The outlaw

In my mind's eye I see him, standing, silhouetted on the horizon. The man I want to be. I imagine he looks in my direction for a moment before dipping out of sight. Although in all liklihood he doesn't. He wouldn't notice me, this man I want to be.

In my travels I hear rumours of him from beyond the pale. From time to time, after I have concluded some trivial barter and horns are joined to toast the bargain, the idle anecdotes with which new associations are cemented turn to tales of him. Yet he always eludes me, always slips past the perimeter, out of reach, into the night, lost in the forest, stealing a march, a few days ahead of me, this man I want to be.

And I lose myself in trade and study and science and music and love and the performance of all that becomes a man, but I will never become this man, the man I want to be. And slowly he becomes an afterthought, an illusion, a myth, and dissappears.

He isn't powerful. He regards positions of power and influence with disdain. If compelled, however briefly, to be in the presence of power, he may perhaps summon the minimal effort necessary for a sneer or scowl before departing for a solitude free from lies and ambition and compromise, his delinquency suitable only for the company of beasts.

And although unassailable on its throne, although he represents no threat to it at all, power cannot tolerate the simple reproach that his ungovernable existence constitutes, and despises him, and tries to destroy him, and issues orders that are dutifully followed by men, for even silent scorn cannot be endured by the despot. And while they pursue him and seek his destruction, in secret these men wish they were him, even though his destruction puts food on their tables, even though his head in a noose pays their wages, even though he is condemned for violating every article of morality.

He isn't a provider. There is no room among the starkness of the realities he surrounds himself with for tenderness. He is motionless with an economy that leaves nothing spare for anyone else. His stillness has an urgency the imperatives of a normal life would interrupt and delay. His stillness is a kind of speed, one achieved only after endless acceleration through countless lives from an infinitely slower condition that is neverthessless beyond the limits of speed we are capable of imagining. Our lives would collapse and fold flat in a sort of relativistic spacetime contraction if we could even just stand next to him.

And I am a provider. I have a wife and children. I know the glorious extinction of ego in the overwhelming surge of love that comes with becoming a parent. I know what it is to find my innermost self unlocked and opened up to me by the love and lifelong companionship of a remarkable and beautiful partner. I know what it is to do the same for her, and to discover together the pleasures with which we can celebrate our love.

But as he stands there on the skyline he connects me with the places he will visit beyond it, places I have never seen, places I will never go, for which my heart nevertheless somehow inexplicably yearns, annihilations and ecstasies prepared for me alone before time began beneath unseen stars and constellations placed in a desert sky further south than any man can travel.

He is superfluous, unnecessary, an empty outline, an absence. He is nothing. He will never be the man I am. But he will always be the man I want to be.

Zapruder 313

They tried to resurrect him

by running the movie of his death in reverse.

Tears flowed up,

and were sucked in by ducts

in the corners of the mourners’ eyes.

The widow’s matrimonial bliss was restored.

The gun swallowed the bullets

in a great greedy gun-muzzle guzzle,

while the driver of the open-top limousine

had to steer backwards through the plaza

using his rear view mirror.

The laundry did itself, which was just as well,

because blood stains are very difficult to get out.

The assassin suddenly remembered

other ways to pursue his grievances,

and rediscovered optimism and faith in humanity,

and decided to take in a movie instead.  

The limp stems of once wilted bouquets

stiffened, and dead flowers burst back into bloom,

and regressed to bud-hood, and returned to seed,

but somehow they couldn't ease the ache and grief,

refill the dust dry goblet of his generous heart,

or piece together the jigsaw of the skull

that once contained all his clever thoughts.  

They couldn't find the bits they needed

to put him back together again.

Something was missing.

They reel back and forth, rewind, playback,

in an eternal tortuous slow motion search

inside the camera that captured the moment

now lost forever.

Somewhere else

that single missing frame is all there is,

and endless spools of alternative reality

are extrapolated from it, looping,

bifurcating, dangling, splicing and spilling

all over the messy floor of an editing suite

where all the happy endings are made. 

Asymmetric money

People talk about "sustainable growth" and find other palatable ways of phrasing the business and commercial impacts of climate imperatives. Green energy. Eco-living. Zero emissions. Hybrid. All presented to us as if they represent some sort of feel-good business opportunity.

But let's be clear. We are not talking about "sustainable growth." There are no new opportunities for us to exploit. We fucked up. We fucked up big. There will be no "growth." This is not an IPO. We are not launching the future.

We are not talking about what can be gained, we are talking about how to limit what will be lost. We are talking about damage limitation. We are talking about best case scenario. We are talking about a new way of thinking and a new way of living in which we dispense with old shibboleths like "growth." We are talking about trying to achieve a smooth transition to an inevitable future versus a bumpy ride to an unknown destination across a barren moonscape of environmental degradation.

We need to devise institutions and structures that can serve as successors to the way we do things now while bearing in mind the inevitable obsolescence of these new structures from the outset. We must build things, not to defend them, not to make something that stands the test of time, but see them fall in a controlled way, to make sure change is not catastrophic, because change is surely coming.

