In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • Lying to a Sovereign People is a crime of High Treason.

     

    A few days ago, my partner pointed her rather basic smart phone in the direction of my aging mug and held the phone there, with amazing steadiness, while I talked at it for the next three minutes.

    I argued that, if a holder of public office, or applicant for public office, or candidate for election to public office, is found to have lied, that person should be tried in a court of law.

    As the theft, or forging, or defrauding, of money is seen and penalised as a crime, so equally should theft or forgery of the truth, through words, be seen and penalised. For language is no less central a currency for our society’s health and proper functioning than is money, and needs to be kept equally sound and trustworthy. Freedom of Speech is a right. But – and especially for those in positions of public responsibility – truth-telling is an obligation.

    I argue finally that if, in our democratic society, we see the People as being sovereign, then to steal the truth from a Sovereign People, so that they cannot make a decision that is properly informed, is to strike at the heart of the state and its functioning and is therefore a crime of High Treason. I am not making that statement as a lawyer or in any precise legal sense, but in principle I believe the argument follows and holds.

    I am supporting a campaign called Brexit Justice, being conducted by a young man called Marcus J. Ball. See : http://www.brexitjustice.com/  Ball is seeking crowd funding now to enable him to take Boris Johnson to court, for an offence in Common Law entitled “Misconduct in Public Office.” Specifically, what is being referred to is that notorious lie involving the NHS, writ large on the Brexit campaign bus painted red.

    It has taken Marcus a while, first, to establish that there is indeed a case under this heading and, second, to form a legal team. But the case is now established and Lewis Power QC is ready to pursue it. If successful, it will set a precedent that will make all politicians pause before acting in a way that so grossly abuses their position and the people they are supposed to represent.

    The video above can also now be found on the right of this blog’s home page and here on Facebook.

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  • A Larger Size of Time

    (written for Sylvia, aged 90)

     

    Does the moment ever shrink,

    as if walls are closing in,

    or skyline flattening

     

    to some endless level of empty sea ?

    As hour by hour the years accumulate

    it might be thought that the high

     

    moments of your life must lose

    altitude, intensity, freshness. But I

    question that conclusion.

     

    Each moment I live

    adds more of me to live with,

    more collated time within

     

    my living, more seeing

    of what there is to see.

    One day soon,

     

    my moment

    may not fit

    me any more

     

    and I’ll have to wear

    a larger size of time

    to hold this larger me.

     

    Rogan Wolf, August 2018

     

     

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  • Parrot Addenda

    Since the Summer of 2018, I have been writing a series of stanzas in rhyme royal, mostly on the subject of Brexit.

    Each has been written as a separate item, rather than as part of a longer poem. They were produced in response to, and often very soon after, various events and announcements that occurred during the weeks concerned, in connection with Brexit’s mind-numbing progress through each day – day after day of intricate insanity in order to arrive at yet more of the same.

    Each separate stanza went up here on this blog – and on my facebook timeline – almost immediately after it was written. They can all still be found on this site, each in its singularity.

    But I have also put them together in chronological order and with footnotes and an afterword. That collection of them, kept up to date, can be found on the right of the home page of this blog, under this same title – “Parrot Addenda.” 

    After I had written several of the stanzas, I included a a lovely public poems by Michael Rosen, called “These are the Hands.” It was written in 2008 to celebrate the NHS. There are various fairly obvious reasons for its inclusion. Some explanation is given in the footnotes. But I also saw it as some kind of interval and refreshing contrast. 

    Incidentally, the term “rhyme royal” describes an old English verse form, introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. It consists of stanzas of seven lines each, five beats to a line. And the rhyme scheme is as follows : ababbcc. Easy.

    Chaucer himself used this verse form and in the next century, so did John Skelton in his long satire “Speak, Parrot.” (I have made my own short and contemporary version, part “translation,” of this extraordinary poem and later shortened it further into an audio-visual version, set in the top of a tower – the Tyndale Monument above North Nibley. For both versions, see the right hand column of the home page, here. Obviously, “Parrot Addenda” makes direct and constant reference to Skelton’s “Speak, Parrot” and – much less directly – to the work and life of William Tyndale. The two men were pretty well contemporaries).

