Octavia Paz (31/3/14 -19/4/98) - Poetry and History

Octavia Paz was born Octavio Paz Lozano in Mixcoac, Mexico, then a small town, but today part of Mexico City on this day 31 March 1914. His parents were Octavio Paz Solorzano and Josefina Lozano. His maternal grandparents immigrated to Mexico from Spain.

The Paz family was a prominent family and part of the Mexican elite. His father and grandfather were active supporters of the Emilio Zapata revolution against President Porfirio Diaz's regime. His father was instrumental in the agrarian uprisings against the Mexican government and so was not around much during Paz's youth. 

Paz was raised by his mother, aunt and paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal, intellectual novelist and publisher.

His grandfather was noted for having written the first Mexican novel with an indigenous Indian theme. Both his father and grandfather were part of the progressive / leftist intelligensia of Mexico at the time.

When Zapata was assassinated, the family fled to Los Angeles, California for about a year until the situation cooled off when Paz was five years old.

Growing up, Paz was introduced to literature early in life through his grandfathers immense library filled with classic Mexican and European literature. He read from a young age and these books influenced his later poems and essays. His formal education was at Colegio Williams that he attended until graduation.

During the 1920s, Paz was mostly influenced by Spanish poets, Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Antonio Machado in his readings and writings of poetry. 

He first published poems as a teenager in 1931 and was greatly influenced by D. H. Lawrence. Two years later, at nineteen years of age, he published Luna Silvestre (Wild Moon) a collection of his poetry. He went on to publish many more collections of poetry, including “Piedra de sol” (Sunstone), which is considered one of his greatest works.

In 1932, he founded his first literary review magazine, Barandal.

After graduating from the Colegio Williams went on to study law, but abandoned his law studies in 1937 because as a young Marxist  he preferred to teach the sons of peasants and workers in the city of Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula. He was following in the progressive and leftist influences of his father and grandfather.

It was here in Merida that he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems, Entre la piedra y la flor (Between the Stone and the Flower) which was published in 1941. These poems described the situation of the Mexican peasant under the thumb of the greedy landlords of the day. These poems were greatly influenced by poet, T.S. Eliot.

At the invitation of Pablo Neruda, Paz traveled to Valencia, Spain in 1937 to join the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers during that country's brutal civil war. Here Paz's writings and sympathies were with the Republican side of the war and against Franco and fascism. He spent a year there before going to Paris, where he advocated for the Spanish Republic. He met poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Antonio Machado, Tristan Tzara, and of course Neruda. The civil war steered his poetry into a short-lived social realist mode, perhaps his first attempt to join words and action. “Elegy for a Friend Dead at the Front in Aragon” and “Ode to Spain” stand out as examples of this effort; the former addresses Paz’s “comrade” and finds brief moments of felicity in the psychology of grief and loss, asking, “What fields will grow that you won’t harvest? / What blood will run without your heirs? / What word will we say that doesn’t say / your name, your silence, / the quiet pain of not having you?” Paz also became known for “No Pasaran,” or “They Will Not Pass,” a call to arms in verse that caused a minor sensation. 

When he returned to Mexico in 1938, Paz co-founded another literary journal, Taller (Workshop) and wrote for this journal until 1941. This journal highlighted the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico along with a new literary sensibility.

Then, Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in the U.S. at the University of California at Berkley. Here he became immersed in Anglo-American modernist poetry.

When he returned to Mexico two years later, he joined the Mexican diplomatic service, working in New York City for a while. He remained in diplomatic service for Mexico for the next twenty years as he wrote his poetry and essays. 

In 1945 he was sent to Paris to work as a diplomat and here wrote his definitive and great book length essay, El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) (1950) This book was an intense look and analysis of modern Mexico and the Mexican personality.

In addition to his poetry, Paz was a prolific essayist, writing on a wide range of topics including politics, culture, and art. His essays are known for their insight and originality, and he was a leading intellectual in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world. 

Paz’s work was deeply influenced by his experiences as a diplomat. He served as Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968, and his time in India had a profound impact on his writing, inspiring many of his most famous works. 

He made contrary marks on history. Acting against the excesses of his own government in 1968, at the time of the Olympic Massacre in Mexico City, he renounced his ambassadorship in New Delhi and became a focus of opposition. Twenty years before, he published and analysed news of the Soviet labour camps, turning left-leaning Latin American writers virulently against him. Although his critics described him as a neoliberal or conservative thinker, Paz's roots were on the left, and he maintained a strong attachment to socialist ideals until the very end of his life.

When Octavio Paz died on 19 April 1998 in Mexico City, Mexico of cancer of the spine in 1998 his passing was mourned as the end of an era in Mexico. Paz's literary career helped to define modern poetry and the Mexican personality. When Octavio Paz died  Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was many poets, from  being the surrealist disciple of André Breton to the admiring imitator of Alexander Pope, alongside being an autobiographer and confessional writer. A social critic, a philosopher, translator, essayist and a brilliant editor, urgently alive in and to his time. 

Octavio Paz’s literary contributions have earned him numerous awards and honors, as well as a lasting legacy. In addition to the Nobel Prize  in Literature, which he was awarded in 1990 Paz received many other awards and honors throughout his career. He was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among others.

Paz’s legacy as a writer, poet, and intellectual is marked by his profound influence on Mexican and Spanish-language literature, as well as his impact on global literary culture. His  writing celebrated for its beauty, complexity, and depth continues to inspire writers and readers around the world, and his ideas and insights into culture, politics, and the human condition remain relevant and important today. He is important because his writings appeal to readers of diverse backgrounds.

Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet. He lived during an era where his early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism and HInduism. His later poetry dealt with love, eroticism, the nature of time and Buddhism.

As a poet, Paz was of the belief that poetry constituted "the secret religion of the modern age" and for Paz it was "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body . . . "

His poetry has been collected in two great collections: Poemas 1935-1975 (1980) and Collected Poems 1957-1987 (1987). I will end this post with the following brilliant essay by him.

