The survivor

When we were children we played on the shore.
We lay on the sand the ebbing tide revealed,
playing below the high water mark.
I traced your outline with a stick.
You chased me through the waves,
and for a moment everything was perfect.

The next day we came back
and saw the tide had washed the trace away.
So we marked it again with makeshift anatomy:
seaweed for hair, driftwood for arms and legs
and a random flotsam body.

The next day we came back
and saw you had drifted out to sea.
Your disaggregated anatomy was nowhere to be found.
So we marked your outline again, with stones this time
carried from a nearby shingle bed, choosing:
the most delicate, beautifully coloured ones for eyes
and a big ferrous red one for your heart.

The next day we came back
and saw it had survived the tide
and it remained there until the end of the holidays.

The next summer we came back
and saw the winter storms had done their work
and the sand lay featureless once more.
Eventually we stopped taking holidays there,
and grew apart as we grew up.

Time has passed and has taken its toll,
eroding you with life's dissappointments,
its misfortunes hacking whole parts off,
until you look at yourself and wonder
"does anything still remain of the person I once was,
or am I now so completely hollowed out and disfigured
as to be a stranger to my former self?"

Believe me my friend when I tell you
you are still here,
because when I look at you I can still see
the friend I knew that perfect day
when we played on the shore,
chased each other through the waves,
and I drew your outline in the sand.

Solstice

We collected our ancestors remains from the cairn,
bundles of bones wrapped with reverential hush,
and conveyed them with all due ceremony
and gathered with them at the standing stones
to watch the dwindling of days,
the sun rise later and set earlier than before,
the gap between them growing more narrow
as the sagging arc traced by the limpening sun
sank further past the darkening world's edge
and we wondered: will the light continue to wane
until we are deprived of it entirely?
Will the pattern our ancestors saw
reliably enough to raise these stones
as a record of the seasons of their days
save us and restore the light? If not,
how can we begin to repair the heavens?
Should we adjust stones that have stood
for one hundred generations, to avert the end of days?

Having received no promise that we could understand,
we rejoiced with no sense of redemption
when some celestial mechanism delivered the sun
a little earlier one morning than the day before.
We saw as it retreated from the extreme on the skyline,
the mark on the world's rim it reached every year
among the silhouette of the trees'
cold bare scaffold of the next year's seasons,
just as we had hoped and prayed and come to expect.

We still feared one day it would not find its way
back to us from the depths of winter.
The darkness remained, as a threat,
a prototype of evil, arbitrary, evasive,
prowling around the plots of light
our camp fires placed within the deeper night,
destructive and inscrutable, unamenable to any bargain,
consuming worlds not out of hunger,
but out of boredom and caprice
in an age before we invented the devil
to take the blame. Nothing happened for any reason
of the kind we subsequently came to understand.

The palpitation of the seasons was ensnared at last.
Within the shaman's feverish delirium,
at the back of the cave, from his trance,
the first truths were received,
truths we could hold and share and use
to attenuate and curtail the terror of the dark.
Insights extracted from his ravings, narratives
teased like thread from simultaneous experience
tangled up in hypoxic convulsions in the sacred smoke
became our camp fire tales. Zodiacal heroes
endowed with superhuman strength, bearing divine gifts,
prevailed in elaborate contests set by whimsical gods,
victories over champion monstrosities
whelped in a cave by the mother of monsters,
and so we began to feel reassured,
and slept the first human sleep,
enjoying at last depths of slumber unknown to any animal
still nervous and tormented by the constant threat
which we now eluded and began to forget. 

Within the safety afforded to the precincts of our dreams
we built shining cities, cascades of glass, tumbling down
through the sparkling cataracts of empire,
falling over the precipice of history, and rising again
behind the hooves of each departing horde,
and in the glistening procession of millennia
some among us at last discerned the workings of the world.
Truth swung so low in her orbit
her necklace of planets hung within the astronomer's grasp,
and were plucked and strung like pearls
along the sinews of their reasoning.
Musicians sought solitude in the forest.
They found that truth strayed so tame across the forest tracks,
lingered so long within earshot
without being startled by their presence
that her song was overheard and learned by heart.
The dark at last was shrunk to fit the sleeve of science.
Our fear of it softened to a surly scowl
glimpsed between the pillars of light
within which it was confined.

But the dark was not defeated.
Within our marrow the memory of our fear lingered,
and now a different kind of solstice comes.
The fulfilment of expectation has grown so tedious
that any other sequence of events is inconceivable,
but the light continues to spiral down night's dark drain
past the level from which we are accustomed to see it fill again.
Generations of certainty suddenly seem naive and idealistic.
The natural order is suspended. The solstice swells and swirls
and becomes an irresistible pole to which we are pulled
to be devoured by the world's strident new solipsisms.
Our ancestors remains are scattered. We revere instead
those who are briefly notorious and quickly forgotten.
Indolence becomes our tutor and scorn his lesson.
“Darkness is good," advisers tell the powerful.
Their project is to stall the solstice. The point
around which the year is slung back out of shadow,
the celestial citadel where the year is rescued,
itself is captured. The sun is taken hostage. Darkness reigns.
Time becomes indefinite, adrift. The solstice continues
well past any familiar reckoning. Darkness persists. 
Long forgotten fears stiffen us again with sudden paralysis
in the extended contemporary solstice of the mind.

Accuracy is irrelevant. Tribe matters.
Information is discarded or disregarded.
The confirmation of any bias is preferred,
and if you can claim to have seen through it all long ago
your reward is a place around the totems that have replaced truth.
We no longer rely on such effete, decadent contrivances as reason.
We grow strong in the dark, unseen. We do not need to be consistent.
We do not find fascination in truth, only in darkness.
Alliances are temporary expedients rather than alignments of ideas.
Allies are discarded as soon as they cease to be useful.
Statements resemble rather than convey knowledge.
We use them as a way of belonging rather than knowing.
We do not need to describe the world, only our place in it,
with Shibboleths, passwords, noises like the call of an animal.
Conspiracy replaces truth as a totems we can gather round,
and if this is the only purpose our words serve
they are truth-proof, for they lose none of their force
no matter how often they are contradicted.
We distill the world into competing visions,
and discard the evidence for any of them,
and this is how we imagine we will be redeemed.

Now we gather around our own isolated camp fires,
warming our hands against the burning books,
telling tales of how the sun was just a trick,
a ploy our enemies used to enslave us long ago,
and how the darkness has set us free,
and will endure for a thousand years
or whatever the highest number is
that anyone can still count to
before being cast out as one of those experts
while our enemies sit around their own fires
telling the same tale. Huddled around fires
we whisper rumours of distant wars,
unimaginable evils stacked up
and propped against each other
on the endless shelves of imagined history
where we condemn each other,
until our accusations embrace
like exhausted boxers,
while in the dark,
beyond the light of the camp fire,
beyond the flickering familiarities
to which we cling in its unreliable light,
the solstice prowls in the dark once more,
its sable pelt velvet and invisible,
unknowable,
waiting to consume us.

The good guys

Gloria Steinem said "women want a men’s movement; we are literally dying for it." More recently, the playwright Eve Ensler, in the context of the current focus on sexual harassment and abuse following the Weinstein revelations, said "I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?"

Where are all the good guys?

As women refuse to tolerate the intolerable any longer, as they say #MeToo and speak up about the sexual harassment and assault they have suffered, some after remaining silent for many decades, there are clear responses men are being called upon to make. They must remain silent while women bear witness to what they have suffered and articulate the anger they have long suppressed. They must hold themselves accountable for their own misconduct, irrespective of where it falls on whatever spectrum might be proposed to evaluate its severity. They must speak up when they see that misconduct in others, and cease being "passive."