    Rhyme royal did not stop with Skelton.  Shakespeare used it for one of his poems and so did Wordsworth. Later still, both Yeats and WH Auden wrote poems which used this form.

    Thank you to my friend Roger Chaffin for suggesting the idea of delivering myself via rhyme royal stanza !

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  • In Despite of White Horses

    Who is Mr Corbyn ? Mr Corbyn is a mist, a mild man standing on a platform made of our storm, carrying our projections. How to disentangle the yearnings of the young audience and the nightmares of the old one, from this slight, ageing man on the platform ?

    He has a life time behind him of stubborn, non-compliant conviction and there is warmth in him.

    But it is a lifetime of mainly solid and detailed work in committee, coming up with awkward little points  of order with which to fluster the Chair.

    Surely here is a man of small print and stubborn fixities, leaning on an old and clanky set of commandments as an extension of himself, just another fundamentalist among so many others.  And he is dreaming his way to a version of Brexit that belongs, perhaps, in the minutes somewhere and accords, perhaps, with one or another of his own points of order somewhere.

    But in the real and present world of flesh and devil and huge forces and rushing shapes, there is a gaping hole in this nation where a leader should be.

     

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  • The Crier Frets

    They keep coming, still in Rhyme Royal. Once it was the parrot who begged liberty to speak. But now he’s become the town crier, in a cage, caught in a storm. Today’s stanza was brought to mind by a good piece by Matthew d’Ancona. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/05/networked-far-right-tommy-robinson  It was featured in The Guardian, today.

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  • …And Smash the Butterfly

    Is this latest little necklace of words in the Rhyme Royal verse-form only a portrait of Mr Trump ?

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  • Paradise Destroy

    “Humankind cannot bear very much Reality” is a quote from the poem “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot. If humanity is ever to be buried in a graveyard, once our work is done, this quote will be writ large on our gravestone.

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  • Going Nowhere to Mean Nothing

    After the 2016 EU referendum,Theresa May kept intoning “The People have Spoken” with lugubrious reverence, as if trying to portray herself as some sort of priestess delivering holy writ. In fact, from first to last, from that unsound and unseemly referendum rumble, full of highly dodgy rude-boy doings, to our present horrendous and dishonourable impasse, what Maybot has “delivered” has been a holy and unwholesome and unforgivable mess.

    At first she must have found it quite exciting. She had been sitting comfortably at the Home Office, creating hostile environments for large numbers of good citizens and good neighbours, when suddenly there was uproar over at Number Ten and an untrained and untamed rottweiler by the strange and foreign name of Dacre entered her office and doffed his feathered hat and bowed extravagantly low and growled/purred at her, as follows : “Would’st thou in thy kindness and twinkly high heels be so good as to board the good ship Brexit, Captain May ?”

    “Captain May !” she cried. “Oh rather !”

    And she hurried up to the Brexit’s bridge. “But this is a very old ship, despite her new name,” she said, as The Brexit slipped its moorings and wavered off across the waves, narrowly missing everything in sight. “What was she called in the beginning ?”

    “Ah, my lady,” the rottweiler growled/purred, unperturbed and as savage as ever. “How perceptive thou art. When this good ship was launched, she was called the Ship of Fools Thrown All Aback. But then a bunch of pirates stormed aboard and they included Flotsam Johnson and Jetsam Gove and quite a few billionaire press barons, and one or two Russians and various other odds, sods and dung beetles. And they gave her this new name. And I must inform you, my lady, in case you didn’t know, that the good ship Brexit is full of holes and not at all in your control.”

    She looked surprised but doggedly determined and so he continued : “When I head off to my rich estates this Autumn, where Leveson can’t get me, among all those traditional red costumes in the chill air, with the horses arching their necks and the steam rising from the hounds’ hot and greedy mouths, you’ll be hitting the rocks, my gel.”

    And the rottweiler leapt into a passing helicopter to be roared away to the Mercian border – with its bristling spears and glamorous longbows and billionaire barons from hell. “Farewell !” he cried in savage glee. “Farewell !”

     

     

     

     

     

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