Simone Weil (3/2/1909 - 24/8/43) - Into the Mystic

 

The French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil was born in Paris to wealthy agnostic parents of Jewish ancestry on the 3rd of February 1909. She was gifted from the beginning with a thirst for knowledge of other cultures and her own. Fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 12, she taught herself Sanskrit, and took an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. She excelled at the Lycée Henri IV and the École normale supérieure, where she studied philosophy. Plato was a lasting influence, and her interest in political philosophy led her to Karl Marx, whose thought she esteemed but did not blindly assimilate.

Very early, she demonstrated a strident, uncompromising compassion when she gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers in the First World War. While still a schoolgirl, she declared her solidarity with the communist left,and was active in workers demonstrations for trade unions, earning the nickname The Red Virgin. 

Though uncompromising in her persona at school, she was also brilliant and had the best education France could offer in languages, classics and philosophy.  While at the École Normale Supérieure, her tutor set her focus on the problem of man as an active being.  To address this she took Plato as her master and Descartes as her antagonist.  These influences remained touchstones in her intellectual life.  Despite the spiritual writings for which she is best known, her training and approach was that of a philosopher.

 After Weil became a teacher of philosophy in secondary schools, she continued her activism both in writing and in the streets.she demonstrated with striking workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes, and like a latter-day Francis of Assisi, Simone gave away her salary as a teacher to help the unemployed in Le Puy. Like George Orwell and Albert Camus, while Weil was very much on the political left, she distrusted revolutionaries no less than she did reactionaries. Certain that a Marxist regime, even more so than a monarchist regime, would lead to totalitarian rule, Weil threw her support to anarchist and syndicalist organizations.

For Weil, reality was rooted in the world of manual labor. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

At one point she took a year off from teaching to work in factories incognito to help understand the experiences of the working class. Weil’s “year of factory work” (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24 weeks of laboring) was not only important in the development of her political philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in her slow religious evolution.

In Paris’s factories, Weil began to see and to comprehend firsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There, she wrote in her “Factory Journal”, “Time was an intolerable burden” as modern factory work comprised two elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly, increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continued to demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely under such conditions) slowed work. As a result, Weil felt dehumanized.  Weil was surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion but rather fatigue, docility. She described her experience in factories as a kind of “slavery”. 

Initially, her interests lay in the labour movement as well as pacifism.  Her judgment of the political weakness of the labour movement and more generally of social causes led to the qualification of her views on pacificism.  Violence, she then thought, could be a defense for human dignity against the Fascism that diminished it. 

 However, her exposure to the Spanish Civil War led her to contradict herself.  Force, she thought, could never be righteous.  Allowing that someone was the legitimate object of force inexorably nurtured tribalism, making murder seem natural.  Force controls those who would use it, an insight she saw in The Iliad which treated Greeks and Trojans alike as victims of force itself.

Her views on force were a singular example of how her developed perspective was at odds with received pieties in Western Culture, both those of the establishment and those who opposed it.  She denied the importance of political rights; of justice by due process; of state or private ownership; private choice in life; and legitimation by collective, public will. Instead she elevated as primary response to affliction; the inestimable significance of a human being; the needs of the soul as the basis for government; meaningful labour; and good and evil. Weil was unafraid of intellectual isolation, nor did she seek fellows,though she did publish her essays in intellectual journals.

On a trip to Portugal in August 1935, upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing villagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrote that:

"the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 “Spiritual Autobiography” 

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament”, we see that in her “Factory Journal” Weil maintains the language of liberty, but she moves terminologically from “oppression” to “humiliation” and “affliction”. Thus her conception and description of suffering thickened and became more personal at this time.

Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover, planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however, with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. Critical of both civil and international war, on the level of geopolitics, she approved of France’s decision not to intervene on the Republican side. On the level of individual commitment, however, she obtained journalist’s credentials and joined an international anarchist brigade fighting alongside the Durutti column.On 20 August, 1936, Weil, who was known for her clumsiness and near sightedmess, stepped in a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep. Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat and Weil went to Assisi to recover.

By late 1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early 1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

In April 1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel  she prayed for the first time in her life amid an ecstatic experience in the same church where Saint Francis had prayed. As she would later describe in a letter, “Something stronger than I compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees” .She embraced Roman Catholicism, but stopped short of baptism, for she felt the Catholic Church was in too much need of reformation. Finding God’s will for her life became her new passion, not replacing her earlier social passions, but becoming the larger context for them.

 Weil received spiritual direction from a Dominican friar and learned much from the Catholic author Gustave Thibon She was especially rooted in Neoplatonic thinking in her spiritual writings. Yet her spiritual curiosity took her far. She learned Sanskrist to read the Bhagahvad Gita. She studied Mahayana Buddhism and the ancient Greek and Egyptian mystery religions. She believed that each religion, when we are within it, is true. But she was opposed to religious syncretism. She saw a blending of religions as diminishing the particularity of each tradition and the truth of that path to God. Though she learned from other faiths, she plunged deeper into her own Catholicism. For Weil truth was deeply personal and could only be approached through deep introspection. She wrote intensely about spirituality, mysticism, beauty and social struggle.  Her writings sought to develop the intellectual consequences of the religious experiences she was having.

From 1937–1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguing that there is a central contradiction in Marx’s thought: although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration that the modern state is inherently oppressive,being that it is composed of the army, police, and bureaucracy,she continued to reject any positing of revolution as immanent or determined. Indeed, in Weil’s middle period, Marx’s confidence in history seemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli’s emphasis on contingency.

 One of the most intriguing and conflicting aspects of Weil’s thought is her notion of justice, which figures prominently in the book. She certainly wouldn’t be characterized as a “social justice warrior” who promotes sanctimonious moralism. For Weil, justice converges into one aspect of life, encounters with God and other human beings, such as those on the French front. But unlike other mystics, for whom union with Christ was an interior experience of a relation between lover and beloved, Weil is a relational mystic for whom justice is one of the most important aspects of religious and spiritual experience. Her asceticism, so clearly visible at the end of her life, is inextricably connected to the suffering of the other.

According to Weil, everything in life is relational, and human relations are intention. We ought to choose self-denial, but only to help us love our neighbor. Imagining nameless people, stranded in a ditch, forgotten and overlooked by others, Weil writes that these very strangers are our neighbors, and “to treat our neighbor who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him.”

In order to empathize with others, we have to understand that we tend to 

  “live in the world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position at the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

She was not celebrated in her lifetime, and almost all of her writings have been published posthumously and have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and she loved Christ but chose never to be baptized into the Christian church. 

As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. She studied with Simone de Beauvoir and debated with Leon Trotsky, and Albert Camus called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.” though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived. 

When the Nazis occupied France, Simone Weil joined the French Resistance working in England. While working for the Free French in London on a manifesto for a transformed government in post-war France, her unyielding manner of living overcame her always-fragile health. Her final and most radical act was self-induced starvation in solidarity with French citizens during World War II, she refused to eat more than the French people were allowed under German occupation, despite being afflicted with tuberculosis. As a consequence, her body gave up, and she died at age thirty-four in a sanatorium  in Ashford, Kent at 34. The coroner’s verdict was suicide. 

