World-of-books.html

“The Life of Arthur Machen.” http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machbiog.html

“Arthur Machen’s Writings: Annotated Bibliography.” http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machwork.html

The Friends of Arthur Machen .://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machfriends.html