Rex quondam et futurus

I wear no crown.

I hold no throne.

I lead no army:
I am unarmed.

I have no honour,
bear no grudge,
and claim no allegiance.

All those things
that I once had
passed long ago
so I may be again
that which I always was,

and silently my summons
gathers bird and beast, responding
by instinct, not obedience. A profusion
of apple blossom is my banner, surrendered
like ten thousand white flags, scattered
upon the waters, from which the weapon
that I once discarded is restored again,
bright and keen, into your hand.

Taking back control

Jeremy Corbyn is visiting SNP held constituencies this week. Interestingly, he is not visiting any Tory held constituencies in Scotland. The constituencies Corbyn is visiting in Scotland can have no impact on the Tories' majority at Westminster.

Therefore, despite what he says, Corbyn's visit has nothing to do with Labour winning power from the Tories. It is only about London keeping Scotland in the Union. Jeremy's jaunt is a unionist ploy posed as a socialist purity test. You can any kind of socialism, as long as it's London Labour's version of socialism.

One question: what about Trident? Another: what about Brexit? Two things Scottish voters overwhelming reject to which Corbyn's Labour are thirled. But this is irrelevant, because Corbyn is not here to take back control of Westminster on behalf of Scotland, but of Scotland on behalf of Westminster.

Despite everything that has happened in recent years, Labour still has a sense of proprietorial entitlement towards Scotland. They behave as though only Labour is eligible to speak for us. They claim they are qualified to do so on the basis of their socialism.

But it's not about socialism. If you were in a resturant perusing the menu, and your partner ordered for you without consulting you, on the grounds that he knows best, you would feel put out, even if he ordered you exactly what you were going to have anyway. We want our socialism to be a consequence of our consent, not coincidence. It's about control.

And it is here that we see Labour in Scotland, rather than the Tories, represent the very essence of Unionism. The unionist asks you to trust that your interests and intentions will eventually coincide with theirs, rather than to determine and pursue them on your own behalf. They appeal to you on the basis of a socialism to which all right thinking people must surely subscribe, but under these circumstances, as illustrated by Trident and Brexit, it is inevitable that promises made are promises broken.

But that doesn't matter, because the essence of Unionism is that the Union must be preserved at any and all costs. The consequences for Scotland do not matter.

We have seen this sense of priority recently when people like Douglas Alexander asserted supporters of Scottish Independence are no better than the worst people who have ever identified themselves as "nationalists." This is not only patently ridiculous, it prompts the serious question: what is more important to Labour, the unity of the United Kingdom, or the unity of our opposition to fascism? The silence with which this question is met shows there is no price they would not pay to keep Scotland in the Union.

Meanwhile the moral high ground is just real estate to Labour, and socialism is just the stake with which they try to claim it. They don't care what acts of hypocritical othering they have to commit to take back control and drive off whatever natives they regard as squatters on their property.

Don't get me wrong: I had high hopes for Corbyn. See here, here, here, here and here.

What has happened instead is my worst fears. He has utterly failed to understand the Scottish situation. Indeed, he seems unaware of its existence. Now we are being required to fall in line with the Brexit project of "taking back control" which Corbyn has to back to appease far right English nationalist elements that somehow remain immune to Labour criticism even while Douglas Alexander makes the most egregious comparisons with Scottish ones.

It is in the way the phrase "take back control" is understood that we find the clearest distinction between the Scottish and the English situation. "Control" can be understood as being exerted individually or collectively.

In England the promotion of "choice" for its own sake, without any reference to the achievement of any common benefit, is more advanced. We see this, for example, in the English education system, where the banal variety of options is crippling. It is a sort of consumer capitalist sense of "control." This is a confrontational sense of the word "control" that ultimately renders one powerless. This is the "control" which Brexit "takes back," which sees differences of opinion as an affront and encourages intolerance.

In Scotland we understand the word in a more collaborative sense. We see that "control" is not meaningful if it does not serve the common good. We see that we can exert control by participating in the councils of Europe, rather than rejecting them. We see that we must accept diversity and differences of opinion and remain an open, inclusive and tolerant society if we are to have any influence at all over anything. This is the "control" which which the Yes Movement is concerned.