 She was buried in Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford; a flat marker laid across her grave was engraved with her name and relevant dates:

Simone Weil

3 février 1909
24 août 1943

Weil’s grave, its location highlighted on the cemetery map, has since become one of Ashford’s most visited tourist sites. By way of acknowledging the constant stream of visitors, a second marble slab explains that Weil had “joined the Provisional French government in London” and that her “writings have established her as one of the foremost modern philosophers. 

Her celebrity came posthumously when her notes on Christian spirituality were published, influencing those within and without the Church.  Subsequently, her philosophical works have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and as a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and debated with Leon Trotsky. Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. Though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived.

In her book Devotion (2017), the poet and rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged, she coursed through the great halls of higher learning, forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice." The French politician Charles de Gaulle thought Weil was mad, while Albert Camus, called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.”

In her brief life she became a bright light for spirituality and social activism. As a teacher and philosopher she never shied away from a fight, and teaches us the art of revolt and rebellion through her philosophical, political, and spiritual work. Living in accordance with her philosophy, she denounced the legacy of colonialism and lived in accordance with her heartfelt beliefs .

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) - Mother of Science Fiction

 

                               

                                                  

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797, in London , England. She was the daughter of the notable philosophical anarchist and novelist  William Godwin and leading feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/04/mary-wollstonecraft-2741759-1091797.html  Her father's most famous book was Political Justice (1793), which is a critical look at society and the ethical treatment of the masses. Godwin's other popular book Caleb Williams (1794) examines class distinctions and the misuse of power by the ruling aristocracy. Mary Wollestonecraft, her mother, espoused her views in her famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

 Mary's parents adhered to revolutionary principles both in politics and in their private lives, but in spite of despising the institution of marriage they took the step after all to facilitate Mary's entrance into society. Sadly however, Mary Wollstonecraft died ten days after the birth of her daughter from puerperal fever. Her father William Godwin was left to care for Mary and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay. Imlay was Wollstonecraft's daughter from an affair she had with a soldier. 

The family dynamics soon changed with Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont on  21 December 1801. Clairmont brought her own two children into the union, Charles and Jane, who later called herself Claire. and she and Godwin later had a son together. Mary never got along with her stepmother, who  did not encourage Mary Godwin's intellectual curiosity and did not bring her up according to her mother's principles. Mary never went to school, but was taught to read and write at home. Her father encouraged her to use her imagination, so she started  being creative  at a very young age, finding a creative outlet in writing.  According to The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, she once explained that "As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'"

The family lived at Somers Town, where William Godwin and his wife opened a publishing firm (M. Godwin and Co.) and a shop retailing children's books. In 1810, the Godwin Juvenile Library published the first work by Mary Godwin: Mounseer Nongtongpaw, a verse poem which extended the five-stanza song of the same name that Charles Dibdin had published in 1808. It is a humorous account in an iambic pentameter ballad of John Bull's trip to Paris and the resulting linguistic misunderstandings.

Mary Shelley was very conscious of the political issues of her time. Visitors to her father's house, when Mary was young, included many leading radical thinkers and distinguished guests included the likes of  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While she didn't have a formal education, she did make great use of her father's extensive library. Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave. She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging home life into her imagination.

By 1812 things between Mary and Mrs Godwin had come to such a head that William Godwin sent Mary to board with an acquaintance, William Baxter, and his family in Dundee for several months.  There she experienced a type of domestic tranquility she had never known. Shelley returned to the Baxters' home the following year.

In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html An admirer of Godwin, Percy Shelley visited the author's home and briefly met Mary when she was fourteen, but their attraction did not take hold until a meeting two years later. Shelley, twenty-two, was married, and his wife Harriet Westbrook. was expecting their second child, but he and Mary began to go on daily walks to the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft at St Pancras churchyard, and here they declared their love for each other on 26 June 1814. When Godwin found out on 8 July, he was outraged, immediately writing to Shelley to forbid Mary from seeing him again (In fact Godwin did not speak to Mary for  three years, which hurt her immensely.) 

Like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart were more important than legal ones, and .in July 1814, one month before her seventeenth birthday, Mary ran away with Percy, and they spent the next few years traveling in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, cut off his son's large allowance after the couple ran away together. 

 In late 1814, Mary and Percy returned to England and lived in hiding to avoid his first wife and previous back debts. In February 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter, who was born prematurely and  who subsequently died in March of the same year. Stricken with grief, the Shelleys moved to Bishopsgate, but Mary soon became pregnant again. In 1816, she gave birth to a son, William, who she named after her father. 

Despite difficult circumstances, Mary and Percy enjoyed a large group of friends, which included the poet Lord Byron and the writer Leigh Hunt. They also maintained a schedule of very strict study,including classical and European literature, Greek, Latin, and Italian language, music and art and other writing.

1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer.” The eruption of Mount Tambora caused a global catastrophe. Heavy smoke and volcanic ash disrupted the stratosphere, blocking sunlight. The loss of sun caused cold temperatures, darkness, and a food shortage around the world.

During this gloomy season, the Shelleys traveled for a vacation  to Switzerland  by the shores of Lake Geneva There, they stayed with their friends, Lord Byron, Dr. John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.  Mary was in an emotionally difficult situation. She had craved a mother's love all through her life and bitterly regretted being alienated from her father. The relationship that developed between Shelley and Claire undermined her self-esteem. 

The following story is well known: The weather was consistently too rainy to go outdoors, in response to their isolation, Byron suggested an indoor activity, a sort of contest. They would each make up a ghost story and read them to each other on the chilly evenings. Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, his personal doctor, John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called “The Vampyre”, which has a history of its own, seventy years later it would be the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Mary had difficulty,coming up with anything until, in a nightmare, she saw a pale figure surrounded by machinery, and another shape lying on a table that suddenly stirred with horrible life. Mary's story, the best of the group, was so frightening to Byron that he ran "shrieking in horror" from the room. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was thus conceived.The story was first only a few pages, but with the encouragement of Percy, the tale took on a greater length.

But as Mary set off to continue working on the novel, she received the news that her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide. Then, just one month later, the Shelleys heard that the body of Harriet Shelley was found in London's Serpentine, into which she had jumped in order to commit suicide. Percy Shelley was denied custody of his and Harriet's two children in the following year. On 30 December, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married Percy Bysshe Shelley at St Mildred's, London. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to adulthood. 

Mary had been having nightmares about the death of her daughter, and her anxiety brought on a "waking dream". She lay awake picturing what it would be like for a scientist to give life to something that was dead and how he would react when the creation started to move. She scared herself so badly that she had to snap out of her reverie. But it sparked her imagination. 

Mary’s monster was created not by magic or alchemy, but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue. Mary was a pretty sharp teenager and was unusually well-educated in the sciences; and had read about the Galvani experiments on dead frogs and she wondered, not unreasonably, if electricity might be used to reanimate dead tissue.