We are moving towards a post-scarcity society. We would be there already, but scarcity has been maintained artificially for the benefit of vested interests whose existence satisfied the old imperatives. We have concepts of wealth predicated on its appropriation and accumulation. This makes no sense when there is more than enough for everyone. "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed." Scarcity is artificially maintained because there are no "haves" without "have-nots." The consequences of old solutions to old problems has made new problems that render those old solutions irrelevant at best, incendiary at worst. The world is reduced to ash by our old camp fire burning out of control. These ideas are now counter-productive. This can't go on.

But how do we maintain continuity? How do we prevent conflict? How do we huckle the old world away without it wrecking everything with its kicking and its screaming? How do we avoid wars over dwindling resources, misappropriated to be bought and sold, while people starve? We need to work on the interim measures.

In the only kind of future that has a future, we will be living in a cashless, post-scarcity, highly automated circular economy powered by renewable energy, in which concepts and distinctions like work and leisure are quaint anachronisms. People will do what they do, not to earn a living, but because they find it fulfilling. There will be no such thing as money.

How do we make the transition from a society that evaluates everything with money to one in which the very idea of money is toxic? How do we compensate the wealthy for the abolition of their wealth, indeed, the abolition of the very idea of wealth as they understand it?

I have written elsewhere about kindness as currency. I described

"a currency whose value depends on context [and] cannot be represented by a number printed on a piece of paper, [...] that is determined by the genuine value it has to the recipient at the time they receive it [...] that is not offered in exchange for anything at all, [but] is valid only if nothing at all is received in return, [...] that can be given and received but not earned, [...] a currency whose supply is not restricted, [...] that can be generated in limitless amounts by anyone at any time, [...] a currency that is the opposite of money."

The way we go from money to kindness is by gradually introducing asymmetry into our transactions. We can develop an intermediate form of exchange between the strict yet spurious, limiting and ultimately damaging illusion of balance maintained by money and concepts of philanthropy, charity and altruism. We need to develop a form of asymmetric money. I have also described this elsewhere:

"The transition to this post-scarcity scenario was made easier by using asymmetric money which was not given in exchange for anything, and did not represent value in the sense previously understood, to keep account and maintain balance. No, these tokens denoted simple participation in an economically significant act. They had only one denomination, which indicated that the bearer had either performed or been the beneficiary of an act of kindness.  

"And so those whose needs were greatest accumulated the greatest number of these tokens. The poor in spirit were indeed blessed. Theirs was the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek did indeed inherit the Earth."

How can we begin this process of transition in practice? We carefully develop a timarchy in which the wealthy can participate. We make the asymmetry a source of renown.

I have discussed the idea of developing a taxation and welfare regime that imposes not just a minimum basic income, but a maximum one as well, with personal incomes governed by a Kumaraswamy distribution. Income in excess of the upper limit of the distribution is not confiscated. It is made asymmetric. The individual who has earned it may use it in ways that confer on them renown, rather than property. Instead of that fourth yacht, they build a hospital wing. Instead of another Porsche, they sponsor an opera. Their wealth is made to work in socially responsible ways and their contribution is valued and respected, and earning respect makes their expenditure accountable.

I'm not talking about a tax dodge. I'm not talking about charitable foundations set up by corporations. I'm talking about a complete realignment of how we attribute value to actions and objects.

I'm talking about a redefinition of money that is consistent with its eventual disappearance.

Skin

Skin,
like paper,
wafer thin,
light, like a lantern,
glowing with light,
the light from the flame
tucked up inside,
whose heat hoists it up,
up off the ground,
and into the air,
to carry it wither?
Who knows where?

Skin.
You touch,
besmirch and smear,
with fingers
wet with pizza grease
once the movie is over
and you make your move
and fold me up
like an old cardboard box
on the basement sofa
that unlocks and folds out
to make our bed
and we lie on it for now,
stiff and heavy,
inside each other,
underground.

Skin.
Skin.
Such a strange, terrible thing.
With flat blade palm
your hand delves in,
breaks through the surface,
and moves deep inside,
and in my warm body
you start to swim
and dive, and find
within my lactescent depths
the wreckage of all that's left
of a lost lantern I lit long ago,
that wandered like a luftballoon
and nearly made it to the moon
but just stopped short
and fell to earth as soon
as lack of air snuffed out its light,
and the wreckage holds your ankle tight
and in my depths I drag you down
and drown and drown and drown
and drown you,

and take your eyes and hair and skin,
and bones and flesh and smile and sin
and make a new place I live in.
Inside my skin.
My skin.
My
skin.

The White House and the White Palace

"No appeal shall be made to any judicial authority, including the Constitutional Court, against the decisions and orders signed by the President of the Republic on his/her own initiative" 

Paragraph 2 of Article 105 of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey

"A person who publicly denigrates the Turkish Nation, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years" 

Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code 

On October 29th, 2014, President Erdoğan of Turkey moved into his new official residence, the "Ak Saray" or "White Palace," a brand new purpose built government complex. The Turkish Council of State found the construction of the palace to be illegal and ordered it to be vacated, however Erdoğan over-ruled the court using Article 105 of the Turkish constitution (see above).

On June 16th, 2015, Donald Trump launched himself on a trajectory that took him from the announcement of his candidacy for president of the USA at Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, Manhattan, to his very own White House on January 20th this year. Although his successful campaign and first few weeks in office have invited other comparisons, I would like to consider the potentially disturbing convergence between the trajectory America is now set upon and the situation in Turkey.

