Danaë

They say the sun is a hole in the sky,

and we are spared the furnace it reveals

only by the whim and contrivance of the gods

who have enclosed us in this dark space.

They have punctured the firmament with stars,

pierced the membrane they wrapped around us,

to remind us of their world beyond the upper air.  

We pitch our tent and find its canvass torn:

its tatters dance in desert storms,

and light reveals the defects in its weave

which the stars unpick with their fingers

insistently probing the gauzy fabric of night

until eventually everything unravels and is lost

in the blast of blistering sand.  

The moon is gentler. For her we rest

captive in cool shadows at the bottom of a well.

She slides the lid off from time to time

to routinely observe her captives with sad pleasure

through the shifting aperture and interval of her movements,

sliding the lid back over again, perhaps pausing briefly,  

peering one last time through a thin crescent of light,

before eclipsing us in darkness. 

Man wanders,

and raises his tent in the ruins of a temple.

He cannot tell the shelter and the sky apart in the storm.

He starves and begs surrounded by wealth he cannot understand

destitute among riches he can never receive.

He arms his camp against the night with stories

and trembles and treats the world like firewood

to burn and brandish in fear and anger at the dark.

Working from first principles

I arrive at the inevitable conclusion

that working from first principles is futile,

the last implicit in the first.

There is no freedom in this equation.

Emptiness is all there is.

So I empty myself,

pour out every urge and inclination on the rocks,

like the wine dark sea,

and withdraw forever to perfect vacancy,

consenting to imprisonment by Acrisius

in his impenetrable bronze citadel.

It's featureless walls are welded to the cliff-top,

and stretch into the clouds, standing sentry

on a vertiginous isle surrounded on all sides by sea

plunging into an unfathomable abyss.

The isle emerges from the deepest trench

the earth's upheavals can wrench open.

Its roots extend to the earth's core.

He has built his tower on a volcano,

an obscene chimney that delivers

the earth's innards up its throat

directly into the heavens through its blasphemous pore

that mimics and mocks the work of the gods,

scorning the strata and debris of a geography of litter

in which Man gropes and despairs,

the soil a shambles, the air thickening with fumes

over a seething sea, the world a ruin,

turmoil from which I am now sequestered,

the memory of life locked up in a chamber

on top of a narrow and precipitous pillar.

But why not let a tyrant's paranoia

be the demiurge of my thoughts and dreams

and roll up my experiences within the sleeve

of this single slim cylinder of bronze?

We all limit and conceal ourselves

to allow ourselves to seem

the person others imagine we are,

and all substance itself is a veil

with which the gods themselves hide their absence,

only occasionally violating it to cherry-pick

our miniscule miseries for their amusement.

It is only in the deliberate subtlety of fiction,

the massage and manipulation of falsehood,

that their deception is foiled

and the truth can be revealed

by the right combination

of the available lies: it is a trick

the shuffling of lies in stories can reveal

and we are the sleight by which

the god’s hand is concealed.

 

That's my story.

Rape, infanticide, cannibalism ... all the good stuff.

But it must be told by others:

everything you hear me say is an accident,

an unintentional interruption of my silence,

a spillage from a vessel I try to keep perfectly still

since every moment is as infinite

as the eternity it ends.

Let these moments be perfect

or let them not occur at all.   

One cannot survive exposure to divinity.

One endures its scalding intensity

only as long as it takes to know the end of time has come.

If glimpsed in peripheral vision, perhaps,

it assumes a lasting shape, a chimerical terror ,

as monstrous myths manoeuvre in and out

of the corner of the eye,

but those who surrender and submit

to the ultimate overthrow of the self

in motherhood,

abandoning their bodies to run the risk

of spouting bull-headed Asterion from their womb,

like Pasiphae, or like Leda,

to win the fate of hatching Helen,

can receive it, can bear witness to divinity,

and it is seen shimmering through half shut eyes

like liquid metal,

as though our tawdry threadbare sky

was transformed to gold, fracturing and flaking,

and descending like liquid autumn

as the god-trodden body is lost

to a god-disgorged seed

as anonymous as the future it makes

forced on it by a god

whose love would be considered promiscuous

were it not perfect

This knowledge has a price:

this belly is not made of bronze,

and the world is now a desert of brine

on which I am cast adrift,

my progeny attached to my breast,

the son predicted in a prophecy

whose utterance was forbidden,

a promise of flesh in an age of metal.