Prior to this time, inanimate objects, such as the Golem, had been brought to life in fantasy tales by magical means. The premise has become familiar to us from two hundred years of retellings, especially film adaptations. Dr Victor. Frankenstein, Shelleys peotaganist an ambitious scientist, discovers a means of giving life to an artificial body, which he calls the Creature through the use of that newly discovered force, electricity. (The idea that this body is a corpse, or made of parts of corpses, comes in later versions.) However, he is horrified by the Creature’s ugliness and abandons it.

The creature can’t bear his isolation so he begs Frankenstein to conjure him a female mate. Frankenstein complies but immediately regrets his action, so winds up destroying the female in front of his original creature.Without guidance from its creator, without human contact, without love, only rejection the creature does turn to violence, but it is more sinned against than sinning. Frankenstein never 'loses control' over his creature,.because he never exerted control - or guidance over the creature to begin with. In its friendless, heartbroken state, it begins to pursue Frankenstein and murder those whom he loves.

 Everything bad that happens occurs because the creature is lonely: “Misery made me a fiend,” it declares. This theme comes from the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the idea that man is born free, but is corrupted by societies and civilisations.

Mary picked a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost for the title page of her book, setting her story up as a mythic recapitulation, in secular terms, of what happened in the Garden of Eden: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”. Adam says this in Milton’s poem when he realises he is going to be expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Mary Shelley very possibly, invented modern science fiction at the age of 18. At least that’s the claim of the British writer Brian W. Aldiss, who, in his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, cited Frankenstein as the first work of actual science fiction and Mary Shelley as the mother of the entire genre.

Frankenstein shows several qualities that have become standard elements of sci-fi. In terms of technique, book uses a pseudo-realistic narrative form, achieved in this case by multiple narrators. This pseudo-realism has become a staple of horror (notably in Dracula) as well as much sci-fi, heightening the emotional impact of the story by making it as credible as possible. 

But the theme of Frankenstein is almost unique to science fiction: the philosophical implications of technology. In particular, the novel explores the question of whether replicas of human beings are human themselves, and how an “artificial intelligence” would respond to the world. The trope that any such creation would turn on its maker, arguably, comes originally from Shelley. Books and films from Erewhon to Blade Runner to 2001: A Space Odyssey have ruminated on these matters ever since.

 Mary felt ambivalent towards her creation and called it her "hideous progeny." The novel was published on New Year's Day 1818, debuting  as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction.  Despite several negative reviews, one calling it a “horrible and disgusting absurdity” it became a big popular success. Mary saw the first theatrical production in 1823.Despite the book’s popularity, Shelley still had to fight for recognition of her work. She still  endured publishers who believed that her husband actually wrote the story. 

Frankenstein  became an iconic masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging  the idea of modernity and questioning the state of “being human” while continually searching for a way to validate the emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the pain on invalidation for most of her life. She received a  severe rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today, Frankenstein stands at the heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true still.

 In 1820, she co-wrote a play called ‘Midas’ .Mary wrote the drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems to it.  Mary Shelley tried unsuccessfully to have the play published by children's magazines in England in the 1830s; however, it was not published until A. Koszul's 1922 scholarly edition. Whether or not the drama was ever meant to be staged is a point of debate among scholars. 

The play combines the stories of the musical contest between Apollo and Pan and that of King Midas and his ability to turn everything he touches to gold. Apollo is judged the winner, but Midas prefers the music of Pan, so Apollo gives him the ears of an ass. Largely concerned with gender issues, Midas comments on the definitions of femininity and masculinity in the early nineteenth century and the developing ideology of separate spheres which encouraged women to restrict themselves to domestic affairs and men to political affairs. Part of the Romantic interest in rewriting classical myths, Midas focuses on challenging patriarchy and satirising the unbounded accumulation of wealth.

In May 1822, the Shelleys moved to La Spezia, where Mary miscarried on 16 June during her fifth pregnancy, On July 8, 1822, Mary's life was forever altered when her husband was drowned at sea in a storm off the coast of Livorno (sometimes called Leghorn), Italy while sailing to meet Leigh Hunt and his wife. 

By now, Mary's life was seemingly connected to tragedy, with the deaths of three children, her mother, and her husband, and the suicides of Percy's former wife and Mary's half-sister. Mary suffered from intense feelings of guilt towards her dead husband, particularly so as at times she had wished her husband were dead. Shelley's friends blamed her, as she did herself, for having made Shelley's last year unhappy. After his death, Mary tried to continue to write, but cycles of depression and sorrow kept her from it, as her letters and journals attest. Bereavement drove her to express her grief in verse, a medium she normally avoided. "I can never write verses," she wrote to Maria Gisborne on 11 June 1835, "except under the influence of a strong sentiment & seldom even then." 

Mary and Percy Florence returned to London in August 1823. They found themselves impoverished. Mary immediately turned to writing articles, novels, encyclopaedia entries, stories and reviews. She turned away from Gothic and futurist novels to historical and sentimental ones, set in fourteenth-century Italy (Valperga), the Yorkist uprising in fifteenth-century England (Perkin Warbeck) or the fashionable world of early nineteenth-century society (Mathilda, Lodore, and Falkner),

William Godwin welcomed Mary on her return to London in 1823. They lived close to each other and met almost daily. But his financial troubles prevented him from giving her the emotional and financial security she needed. She refused all offers of marriage, namely from John Howard Payne, an American actor-manager (1825), and the writer Prosper Mérimée. Edward John Trelawny suggested in 1831 that fate might have thrown him and Mary together, but she refused him, too, although she had retained his friendship since her husband's death.She had an epistolary relationship with Washington Irving, another American writer. Mary also may have had a romantic relationship with  a Jane Williams, and moved to be near her in 1824 before they had a falling-out. 

After returning to London in 1823 Mary had found that Frankenstein had become a stage production, complete with a frightening monster which sprang from a concealed laboratory at the top of a staircase! In her novel the scientist who re-animates the corpse is called Frankenstein; yet ironically by 1830 his creation was being referred to by this name. Mary’s original creature is not evil; he is an innocent victim, who develops and yearns to be integrated into society. He becomes malign after being rejected by his creator and by society, declaring: ‘I am malicious because I am miserable.’ Nevertheless the word ‘Frankenstein’ gradually became associated with things that were monstrous and threatening.

 In 1824, Shelley;s Posthumous Poems was published, which was edited by Mary. She had begun negotiations with her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, who did not want his  renegade  son's works published or his family's name published in the press again during his lifetime. 

The Last Man (1826) is her best-known work after Frankenstein. This novel, in which she describes the destruction of the human race in the twenty-first century, is noted as an inventive description of the future and an early form of science fiction.  The work is the first English example of a novel about a dystopian universe where a pandemic sweeps across the earth, spreading through globalization and panic. It shakes the foundation of countries, stoking revolution and fear around the world. 