Corbyn is in Scotland to take back control of Scotland, and the collaborative sense of the word is not the intended meaning on this occasion, as Brexit and Trident show.

"Here's tae us, wha's like us?"

"Here's tae us, wha's like us? Damn few an' they're a' deid ..."

... as the old saying goes. And why? Because we killed them. We stole their land, and enslaved their children.

Cat Boyd, in today's National, has written an important article about how, if Scotland is to consider itself a mature nation, it must fully confront the crimes of empire in which it is complicit. Her article, "It’s about time Scotland confronted its own racist, colonial past," should be read by everyone.

Pride in your history is hollow if you don't know your history. What does that pride mean, if is not invested in real accomplishments, but half-true tales of spin and fraudulent imperial propaganda instead.

Scots are often asked to be proud of their disproportionate role in empire. They should consider their disproportionate role in its crimes. Let's make sure education and information is available so that everyone can easily make themselves aware of the full significance of the street signs and statues of our great cities. We will find the laurels we rest on do not always make the most comfortable seat, as we consider the plunder and genocide our ancestors saw as legitimate instruments of empire, and acceptable commercial expedients.  

I speak about "pride." I have written about this kind of "pride" before, about the stories we tell ourselves to justify the situation we find ourselves in, to exculpate our actions as necessary for "progress," in "evanishing amid the storm," when considering the demise of the Scottish Tory as standard bearer of Whig historiography, a banner grown ever more threadbare as the realities of imperial decline take their toll and the "winds of change" blow through its tattered remnants.

The pride we are invited to share by "proud Scots," the hollow pride held in achievements without knowledge of their full cost, is not really pride at all. It is a prison. It is a device, a mechanism, by which we are kept trapped in the past.

We are told our imperial past is the best we can achieve: a corollary of which is that we should not aspire for more than we have. And what we have seems to diminish every time we glance at it to casually evaluate our situation, as the comedy of unforced errors that is Brexit continues to unfold.

It was ever thus: even at empire's zenith, most of us had little enough, and were taught to be content with that by the illusion that we had more in the form of some intangible, imagined glory and honour and burden. And we maintained that "glory" and "honour," with which we consoled ourselves for our own poverty, by going overseas and taking from some other poor bastard what little he had for our imperial masters.

And perhaps if there was some spare cash left over from the heaps of plunder we accumulated to spend on castles and country houses, we might erect a statue to one of the more intrepid among us who developed a financial instrument, or invented some technology, or founded a colony, or achieved some other heroic imperial exploit that made the whole process easier.  

Credit where credit's due: the world is a better place for Lister's antiseptics and Boyd-Orr's sanitation and nutrition. Lord Kelvin connected the world with his transatlantic cable. James Watt's steam engine allowed us to short-circuit the carbon cycle, hauling millions of years of accumulated photosynthesis out of the ground in the space of a few hundred, transforming the world into the one we see today in the process, for better and for worse.

But remember, empire is not benevolent. It is rapacious. We benefit today from innovations the parasite found necessary to keep its host alive.

For every comfort and ease we enjoy today we owe an incalculable and largely unacknowledged debt of misery. An anonymous multitude - we do not know, we will never know, their names or number - perished in mines and plantations, in the holds of slave ships, in chains and under the whip, dehumanised and worked to death in the dark corners of colonies described only in imperial archives that have long since been disposed of to allow a building to be redeveloped as luxury flats or demolished to make way for a shopping centre.

So rather than celebrate the accomplishments of yesterday, let us celebrate the ambitions of today, and build a better future for everyone. For this is the only penance for past crimes that is now available to us.

Dark dream

A full and eldritch moon

places its pale pristine mask tight

upon the sparkling obsidian skin of night

and exhales a moist and gauzy mist

to dissolve the glittering pin-prickle of stars

leaving curtains of cloud spilling across the sky,

like luminous afterbirth, to set the scene.

