We search the screen for images
but they come searching us.
They are seeking our weak points.
They want to win us.
They reach for us
through the screen
antennae probing.
They never see us.
They cannot see.
We peer at them
through the screen
trying to decipher
their ploys, their deceptions
their hidden purposes.
The screen masks them
and we cannot see.
We prostrate ourselves
at the screen’s foot
and cry, Hail, Delusion !
Posted:
What has been the effect upon UK citizens of the behaviour we have witnessed during the past few days, as negotiations over the planned televised debates between our political leaders appear to have reached their climax ?
For me, the way Cameron/his Party/his hooligan Press have conducted themselves has been utterly astonishing. Obviously the Tory decision to avoid the debates was taken ages back, for mendacious reasons. The signals since that decision was made have been clear. It was based on a close calculation of party advantage, with no reference to, or respect for, democratic process, or the needs of democracy itself.
This dodgy lot is not the first to have calculated on that basis, but the existence of precedents is no excuse, especially in our present climate of disenchantment with, and detachment from, politics and politicians. Cameron is actually not a coward and for opponents to call him one now is just to join the whole absurd charade, its script predicted and maybe even written in Tory Head Office. Cameron is a red-faced self-worshipper. He is also a calculating machine, utterly irresponsible, utterly without conscience. He is weighing his chances and trying his luck.
But worse, the brazen manner with which this has been done, under so many eyes, the lazily transparent dishonesty of the long succession of ploys and alibis, have had a quality of their own. The original decision was a corrupt and cynical one. But the manner in which it has been implemented has been still more corrupt, if that were possible. There is absolute contempt operating here, and it is dangerous. Cameron and his street gang are making a nonsense of us all, of the political process, of what that process is for, of our language, of our nationhood.
During the same week in which these contemptuous acts of hooliganism were taking place, we have witnessed the latest Prime Minister’s Question Time, which some have described as the most appalling yet. Repeatedly, the man occupying the high office of our Prime Minister did not see fit to answer our Opposition’s questions. To the orchestrated bayings of approval from the tail-wagging fox-hounds behind him, he merely chose his own topics to talk about, independent of the questions. More delinquent Bullington-boy abuse of our democracy, of due process shaped and developed over centuries. Whatever he can get awhy wiv, he will pursue. Knock it all dahn.
I struggle with the meaning of this. What does it mean to be Cameron, or his supporters, doing what they are doing ? These are calculated policy decisions they have made, in order to win advantage. But at what cost to all of us, themselves included, their own party, their own children ? Are they not awake to any wider concern ?
And what does it mean that people behaving in this rude-boy fashion, with the record they have of social fracture, injustice and division, deeply dubious austerity measures, savagely implemented, are level in the polls these days and might even win ?
Do we assent, after all, to being ruled by an unrepentant street gang, sleek delinquents, posh hooligans ? Is that what is left to us ? Is that what is left of us ?
In present conditions, the worship of self, of Me n’ Mine, the worship of the god of selfies, in defiance of community and trust, is similar if not the same as the ancient worship of Moloch. By all accounts, the ancient worship of Moloch required the burning to death of the nation’s first born, as propitiation. By the same token, if we do not want our children soon to die in a burning world, brought about by our greed and hooliganism, our maltreatment of Other, then we need to adopt a very different god from this baleful Me n’ Mine. The coming election is actually not a choice between left and right. It is a choice between gods.
Put it another way : over the past five years, and now as they prepare to fight for re-election, the people who presently run this nation’s government have revealed very clearly who they are and how they view the electorate. Their behaviour is that of juvenile delinquents set loose in the playground, unsupervised and utterly arrogant. But they are also transparent (unless we are choosing to be blind). Therefore, if they win the election, they will do so only because the electorate has chosen to share with them their surrender to hooliganism, this nihilistic dance of death.
It is as if we are all waiting for the adults to come home. Do we yearn for their arrival or do we dread it ? Will they come home in time ?
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There was once a teacher whose words had unusual power. Crowds gathered wherever he spoke. But somehow and at the same time, his mere presence seemed to threaten all order and decorum in the city. With wonderful persuasiveness, he seemed to be calling a whole way of life into question. He was advocating change, astonishing change.