 Mary tested her ideas of the egalitarian family against human egotism, temporal mutability and the brute forces of nature which annihilate individual achievement through chance, accident and death, thus contradicting the more optimistic stances of both her father and her husband and their utopian idealism. Instead of following the idea of Godwin and Burke, that history leads ultimately to perfection, Mary depicts a history that can abruptly stop. She also introduces the theme of shared marital love being lost love; trust is destroyed. She portrays the self-destructive side of motherhood, a mother who lives for her children only cannot acquire a life of her own. In this deeply pessimistic novel, women cannot find fulfilment within nor without the family. She saw herself as a follower, not as an active agent, and felt unable to take a stand on behalf of women's rights.

 In 1831, Mary revised Frankenstein for Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novel Series. By then, her philosophical convictions had radically changed; her personal tragedies, together with her financial straits and her despair over her feelings of guilt, had convinced her that material forces beyond any human, not free will or personal choice, control the course of events. Her organic conception of nature was now replaced by a conception of nature propelled by brutal, machine-like force. Human beings are reduced to puppets manipulated by external forces. Victor Frankenstein is presented in a more sympathetic way, he is held less responsible for his actions. He is the victim of circumstances, not the perpetrator of evil. The earlier ideology of the loving family has now turned into maternal love as a self-destructive force. Experience had taught Mary Shelley that her earlier Utopianism and her belief in a world without monsters were untenable.

 I believe that we should treat Shelley’s novel as a cautionary tale. It should prompt us to ask ourselves if our science and technology today is or is on track to cross lines to the point of human anguish and demise.Shelley’s most pressing and obvious message is that science and technology can go to far. The ending is plain and simple, every person that Victor Frankenstein had cared about met a tragic end, including himself. This shows that we as beings in society should believe in the sanctity of human life.

We also learn important life lessons through her book. She illustrates that actions have their consequences and stemming from that, we should not “play God.” The novel’s subtitle, or alternate title is The Modern Prometheus. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man and suffered punishment eternally as a result. Shelley parallels this through her story, where Victor Frankenstein pursued a place of forbidden knowledge in arrogance. Frankenstein is an example of the Romantic over-reacher, breaching boundaries between human and divine principles.

An additional message Shelley conveys is that “monsters” are not born as monsters. The Creature arguably became the way he was through his treatment, or mistreatment rather. Shelley gives the Creature a voice, and the reader understands that there is a disparity between his appearance and his thoughts which ultimately tests the reader. I thought it was interesting that Shelley’s character heavily contrasts the Frankenstein portrayal that we see in popular culture. She may have been making a statement on how humans should not mistreat one another for judgement of their appearance, and their race even.

The education of Mary's son Percy Florence at Harrow proved too costly when she boarded him there, so she left London and moved to Harrow herself to cut down on cost. Sir Timothy did little to help her and his heir. On 7 April 1836, William Godwin died of catarrhal fever and was buried beside Mary Wollstonecraft in St. Pancras Churchyard.

 In 1837, Mary published the novel Falkner, another book on the theme of the (foster) father- daughter relationship. Again Mary demonstrates that a woman's fulfilment lies within the family. Also in 1837, Volume III of the Lives was published, with Mary contributing essays on Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. In the same year, Percy Florence took up his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. July 1838 saw the publication of Volume I of the Lives of the most Eminent Men of France with essays by Mary on the lives of Montaigne, Rabelais, Corneille, Rochefoucauld, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Mme. de Sévigné, Racine, Boileau, and Fénelon. 

In 1839, Mary contributed essays on Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Mme Roland and Mme. de Staël for Volume II. In the same year, she also published Volumes I through IV of her husband's Poetical Works, complete with notes, at monthly intervals. In November, she published her edition of his Essays, Letters.

 The situation for the  Shelleys'  improved when Sir Timothy increased Percy Florence's allowance with his coming of age in 1840, which allowed mother and son to travel in Italy and Germany; their journeys are recounted in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843  published in 1844.After graduating from Cambridge in 1841  Percy married Jane Gibson who Mary adored, and equally Jane thought the world of her and on all accounts Percy was a loyal and affectionte son. so Mary was at least surrounded by loved ones as she aged. In July 1843, Mary returned to England, stopping on the way to visit Claire in Paris.

In 1844, Sir Timothy died, leaving the baronetcy and his heavily indebted estate to Percy Florence. In 1849 Mary was able to move into Field Place, the Shelley country home at Bournemouth, with Percy Florence and his wife Jane. Sadly due to a life plagued by trauma and misfortune, Mary  suffered from various kinds of psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks. Finally, she died from a mysterious paralysis on 1 February 1851 aged fifty-three.

After she died, her family cleared the contents of her writing desk. In it, they found locks of her dead children’s hair, as well as a parcel of Percy’s cremated heart, wrapped in one of his last poems, Adonais. She was buried between her mother and her father, whose remains had been transferred from St. Pancras, at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.

 Mary's legacy was sanitised after her death. Her son, Percy, and his wife, Jane, became fierce guardians of her papers. Jane despite worshipping  Mary destroyed many journal entries and letters she deemed too bohemian for proper society, and refashioned Mary her  into the Victorian ideal of a selfless daughter, wife, and mother, presented as an entirely innocent woman, which she wasn't: she had run off with another woman's husband. Jane also commissioned a monument, modelled after Michelangelo’s Pièta, and created a ‘shrine’ for Mary, Shelley and their circle at Boscombe Lodge, near Bournemouth.

It wasn’t until the middle 20^th century that Mary Shelley’s unconventional life became more widely known, and scholars began reexamining her life and work, looking at her journals, letters and fiction together, they reveal a remarkable woman, who overcame tragic circumstances time and time again with such reslience.. Mary herself was a revolutionary figure who lived an exciting life of hedonism and sin, tooled around with England's poetic elite, and broke rules as her mother and her father often encouraged. She was a modern woman in every sense, too often sidelined  by her husband and his Byronic buddies.

 Frankenstein, became an iconic masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging  the idea of modernity and questioning the state of “being human” while continually searching for a way to validate the emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the pain on invalidation for most of her life.

She received a  severe rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today, her trailblazing literary masterpiece Frankenstein stands at the heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true still. Shelley’s Frankenstein, whether it was the intended purpose or not, serve as a warning in regards to the direction of science, technology, social responsility and human circumstances now, and most likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.Like her most famous creation,she contiiues to be revived and reappraised, haunting the popular imagination, For this alone Mary Shelley leaves us a tangible legacy that will never fade.

                                     Mary Shelley's Gravestone , Bouremouth

Catharsis

As days turn over again and  again

The world opens like a book,

We rise from different nations

With similar threats and needs,

There are whispers, there are rumours

The looks of abject  fear and terror,

Some exhausted, mentally broken

Having found it difficult to sleep,

A sea of humanity seeking purpose 

Layers of meaning and understanding,

Carrying a myriad of values, diverse beliefs

The cry speaks in a million of accents,

Of triumphs, and disappointment

Of convictions, of negotiations,

Releasing a variety of reasons and emotion

Dropping a smile here, shedding a tear there,

Giving thanks to workers, fighting for our lives

The torch of humanity illuminating joy cheated eyes,

Everyone of intrinsic value, forgive the Covid deniers

Let hope rain down, to help overcome the barriers, 

In moments of transition  carved with mutability

Facing forwards with unity, find pathways of tranquility,

SOPHIE - It's Okay to Cry

 

Sad news DJ, avant pop artist , musician, and producer SOPHIE has died following a sudden accident this morning (January 30). 