We pass from one amniosis to the next,

from my inner ocean which birth has delimited

within the world’s horizons, to this other amniosis,

with a moment’s pain to mark the passing

and now he sleeps again,

curled up like a little nut within this bark

beneath the crystal caul of night,

a captive of the stars,

and I have become infinite to him,

and he has become the afterlife to me 

and all that came before us.

From the first, ancient lipid membrane,

adhering to some small defect on the surface of a stone

on the slopes of an underwater volcano long ago,

drawn like a curtain to protect and conceal fugitive molecules

dancing in secret, microscopic innovation,

learning how to tirelessly replicate their steps,

winding each other up in their untimely embrace,

coiled around each other in helical intimacy

before being sent in plumes of life billowing out

into the eternal seas from a nursery of hot young rocks,

from that first eruption of living mud

to the confluence of blood in my baby's veins,

seeping through the pages of history,

cascading from the massacre of ancestors,

the lessons of their failures tumbling through chemical chronicles

bleeding through the gaps between the words

while their remains lie mutilated by the grave’s slow worm-churn,

their blood inundating him, setting the sea

on which he starts his very own ripple with a fingertip

red with fire in my darkening mind

as all these pasts coincide and coalesce in him now,

he is the afterlife.

From that once celebrated antecedent,

whose exploits now unravel in obscurity,

to the most unremarkable organism

that is now no more than a drop of blood

in the ocean of time on which we drift,

he is the afterlife,

and he is mine,

for we are bound together in blood

and as I wade each day through red darkness

I will look back and observe my descendants on the shore

where they have already taken their place, as I take mine,

beyond the banks and shoals of time,

and together we watch the stars shine

at midday in the midst of this eternal mind,

and I will protect him against his father,

and I will wear snakes for hair if I must,

and I will cite my own autochthony

to over-rule all judgements against him,

and his children will only hear lies about me,

and I will become everything I hate to save him, 

and I will give him my bones to beat me with,

and I know he is formed from shimmering metal

and not windfall seed, and I will gladly die

if my obscurity will give him life.

Cosmic distance ladder

I was in Bulgaria recently on business. I was sitting in my hotel room working. Surely there is no better example of comfortable misery than when one is alone working in one's hotel room at midnight far from home. I needed a break.

I went downstairs to take a walk on the beach (I was staying on the Black Sea coast). Once my eyes had adapted to the dark I could begin to enjoy looking at the stars.

Far out to sea I noticed the flicker of distant oil platforms flaring off gas. I hadn't noticed these during the day, they were so far away. But at midnight a few could be seen flickering faintly on the horizon in a row.

I saw a planet hanging low in the sky. It was roughly the same brightness as the flares, although obviously much further away. I think it was Jupiter: 1,321 time larger than the Earth, its illumination so attenuated by distance that it was rivalled by a mere gas flare, like a candle held up to the Sun.

A star was next to the planet in the sky. It was very bright, one of the prominent low magnitude stars, and was similar to the planet and the flares in brightness, but again, another step further away on the distance ladder that rested on that beach in Bulgaria that night: more luminous, but further away.

But the most distant place in the universe that night was my home. As I looked at pictures of my family on my mobile phone, nothing was more luminous than my aching heart that night, and so nowhere felt further away.

What's in a name?

One day all our names will be forgotten. All that will survive us is the love we felt.

Just as truth endures even when the languages used to speak it have passed from human knowledge, love remains.

This is the lesson of every legend, the meaning of every myth. This is the truth we knew in our mother's arms before we had even learned the words to say it.

So when evil stands smiling before us in the dock, and when asked his name, responds with an announcement of what he imagines is our doom, remember, his answer was already irrelevant before he opened his mouth to offer it.

The hinge

The assassination of Jo Cox yesterday is truly shocking. As a parent, all I could think about was the unbearable anguish she must have felt for her young children during her last moments, confronted with the possibility of being unable to continue protecting them and providing for them, and my heart breaks for her and for them.