However, it is misleading to think that this in any way forms the basis of being "good men," as Ensler and others put it. It's not just that there is no exculpation in not being responsible for improper behaviour, for being able to say "I'm not like that. I don't behave that way. I'm one of the good guys. Not all men!" You can't get off this hook, it goes in too deep. Nor does understanding the obligation on all men to eliminate this behaviour, whether or not they are individually responsible for it, confer any special virtue or deserve any recognition. Any cookies men feel entitled to should stick in their throats.

Gloria Steinem is mistaken in her call for a men's movement. There already is a men's movement: it's called Patriarchy. She is confusing the absence of a negative with the presence of a positive, confusing the necessary with the sufficient, confusing an effect achieved through the application of stimulus with one achieved through the removal of an inhibitor. This mistake is perpetuating the misleading idea that there can be "good guys" somehow.

There are no good guys.

While a system of privilege and oppression exists, no-one who benefits from it, no matter how well-intentioned their actions, no matter if those actions are directed towards dismantling that very system, should feel good about their actions. While a man's agency differs from a woman's, even if that agency is used to challenge rather than perpetuate that difference, it is not something to feel good about. Men cannot be satisfied with their conduct even when it is precisely what is called for, because it is a product of their circumstances and those circumstances are not satisfactory. While a man may draw inspiration from the incredible courage of women who are speaking out, and run whatever risks challenging misbehaviour among his peer group might entail as a consequence, the bravery of those men today does not redeem the decades of cowardice from which they are belatedly stirred. There is no redemption for men.

Of course men should behave in the way they are being called upon to act. It is necessary. But they should be under no illusions that it is sufficient. Not being a bad guy does not make you a good guy.

The delusion that there can be some redemption leads to some toe-curlingly awful utterances. Consider the "apology" made by Louis CK. I think Lena Headey sums it up pretty accurately when she describes it as "a shitshow of narcissistic cock soup." We can all feel "sorry" a few generations from now when sexual harassment is the subject of some future episode of "horrible histories" or similar, used to educate children about how appalling their ancestors were, the way we feel "sorry" about slavery or burning witches. At the moment we are still a long way from being able to express regret. We are nowhere near being clear of the debris of this wreck. Attempting the retrospect necessary for remorse is premature. 

However, there is a way men can be "the good guys."

This assertion that there are no good guys is not mere self-flagellation, as performative in its own way as Louis CK's over-elaborate confession. I'm not writing this as an act of self-indulgence as flagrant and egregious as the various excuses offered by way of apology by the celebrities caught up in Weinstein's wake. There is a positive course of action men can take, rather than just a negative course of action from which they must desist, but recognising it requires clearing away any misconceptions about becoming "good guys" just by modifying your behaviour and no longer making a nuisance of yourself.

Men must challenge privilege in general. They must tear down the abstract template of privilege of which Patriarchy is just one concrete instantiation. Otherwise the system of which Patriarchy is just one manifestation will endure, and find new ways to enslave us. If men stop oppressing women it gives them an opportunity to reflect on the ways they themselves are oppressed. That opportunity is squandered if men are content to be "good guys" merely on the basis of no longer being "bad guys." Indeed, the whole endeavour is doomed to failure because it doesn't go far enough. Privilege will merely re-assert itself in new ways.

Women are discovering a depth of anger that surprises even them. Men must discover their own rage at a system of privilege that extends far beyond Patriarchy that turned them into the cause of women's anger.

Swamp thing

When I was a boy
I wished I was a dog. An injured dog
that someone beautiful nursed back to health
somewhere it was safe to be helpless
and I was treated with concern and sympathy.
I wished this because I already knew
as far back as I can remember
I was repulsive,
it was not safe,
and no-one cared,
at least, not as much as they would about a dog.

Once,
just once,
I'd like to know what it's like
to be touched by someone
as though they thought I was beautiful,
and more than just a means to an end,
more than just a fuck,
to feel them encounter my skin,
their meticulous attention and caress
hushed with the awe and reverence,
with which one treads
upon the threshold of a miracle,
and we would hold our breath together
to arrest the passage of time
and preserve this perfect moment.

At least I used to feel that way
until I realised if they did
I wouldn't believe them.
I'd assume it was all some elaborate joke,
and the joke was on me, because I'm repulsive.
My self loathing turned all tenderness to lies
I thought the only intimacy I could enjoy
would have to be taken, not received,
to be stolen, a fantasy made real
by a violence that was all that was left
that I could trust,
even though it would destroy
the only thing I ever wanted:
to be touched as though I was beautiful.

So I went into the woods
where no-one would be able to find me,
and covered my skin with mud and excrement
and chose to be a living, walking grave
and raised a cordon of fear around myself
and made a smiling mask of my disgust,
a grimace drawn upon my face of earth,
the caricature of a smile scraped
by a finger that pollutes all it touches,
and when I touch you I make you feel like dirt
but when you scream at least I know
you are not lying to me,

and when I tell others not to believe you
it is to punish you, not for anything you did,
but for my inability to believe
you could ever touch me
as though you thought
I was beautiful.

Strong

It's when you feel most weak that you are strong.
You bend but do not break. You carry on,
and even though it seems dawn will not come,
but leave you clutching cliches in the dark,
straws slipping through your fingers one by one,
you manage to hold on while hope departs.
All victories are relative, you see,
each victory but a lesser defeat,
but I'm still here! That's victory enough!
Despite the dissappointment and fatigue,
when pain defies belief and hope is gone,
it's when you feel most weak that you are strong.

Twa kultyurz

I see The List's "Hot 100" for 2017 has been published, celebrating the 100 individuals or organisations they judge have had the biggest impact on Scotland's cultural landscape, thus: "the Hot 100 is The List's annual celebration of the figures who've contributed most to the cultural landscape during the year. From chefs and theatre-makers to writers and musicians, you'll find them here."

I wish these lists would just once include scientists and engineers.

The term "cultural landscape" should have room for visionary innovators transforming the material basis of our culture, insightful investigators pioneering new ways of understanding the universe, and educators extending and enriching our common conceptual vocabulary for describing it. 

Scotland is leading the way in developing and adopting clean energy systems. These are an indispensable part of the zero emission circular post-scarcity economy that is an essential aspect of the only viable long term future we have as a species. For example, the Hywind project is a sneak preview of the future of offshore wind power. Nicola Sturgeon is attending a UN Climate Change conference tomorrow, and the authority with which she will be able to speak there is derived in no small part from Scotland's leading role in showing how a society can adapt itself to the requirements imposed on it by Climate Change.

Scientists at Glasgow University have a central role in the development of the electrochemical processes that will some day allow us to create "artificial leaves" that use atmospheric carbon dioxide to photosynthesise fuels. Its scientists have leading roles in gravitational wave detection projects that were recognised by the award of the Nobel prize in physics this year. Gravitational wave research has been underway at the University of Glasgow since "before it was fashionable," back when I was an undergraduate in 1988.

Edinburgh cafes are world famous as the place where certain novels about a boy wizard were written. However, Edinburgh's contemporary distinction in science is as the residence of Peter Higgs. The discover of the boson named after him was a key event in the experimental confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics. Edinburgh is also the venue for progress in life sciences of global significance. The impact of Dundee's game technology is perhaps a clearer and more direct influence on "culture." 

And so on. All of these aspects of Scottish society and culture are worth recognising. Not recognising science and engineering as essential aspects of our "cultural landscape" is a casual but profound act of omission that amputates from the "Hot List" any possibility of fully appreciating all important contributions to our society. Any realistic list of 100 influential Scots should include a significant number of scientists and engineers.

Is this a stubborn persistence of C. P. Snow's "two cultures," not confined to Oxbridge but distorting our perspective in Scotland too? C. P. Snow remarked on the segregation of science and technology on one hand, and arts and humanities on the other, and bemoaned its crippling effect on society. He complained that people were selected to govern us based on their classical education without having any appreciation of scientific realities.

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? 