The news was confirmed by a representative for the artist, who wrote in a statement to Mixmag: 

“It is with profound sadness that I have to inform you that musician and producer SOPHIE passed away this morning around 4am in Athens, where the artist had been living, following a sudden accident.” 

 “At this time respect and privacy for the family is our priority. We would also ask for respect for her fanbase, and to treat the private nature of this news with sensitivity.”

The statement continued: “SOPHIE was a pioneer of a new sound, one of the most influential artists in the last decade. Not only for ingenious production and creativity but also for the message and visibility that was achieved. An icon of liberation.”

Labels Transgressive and Future Classic added: “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch and her peers have been paying tribute on social media, remembering her not just as a talented and innovative artist, but a pioneer for queer and transgender representation in the music industry:the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. She will always be here with us.” SOPHIE was 34.

Following the news of her unexpected death, SOPHIE’s fans and her peers have been paying tribute on social media, remembering her as a trans icon and  a pioneer for queer and transgender representation in the music industry.

A trailblazing, visionary Sophie Xeon was born and raised in Glasgow,known for her innovative “hyperkinetic” take on pop music, SOPHIE won legions of fans for her surreal production style and sound. After spending the initial part of her career as a DJ and producer, SOPHIE came to prominence after the release of her 2013 single ‘Bipp’ and her 2014 single ‘Lemonade’.

Her debut album Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides was released in 2018 to critical acclaim, ultimately earning a Grammy's nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album. 

Outside of her own solo work, SOPHIE also won praise for her production work with several high profile artists, including Madonna, Charli XCX, Vince Staples, Let’s Eat Grandma, Kim Petras, Flume, Namie Amuro and Itzy.

 Known to be intensely private, Sophie’s identity was shrouded in mystery for the first few years of their career. In 2017, Sophie used her voice and image for the first time on the single “It’s Okay to Cry” and came out as a trans woman in the months following. (Sophie’s representative had previously requested not using pronouns for the musician.)

Speaking to Paper magazine in 2018 about being a trans woman, SOPHIE said that her coming out “means there’s no longer an expectation based on the body you were born into, or how your life should play out and how it should end. Traditional family models and structures of control disappear.”

She continued by explaining how control is key when discussing transness, saying “‘Transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren’t fighting against each other and struggling to survive. On this earth, it’s that you can get closer to how you feel your true essence is without the societal pressures of having to fulfil certain traditional roles based on gender.”

A fearless powerful artist, a beautiful spirit who rebelled against the normative society disrupting the cultural zetgeist, her artistry was revolutionary, she introduced new ways music can be represented, tested the boundaries within which electronic music exists, who with honesty and emotional intensity exploded ideas about underground and melding worlds of house, techno, trance, pop and the avant-garde into something brazenly new and undeniable, while helping thousands of people to find who they are. Her influence on pop today as a producer or singer can't be understated. A true pioneer, her legacy will shine on. Rest in Power. Tell people you love them when you can. It's ok to cry 

 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2021 : Be the light in the darkness

 

Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau,the largest Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. where 1.6 million men, women children were killed in the holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day also commemorates as well as victims of later genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Darfur.

The day aims to remind people of the crimes and loss of life and encourage remembrance in a world scarred by genocide  and prevent it ever being forgotten.

Alongside the six million Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, hundreds of thousands of others were targeted by Hitler's regime - including trade unionists, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transpeople, (LGBT) gypsies, disabled people and the mentally ill, and others attacked for their race or simply being different. At Belsen, Chelmno, Revensbrul to name a few more among hundreds where the inhumanity of man to man was endorseded by the Nazi regime.

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2021 is Be the light in the darkness. It encourages everyone to reflect on the depths humanity can sink to, but also the ways individuals and communities resisted that darkness to ‘be the light’ before, during and after genocide.

Be the light in the darkness is an affirmation and a call to action for everyone marking HMD. This theme asks us to consider different kinds of ‘darkness’, for example, identity-based persecution, misinformation, denial of justice; and different ways of ‘being the light’, for example, resistance, acts of solidarity, rescue and illuminating mistruths.

Increasing levels of denial, division and misinformation in today’s world mean we must remain vigilant against hatred and identity-based hostility. Rapid technological developments, a turbulent political climate, and world events beyond our control can leave us feeling helpless and insignificant. The utterly unprecedented times through which we are living currently are showing the very best of which humanity is capable but also - in some of the abuse and conspiracy theories being spread on social media - the much darker side of our world as well.

We can all stand in solidarity. We can choose to be the light in the darkness in a variety of ways and places – at home, in public, and online.

Download a copy of the full theme vision here

Download a copy of the theme vision summary here

Holocaust Memorial Day enables us to remember – for a purpose. It gives us a responsibility to work for a safer, better, future for everyone. Everyone can step up and use their talents to tackle prejudice, discrimination and intolerance wherever we encounter them.

We must remember that genocidal regimes throughout history have deliberately fractured societies by marginalising certain groups, and how these tactics can be challenged by individuals standing together with their neighbours, and speaking out against oppression and all forms of racism and discrimination. The Holocaust is not just a Jewish tragedy, but it is a lesson to all of us of all faiths in all times and a continuing reminder to stand with “others” when their rights and freedoms face attack.

In the years leading up to the Holocaust, Nazi policies and propaganda deliberately encouraged divisions within German society – urging ‘Aryan’ Germans to keep themselves separate from their Jewish neighbours. The Holocaust, Nazi Persecution of other groups and each subsequent genocide, was enabled by ordinary citizens not standing with their targeted neighbours.

Let 's not forget  that the Holocaust did not appear out of thin air, it was built on hatred for "the other," politically weaponized by those seeking ever more power. As politicians today say never again, some are walking doen that same path. Today there are still those that are stoking up increasing division in communities across the UK and the world, antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia are on the.rise again. We must oppose attempts to divide us along the lines of race, religion or ethnicity.

Far right and fascist forces are growing. Many of them deny the horrors of the Holocaust. and are whipping up racist scapegoating.Neonazi electoral advances in Europe are linked to anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-semitic violence. The wall by a Jewish cemetery only two miles from Auschwitz was recently desecrated.

Online, despite some deplatforming of sites following the Capitol Hill riots, fascist ideas and organisation remain. The increase in fascist terror and planned terrorism do not operate in a vacuum.

In recent years, Muslims and Roma have faced fascist hate, as new communities are victimised by the far right. As open nazis appallingly revel in the crimes of the Holocaust, we hope to make a small contribution to ensuring that Jews are not left to face nazi evil alone.

 Now more than ever, we need to stand together with others in our communities in order to stop division and the spread of identity-based hostility in our society. Somehow  human beings around the world are capable of so much hate, we should work together to prevent this. Remember those who have resisted, shown bravery and courage. Remember all the victims of the Holocaust. Those who were murdered because of who they were, and reflect on the dark evils of Nazism, anti-Semitism and racism. While you do. please think about those people who are also facing genocide today; The Uighur Muslims in China, The Rohingya in Myanmar and also the Palestinian people too.