He taught that the quality of your life and your significance as a human being were not to be measured by which gods you worshipped as compared to other gods, or which possessions you owned as compared to other possessions.
He proclaimed that there was just one central truth, one light, that stood before all of humankind. It was not for mere humans to choose between gods, different gods for each tribe, or region, or tradition, or aspect of life. It was a plain fact from which no human could escape that. just as there was but one Creation, so there was but one Creator and all of humankind derived from that one source, that one beginning.
And this in turn called into question the value of material gain as an aim in human life, once you had enough for your own needs and those of your family. In fact, any way of life which aimed at pampering self, in competition with others, was a distraction and even a wickedness. Human beings were born not for the world to serve them, but for them to serve the will of their Creator, in step with the dance of Creation. So the teacher preached against acquisition and accumulation for its own sake and, instead, urged and prescribed generosity towards the poor and the needy, kind treatment and emancipation of slaves, and equality between men and women before God. For all human beings were made common by a plain and irrefutable fact that there was but one Creator and all being is derived from that one source.
The teacher said that what mattered was not what you possessed in your own walled spaces, distinct from others, but how you behaved in the space between yourself and others, as a fellow-citizen and neighbour ; so that an over-riding urge to wealth and comfort was actually an anti-social and destructive force ; and any wealth and comforts you possessed that were superfluous to your needs, you should give away to those who lacked a sufficiency.
The longer he spoke, the more the city walls shook and trembled. The wealthy and privileged who lived in their palaces and behind their high walls, plotting together on how to avoid paying the taxes required for the community’s use and betterment, how to curry favour with the local rulers and their entourages, how to climb the prestige ladder, saw that their world was about to collapse around them. They were proud of feeling better than and different from all the poor people outside their high-built walls. And this teacher seemed about to blow those walls down.
So they went to the teacher’s uncle and guardian and sought to threaten and bribe him. Give us the teacher so that we may kill him, they said. Otherwise he will bring chaos to the city.
But the teacher’s uncle refused.
They said, we will give the teacher treasure if he complies with us, such treasure that he won’t be able to refuse. Look at it. Now pass it to him. They thought this would persuade him. But still the uncle refused. He said that while this treasure might mean a great deal to the rich people who were offering it, it would mean nothing at all to the teacher. They were trying to silence him by means of their own bankrupt currency. Their bribes had no meaning, no weight and no value.
So with guile, good fortune and through the courage and wisdom of his supporters, the teacher continued his preaching and his witness. He preached and proclaimed in the city and far beyond. He died many deaths along the way.
His name was Muhammad.
(NB the title of this piece has nothing to do with what is a traditional Muslim story. The title comes from one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Specifically, the words can be found in Part IV, lines 1919 – 1921, of “The Knight’s Tale” and are spoken by the knight Arcite, as he lies dying).
Posted:
Shall we blame Foreigners ? Oh yes, let’s. It’s all those Eurocrats and Asylum Seekers. Those Ukranians. Those Poles. Those Australians. Those “ethnics.” Foreigners are all liars and criminals. Well, let’s pretend they are, anyway. It’s comforting to feel under siege. It makes you surer of your ground.
And shall we blame Poor People too ? People dependent on a benevolent State ? People in a weak position ? Oh yes, let’s. They’re all skivers, all workshy. That’s a lie, of course. But so what ? It’s comforting. Let’s grab the lie and wack ’em with it. Let’s make them foreign in our minds and give ’em a kicking. It will cheer us up. It’ll make us feel surer of our ground.
People outside a particular and familiar ring. People beyond the pale. Easy targets. Let’s get ’em. Then we few can feel that we’re all in this together. In a ring and under siege. Hitting out at the besiegers.
Or shall we blame the politicians who should fix everything, but do not ? Who should speak to us from the heart but merely mouth their lines at us, treating us like children, treating us like the enemy without, treating us as just fodder for their sleek and poisonous propaganda ?
