sleep furiously

 

I have been rediscovering an award winning documentary from 2007  called Sleep Furiously a quietly  melancholic film set in a small hill- farming community in Trefeurig, mid Wales, Ceredigion, 10 miles from Aberystwyth.

A place where director Gideon Koppel's parents, both refugees  who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930's  found a home. It's a landscape that's changing rapidly as small scale agriculture, which characterised the area, is disappearing  and the last generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out.

The title of the film is a reference to social critic and activist Noam Chomsky’s sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.This phrase was given as an example of a grammatically correct, but meaningless, linguistic construction. Chomsky’s intention was that people would recognise that the language we use cannot be glibly  reduced to tidy formulas. Ironically, it has been proven that the phrase he chose to illustrate his point can actually make perfect sense given the right context.

Koppel manages to bring meaning and poetry to the line. With a score composed by revered electronic musician  Richard D James aka the Aphex Twin. Koppell has written that music was a vital component from the outset. It should be noted that Richard James  admired the film but wasn't too enamored about the way his music was edited.  The abrupt cuts to Avril 14th, a track that is used as a repeated refrain throughout, are made because Koppel didn't want the music to be used as conventional soundtrack but needed it to denote “an accentuation of the emotional dynamics of drama”. He justifies the crude editing of the music by saying that  “throughout the film we are asking the audience to listen to the silence”. The lilting strains of Aphex Twins music works wonders on the soundtrack, as does the abrupt consistently surprising diting, which efforlessly transports the viewer from place to place, life to life.

The filmmaker spent nearly nine months back in his homestead where he was bought up observing the rituals and traditions of the inhabitants with his Super 16mm camera, although this is far from being a conventional documentary study: there’s no voice-over, there are very few ‘characters’, and the connections between the vignettes of everyday existence are rarely spelt out, the film simply asks audiences to observe and draw their own conclusions from the images of ordinary lives and the natural landscape.   .

The two most significant human figures turn out to be Koppel’s widowed mother Pip, and the kindly mobile librarian John Jones. A tiny, physically resilient individual, the animal loving Pip seems completely unaffected by the presence of the camera, whilst the monthly visit of John’s bright yellow van is a reminder of how important books can be in establishing a sense of community. Koppel frequently drops in on unnamed people who are absorbed by their work, whether it’s teaching, baking, sheep shearing, milking, repairing vehicles, ploughing, haymaking, or cabinet-making, ways of life that are slowly being crushed by the wheels of progress. And he juxtaposes these images of human toil with shots of the magnificent surrounding countryside, captured in different seasons, lights and weather conditions, showing the sheer beauty of my country.

Following the progress of a mobile library gives a framework to the film, this van is literally a vehicle of stories that takes us on a profound and poetic journey into a world of endings and beginnings, a world of stuffed owls, sheep and fire.If the film can be said to have a message or purpose it is to remind us how the notion of  ‘community’ should be viewed as something that affects people’s daily lives rather than as a political concept. One issue that unites the community of Trefeurig is the threat to the future of the village’s primary school and we see a meeting where the locals criticise the council’s short-sighted decision to close the school.

Change is inevitable but does not always bring improvements, something neatly encapsulated in a witty poem about replacing a wooden signpost with a metal one. The new one is sturdier yet proves unreliable whenever there’s a strong wind. Wood may rot but a least the indicators remain in the correct position.

The spectre of modernity is always present and means that you can’t watch this film without the sad reflection that the inevitable march of progress will sweep away the old traditions and values depicted.

Sleep Furiously preserves for posterity moments and memories that will fade in time. The lines that appear on-screen near the end of the film remind us of the limitations of language when it comes to articulating what this means in human terms : “It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak. The courage, but not the words.”

Much influenced by his conversations with the writer Peter Handke , Koppel speaks, affectionately and lyrically, through his images, allowing us to see a disappearing word anew. The film never rests on teeness or sarcasm and as a result produces something altogether deeper, moodier, more compassionate and joyful. I would strongly recommend buying the DVD of this beautiful, moving patchwork quilt of a film that  has been so lovingly stitched .The DVD also includes a one hour pilot film called ‘A Sketchbook for The Library Van’ where, in a series of straight to camera monologues, the people talk about their lives. As in the main feature, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. A rich  artistic exploration of the dwindling flame of rural life, a profound moving  journey into a world of endings and beginnings. A film that has been described as " lyrical film making at its best". Avoid amazon it can be found in more ethical places.

By taking things deeper than face value and looking for alternative interpretations we can understand the world better around us. Not everyone views the world from the same lens, and something that may have no meaning to us, such as the sentence "colorless  green ideas sleep furiously." could have significance to someone who is able to look through a different lens. It is for me, what makes this wold we inhabit ever so richer. While winter reigns and the earth reposes allow colourless green ideas to sleep furiously.

sleep furiously film trailer

Happy birthday Aneurin Bevan (15 November 1897 – 6 July 1960)

Aneurin Bevan , was born on this day at 32 Charles Street, Tredegar in 1897. It was one of a long row of four- roomed miners' cottages. He was the sixth of ten children born to Phoebe and David Bevan a coal miner of whom  only eight survived infancy and only six to adulthood.

More commonly known as Nye, he was a Welsh Labour party politician who served as Minister of Health from 1945 to 1951. He began  his own working life down the mines working with his father. as a collier's helper at the age of 13.

 Although a strong boy he found the work exhausting: "Down below are the sudden perils - runaway trains hurtling down the lines; frightened ponies kicking and mauling in the dark, explosions, fire, drowning. And if he escapes? There is a tiredness which leads to stupor, which forms a dull persistent background to your consciousness. This is the tiredness of the miner, particularly of the boy of fourteen or fifteen who falls asleep over his meals and wakes up hours later to find that his evening has gone and there is nothing before him but bed and another day's wrestling with inert matter."

Bevan developed a love of reading. He joined the Tredegar Workmen's Institute Library where he read the works of H.G Wells, Jack London, James Connolly https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/05/james-connolly-working-class-hero.html  and Eugene V. Debs https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/10/eugene-v-debs-5-11-1855-2010-26-working.html. He was also a keen attender at Plebs League  classes given fortnightly at Blackwood by Sydney Jones.

Bevan also joined the Tredegar branch of the South Wales Miners; Federation soon became a union activist and by the time he was nineteen he was chairman of his Miners' Lodge. Bevan became a well-known local orator and was seen by his employers, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company, as a revolutionary. The manager of the colliery found an excuse to get him sacked. However, with the support of the Miners' Federation, the case was judged as one of victimization and the company was forced to re-employ him.

Bevan was also deeply influenced by the teachings of Noah Ablett, the leader of South Wales syndicalism. Ablett was an evangelist of aggressive Marxism who  produced a pamphlet,The Miners' Next Step (1912). Ablett called for a new type of unionism: "A united industrial organisation, which, recognising the war of interest between workers and employers, is constructed on fighting lines, allowing for a rapid and simultaneous stoppage of wheels throughout the mining industry."  Bevan also began attending the Tredegar branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Like most members of the ILP, Bevan was an opponent of Britain's involvement in the First World War. In 1917 he was called up under the government's Conscription Act.  He refused to join the British Army and claimed he would choose his own enemy and his own battlefield and would not let the Government do it for him. He was eventually rejected on health grounds as he suffered from nystagmus. Over the next two years Bevan was active in anti-war campaigns across Wales.