You sink into deep tar pits of dark dreaming,

your limbs aching with the joy of futile struggle.

The late dawning of the low winter sun

gives no release or consolation. Your cravings

anchor and submerge you in the rising tide of night

and the decline and brevity of day as the year dips

towards the deepening darkness of midwinter

is the only respite you seek. Night twists

and tightens its roots around each individual rib

as you disintegrate, overthrown and overgrown

by every weed that has ever borne the name "desire"

thriving in the fever and fatigue and indolence

behind your mind's high walls, their black blossom

witnessed only by a porcelain moon on nights like this.

The threat of eternal darkness may be averted

and the night's onslaught repelled by the solstice

but the soul continues its descent regardless,

and the dark will preserve its bliss and end despair

depending upon how it's met, by whom, and where.

The World's Worst Nationalists

Those who advocate Scottish Independence are as bad as the worst people ever to call themselves "nationalists," according to Douglas Alexander. Here's what he said (on Twitter):

"The problem with nationalism isn't the name...it's the damaging impact of constantly asserting victimhood as it's core belief. Far from being a 'joyous', 'civic' nationalism's core is the repeated assertion of blame for perceived victimhood & loss. The 'other' who is blamed varies from context to context, continent to continent, but the grievance is constant. Scottish (& British) Nationalists, Trump & Putin all assert their countries have been held back by those from beyond their borders. Nationalism is about exclusion, not inclusion. Patriotism needs no enemy while nationalism demands one."

And in a sense Scottish Nationalists are among the world's worst nationalists. Because, like Gandhi and Mandela, they seem to be very bad at it, at least according to Douglas' definition. If Douglas insists on equating Scottish "nationalism" with the worst excesses perpetrated by anyone claiming to be a "nationalist" then he must concede Scottish nationalists are very bad at this "nationalism" lark.

"Nationalists" have been in power in Scotland for ten years. Ask yourself, in all that time which minorities have they persecuted? When were elections rigged or cancelled? What policies of territorial expansion have they proposed?

Compare their track record on these "core" "nationalist" concerns identified by Alexander with what the regimes he is inviting us to compare them to managed to achieve in the decade after taking power. Ten years after taking power in 1992 Radovan Karadžić was a fugitive for acts of ethnic cleansing. And in 1943, a decade after taking power, the nazis were facing military catastrophe at Stalingrad and Kursk on Soviet territory.

In ten years what dastardly plans of the evil SNP has the world had to intervene to thwart? Baby boxes!? Named persons!? The abolition of prescription charges!?

Will the horrors never cease!?

Unionists have to admit that, in the terms of their own cynical slander, Scots must be the World's Worst Nationalists! We are just so very bad at being, well ... bad.

The insistence of Alexander and other unionists to identify the SNP, and by extension, anyone who advocates Scottish Independence, as "nationalists" in the sense of evil racist warmongers inflicting manufactured grudges on an unsuspecting world, is not a consequence of abject stupidity, no matter how tempting it might be to believe that. As we are constantly reminded, the "son of the manse" is an intelligent, well-educated, morally upright individual.

No, this is deliberate. Without conveying a hint of the irony with which the attempt to "other" us is replete, he is constructing a monstrous straw man and hanging a "nationalist" sign around its neck, and then labelling as "nationalists" his political opponents, those who advocate Scottish Independence, in a colossal act of "othering" 45% of the Scottish population (the last time we counted).

This is a betrayal of everyone in Scotland who would find common cause with him when opposing real, actual nazis. When unionists are challenged about whether this means they would reject the comradeship of people who advocate Scottish Independence in any struggle against genuine fascism, they either demur, or confirm that, yes, they really are that crazy.

So the next time Douglas Alexander or any other unionist attempts to slander you with an accusation of "nationalism," remember which side the real, actual nazis have consistently been on in the Scottish constitutional debate.

Postscript

Do all the unionists complaining about the cover of the National (21/08/2017) and Carolyn Leckie's column in it by any chance remember this front cover from Scotland on Sunday, which elicited an altogether different response from them back in 2014?