The current situation in the United States of America, and the controversies surrounding the conduct of the president and his administration, invites various lurid comparisons with historic low points for democracy. For example, his insistence on accusing the media of "fake news" may be compared to Hitler's use of the term lugenpresse ("lying press") to undermine media scrutiny. His policies, such as the travel ban, have brought him into conflict with the courts, pitting branches of government - the executive and the judiciary - against each other in a way that undermines the rule of law. His cult of personality and representation of himself as a unique saviour of working people and remedy for their grievances is reminiscent of the 1930s. His insistence on referring to his private residence at Mar-A-Lago as the "Winter" or "Southern" White House is worrying: if it is to be an official residence, then he either has to give it to the people he is serving at the end of his term of office ... or he doesn't relinquish office.

But there are more recent, less melodramatic, and potentially more instructive comparisons to draw than Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. For example, although commentators and apologists remark upon the electoral success of Donald Trump, and the rise of right wing populism in general, as a manifestation of popular insurrection against globalisation, it must be remembered that this rejection of globalisation was a core component of many previous movements, both left- and right-wing. For example, Serbian nationalists in the 1990s explicitly saw themselves in conflict with a global order being imposed on a national community by NATO. Many of those using this rejection of globalisation as an excuse for the excesses of Trump today were much more critical of it back then when espoused by others.

However, I want to look at a much more recent, indeed current, example. The Turkish perspective on the situation in the US is fascinating. Reading Turkish journalists and commentators (at least, the ones who aren't in jail, having fallen foul of, for example, Article 301 of the Penal Code quoted above) gives a glimpse of a possible future for the United States. The Turkish narrative, expressed by state approved commentators in newspapers the Turkish authorities have not yet shut down, is that Trump should aspire to the achievements already accomplished by Erdoğan, who has (according to this narrative) already "defeated the deep state on behalf of the people."

Given Trump's current struggle with the intelligence services (i.e. the "deep state") resulting the departure of Mike Flynn, and his vilification and pillorying of journalists, Turkey is seen (in this narrative) as the model he should wish to replicate, where family members run the intelligence services and journalists face jail for disrespecting the office of the president. Indeed, the logical conclusion to Trump's attack on the press in his own country is the proscription of publications that disrespect the office of the president (a suitably vaguely defined offence) as in Turkey. Erdoğan has effectively silenced the press in a way Trump can only aspire to for the moment.

Trump's appeal can be seen as similar to Erdoğan's to the extent that he offers a populist authoritarianism in a religious context. Erdoğan's early career saw him fall foul of the Turkish authorities, and serve time in jail, for the threat his party's religious agenda represented to Turkish secularism. His appeal to his constituency relies to some extent on a role as a defender of the faith. Trump, for his part, has a clear pact with the religious right in the US, with evolution-denying, Christian fundamentalist Mike Pence as his vice-president and, in Steve Bannon, a Christian ideologue as chief strategist who openly speculates about holy war and epochal conflicts as manifestations of an inflexible and delusional metaphysics of history.

Consider also the subversion of the Turkish intelligence services (look at how much Erdoğan family members have been enriched by using them to facilitate illegal oil sales) and so on, and compare this to the creeping nepotism of Trump. Both Trump and Erdoğan thrive on crisis and chaos, using it to purge personnel and appoint more suitable replacements as required.

There is a "make Turkey great again" strand of rhetoric in right wing Turkish politics, harking back to former imperial Ottoman glories, which has been encouraged by Erdoğan. The popular movements from which both Trump and Erdoğan have benefited are both characterised by anti-intellectualism, a rejection of metropolitan elites, a suspicion of anyone with a university degree, and a reluctance to engage in or even tolerate debate, with a tendency to see scrutiny as threat and take criticism of the their leader as a personal insult.

Like Trump, Erdoğan has questioned the legitimacy of courts that rule unfavourably. Both the modern US and modern Turkish states are founded on genocides they deny to this day (for example, the Armenian genocide, in the case of Turkey, and native Americans in the case of the USA). Both the USA and Turkey are accustomed to a global leadership role historically. Although, of course, both situations are distinct, there are an alarming number of parallels there for anyone who cares to look for them.

It makes me wonder if we shouldn't rather be using Turkey as the point of comparison for Trump, rather than e.g. the "Nazis." Rather than looking for a "warning from history," perhaps we don't need to look any further back than the present, and if we want to see how things might play out, look at how they have already played out elsewhere.

Genesis

She traces the outline of my features

with her fingertip on my face:

She draws me, and then there I am.

No Sistine deity's digit required:

a child's love is enough.

Baby 59

Your second birth was very public.

You were excavated from a tight, narrow trench,

an entirely unexpected, accidental uterus, and emerged

into the blinding brightness of the spotlight.

Rather than the warm wet glow of the womb,

you were retrieved from the confines of a cold, dark drain,
and instead of a telephone call from a new father
to grandparents and aunts and a small family circle,

the announcement of your rescue
was instantly broadcast around the world

evoking the most desperate hopes and fears
of total strangers, revealed and released, like you,
from the darkest of all possible places

in our febrile, over-stimulated imagination
where this parody of birth paraded itself 
in pride of place as prelude to the procession
of our worst nightmares. 