After his mining trade union  sponsored him to study politics, history and economics in London, in 1919 Bevan  discovered Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, solidifying his left-wing political outlook. He would soon become politically active and became a lifelong champion of social justice, the rights of working people and democratic socialism. Reciting long passages by William Morris gradually began to conquer a stammer that he had  had since he was a child.

Bevan remained in the college  until 1921, Not one of the most diligent students he found it difficult to follow an organised routine, including getting up for breakfast. Yet after overcoming his stammer, he went on to become one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, defending the rights of working people and the cause of socialism.

When Bevan returned home in 1921 the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company refused to re-employ him. For the next three years he was without work. During this time Bevan worked as an unpaid adviser to people living in Tredegar. Bevan considered emigrating to Australia but in 1924 he found work at Bedwellty Colliery. But after ten months the owners decided to close the colliery down and Bevan had to endure another year of unemployment. In February 1925, Bevan's father died of pneumoconiosis in his arms.

In 1926 he was appointed a union official just as the General Strike came into force.The strike brought Bevan to the fore as a leader of the South Wales miners, and he orchestrated the distribution of strike pay in Tredegar during the six months lock-out the miners endured after the industrial action. He gave his full support to  A.J Cook general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/11/ajcook-militant-miner-and-trade-union.html

He became a councillor on Monmouth County Council in 1928, then a member of parliament for Ebbw Vale in 1929. His maiden speech was an attack on Winston Churchill, who he saw as the main enemy of the miners.
Bevan married a fellow left-wing Labour MP, Jennie Lee, in 1934 and together they campaigned to support the Socialists in the Spanish Civil War against France as well as setting up the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. In 1936 a group of prominent left-wingers including Bevan set up a weekly Socialist newspaper, The Tribune, followed by trips around Spain during the Civil War. He famously declared ' Fascism is not itself a new order of society. It is the future  refusing to be  born."

His activism and agitation led to his brief expulsion from Labour in 1939, but he agreed to toe the party line and was readmitted.Despite opposing Churchill in mining matters, Bevan argued that he should replace Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. But once Winston Churchill was in power, Bevan criticised the wartime reductions in civil liberties.

In 1945, the general election saw Labour returned comprehensively to government. Bevan  saw this post-war victory as a chance to implement radical social reform, and on 5 July 1948, while he was minister for health the National Health Service was created,  his most famous accomplishment that saw the provision of  medical care being introduced,  free at the point of need to everyone, regardless of wealth. .In 1945 Nye said ":We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, and now we are the builders,"

The initial idea came from the Socialist Medical Association, the president of which, Dr Somerville  Hastings,successfully proposed a resolution during the Labour Party Conference suggesting it should commit itself to establish a State Health Service. While is was a first feature of the Labour platform at the time, the proposal captured cross-party support in 1942. Then the Beveridge report of 1943 set the seeds and blueprints  for the creation  of the NHS  and the welfare state. Henry Willink, Conservative MP and Health Minister in 1944 circulated the A National Health Service white paper in Parliament. Aneurin Bevan ultimately took on the campaign to establish the NHS in 1945 and proposed the final concept in 1947. 

Bevan's 1949 Housing Act removd the restrictions of public housing to the ' working classes' so that council housing was available to all. For a short time, council  housing was a genuine alternative to private renting or ownership, and was built in large quantities. More council houses were built in Wales between 1945 and 1951 than have been built since 1975. 

Bevan’s contribution to the quality of council housing is less well recognised.  He insisted on good design, increased space standards and the provision of an upstairs and downstairs w.c. – all revolutionary at a time when two-thirds of houses in the Rhondda valleys did not have an indoor toilet.  It is no accident that post-war council housing remains some of the most well-built and popular even 60 years on.

Nye's autobiography, In Place of Fear  came out in 1952. He would lead the left wing of the Labour Party from the back benches until he ran for the leadership of the party in 1955. He was defeated by Gaitskill, but was made shadow colonial then shadow foreign secretary.
In 1959 he was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party, but  he was a very ill man and died of cancer on 6th of July 1960  having made his reputation as father of the NHS.

Since 1960 he has been all but canonised, raised above criticism as the soul and conscience of the old Labour Party, and a source of emotional inspiration and legitimising quotations, while successive Labour leaders from Harold Wilson to Neil Kinnock have fallen over themselves to assert their claim to his mantle. 

Yes he courted  controversy during his political life with his acerbic comments about his political opponents and his views  on nuclear disarmament and devolution, which he opposed, and I wonder what  he would thing of the gathering momentum  for independence here in Wales. Oh and in his private life was known for his enjoyment of the good life. Despite some faults Nye Bevan hated the  Tories with a passion, and helped make the biggest improvements to the quality of life for the average British person on living memory, so I respect him for this. There can be no greater achievement than  better health and better housing for ordinary people. Bevanite remains a meaningful term, still today invoking a Labour  vision of a better and more equal society. Such a shame that it's current leader Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten and abandoned these principles. Who did he think Nye was talking about  when he said " The right wing of the Labour Party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline than abide by its democratic decisions ?" 

On the Tories famously said the following ,in a speech he made on July 4, 1948, " So far as I am concerned they are lower  than vermin." he went on. "They condemned millions of people to semi-starvation, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying, do not listen to the seduction of Lord Woolton.They have not changed, or if they have are slightly worse.,"

Nye didn't come to that conclusion because he was a mean spirited Welshman, he'd grown up in a world shaped by the Tories from cradle to grave. To him a tale of  neglect and abandonment and he knew exactly who was to blame.

I am reminded  that my quality of life owe more to a dead man than a whole Tory Government ever could. Everyone who has ever benefitted from NHS treatment should be grateful to this true working class hero and continue to heed his warning about "the art of Tory politics." Over seventy years on the NHS remains one of the most treasured services in the country.  

Because of Nye we can be proud that people in Britain do not live in fear of medical bills they cannot afford. We can congratulate those many thousands of health professionals who have given brilliant service to the sick and pushed so wide the boundaries of medical care. We can celebrate longer life and healthier living. So thank you Nye Bevan, happy birthday, to this man of deep  passion and principle.Now is the time to carry his great legacy forward. We should continue to defend the NHS with all our might..As Nye said " It will last as long as there are folk  with the faith to fight for it"

Nye Bevan speaks about the National Health Service 

Durability

It''s been a bloody tough year 

But like comets we can soar,

With the smile of love

On our many diverse faces,

As winter's cloak arrives

Try to forget about frustration.

As condolence trends worldwide

People say goodbye over and over,

There are still moments to grasp

To give the past a kick into touch,

Surging ever forward, beyond suffering

Collectively walking on from devastation.

Abandon thoughts of senseless guilt

Carry on moving, through life's heady paths,

Keep on conning, unwitting the devil

Eyes ablaze, following future unwritten,

Beyond the rising stench of fascism

The many obstacles of negativism.

