What's new . . .

• What history teaches us when the state goes secret

• Winning Politics in Camp Mirage and Hotel Redact

• Busing with Ganesha   

• "Retreats of the live creature" - reflections on the the body's work to save itself amidst ugliness and menace

• Poems: Marge Piercy's "The Low Road,"  Shao Yanxiang "My Optimism," Bertolt Brecht's "When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
• Ashis Nandy's article "Gandhi After Ghandi" on the uses and abuses of Gandhi in India. 
• A tour through the New India megalopolis Gurgaon, one of our possible futures. 
• New photographs.

Why this blog?

This blog might have been called bursting the foundations, after D.H. Lawrence's 1925 declaration, written as he witnessed Fascist gangs take over the streets of Italy, that "The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can't make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us."

The blog looks in two directions: into our era - its allure, its historical memories and fantasies, and its built-in catastrophic qualities and dilemmas - and towards signs of shoots of life. It combines structural (the foundations) and experiential-creaturely perspectives. It suggests that art work (novels, poetry, the visual arts), elements of the anarchist tradition of reflection and experiment, and the dialogic qualities of cross-cultural experience evident in the work of some anthropologists, can be among our best teachers.

Why roadstained? Because each of us also lives among these foundations - and lives with them inside us - even as we are also the sources of new life growing inside and between us. We are not above or outside the pathologies of our culture. Just as the traveler can be smeared with the muck of a passing truck, or breath in the deadly air of any modern megalopolis, or attempt to shut down her senses against the culture's many aggressive, overwhelming surfaces, so we live roadstained in our bodies and within in our thoughts and responses. 

And yet independent shoots of life can burst forth - in relationships, in dialogue, in imagination, in raw exasperation ... often from places we haven't known existed, and often revealing experiential places that the culture debases or dismisses as unrealistic. Somewhere here is what John Dewey calls the live creature, calling out, appealing to the dialogical, associative, playful, nostalgic and imagining capacities of our intelligence. 

This blog is an experiential, reflective, critical, archaeological journey along these cracks in the foundation of our era, between the forces of death and life. Where are we? it asks. How do we live? And how could we live?

Who created this blog?

Tom Morris worked as a campaigner and publicist with Amnesty International Canada; has taught in the humanities at various universities in Canada and abroad; travels independently, mostly by foot and local transportation, in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas; and has interests in writing, literature, the visual arts, photography, wayfinding and mapping, cultural criticism, gardening, walking and canoeing. He is married with two sons. 

Another way of thinking about the author of this blog is through Meera Mukherjee's Sitting Woman (shown on the right-hand side of the blog’s banner). I imagine her sitting with others, myself among them, history's creaturely witnesses - in defiant, sometimes furious, sometimes calm immovability - staring out towards another approaching made calamity, our very form or bearing sowing doubts in several of those being given orders to clear the way. 

One further way of considering the author might be found in the following story ...

… and when the traveller returned to town, we asked about what he had experienced, the dangers of the road, do people out there really live as we hear. We're now sure he invented much of what he told us - the kindly people, the wonders, certain similarities with our own lives. He was always a day-dreamer. But strangest of all was the fact that his stories from afar were no less full of curiosities than the ones he sometimes told of our own world, stories that several of our town folk even responded to as if with some personal recognition, although most listened with impatience and sometimes with anger. 

Remarkable too was how, now at home among familiar people and things, he often appeared perplexed, sometimes melancholy, sometimes astonished, his speech full of hesitation … unsettled, one person said. How his eyes and brow would sometimes seem to say so this is how it is, how he muttered indecipherable phrases – the difficulty of finding one’s self amongst all this familiarity … border crossings among the great negations of life … so many places stained by empire. Such nonsense.  

The notebooks he was rarely without - wayfinding journals, he called them - were said to be thick with page after page of hand-written notes, along with cryptically-titled photographs and diagrams, and other images that seemed quite at odds with common understanding ... such was the pasted-in water-colour of an emaciated man, paint brush in hand, sitting in ruins, staring astonished at his canvas which has a great hole as if blasted through its centre by some terrible weapon. 

These are the real dangers of travelling, one person said, wisely, remembering this drawing and hearing another of the traveller's stories. 

Of course the sensible among us soon lost all interest and got on with our lives.The others will have to speak for themselves.

"In Detention" - Chris van Wyk

He fell from the ninth floor

He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

© Chris van Wyk. Published in van Wyk’s collection It Is Time To Go Home (1979)

Where exactly was this poem written, where could it have been written? Uruguay? Singapore? Ireland? Canada or the United States? Israel? Iran? Zimbabwe? Czechoslovakia? It happens that this "In Detention" was written in apartheid-era South Africa. But it  - with its attention to the dizzying, mystifying, denying, slippery patter of "explanations" for deaths in custody resulting from state torture - might have been written earlier (say of French officials "explaining" deaths in their Algerian prisons) and it definitely could be written today.