A crystal clear example of the "othering" of independence supporters. Before they start complaining, could they answer a couple of simple questions: 

• What is more important to you, the unity of the United Kingdom, or the unity of our common opposition to fascism? 
• Would you reject the comradeship of someone in the struggle against fascism if they happen to support Scottish Independence?

So far, in response to these questions when I have posed them directly, I have yet to find a *single* self-identified unionist who has not demurred!

So spare us your outrage and mind your priorities, unionists! You held your nose before, while fascists found common cause with you in 2014. You don't get to complain about the stink now.

Perseid

What wishes ride upon your tail,
o Perseid, o shooting star,
for you receive the wishes made
by many people, near and far.
They see your tail, so brief, so bright,
evanishing into the night
and in that vision they confide.
I watched, not you, but her, tonight,
my secret star, stood by my side
and in her pleasure watching you
I saw my only wish prevail.

Medusa

Quoth Perseus:
"For a long time I have looked for you. 
I searched and I searched
among the mountains of the moon,
whose face of stone I thought
must be your finest monument:
a light provided by the gods themselves,
in case your fatal glance
should ever rest upon the sun
and rob its complexion of its blush
and see it tumble back to earth, 
like a rock cast by a petulant child,
exposing the gods for what they are,
and condemning us all to endless night. 
I extorted intelligence by trickery,
and heroic disrespect, to find you,
defiled altars, violated sacred precincts,
redefined divinity in my own image,
committed crimes that overthrew the court,
absolved myself by abolishing the law,
and I still endure ritual pollution, 
transgressing all to find you."

Quoth Medusa: 

"That all sounds very impressive,

but I know why you are here:

it's my sacrifice you seek, not yours. 

Feel free to go back there then,

back to the mountains of the Moon,

because you're not wanted here.

You have already intruded too far,

and trespassed to long upon my time." 

Quoth Perseus:
"I can't leave. 
You have something I need."

Quoth Medusa:

"Don't pretend you deserve it though.

I know why you are here,

and I am not your prize.

I am not a reward 

for any of your efforts.

Go away."

Quoth Perseus:
"I will have what I came for."

Quoth Medusa: 

"Your voice persists

over the monotony of the chorus

of ridicule and disgust

that has followed me all my days. 

Look at them. My detractors.

There they are, behind my back. 

They have always been there 

from that first fateful moment, 

keeping their distance, 

avoiding my glance,

but never leaving me alone, 

laughing at me wherever I go,

but if I turn and try to talk to them

they behave as though they are made of stone,

and I walk among their cliques like a ghost.

Sometimes I think I can be happy 

alone with my thoughts

but their ridicule, 

and the insistent memory of their ridicule,

interrupts my every contentment. 

What if they were right all along?  

What if I am a monster?"  

Quoth Perseus:
"That is why I am here."

Quoth Medusa: 

"It's easy for you to say that

You were born of a woman 

who caught divinity in her belly.

I was made in a cave by monsters 

to carry god's curse to men,

but I still sometimes imagine 

I can remember a time before,

when I was free, walking in sunlight,

before all my memories were poisoned,

back when I had wings and could soar

without a moment's reflection,

or pause for thought,

without looking down,

escaping all my self-loathing, 

and forgetting all my deviance,

and not caring what people thought,

to find a place among the stars,

but now I realise that will only happen

at the edge of your sword."

Quoth Perseus:
"It is an honour to be beheaded. 
We don't behead women. 
We stone them. We bury them alive. 
We rape them to death 
and throw their body in the dump.
We don't behead them. 
That's a man's death, 
so this is an honour."

Quoth Medusa: 

"Tell yourself that 

if it makes you feel better. 

This play is about you after all. 

Finish it."

Apples and oranges

Language is important. We can call an orange an apple if we want, and this is sufficient if I simply mean "a piece of fruit" when I ask for an "apple," when I am happy to get either an apple or an orange as a consequence. But when I specifically want an orange, as distinct from an apple, I need to make that clear. I need the words "orange" and "apple" to mean two different things if I am interested in one of them in particular. If I call everything an apple I might even believe there is no such thing as an orange.