There are still many safe spaces

Where voices can release fastidious dream;

As the gleaming sun sets in the mornings

Beyond the vortex, energy does not die, 

Across the fields, and the valleys and the oceans

With tenaciousness, reassess affinity with aspiration.

Ogoni 9 activists remembered 25 years on

 

 

25 years ago today, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine. were executed by hanging by the military government of Sani Abacha in Nigeria. Their deaths sparked an international outcry that lingers to this day.

 Shell had been waging a lethal ecological war in Ogoni land since 1958 when it first discovered oil reserves in the area. The oil exploitation has been concentrated in the coastal plains terraces to the north of the Niger delta, which is home to the Ogoni people. 

More than 900 million barrels of oil of estimated value 30 billion US dollars have been mined from the area since the discovery of the oil reserves. 96 oil wells connected five oilfields which were mostly operated by Shell and where gas has been flared twenty-four hours a day for more than thirty-five years. Between 1976 and 1991, over two million barrels of oil polluted Ogoniland in 2,976 separate oil spills. 

In 1990 the Ogoni began to powerfully resist the destructive intervention of the oil industry and the Nigerian dictatorship in their home, where despite of the stupendous oil and gas wealth of their land, they were confronted with environmental degradation, political marginalization, economic strangulations particularly marked by an unemployment rate of over 70 percent, slavery, and possible extinction. What became known to as the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), with Ken Saro Wiwa as its leader, they issued the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) in which they demanded ; the right to self-determination as a distinct people in the Nigerian Federation;

adequate representation as of right in all Nigerian national institutions;

 the right to use a fair proportion of the economic resources of their land for their development and  the right to control their environment.

 This was followed by the largest peaceful protest against a single corporation in to this date, in which 300,000 Ogoni people marched against Shell’s ecological war in January 1993. 

The protest was followed by an extremely violent crack down on the movement by the Nigerian government and Shell whereby over 1,000 Ogoni people were murdered and 30,000 people displaced.

Ken Saro Wiwa was born in 1941 as the eldest son in an Ogoni family. After leaving university he pursued an academic career and became the most outspoken environmental activist in the Niger Delta decrying the devastation of the land, air and water at the hands of rich corporations and complicit governmental authorities.

He was a writer, artist, journalist, and television producer and became the President of the Association of Nigerian Authors  for three years until 1991, when he decided to devote himself entirely to the nonviolent struggles of his fellow Ogoni people.

He chose to fight using nonviolent resistance techniques such as poetry, prose and peaceful protest. Saro-Wiwa was able to mobilize the people of the Niger Delta to push for adequate representation and the preservation of their homeland, which was continuing to be destroyed by oil exploitation.

In 1994, Saro-Wiwa was given the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize”, along with three other environmental activists. The following year he was given the Goldman Environmental Foundation of California prize.  It didn’t take long before the Nigerian government felt their economic interest in oil exploitation was being threatened by the growing movement of Saro-Wiwa and his followers.

In May 1994, a meeting took place which broke out in violent confrontation, and four of the elders were killed. Even though Saro-Wiwa had been barred from attending the meeting, he and 8 other Ogoni leaders were held responsible and arrested. A trial took place, though independent and international witnesses claim the various circumstances surrounding the proceedings strayed from the laws outlined in the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights law. Accused of murder and without legal counsel nor right to appeal, Saro-Wiwa and the other 8 Ogoni leaders, were hanged on November 10th, 1995.

25 years have passed since then but despite continueous protests, no justice has been served to the Ogoni people and neocolonial violence persists! While oil production has ceased, pipelines operated by Shell still traverse the land, creeks and waterways. Leakages – caused by corroded pipelines as well as bandits – mean that the area is still plagued by oil spills to this date. The Nigerian Government officially launched a clean-up programme in Ogoniland  however, communities are still waiting for emergency measures to be taken and clean-up to begin. 

While Shell admitted that its oil operations have polluted large areas of the Niger Delta it resists charges of complicity in human rights abuses. However, confidential memos, faxes, witness statements and other documents released in 2009, clearly showed the company regularly paid the military to stop the peaceful protest movement MOSOP against the pollution, even helping to plan raids on villages suspected of opposing the company.

To this day, despite facts that tie Shell to their murders and to the continuing abuse of the Ogoni people, Shell still denies culpability and continues to drill for oil in Nigeria.Moreover, Shell continues to undermine democracy and feed into corruption in the country by engaging in rigged trade deals that served business’ interests rather than the welfare of the people. "Shell must not get away with this," said Osai Ojigho, director of Amnesty International Nigeria."We will continue to fight until every last trace of oil is removed from Ogoniland."

Ken Saro-Wiwa once said: "I am more dangerous dead" — a quote that remains true 25 years after his death. 

The following converging factors give this anniversary particular resonance. The upsurge of activism in Nigeria last month has been met with fatal repression but has also brought fresh aspirations in this 60th anniversary year of independence. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement continue to expose economic inequality and racial injustice as well as the uneven accountability of governments; at the same time, both challenge not only commitments to corporate responsibility, but also the fundamentals of corporate purpose..This day will ever be remembered now and always as a day, the innocent blood of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists were shed.

"Dance your anger and your joys,
Dance the military guns to silence,
Dance oppression and injustice to death,
Dance my people,
For we have seen tomorrow
And there is an Ogoni star in the sky."

— Ken Saro Wiwa - Hung for opposing Shell

Coronavirus: Insights from Albert Camus' 'The Plague'

 

 

 Much has been written about my hero French- Algerian existentialist philosopher Albert Camus ,   https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2012/05/albert-camus-71113-4160-smoking.html admirer of revolutionary syndicalism, anarchists, conscientious objectors, and all manner of rebels. Standing against totalitarianism in the form of Stalinism and fascism, and was never afraid to speak his truth.
Born in extreme poverty, on the 7th of November 1913 in French occupied Algeria, to an illiterate mother who was partially deaf, who lost his father in the horror that was  World War 1, and despite tremendous disadvantages by the age of 44 he was collecting the Nobel Prize for literature.

His acclaimed novel, La Peste, translated as The Plague in English, published in 1947  is currently flying off the bookshelves  amidst  the current coronavirus pandemic, a novel that  evokes so  vividly and on such an epic scale the story we are currently living every day. 

The book  often seen  as an allegory for the French resistance movement, a tale of valiant though impossible struggle. against the dark forces of fascism, but beyond this connection , Camus tale written in sparse, haunting prose –goes beyond this and  takes us through a catastrophic outbreak of a contagious disease in the lightly fictionalised town of Oran on the Algerian coast, as seen through the eyes of the novel’s hero,  Doctor Rieux.

While Bernard Rieux is The Plague’s central protagonist, and later revealed to be its narrator too, Camus’ beliefs are most explicitly delivered through the character of Jean Tarrou. A former communist revolutionary from France who is whiling away his disillusionment in Oran when the quarantine is announced, Tarrou aids Rieux by organizing volunteer sanitation workers to fight the disease’s spread. The novel advances through the two characters’ perspectives, via Rieux’s recollections and Tarrou’s diary entries, sections of which read as if they are a continuation of Camus’ philosophical work on absurdism—the desire to find meaning in a meaningless world: 

" How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth."