And then, after treating us like children, they behave like adolescent hooligans themselves, squealing yah-boo in public in ways that we would punish them for if we were their parents. And they in turn join the blame-game, in their adolescent way, turning the House of Commons into a poorly supervised school playground :
Mumsy, it’s not me. It’s him. It’s Them. The international financial crisis precipitated by the misbehaviour of certain banks around the world was all Gordon’s fault, Mumsy. Blame him. And Ed. And Ed. Them others. Not me. I’m a good boy. So is Georgie-boy. And him over there, on the other side, he’s a waste of space, Mumsy. Love me, not him. I’m the one for you, Mumsy. Just look at the way I point at dead fish in foreign places in the Summer-time. It proves I was born to lead, Mumsy. Throw me your favour.
Once upon a time, people burned witches. Especially in times of heightened anxiety. Especially along uncertain frontiers. It was comforting.
In some aspects we have advanced since then. These days, for instance, we can sit a space-craft down on a comet. In other aspects, it seems, we have advanced not a millimetre. Our children will pay for that.
In our anxiety we retreat into a ring of anger and look to make someone outside it pay. As if that will solve the problem. As if that will magic away the cause of our anxiety.
In my own ring, I find myself raging at my country’s political leaders to the point of hatred. My contempt for Cameron et al is already leaking into this piece and I have to ask myself, am I not just joining the witch-hunt ? Where The Express seeks to whip up prejudice against foreigners, where the Mail seeks to whip up prejudice against people it calls “the Workshy” and where Davey-boy blames Gordon in a sustained attempt to blind people into supporting the Tory cuts and Austerity policies, leading them away from the facts and away from their saner selves, am I not equally scapegoating Davey-boy – for things over which he actually has no control, things which, even were he a far better and more honourable statesman and citizen and human being than he is, he could not do much to ameliorate ?
And I have to answer, yes, probably, to an extent. The extent of the intensity cannot entirely be due to the man and his actions. I yearn for his defeat in May, and for everything he apparently stands for, but under a different less smoothly loutish and socially divisive and destructive group of political leaders, will the world be that much safer ? Will humankind be any closer to salvation ? Will our futures look significantly more redolent of hope ? We are who we are and maybe in this generation we are merely discovering that who we are as a species is a hopeless case. Davey-boy, Head Rude-boy of Blingland, is just a reminder of a wider cause for despair. He is who we deserve, maybe. He is us, maybe. He occupies a space that we have left for him. It is finally our doing that at this juncture the high office of Prime Minister of the UK is occupied by a sleek sociopathic salesman of rotten cabbages whom significant numbers of us continue to find plausible, against the evidence of five years’ worth of harm he has done to this country, to its structures and to its soul.
And here I think is my justification. In the circumstances, I am looking too much to a mere political leader to rescue us, to have all the answers, to work miracles, to be genuinely inspirational ; and I have no right to blame that leader for what is actually human nature, the limitations, frailties and fallibility from which none us is free ; but in our present situation of tumult, fragmentation and uncertainty, conditions which call for the best and wisest and most generous in all of us, I am justified in blaming that leader for seeking as often as the present one does to work on and encourage and ride upon the worst in all of us, for his own benefit. And the lies keep coming, carefully coined, smoothly delivered. The lies alone signify a contempt for and distance from the nation he keeps lying to, that makes him dangerous to it. Each new lie is a further drop of poison in the reservoir of our democracy and our community. Neither democracy nor community can survive without trust. And as any parent will tell any child, lies destroy trust and make speaking in words pointless.
So, in the circumstances, I am looking for worthy political leadership with greater need and expectation than perhaps is quite justifiable ; but what the present leadership has provided for the past five years is an attack across the board upon all the values I hold dear and on all the ties which in my opinion hold us together as a Society and are the soil and spring-board for any real recovery that we might hope for. A vacuum has grown and grown. The words we seek continue to fail. The ways forward we reach for keep failing to materialise. The present leader has not led. He has merely postured and kicked out. There has been no recovery of anything of worth. He has merely shown us, time after time, in himself, what the problem is. If we were in doubt before of what we stand for and where we are going, we are in utter bewilderment now. Values have been thrown to the winds. As a nation in 2015, we stand for nothing we can be proud of, only self and self-seeking, deceitfulness and greed. We have been spun into utter emptiness and delinquency at all levels. Our own children have cause to be very frightened of us.