 

We should never forget where hatred and bigotry can lead. There can never be anytime for passivity, and we must  stand strong against the dark forces  of intolerance, bigotry, racism and division that create them.When we remember the Holocaust, “never again” must mean exactly that.

 

On Holocaust Memorial Day, Here is a list of some other  places  and people that the world sometimes forgets.

Cambodia,

Darfur,

Siebrenica,

Karabakh, 

Liberia,

Sudan,

Holodonor,

 Armenia, 
                                 
the ethnic cleansing of indigeneous Palestinians,

The Indigeneous Peoples of  America,

Checknya,

Congo,

India

and the genocide of slavery

and on and on and on.

Sadly  there will always be individuals, organisations and regimes who want to exploit differences for their own ends and we must have the courage to speak out  against hatred and intolerance where we see this happening. In a world which is increasingly fractured, where we have some leaders that are more interested in promoting division than harmony, it is vital we remember that there is far more that unites than divides the human race, to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the past, lets strive to work for equality , peace and justice for the whole of mankind. Be the light in the darkness.

First They Came - Pastor Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the Trade Unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade Unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left To speak out for me.

Read more about Holocaust Memorial Day

Celebrating The radical Robbie Burns

 

January 25th marks Burns Night, the annual celebration of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns. Burns Night is a great occasion on January 25th when many dinners dedicated to his memory are held all over the world. The ritual of the Burns Supper was started by close friends of Robert Burns a few years after his death and the format remains largely unchanged today, beginning with the chairman of the Supper inviting the assembled company to welcome in the haggis The poem ‘To a Haggis’a paean to the Scottish pudding of seasoned heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, and oatmeal and boiled in an animal’s stomach:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm.

is recited and the haggis is toasted with a glass of whisky. The evening ends with a rousing rendition of ' Auld Lang Syne,' This year will be a little different as celebrations will be held at home, but despite lockdown the traditions will continue.

Robert Burns is not only Scotland’s best known poet and songwriter but one of the most widely acclaimed literary figures of all time. He is held in very special affection by millions around the world. Admired  as the bard of freedom, liberty and the common good of humankind.

Robert Burns was in rural poverty on 25 January 1759 in the village of Alloway, two miles south of Ayr,the son of a poor tenent farmer, Jacobite in sympathies, who had moved from near Stonehaven in Kincardineshire. Burns had a fairly extensive education. He attended several schools and was given lessons from his tutor, John Murdoch, who introduced him to Scots and other literature in the English language.The farm his family worked on would provide enough to scrape through each year provided every family member worked as long and hard as they could. 

Burns’s upbringing was one of hard labour and little leisure. His early teenage poems, written in his own Scots dialect, reflect the life he lived and are concerned only with the people and places he knew, not, as with popular contemporary poets, the triumphs of mythological heroes or the achievements of great classical civilisations. For Burns, poetry was not work, but a way of understanding life and of comprehending the beauties and evils he saw around him. In his life of labour and poetry, Burns came to develop philosophical understandings of the world around him. His poem ‘To a Mouse’ Shows this:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow-mortal!

This is of course the most famous example of Burns’s unique poetic understanding of life and humanity. The sympathy he has for the mouse whose house he has turned up while ploughing the field is developed into a reflection on his own lowly position and the now ‘broken union’ between living things. Whilst this poem is undoubtedly famous for its unique handling of Scots, its incredibly important and valuable message of compassion and unity is often ignored.

Burns lived through the time of the French Revolution of 1789. The events of the revolution and the philosophical ideas that had influenced it had an effect all across Europe. All of a sudden it seemed that the entire political establishment of the civilised world was being put into question. Through a development of consciousness, mankind could completely alter the shape of society. Those who benefited from the old regime didn’t stand a chance. For the bourgeoisie, the revolution was a step forward in the establishment of capitalism and the withering away of the powers held by church and nobility. But for the generation of thinkers Burns belonged to, the revolution was a display of the power held by the masses, and an example of how philosophical ideas could manifest themselves in revolutionary action. Unlike the slightly later romantic poets, who praised the revolution from their perspective as classically trained scholars, seeing it in comparison to the great achievements of classical civilisation, Burns instead saw the revolution from the perspective of the oppressed masses. As a poor worker himself, Burns saw poetry not in the efforts of the great lawyers and politicians of the revolution, but in the mass of revolutionary workers, who defended their demands of liberty, equality and fraternity, even after the bourgeoisie established their rule over France. His poem ‘The Tree of Liberty’ reflects the mood the revolution inspired in him:

‘For Freedom, standing by the tree,
Her sons did loudly ca’, man.
She sang a sang o’ liberty,
Which pleased them ane and a’, man.
By her inspired, the new-born race
Soon drew the avenging steel, man;
The hirelings ran——–her foes gied chase,
And banged the despot weel, man.’

 When Burns’ father died in 1784,  worn out and bankrupt after 18 years of hard graft with little reward.As a result he satirised religion and politics that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity in his poetry as he became a rebel against the social order of the day.The women of his life during this time were also the subjects and inspiration of his prose.

On July 31 1786, as thought of emigrating, a volume of his poems was published in Kilmarnock, entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

It became an immediate success, and led to Burns moving to Edinburgh in November 1786.Newly hailed as the Ploughman Poet because his poems complemented the growing literary taste for romanticism and pastoral pleasures, Burns arrived in Edinburgh, where he was welcomed by a circle of wealthy and important friends.

  The aristocrats belittled him though as the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ because they couldn’t come to terms with the fact that one of the poorest and lowest stood intellectually above all the expensively-educated young ladies and gentlemen of Edinburgh. These “parcel of rogues in a nation”, who had already betrayed the Scottish people in 1707 and 1745 (when even Gaelic and tartan were outlawed), had abandoned the lowlands Scottish dialect and wanted Burns to do the same, to turn him into the bard of Scotland-in-Empire.

 In The Cannongate Burns Andrew Noble observes, “Had Burns adhered to the social etiquette of Edinburgh’s genteel society, he probably would have written no poetry worth reading after 1787”. His burning desire for social justice and equality against class exploitation are made explicit in many of his poems. Although he became very successful, Robert never forgot his roots. His poems often reflected his love of farming and the difficulties faced by working-class people.

 He was handsome and managed to combine his wit and wisdom with a down-to-earth attitude, which made him very popular in social circles.His love life was certainly complicated. In 1785, Elizabeth, his daughter by his mother’s servant Betty Paton, was born, shortly before he met Jean Armour. His relationships proliferated. Armour was pregnant with his twins in 1786, while Burns was also still devoted to Mary Campbell. Later he would have a relationship with Agnes McLehose, but turned to her maid Jenny Clow for a more physical relationship. Early in 1786, Burns signed “some sort of Wedlock” with Armour, but her father repudiated him and sent Jean away. They were married in 1788, and the Ainslie letter deals with his return to her from McLehose.