Tarrou also directly addresses the plague as a metaphor for something much larger and longer-standing than the epidemic. One evening, sitting on a terrace overlooking the city to the sea, Tarrou tells Rieux:

"I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition." 

Tarrou goes on to clarify that he isn’t referring to the bubonic plague, but to the condoing of murder—which amounts to the same thing: death. He saw this “plague” in his father, who was a prosecutor arguing for executing criminals, just as he saw it in some of his communist comrades with an authoritarian bend, who claimed to be fighting for a better world, but also committed cold-blooded murder. From this disillusionment comes Tarrou’s only certainty:

:"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” And so Tarrou chose to throw his lot in with the people of Oran, a strange city where he knew no one, helping them fight off a disease that ultimately claims his life."

As the novel opens, an air of eerie normality reigns. ‘Oran is an ordinary town,’ writes Camus, ‘nothing more than a French Prefecture on the coast of Algeria.’ The inhabitants lead busy money-centered and denatured lives; they barely notice that they are alive.But with the first series of deaths displaying the same curious symptoms, town officials squabble about whether or not the deaths qualify as an “epidemic” and how seriously they should take it. They nervously note how poorly prepared they are with the necessary equipment to treat large numbers of stricken people. Officials advise locals to “practice extreme cleanliness” while privately worrying about how many hospital beds are available. The number of deaths rise,  Oran officials decide it is time to close the town. Businesses are shuttered. Daily deaths are counted. Protective masks are sought. Fake antidotes are advertised. Panic and fear is spread “This here damned disease,” one character says, “even them who haven’t got it can’t think of anything else.” Most of all is the waiting.

In order to write the book, Camus immersed himself in the history of plagues. He read books on the Black Death that killed 50 million people in Europe in the 14th century; the Italian plague of 1629 that killed 280,000 people across the plains of Lombardy and the Veneto, the great plague of London of 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged cities on China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th and 19th centuries. In March 1942, Camus told the writer André Malraux that he wanted to understand what plague meant for humanity: ‘Said like that it might sound strange,’ he added, ‘but this subject seems so natural to me.’

Camus wrotes: ‘Pestilence is so common, there have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly utterly senseless, but that doesn’t prevent it from starting again and bloody again, like a pestilence that sadly has no ending . an absurdity that to this day some deny, in a continued irrational way. 

Camus argued that there is in most of us a moral plaque  as equally debilitating  as the physical variety, The plague is our moral indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others,including the suffering  of others, including the suffering that we may not directly endorse, but which occurs under our implied consent to the current social contract, Describing very well a society  where the policies of our leaders leaves people dying in the Mediterranean sea, as they failed in their search for a better life. the plague is our moral indifference.

Camus saw no dichotomy between the emptiness that lies at the center of immorality  of politics and in the tragedy of morality, but in end offered solace as both we and the people of Oran  collectively mourn the many deaths  and keep a wary eye to the future. What he still offers is a meaningful path forwards out of the paths of darkness, emphasising his faith in humanity and our willingness to face these burdens together. 

The theme of love is also omnipresent and Camus explores it most profoundly through the character of Rambert. A young Parisian journalist trapped in Oran, Rambert initially attempts to escape from the plague-ridden town. Invoking deep love for his wife back in Paris, Rambert tries to justify his decision to Rieux and Tarrou. Rambert insists that his desire to escape isn’t borne out of a lack of courage; previously he’d risked his life fighting in the Spanish Civil War. But what the war taught him is that courage and conviction cannot be abstract idea. Dying for an idea, he claims, is heroism, and it is heroism in which he no longer believes. For Rambert, life is about “living and dying for what one loves,” and his concrete love for his wife, he insists is what really matters.

The doctor Rieux counters that “man” — whether in fighting war or fighting disease — isn’t merely an abstract idea and that his own actions aren’t about heroism, but common decency and doing one’s job. But in any case, Rieux reassures Rambert that his decision to leave is “absolutely right and proper”. Rambert insists he’s putting love first and that it’s easier for Rieux and Tarrou to stay and fight the plague because they have nothing to lose. Assuming that both of them are alone, Rambert claims it’s easier “to be on the side of angels”. But when his efforts to flee are delayed and he’s forced to witness the suffering brought on by the pestilence, Rambert is forced to re-think his position. His views are further challenged when Rambert discovers that Rieux is married and that his wife is in quarantine with plague. Upon learning of Rieux’s wife, Rambert gives up his efforts to escape and courageously volunteers to help the fight. In short, Rieux becomes empathetic. And empathy is really a form of love for humanity. So in the end it’s not a question of putting love first, ahead of some other cause, but about embracing a broader and deeper form of love that encompasses yet transcends Rieux’s love for his wife.

The theme of justice also runs throughout the novel. The plague is indiscriminate. Rambert seems to be rewarded for his courage and is eventually reunited with his wife. Yet at the same time, an innocent child dies. Tarrou, despite great courage, also succumbs to the plague, as does Rieux’s wife. Grand, a man who wastes his life revising the first line of his novel, miraculously recovers. These examples highlight the absurdity of existence and the fact that we cannot rely on the benevolence of some external force to ensure just outcomes. For justice to be served, we must take matters into our own hands. Thanks to the brave actions of a small group of people, the plague is eventually defeated. And at the end of the novel Cottard, an opportunist that had profited from shady dealings during the outbreak, feels the wrath of justice at the hands of a mob of frustrated townspeople.

" On this earth there are pestilences and there are victims " Tarrou surmised , " and it's up to us so far as possble, not to join forces with the pestilences" And like Rieux we must realise the importance of courage, which represents the difference between being swallowed  up by the plaque or prevailing over it. Keep safe, don't give up hope, much love.Thank you Albert Camus

 

 Coronavirus: Insights from Albert Camus' 'The Plague'

 

 

 

Remember, remember, the fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot

 

 

It's that time of year again - when  Britons commemorate the failure of the November 1605 Gunpowder Plot by a gang of Roman Catholic activists led by Warwickshire-born Robert Catesby.

In the 1600's Catholics had to practice their religion in secret. There were even fines for people who didn't attend the Protestant church on Sunday or on holy days.When Protestant King James I acceded to the throne, English Catholics had hoped that the persecution they had felt for over 45 years under Queen Elizabeth I would finally end, and they would be granted the freedom to practice their religion. When this didn't transpire, a group of conspirators resolved to assassinate the King and his ministers by blowing up the Palace of Westminster during the state opening of Parliament.

 Guido Fawkes was born Guy Fawkes on the 13th April 1570 in York. It is recorded that Fawkes lost his father at the age of eight; his mother then remarried a Catholic man, with Fawkes later converting to Catholicism in a country increasingly abhorrent of his new faith. For about 10 years, Fawkes fought abroad for the Catholic cause in Europe in the Eighty Years’War and it is here that Fawkes adopted the Italian name Guido for the remainder of his life
Fawkes returned to England with fellow English Catholic Thomas Wintour, who introduced him to Robert Catesby. There were 13 conspirators all together, Guy Fawkes, Thomas Bates, Robert and Thomas Wintour, Thomas Percy, Christopher and John Wright, Francis Tresham, Everard Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, Hugh Owen, John Grant with Robert Catesby being the true ringleader.