"I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

We are often told by post-modern theorists that the conclusions we reach by means of the scientific method should be considered cultural artefacts as much as works of art, literature and music are. I experience a deep sense of hesitation when asked to accept that statement, but not because I consider scientific conclusions to have some superior status with respect to objectivity and the representation of some objective reality than artistic statements, but because their status is fundamentally different with respect to the way they are qualified. Science is conjectural in a different way from other statements generated by our culture. But let's accept for a moment the idea that scientific statements are in some way equivalent to artistic statements.

One might require some familiarity with circumstances beyond the work of art itself to fully interpret and appreciate it: its context, its predecessors relative to which it represents novelty or development, the successors for whom it is inspiration, the various movements it exemplifies, the references it makes, the technical achievement associated with its realisation, the social context in which it arises, and so on. It is reasonable to expect people to have some knowledge and even training to equip them and make them sufficiently aware of the various overlapping penumbrae and in which it stands, the hinterlands from which it is resourced to appreciate it.

Why is it not then expected of people to have at least the modicum of awareness of the background that would unlock for them the beauties of, for example, General Relativity, as an exhilirating accomplishment of the human mind. If we are to agree terms on which we can accept scientific statements as cultural artefacts, at the insistence of the very theorists who revel in lists like the "Hot 100," why do we typically dismiss the background knowledge necessary to appreciate them? Why is the mind to be furnished with knowledge of art, music and literature, but not science and technology?

The poet Kaveh Akbar said "bewilderment is at the core of every great poem." Einstein said “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” His General Relativity is an epic just as much as the Iliad, and arguably more significant, but is treated as a mere curiosity by those unwilling to invest the effort necessary to appreciate it. We look up at the stars and marvel at their beauty. How much more beautiful are they when you begin to understand the processes that make them shine, the stages in their evolution, the intervals in space and time they encompass.

In "an anatomy of the world" John Donne wrote in 1611

"And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world's condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetic force alone,
To draw, and fasten sund'red parts in one;"

His words show a familiarity with the scientific developments of the day - the observations and "new philosophy" of Galileo, the experiments in magnetism of William Gilbert, the Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretian atomism - which was completely up to date at the time. Yet now, over 400 years later, the scientific knowledge of those who would read these words is so utterly impoverished that they know less about science than Donne did, and their appreciation of his poetry is diminished as a consequence.

The "Hot 100" list exists in an inconsequential bubble of mutual congratulation, an irrelevant circular backslap, if it is unconnected to the scientific and technological trends and achievements that are the only real forum for progress and the only real basis for evaluating the significance of our accomplishments.

Climate change

Your words make my brain disintegrate.
I can't keep up with your lies. Logic is mush.
You prove things wrong by saying they are wrong.
According to you things are right
because everyone knows they are right.
I have neither the time nor the inclination
to keep up with your incessant deceit.

I see you, 100,000 years ago. I remember you.
I remember you. I was there when you said this before,
100,000 years ago, and we ignored you then too.
You hate that we ignored you.
You think it was because we hated you,
but we don't hate you. Up your game!
You've waited this whole time,
from when our mother made the first needle
and sewed the clothes everyone has worn ever since
without a single nod of recognition from the catwalk,
you've waited while bigger scandals broke,
and let women and snakes take the blame,
and when you had the chance to make your move
you waited, and you choose now to speak?

Rewind, mate. You've learned nothing.
Do you think that because we let you have you say,
anyone thinks you have anything worth saying?
You killed the beast that didn't need to be killed.
You sheared the sheep whose wool we didn't need.
You give us what we do not lack
and leave us without what we most need.
You prove the point that doesn't need proving.

We are not going to take you seriously
just because you can now threaten to destroy the world
with your vanity. Kill us all. You'll still be wrong. 
Wear this world like a bead on your necklace.
You will not escape our ridicule from beyond the grave.

Roll call

It’s the final parade of history.
We are lined up for inspection.
The monsters of the past have summoned us to roll call.
Colonel War paces back and forth, pauses, looks me up and down,
and, disapproving, briefly thumbs my lapel, then moves on,
his bloody hands leaving only the slightest smear of poppy red,
a smudge that is easily removed,

not lingering like an indelible stain on my memory, and I sigh,
relieved He did not grip more firmly, pull my face towards His,
as He does with some unfortunate soul further down the line,
and with a grin and grimace give instructions that can’t be forgot:

stories of the ugly deaths of beautiful people: in arctic convoys
where they burn or freeze before they have a chance to drown;
sieges at the gates of Asia, where they are outlived by a fly,
and machine guns are discarded at close quarters in the rubble
and the trenching spade becomes the weapon of choice;
tales of 18th century politics pursued by 20th century means,
and of the next war, more terrible once the politics catch up,

until Colonel War's gaping maw yawns as wide as the ovens
through which we fall beyond His infinite appetite,
turned to ash, dumped into the void
where atrocities are heaped
and humanity is unmade.

I am spared having these memories,
and so must remember those who can't forget,
and that is why I will leave the poppy in place,
in my lapel, for a little while at least.

Cànan Edein / Language of Eden

A' Rìbhinn.

A' Ghealach.

"Tha sin aon ceum bheag 'son fear,"
mar sin air adhart.

An Cruinne-Cé gu leir, An Corg, Am Bliogh,
Neo-chrìochnachd's a' Thall.

"Tha a' h-uile saoghalan seo dhuibh fhéin,
ach Europa."

A' chiad uair a' togaidh sinn ceum ris
thoir iomradh air anns a' Chànan Edein,

anns an do bhruidhinn bean
a' chiad faclan do nathair.

Venus.

The Moon.

"That's one small step for man,"

and so on.

The whole wide world, Mars, Jupiter,

infinity and beyond.

"All these world's are yours,

except Europa."

When we set foot there for the first time

let us remark upon it in the Language of Eden,

in which the first words spoken
were by a woman to a snake.

This park

We've not been
in this park before,
my daughter and I.

We laugh
as the spokes
of our bicycle wheels
stir up and unsweep
the piles of autumn leaves.

Their colours swirl
beneath the cauldron sky,
and the shifting mosaic of days,
rearranges itself into another season.

Her birthday is soon.
I think about what to get her,
and then suddenly I remember,
I have been here before,

in this park,
before she was born,
before her brothers were born,
once, with my wife,
following the treatment,
the day she felt a sharp pain in her stomach,
and we knew that cycle of treatment had failed,
and we braced ourselves for a different future,

but we've not been
in this park before
together,
my daughter and I.

Laniakea

Kick the tin of confetti over the cliff.
Watch. The wind whips it up.
Watch the updraft celebrate nuptials
that never happened,
nuptials between no-one
in the nowhere past the precipice' brink.
Watch the wind take those little scraps
dancing off into the distance.
Imagine written on each
are the hopes and dreams and memories
of an entire world.

All our riches are borrowed from oblivion.
Distant cosmic cataclysms are their mint.
We raise our telescopes to the sky
and lay beams of light across the earth
for neutron stars to strum across the epochs
but our retinas remain a precipice
beyond which we cannot pass. We see stars
strewn across the abyss of indifference,
galaxies thronging along its sinews,
and caught in the folds of its membranes
as they are stretched over the palpitations
that heave the universe into being,
as though it was an animal
as eager and desparate to live as us.

We are the animal that lies, and thinks
the world must change to fit our lies.
The only words we are capable of hearing
must carry the hallmark of our deceit,
as we insist the world measures up
to our abject inability to describe it,
as we condescend to the universe
by making jewelry from atoms of gold
forged in the death of stars.

We can no longer lie when we see this.
We can no longer lie when we behold
Laniakea.