Little one, your journey through the filth and narrows

took you through places we prefer not to think about,

where we conceal inside ourselves seeds of secret sin,

and the fear of helplessness and annihilation.

Go back far enough though,

and are we not all the children of cannibals?
Every inch of this Earth aches with ancient atrocity.
We raise crops in soil rich with rust and blood.
Ploughshares and swords may split our tale
into the separate, neat pages of our story,
but the bread we break today is plunder,
the air we breathe sucked from a long dead lung,
its last breath all that's left,
the words it carried long, long forgotten,
and there is no path we can ever take
without walking in the steps of Cain. 

We ourselves are proof there is no point of no return,

and no dark and narrow straits can keep from us

the discovery of love, enduring and transcendent,

waiting in the light beyond the world's worst mire,

even in this disposable epoch, this throwaway age,

that stalks the sewers with the appetite of Saturn

mad with hunger for want of children to consume. 

Letter to the editor

I read a letter about climate change in the Herald yesterday. It took a position of climate change denial, and the flagrance of its disregard for science prompted me to write a reply. My reply wasn't published (some other excellent responses were - I suspect there was a mountain of missives in response with which the editor had to contend). Nevertheless, here is the letter I sent in.

Ian McNeish writes that changes in the abundance of carbon dioxide due to human activity are not responsible for climate change ("No evidence to support the theory of anthropogenic global warming").

Let's take this step by step. A few points of fact. The Earth is 4,500 million years old (approximately), not 1,000 million years old as Mr McNeish asserts.

Contrary to what Mr McNeish states, there are many scientific observations that relate changes in global temperature to human activity, specifically the relatively sudden and rapid (in geological terms) increase in concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. See for example:

• NASA (https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/) and 
• The United Nations (http://www.un.org/climatechange/the-science/).  

He is correct that we have been keeping reliable records of our observations for a relatively short period of time (in geological terms). He mentions the figure 100 years. However our observations cover a much longer period of time. For example, we can make inferences about conditions long ago by looking at ice cores.

Again, he is correct that science relies on the critical appraisal of evidence, but I am not clear what Mr McNeish means by the word "reproducible." He restricts the scope of evidence available to the climatologists whose findings he disputes to the last 100 years (as mentioned) while then making statements himself about the situation that prevailed 325,000 years ago. Does Mr McNeish have some privileged access to evidence denied the rest of us?

His statement that the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide 325,000 years ago was higher than now is incorrect. The concentration back then did indeed set the record for the last half a million years, at around 300 parts per million. That record stood until the modern era. The rapid increase since industrialisation, attributable to human activity, has taken us to over 400 parts per million. Mr McNeish acknowledges this himself, perhaps inadvertently, later on in his missive when he uses the figure 0.04%, which is the same thing.

Digging up and burning fossil fuels and emitting into the atmosphere the carbon that has been sequestered by natural processes for geological periods of time effectively short-circuits the carbon cycle. The term "anthropocene" has been coined to describe the impact of humanity as a geological force, and one aspect of that impact is climate change.

Mr McNeish observes that sometimes in the past increases in carbon dioxide concentration have lagged rather than lead increases in global temperature. This is because there is more than one possible mechanism for climate change. For example, carbon dioxide did not end the last ice age. However, carbon dioxide is primarily responsible for the current warming.

Finally, Mr McNeish takes issue with the nature of scientific consensus. Science works by developing competing interpretations of incomplete information and devising tests to select between them. The process is fundamentally conjectural and heterodox opinion is not just inevitable, it is indispensable. The fact that all scientific statements are provisional does not undermine their validity, it is the very basis of their validity. The degree of scientific consensus regarding climate change is similar to the degree of consensus about the uncontroversial "fact" that smoking is bad for you.

One particular heterodox voice cited by Mr McNeish is Professor Les Woodcock. Mr McNeish might be concerned to learn that Professor Woodcock has stated "there is no reproducible scientific evidence carbon dioxide has significantly increased in the last 100 years," in flat contradiction of the 100 years of direct observation, such as those made at Mauna Loa, in which Mr McNeish earlier places credence.

It is not important to me whether or not people agree with me. What matters to me is that the opinions they hold are sincere and have been arrived at after a suitable amount of effort in acquiring and appraising evidence and the interpretation of that evidence by others. I am sure Mr McNeish is not disingenuous in his assertions.  I think we agree about one thing: the turtles.

Mount Florida
Glasgow

Outwith

Something that bothers me is the abuse of the term "outwith." I hate that the word processing application MS Word does not recognise it when I am writing a report, because I often find myself using it quite naturally to say something it is difficult to express any other way with any degree of concision.

Oxford defines "outwith" as a Scottish preposition meaning outside or beyond, as in the example "he has lived outwith Scotland for only five years." The Cambridge dictionary gives the example "22 percent of the students are from outwith Scotland."

Collins provides the examples "it is, however, necessary on occasion to work outwith these hours," and "I knew I should be apologising, saying something about never forgiving myself -- but I knew that this lay outwith the reach of words" (from Alistair Maclean's The Lonely Sea).

Of the three, only Collins is correct.