Guy (Guido) Fawkes) from York, and his fellow conspirators, having rented out a house close to the Houses of Parliament, managed to smuggle 36 barrels of gunpowder into a cellar of the House of Lords - enough to completely destroy the building.

However, the scheme began to unravel when an anonymous letter was sent to William Parker, the 4th Baron Monteagle, warning him to avoid the House of Lords. The letter (which could well have been sent by Lord Monteagle's brother-in-law Francis Tresham), was made public and this led to a search of Westminster Palace in the early hours of November 5.

Explosive expert Fawkes, who had been left in the cellars to set off the fuse, was caught when a group of guards discovered him at the last moment.This is also why he became the most well known out of all the plotters.

Lord Monteagle for his treachery was rewarded with £500 plus £200 worth of lands for his service in protecting the crown.

 Defiant when captured, Fawkes remained resolute and unrepentant for his actions. He endured three days of torture in the Towers of London, from the 6th to the 9th, until he fully revealed the names of his co-conspirators and their plan – by this time around half of his colleagues managed to evade capture. Fawkes, along with the other conspirators, were sentenced to be hung on the 31st January 1606 and quartered thereafter for high treason.This was the traditional death for traitors in 17th- century England.  

As he awaited his punishment on the gallows, Fawkes leapt off the platform to avoid having his testicles cut off, his stomach opened and his guts spilled out before his eyes.

Mercifully for him, he died from a broken neck but his body was subsequently quartered, and his remains were sent to "the four corners of the kingdom" as a warning to others.

The other men received the full measure of their sentences as a warning to other potential rebels.
 Fawkes at the time said his only regret was that the plot was foiled. When he was asked why he was found with so much gunpowder he said “to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains.”
 Despite attempting to kill the new king of England, James I apparently praised Fawkes for being dedicated to his cause and for having a ' Roman resolution.'

His capture has since been illustrated in countless schoolbooks, novels, popular works of history, and movies: a tall, bearded figure in boots, dark cloak, and dark, wide-brimmed hat. It is his figure that is still burned in effigy on bonfires around England every year on November 5.  A  much  maligned individual , but due to a deep undertow of popular discontentment has become a symbol of resistance. Possibly down to Alan Moore and his brilliant comic creation in V for Vendettas, the main character ‘V’ wears the ‘Guy Fawkes mask’ to hide his identity and instead promotes the idea of anarchy and freedom. The film concludes with him –successfully- blowing up Parliament. Across the world protestors started  wearing the stylised masks of Fawkes, some wore his mask as a symbol of their contempt for authority and government, reclaiming Guido as a symbol of hope and resistance.serving both a symbolic purpose as the spirit of rebellion, and a practical one in helping to hide the faces and identities of protesters from police. In this context, Guy Fawkes is a hero who fought, and won, against overwhelming odds..

Following the failed plot, Parliament declared November 5th a national day of thanksgiving, and the first celebration of it took place in 1606. .Largely secular , the annual celebrations became a focus of anti-Catholic feeling. The original effigy burnt was that of the Pope.

King James I also sought to control non-conforming English Catholics in England. In May 1606, Parliament passed 'The Popish Recusants Act' which required any citizen to take an oath of allegiance denying the Pope's authority over the king.

Observance of the 5th November Act, passed within months of the plot, made church attendance compulsory on that day and by the late 17th Century, the day had gained a reputation for riotousness and disorder and anti-Catholicism. William of Orange's birthday (November 4th) was also conveniently close.

The actions of Guy Fawkes are immortalised in the nursery rhyme 'Remember, remember'. Although several different versions exist, the first five lines remain to same in all.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot

We see no reason

Why Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot ….

Guy Fawkes, guy, t'was his intent

To blow up king and parliament.

Three score barrels were laid below

To prove old England's overthrow. 

By god's mercy he was catch'd

With a darkened lantern and burning match.

So, holler boys, holler boys,

Let the bells ring. 

Holler boys, holler boys,

God save the king.

And what shall we do with him?

Burn him! 

The Houses of Parliament are still searched by the Yeomen of the Guard before the state opening. The idea is to ensure no modern-day Guy Fawkes is hiding in the cellars with a bomb, although it is more ceremonial than serious. And they do it with lanterns. 

Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated in the UK, and in a number of countries that were formerly part of the British Empire, with fireworks, bonfires and parades. Straw dummies representing Fawkes are tossed on the bonfire, nowadays as old traditions make way for new, more contemporary political figures are increasingly used.

The word ‘bonfire’incidentally  is said to derive from 'bone-fire', from a time when the corpses of witches, heretics and other nonconformists were burned on a pyre instead of being buried in consecrated ground.

Their is a well known phrase ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ The  act can be perceived as mindless violence or just necessity, depending on the attitude of those perceiving it. The changing perceptions of Guy Fawkes proves this. I am in no way condoning the way that some people choose to resort to extreme violence in order to make their point, but I do think we should be aware of the complex and subjective nature of the term ‘terrorist’, and should use it accordingly.
In the end Fawkes and his friends paid the ultimate price, and  although unhappy with the state of Catholicism in Europe, Fawkes would have happily seen a return of an autocratic Catholic monarch to Britain. Hero or Villain; it really depends on your interpretation of their legacy and your level of dissatisfaction with the world we live in today, to many a freedom fighter who in his time  stood up for the people of England, and against the oppression of the government, who still resonates deeply with the world we live in today. In the meantime carry on resisting, and if you must play with fire, please be careful out there, and don't get caught. 

A.J.Cook - Militant Miner and Trade Union Leader ( 22/11/1884 - 2/11/31)

                                                                                                             

Arthur James Cook better known as A.J.Cook, was General Secretary of the Miners Federation of Great Britain - the forerunner of the NUM -  from 1924 until 1931, a period that included the General Strike of 1926.

Born  at Wookey, Somerset, 22 November 1884, son of Thomas Cook, a serving soldier. After leaving elementary school he worked as a farm labourer. At 17 he was preaching with the Baptists; at 19 he went to work to the Lewis Merthyr Colliery, Trehafod, and developed radical socialist views which led to his severing his relations with his religious denomination. 

Cook moved to Porth in South Wales, and later to Merthyr Tydfil, to find work in the mines.

Cook joined  the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1905. He played a prominent part in the Unofficial Reform Committee which led the struggles in the Cambrian combine in 1911https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2015/11/remembering-1910-cambrian-combine.html and 1912 against the coal owners  and the right wing leaders of the South Wales Miners Federation. This grouping around Ablett, Hay and Mainwaring producing  the famous syndicalist  pamphlet  “The Miners’ Next Step” in 1912. Cook was involved in the initial discussions around the document.The pamphlet- written  by rank-and-file miners in South Wales - exposed  the treacherous role in which some of the union leaders had played in their dealings with the coal-owners. It argued that the left needed to organise from below to gain control of the leadership of the union.Over the next ten years that is exactly what Cook did.