Contemporary governments (along with most modernized publics) officially abhor "torture," forbid its practice (while sanctioning or excusing torture under other names), and will go to telling lengths, when torture's practice and results leak into public view, to deny its use. That's why Chris van Wyk's poem still feels immediate - especially its rendering of the modern state's habitual press conference patter, a patter characterized by the effort to keep its actual loopiness from notice, and whose aim is to mesmerize us away from our felt-sense and intelligence. 

In the current era, torture always needs an excuse: named as an exception or an accident or an incident, or by one of its proliferating pseudo names (enhanced interrogation is but one), or as a difficult but necessary measure that will save us from harm. And thus those who order and carry out torture are helped to continue.

Retreats of the live creature

In A Chorus of Stones, Susan Griffin writes about how Hemingway so much wants war to elicit the heroic, how he works to reconstruct and fabricate the experience of war toward this end. But, she continues, "he is telling another more crucial truth. How the war was not heroic. How there was fear and failure and a flatness in the end, a sickness of heart because 'the things that were glorious had no glory ... and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago'."

War as the circumstance, beyond all others, at least in the world of collective activity, in which the human sensorium attempts to withdraw, pull inwards or retreat physically, from a world of harm. Like the echidna  we helped that was stranded midway across a wide west Australian desert highway, terrified of passing vehicles, pulled inwards into a tight ball, spines instinctively defending it against the tons of metal and plastic whirling by.

David Grossman in The Yellow Wind - his discussions with Palestinians and Israeli "settlers" in the West Bank, amidst such deeply embedded mutual violence, mistrust and hatred - ends the 2002 Afterword with his need for hope, and then says: "The very fact of writing these words, of expressing a hope of any sort, already threatens to crack the hard protective membrane each of us has now generated to ward off hurt, and to prevent us feeling too much." Or, he says elsewhere, thinking and speaking in ways that are seen as unrealistic, naive, inhumane, suspect, even tantamount to treason.

I have remembered Griffin telling a story told her by an Israeli friend: A young Israeli soldier is sent to Gaza. One day he picks up stones thrown at him by Palestinian children, then begins to juggle the stones. In the days following, the children again gather nearby, but instead of throwing stones, they watch the juggler with pleasure. A counter-story, perhaps wishful, perhaps one of those hopeful exceptions, to modern retreat, warding off and "sickness of heart" amidst a world of learned, embedded "enemies."

Another story (possibly from Griffin's book, but not sure) .... A child in Chernobyl is told by her mother: "You are not supposed to touch the grass. You must not touch the soil. You cannot touch the flowers, the vegetables." And so on. And so the child learns to hold back her hands, her steps, her body, and over time to ask, sometimes aloud, sometimes to herself, sometimes deep inside beyond conscious hearing: "Is this safe? Is this? Is this?"

I think of Kafka's retreating, burrowing, hyper-nervous, sometimes paranoid creaturely animals. Or the young Palestinian girl, running from one family member's house to another during a curfew in Qalqilia, described by Grossman:  "like a hair crossing an open field, she rushes, slightly bowed, and disappears." Or civilians hiding in underground bunkers during bombardments. Or the childhood experience of my generation in North America of hiding under school desks and the fashion of "fallout shelters." Or, on city streets, the eyes turned away - or appearing to look but not actually seeing. Hands over ears. That "sickness of heart." That modern, cynical disinterest in patient, empathetic reflection. The so-called "siege mentality" as now normal psychology.

The Chernobyl story reminds me of how William Morris understood the ugliness (filth, crowdedness, noise, cramped and cluttered urban design) of 19th urban-industrializing England in terms of the experience of the creaturely human. You come upon in Morris what to our long-modernized conscious thoughts seem to be the most outlandish suggestions. Imagining a new, freer, more just and more beautiful (sense-receptive) society, he suggests that "perhaps mankind will regain their eyesight, which they have at present lost to a great extent" - and by eyesight he means both the "mechanical" thing (because of new forms of factor and office labour) and the ability to "take in mental impressions through the eyes; whereas in times past the eyes were the great feeders of the fancy and imagination."

Or, referring to the late 19thC "grimy, disorderly uncomfortable world," of urban-industrial-commercial Europe, Morris writes how this world "offends the senses at every turn ... forces us unconsciously to blunt their keenness. The man who notices the external form of things much nowadays must suffer in South Lancashire or London, must live in a state of perpetual combat and anger; and he really must try to blunt his sensibility, or he will go mad, or kill some obnoxious person ...."  ("The Society of the Future," 1887)

These examples make me wonder how the senses - the live creature - experience the many dimensions of modernity's special aggressiveness: the modern's felt-unsafe and ugly, unpleasing qualities as experienced by the living organism. How it can drive the sensing creature back into herself, that pulling back or away from the more natural expressive impulse to embrace surroundings and life with which all life begins. The need for a kind of physiology of modern-era withdrawal and retreat on behalf of self-protectiveness, expressed as caution, guardedness, nervousness, fear.