Take off your trinkets,
your embellishments,
and drop them to the ground.
Dishevel your hair.
Derange all ornament.
Tarnish the silver,
and beat the gold.
Pull a blade across the canvass
where you thought
you caught a likeness.
Throw your stool
through the stained glass
of your most cherished
and reassuring dogma.
Confound all the theories.
Rip up all the maps.
Stand naked and alone
at the edge of the precipice.
Cast those lies to the wind.
Toss them like confetti over the cliff.
Let the wind take them where it will.
Embrace the nuptials of nothingness.
Become no-one and everyone,
living nowhere and everywhere,
owning nothing and everything,
in the celestial commonwealth
of Laniakea.

An t-seanais / the whisper

Is mo dhuin' as fhad' a-mach an dàimh
mo dhuin' as fhaisg' an dàimh gu dearbh,
nuair a tha damh-féidh droma air astar
dlùth-dhàimh, gu leòr mar a chluinn e
am fathann saighd' ann an cluais aige,
teannachadh an cian bàis
nas dhlùth fiù 's dathan fighte ri chéile,
taobh ri taobh, a h-aon leth ri an té eile,
anns an dreas' as ghaolach
air an gruagach àlainn agamsa
anns mo ghàirdeanan
airson bu cheart cho math leam
a thog mo gràbhailt's màilleach as
a chaidir ann an dlùth-ghabhail mhór
an t-saoghal, an cruinne-cé gu léir
air los gum innseadh mi am meud mo ghaol
tro falt dorcha
coltach ri a' sgàil-roinn na h-oidhche,
air a dhealaich ann an seanais
air Oidhche Shamhna seo, an t-snàthad
d' an t-suil a bhith a h-uile bliadhna
seachad throimhpe air a' chrìoch ùine
an t-suil leis an do ghabh am Foghar
cuimse air an cridhe Samhraidh
le craobhan lom a dhuilleach
a' fhleist a saighead.

My most distant relative 

is indeed my next of kin 

when the wild stag 

on the distant ridge 

is close enough 

to hear me whisper in its ear

the rumour of an arrow,
collapsing the remoteness of death,

closer even than colours 

woven together side by side

one right next to the other, 

in a much-loved dress

my beautiful long haired maiden 

wears in my arms,

for I would find it so right 

to take off my helmet 

and chain mail, and take 

in a great close embrace 

the whole world round, 

the entire earth,

so that I could tell her 

the size of my love, whispered 

through a parting in her dark hair,
like night's dark partition,

this All Hallows' Eve

the needle whose eye 

all years pass through

at the end of time,
the eye with which Autumn takes aim
at the heart of Summer
with trees stripped of leaves
to fletch his arrow.

Beyond Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein has been sacked, repudiated, disowned, ostracised, and abandoned as a consequence of his sickening, coercive and abusive attitude to the women over whom he could exert some pathetic semblance of power. He may face a criminal conviction.

But it mustn't stop there. This will achieve precisely nothing if the same moral yardstick with which we evaluate his conduct is not applied to other men in similar positions. This means we need to be equal in our condemnation of Trump, for example, and men like him.

This isn't straightforward. Trump is an easy and obvious target, but Kim Masters points out, in Fighting 'The Gawker Effect’ in the Wake of Weinstein, "the lengths to which a deep-pocketed subject will go to shut down a negative story." A criminal conviction is necessary if we don't want to allow wealthy individuals to simply litigate and settle their way out of being accountable.

The depth of the subject's pockets is a key observation here, because male privilege and economic privilege are interconnected. Patriarchy makes men disposable economic objects governed by appetites manipulated and degraded so that their acquiescence may be bought with the objectification and subordination of women to satisfy those appetites. It is part of an economic system of privilege and exploitation that affects both men and women.

And the movie industry is one of the way this appetite for objectification is fed, as Sara Polley describes in The Men You Meet Making Movies. "Harvey Weinstein may be the central-casting version of a Hollywood predator, but he was just one festering pustule in a diseased industry." As screenwriter Scott Rosenberg puts it, "Everybody-fucking-knew [...] [the] courage [of the women making the recent revelations] only hangs a lantern on my shame."

As I mentioned in my article Cannon Fodder and Comfort Women, "[Weinstein's] behaviour [was] tacitly accepted as part of [a] system of male privilege and entitlement. It would provide an example to other, less powerful men, about how they can distract themselves from their own disposability: treat women as disposable sexual objects. Predators like Weinstein help normalise the pathologies of a system of [economic] exploitation." The very fact we are now talking about something that has been common knowledge for decades indicates this system is in crisis. We must now press on and dismantle it entirely.

The effort takes its toll. As Rebecca Solnit observes in her article The Fall of Harvey Weinstein Should be a Moment to Challenge Extreme Masculinity, in the Guardian, "this past week was not a good week for women." Several of my friends are noticeably fatigued by the relentlessness of the misogyny that has been revealed in recent weeks. It doesn't matter that these revelations are concerned with events that took place over a number of decades. We are confronting them, and the system they are part of, now. This is incredibly tiring. Recent days have been exhausting.

But remember, nothing in particular has been revealed recently that changes what we already knew in general. We have not learned anything fundamentally new. We always knew about the system. The news lately has just been concerned with a few instances of it in operation. As Sarah Polley observes, "the only thing that shocked most people in the film industry about the Harvey Weinstein story was that suddenly, for some reason, people seemed to care."

All that is really new is our conviction that we simply will not put up with it anymore. All that is new is our collective, sustained and definitive rejection of what was previously tolerated. It is no longer acceptable in general, and so specific instances of it are being rooted out in particular. This process must continue unabated.

And if it is no longer acceptable in general, the system of collusion that supported it is in crisis. The blind eye yields to the spotlight of scrutiny. The nudge and the wink connote membership of a club no-one wants to belong to anymore.

So take heart: that feeling of exhaustion is a righteous fatigue. It comes from the effort of millions rising from their knees and raising their fist in defiance and saying "no more." And when the dust settles, we will see that it is not just men we have brought down, it is the system that protected their reputations to preserve privileges that extend far beyond the advantages they took as individuals.

Da pacem, Domine

Da pacem, Domine,
in diebus nostris
quia non est alius
qui pugnet pro nobis
nisi tu Deus noster.

Grant us peace, Lord,

in our days, 

since there is no other

who will fight for us 

except you our God.

Or rather,

if none will fight for us 

but You, Lord, our God, 

we ask of You only this:

that we need not ask 

that of You at all,

and so both You and we 

may live our days in peace,

and when the end of days has come,

You will be unpractised in punishment,

and we will know the depth of Your sadness

when the first time You raise Your hand

on our behalf, it is against us.

Cannon fodder and comfort women

If we seek to dismantle the patriarchal system of male privilege and entitlement that results in sexual harassment of women, one of the things we must do is encourage men to reject their own disposable status, for which patriarchy offers that privilege and entitlement as compensation.

The revelations about Harvey Weinstein have once more concentrated public discourse on male behaviour towards women. We find ourselves once again asking how to stop the endemic abuse and harassment of which Weinstein is just a very public and high profile example. It has been said he represents just the "tip of the iceberg," but perhaps we should be casting our similes in terms of pyramids rather than icebergs.

Because patriarchy is structural. It is fundamentally a system of divide and rule that exploits the oldest and most obvious division that exists in society, the one between men and women. The frustration men experience as a result of their subordination in society's power structures is misdirected by patriarchy into a spurious sense of thwarted entitlement towards women as a mechanism for maintaining those power structures. Men subordinate women in response to their own subordination.

To be clear, I would just like to anticipate the condescension and outrage of the self-satisfied toxic sociologists who explain everything with reference to some variety of "masculinity" to establish their feminist credentials and earn their ally cookies. Of course I condemn unreservedly the behaviour I am trying to explain. In trying to explain it I am in no way condoning it. I am trying to find a useful description that helps to eliminate it. I find the language of "toxic masculinity" unhelpful in this respect. We would not discuss "toxic femininity" when we really mean internalised misogyny. We need a better way of discussing the male equivalent. Sometimes we should just say "misogyny." Perhaps sometimes, when considering male violence against the self rather than others, a concept of internalised discrimination rather than "toxic masculinity" is more helpful. 