Men who agree with the aims of feminism are the subject of precisely such a need for clarification. I don't think it is sufficient to simply call them feminists, as there are occasions where this introduces a degree of confusion, where there is something specific to the situation that is not captured by that terminology.

Feminism relates to female experience. While both men and women are victims of patriarchy, their experience of it is very different. The aims of men opposed to patriarchy may very well be very closely aligned to those of women, but they cannot be exactly the same, because men do not share the same experience. I think it may be accurate to describe them as "allies" but to call men "feminists" risks confusing apples and oranges.

Men need to address gender issues in relation to their own experience as much as they need to address the extent their actions impact on the experience of others, if they are to engage with these issues in an authentic, productive way. While feminism can inform their approach to how their behaviour impacts the experience of women, there are areas of their own experience it cannot help them address.

I've discussed some aspects of specifically male experience previously in "the Fisher King," "the Outlaw," and "Cannon Fodder," and elsewhere. I have discussed the impact of male behaviour on women in "Not all men," "I'm just a girl who can't say no," "Repairing our intimacy engines" (part 1 and part 2), "Honi soit qui mal y pense," and in various other places.

While I am asserting that men cannot be feminists, at the same time I am not advocating the formulation of some equivalent "ism" to describe the distinct if closely aligned aims to which men should aspire. Men are in a privileged position which confers a spurious univeral status on their particular experience. Male experience is considered universal human experience, while female experience remains "just" female experience, as a result of this male privilege.

This spurious universalism attributed to male experience as a consequence of patriarchy means efforts by men to move beyond patriarchy and achieve a more authentic and meaningful way of living with themselves and others cannot be categorised in the same way as female efforts. I have discussed this before in "are beards a feminist issue?" If we were to insist on attaching some label to these efforts by men that is equivalent to the label "feminism" we would constrain and distort the whole endeavour by enforced analogy. While there are many similarities between the two projects, we simply have to accept that this is one fundamental difference.

It is not possible to raise some distinct standard around which men can rally as they confront patriarchy in the same way women can rally around feminism. This is because men are the beneficiaries of patriarchy. The lack of a plausible "common cause" seems to leave men with two options. They can rally around patriarchy, listening to MRA advocates who say it offers them a legitimate home for their concerns. Alternatively, it is one of the reasons men rally to a feminist cause which is properly the exclusive concern of women.

They then find themselves seeking membership of a feminist club for which they are ineligible. They perform their "feminism" like an audition, in an effort to qualify, and expect admission as reward. When they are denied the recognition and congratulation they think they deserve, they revert to precisely that sense of entitlement that is part of the problem in the first place. They expect a "cookie" for their feminism. "Isn't this what you wanted?" they ask. They think they are participating in the same "ism" the women are involved in. However, it's not an apples-for-apples comparison, but they lack the vocabulary to describe, and as a consequence, understand, what it is they are doing. Women don't want men to be feminists. They want them to stop behaving in a way that makes feminism necessary.

There is a third option. Instead, they should respond to the impossibility of belonging to a group intent on overcoming the privilege of its own members, a group whose only meaningful purpose can be its own abolition, by each considering their own individual refutation of patriarchy. The male reaction to patriarchy is necessarily an individual act of rebellion, not participation in an organised response analogous to feminism. They should have expectations only of themselves, not anyone else.

I have discussed how the fact that, although male objectives in response to patriarchy may be well aligned with female ones, it doesn't make them feminists. In fact the discontintuity goes deeper than this. Although the aims of individual men in response to patriarchy may be well aligned with each other's, they cannot form the basis of a common purpose. Every man must act alone and assume individual responsibility for his own actions.