Poetry and History - Octavia Paz

Every poem is an attempt to reconcile history and poetry for the benefit of poetry. The poet always seeks to elude the tyranny of history even when he identifies himself with the society in which he lives, and when he participates in what is called ' the current of the age' - an extreme case which is becoming less and less imaginable in the modern world. All great poetic experiments - from the magic formula and the epic poem to automatic writing - claim to use the poem as a melting-pot for history and poetry, fact and myth, colloquialism and imagery, the date which can never be repeated and the festivity, a date which is alive and endowed with a secret fertility, ever returning to inaugurate a new period. The nature of a poem is analogous to that of a Fiesta which, besides being a date in the calender, is also a break in the sequence of time and the irruption of a present which periodically returns without yesterday or tomorrow. Every poem is a Fiesta, a precipitate of pure time.
The relationship between men and history is one of slavery and dependence. For if we are the only protaganists of history, we are also its raw material and its victims: it can only be fulfilled at our expense. Poetry radically transforms this relationship; it can only find fulfilment at the expense pf history. All its products - the hero, the assassin, the lover,the allegory, the fragmentary inscription, the refrain, the other; the involuntarily exclamation on the lips of the child at play, the condemned criminal, the girl making love for the first time; the phrase borne of the wind, the shred of a cry - all these, together with archaism, neologism, and quotation, will never resign themselves to dying, or to be battered against the wall. They are bent on attaining to the end, on existing on the utmost. They extricate themselves from cause and effect. They wait for the poem which will rescue them and make them what they are. There can be no poetry without history, but poetry has no other mission than to transmute history. And therefore the only true revolutionary poetry is apocalyptic poetry.
Poetry is made of the very substance of history and society - language. But it seeks to re-create language in accordance with laws other than those which govern conversation and logical discourse. This poetic transmutation occurs in the innermost recesses of the language. The phrase- and not the isolated world- is the cell, the simplest element of  language. A word cannot exist without there words, a phrase without other phrases.
That is to say, every sentence always contains an implicit reference to another, and is susceptible of explanation by another. Every phrase constitutes a 'wish to say' something, referring explicitly to something beyond it. Language is a combination of mobile and interchangeable symbols, each indicating 'towards' what it is going. In this way both meaning and communication are based on the 'intentionality' of words. But no sooner does poetry touch them that they are changed into rhythmic units or into images; they stand on their own and are sufficient unto themselves. Words suddenly lose their mobility, there are various ways of saying a thing in prose, there is only one in poetry. The poetical word has no substitute. It is not a wish to say something, but is something irrevocably said. Or alternatively, it is not a 'going towards' something, nor a 'speaking' of this or tat. The poet does not speak of horror or of love: he shows them. Irrevocable and irreplaceable, the words of poetry become inexplicable except in tears of themselves. Their meaning is no longer beyond, but within tem; the image is 'in' the meaning.
The proper function of the poetic image is to resolve into a unity realities which appear to us conflicting and irreducible. And this operation takes pace without removing or sacrificing the conflicts and antagonisms between the entities which it evokes and re-creates. That is why the poetic image is inexplicable in the strict sense of the term. Now poetic language partakes of the ambiguity with which reality reveals itself to us. In transmuting the language, the image not only opens the door to realty, it also, as it were, strips realty bare and shows it to us in its final unity. The phrase becomes an image. The poem is is a single image, or an indivisible constellaion of images. The void left by the dissapearance of what we call reality is peopled with a crowd of heteroeneous or conflicting visions, inevitably seeking to resolve their discord into a solar system of allusions - the poem: a universe of opaque, corruptible words which can yet light up and burn whenever their are lis to touch them. At certain times, in the mouths of some speakers, the phrase-mill becomes a source of evident truths requiring no demonstration. Then we are transported into the fullness of time. By exploiting language to the utmost the poet transcends it. By emphasising history, he lays it bare and shows it for what it is - time.
When history allows us to suspect that it is perhaps no more than  ghostly procession, without meaning or end, ambiguity of language becomes more marked and prevents any genuine dialogue. Words lose their meaning,and thereby their powers to communicate. The degradation of histpry into a mere sequence of events involve the degradation of language, too, into a collection of lifeless symbols. All men use the same words, but they do not understand one another. And it is useless for men to try to 'reach an agreement' on the meanings of words. Language is not convention, but a dimension from which man cannot be seperated. Every verbal adventure is total; a man stakes his whole self and life on a single word. The poet is a man whose very being becomes one with his words. Therefore, nly the poet can make possible a new dialoque. The destiny of the poet, particularly in a period such as ours, is 'donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.' This implies that words are rooted out of the common language and brought to birth in a poem. What is called hermeticiism of modern poetry spins from that fact. But works as inseperable from men. Consequently, poetic activity cannot take place outside the poet, in the magic object represented by the poem; rather does it take man himself, not in the poem alone. The two are inseperable. The poems of Rimbaud are Rimbaud himself, the adolescent fencing with shining blasphemies, despite all attempts to convert him into a kind of brute upon whom the word descended. No, poet and his word are one. Such has been, during the past hundred years the motto of the greatest movement of the century - surrealism - been any different. The grandeur of these attempts - to which no poet worthy of the name can be indifferent - lies in their endeavour to destroy once and for all, and in desperation, the dualism which tears us asunder. Poetry leaps into the unknown, or it is nothing.
In present circumstances, it may seem ludicrous to the extravagent claims of poetry. Never has the domination of history been greater than now, never has the pressure of events' become so suffocating. In proportion as the tyranny of 'what to do next' becomes more and more intolerable - since our consent has not been asked for the doing, and since it is almost always directed towards man's destruction- so does poetic activity become more secret, isolated, and rare. Only yesterday, to write a poem or to fall in love were subversive activities, compromising the social order by exposing its double character. Today, the very notion of order has disappeared, and its place has been taken by a combination of forces, masses, and resistances. Reality has cast disguises and contemporary society is seen for what it is: a hetegeneous collection of things 'homogenized' by the whip or by propaganda, directed by groups distinguishable from one another only by their degrees of brutality. In these circumstances, poetic creation goes into hiding. If a poem is a Fiesta, it is one held out of season, in unfrequented places - an underground festivity.
But poetic activity is rediscovering all its ancient subversive powers by this very secrecy, impregnated with eroticism and the occult, a challenge to an interdict not less condemnatory for not being explicitly formulated..
Poetry, which yesterday was required to breath the free air of universal communion, continues to be an exorcism for preserving us from the sorcery of force and its numbers. It has been said that poetry is one of the means by which modern man can say No  to all those powers which, not content with disposing of our lives, also want to rule our consciences. But this negation carries within it a Yes which is greater than itself.

Reprinted from
Anthology of Mexican Poetry
Grove Press 1994

originally published , in an edition
by Thames and Hudson, 1959.

FREEDOM - Pat Arrowsmith ( b.3/3/30)

Here at least, I thought,
I shall find freedom.
Here in prison all encumbrances
will be removed.
I shall be left without the burden of
possessions, responsibilities, relationships.
Alone and naked I shall feel
a fresh wind over my uncluttered body
blow each pore clear,
cooling and cleaning every crevice.

At last I shall know the relief of
simply obeying orders,
owning nothing,
caring for no-one.
being uncared for.

I shall sit content for hours on end
in a bare cell,
glad to be cut off from
things, people, commitments and the
confusing world outside.

But I was wrong.
There is no freedom here-
prison is the world in microcosm.

In my locker is a cache of valuables:
needle, cotton, nail-file, pencil.
My wages buy me fruit and biscuits which
I hoard and hide,
fearing they'll get stolen.

Meticulously I arrange the flowers that
outside friends send in:
with difficulty acquire a tin of shoe polish:
carefully decorate my cell with cut out pictures:
get flustered if I lose my mug or bucket.

I am no hermit from the outside world,
but strain through busy days to read
each item in the newspapers.
International problems follow me inside;
a prisoner is picked on - she is coloured.

Every evening I am forced to choose
betwen a range of recreations:
I may read or dance or take a bath,
go to class, play darts or
watch the news.

I am seldom on my own:
a geometry of love, hate, friendship
forms about me.
Someone calls my name,
enters my cell,
asks a favour,
makes some claim upon me.

And I marvel
as I lie alone at night
that this world is as complex as the other:
that even here in jail I am not free to
lose my freedom.


Holloway Prison, London, 1969

FROM:-

BREAKOUT

POEMS & DRAWINGS

FROM PRISON

BY PAT ARROSMITH

Published by Edinburgh Univesity Student Publications Board 1975_

Edward Hirsch (20/1/50) - In Spite of Everything, the Stars.

Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of dazed stones
floating overhead, or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,
like a conductor's expectant arm
about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler's plates defying gravity'
or a hundred fastballs fired at once
and freezing the sky over the city.