Language is important. We are accustomed to saying that men like Weinstein are abusing a position of power. However, men don't do what they do because they are powerful. They do it to assert power from a position of perceived powerlessness. The actions of someone like Weinstein are not the actions of a confident, powerful man. These actions are pathetic. They originate in an experience of the fundamental male powerlessness of being disposable. Patriarchy provides them with an opportunity to assert power over women to compensate them for their disposability. This maintains their subordination to the power structures they themselves are victims of and to which they are expendable. Men treat women as a consumable item because they themselves are consumables.

Weinstein seems a particularly egregious example because he himself is supposedly a beneficiary rather than a victim of society's power structures, and therefore, according to this thesis, should not require compensation to gain his acquiescence. Why does the man who has everything require compensation? But predators like Weinstein serve a certain purpose. While they are tolerated they legitimise and give permission to other men to behave in this way. They are part of the system. As Emma Thomson said in her recent interview on the subject, in the "olden days" his behaviour would have been described as "pestering." It would have been tacitly accepted as part of this system of male privilege and entitlement. It would provide an example to other, less powerful men, about how they can distract themselves from their own disposability: treat women as disposable sexual objects. Predators like Weinstein help normalise the pathologies of a system of exploitation. He is being pilloried now not because we have just found out about his behaviour, but because the system he is part of itself is in crisis and is being rejected. 

We see this pattern most acutely where men are most expendable: during conflict. Whether it is the "comfort women" abused by Japanese soldiers, the various rape camps set up by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, or more recent instances where rape and sexual abuse are used as weapons of war and genocide to dehumanize, demoralise and subdue a population, we see men being distracted from their own disposability by the objectification of women as sexual entertainment.

This pattern extends into society in general. Whether militarily or economically, the power structures in society mediated by patriarchy cast us in the roles of comfort women and cannon fodder. There is no fundamental difference between the workplace and the front line in this regard. What interests me is the extent to which these roles are connected: the extent to which one would not exist without the other. I have written elsewhere about the fault line through society. We find it at the front line, we find it on the picket line, we find it in the bottom line of the annual profit statement. This is one more example where we are placed in opposition to each other on the lower tiers of a power structure to ensure we continue to support the higher tiers.

So how do men gain the power they need without having to demean others to do so? Reject your disposability. Understand your own worth. Define yourself by your own interests, ambitions, curiosity, talent, not by the purpose you can serve on behalf of someone else. Realise you offer something more than what can be achieved with a dildo, a sperm bank and a pay check. Believe your woman when she says she loves you. Stop thinking this is some elaborate charade you don't fully understand related to some role you play. Stop thinking of yourself as disposable, interchangeable, expendable. Acknowledge your secret self-loathing. Confront your internalised discrimination and sexism. Cease to be cannon fodder. Cease seeking comfort women. Forgive yourself, and finally begin to live.

Why do unionists lie?

I read a tweet today that said Scottish Labour need to lie because there is a simple answer to all their concerns which they are ideologically incapable of considering as long as they remain dogmatically unionist, which is, of course, Independence. This single tweet encapsulates much that is wrong with our politics. Yes, unionists lie. This is not why unionists lie, although superficially it makes a lot of sense.

We sometimes struggle to believe that unionist opposition to Scottish government policies, and criticism of its performance in delivering them, is genuine, because we understand all too well their ulterior motives for criticism. We know all the reasons they have to be disingenuous wreckers.

But we must be very careful about this. We run the risk of making assumptions as unfounded as the unionists' when we treat everything they say as mere a pretext to try to undermine the credibility of a constitutional position to which they are implacably opposed and the government is in favour of. Just because they are often disingenuous does not mean they are always disingenuous, and every government needs genuine opposition scrutiny, which must be welcomed. Our democracy is healthy not because it tolerates dissent, but because it celebrates it. The biggest insult of disingenuous, unconstructive opposition is not to government, but to those voices who would raise real concerns that are drowned out by slogans and sound bites.

On the one hand the people are let down by an opposition if everything it says is just a tribalistic power play and it has nothing constructive to offer. On the other hand there are many unionists whose concerns are sincere, whose opinions are well informed, and whose contributions should be welcomed. We should always bear in mind we are all wrong, both those who agree with us and those who disagree. No-one has all the pieces of the puzzle and we need to work together to solve it. Don't believe anyone who says they have all the answers.

The problem is that all to often we currently confuse the content of our politics with the context in which they find expression. Independence is not a "simple answer." It is a possible context in which we can grapple with the difficult questions that form the content of our politics. Neither is the Union is a "simple answer." It is another possible context. There are no simple answers, and the status quo is not exempt from that observation. I prefer Independence for a variety of reasons, but I can easily find myself agreeing with unionists on a range of issues that are common to both. We need to make a clear distinction between the content and the context of our politics.

So, unionists are not lying to deliberately deprive us of some panacea that would otherwise solve all our problems and put them out of a job. At least, not all of them are ;-). This isn't the reason unionists lie. No, they lie for a fundamentally different reason. They are lying to themselves.

Unionism is based on fundamentally flawed premises. Truth must therefore remain elusive and inaccessible. It assumes:

1: Identity is a zero sum. Our affiliations are finite and must therefore be invested in a single identity to be rendered most effective. I have written at length about the dangers inherent in this assumption in "the vortex."

2: Identity has some instrumental or intercessionary purpose. It is the basis for collective action to address common problems on behalf of individual needs. We must organise our institutions in relation to identity, for example, national parliaments, etc.

3: Identity is linear. The individual is connected to the whole by a single straight line. This line joins each human being to the species, each person to the planet. The only way to express your common humanity is through the identity assigned to you by the unionist.

All of these assumptions are wrong.

They are assumptions that are shared by many opponents of unionism as well, when they mistakenly believe the best way of opposing it is to play the role unionism has cast them in.

Item 3 makes the unionist the gate keeper of solidarity. The line becomes a set of scales, with the union purported to represent some perfect balance between the mass of individuals and their various needs, hopes and fears on the one hand, and all the common challenges we all face as a species on the other. The unionist sits herself at the pivot and claims to be the only way to reconcile these considerations, and, through the various agencies established by her unionist identity, usurps all other perspectives. There can be only one pivot.

But identity is not linear. I can celebrate our common humanity without having to write a letter to my UN representative, appointed by my unionist UK government, for permission to do so. I don't need permission to collaborate with someone in another country when writing a song. Only the most repressive regimes would say I did, and in doing so, would be, and historically have been, unionist regimes. There are many paths and routes we can find to each other, and then follow back to ourselves again, there are many affiliations that can emerge and come into focus and fade once more into obscurity in the shifting simultaneity of our many interactions with each other. Identity is circular, not linear. It is this circularity of identity the opponents of unionism celebrate and unionists abhor, because the gatekeeper of solidarity hates to be bypassed and become irrelevant.

Unionism offers a "one size fits all" solution, which is why it can only conceive of the alternatives that compete with it as "one size fits all" solutions, and insists on criticising them on that basis. This is why they dismiss their opponents as nationalists: because unionism is nationalism. This is the logical template their own position imposes on all others.

Let me say that again: the opposite of unionism is not nationalism. Unionism is nationalism.

Unionism is a form of narcissism that finds a mirror in all its opponents. It is no accident that all of the worst examples of "nationalism" that unionists cite when trying to slander their opponents by association were, in fact, unionist varieties of nationalism, all seeking to impose uniformity on a region "identified" as a suitable candidate for a union, and seeking to consume all affiliations within the "vortex" of that unionist zero sum identity, that aggressive, expansionist, imperialist identity which preconditions the perceptions and understanding of all who profess it.