Even at this stage  he was described as being a brilliant and dynamic speaker. By 1919 he was miners’ agent (a paid union official) in the Rhondda.

It was on the initiative of the Unofficial Reform Committee that in 1911 Cook was sent to the Central Labour College which had been established by the Plebs League as a challenge to anti-Marxist indoctrination courses taught at Ruskin College. As well as being a working miner and union activist, Cook gave regular CLC classes in Marxism on his return to the Rhondda.  The militant activists in South Wales – Cook included – were heavily influenced by syndicalism. As against the weak-kneed reformism of the early Labour Party which had become a mere appendage of Lloyd George’s Liberals in the House of Commons and against the conservative trade union leaders seeking only to strike deals with the bosses on behalf of the skilled workers, the Syndicalists had a bolder class perspective. Their view was of continuous militant union struggle which would step by step drive the bosses to the wall. Whilst Cook himself became a union leader and a member of different political parties, he never outgrew this non-political militant unionism. While working as a collier, he was elected chairman of the Lewis Merthyr colliery lodge of the South Wales Miners' Federation and a member of the executive committee of the union; he was also elected a member of the Rhondda Urban District Council.

 His militancy  however led to his conviction and imprisonment for three months in April 1918 under the Defence of the Realm Act; he was also sentenced to two months' imprisonment in 1921 for inciting to unlawful assembly. 

In many ways it was the organisation and early success of the Miners’ Minority Movement (MMM) that inspired the NMM. The growth of a militant current among miners can be seen against the background of The Miners’ Next Step, the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

When Frank Hodges, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation, became lord of the admirality in the first Labour government of 1924, the Minority Movement was able to force him to resign his union office.The South Wales Miners’ Federation nominated AJ Cook to replace him, and he beat a Yorkshire miner for the post by 217,664 votes to 202,297. Cook was then 39 years old.

On learning of his election, TUC general secretary Fred Bramley exploded that Cook was a “raving Communist”. We can understand Bramley’s reaction by reference to a speech that Cook made to Holborn Labour Party in June 1924. He declared, “I believe in strikes. They are the only weapon.”

Although a member of the ILP  Cook worked closely with the Communist Party after its formation in 1920 and the National Minority Movement from 1924 to 1929. Arthur Horner, a leading South Wales Communist and mining militant described Cook's tenure as General Secretary as “a time for new ideas — an agitator, a man with a sense of adventure”. Cook remained a member of the ILP throughout this period, with the exception of a brief period after the foundation of the Communist Party (CP). He left the CP in a dispute over tactics in the miners’ lockout of 1921.

He played a leading part in the great general strike of 1926 and the prolonged miners' strike which followed. During the miners’ struggle of 1926 no figure came to represent the anger and determination of the miners more than A.J. Cook. He was adored by the militants in every coalfield as a tireless and selfless fighter for the cause of the miners. His slogan 'Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day' became the cry of the miners throughout the country. He was hated by the right wing trade unions leaders. He was pilloried in the bosses’ press.

The fact that Cook could read and write saw him help his fellow miners to fill in the complicated forms necessary to claim their compensation and other entitlements. He worked tirelessly and his front room was converted into a miners' consultation office. He was hated and despised by the stuck-up parliamentarians who saw the miners’ struggle as futile and doomed,but despite this he sacrificed his all for the miners’ cause and derived no personal gain from the tenure of office

He endured great physical pain during his last years from an injury received whilst a miner and aggravated by an attack on him during the 1926 strike. His leg had to be amputated, complications set in, and he died at the Manor House Hospital, London, on this day 2 November 1931 at only 46 years of age. 

Thank you to my friend and comrade Mel Hepworth former striking Yorkshire miner, 1984- 1985 for bringing A.J, Cook to my attention and for providing me with much of the information contained within this post. And here are two links, the first  of which  you can read an account of this great man's life in his own words. followed by an appraisal of his life by the late Paul Foot.

http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/History/Cook.html

https://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1986/01/ajcook.htm

Balfour Declaration’s 103rd Anniversary prompts calls on Britain to apologise and recognize Palestinian rights

 

 Lord Arthur Balfour

 

The Balfour Declaration was issued 103 years ago  today; It.was the one of key developments in the early stages of the twentieth Century  that influenced the Jewish communities of the world to believe that Great Britain would support the creation of a jewish state in the Middle East. The ramifications would be seen up until the present day and is regarded as one of the most controversial and contested documents in modern history.

 It was named after Lord Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary during the Word War 1, who  on an order by United Kingdom’s Prime Minister at that time, David Lloyd George,sent an official letter  to Baron Walter Rothschild (the 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Zionist community, who accepted it on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland.

The document was quite short, consisting of only 67 words in three paragraphs. However, the impact was enormous: the declaration was the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has not ended.The immortal words of the letter said the following:

" His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by jews in any other country."

The Original Letter of the Balfour Declaration

 

 

With the Balfour Declaration, London was seeking Jewish support for its war efforts, and the Zionist push for a homeland for Jews was an emerging political force. In 1917, Jews constituted 10% of the population, the rest were  Arabs. Yet Britain recognised the national rights of a tiny minority and denied it to the majority This was a classic colonial document which totally disregarded the rights and aspirations of the indigenous population. In the words of Jewish writer Arthur Koestler: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

It was a shock to the Arab world, which had not been consulted and had received promises of independence of its own in the post-war break up of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Palestinians have always condemned the declaration, which they refer to as the "Balfour promise" saying Britain was giving away land it did not own.

The Balfour Declaration constituted a  dangerous historical precedent and a blatant breach of all international laws and norms, and this  act of the British Empire to “give” the land of another people  for colonial settlement created the conditions for countless atrocities against the Palestinian people. Balfour, in a 1919 confidential memo, wrote: 

 “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”  

The discriminatory language used by Sir Arthur Balfour and seen in the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate reveal the prejudiced rational behind British foreign policy in Palestine. A month after the Balfour Declaration on 2 December 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. In 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine came into effect, and included the entire text of the Balfour Declaration. Through the Mandate, Britain would go on to rule Palestine for three decades.

The Mandate for Palestine constituted the entire legal framework for how Britain should operate during its occupation of Palestine. Despite this, the Mandate made no mention of the Palestinians by name, nor did it specify the right of Palestinians to nationhood. Instead, it was during its rule in Palestine that Britain sought to lay the foundations for the creation of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’. 

By the end of the 1920s, it became clear that this ambition would have violent repercussions.Between 1936 and 1939, thousands of Palestinians were killed and imprisoned as they revolted in protest against British policy.

The British response took a heavy toll on the livelihoods of Palestinian villagers, who were subjected to punitive measures that included the confiscation of livestock, the destruction of properties, detention and collective fines. During this time, British forces’ are said to have carried out beatings, extrajudicial killings and torture as they attempted to quell the uprising. To this day, there are still the ‘Tegart Forts’ in Palestine built and named by Sir Charles Tegart who had been stationed in India to punish those fighting against the British Raj and then later stationed in Palestine to control any Arab dissent.