Speaking of Syrian refugees and their children, Cox once said "these children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness and I know I personally would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hell-hole". Now she no longer has the chance to be there for her own children.

But Jo Cox was also an MP, and as a citizen I was horrified that the political climate of hostility and anger and prejudice that has been cultivated recently should summon and circulate such poisonous storm clouds of hate and intolerance from which the dark lightning was provoked that struck her down so tragically yesterday.

For although the attacker is being portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems, as John Donne said, "no man is an island", and as Alex Massie eloquently described in the Spectator yesterday, our motivations are informed by our surroundings. And if it is confirmed that the attacker shouted "Britain First" it would seem toxic right wing fantasies that have been given credence recently may have influenced his actions.

There are secret chambers to the heart not found in any anatomy textbook. The routine beat of our hearts is the slow pad of our footfall as we pass by these many mansions everyday. In some we store treasures that we may visit on occasion: unique, glorious, private repertoires of intimacy that we only unveil in the immediate undeniable presence of love.

In others we hide monsters: prejudice, frustration, grudge, insecurity, self-loathing. The door to that chamber is rarely touched and rests ajar, the hinge rusted stiff with neglect.

But recently we have become fascinated with that door, beguiled by the possibilities it represents. We have picked the scabs of rust from its hinge and oiled it until the oil, blood red with rust, has spilled on the floor and stained our hands. And what we are now finding is that monsters need no invitation once the door will open easily, and murder is the hinge on which it swings.

People take matters into their own hands when they feel powerless and let down by politics. This sense of powerlessness can be exploited. It can be encouraged. This sense of powerlessness is part of a corporate agenda where the commercial inconveniences imposed by democratic authorities are to be circumvented or abolished.

Isolated individuals are easier to manipulate and control than those embedded in a long tradition of open democratic debate with collectively agreed procedures for evaluating circumstances and identifying the appropriate response. Individuals whose isolation is accentuated by our society's focus on instant gratification of narrow self-interest, and a sense of distrust fostered by the media's relentless emphasis on the narrow self-interest of others, always presented as a threat, will react to every spurious dog-whistle that irresponsible politicians articulate and that corporate-owned media then dutifully transmit. We forget that it is our ability to defer indefinitely the gratification of our own needs and desires that makes us human.

The dog-whistle goes from the podium, over our heads, and straight to the misfit at the back of the room lurking by the exit.

The lone wolf assassin always emerges in an anti-democratic climate, whether it is theocratic or fascist in manifestation, a climate which is cultivated at arms length with the utmost plausible deniability by powerful interests controlling the media and concerned only with preserving their own power and privilege. Fascism and religious extremism ask us to dehumanise our antagonists, to consider them to be sinners or traitors or infidels, and both ideologies share the fascist paradigm, described by Goering in Nuremburg, that people are fundamentally evil and can only be redeemed by unquestioning submission to a religious or political authority which legitimises itself with an appeal to some ultimately unverifiable and metaphysical inspiration. The powerless, marginalised, ostracised loner who feels rejected by the people around him finds his vindication in this transcendent vision, and strikes the first blow. It is easy because the victim is not a person like him. The victim is one of "them".

We might lose faith in politics, but that doesn't make politics go away. If you don't like politics become a hermit. Politics is always present where any co-operative endeavour takes place. If you lose faith in politics all that happens is that politics becomes ugly.

Nationalist sentiment has been manipulated recently using toxic fantasies of victimhood and manufactured grievances about immigrants and foreigners to summon and unleash its chaotic power in service of a clandestine corporate agenda. All that is required now for fascism to emerge from this chaos is an attack on democracy, a rejection of it as a valid mechanism for expressing a collective response to our circumstances. We saw that with the assassination of Jo Cox.

Fascism may be as fascinating as a scab, but like a scab, the urge must be resisted.

If you are dissatisfied with politics, get involved. Join a union. Participate in a community initiative. Join a political party even, if you can find one that you agree with enough. If you can't, become an activist for the issues that are important to you. Seek like-minded people with whom you can pursue this activism. With equal vigour seek out people who disagree with you and embrace them as the litmus of your own convictions and the very image of your own enthusiasm.