The only logically coherent position a unionist can take without being nationalist is a unified world government. This is not the principal position advocated in London and Madrid these days.

The linear and intercessionary nature of identity assumed by unionism is dangerous. It allows for the possibility of politics becoming a secular priesthood, for one or a small clique of charismatic authority figures to presume to speak on behalf of everyone, annointed in some mystical way by the "will of the people." That never ends well. Unfortunately we are living in another age in which history's diverse spasms has vomited up another set of unprincipled criminal unionist charlatans setting themselves up to speak on our behalf on the subject of, for example, Brexit.

There is only one union I can thole, and it is unqualified and unconditional. I embrace the variety of human experience. I love all its shades and sexualities, every dance and melody, each opinion and its opposite when sincerely believed and argued, and I do not find this incompatible with Scottish Independence, quite the opposite, it is in Indrpendence that I find my circular identity, and celebrate my connection with all things and all people, and reject the sterile doctrines of the unionist.

Learned helplessness

Scotland leads the world in one thing: learned helplessness.

We call it "the cringe" and it has been a feature of Scottish life and culture for about 300 years.

It has persisted so long it has fractured our collective mind, manifesting itself in Caledonian anti-syzygy and spawning creatures such as Hogg's justified sinner and Stevenson's Mr Hyde. The contradictions and cognitive dissonances of learned helplessness cannot continue for 300 years without contributing to the development of some interesting pathologies, and Scottish society displays these in abundance.

Why is this important? Because the world can learn from us. We have been a laboratory for the world, a neglected one perhaps, one where the experiment in powerlessness has been allowed to run unsupervised and out of control, but one where that experiment has continued until angry young men on football terraces feel compelled to borrow and wave flags from foreign conflicts, like Palestine and Israel, just to feel able and empowered by emblems potent and valid enough to articulate the artificially intensified hatred they feel for their rivals as a consequence of their impotence. Scotland has been a pressure cooker of powerlessness and the world can benefit from sampling the taste.

I realise of course there are aspects of poverty, alienation, and disenfranchisement involved in the pathologies of powerlessness that are common to all too many societies. Nevertheless, Scotland has perfected its own uniquely deranged cocktail of self-loathing and has been serving up the same recipe for 300 years now, ever since "the brightest prospect a Scotsman ever saw is the high road leading him to England."

Imagine a future 300 years from now. The Kushner dynasty has reigned uninterrupted over the radioactive wastelands of half the globe. Donald XVI sits on the throne. Dissent is not just crushed. It is inconceivable. The people have been reprogrammed by fear, hatred, hunger, mutual suspicion, and self-loathing, to accept the self-contradictory dogma that sustains and legitimises the regime. Hope is not just futile, it is ridiculous, a matter of scorn and derision. It is immediately poisoned by the cringe.

This world, this dystopia, owes Scotland a huge debt, for we provided the prototype for the highly effective and contagious cringe it needs now to survive, without which it would surely descend into chaos. This debt will last long after the last book on Maxwell's electromagnetism or Kelvin's thermodynamics has been burned, long after the last television set has been smashed and the last telephone line cut, long after anti-biotic resistant bacteria have spread in epidemics across continents. Scotland's last gift to the world, as a few hundred million survivors shuffle through the rituals of survival in the post-apocalyptic desert they are bequeathed, will be the knowledge that they deserve it all.

Fascists love learned helplessness. They tell you it is your consent to whatever they propose. Then they tell you your consent, as they have contrived it, is irrevocable once given. They take the acquiescence of a fatigued and frightened people and their yearning for respite, and offer a path of least resistance and call it choice, or the "will of the people," or some other meaningless formula, and then insist that once that path is taken there is no turning back. It is a self-perpetuating system that continually generates the illusion of consent from exhaustion and confusion.

I saw an incredibly text-book example of the cringe today on social media. Gerry Hassan reported a conversation he had today in his local shop about last night's football result (Scotland beat Slovakia 1-0) with someone.

Gerry: What do you think of the result last nite?
Chap: I don’t know the result. Take it we lost.
Gerry: We won.
Chap: Just assumed we lost and were rubbish.
Gerry: They were pretty impressive. Team is on a roll.
Chap (said sarcastically): That’s what happens when you are in a union.
Gerry: Obviously.
Chap: And look at that mess in Catalonia. That’s self-determination for you.

"Just assumed we lost and were rubbish"

A t-shirt for us all to wear as we fall in line with the death march to the future the fascists are preparing for us, as we stumble on staring at the heels of the person in front, lacking the courage and imagination to challenge our learned helplessness, yearning for a quiet life even if that ends up being just the edge of a mass grave and bullet in the back of the head.

"Just assumed we lost and were rubbish"

The future is not a boot stamping on a face forever. The future is just inexhaustible reserves of cringe. 2014 was Scotland's 1984. The matter is settled. Eat your cereal.

"Assumed"

The opposite of courage and imagination. The opposite of curiosity. The intellect's capitulation. Its abdication and surrender. The abandonment of our faculties to the mercy of those who despise us. Don't ask any questions. Don't expect any answers. Just assume the worst case scenario and you won't be disappointed. Jump before you're pushed.

"Lost"

The opposite of confidence, knowledge, hope, direction. The opposite of a sense of place. The opposite of a geographic and historical location. The opposite of context. The opposite of receiving a cultural inheritance to which you can contribute and leave as a legacy to future generations. The atomised individual's apology.

"Rubbish"

The opposite of self-esteem, "that sense o' worth and pith o' self," ambition, value. Trash. Scum. Filth. Incapable of anything worth the effort.

"And look at that mess in Catalonia. That’s self-determination for you."

Not just Scottish Independence, because Catalonia isn't Scotland, no, the abstract concept of self-determination itself is a mess. Oh, if only there was a strong authority figure this person could turn to, a charismatic leader who could redeem all the stupidity and selfishness of us unworthy people, with our disastrous notions of "self-determination."

It's time Europe became a proper democracy

The situation in Barcelona will have ramifications beyond Iberia. I am not talking about the example Catalonia sets for other secessionist movements. I am talking about the fault lines in the logic of Europe's institutions that lie exposed when the EU Commission feels compelled to defend a government that deploys paramilitary force against its own people.

I am talking about its statements that seem to place the right of the government to send in police to beat the people over the right of the people to choose how they are governed. I am talking about its support for a constitution even when it has been invalidated by the violence used to defend it against the very people it is supposed to protect.

One possible outcome of this contradiction at the heart of Europe is the development of tension between the EU Parliament and Commission. The parliament surely must appreciate how yesterday's events have altered the context of discussion, shifted the "moral horizon," in ways the commission seems unable.

Parliamentarians are elected by and speak for the people. The can articulate the widespread disgust at the state-sanctioned antics of the Guardia Civil. Some were present among crowds under fire from rubber bullets. If you have a problem about this you should write to your MEP, not a commissioner.

Commissioners are appointed by and speak for the governments. It is inevitable they will adopt a constitutionalist view. They are civil servants. The take their instructions from the Council of Europe, the heads of government. They are a "government club," not representatives or delegates of the people.

Therefore I will follow the debate on the situation in Catalonia in the European Parliament that has been called for Wednesday with interest, in particular the contribution of Alyn Smith.

One thing that is revealed by recent developments is that if sovereignty is to be pooled and shared in Europe for our common interests it must be a matter of parliamentary process, not technocratic bureaucracy, because that is the proper forum in which the peoples of Europe can embrace each other in solidarity and with joint and meaningful commitment to democracy. Parliament is where the peoples of Europe find common cause, while the Commission is merely an extension of the corporate boardroom into the public sphere.

Over reliance on the Commission risks merely amplifying frustrations and resentments with the governments that appoint it. Barcelona, ironically, shows us it is time Europe became a proper democracy. Maybe it is time for another tennis court oath to define the times we live in.