For Palestinians, Britain’s three decades of occupation in Palestine was a turning point in the country’s history, laying the foundations for what would become decades of occupation, displacement and insecurity.

When the UK eventually decided to withdraw from Mandatory Palestine in 1947, it left decisions regarding the future of Palestine to the United Nations. In May 1948 the Israeli state was established.  This time is known by Palestinians as the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’, during which 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinian men, women and children were driven out of their homeland by Jewish militias, and an estimated 500 villages and towns were depopulated and demolished.

To this day, there are more than 5 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Jordan as a result of the Nakba in 1948 and the displacement that followed the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1967.

Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now been under occupation for over 50 years, devastating the lives of millions of Palestinians.

The catastrophe of the Arab Palestinian people in 1948 continues today at the hands of Israel, using the same old policies and laws established by the British such as land confiscation laws, home demolitions, ‘administrative’ detention, deportations, violent repression, and the continuation of the expulsion of about 7.9 million Palestinians who are denied their basic national and human rights, especially their right to return and live normally in their homeland. This catastrophe of the Palestinian people could not continue without the support of Israel by the United States and Britain.

 In the June 1967 war, Israel completed the conquest of Palestine by occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By signing the Oslo Accord with Israel in 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organisation gave up its claim to 78% of Palestine. In return they hoped to achieve an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in East Jerusalem. It was not to be.

The repercussions of the Balfour Declaration are still coming in and they are represented today by the 

Proclamation by US President ,Donald Trump, which announced that Occupied Jerusalem is the capital of the Israeli entity ,in addition to moving US Embassy to it in the middle of 2018 in parallel with the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba .All of these were also included within the so called Deal of the Century that was announced at the beginning of this year. 

 Having just formed a new coalition government following a third inconclusive election in one year, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader,  announced his plan to formally annex about 30% of the West Bank ,including the settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. There is a majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for annexation. If annexation takes place, it would leave the Palestinians with roughly 15% of historic Palestine. It would also hammer the last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution to which the international community still clings.

However, the Palestinians stress their continuing steadfastness in the face of continued Israeli violations ,resisting  the occupation schemes  insisting on the Palestinian Right of Return home and establishing their sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital. And until  measures are made by Israel to improve the standard of living, and bring economic prosperity to the Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Bringing some chord of social justice, and recognition of the Palestinians identity, and stolen land given back to them,and an end to their continuing use of apartheid practices., their will be no peace. That is Balfours tragic legacy.

Yet at the same time, Britain has a unique responsibility to make amends for its past, by ensuring the basic human rights of Palestinians are met, to help stop Israel’s violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories, and recognising  a state of Palestine, make the declaration "right" by assuring Palestinian's rights at last, and to ensure that future generations of Palestinians can live in dignity.

 The Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) has called on Britain to apologise to the Palestinians for the 1917 Balfour Declaration , which led to the displacement of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. 

In a statement issued on the occasion of the 103rd anniversary of the pledge, PRC said that it is time for Britain to act with responsibility and extend an apology over the notorious Balfour Declaration. The PRC also called on Britain to acknowledge the political rights of the Palestinian people, which have been denied for more than a century. 

https://prc.org.uk/en/news/3081/despite-its-acknowledgement-of-violation-of-palestinian-rights-prc-continues-to-urge-britain-to-apologize-over-notorious-balfour-declaration

Samhain Reflections

 

 

As we in the northern hemisphere cross the threshold of autumn into winter, I am reminded what a powerful time of year it is. As the ancient Celts referred to it, Samhain.The word is Irish Gaelic for "summer's end".It is usually pronounced "sow-in" with the "ow" following the same sound as "cow".There are some regional dialects of it though which include "sow-een", "sowin" (with the "ow" similar to "glow").Now called Halloween, it was a time of honouring the dead. Not just the ancestors who've crossed over, but the parts of our lives that are readying to die. Samhain was both a community and a spiritual event, when bonfires were lit and food offered to the spirits who had crossed over from the Otherworld for the night. 

This year’s Samhain has a few unusual characteristics. For one, this year’s Samhain features a full moon that is visible in all time zones on Earth, something that hasn’t happened since 1944 and won’t happen again until 2039. (The moon is also a Blue Moon this weekend, following on the Harvest Moon earlier in October.) With NASA’s recent announcement that it has found water molecules in the sunlit surface of the moon, this has proven to be an exciting week for lunar news.

And in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, where people are suffering and dying because of the deadly virus, as of October 29, nearly 1.2 million have died of the coronavirus, and nearly 45.5 million cases have been reported worldwide, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html  and despite of  social distancing and other measures as part of coronavirus prevention strategies,  Samhain  still has much relevance, and  it's precisely because of the current situation that it's essential to hold on to customs like this, that can bring us all together, despite our isolation from one another.

Under the guise of Halloween, Samhain  has since morphed into a nonsensical circus of skeletons, witches in pointy hats, masks, trick or treat, gouged turnips and the like, frivolous and commercialised aspects that are the products of American secular capitalism, but let's not let this take away from its original importance.The appreciation of each other, and, above all, a layer of spiritual awareness that keeps us connected to our dearly departed, and despite many celebrations being cancelled this year, the spirit of Samhein must certainly live on. 

The Celts, who lived around 2000 years ago, celebrated their new year on November 1^st. They believed this day marked the beginning of the dark, cold winter, and Samhein was understood as a liminal time, when spirits and ancestors from the Otherworld could more easily enter this one. The ancients would hold great gatherings to mark the end of the harvest season, and the entrance into the darker, leaner half of the year. The souls of the dead were said to seek hospitality in their old homes, so the living would set places at the feasting table for them with offerings of their dead kin's favourite meals and drinks.Huge sacred bonfires would then be lit for releasing and cleansing rituals. People would gather to burn crops and animal sacrifices.They would also wear costumes, often consisting of animal heads and skins. The Samhain bonfires were also symbolic of the transmutation process of nature's seasons. Traditionally certain kind of wood were burned in a sympathetic magic with the season, symbolising the necessary sacrifice of those things in our lives that inhibit the power of growth

In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III made November 1 a day to honour saints and martyrs.To keep the peace with the pagans, he made sure All Saints’ Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The name Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows’ Evening which is also referred to as Allhalloween or All Hallows’ Eve or All Saints’ Eve – the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day, which is better known as All Saints’ Day.Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day, which is better known as All Saints’ Day.

For those of us who follow the wheel of life and as the spirits awaken, beyond the destructiveness of Capitalism, there is also a profound connection between honouring our ancestors and following the call for change. If you think of your life as the fruit of a long surviving tree, you are an expression of a dream once seeded by your ancestors. The privilege and responsibility now falls to keep that expression alive, even if it means releasing inherited fears. Despite the limitations and difficulties now placed upon us all we can still enjoy safe celebrations at home. Let's remember the spirits of nature, of land, of place and our departed watching over us, keep sowing seeds of change and transformation. Remember the dead, keep on fighting for the living and may the new year be brighter than the one that has come before. There is still much magic all around us.