And include those isolated individuals who may otherwise feel left out. Overcome barriers to inclusion. Let the discipline of democratic reflection and argument dispel the notions that would fester and thrive in their involuntary hermitage.  

At all times work to make the world a better place for everyone, not just yourself.

Like Jo did.

Dalmore days

Somewhere
between Shawbost and Carloway
the slow skelp of weather from the west
surrounds us.

The mood of the sea shifts:
one minute basalt black Atlantic,
the next cupric Caribbean green.

The river is a slick greasy with peat
or a crystal clear flood.

Rocks exposed long ago
by some ancient convulsion
worthy of a Calvinist apocalypse
slowly erode in winter storms
or bake in summer suns.

One thing remains constant: a child's delight,
reckless, capricious,
where events of epic significance unfold
and are then instantly forgotten,

unless, perhaps, unexpectedly recalled, much later
during a sudden reperfusive shock of memory
in a brief moment of clarity in old age,

and pure, un-self-conscious joy matches the forces of nature
where everything ebbs and abates
yielding to everything else
and yet endures

somewhere between Carloway and Shawbost.

"I want time to stand still" mother says, while father
tries to gather every precious moment in his camera
like a beach comber,
the futility of his task alleviated by a grace
that gradually exerts itself in this place. 

Orlando

I was thinking about the terrible events in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando recently, and imagined all the love that existed inside that building, all the people celebrating each other's existence with a night out in each other's company at the time of the attack, and it seemed to me that no act of violence can erase that love. Love survives everything.

I wrote these words below to accompany the "Interlochen" theme from the great American composer Howard Hanson's 2nd symphony to express this sentiment. The theme itself can be heard on this recording, starting at 4 minutes 25 seconds in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxBAaME-ag

Please read the words while listening to the tune they are set to.

Orlando

Last night on earth? I'd spend it with you.
When I'm down your smile sees me through.
Nothing to fear when I hold you near
and you're holding me too.

I waited for love's debut,
years yearning, looking for you.
Now that you're here let's disappear.
Let's say adieu.

Project Fear Squared

As we enter the closing phase of the EU Referendum campaign, we find ourselves confronted by two competing but equally negative and unpleasant visions of the future.

Rather than evaluate arguments for and against a positive and progressive prospectus, we are being asked to decide which is the lesser of two evils. We are being asked to consider which threats we find most compelling. It's all stick and no carrot. And the problem is, this grim choice is entirely spurious.

The debate is being framed as a decision between an economic meltdown on the one hand and an immigrant invasion on the other, both equally implausible. Even those in the official Remain campaign now argue in favour of the EU on the basis that it is a more effective way of controlling immigration, rather than question the underlying erroneous assumptions about immigration on which the Leave campaign relies. We are being asked to choose between what's bad and what's worse, rather than to engage with an energising prospect of how to make things better.

The Scottish Independence referendum was contested two years ago between a self-styled "Project Fear" and the Yes Movement, a progressive alliance who viewed self-determination as an opportunity to promote a positive agenda. In contrast, on this occasion, with the EU referendum, we have two opposing fear projects and no progressive alliance. It's Project Fear Squared.

How did it end up this way?

The campaign has effectively become an English Independence referendum, an opportunity for the English to assert their identity, and this has had some adverse consequences.

During the Scottish Independence referendum two positions were set out which one might broadly characterise as optimistic and progressive on the one hand and conservative and cautious on the other. "Things can only get better" versus "if it ain't broke don't fix it" as it were. This is not a viable set of options on this occasion. An English Independence referendum can only be based on fear and negativity. Why do I say this? The starting point for the English is already one of relative advantage, and so the only way to stimulate them towards change is threat. "Things can only get worse".

An English Independence referendum cannot be about a national community seeking a degree of autonomy and self-determination it has previously been denied. England is the dominant constituent country in the United Kingdom and can out-vote the rest put together. Compared to the other countries, England has an enviable degree of de facto autonomy as things stand. Its priorities can never be neglected, while the most the other constituent countries can hope for is that those priorities coincide with their own.