And that's why drunks leaning up
against abandoned buildings, women
hurrying home on deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners, and
even thieves stepping from alleys
all stare up at once. Why else do
sleepwalkers move toward the windows,
or old men drag fllimsy lawn chairs
onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals
press sad foreheads to steel bars?
Because the night is alive with lamps!
That's why in dark houses all over the city
dreams stir in the pillows, a million
plumes of breath rise into the sky.

At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire
of stars flaming on the other side of the sky,
but the body stares into an empty night sheen,
a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels,
feverish old loves: don't seperate yet.
Let what rises live with what descends.

FROM -Wild Gratitude
Knopf,New York, 1986....


Had too much too think earlier, so now I rest in Wood Green,  at sisters ,still looking out, tomorrow  will have a look  at river.. sweet dreams... back soon.

March for the Alternative ( Saturday March 26th ) Why I'm marching.

This coming Saturday I will join thousands of protestors marching to protest against David Cameron's Tory led coalitions plans to divide Britain. Millions of workers, pensioners, students and benefit claimants are currently being kicked in the teeth by this government. A coaltion need I not remind you that the majority of the people of this country did not vote for.
Driven by right wing ideolgy hellbent on destruction, Margeret Thatcher herself did not dare to do to the N.H.S what Cameron and his cronies is about to try and do. He and his partner in crime Nick Clegg has unleashed a wreacking ball to the ethos of the welfare state and must be resisted. They seem intent on rolling back the years with mass privatisation and sweeping cuts that are based simply on ideological reasons, one based on capitalism and greed. The money supply which capitalism breathes with and the conservatives allies the bankers are sucking the life out of society while ordinary people suffer.
These are some of my reasons for joining the protestsors on the T.U.C March for the Alternative this Saturday.
The dismanting of years of progress by the wreckless antics of a priveleged few must be oppossed. The cuts about to be implemented will effect the lives of every person in the land, apart from a small elite. Ordinary citizens will be hit the hardest while the Tory's friends the bankers, who incidentally caused our current financial crises get away scot free.
Nick Clegg himself said last May that Ministers "would put fairness at the heart of everthing we do". He was obviously telling lies, because it would be hard person to find any fairness in any of the policies this coalition has pursued.
I would urge everyone who can, to try and join the demo on Saturday, we have nothing to lose and so much to gain, we must show this government that the people are united against them, we have the power to challeng them and ghange their direction.We must at every opportunity say no to their lies, their distortion of reality.
They want to crush us, and divide us, but we have the power to beat them, remember in recent times history has proven that their is no greater force than the will and the power of the people.
The Con-dem reality is a simple class driven policy of stealing from the poor and giving it back to the rich.Their vicious onslaught will continue unabated , with their dangerous policies impacting on us well into the future. It is time to fight back, time to march, time to tell them with one voice.No. For tomorrow's sake and for justice's sake.

When the Government - Adrian Mitchell (24/10/32 - 20/12/ 08)

When the government whips
when the government whips
it's a special kind of gangster
bashing out its brutal will
with a mouthful of morality
heartfelt of cruel thrill

When the government kills
when the government kills
it's a special kind of murderer
srangling with a hypocrite's sigh
mouthful of deterrence
heartful of hang shhot and fry

When the government tortures
when the government tortures
it's a special kind of thug
who's trained to be a terrorcop
mouthful of security
heart full of poison to the top

When the government bombs
when the government bombs
it's a special mass murderer
crazy with its own success
mouthful of democracy
worldful of emptiness.


Originally Published in Blue Coffee, Poems 1985-1986.
Bloodaxe Books

still very apt
I feel.

...Nothing is Random - Luna Auriga Serena

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be,
whether a long string of perfectly blue day ,
that begin and end in golden dimness,
the most seemingly chaotic political acts,
the rise of a great city,
the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light,
the distributions of fortune,
what time the milman gets up,
the position of the electron,
or the occurrence of one astonshingly frigig winter after another.

Enen electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability,
are tame and obsequious little creature that rush at the speed of light,
going precisely where they are supposed to go.
They make faint whistling sounds that when apprhended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying throuh a forest,
and they do as exactly as they are told.
Of this, one can be certain.

And yet there is
a wonderful anarchy,
in that the milkman chooses when to arise,
the rat picks the tunnell into which he will dive
when the subway comes rushing down the track,
and the snowflake will fall, as it will.

How can this be?
If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined,
how can there be free will?
The answer to that is simple.

Nothing is predetermined;
it is determined,
or was determined,
or will be determined.
No matter, it all happened at once,
in lesss than an instant,
and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance
the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given-
so we, track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece.

Time, howver, can be easily overcome;
not by chasing light, but by standing back
far enough to see it all at once.

The universe is still and complete.
Everything that ever was,
is;
everything that ever will be, is,
and so on,
in all possible combinations.
Though in percieving it we imagine that it is in motion,
and unfinished,
it is quite finished and astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are,
any event, no matter how small,
is intimately and sensibly tied to all others.
All rivers run to the sea;
those who are apart are brought together,
the lost ones are redeemed;
the dead come back to life;
the perfectly blue days that have begun
and
ended in golden dimness continue,
immobile and accessible;
and when all is percieved in such a way to obviate time,
justice becomes apparent not as
something that will be, but as something that is...

(Miyagi, March 14th 2011)

This is my random thought which I've been thinking since this morning. So many thoughts running on my mind. The sudden earthquake, the sudden  blast of nuke plants and Nothing is Random.

Roger Waters - Tear down this Apartheid Wall.

K

In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, was banned by the government of South Africa because it was being used by black South African children to advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so to speak, on certain songs, including mine.
Twenty-five years later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the song to protest against Israel's wall around the West Bank. They sang: "We don't need no occupation! We don't need no racist wall!" At the time, I hadn't seen first hand what they were singing about.
A year later I was contacted to perform in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from a movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was unsure whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go.
The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit the occupied territory to see the wall for myself before I made up my mind. I agreed.
Under the protection of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.
If it culd be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel's occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: We don't need no thought control."
Realising at that point that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would legitimise the oppression I had seen, I cancelled my gig at the stadium in Tel Aviv and moved into Neve Shalom, an agricultural community devoted to growing chick peas and also, admirably, to co-operation between different faiths, where Muslim, Christian and Jew work side by side in harmony.
Against all expectations it was to become the biggest music event in the short history of Israel. Some 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. It was extraordinarily moving for us, and at the end of the gig I was moved to exhort the young people there to demand of their government that they attempt to make peace with their neighbours and respect the civil rights of Palestinians living in Israel.
Sadly in the intervening years the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably annexing more and more of the West Bank.
For the people of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel's illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to support their families. It means that university students with scholarships to study abroad must watch the opportunity of a lifetime slip away because they are allowed to travel.
In my view, the abhorent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denials of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Where governments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means at their disposal. For me this means declaring an intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people of Palestine but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree with their government's policies, by joining the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
My conviction is born in the idea that all people deserve basic human rights. This is not an attack on the people of Israel. This is, however, a plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to artists in other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott.
Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa's Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes - and it surely will come - when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve."