How can we ever fully understand ourselves, the tides and currents that swirl in our systems ? Perhaps also there is a kind of well in me which has been breached, concerning people who are vulnerable. Connecting with the vulnerable, the outsider, is a kind of well-spring for me and explains much of my working life. This government has laid into the vulnerable virtually from the start, making political capital from something unworthy and destructive in human nature which it had a duty, as the government of a civilised country, to oppose. Instead it cultivated the fissure, encouraged the misinformation, indulged itself in the prejudices of its natural supporters, and moved in and began to bully, claiming virtue in so doing. There can be no excuse, no justification. I see it as a criminal offence.
One more line of thought : politics can arouse passions and for all its limitations can have a massive impact on many people’s lives. Witness the Bedroom Tax. This is Caesar’s world, after all. Caesar can kill in all manner of ways. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s due.
But where is God in this ? Or religion ? Or the faith that goes with both ?
Are the worlds of God and Caesar so very distinct ? There is much that can be said in answer, but I shall limit myself to a few thoughts and then I shall offer a couple of names for a new god.
Faith which is normally associated with religion can also be applied to secular movements, to political means and ends. Thus, people can believe in certain politics, certain governmental policies and ideas and creeds, with religious fervour. So those ventures become something other than mere human constructs and rational attempts of the possible. They become Right (or Wrong) ; they become Good (or Bad) ; they become attempts to correct (or corrupt) human living. They become objects of worship. They attract devotees, some of whom may be fanatical.
And my name for this new god is Me n’ Mine. Another name is Number One. In turn, this god reminds me of other false gods I have heard of – Baal and Moloch. They occur in the Old Testament and are associated there with idolatry, enemies of the chosen people. They are also associated with child sacrifice. Devotees propitiated the god by sacrificing to him their own children. Flaubert gives an appalling description of one such imagined ceremony in his novel “Salammbô”. The children were burnt alive within the brazen statue of the god.
Come to think of it, Number One is not such a new god after all. Mammon has been around for quite a while, attracting devotees, enjoying his creatures.
But this false god, however we name it, is not just our own figment, our own blank canvas. It has reality, real force. It works upon and within each one of us, strengthening the worst in us, weakening the best. Some of us become its creatures, its orcs, wholly overwhelmed and overtaken. I think it originates in fear.
But only in this generation has the worship of Mammon actually threatened the next generation of humanity with death from global burning. Maybe this is another reason for the intensity of my hatred of the present government. It is a government of faith. Its creatures worship Me an’ Mine/”Number One”/Mammon/Baal/Moloch. Their faith is blind. And they are dangerous.
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My shadow dogs my path. It dwarfs me,
this daemon, this desolate god.
Could I live shadow-free ?
Would I fly ?
What would be left of me ?
Here are some more thoughts on the shadow :
I can say this with real pride :
no one but I
throws my shadow.
I call it my under-self, my field
of operation. I cannot
call it home.
I glimpse it sometimes, usually at night,
leaping the wet rocks
as the tall seas break and pursue ;
or poised for a moment of a bare grey tree-stump
calm after that stoop for eternity
out of the wind, the clutch of the mist ;
or sidling with gleeful expertise
through the ranks of the juggernauts –
that blind, brutal caravan…
My shadow leaps on me
each time I sleep –
to devour me.
Yet still my mornings
find me whole
and at each waking
there my shadow hangs
like empty sacking
against my wall –
wholly at my disposal.
The dark angel of my dreams
was dreadfully beautiful
lithe and invincible
and faceless
sans eyes sans mouth
his head like a smooth bulb
dark and gleaming.
I knew I could not hope
to escape and yes
here he comes pouring
up the stone steps
by the sea-shore, the waves
wild behind him
straight up at me
outwitting me without effort
in our life-long race,
glorious in his searing energy.
I submit, powerless and rapt
as the lipless angel kisses me
taking my face.
How have I allowed
my shadow to grow so tall ?
It rises from my lamp
like a vast giggling genie.
“Your wish is my command,
O Master,” my genie roars.
And I quail.
It winks at me
each evening
and for that moment
I see nothing
anywhere in the world.