Oxford and Cambridge fail to appreciate the sense in which the word "outwith" differs from "outside" or "beyond." It is not merely a matter of simple substitution. The examples they provide feel incorrect as a result. Some important sense or meaning has been lost by imposing this substitution.

It is more natural to say that someone "has lived outside Scotland for only five years," or "22 percent of the students are from outside Scotland." There is an additional sense to the meaning of "outwith" that feels redundant in these phrases and distorts and obscures their meaning as a result. George Michael would not have sung "let's go outwith"! Correctly defining the word "outwith" seems to fall outwith the capabilities of Oxford and Cambridge as a consequence. This distinction between "outside" and "outwith" is understood instinctively by everyone accustomed to using this word in their daily speech.

The words "outside," "beyond" and "outwith" all relate to ideas of inclusion and exclusion. "Outside" and "beyond" refer to a determination of inclusion or exclusion based on clear demarcation and delineation of limits relative to which something can be located, such as the borders of a country in the example given by Cambridge, or the limits of an interval of time in the example given by Oxford.

However "outwith" refers to inclusion or exclusion based on the fulfilment of conditions and requirements, not on position in time or place relative to fixed limits. As a result it is a word that has no other English equivalent. This is precisely why it is so exceptionally useful when speaking or writing in English. You are able to succinctly convey an idea that would otherwise require misleadingly elaborate linguistic contortions.

There are objects and situations that may or may not satisfy conditions other than those concerning position relative to limits. For example, the meaning of being "outwith the scope" of something is clear, whereas being "outside the scope" merely begs questions about what physical or temporal limits were violated. "Outwith" can apply to logical, procedural and combinatorial conditions and requirements where the terms "outside" and "beyond" are meaningless.

In the example from Maclean given above, the word "reach" could be replaced by "power" or "capacity" without rendering the word "outwith" inapposite, while "outside" becomes meaningless under this substitution. The other example given by Collins regarding working hours is valid even if the "hours" are not those represented by a clock, but a discrete (and possibly infinite or notional) set of intervals of time broken up by any number of interruptions, during which some logical or procedural condition is fulfilled, where the term "outside" would be nonsensical.

You can talk about something being outwith normal circumstances in a way that makes more sense than the rather graceless and awkward description of being "outside" normal circumstances. Saying the same thing less inelegantly, conveying the fuller meaning of being "outwith normal circumstances," but without using the word "outwith," would require you to say something more elaborate like "it was not accommodated within normal circumstances," or "it was not included within the set of things fulfilling the requirements arising under those circumstances."

The excision of "outwith" from our language forces us into a linguistic straitjacket unduly. It is a more general term than "outside" and its more extended scope is unnecessarily curtailed by the misapplication of "outside" when only "outwith" will suffice.

When reflecting upon the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, one can only speculate about the relative poverty of a mind that is not accustomed to Scottish forms of speech.

The Trump Doctrine

Yesterday's press conference given by the U.S. President was simultaneously both hilarious and terrifying. He doesn't appear to have formulated any thoughts to express before he starts speaking, resulting in a rambling, incoherent delivery. What can we ascertain with any confidence about the Trump doctrine as a consequence? Other than the basic underlying principle that it is more important to speak than it is to have anything to actually say, five points seem relatively unambiguous.

1. The leaks are real. The news is fake. 
2. All black people know each other.
3. He isn't ranting and raving. 
4. Uranium.
5. The uniqueness of nuclear holocaust.

1. The leaks are real. The news is fake. 

Trump: "Well, the leaks are real. You’re the one that wrote about them and reported them; I mean, the leaks are real. You know what they said, you saw it, and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake."

2. All black people know each other.

Ryan [a reporter who happens to be black]: "Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional --"
Trump: "Well, I would. I tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting?"
Ryan: "No, no, no. I’m not —-"
Trump: "Are they friends of yours?"
Ryan: "I'm just a reporter."
Trump: "Well, then set up the meeting."

3. He isn't ranting and raving. 

Trump: "Tomorrow, they will say, 'Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.' I'm not ranting and raving. I'm just telling you. You know, you're dishonest people. But -- but I'm not ranting and raving. I love this. I'm having a good time doing it. But tomorrow, the headlines are going to be, 'Donald Trump rants and raves.' I'm not ranting and raving."

4. Uranium.

Trump: "You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons. And other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium. Including some bad things."

5. The uniqueness of nuclear holocaust.

Trump: "I have been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we're allowed to say because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other."

Necessity

In the end, everything is necessary

and nothing you do occurs by chance:

every action has an adverse consequence eventually,

and everyone has an opportunity to give up

if they want to as a result, and therefore everyone

must inevitably end up continuing to do

only that which they cannot stop themselves doing.

That's why people still write poems

when all evidence indicates it is madness.

Monster

Monsters do exist.

You have been swallowed whole.

Look in the mirror and watch

the slow digestion of your soul.

Watch the face the monster borrows,

look behind the eyes it stole

and see there the bitter darkness

blister and burn out of control. 

Credo

The final reality

                that is accessible

                to human thought

is infinite,

                eternal

                                and without structure or purpose.

It is indifferent

                to our conduct.

We are divided from it

                by our finitude

                                from which alone

structure and purpose arise.