Struggling to make ends meet and trying to forget Jean in “dissipation and riot,” Burns agreed to take a post on a slave plantation in Jamaica. Lack of money and the “feelings of a father” when Jean gave birth led him to postpone and then abandon his emigration. It was at this point that he was encouraged first to publish his poems to finance the trip. This led to him being courted by the Edinburgh literary scene and groomed as a contributor to anthologies of Scottish song and verse like James Johnston’s Scots Musical Museum.

Burns’s association with slavery is problematic for those who do not view him historically, but his poetry attests to an aspiration for freedom globally. The final lines of For a’ that and a’ that are justly celebrated:

For a’ that, and a’ that,
Its comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

Burns also wrote movingly of The Slave’s Lament:

The burden I must bear, while the cruel scourge I fear,
In the lands of Virginia-ginia O;
And I think on friends most dear with the bitter, bitter tear,
And Alas! I am weary, weary O!

 Burns reached his highpoint in support of the French revolution, not just in fiery words, but in deeds – sending them four cannon as the British bourgeoisie started its anti-Jacobin war (‘Napoleonic’) in support of the reactionary aristocratic regimes of Europe. With widespread starvation and troops sent against food riots in Dumfries, he helped form a branch of the underground ‘Friends of the People’ and teamed up with the working-class London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen – his poems particularly inspiring many Ulster Protestants to rise up for Irish independence. Andrew Noble writes: “The real war fought by Pitt and Dundas was not against France per se. Their battle was an ideological war against the domestic pro-democracy movement in Britain and in Scotland in particular, where they feared a mass rebellion or outright revolution”.

In December 1792 Pitt declared martial law and unleashed a wave of repression. That same day Burns was the first to be investigated for his support for the revolution (singing the revolutionary anthem ‘Ca ira’ in a Dumfries theatre). Yet the next day Burns answered with ‘On The Year 1793’. When Paine’s The Rights of Man sold 15,000 copies, the publisher was arrested. A declaration of loyalty and blacklisting were introduced, trade unions made illegal and opponents deported. Reformers and democrats were portrayed as terrorists and traitors.

Conservative ‘Burnsians’ foster the myth that Burns then became a Hannoverian loyalist or a coward, abandoning radical writings. In fact, this is when he established safe routes to publishers in Edinburgh and London to anonymously publish his clearest revolutionary anti-war propaganda poems. These and others were suppressed or denied by the literary establishment for 200 years until Patrick Scott Hogg published Robert Burns: The Lost Poems in 1997. Just months before his death in 1796 Burns confirmed, “If I must write, let it be sedition”. When he received the letter from his employers, the Commissioners of Excise, forbidding his political views, he immediately scribbled “the creed of poverty” on the envelope in defiance.

Burns knew he was being spied on. As a cover, he joined the Dumfries Volunteers and wrote a few token loyal poems, later to be picked up by his enemies. Yet despite the terror, Burns couldn’t ignore provocation nor resist ridiculing the ‘Loyal Natives’, a bunch of subservient thugs also in the Volunteers. Following one of their grovelling toasts in a pub one night he caused uproar with his own sarcastic: “May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause!” On another occasion: “May the last king be hung in the guts of the last priest!”

Burns had a heart of gold, but he was no softy. His most explicit call to revolution and a classless, peaceful society, ‘Why Should We Vainly Waste Our Prime?’ (drafted by an English radical and crafted by Burns), is determined and uncompromising:-.

WHY should we idly waste our prime
Repeating our oppressions?
Come rouse to arms! ’Tis now the time
To punish past transgressions.
’Tis said that Kings can do no wrong —
Their murderous deeds deny it,
And, since from us their power is sprung,
We have a right to try it.
Now each true patriots song shall be:
‘Welcome Death or Libertie!’

Proud Priests and Bishops well translate
And canonise as Martyrs;
The guillotine on Peers shall wait;
And Knights shall hang in garters.
Those Despots long have trode us down,
And Judges are their engines:
Such wretched minions of a Crown
Demand the peoples vengeance!
To-day ’tis theirs. To-morrow we
Shall don the Cap of Libertie!

The Golden Age we’ll then revive:
Each man will be a brother;
In harmony we all shall live,
And share the earth together;
In Virtue train’d, enlighten’d Youth
Will love each fellow-creature;
And future years shall prove the truth
That Man is good by nature:
Then let us toast with three times three
The reign of Peace and Libertie!

His correspondence with Agnes ‘Nancy’ McLehose resulted in the classic Ae Fond Kiss. A collaboration with James Johnson led to a long-term involvement in The Scots Musical Museum, which included the poems including Auld Lang Syne. In just 18 short months, Burns had spent most of the wealth from his published poetry, and in 1789 he began work as an Excise Officer in Dumfries. His increasingly radical political views influenced many of the phenomenal number of poems, songs and letters he continued to pen.  Burns’s social consciousness and faith in humanity are reflected in the following  poem ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’, a poem that focusses on the divide between rich and poor and the need for systematic change across the world.

 Is there for honesty poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave - we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

 hat though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that,
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that,
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A price can mak a belted knight,
A marquise, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that,
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
That man to man, the world o'er,
Shall brithers be for a' that.

 Burns was also acutely conscious of the environment and the delicate ­ecological balance between human activity and nature. Now Westlin Winds (1775), surely one of Burns’s most beautiful songs, captures this extremely well. It is also both a love song and a condemnation of blood sports. In the song Burns refers to “slaught’ring guns” and “Tyrannic man’s dominion!” 

Dick Gaughan - Now Westlin Winds

 

His love of nature and animals is also revealed in poems such as The Wounded Hare (1789). In a letter to Alexander Cunningham (4 May 1789) he writes of his views on blood sports, saying: “Indeed there is something in all that multiform business of destroying for our sport individuals in the animal creation that do not injure us materially, that I could never reconcile to my ideas of native virtue and eternal right”. The natural world and the environment feature strongly in Burns’s work. If he were alive today he would surely be concerned about current threats to the environment.

Burns’s last few years were blighted by poor health but just a few weeks before his death aged only 37 on 21 July 1796, an ailing Burns defiantly writes: “If I must write let it be Sedition, or Blasphemy, or something else that begins with a B, so that I may grin with the grin of iniquity and rejoice with the rejoicing of an apostate angel”

One of the last people to meet Burns before his death was the reverend James MacDonald. In a manuscript, cited by Burns scholar Robert Crawford, MacDonald reveals that Burns talked to him about his staunch republicanism and radical politics. Crawford remarks “this is Burns the spirited rebel, Bard of Sedition, even Blasphemy”

On the 21st of July Robert Burns, the national bard of Scotland, died at the young age of 37. In a world where famine and disease frequently wreaked its havoc, early death was often common. However, for those who lived past the diseases of childhood, long life was a definite possibility. So, even in the eighteenth century, Burns’s death seemed premature and tragic. His funeral was held four days later, the very same day his youngest son, Maxwell, was born.