This article originally appeared in the Guardian and The Morning Star.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/11/cultural-boycott-west-bank-wall

Obviously a successful boycott requires a general consensus. Can any boycott be described completely as just, is their perhaps room for compromise. Their inevitably will always be casualties on either side. Yet it is fact Israeli artists have freedom and thought to express themselves freely around the world, wheras this is not the case for the Palestinians who are prisoners in their own land. Daily Palestinian land is being stolen, their houses demolished and crops destroyed.Though recently Ian McEwan recently visited Israel and openly critisised actions goin on in Israel's name, standing in solidarity so to speak, I personally find that generally cultural visits normalise and legitimise Israel's actions.
Anyway a growing roster of international performers have declined to whitewash Israel's policies, these include Pete Seeger, Gil-Scot-Heron, Devendra Benhardt, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz and the Pixies. Another argument for some performers playing is that music can have a healing force. Not when your on the wrong side of a prison wall it doesn't.

R.S Thomas - Here

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow,
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.

Ist is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

Bradley Manning - The Forgotten Man

Bradley Manning is a 22 year old Army intelligence analyst , not a person I know personally but he spent his schooldays down the road from me in Pembrokeshire. He went to school in Tasker Milward where he is remembered for his integrity and intelligence. His mum, aunts and uncles still live in Pembrokeshire.
I personally believe him to be one of the bravest people of our time, it is being alleged that he released information to Wikileaks of abuse and corruptibilty in the army and governments. Barak Obama himself has said that whistleblowers themselves have an important part to play in democratic societies.
One of the videos he allegedly shared contained images of a US helicopter attack that killed 11 innocent civilians in Baghdad, Iraq. The Army, however  soon covered up this evidence of a war crime and somehow declared it "justified". Now they brand the exposing of this and their part in a massacre criminal. They have also accused Bradley of having shared documentation of similar atrocities ( " Collateral Murder" ) in Afghanistan.
Bradley has been identified as a person of interest regarding the release of  90,000 battlefield reports describing civilian deaths inflicted by occupation forces in Afghanistan, collusion with warlords, corruption, and an unvarnished view of a decade-long war. But still no actual charges have been made against him.
Instead of being lauded he has since been persecuted and hung out to dry.

Since these things have happened things have got far worse for Bradley as the Independant Newspaper and the News Statesman has reported. Beneath the U.S's veneer is the brutal treatment he has recieved. He has now been locked up for 8 months, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day, kept in a prison cell 6 feet wide and 12 feet high, ritually forced to spend days naked, simply because he embarressed the US army, and shown the world how lax their security is that a 22 year old could access all their information and simply download it onto his ipad or memory stick. Does any human deserve such humiliation, especially in a country where their is so much talk of freedom in other peoples lands. Is this the world that we live in now, I believe that instead of being treated like a common criminal we should be showing him gratitude, and he should be rewarded for bringing these abuses of military and governmental power to our attention. God knows what will happen to Julian Assanges if the Americans get their hands on him. Bradley's health is now beginning to deteriorate, he has become withdrawn and catatonic , feels persecuted and is now barely able to communicate.Is this how America treats its heroes. Mistreated and abused ! For humanities sake we must challenge this, e.mail your M.P, your AssemblyMember, Congreessman, Barak Obama himself, sign online petitions, anything. We simply can't afford to forget this honourable man.. http://www.bradleymanning.org/

INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY / A Century beyond the Fragments.1911-2011

Some writings for International Womens Day.

SARA TEASDALE (1884 -1933)

American Poet, work much influenced by Christina Rossetti. Died after an overdose.


There Will come soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of thewar, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.


Irina Ratushiskaya (4/3/54)

I Shall Write

I shall write about all the sad people
Who have remained on the shore
About those who have been condemned to silence-
I shall write.
Then burn what I have written.
Oh, how these lines will soar,
How the sheets of paper will fall back
Under the fierce blast
Of irrepparable emptiness!
With what haughty movement
The fire will outstrip me!
And the ashen foam will tremble.
But give birth to nothing.

Henriettte Roland- Holst (24/12/1865 - 21/11/52)

Henriette Roland Holst was born in Amsterdam. A student of Marx, she joined the Socialist Party, but broke away and founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1915.
Her poetry shocked readers at the time for its unorthodox rhyme and rhythyms and its subject matter.

Untitled.

Throughout the day we are able to ban the voices
Because the task takes all our strength,
But when day's fruit has ripened ito evening
We feel the many questions tightening like bows.

Half content we settle around lamps
Ans around the sadbess-defeating hearth's fire,
Relieved that the day which has emptied
Has left no dregs of greater pain.

For there is always something that we fear;
We are like the wives of fishermen at sea
Who day after day scan water and wind:
All they have heaves on the waves.

Our heart is embarked on world-whirling;
Storms and stillnesses move us,
Surf breaks against us, and we feel
Each shuddering go through our depths.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933)

Was a German, Marxist law reformer, pacifist and political anarchist. Jailed in 1914 for anti-war activities.

... far too many do not shrink from demanding from the workers once more new sacrifices of blood and property for imperialist wars. ' We went through the World War with its terrible demands and horrors, let the young men now bear what we had to bear,' so declaim, in heroic pose, men who in their time in the trenches piteously complained of being cannon fodder for capitalist profits, and ater the conclusion of peace swore, 'no more war.' The meaness of their attitude is self evident. The progressive workers have always felt it to be their elementarry duty that the fight of the 'old generation' should spare oncoming youth the pain that they have suffered, in order that the youth might reap where their fathers sowed, in order that they might grow beyond them, promoting the rise of mankind to higher life in freedom and culture. With our glances firmly fixed on the fate, the rights and the tasks of the youth, we say: 'The workers against imperialist wars.'

In the misery-laden atmosphere, with the unemployment totalling thirty-five millions, not a few are led astray by the imperialist war provocateurs and war makers, through the illusion that massacres of the peoples will provide bread. Men and women whose years have suffered bitter want, who have often hungered and frozen for months together without bread or shelter, find employment in war industries. Their propertyless , exploited slave existence compels them to hard servile labour there. The boom in the armament industry allows its controlling, profit-swallowing 'magnates' to pay to individual working men and women and clerks, and to small groups of them, higher wages for overtime and premiums for special output. Such expenditure is tainted with the corruption of bribery for the purpose of splitting the workers and crippling their power of resistance to imperialst wars; they are insurance premiums paid for carrying through the latter. The growth of the armament madness of the bourgeois states increases their miltary budgets and their need for revenue. For what those employed in the armament industry take home as wages, the masses of the workers must pay in taxes and through tariffs.

TOGETHER LET US ALL WORK TOGETHER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

GENERAL STRIKE - ERIC DROOKER

AWAKENING!

Trees offer shelter
as spring gives promise
and we go mad with song.
Blue haze and mist
comes creeping, wraps around
whispers protection.
Images of broken light
gently obstruct
barricades still being formed.
Far beyond stars move
look down
nature finds a soul,a voice.
From distant borders
winds scatter delusions
pokes in corners
shoots out branches ,earth answers back.
Petal bombs explode
sending magic echoes into dark clouds
buds wake early to greet the dawn.
Time drifts alongside never forgetting what is lost,
digging away the ground beneath our feet
epic heartbeats rise and fall.
New cadences sap and spin towards the infinite
shadows irreversibally change the paradox of seeing
a choreographed bloom, effortlessly rearranged.