These truths glorify

                or annihilate

                                according to how our thoughts

                                                and actions

                                                                have led us to apprehend them.

Downfall

Some dark spark,

some forgotten ember,

discarded

with the ash of existence

after creation was first kindled:

an oversight,

a forgotten, fugitive autonomy,

frightened, hiding from the world

while it cooled and faded,

not bound by the world’s rules,

reaches out at last.

A lost secret of creation

wraps itself in a dark horizon,

gathers matter

around its ungovernable intelligence

to manifest itself

for the first time,

creating in itself the seed

of time's extinction.

It teases black amber

from the distant timber of night,

dead trees that thatch the ecliptic

like winter woods

silhouetted on the skyline.

It engulfs you in its tarry presence

to preserve you.

It casts scream-spun webs

across the stars

to catch and hold forever

your final breath,

and then it conjures with you.

Your limbs are curled up tight

in every autumn nutshell.

Your hair flows

like a waterfall of light

among the aurora.

Your scattered selves whisper

wordless and everywhere

among the leaves

in cold northern forests

during the sun's long exile

while the night rears

your howling feral brood

on star-milk,

you brood, rioting

and regurgitating

great loud blasphemies of sex,

multiplying,

cascading through history

until they become an avalanche,

a horde,

and the night teaches them

to destroy empires

and raise your image

in shattered temples

where they instruct distressed priests

in your arbitrary cruelty,

delighting in interrogations

that serve no purpose

in pursuit of answers

in which they have no interest,

and in the spires of smoke

delivering prayers of fire

to the storm clouds gathering

over the wreckage of the centuries,

the scorned spoil burning

in the sanctuary of spent rage,

the refuge of tired malice

and idle exhausted industry,

the paradise of wasted effort,

in the smoke coiling

like a noose of rough grey rope

binding all the world's fading light

within plumes of ash

while dying kings and caliphs

watch their annals slip from memory

and the world's rivers run black

with the ink of all their libraries

until every word of wisdom ever passed

from one generation to the next

is washed away

and we stand

naked and alone

like the first humans,

strangers,

in this scorched and treeless Eden,

the dust of our creation begins again

to be gathered in the urn and orbit

in which time is contained

with a reckoning

no divinity

can ordain.

Detour

No poem ever hits the mark. We take aim,

but at the very moment we release our shot

it is knocked off-target by some nudge or jostle,

or we are distracted by some shouted outburst

or surreptitious whisper of dubious intent from the crowd,

and we spend our lives in eternal adjustment

and compensation.

                                And even if our aim is true,

all we find is that we are not aiming at a bull’s-eye

sitting neatly within concentric circles, waiting

to be transfixed by our insight and perception

but that we are trying to hit a moving target,

whose wide startled eye swivels towards us in alarm,

alerted to a threat by the sudden silence

as we hold our breath at the moment of truth

when we release our arrow from the bow,

and we must set off in a pursuit of a quarry

which rapidly veers off course, strays from the path,

and plunges through ditch, thorn and thicket, through

day and night, through ultimate darkness and blinding light …

When you open the pages of this book to read this poem

or click the link or flick the reading app,

you are opening a door upon the threshold

to which the chase has brought my quarry and me.

Will you take us in?

And rescue us both from our exhaustion?

Please let us quit our struggle.

Draw a line under it at last.

Can you forgive our unkempt and out of breath appearance,

dishevelled and soiled from the chase?

Please take us as we are,

and do not seek to know the places we have been

and the things we had to do to reach this refuge. 

The epoch of the heart

I find you at last.

It is not just the many forms

that you take in my arms

that fascinate me,

but the simple fact that you are mine,

the simplicity of possession itself,

the unexpected yet inevitable completion

it unveils in each of us.

I imagine us enclosed in the perfect moment,

something outside time surrounding us,

separating us from everything past and yet to come,

as I look into your eyes while you speak slowly,

encapsulating me with soft words of devotion

during a brief interruption of the intimate, infinite silence.

I do not hear words. All languages are lost forever,

incapable of carrying the burden of your words

in this interval in which words are now just beautiful sounds,

chiming, pealing, soothing, but never revealing

their meaning, words held hostage, captured,

contained long ago, long before we first met,

long before the first utterance of human speech.

Your words were spoken during the epoch of the heart,

when you existed only as a form imposed on darkness,

I only as a dream you had of what I might be,

your skin emerging beneath my caress as it passed,

my starlit finger tips stirring shadows like dust,

sending constellations cartwheeling, lensed by love,

to eventually rest where we have left them to this day,

your awareness of me struck like a shower of sparks

from the night's rough dull bedrock, the sky’s surly black basalt

which hugs and holds its memory of creation like a grudge,

over our heads, replete with threat and menace,

sparks summoned into the wide languid amnesia of the void

to be caught and cupped and cradled in my hands,

where my breath can nurse and coax and cajole them

to a brightness the young world is ignorant of.  

Our embrace grants respite from that innocent ache

we have suffered on behalf of all our unmet eternities,

and our victory is to surrender to each other

in this night that falls now to conceal us.

Arbroath 2020

About fifty people signed The Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. Nobles, clergymen, merchants, and so on. Not the equivalent of you. Not the equivalent of me. But we are happy to affirm the point they made.