 Burns’ stature owes much to the huge range of his songs and poems, some of which are still familiar nearly two hundred and fifty years after his birth. In fact, there would be few English speaking people who do not recognise “Auld Lang Syne” 

His popularity is also linked to his association with a brand of socialism radical for his time and timeless in its understanding of the plight of the common man. Burns would have naturally understood these issues having experienced hardships not untypical for the ordinary man of the eighteenth century.jjjj The poetry of Burns has lasted the test of time because what he had to say remains highly relevant. We still live in a world of class oppression, where people are violent towards each other. It’s clear that capitalism Burns screams a challenging questioning of th isunjust social order in 'Man was made to mourn':

When chill November’s surly blast
Made fields and forests bare, 
One evening as I wandered forth
Along the banks of Ayr, 
I spied a man, whose aged step
Seemed weary, worn with care;
His face was furrowed o’er with years, 
And hoary was his hair.

 Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?’
Began the reverend sage;
’Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,
Or youthful pleasure’s rage?
Or haply, pressed with cares and woes,
Too soon thou hast began
To wander forth, with me to mourn,
The miseries of man!

‘The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
A haughty lordling’s pride;—
I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice forty times return;
And every time has added proofs
That man was made to mourn.

‘O man! while in thy early years,
How prodigal of time!
Mis-spending all they precious hours,
Thy glorious youthful prime!
Alternate follies take the sway,
Licentious passions burn;
Which tenfold force give Nature’s law,
That man was made to mourn.

‘Look not alone on youthful prime,
Or manhood’s active might;
Man then is useful to his kind,
Supported in his right:
But see him on the edge of life,
With cares and sorrows worn;
Then age and want—oh, ill-matched pair!—
Shew man was made to mourn.

‘A few seem favourites of fate,
In pleasure’s lap caress’d;
Yet think not all the rich and great
Are likewise truly blest.
But oh! what crowds in every land,
All wretched and forlorn,
Through weary life this lesson learn,
That man was made to mourn.

‘Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame;
More pointed still we make ourselves—
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,—
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

’See yonder poor, o’erlaboured wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful tho’ a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.

‘If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—
By Nature’s law designed—
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty or scorn?
Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn?

‘Yet let not this too much, my son,
Disturb thy youthful breast;
This partial view of humankind
Is surely not the last!
The poor, oppressed, honest man,
Has never, sure, been born,
Has there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn.’u

All in all Burns has become the personification of Scottish identity and the Immortality that Burns has rests in his work that was so deeply imbedded with hope for change, that continues to be studied , celebrated and preserved the world over, And so this Burns’ Night will raise a glass and drink a toast to Robert Burns .immortal bard of freedom. 

Historic Day : Nuclear Weapons are illegal at last

Nuclear arms are the most destructive, indiscriminate, inhumane and monstrous weapons ever produced, but today is an historic one, that we can all celebrate as a major milestone in the long march towards peace: The date 22 January marks a victory for humanity. That’s the day the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons enters into force, the day that nuclear weapons become prohibited. 

Efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons  date back to the beginning of the nuclear age , they  have always been immoral. Now, they are also classified as illegal, just like chemical and biological weapons. This is a major shift as it will bring about a change in the public perception of these weapons. The TPNW is not symbolic.The Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons is the first globally applicable multilateral agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons outright. It prohibits their use, threat of use, development, production, testing and stockpiling. It also commits States Parties to clearing contaminated areas and helping victims. By providing pathways for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the Treaty is an indispensable building block towards a world free of nuclear weapons. 

The dropping of two nuclear bombs 75 years ago, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945, combined they resulted  in the deaths of over 400,000 people. This is exactly what these horrific weapons were designed to do-indiscriminately kill vast amounts of people and clearly.demonstrated their enormous destructive power. There is no doubt that if one was exploded again, in war or accidentally, it would cause a humanitarian disaster. It is argued that they are militarily unusable because of the destruction their use would cause and many more people, even those who may not call themseles pacifists believe that using nuclear weapons  is immoral, Now there is a further argument illegality. 

A nuclear darkness has engulfed the world for seven decades, with only intermittent breakthroughs of light, after treaties had been repeatedly broken, but the gloom began to lift in July 2017 following international concerns about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons over a hundred and twenty countries voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. On October 24, 2020 Honduras provided the 50^th ratification of the Treaty, which was required for the 90-day countdown for the Treaty to enter into force to officially begin. which means it will become international law on 22nd January 2021. Not only does it prohibit the use of nuclear weapons but also related activities such as developing, testing or manufacturing nuclear weapons and assisting others with any prohibited activities.

Built on decades of nuclear disarmament advocacy, the treaty has been led by the true experts of nuclear weapons, the survivors of nuclear weapons use and testing. The treaty recognises nuclear weapons for what they are, unacceptable instruments of mass destruction, and acknowledges their disproportionate impact on indigenous communities.

As an  individual I am delighted that the Treaty has now been ratified, it embodies the collective moral revulsion of the international community. The entry into force of the Treaty provides Conscience with a new powerful argument: It provides added pressure to change the law so no-one is forced to pay through their taxes for nuclear weapons which are now illegal as well as immoral.

I also recognise that possession of nuclear weapons ties up resources that could be better used to tackle the problems that face the world, including the causes of war as well as the current Covid-19 pandemic and climate change.Conscience is clear that there are many alternative ways to resolve conflict, ways other than war, and that nuclear weapons have no place in conflict resolution.

 And yet 22 January will not mark the end of the journey. In fact, the banning of nuclear weapons should be seen as the beginning of multiple efforts to realise the objectives of the Treaty and bring about a world free from nuclear weapons.  It is now crucial to make the Treaty come to life as a new norm of international humanitarian law. The Treaty’s success depends on the broadest possible adherence..  

None of the 9 nuclear armed states,-China, France, India, Israel. North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, have signed the Treaty. They have even tried, unsuccessfully, to block it. As long as they refuse to sign, the Treaty does not apply to them directly – but it does make it much harder for them to justify their opposition. They can expect to face increasing international criticism, as well as internal political pressure. who will continue to work for the treaties full universalization and implementation. 

The Treaty will also have a significant impact on financial institutions (pension funds and banks) because the Treaty also bans the financing of nuclear weapons systems. By investing in nuclear arms, these institutions have played a major role in the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. They will now have to choose to endorse or reject this new standard: if they decide to reject it, they run the risk of tarnishing their image and becoming unpopular with their clients. Financial bodies of countries (Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden, for example) which do not support the TPNW have already made the decision to disinvest, which demonstrates the extent of the Treaty’s impact.

 Our key priority is to continue making the Treaty as universal as possible by getting as many states to sign and ratify it, increasing its legal influence. Monitoring its implementation will also be a very important task as it is a means of demonstrating its effectiveness.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and many other peace organisations in the UK will continue to campaign for the UK to honour its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to make tangible steps towards disarmament. Until the UK does so, Conscience will argue that UK taxpayers should not be forced to pay for nuclear weapons which are now not only immoral but illegal.Now the UK must  get in step with the rest of the world, acknowledge the foolishness of continuing to threaten the world with mass destruction, join the Treaty and disarm.

LINKS

UN Office for Disarmament Affairs - www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/ This includes a link to the treaty text.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - https://cnduk.org/resources/towards-world-without-nuclear-weapons/

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) - www.icanw.org/