A Poem Like a Grenade. - John Haines ((June 29, 1924 – March 2, 2011)

John Meade Haines, who was born n Norfolk, Virginia, published nine  collections of poetry and numerous works of nonfiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book ' The Stars,The Snow, The Fire.
In May 1947 he decided to move to Alaska, which had a decisive effect on his life and work.
He built a cabin on a deserted hillside above the Tanana River about 70 miles southeast of Farbanks in a spotso remote that he claimed ne could walk north from his homestead all the way to the Artic Ocean and never cross a road or encounter a village.
LivIng alone most of the tme, Haines spent 25 of the next 42 years in the Alaskan interior. In this isolated landscape he would become self-reliant largely supporting himself through hunting and trapping.
He had to relearn what his ancestors knew, how to live off the land. Working as a hunter, grdener, fisherman, trapper and homesteader. He also used these solitary years to master another primitive craft,making poems.
He was appointed the Poet Laureate of Alaska in 1969. A collection of critical essays about his poetry The Wilderness of Vision,  was published  in 1998. He went on to teach graduate level and honors English classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He died in Fairbanks, Alaska aged 86.
Alaska has lost one of its most creative minds.  singular and prophetic  voice of the times and the world in which we live.

A Poem like a Grenade

It is made to be rolled down
a flight of stairs,
placed under a guilty hat,
or casually dropped into a basket
among the desks
of the wrongheaded statesmen.

As it tumbles on the carpeted stairs
or settles quietly
in its wire-wicker nest,
it begins to unfold,
a ragged flower whose raw petals
burn and scar...

Its wastepaper soil catches fire,
the hat is blown from its hook.
Five or six faces are suddenly,
permanently changed...

There will be many poems written
in the shape of a grenade-
one hard piece of metal flying off
might even topple a government.

Y Ddraig Goch - Henry Treece (22/12/11 - 19/6/66 )

Henry Treece was a midlander of Welsh parentage who was particularly known as a childrens novelist, but also wrote  adult historical novels.
Dragons are leader, but are prone to slumber until aroused, then it is a force to be reckoned with, powerful and mysterious. Beware, one  woken inspires action. Slays apathy.
Dydd Dewi Sant hapus/ Happy St David's Day

The dragon of our dreams roared in the hills
That ring the sunlit land of children's songs.
Red with the lacquer of a fairy tale,
His fiery breath fried all besieging knights.
Whole seasons could he lay the land in waste
By puffing once upon the standing corn!

He was our dragon dressed in red, who kept
Sly ghosts from lurking underneath the thatch,
And made the hen lay dark-brown eggs for tea.
One word to him, just as you went to bed,
Made Twm, the postman, call next afternoon;
"Ho, Bachgen," That is what he'd say, "Just look,
A fine blue postal-order from your Mam!
Twm gets a pint for being that, I bet!"

The dragon cured us when the measles came,
And let the mare drop me a coal-black foal.
He taught us where nests lay, and found us fish,
Then thawed the snow to save the winter lamb.

Ho, Ddraig Goch, my pretty, pretty friend!
We were his children, knowing all his ways;
We laid out nightly gifts beneath the hedge,
Five linnet's eggs, a cup, a broken whip,
And heard his gracious sighs sweep through the trees.
But tears for all the fools who called him false!
One lad who sniggered fell down Parry's well;
The English Parson had a plague of warts;
Old Mrs Hughes was bitten by a cat;
The school roof fell in when the teacher smiled!

Ho, Ddraig Goch, they tell me you are dead;
They say heard you weeping in the hills
For all your children gone to London Town.
They say your tears set Tawe in a flood.
I'm older now, but still I like to think
Of your grat green glass-green eyes fixed on the Fferm,
Guarding the children, keeping them from harm.

Don't die, old dragon, wait a few years more,
I shall come back and bring you boys to love.

Picture of Henry Treece.

Harri Webb -( 7/9/20 -31/12/94) - A Sermon on St David's Day.

( The first H-Bomb was dropped on Bikini Atoll on March 1st 1954.)


Saint David sprung his big surprise
On far Bikini's isle
He watched the mushroom cloud arise
And allowed himself a smile.

And as that anger shook the world
He spoke to all mankind:
Heed now the warning I have hurled,
You are deaf and blind.

God's final messenger am I,
So allow me to acquaint
You sinners with what it is to try
The patience of a saint.

To you I breathed my dying word:
Remember the little things.
Now, since quiet counsel goes unheard,
My voice in thunder rings.

And since, in all creation's scale
The atom is the least,
That is the power that shall prevail
Till all your wars have ceased.

America, I have dried your seas,
Russia, I have thawed your snows,
Europe, your ancient rivalries
Must go as a bad dream goes.

Paris, Peking and Leningrad,
London, Washington, Rome,
Are egual now with the meanest pad
That the poorest man calls home.

And for the sake of a little place,
Accounted of little worth,
Behold, I have abolished space
And shrunk the globe of earth.

Now naked every nation stands
And egual in the scales,
And those once-proud imperial lands
Are all the size of Wales.

To her I speak as a father should
As her new life now begins:
Leave whoredom, seek the highest good,
Renounce your servile sins.

Although unworthy, it may be
For this you have spared,
To lead men's thoughts to a world that's free
Where all good things are shared.

My sign, it is the gentle dove,
So listen to my voice:
Mankind, it's time you learnt to love.
You haven't got much choice.

Reprinted from GLASNOS/POEMS FOR PEACE
CND CYMRU 1987

More on this Red Welsh Republican coming soon.

Oh have a good St David's Day/Dydd St Dewi Da

Lis of Greedy CEOS Who thought the best way to support region wide movement for change was go on a junket selling arms to dodgy Governments..

Samir Brikho CEO, AMEC

Steve Marshall Chairman, Balfour Beatty

Graham Cartldge Chaiman, Benoy

Mouzan Majidi CEO Foster & Partners

Ben Gordon CEO Mothercare

Keith Howells Chairman, Mott MacDonald

Chris Hyman CEO, Serco

John Stanion, Chairman & CEO, Taylor Woodrow

Prof Malcolm Grant President/Provost, UCL

Paul Skinner CEO, Infrastructure UK

Bob Fryar Executive Vice President foProduction, BP

Ian Gray Non Exec Chairman of Vodafone Egypt

Phillip Dilley Chairman, Arup

Stuart Laing Deputy Vice Chancellor, Cambridge University

Peter Gammie CEO, Halcrow

Lord Dazi Imperial College

Malcolm Brinded Exec VP, Shell

John Peace Chairman, Standard Chartered

Ian Conn MD & CE, BP

Richard Barrett Regional Director. Atkins

Rob Watson, Reginal Director, Rolls Royce

Victor Chavez Thales Uk

Ian King CEO, BAE Systems

Prof John Hughes Vice Chancellor, Bangor University

Dean Webster EO, Cyril Sweett

Michael Soeting Global Head of ENR/Oil & Gas, KPMG

Rob King Development Director ME, the Edge

Shaun Carter Regional Director, Carillion

Sam Laidlaw CEO, Centrica

Charles Hughes VP Marketing, Cobham Group

Dr Rajan Jethwa CEO, Virgin Healthbank

Sir Frank Williams Team Principle, Williams F1

Alastair Bisset Group InternationalDirector, QinetilQ

Andy Pearson MD, Babcock International Group

Elizabeth Reid CEO, SSA Trust

Douglas Caster CEO, Ultra Electronics


As you can see the usual suspects, dictatorhip loving phone companies and tax dodgers , oh the odd university, and look closely some other surprises. Profit is a serial business.