 

 Bright Blessings (A Poem for Samhain )

 

Though darkness treads this day of ours
today is one of celebrating light,
time to remember the paths of ancestors
forever casting their eternal beams,
goddesses returning, resurrecting feeling
whispering enchantment, releasing power,
as the veil of  life gets thinner and dimmer
time to welcome old spirits that walk among us,
that enable us to dance and sing again
beyond this realm allows us to be blessed,
as leaves turn golden, and fall to nourish the land
under trees branches we can all nobly stand,
mother earth reaching out offering protection
absorbing our longings, accepting our wrongs,
in the vortex of time, keeps on shining bright
guiding us as we follow ancient paths of wisdom,
slipping through time, surrounded by love
allowing truth and justice to be the natural law.

( when the barrier between the worlds is whisper-thin and when magic, old magic, sings its heady and sweet song to anyone who cares to hear it.
~Carolyn MacCullough, Once a Witch)

Diane di Prima, Pioneering Feminist Beat poet and activist, dies at 86

I am saddened to write that Diane di Prima, lifelong  feminist poet, activist and teacher who was one of the last surviving members of the Beats and one of the few women writers in the Beat movement, has died at age 86.

Di Prima's longtime partner Sheppard Powell told The Associated Press that di Prima had been in failing health and died Sunday in San Francisco General Hospital. She had Parkinson;s disease and the autoimmune disorder Sjogren's disorder.She had been writing poems almost to the end of her life, even as her arthritic hands forced her to dictate some to Powell.

 Di Prima was known for her epic 1978 multi-part poem “Loba,” referred to at times as a feminist counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's “Howl!” which was,dedicated to a wolf goddess – spending over 100 pages exploring what it’s like to be female, moving chronologically through the phases of womanhood, from youth through childbirth and motherhood.

  

“How was woman broken?

Falling out of attention.

Wiping gnarled fingers on a faded housedress.

Lying down in the puddle beside the broken jug.

Where was the slack, the loss

of early fierceness?

How did we come to be contained

in rooms?”

 She is also remembered  for the anthology “Pieces of a Song";  and for her controversial,  fictionalized and explicit “Memoirs of a Beatnik” inspired by her experiences with the Beats  and for the autobiography “Recollections of My Life as a Woman.” During the Band's farewell concert in 1976 at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the basis for Martin Scorsese's documentary “The Last Waltz,” she got on stage  and read a one line poem, "Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife," before going into "Revolutionary Letter #4":

Left to themselves people

grow their hair.

Left to themselves they

take off their shoes.

Left to themselves they make love

sleep easily

share blankets, dope & children

they are not lazy or afraid

they plant seeds, they smile, they

speak to one another. The word

coming into its own: touch of love;

on the brain, the ear.

 

Di Prima was  born August 6, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, the only daughter and eldest child of Francis and Emma di Prima. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. She began writing at the age of seven, and committed herself to a life as a poet at the age of fourteen,  with enough literary talent and precocity to be corresponding with Ezra Pound in her late teens,and thereafter visited him regularly in a psychiatric hospital in Washington. . 

Di Prima attended Hunter College High School in New York City, where she began writing. In 1951, she went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, but dropped out two years later to join the bohemian community in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village,  then alive with jazz musicians, writers and counterculture artists. where she became a member of the Beat movement and developed friendships with John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, and Frank O'Hara, among others.

She was set on learning from writers she respected – most of whom were men in an age when women were prevented from achieving true artistic freedom.

 

 “However great your visioning and your inspiration, you need the techniques of the craft,” she reflected in an interview in the 1980s. “They are passed on person to person, and back then the male naturally passed them on to the male. I think I was one of the first women to break through that.”

 

In the 1950s and ‘60s, she divided her time between New York and California, and became lovers with Amira Baraka, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/01/amiri-bakara-leroi-jones-b71034.html who was calling himself LeRoi Jones at the time. In a 2017 interview with The Washington Post, she recalled that some of her fellow Beats were interested in her for reasons other than poetry.

 

"Jack (Kerouac) wanted me to hang out because everyone was gay and I was straight," she said. “He was probably hoping to get laid later.”

 

She and Jones helped found the New York Poets Theatre, a leading avant-garde venue in the early ’60s, and co-edited the literary newsletter The Floating Bear,  (1961-1969). In 1966 she moved to upstate New York where she participated in Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community at Millbrook.In 1964, di Prima, along with her first husband Alan Marlowe, founded the Poets Press, which published books by David Henderson, Clive Matson, Herbert Huncke, and Audre Lourde, who had gone to high school with di Prima, and for years taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado. She also co-founded the New York Poets Theatre and founded Eidolon Editions and the Poets Institute. A follower of Buddhism, she also co-founded the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts.

Di Prima’s poetry mixed stream-of-consciousness with attention to form and joined politics to spiritual practice. In an interview with Jacket magazine, di Prima spoke about her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist.

 

 “I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.… So my feeling was, ‘Well’—as I had many times had the feeling—‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’” 

 

 In San Francisco, she became a member of the Diggers, a  group of anti-capitalist activists and actors who collected food for the lost souls who wandered Haight-Ashbury.  Like many of her male peers, di Prima was a free thinker, a political activist and a target for government censorship. The FBI arrested her in 1961 on obscenity charges (They were later dismissed) and she would allege that was frequently harassed by law enforcement officers. She opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.When pressed on her political leanings, she allowed she was likely an anarchist, much like her grandmother.

Ginsberg openly praised this same radical bent in di Prima’s work: 

 

 “Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. … She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”

 

She was together with Powell for more than 40 years and had learned enough before him to decide they were better off never marrying. She had been married twice, divorced twice and had five children with four different men, including Jones. She was a nonconformist down to her last name, spelling it "di Prima," in honor of her Italian ancestors, even as other family members capitalized the “D.” 

Di Prima's legacy is impressive, even though little known to thee general public, including many Beat devotees. She authored more than thirty collections of poetry, as well as plays, short stories, novels, nonfiction, and more. She received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2009, she was named the poet laureate of San Francisco, and in 2006 received the  Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achieivement and community service.At the press conference where she was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she told thee crowd about a dream she'd had that showed her how all the work was ever witten was part of the same big piece that "cuts through time and cuts through space, and we have no idea what it is - it is wonderful and large." Her deepest service, she added, was to poetry and to humans. 

 

Her final collection of poems, “The Poetry Deal,” was published in 2014. As often was the case, City Lights was her publisher. Di Prima continued to write until weeks before her death, though her arthritis forced her to use a stylus on a cellphone to write. Sometimes, Powell said, she’d dictate her verse, often to him. She is survived by Powell, two brothers, five children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A truly remarkable poet and activist and pioneer who broke through boundaries of class and gender to publish her writing, Di Prima's messages about non-conformity and the importance of imagination are more important than ever, says her daughter. And her poetry has gained a new resonance as new resonance as a new generation of activists takes to the streets to protest racism, fascism and police brutality. Her  life and works should be explored and celebrated alongside those of her peers, and coveted for their unapologetic examination of what it was like to be a female in a frequently hostile and stifling environment. Forever a free spirit,  a life lived with revolutionary passion. Rest in Power Diane di Prima.