I threw my shadow
all over town –
It leaned across at me
from each echoing underpass
from each foul lift-shaft
from each despairing alley-way.
I scattered my shadow like seed
across the fields –
and the seed bounded from the earth
like a mob of heroes
who chased me and harried me
and reduced me before the whole world.
I caught my shadow by the throat
and flung it into a pit
and packed the pit with sand
boulders and rich cement
and when all had set
hard as rock
I turned to escape, shrieking with relief –
a hand formed of new rock
siezed my heel.
I stood there above my pit
locked in my shadow.
I have this enemy
my “inveterate foe”
my enemy Number One.
Whenever we meet, my enemy
wastes me. I become zero.
All meaning drains from me.
I become a flatness on the road
a vague ugliness in the air
an abortion. And I have nothing
I can call on, no wild cards
no reserve forces, no hidden energies
to throw into the field.
I call my enemy “Number One.”
I don’t know what it looks like
for it borrows any form
it chooses. And is it “He ?” or “She ” ?
It is random and boundless.
It is All. All is “It.”
And I never have warning
of an encounter. No clouds
of dust on the horizon,
no slow rumble of feet, no tensing
of greased muscle, no pause in sound.
Simply my shadow deserts me.
*********************
And suddenly I lose my footing.
My ground just goes, my hold on space.
I look about me. I’m not here.
I reach for anything I have
anything that makes me
anything that marks and shapes me.
I reach for my history
my unique possession –
it’s gone it’s an empty lift shaft.
I reach for my voice
my shaping words my answer my shriek –
and the words give in the wind
and all my forming my bite on the air
collapses like a slack sail
like a shower of teeth.
I reach for my rage my saving grace –
and find nothing but a gasping franticness
an incapacity, a self-immolation
and all that comes of my rage
for survival is a rush to give ground
and yield all to the poised advance of my destroyer.
I writhe in the air like a foreign element
marooned here here above ground
hanging like a fish by the tail
held in triumph one Summer’s evening.
I am a transparency held to the sunlight
open to any examination.
*********************
And I cry to my shadow
“Why now ?” Why desert me
now ? Each breath of my life
I have sought to escape you
to fly weightless
to exist in pure mind
to secure utter distinctness
to achieve eternity.
Must now be the time I at last succeed
now when I need your earth ?
For my infidelity
you desert me to our ruin.”
And Number One, deep in its steel case
lashing at forests, at continents, at cities,
befouling ocean, air-wave, blood-stream,
raising hordes
of zealots to slaughter their fellows
in the name of a phantasm
breeding the will to deceive,
tending the urge to piracy and plunder
nurturing despair, aiding inertia
working deep in, working slowly
to the very core, paring
particularising, severing, numbering
Number One turns from its vast enterprise
hissing in glee
at my distress
and whispers :
“From whence do you consider
stem my victories?”
…My shadow carries my shape and moves with my movements. But it has no features and it never speaks ; and all sorts of strange forms or colours could be hidden in its darkness. Its shape keeps shifting and often it simply disappears. But then it returns. When I am happy I dance and with me my shadow dances. We dance together. When I am ill at ease, I labour and constantly I look back in dread and see my shadow pursuing me, threatening me.
Sometimes, then, my shadow seems to be my loyal and faithful friend, at others my implacable and inescapable enemy. To befriend my shadow would appear to be essential if I am to live successfully here on Earth.
If someone or something overshadows me, I receive immediate protection from the Sun and am relieved of the immense responsibility of my own shadow. On the other hand I am weakened, deprived of my energy and autonomy. It is as if my shadow has been stolen from me, eaten up by a stronger force.
And this in turn implies that my shadow is an important energy source and that I should retain that energy by insisting on my personal independence. Accordingly I must allow nothing and no one to overshadow me. For the Earth is sick and any creative source of energy which can retain wholeness must now devote itself to restoring the Earth.
© Rogan Wolf
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In the early 1990’s, I wrote a series of poems called “I hyphen Thou”. The poems explored the image of the hyphen and were suggested by a book by the philosopher/theologian Martin Buber called “I and Thou.”