INTEGRITY, THIS MAN DOES NOT KNOW THE MEANING OF THE WORD. I THINK I HEAR A STORM A BREWING.

Adolf Wolfli (26/2/1864 - 6/11/30) General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911 and other tales.

Adolf Wolfli , a swiss man of peasant stock was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirty-one and was subsequently whisked of to a mental asylum near Bern where he lived until his death thirty-five years later.He was on all accounts a highly disturbed and dangerous individual prone to pshychosis and violent hallucinations.
Hovever after his incarcenation he began to produce an astounding oeuvre of drawings, collages, sheet music, prose and poetry. These illustrations are included in Fromthe Cradle to the Grave a series of nine hand bound books (2,970 total pages, with 752 illustations) that recount Wolfi's imaginary life life story from ages two through eight ( his real life was one of grimness and despair, abused physically, sexually and mentally throughout his life). In his pictures or dreams the protaganist travels around the globe, imposing his own sense of on it. On all accounts a bit of a control freak, it appears Wolfi based his descriptions of faraway places on the familiar topography of Bern and the Swiss countryside and also on a school atlas he owned, but what is clear that the fantastical visions he had were very much his own. Out of his miserable existence he actually produced some astonishing work.
A spontaneity emerged and whatever his life had been before a transformation was achieved that would not have been achieved outside his prison walls. It was his own captors the psychiatrist's who began to regard hiswork in aeshetic terms and actually valued their immedacy and their uniqueness so gave Wolfi (the Beast) a taste of freedom.
His work belongs I suppose inthe schools of Art Brut and of course outsider art.


General View of the Island Neveranger,1911


Big Thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/?wiki?Adolf_W%C3%B6lfi

Eleanor Dare - FIVE FINGER DISCOUNTS.

For the Sisters

'A great deal of talent is lost in this world for
want of a little courage.'

About shoplifting,
for all those who still believe
Big Daddy is watching You -
Bullshit.
Just say the shoplifters prayer:
Survive Danger
Be afraid and go on
See fear and diminish it.
There are luscious things
crying out for a woman's swift touch,
Take them!

As for store detectives
They are easily uncovered,
they look like they are at work
i.e. depressed, unimaginatevely dressed.
They hold us down with fear -
An army of omniscient fathers
Ubiquitie eyes,
Surveillance cameras, their
dissaproving lenses tracking
our private minds.

Shed guilt, take more than is given and pass it on,
forget the fathers, headmaster
they all had an interest in keeping us down
Stealing is exhilarating, ribcage acceleration
two fingers to drab minds of
primary school teachers and tedious preachers.

Besides,
the rich are unworthy of some things-
Star fruit,
Lapis Lazuli, Beautiful books.
We are dangerous
We have ingenuity, defiance
the righteous indignation
of a thousand years.
Laugh out Loud -
all they come up with
is the
rattle of keys.

Originally published

in the virago book of wicked verse,virago press 1992.

1992.

George Heywood Melly (17/8/26 - 57/07) - Homage to Rene Magritte

When Magritte died
The stones fell to the ground
The birds divorced their leaves
The night and day agreed to differ
The breasts became blind
The cunt was struck dumb
The tubas extnguished their flames
The pipe remembered its role
The words looked up what they meant in the dictionary
The clouds turned acstract
The ham closed its eye for ever
When Magritte died.

When Magritte died
The toes hid modestly in their shoes
The mountains no longer envied their eagles
The apple shrunk to the size of an apple
Or did the room grow to the size of a room?
The bowler hat lost its ability to astonish
The old healer
Returned from a dip in the sea
Put on his trousers
his boots
his cloak
his hat
Picked up his stick
his sack
his cage of doves (clanging its door to)
And set off on his banal journey

When Magritte died.

SURREALIST MAP OF THE WORLD, 1929.

Artist Unknown, from a special issue of Varietes, a Brussels-based magazine. entitled " Le Surrealisme en 1929"

The Surrealists amused themselves by creating a map that puts imperialist powers in their place. For example: other than Alaska, the United States are invisible; mainland Britain is dwarfed by Ireland; Easter Island looms over a tiny Australia; and only two cities are marked, Paris and Constantinople, with the rest of France and Turkey missing.
This I guess was a map of the Surrealists cultural ideas. They gave great importance to the shattering of rational thought and bourgeois ideas and values, they aimed to free people from staid ideas and restrictive practices, cultures and structures, borrowing loosely from the ideologies of socialism and anarchism.
I too like the subversion of conventions, and draw on an internationalist world view as a source of inspiration and have also always been weary of nationalism and the waving of flags, though I do confess to having supported a few.
The legacy of their ideas lives on however, and today we live in a period of rising movements against borders. Facts are, all borders are manmade and all nations are based on fakery and vivid imagination and subsequently the logic of the world's order equals nonsense.
In 1925 Katherine Harman in a book called ' You are here ' an early surrealist manifesto wrote
"Even more than patriotism- which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most- we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosopic of the concepts to which we are subjected...Wherever Western civilistion is dominant, all human contact has dissapeared, except contact from which money can be made - payment in hard cash."

Well I can safely say I agree with that, what do you think?
So destroy all borders, but having said that I still feel the need to shout Free Palestine. Call me a hypocrite .
heddwch/peace.

Click on Picture to enlarge.

John Keats (31/10/1795 - 23/2/18) - The Nature of Love

Hi Folks , it's that time of year again when people get dizzy and do stupid things. I personally am an unashameable old romantic, so on this silly day thought I'd post this letter from another incurable one, John keats. A letter that really shows the depths of John Keats utter devotion to his one true love Fanny Browne.
Unfortunately shortly after they met in 1818 he became aware that he had TB and would never be able to marry. His love was intense, obsessive, jealous and sadly unfulfilled. In 1821 he left for Rome, where he died .
Theirs a link at bottom to earlier post I did on John Keats, hope you enjoy, don't get too sad though, take care and carry on, and remember fight the cuts.

1819

My sweet Girl

Your letter gave me more delight, than anything in the world but yourself could do; indeed I am almost astonished that any absent one should have the luxurious power over my senses which I feel. Even when I am not thinking of you I recieve your influence and a tenderer nature steeling upon me. All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights, have I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me: or rather btreathe in that dull sort of patience that cannot be called Life. I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel,I did not believe in it; my Fancy was affraid of it, lest it should burn me up.But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures. You mention 'horrid people' and ask me whether it depend upon them, whether I see you again. Do understand me, my love, in this. I have so much of you in my heart that I must turn Mentor when I see a chance of harm beffalling you. I would never see anything but Pleasure in your eyes, love on your lips, and Happinness in your steps. I would wish to see you among those amusements suitable to your incinations and spirits; so that our loves might be a delight in the midst of Pleasures agreeable enough, rather than a resource from vexations and cares. But I doubt much, in case of the worst, whether I shall be philosopher enough to follow my own lessons: If I saw my resolution give you a pain I could not. Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you. I cannot concieve any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart. So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Poer. You say you are affraid I shall think you do not love me - in saying this you make me ache the more to be near you. I am at the diligent use of my faculties here, I do not pass a day without sprwaling some blank verse or tagging some rhymes; and here I must confess, that, (since I am on the subject,) I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel. I have seen your Comet, and only wish it was a sign that poor Rice would get well whose illness makes him rather a melancholy companion: and the more so as to coquer his feelings and hide them from me, with a forc'd Pun. I kiss'd your writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey-What was your dream? Tell it me and I will tell you the interpretation thereof.