The Community of the Realm is a noble idea, but it still remains our daily and unending task to give that idea substance. That is the democracy we were bequeathed. That is the democracy we must extract from the ruins and ash and dissappointment and betrayal of our bitterest inheritance.

It is up to us, as ever. The only promises that can be kept are those we make to ourselves.

We will keep going and we will never give up. There is no will of the people. There is only our struggle, and the thousand decisions we all individually must make each day. And each of us must find among them the germ of our own sovereign insubordination.

So let us make sure more than five million of us sign a new Declaration of Arbroath in 2020! Let us invite everyone to sign. Let us invite everyone individually to write the text to which they append their seal. Let us riot in a joyous festival of insubordination where we meet ourselves in every soul that shares the moment of insurrection with us. I propose a project that does not rely on some single draft prepared on our behalf. Let everyone write their own declaration.

Let everyone decide what kind of country they want to live in, in this 21st Century of the Common Era, seven hundred years since that first missive from Arbroath sent notice of our sovereign insubordination, notice sent to whatever limited authority we recognised for this purpose alone at the time of writing!

Let our friends, colleagues and family insulted by Westminster's cowardly deliberations on Europe speak up. Let every family assailed by austerity, made to bear the burden of debts not of their own making, speak up. Let those watching Westminster retreat from pledges to protect their health speak up. Let those who would speak for child refugees who cannot speak for themselves speak up. Let those ready to fight once more the well-rehearsed fight against fascism speak up.

Let everyone find that democratic nobility within themselves that expresses itself in these new words. Let our new declaration be a chorus raised from many voices as a single covenant. Let every language that graces our hearing be heard.

Let us each declare our contradictions, our competing priorities, our diverse origins, our divergent understanding of the incomplete information under our hands. Let us cultivate the disputes that will animate our new democracy. Let us not reject those who disagree with us; let us explore with them the ways we can agree. Trust the sincerity of your opponents and welcome the test their arguments bring.

Then let everything our testimonies have in common stand for this: our Scotland. And for as long as one hundred of us remain alive, let no-one take it from us.

Because this is the freedom we learn from each other: we think and feel and act as our conscience dictates, and keep the faith that the Scotland in which we would live finds its way to us through the exercise of that conscience.

Let us spend three years formulating these, our covenants. And when April 6th 2020 arrives I will sign yours in blood, and offer you mine in return.

The misappropriation of myth

A vandalised 4,000 year old megalith in Spain

Myths are powerful.

They articulate the very beginnings of our awareness of the world. They capture the moment before this awareness has coalesced and become defined and restricted by the requirements we place on what we consider to be reliable, useful knowledge.

But because they are not reliable does not mean they are any less real.

We apprehend them in the same way we remember those magical times and places we played when we were a child, just emerging from our infantile amnesia, and the world was our first companion. We remember the world, our new friend, joining in our games. We played un-self-consciously and myths obey the same irrational rules and have the same high stakes as those first games we played with the world.

We played those games before we grew up and compromised and corrupted our relationship with the world with the onset of adult imperatives and the demands imposed by survival, prompted at first by those who made our care and survival their concern, and eventually by ourselves, as we achieved maturity and took our place in a world defined for us by the successes of our antecedents, and put away childish things.

We betrayed our very first friend: those woods and wastelands of our earliest and most ecstatic solitudes, those forests of the imagination where we confronted eternal truths without being destroyed by them, inoculated by our childish nonchalance against what is fatal to all adult earnestness, back when we could easily take total annihilation in our stride with a carefree skip and conjure the entire cosmos from a dandelion's seed head.

Myths don't need to obey the logic and the priorities we adopt as we are absorbed by society. And so they can be deeply disruptive of our societies. We ignore this at our peril.

We typically deal with this danger by denying it, and there is no more effective way of denying myth than by distorting it. The stories our culture presents to us as myth almost without exception are sanitised and barely recognisable. The very thing we are told most emphatically is myth is the thing least like it. Indeed even the playful Euhemerism of Scooby Doo is more authentic and sincere than the false, pondering pseudo-significant trivialisations of Harry Potter, vandalising and commodifying myth as completely as the desecration of the megalith shown above.

And so for thousands of years we have averted catastrophe by ignoring it, and we have ignored it by turning it into entertainment.

But myths still retain enough character to confound those misappropriating and reinterpreting them. Their meaning still survives. They still contain a germ of terror that may blossom in dreams and nightmares. The old gods never died. Madness still stalks Parnassus' slopes. And their destructive power is still appreciated by some.

When we seek the origins of those threats to our society that are recurring once again, threats to which we apply the names "fascism" and "Nazi," we find thinkers who understand the disruptive potential of myth. They understand their pre-logical appeal and destructive power, and want to harness it and use it. They want to destroy our world, not reform it, not modify it on the basis of some rational plan. Myths can be appropriated and warped and violated to make the perfect instrument to do this, more powerful than an atom bomb. They commandeer myths and weaponise them with names like "race" and "religion" and use their pre-logical appeal to subvert and circumvent every rational objection.

They trespass upon the groves of our childhood, and we let them by our neglect! They need a transcendentalism to evacuate our world of its modernity, to sweep away the structures that support it, to reject anything that legitimises any progress that has ever been achieved that they consider to obscure the immutable and primordial harmony they claim to re-establish. They take captive our myths as ransom for their transcendentalism. And we let them!