The oppressed participate in uprisings against oppression, not the oppressors. The oppressor and the oppressed must find their own ways to avoid being defined by the system of which they are part. While an individual oppressor can act in support of the oppressed he can never be one of them. His actions must be judged by different criteria. The unity of purpose experienced by the oppressed acting together to achieve their own liberation can be existential and definitive. For the oppressor it can only ever be temporary and contingent. He can only reject the system by resigning the offices it bestows on him as an individual, rather than overthrow the system entirely as a member of a movement, because the system operates on his behalf.  

Of course, more radical perspectives consider that gender itself is constructed and should not be the basis of discussion. Certainly, there are stimuli we can characterise as sexual which can form the basis of pleasures we participate in to physically celebrate a loving relationship with another individual. There is the basis of reproductive biology. But our direct experience of the world is mediated by a number of mutable, expedient cultural filters, one of which is gender, and the various categories of human experience we use it to describe and discuss our experiences are not inevitable consequences of the content of our experiences themselves. That's the theory.

This is a legitimate point of view, but in the meantime, while we accept gender as a dimension of authentic human experience, while we accept that apples and oranges are fundamentally different, rather than artificially apple- and orange-flavoured versions of the same basic substance, we need to develop and promote the mental apparatus available to men to engage with their own issues and privileges. It is only then that we can make them more capable of the act of individual, personal rebellion required of them to escape the limitations of patriarchy.

The sparrow

(After Catullus 2)

My love's desire is distress.
She keeps a sparrow in her lap,
and in the folds of her fine dress
she toys with it and keeps it trapped
and pokes and prods until it pecks.
Why does she do this? To forget
a sharper pain? I wish that I
could play with it to help deny
a love that she cannot requite.

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,

cui primum digitum dare appetenti

et acris solet incitare morsus,

cum desiderio meo nitenti

carum nescio quid lubet iocari

et solaciolum sui doloris,

credo ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:

tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem

et tristis animi levare curas!

Condemned

All of us are condemned, for should I meet
an arms dealer walking in the street,
I'll kill him with a random cobble stone,
with which I'll crack his skull and break his bones,
and whisper to his corpse through gritted teeth
"I got the stone I killed you with for free!"
suspending morals for a moral end
and like the man I kill I'll stand condemned.

A collision

We live our lives in an imagined present.
An entire lifetime might lie curled up
coiled within the spiral of a spring,

an acorn of time tucked inside a clock

waiting patiently upon your mantel,
a spring whose stiffness reckons how long it takes
to split a second between two sub-divisions
upon the circumference of the clock's dial,
in a brief, unknowable quantum of uncoiling,
as dawn slips along the world's rim
swinging back and forth between solstices,
a slow solar pendulum pacing out the year,

subdividing the horizon with seasons of sunrise

whose extremes are marked by ancient megaliths.

We live our lives in an imagined present.
We don't keep our eye on the ball.
It moves too fast to follow. We anticipate. 
We look ahead to where it ought to be,
and by the time we see it, it has already moved on,

all sight a stale celluloid afterthought.

Our lives are a hectic vigil
for a world as absent as the long dead star

we cherish and commemorate in myth,

animating the sky with constellations

in futile protest at the indifference of the void,
a star whose light we siphon, pulling focus, 
into the luminous syringe of our telescopes
and marvel at as though we had captured
and perfectly liquefied a firefly.

We live our lives in an imagined present,
bearing witness to the immeasurable gulf 
that lies between now and knowing,

relying on belief that is foolish

yet absolutely necessary.
You are an arrow in flight
that knew no bow and finds no target.
Likelihoods, even certainties,
become as improbable 

as each alternative astronomy

that yielded at the dawn of time

to the heavens that we see today. We can believe
only because we don't know all the facts,
and in the final analysis

everything is impossible.

We live our lives in an imagined present.
You are not reading this.
You are reading words you think you saw
on the basis of something you think you know,

because what you think you saw
and what you think you know
have never been contradicted all this time
but that does serve as confirmation
because you haven't finished reading yet, 

and the possibility remains

that contradiction is deferred. 

What is not yet revealed remains hidden

until it is revealed. There is no end, 

and nothing has happened at all 

until everything has happened.