Ever yours, my love!
John Keats

Do not accuse me of delay - we have not here an opportunity of sending letters every day. Write speedily.

http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2010/04/john-keats-doomed-romantic.html.

The letters of John Keats edited by Maurice Forman (OUP) 1947.

Rabindranet Tagore ( 7/4/1861 - 7/8/41) - Freedom

Freedom from fear is the freedom
I claim for you my motherland!
Freedom from the burden of ages, bending your head,
breaking your back, blinding your eyes to the beckoning
call of the future.
mistrusting the star that speaks of truth's adventurous paths;
freedom from the anarchy of destiny
whole sails are weakly yielded to the blind uncetain winds,
and the helm to a hand ever rigid and cold as death.
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet's world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits,
where figures wait with patience and obedience for the
master of show
to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
you fasten yourself in night

JAMES BALDWIN ( 25/8/24 - 1/12/87. ) Of the Sorrow Songs: The cross of redemption.

A writer whose ouevre I have admired for a long time is James Baldwin, who was a brilliant, often controversial , novelist, poet, playewright and essayist. He was also a fierce crusader for equal rights, political thinker and black activist, friend to many. black and white, American, French and British. His books such as 'The Fire Next Time ,' 'Go Tellit on the Mountain' and 'Giovanni's Room ' have become modern classics. He was born in New York in 1924. Here he found his first public success as a lay preacher. His essays and stories began getting published in New York's leading intellectual journals.

By 1948, however he was living in poverty in Paris, where he had gone to escape American racism and homophobia, but in a strange twist it was in France that he discovered his American identity.When he felt he could no longer ignore the problems of his own country he returned to America, where he flirted with the Black Panthers and formed a strong bond with Martin Luther King, whose death profoundly affected him.

He spent more relaxed times in Turkey where he lived and in the South of Francewhere he spent his subsequent days. Baldwin wrote the following piece in 1979 for a small Scottish magazine.Ostesibly a review of James Lincoln Collier's ' The Making of Jazz'. It follows its own beat and becomes a sort of meditation. Writen a while back so some of parts might have got lost in the passages of time, but I feel still stands strong. Enjoy.

29 July 1979

I will let the date stand: but it is a false date. My typewriter has been silent since July 6th, and the pieces of paper I placed in the typewriter on that day has been blank until this hour.
July 29th was - is - my baby sister's birthday. She is now 36 years old, is married to a beautiful cat, and they have a small son, my nephew, one of my many nephews. My baby sister was born on the day our father died: and I could not but wonder what she, or our father, or her son, my nephew, could possibly make of this compelling investigation of our lives.
It is compelling indeed, like the nightmare called history: and compelling because the author is as precise as he is deluded.
Allow me, for example, to paraphrase, and parody, one of his statements, and I am not trying to be unkind.

There has been two authentic geniuses in jazz. One of them, of course, was Louis Armstrong, the much loved entertainer, striving for acceptance. The other was a sociopath called Charlie Parker, who managed... to destroy his career- and finally himself.

Well. Then: There have been two authentic geniuses in art. One of them was, of course was Michelangelo, the much beloved court jester, striving to please the Pope. The other was amisfit named Rembrandt, who managed... to destroy his career- and finally himself.

If one can believe the first statement, there is absolutely no reason to doubt the second. Which may be why no one appears to learn anythig from history- I am beginning to suspect that no one can learn anything from the nightmare called history - these are my reasons anyway, for attempting to report on this report from such a dangerous pint of view.
I have learned a great deal from traversing, struggling with, this book. It is my life, my history, which is being examined -defined: therefore, it is my obligation to attempt to clarify the record. I do not want my nephew - or, for that matter, my swiss godson, or my Italian godson - to believe this 'comprhensive' history.
People cannot be studied from a distance. It is perfectly possible that we cannot be studied at all: God's anguish, perhaps, upon being confronted with His creation. People certainly cannot be studied from a safe distance, or from the distance which we call safety. No one is, or can be, the other: there is nothing in the other, from the depths to the heights, which is not to be found in me. Of course, it can be said that 'objectiely' speaking, I do not have the temperment of an Idi Amiin. or Somoza, or Hitler, or Bokassa. Our careers do not resemble each other, and, for that, I do hank God. Yet, I am aware, that at some point in time and space, our aspirations may have been very similar., or that had we met, at some point in time and space- atschool, say, or looking for work, or at the corner bar - we might have had every reason o think so. They are men, after all, like me; mortal, like me; and all men reflect, are mirrors for, each other. It is the most fatal of all delusions, I think, not to know this: and the root of cowardice.
For, neithr I, nor anyone else, could have known, from the beginning, what roads we would travel, what choices we wouldmake, nor what the result of these choices would be: in ourselves, in time and space, and in that nightmare we call history. Where, then, is placed the 'objective' speaker, who can speak only after, and never before, the fact? Who may, or may not, have percieved (or recieved) the truth, whatever the truth may be? What does it mean to be objective? What is meant by temperament? and how does temeramentrelate to experience? For I do not know, will never know, and neither will you, whether it is my experience which is responsible for my temperament, or my temperament which must be taken to task for my experience.
I nationam attacking, of course, the basis of the language - or perhaps the intention of the language - in which history is written - am speaking as the son of the Preacher-Man. This is exactly how the music called jazz began, and out of the same necessity: not only to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European notion of the world. For until this hour, when we speak of history, we are speaking only of how Europe saw - and sees - the world.
But there is a very great deal in the world which Europe does not, or cannot, see: in the very same way that the European musical scale cannot transcribe - cannot write down, does not understand - the notes, or the price, of this music.
Now, the author's research is meticulous. Collier has had to 'hang' in many places - 'has been there', as someone predating jazz might put it: but he has not, as one of my more relentless sisters might put it, 'been there and back'.
My more relentless sister is merely, in actuality, paraphrasing, or bearing witness to , Bessie Smith: "picked up my bag, baby, and I tried it again". And so is Billie Holliday, proclaiming - not complaining - that "my man wouldn't want me no breakfast/wouldn't give me no dinner/squawked about my supper/and threw me out doors/had the nerve to lay/a matchbox on my clothes.
"I didn't, " Buillies tells us, "have so many. But I had a long, long ways to go.
Thus, Aretha Franklin demands respect: having 'stolen' the song from Otis Redding. (As Otis Redding tells it: sounding strangely delighted to declare himself the victim of this sociopathological act.) Aretha dared to 'steal' the song from Otis because not many men, of any colour, are able to make the enormous confession, the tremendous recognition, contained in try a little tenderness.
And: if you can't get no satisfaction you may find yourself boiling a bitch's brew while waiting for someone to bring me my gun! or start walking toward the weeping willow tree or ramble where you find strange fruit - black, beige, and brown - hanging just across the tracks where it's tight like that and you don't let the sun catch you crying. It is always: farewell to storyville.
For this celebrated number has only the most passing, and, in truth, impertinent, reference to the red-light districy of New Orleans, or to the politician for whom it was named: a certain Joseph Story. What a curious way to enter, briefly, history, only to be utterly obliterated by it: which is exactly what is happening to Henry Kissinger. If you think I am leaping, you are entirely right. Go back to Miles, Max, Dizzy, Yard-Bird, Billie, Coltrane: who were not, as the striking - not to say quaint - European phrase would have it, improvising: who can afford to improvise, at those prices?
By the time of Farewell to Storyville'. and long before that time, the demolition of black quarters - for that is what they were, and are, considered - was an ireducible truth of black life. This is what Bessie Smith is telling us , in 'Back Water Blues'.This song has as much to do with the flood as 'Didn't it Rain' has to do with Noah, or as 'If I had my way' has to do with Samson and Delilah, and poor Samson's excess of hair. Or, if I may leap again, there is a song being born, somewhere, as I write, cocerning the present 'boat people', which will inform us, in tremendous detail, how ships are built. There is a dreadful music connnecting the building of ovens with the activity of contractors, the reality of businessmen ( to say nothing of business) and the reality of bankers and flags, and the European middle class, and its global progeny, and Gypsies, Jews, and soap: and profit.
The music called Jazz came into existence as an exceedingly laconic description of black circumstances: and, as a way, by describing these circumstances, of overcoming them. It was necessary that the description be laconic: the iron necessity being that the description not be overheard. Or, as the indescribably grim remnants of the European notion of the 'nation-state' would today put it, it wac absolutely necessary that the description not be ' decoded'. It has not been 'decoded', by the way, any more than the talking drum has been de-coded. I will try to tell you why.
I have said that people cannot be described from a distance. I will, now, contradict myself,and say that people can be described from a distance that they themselves haveestablished between themselves and what we must, here call life. Life comes out of music, and music comes out of life: without tusting the first, it is impossible to create the second. The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state has crashed is nothing more- and absolutely nothing less- than the question of identity. Who am I? and what am I? and what am I doing here?
This question is the very heart, and root, of the music we are discussing: and contains ( if it is possble to make the distinction) not so much a moral judgement as a precise one.