To the extent that these examples reveal something about modern human being, what is then happening in the creaturely human to enable it, over time and generations, to return daily to the "normal" routines of modern urban workplace, production, commuting, leisure? Kafka imagines, in The Metamorphosis, a person who is conscientiously eager to rise and face the day of work and responsibility, and another, the live creature, for whom this same conscientiousness has been leading towards a night of involuntary transformation, like the dream-work become real in the body, waking in a morning immobile, or rather only mobile like an utterly unwieldy, dyfunctional machine - in effect, the live creature as now alien-seeming and refusing (incapable really) to rise and face the day as offered us?

Counter experiences: - My excitement and great pleasure, amidst each day's end exhaustion, of traveling the streets of India. That overwhelming cacophony of sounds, awful disabilities and humiliations, jumbles of signs, savage power, moving objects of every sort, overpowering odours, thick crowds, moments of such beauty. The pleasure of embracing this again, although perhaps best felt not immediately on foot but from a passing trishaw.

Or - another counter-experience - the pleasure of a certain dance floor perhaps twenty years ago now: crowded with gyrating people-ghosts, our bodies discontinuous, now here, now there, now nowhere under strobe lights, all of us moving in something like a pit circled with rising tiers of bystanders in the half-light, the base notes battering our hearts, thud, thud, thud. Painful, actually, as I remember now and even at the time - but also pleasurable, exciting, especially I think because of how the place created a kind of heightened eroticism. All of us, women and men, all energy and movement, all expressive pulsing limbs and torso, and anonymous as well. Without this I would have fled. The pull/attractiveness and push/repulsiveness of such a place. A kind of modern urbanism in the form of an intense caricature?

The Low Road - by Marge Piercy

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

From Marge Piercy's The Moon is Always Female (1980)

My Optimism - by Shao Yanxiang (1984)

I’m an adult

My optimism is adult too

My optimism

Doesn’t smile all the time

It has rolled in the mud

It’s been struck on an anvil

It burst out into sparks under the hammer

It burned in a bonfire that almost went out

For a while people scornfully called it dead ash

It has been worked over with nightsticks

Jerked around every which way

Then floated downriver chilled to the bone

None of its fibres

Is tainted by even a speck of dust

It doesn’t wear coveralls

Not my optimism

My optimism

Isn’t a coat

That you sometimes put on and then take off

Nor does it have a pocket with a conscience inside

That you could sometimes bring with you

Or sometimes leave at home

My optimism

Leaped into my arms

And I warmed it up with my body heat

After it had been trampled when those

Who had once embraced it cast it aside

I warmed it up

And it warmed me

Double-crossed

And reported on in secret

It grew up step by step

Yet without encountering obstacles

Without a taste of mean tricks

How could my optimism become adult?

Adult optimism

Isn’t always sweet

Sometimes its face is bathed in tears

I once heard it choking back sobs

But it woke out of its grief

Caught my hand

Comforted my heart

Propped my head in both hands

And tried gently to console me

With a tune that only parents would use with a child

Hello old friend inseparable as body and shadow

My long-suffering weather-beaten optimism

The poet and essayist Shao Yanxiang (b. 1933), an early supporter of the Chinese Communist revolution through his poetry, became in the mid-1950s sharply critical of party officials and bureaucrats who in turn denounced and harassed him.

"Blissed Be Sempill Lyfe Withovtin Dreid"

I came upon these words by the 15thC Scottish poet and story-teller Robert Henryson, etched into a flagstone in Makar's Court, Edinburgh. Henryson lived between the medieval and emerging Renaissance worlds. Some 5,000 lines of his work have survived: often first-person narratives that, I read, mix humour and serious purpose, realism and scepticism, criticism of the ruling powers and a humanist compassion. Little is known about his life. He appears to have been familiar with law and the humanities, to have been a teacher and writer, and be associated at various times with an east coast abbey and court household. 

These mere six words - again so resonant with meaning in our own time, make me want to read more of Henryson's writing. 

Interesting too how the Scots language, through the word 'makar', identifies Henryson the poet with all those who construct, produce or prepare ... a usage so at odds with the modern habit of differentiating, even opposing, the sphere of production and work and the sphere of creativity, inquiry, insight and beauty.

When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain (Bertolt Brecht)

Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office

   hours: the counter is already closed.

Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks

   another language. They do not understand him.

Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at a door where he has four

   times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry.

Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor:

   his blood goes on flowing.

So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.

The first time it was reported that our friends were butchered there was a cry of horror. 

Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was 

   no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become

   endurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

From: Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forché, Norton,1993. Trans. John Willett.