Homage to Catalonia

Thugs in balaclavas assault women and children and vandalise the apparatus of democratic self-expression while being applauded by fascist spectators and supporters. They do this with complete impunity, however, because these are state-sanctioned thugs. They are Spanish police disrupting the Catalan Independence referendum today, the first day of October, 2017.

How is this any of my business? I can feel sympathy for Spaniards who see Catalan Independence as the dismemberment of their "indivisible" country. I can appreciate their deep sadness at the apparent violation of the 1978 constitution that reconciled a country recovering from dictatorship.

Friends of my grandfather, Red Clydesiders, fought and died in Spain fighting fascism. I might not be here if he had been able to make the same journey. My country, Scotland, currently suffers a constitutional arrangement that might be interpreted as a relic, a mere stratagem and temporary expedient, from the War of the Spanish Succession that has persisted because of a series of circumstances (the Hanoverian state's survival of it's mid-18th century crisis, and so on) that were not inevitable. So in some sense I feel I have a stake in today's developments in Spain.

But I take an interest not as a Scot, or a Spaniard, or a Catalan, but, like my grandfather and his friends, as a human. The stake I have in the outcome of this project lies in its broader implications and ramifications for us all. I am not just seeking a development abroad that helps legitimise my hopes in domestic politics. I am not just finding in Catalonia an example Scotland might follow in its own journey towards the restoration of its ancient rights and privileges of self-determination. I am not simply acknowledging and admiring the ample "collons" of those struggling for their own self-determination and wishing such determination was more in evidence here. I am seeing universal forces confront each other on the streets and in the polling stations of Barcelona and Girona and all across Catalonia.

"Una, Grande y Libre" was the motto of fascist Spain, and the doctrine of Spain's indivisibility provides an opportunity for francoist nostalgia which we see expressed by the small number of right wing extremists offering nazi salutes in support of Madrid's uniformed thugs on the streets of Barcelona.

When the state becomes an end in itself rather than a vehicle for the aspirations of the people it becomes a breeding ground for monsters. We see unionists, in both Spain and Scotland, villifying peaceful independence activists while failing to repudiate the fascists in their own ranks. No matter how obnoxious the individuals and organisations that find fellowship and common cause with them are, they serve a purpose, and so the unionists just hold their nose and turn a blind eye. And so the far right is emboldened, and grows, and thrives in the shadow of the union.

But the 20th century offers blood-soaked testimony that if we tolerate this while the fascists are weak, we only have to defeat it once they have grown strong. The governments of a European Union formed as a bulwark against fascism and a guarantor of the legitimate aspirations of its peoples must unequivocally condemn Madrid as a matter of existential necessity.

The A Bomb

Trump has concerned himself recently with nuclear weapons detonated in tests in an Asian peninsula. But when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico it did so with the force of ten Hiroshimas being released every second on a US territory in the Carribean. As the mayor of San Juan begs for the lives of her citizens, the devastation is plain to see. Puerto Rico is a bomb site.

The extent to which this device was man-made is a subject for scientific approximation. The intensification of hurricanes like Irma and Maria has been estimated to be 40% due to anthropogenic climate change: warmer water at greater depths means the injection of energy into these weather systems continues longer than previously. The rate at which category 5 hurricanes occur has increased concommitantly.

But that's not even the principal source of the devastation I allude to by my reference to an "A Bomb." On this occasion A stands for Apathy. As Sarah Kendzior describes in her familiar magisterial prose, Puerto Rico's catastrophe is compounded by the effects of an Apathy Bomb whose origin is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue rather than Pyongyang. Trump has shown by inaction that he simply doesn't care about the lives of the US citizens of Puerto Rico affected by this hurricane.

But the effects of this Apathy Bomb are much more widespread. They are felt across the world. There is an abdication of responsibility which has rarely been seen in a democracy, an abdication of responsibility that is most often accompanied by the cynical exploitation of authority by criminal despots who are indifferent to everything other than their own interests. On this occasion A also stands for Accountability, which now also lies in ruins as much as the infrastructure of Puerto Rico.

And if Trump is not held accountable for his indifference it is not just his abdication of responsibility with which we should be concerned. We should recognise an abdication of the democratic responsibility of the electorate that put him in office. In a democracy the buck stops with them.

The Apathy Bomb that has destroyed Puerto Rico may include the last illusions of American democracy among its casualties, as the people acquiesce to the despotic caprice of their president in a way that would be inconceivable in an age of democratic accountability.

Hierarchy of needs

I was thinking of writing up a cosmic Maslow,
a hierarchy with a bit more cosmos in its scope,
a hierarchy of needs with a bit more undertow,
and so I came up with this little list below:

oblivion,
inheritance,
conception,
birth,
survival,
stability,
death,
succession,
immortality,
oblivion.

But then I thought:

love,

just love;

because people lock from the inside.
They close off when their dignity is denied,
and we are all implicated in that crime.
Their gut tells them: all laughs are at their expense;
our fellowship could only ever be a pretence,
a suspicion from which they have no defence,
and they think they'll never know the reason why,
and the world seems to be just passing them by.
Their peer group seems an impenetrable clique
they cannot crack, despite how hard they seek
to be initiated into its watchwords and mysteries,
let alone satisfy some elaborate hierarchy of needs,
and so they lock themselves away inside.
They close the door and curl up and hide.
It's the only way they know how to survive,

except for love,

just love,

because the world locks from the inside.
We feel we're trapped because it's finite.
The sky seems flat, and the orbits of lonely planets,
the scintillations of long dead stars, have no point
beyond the empty iteration of an order that reveals
only the deeper chaos from which it is retrieved,
an unavoidable void for which we stand witness,
and nothing can rescue miracles from the meaningless

except for love,

just love,

so, love is the key.

Love unlocks the mystery.

Love is all you need.

Fish out of water

Strange companions
share your dry stone pool:

Z-rod and V-rod; comb and mirror;
wolf and whale; serpent and crescent;

horse and rider in perfect profile,
the affectation of dispensing with stirrups
in emulation of those foreign emperors
whose cupidity and presumption
our forebears fought off long ago
yet another irony lost upon us

as we admire the craftsmanship,
the contours, incisions, the relief,
that catch you, the symbol-salmon,
no longer able to swim and swerve
over gravel beds strewn with boulders
arranged and eroded by glacier and flood
ten millennia hence, to leap and launch yourself
through cataracts of impossible airborne time,
escaping the grimace and gritted teeth
of the warriors in pursuit,

who share your fate now time is less fluid
upon a boulder quarried and carved by man,
a surface that knows rain instead of river,
and the cloudy time-lapse smirr,
the clanjamfrie of centuries of spectators
who marvel without understanding,
each peeling their thin glimpse of you
from the membrane of stone to which you cling
rubbing you smoothe with fumbled curiosity

and whatever wisdom there is in that
is held within the secret silence of the stone.

The well

As boys we sat at the edge of the village well
and flicked pebbles into the cool shadow of its shaft
waiting to hear them reach the bottom. We waited.

We waited. The sun shuttled between the solstices
and Eratosthenes tossed those in the well at Syene too
at the height of Summer. Time passed. No sound,

and as we waited, in the full mirage of our youth
the well slowly filled with the shadows of all the words
we did not say, and every pebble became a poem,

falling, and we waited. A butterfly was the pinkie hinge
upon which all our years' vagrant seasons swung,
a miracle of reckless yet enduring delicacy,

of weightless fragility. Early autumn held its breath,
teaching us in silence what cannot be learned
from all the world's loud boasts of strength,

and in the evening the equinox stood at the door,
pausing, searching through his bundle of keys
for the one which unlocks winter, and turned it.