The Irish, for example, as it now, astoundingly, turns out, never had he remotest desire to become English, neither do the people of Scotland, or Wales: and one can suppose thepeople of Canada, trapped as they are between Alaska and Mexico, with only the heirs of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny between themselves and these two definitely unknown ports of call, distract themselves with the question of whether they are French or English only because their history has now allowed them the breathing space to find out what in Giod's name (!) it means to be Canadian. The Basques do not wish to be French, or Spanish, Kurds and Berbers do not wish to be Iranian, or Turkish.
If one travels from Naples, to Rome, to Torino. it can by no means be taken for granted that the nation- hammered into a nation, after all, quite recently- ever agreec, among themselves, to be that. The same is true of an egually arbitrary invention, Germany: Bavaria is not Berlin. For that matter, to e in Haifa is not at all like being in Jerusalem, and neither place resembles Nazareth. Examples abound: but , at this moment, the only nations being discussed are those which have become utiitarian but otherwise useless, Sweden, for examole, or Switzerland, which is not a nation, but a bank. There are those territories which are considered to be 'restive' (Iran, Greece) or those which are 'crucial' and 'unstable'. Peru, for the moment, is merely 'unstable', though one keeps on it a nervous eye: and though we knoe that there's a whole lot of coffe in Brazil, we don't know who's going to drink it. Brazil threatens to become. as we quite remarkably put it, one of the 'emeging' nations, like Nigeria, because those decisions, in those places, involve not merely continents, but the globe. Leaving aside the 'crafty East' - China, and Russia - there are only embarrassments, like the British colonial outpost, named for a merciless, piatinical murderer/colonizer: named Cecil Rhodes.
What, indeed, you may ask, has all this to do with 'The Making of Jazz? A book concernrd, innocently and earnestly enough with the creation of black American music.
That music is produced by, and bears witness to, one of the most obscene adventures in the history of mankind. It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that universal question:

Who am I? What am I doing here?

How did King Oliver, Ma Rainey, Bessie, Armstrong- a roll-call more vivid than what is called History - Bird, Dolphy, Powell, Pettford, Coltrane, Jelly Roll Morton, The Duke - or the living, again, too long a roll-call: Miss Nina Simone, Mme Mary Lou Williams, Carmen McRae, The Count, Ray, Miles, Max,- forgive me, children, for all the names I cannot call- how did they, and how do they, confront that question? and make of that captivity, a song?
For, the music began in capyivity: and is , still, absolutely, created in captivity. So much for the European vanity: which imagines with a single word, history,it controls the past, defines the
present: and therefore, cannot but suppose that the future will prove to be as willing to be brought into captivity as the slaves they imagine themselves to have discovered, as the nigger they had no choice but to invent.
Be careful of inventions: the invention describes you, and will certainly betray you. Speaking as the son of the Preacher-Man, I know that it was never intended, in any way whatever, that either the Father, or the Son, should be heard. Take that any way you will:
I am trying to be precise.
If you know- as a black American must know, discovers at his mother's breast, and then, in the eyes of his father- that the world which calls itself white: and which has the further, unspeakable cowardice of calling itself free - if you will dare imagine that I, speaking now, as a black witness to the white condition, see you in a way that you cannot afford to see me: if you can see that the invention of the black condition creates the trap of the white identity; you will see what a blck man knows about a white man stems, inexorably, from the white man's description of who, and what, he takes to be the other: in this case, the black cat: me.
You watch this innocent criminal destroying your father, day by day, hour by hour - your father! despising your mother, your brothers and your sisters; and this innocent criminal will cut you down, without any mercy, if any of you dares to say a word about it.
And not only is he trying to kill you. He would also like you to be his accomplice - discreet and noiseless accomplice- in this friendly democratic, and, alas, absolutely indispensable action. I didn't, he will tell you, make the world.

You think, but you don't say, to your friendly murderer, who, sincerely, means you no harm:
Well, baby, somebody better. And, in a great big hurry.

Thus, you begin to see; so, you begin to sing and dance; for ,thoseresponsible for your captivity require of you a song. You beginthe unimaginable horror of contempt and hatred; then, the horror of self-contempt, and self-hatred. What did I do? to be so black, and blue?If you survive - as, for example, the 'sociopath'. Yard-Bird, did not, as the 'junkiei', Billie Holliday, did not - you are released onto the tightrope tension of bearing in mind: every hour, every second, drunk, or sober, in sickness, or in health, those whom you must not even begin todepend on for the truth: and those to whom you must not lie.
It is hard to be black, and, therefore, officially, and lethally, despised. It is harder than to despise so many of the people who think of themselves as white: before whose blindness you present the obligatory, historical grin.
And it is harder than that, out of this devastation - Ezekiel's valley: Oh, Lord. Can these bones live? - to trust life, and to live a life, to love, and be loved.
It is out of this, and much more than this, that black American music springs. This music begins on the auction-block.
Now, whoever is unable to face this - the auction-block; whoever cannot see that the auction-block is the demolition accomplished, furthermore, at that hour of the world's history, in the name of civilization: whoever pretends that the slave mother does not weep, until this hour, for her slauhtered son, that the son does not weep for his slaughtered father: or whoever pretends that the white father did not - literally, and knowing what he was doing - hang, and burn, and castrate, his black son: whoever cannot face this can never pay the price for the beat which is the key to music, and the key to life.
Music is our witness, and our ally. The beat is the confession which recognises, changes and conquers time.
Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which to hide: and time becomes a friend.

Originally Published in the 'New Edinburgh Review' Autumn 1979