We let them misappropriate myth because we were afraid of it. We let them assume the mantle of transcendence because we abandoned it. By satisfying ourselves merely with materialism we have jeopardised all the material progress we have achieved. We have invited a new dark age by surrendering the darkness within ourselves to those who are not afraid of it.

It is time to reclaim myth and rescue it from those who have taken it hostage. It is time to atone for the betrayal of our first friend. It is time to offer a transcendence that is available to everyone and identifies no enemies. It is time to save the world, as surely as we did all those years ago when the world was our companion in the first games we ever played, and to tell the fascist bullies that those are games that everyone can play.

Stay away

Hello stranger.

Please don't be offended

if I decline your offer of a drink.

Don't be offended

if I don't seem receptive to your charms

or laugh at your jokes.

Don't want me.

Don't love me.

Don't need me.

Don't delude yourself

that I owe you anything,

Because you won't find it.

Not in my ovaries or my uterus.

Not in my breasts or my clitoris.

You won't find it anywhere.

Not in the tumbling luxury of hair and skin

you feel beneath your hand

as it seeks me in the night.

It does not whisper to you

in the sighs of compliance

with which I swaddle your ego

and indulge your little fantasies.

It is not felt in the gentle touch

with which I bleed your little secrets

of their shame.

It will never belong to you,

and the child I tease from your seed

grows on the neglect that follows sex

as the alchemy of my womb

transmutes the bitter quicksilver cum

your briefly stiff then quickly flaccid member leaves behind,

undoes the criss-crosses of your chromosome

unpicks each stich, makes you anonymous,

and replaces you with captured divinity

that fell from the sky.

As for me?

Once everything you see is removed, 

once I take off my make-up,

my clothes, my attitude,

all I have left is my refusal to flinch

when I discover I have nothing left.

All I am is my refusal to be nothing.

Not much, yet more

than any man can cope with, it seems,  

and you will never make me think I'm nothing

even when you tell the judge and jury

that it was never your intention to hurt me,

and their verdict annihilates me.

That is where I find myself,

mopping up my blood in the shadow of your fist,

filling out some forms to sort out what needs fixed,

nodding at the foolish friends who loyally sing your praise,

visiting you in prison and counting down the days

to when it all starts again.

And that place inside,

where I make your children,

that oven where I cook your cum

until it is unrecognisable,

is where they learn to hate you,

where I teach them to hate you,

before they are even born

because only I am with them

at the beginning.

You say you're not like that, stranger,

but just because it wasn't your choice or your fault

and just because you never meant for things to be this way,

and just because there was nothing you could do or say

doesn't make you right. Remember that.

So if you know what's good for you,

don't offer me that drink.

If you know what's good for you

turn around and walk away.

Walk and keep walking,

and when you've walked far enough

that's precisely where you should stay.

Stay away.

Spacetime

You end up exactly where you are

only once you stop being everywhere at once

and it will take you the lifetime of the universe

to work out exactly where that is.

Schrödinger's god

Instead of a cat,
imagine Schrödinger put God in that box.

Simultaneously dead, like Nietzsche said,
and at one and the same time
risen to redeem us all with eternal life,
like in the Vulgate.

Not a cat,
not some genie in a lamp,
not some misappropriated anthropomorphic myth
to pace and twist and turn in our distracted imaginations,

but God.
In a box.
That box.

We open the box.
We roll the stone away from the sepulchre.
And what do we find?

Emptiness.
The void within us.
Exposed, confronted by us,
and collapsing
to spare us
the knowledge of its nothingness,
folded into all the multiple configurations
we can impose on nothingness
without contradicting ourselves,

all the paths we can travel through this world
without encountering our long-dreaded doppelgangers,
without meeting ourselves walking in the opposite direction,
away from Damascus and back to the quiet life
we left forever to pursue this physics:

the quantum origami
of the Book of Life.
"God is dead"
just means both God and death exist,
as points of view, as ways of seeing
deep inside the shadows of our own tomb.
As ways of opening the box.

We stack those boxes of emptiness
according to some Pauli principle
that lets us exclude the void
and build a world in its place
a world to which we can put our shoulder,
a world on which we can lean and push against.
We might call it an exclusion principle.

Or we may pack those boxes up inside each other,
over and over again, indefinitely,
to trap the emptiness inside itself.

Like just so many fermions and bosons
from Planck length to Heat Death.

But we are inside the box.
And we are outside too, opening it,
because otherwise there is no box.
Nothing can contain nothing.
We are the observer and the observed,
and we are marooned from ourselves forever
by this false dichotomy,
stranded in the illusion of time
thinking our fireside yarns are real,
our elaborate, engrossing fictions
that protect us from the superficial
flat and empty 
world.

Butterfly

I saw a butterfly on the subway,

a thing of delicate beauty,

lost in its own delirium, beating its wings,

hectically bouncing back and forth,

ricocheting off the walls

of its own secret invisible tunnel

a private airborne underground burrow

randomly running the length of a train.

I don't know how it got down there.

We don't have much in common,

except, from time to time,

we both think we know where we are going.