Lightning briefly cracked the sky apart
and for a moment, through the crack, we caught a glimpse
of the light of better worlds, where butterflies are from,

and imagined our pebbles, falling, and as they fell,
growing, accreting mass, becoming planets lost to an orbit
through darkness deeper than any well, and we waited,

and imagined ourselves growing older, accumulating years
in silence, and when we died we imagined ourselves buried
in the cold earth of those planets, falling through space,

and now it is our turn to fall, through the cold grave
and into the bottomless darkness, and as we fall
through the silence of all the words we never said

we realise the only thing we have when all else is discarded
is the fragile love between us, as we wait in the sunshine,
wait in the full mirage of our youth, in silence, by the well.

Discovery

In so many aspects of life just now we seem to be stuck firmly in reverse.

I was watching a rerun of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation the other day. Although set in the far future, science fiction adopts the ethics of when it is made. These might be values shared by its protagonists, or assumptions challenged by the kind of counterexamples science fiction permits. However they are manifested, they express the values of the programme makers.

When I was watching TNG I was struck by how far we have regressed from the ethics it reflected. I was shocked to realise the set of assumptions it expresses regarding tolerance, conflict resolution, personal development, the purpose of collective endeavour, all seem less secure now than when it was first shown.

Our values today, even after the short period of normalised decline that has elapsed since Trump and Brexit were endorsed by the popular vote, seem constrained, narrower, more shrill, less accommodating. I feel we would have to argue today for positions we all shared and took for granted back then.

It's as if we have reverted back to the '70s, or worse, like we are Buck Rogers, but instead of being accelerated to some utopian future, have fallen back through time 500 years from the 25th century to a more barbaric age. It's like Superman has done that thing where he flies so fast against the Earth's rotation he reverses it, except he has not bothered to turn it back again.

Like people have forgotten retro-chic is just about style, fashion, music, and are trying to turn back the clock on morality, values, and all the tiny, excruciating increments of progress that took decades to achieve.

Do we really have to fight all these battles again? Have we really landed unwittingly on the wrong square in historical snakes and ladders. Have we really drawn the Go To Jail card? Do not pass go. Go straight to fascism, homophobia and misogyny. Do not collect several centuries of progress and enlightenment.

I feel like it's like that moment in a conversation when the person who has been smiling and nodding in agreement while you exposit says something in reply that reveals they have not understood a thing you've said, and have taken you to mean the exact opposite of what you believe, and are agreeing with an opinion you abhor.

It's like that moment when Pam Ewing wakes up to find Bobby in the shower. Except Bobby here is Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or some other harbinger of doom. Several seasons of progress seem not to have happened. We were asleep the whole time.

Now we've woken up to find ourselves in a Captain Kirk universe, and Picard was just a dream.

Ironic that the new Star Trek series is another prequel.

Maybe we need to remember that one of the first science fiction stories, "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells, was a dystopia, that progress can never be taken for granted and does not occur as consequence of natural processes, but requires our continual collective efforts. 

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a lie

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a lie.
I don't know why she swallowed the lie.
Perhaps she'll die. 

There was an Old Labour that swallowed a liar
that wriggled and giggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the liar to catch the lie.
I don't know why she swallowed the lie.
Perhaps she'll die. 

There was an Old Labour that lied until hoarse.
She's dead of course.

There is none with neck so brass as those who offer to solve the problem they themselves caused without taking any responsibility for causing it.

PFI? The Scotland Act? Equal Pay? The Scottish rail network franchise? Labour's response is to offer nothing but lies, denial and obfuscation, as they dodge the blame and claim the credit for other people's ideas.

Labour in Scotland only has one principle, and that is power. The moral high ground is, for them, merely territory that must be seized, merely real estate, and "socialism" is merely the stake with which they make that claim. The reflex to every challenge is lies and denial, even when there is a constructive option available. 

They will seek political advantage at the expense of genuine solutions to real problems if necessary. We have seen they will even find common cause with fascist thugs if it serves the purposes of their unionism. In any meaningful respect they are merely the lying face of the British state in Scotland, and nothing more. 

The heist

You are accomplice to your own overthrow,
handing me keys to your private vault,
not to help me commit an act of theft,
but because it locks from the outside
and you yearn to be shut away within
its confines, fitting tight your lip and limb,
kept hidden by me, my secret obsession,
tucked in a corner of my heart unknown
to anatomies described in other poems.
I ache to make your heart entire and whole,
trapping you like an undiscovered pearl
by stealing you, even if that breaks the world's

Fat lady

She may as well be mute,

she may as well be deaf,

because for you, this fat lady don't sing,

and this fat lady ain’t goin’ on no diet,

and this fat lady ain't goin’ to let you

call her fat no more!

This fat lady's gonna dance til dawn!

And if you want to dance to this kind of blues

you’d better wear your steel-toed dancin’ shoes

The net

The net was patched and mended

so many times, over so many generations,

the original starting knot was lost.

Everything old was new once:

replaced so often, by so many hands,

their various patches overlapping.

And yet the big fish still swam free,

while the old man pointed out his work

to the boy learning needlework on the jetty,

one hand resting on the other, guiding it.
And the big fish would tell them
the only knowledge that endures is love,

but they would have to catch it first,
and that was never going to happen,
and so the net was patched and mended.  

The vortex

"I find it curious that so many Scottish Nationalists seem to find a greater affinity with Catalonian seperatists than the people of Tyneside, Yorkshire or Merseyside."

Kevin Hague 

"There are no foreigners in Scotland. Where you’re from is interesting, but if you are here, you’re one of us. That’s our values." 

Alyn Smith MEP

If I glance down at my jacket just now I can see I am wearing a number of badges. I have: a raptor I got when donating to the RSPB; a rainbow Yes 2 badge that was handed to me in the street; a Harris Gin "H" I got at the distillery in Tarbet; a little Saltire incorporating the twelve stars of the Flag of Europe; multiple overlapping or unrelated affiliations of varying scope and significance.

Boris Johnson's recent remarks that affiliations beyond the UK weaken affiliations within it reveal an attitude that is incompatible with my badge wearing habits. The same attitude is evident in Theresa May's "citizen of nowhere" speech at last year's Conservative Party conference. The UK government clearly believes identity is a zero sum.

They are encouraging a certain kind of British nationalism just now because they believe they can benefit from it. In this vision of Brexit Britain, which we must share or risk being branded traitors or saboteurs, any affiliation to one identity is at the expense of an affiliation to another, and they have stipulated that their vision will be the sole receptacle of our undivided loyalty.

It doesn't matter if the vision is vague or undeliverable, as long as it allows them to declare themselves custodians of "the will of the people." Indeed, the less well defined the vision is the better, as the only essential attribute of this vision is the pretext it provides for demanding loyalty and centralising power. Alternative loci of authority, at sub- and supranational level, in Holyrood and Brussels, are to be liquidated as competitors rather than collaborators.

The problem is, identity is not a zero sum. If we adopt one affiliation we don't have to abandon another. Identity is not some substance that must be subdivided and shared out. It is not a transaction, it is a celebration. It is a starting point, not an end in itself, a way of initiating conversations, not shutting down debate. It is a rioting jungle, not an austere desert, a party, not a vigil. It is promiscuous and profligate and kaleidoscopic and infuriating and exhilarating in its variety. It gently ebbs and flows in our awareness. It does not demand attention. It is what we actually do, not what we should do. It is who we actually are, not who we must pretend to be.

In the sterile vision of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, and the others in the right wing clique that has captured the British state, there is room for only one badge on my lapel and all others must be swept away and swallowed by the voracious centripetality of their vision. Westminster, the media, the full panoply of the state, is to become a factory. Our identities and affiliations are to be stripped from us and fed to it as raw material from which shiny new lapel pins announcing our proud affiliation to the "will of the people" as embodied in Brexit are to be manufactured and distributed, one for each of us.

And if we decline they will find another symbol for us to wear, for where one identity becomes a vortex that consumes all others we are all diminished and some of us are destroyed.