It cannot be about opening up avenues to social justice that have been closed to it hitherto. The interests served by austerity are located in London itself and the extent to which they are reflected in policy is a matter for an English-dominated Westminster administration. Austerity is England's choice, implemented by the government they voted for. Economic policy reflects the democratic choice of the English people for a Conservative majority government. The super-rich benefit from austerity and push house prices in London out of reach of the common people: this is an internal English discussion about English priorities, not a matter of self-determination.

It cannot be about creating opportunities to promote peace and abolish weapons of mass destruction, as if these opportunities do not already exist. Westminster could get rid of Trident any time a majority of English MPs felt like it.

It cannot be about supporting greater confidence in the expression of a unique culture and set of values. Our broadcasting services and cultural institutions serve a primarily English audience and provide content tailored to their preferences, based on their experiences and outlook. In Scotland we are used to seeing ourselves represented on our television screens as something foreign and exotic, at one moment enticing, at another threatening, mere ciphers carrying the burden of a plot devised to entertain another set of viewers. The English complain about how they are portrayed on American TV? They should try not being English while watching British TV.

There is no alternative version of England that cannot be achieved already with the powers already available to the English people. There is no need for significant constitutional adjustment to do so. There is no positive vision of England that can only be articulated in a way that explicitly or implicitly requires Independence. England is to all intents and purposes independent. "English Votes for English Laws" merely formalises what was already a reality.

And when everything you could hope for is already within your power, those who would influence you must resort to fear rather than hope, and goad you with the threat that your power will be denied. They must deprive you of hope rather than inspire it.

Initially the referendum was a "blue-on-blue" internal Tory party dispute in which the fate of the rest of the country was hostage to the careers of a couple of over-privileged Etonian caricatures. The referendum provided a means for opposing sides in this leadership contest effectively to use the rest of the people of Britain as human shields.

But as this contest became more ugly these citizens became more involved. And when your starting point is one of pre-existing dominance and advantage all that remains to appeal to you is toxic fantasies of victimhood. The vocabulary in which these fantasies are articulated is one of nostalgia for the Britain whose casual conflation with England is all the more blatant since devolution and the Scottish Independence referendum led to the clear formulation of a Scottish alternative. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have become spectators now that the debate is about how England sees itself. And when your starting point is one of relative advantage, calls to achieve equality and justice are redundant. Only a supremacist war cry catches your attention. "Make Britain Great Again" as it were.

What we need to understand is that this was the intention all along. The main reason it has ended up like this has nothing to do with sovereignty or self-determination or immigration or Britain's status as an EU member. The entire campaign has concerned itself with questions that are ultimately irrelevant to the purpose of the referendum and the consequences of leaving the EU. The whole thing is an exercise in misdirection. Our buttons are being pushed. Britain is not the target. The EU is the target.

Around the world workers' terms and conditions have been under sustained, co-ordinated attack from unaccountable, often anonymous, global corporations who seek to abolish or circumvent every impediment to their commercial interests and imperatives that they encounter as a result of the policies of democratically elected governments, trade union activity, and community initiative.

The president of Brazil was recently impeached for corruption. But she was replaced by someone significantly more corrupt than she was. However he is also significantly more "sympathetic to investor interests". The coup in Brazil is "good for business" we are told. This is of course code for the erosion of maternity leave, health and safety regulations, the right to strike, and so on, all entitlements only officially recognised after successive "left wing" administrations replaced a military dictatorship.

In France we see the people taking to the streets in huge numbers to protest against new laws aimed at placing limits on terms and conditions of work there. Around the world we see treaties being negotiated that include dispute resolution procedures that can be initiated by corporations in secret against countries on the basis of commercial disadvantage caused by government policy without any recourse to democratic transparency, oversight or accountability.

The Brexit debate should be interpreted in this context. The EU, for all its faults, is a powerful and democratically accountable potential advocate for all the measures that inconvenience corporations, from workers' rights to environmental safeguards, controls over food quality to stop companies poisoning us to health and safety regulations to prevent them putting us in harms way on behalf of their profit margin. We are being manipulated by false dichotomies and distracted by straw men while workers' rights around the world are being dismantled. The EU Referendum is an instrument to allow English nationalist sentiment to be manipulated using manufactured grievances in the interests of a corporate agenda.