The idea of the hyphen is an old favourite of mine. In fact I run a small charity called Hyphen-21.
Literally, the hyphen is a dash on the page and connects words. But in Buber’s wonderful book, the hyphen also connects Me to Thee, I to Thou, I – Thou.
Bewilderingly, miraculously, I am the centre of the universe, in my experience, for my time.
If I choose, I can treat you as just a shadow, or object, or obstruction, or tool, or target, from a place of callous detachment. I – It.
But in doing so, I shut myself down in some way, as well as you down.
As an alternative, I can choose to see and treat you as being equally as central in the universe as I am. If I do so, I am of course realising the truth about you, as well as about me. I – Thou.
And maybe, in a world of ever accelerating change and flux, the hyphen that connects us, in this awareness and realisation, is the only solid ground that now remains. The skills of connection are therefore the most central human skills of all. However, in present conditions, the urge to disconnect becomes more and more powerful.
Social workers, nurses, teachers, artists and the like use the skills of human connection all the time, however inadequately. The skills of love and of community (see earlier posts on this blog, especially this one). But too many politicians and other world leaders, as well as terrorists, as well as most of the rest of us between those positions, are attacking, perverting and poisoning, all the time, these skills which we need so desperately in order to sustain a human community on Earth.
In the last few hours, thinking of Charlie, I have been going over the “I hyphen Thou” poems and finding they speak for and to me as vividly as ever, and perhaps even more pressingly than when I wrote them twenty years ago. Here are some excerpts :
Riding the Hyphen between I and Thou
Through the débris we ride our hyphen
our kite in the hurricane
our dry leaf on the last day
Unnameable fragments swirl about our ears
and rage unanswerable
and pain unhealable and unredeemable
Through the débris we ride our hyphen
our kite in the hurricane
our dry leaf on the last day
What would you bid for a berth on the Ark
for a last communion in the whole aching night
where there’s warmth and trust and a roof above your head
as the world of our failure is unmade ?
Unnameable fragments swirl about our ears
and rage unanswerable
and pain unhealable and unredeemable.
Through the débris we ride our hyphen
our kite in the hurricane
our dry leaf on the last day.
The Holds I hang from
Lost among glimpses
among surfaces among scatterings
at loose within the leaping disasters
of an immeasurable universe
we are the makers
of our own safe ground
the stillness upon which we stand
is all ours to build.
Like a climber who negotiates
the overhang
I carry my footholds
the footholds which only I can construct
are all that preserve me.
In view of my exposure, however,
I must also attend to the rock
I owe it to myself
to take care
of the holds I hang from.
The fact of my knowledge of you
is far more a certainty
than the fact of me…..
The Hyphen as Surf-board
…The Earth is made raw
goaded past endurance
and none bar the surfer
will survive its onslaught
leaping the crazed beast
as it rages and grieves
in some ancient dance
of despairing beauty
for there’s nothing left
to follow now
but the wild wild blue.
I shall learn to land-surf
to keep my feet
all I can claim of the world
is here to feet.
The city heaves and buckles
squealing and trumpeting
gathering pace
it hastens me
it drives me forward
it tunnels me like a curling wave.
Let me not stumble
let me keep my feet
let me ride it through
let my little board
dash me
steadily through.
from Hyphen Loitering (with intent)
…I believe today I almost met someone.
For just a few moments, possibly,
the whirring edge of me
disturbed some surface of attention.
Perhaps in time I’ll risk being still enough
actually to meet a whole person.
I wonder would either of us survive
the awe and enormity of true encounter.
I loiter here between lines of thunder
poised for the sudden break
the momentary opening
my own hushed moment of interruption.
I must learn to do without lines.
As soon as a line is drawn
defeat there becomes possible
and even perhaps significant.
There is no excuse for defeat
and significance is wasted there.
To be invincible
you need do nothing
but dance at all times…..
Rogan Wolf
Posted:
All that matters of me
resides outside my skin.
Here
I am dross
an eye-lid’s flicker
but where we meet
and what we make there
shall never leave the Earth.
We have to make precious
the space between us.
It is humanity’s
last hope.
Our medium is diamonds
if only we will shape them.
Rogan Wolf
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