It is easier to control someone who is trying to stop things getting worse than someone who wants to make things better. The former do as they're told. The latter think for themselves.

Phoenix

In the end no cage will hold you.
You are a phoenix.

Though fire turns your body to ash
your soul is free forever.
You are a phoenix.

Though hatred surrounds you
and condemns you to death
you fly out of its reach.
You are a pheonix.

They fear the fire.
Like you it won't be ruled.
To them it is an instrument
of terror and destruction,

but as the flames consume you
your courage is revealed.
Pain is defeated by radiant new flesh
escaping through the bars of your cage
to soar forever in every rising sun,
for you are transformed, not destroyed.
You are a phoenix.

(This was written in response to the sickening news of 19 Yezidi women being caged and burned to death in Mosul for refusing to be sex slaves)

בְּחִירָה

The choice.

Israel had an opportunity to create something beautiful.

Israel could have been a beacon of peace and hope, a repudiation of everything that came before, a realisation of the highest ideals, an inclusive, progressive democracy that did not discriminate on the basis of its citizens' creed or colour.

Instead it chose a different path.

Instead it chose to repeat the patterns of the past.

It made itself into an inverted ghetto. It made itself into the ultimate diaspora. It let itself be defined by the crimes its people had endured and so let them off the hook for all the crimes they would subsequently commit. It circled the wagons when it should have been creating a state. It built a wall. It behaved according to the strict repertoire of 19th century European imperialism. It legitimised and was legitimised in return, by the worst actions least deserving repetition.

It turned itself into a beacon of prejudice and despair rather than peace and hope. It attracted settlers on the same prospectus as any 19th century North American land rush, settlers who were happy to hope at the expense of another's despair, without even acknowledging it, without even regarding them as human and competent and capable of hope or despair.

It inflicted ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. It is a matter of public record that Albert Einstein regarded the Tnuat Haherut of Menachem Begin as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties". (Letters to the Editor, New York Times, December 4, 1948). Was Albert Einstein an anti-semite? We are fortunate not to have to rely on Israeli historians in relation to massacres and expropriations of the Palestinian people.

The Armenians, the Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, the list goes on, of peoples who can testify that crimes against humanity confer no special status, grant no special privilege or permission, to excuse similar behaviour. At its best and most basic, when it comes to the official utterances of the State of Israel, we are confronted with a child's pleading. For the State of Israel is a child, installed in the deadly playground the toxic cocktail of indifference and incompetence European imperialism concocted to precede them in the region's Ottoman ruins.

And the common cause now found between Israel and Turkey is itself most eloquent. Their enemy's enemy turns out to be the same even if their enemies themselves are different. How convenient the final abdictation of any moral authority turns out to be. And so fascism agrees its terms and conditions and signs its non-disclosure agreements in a back room while a journalist (mother of two) is assassinated by car accident outside.

Consider the fate of Ethiopian jews seeking to settle in Israel. Consider the fate of holocaust survivors already settled there. Shame, embarassment, and prejudice result in neglect at best, discrimination at worst. It's not enough to be Jewish. You have to subscribe to and conform to a certain supremacist template to be acceptable. Israel is a racist state.

But it's not too late. It's never too late.

It has been said that the people of Israel have a birthright as "God's chosen people". On the other hand it has been said that they merely benefit from powerful lobbies in Washington, New York, London, etc. Neither of these is true.

The principal advantage they enjoy as a result of collective delusions mediated by scripture arises from the favourable disposition of North American protestants of the "Bible Belt" and similar. This is where the literal interpretation of the Bible is found to be beyond dispute, on which all insistence on divine preference is founded.

If they are convinced of their reading of the Bible, let these North American protestants compensate the Palestinians for every lost acre, every scrap of clothing left hanging on the line as they were chased from their homes by paramilitary gangs.

Israel was chosen. But the people of Israel are not God's chosen people.

The people of Israel chose themselves!