Spring, retirement and songbirds

Six years ago on this first day of spring – when one thinks of returning songbirds – I ‘retired’. ‘Retirement’ is one of those stupefying words that claim to help shape and explain our life. The man in the picture, about my age, is gathering cattle feed and firewood, perhaps conversing with the mountains, trees, and birds. He lives in Chitkul village at the top of the Baspa Valley, high in the Indian Himalayas. No one here thinks of ‘retirement’ as we have come to do – nor did anyone else for tens of thousands of years.

In the village, labour and leisure slosh together, attuned to the seasons and a deep ethic of mutual aid. People make lot of distinctions, around gender roles for example, but there’s little of the arbitrary-feeling, bureaucratized segmenting of life that we know.

Down the Baspa valley are vast pesticide-covered orchards;  farther down are enormous, landscape and village-wrecking hydro dams being built to fuel ‘new India’ industrialization and instant glass corporatized cities. Down there they also talk about ‘retirement’.  

I hear that in the past 50 years the world has lost half its songbirds – in large part, researchers believe, because of factors like modernity’s pesticides, glass towers lit up 24/7, atmospheric pollution and deforestation.  That dismays and disheartens me. This first day of spring, I want a world with plenty of songbirds.

What history teaches when the state goes secret

>>  Policing, broadly understood, becomes a doubled universe. On the one hand, publicly known police stations and prisons accessible to lawyers and families, publicly recognized legal rights and processes, etc. On the other hand, secret detention centres (like Homan Square in Chicago, various secret centres in Santiago,Chile, and other South American cities under military dictatorships, the ‘black sites’ set up by the US and its allies), no or little access by lawyers and families, mistreatment of detainees, the increased likelihood of forced/false confessions.

>> The elaboration/expansion of policing micro-cultures with their cult-like isolation, their increasingly internally-defined morality (constantly adjusted to deliver results given the harrowing mission they have been assigned), their resistance to public scrutiny let alone dialogue. We can’t plead ignorance of the results, including in Canada where the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Canadian officials were complicit in the torture of Omar Khadr at Guantánamo Bay; and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci confirmed that Canadian officials were complicit in the torture and other human rights violations suffered by Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin in Syria and, in Mr. Abou-Elmaati’s case, Egypt.

>>  Morality adjusted to delivering results within the context of a harrowing mission called variously a ‘war on terror’, ‘saving civilization’, ‘protecting public safety’ etc . This has routinely (‘routinely’ and not the state’s ‘bad apples’, ‘exceptions’, ‘mistakes were made’ claims) led into a world of lies, fabricated/planted evidence, threats, abductions, mistreatment including torture, etc.  Morality in such contexts has been repeatedly demonstrated to become human amorality.

>> Cultures of covert policing in the context of ‘saving civilization’ (and moralized categories like ‘civilization vrs. barbarism’) inherently provide sanctioned working space for racists and xenophobes – and likely attract both among their recruits.  States that have turned to this rhetoric demonstrate this clearly: Argentina under its military dictatorship, apartheid South Africa, Israel and France (in Algeria), to name but a few.  Thus the defence of ‘civilization’ (with its ideals of cosmopolitanism, pluralism, tolerance, dialogue) comes to rely on racist stereotypes, bigotry, etc.

>> The culture described so far - with its ‘results at all costs’ understandings of its mission, and its milieu of absolute or near absolute powers over suspects and detainees (withholding of ‘evidence’, absence of public judicial forums, absence of public scrutiny) – are a license to abuse and abusers, including (history shows) sadistic behavior and sadists. To paraphrase Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

>> As for we the people, more people – named as ‘suspects’ or ‘suspicious’ – are placed on secret ‘watch list’ databases, with increasingly restricted means to identify or challenge their accusers.

>> The lines fade between suspected, accused and, in effect, convicted (e.g. detained indefinitely without charge or open hearing), especially where the requirements of state secrecy is asserted.

>> The disastrous abuse of people’s basic freedoms and human rights as a result of such watch lists becomes more likely, e.g. the situation of Maher Arar and the other Canadians named earlier.

>> People’s right to dissent, including various forms of civil disobedience (assured under the Canadian Charter) are more vulnerable to being ‘watched’, subverted and blocked by secretive agencies with a vague and politicized mission to protect ‘public safety’ and ‘the economy’, and with a license to act against ‘unlawful’ activities (not necessarily criminal, e.g. blockades) and imprecisely but emotively named phenomenon like ‘disruptive’ social activism.

Winning politics in Camp Mirage and Hotel Redact

Some thoughts on an item in this week's news: more than four in five Canadians – 82 per cent – back the new legislation to expand the powers of 'intelligence agencies' and police.

A century of war (the thuggery of nation-states and non-state gangs) has been a godsend for weapons-makers, saviors of many kinds and the burgeoning ‘national security’ industry – the latter with its public face of ensuring ‘public safety’ and its secreted history of abuses and deceit.

Among democracies alone, just consider the operations of the French in Algeria, the British in Ireland, the US across its global network of hidden torture centres, and Canada-US collusion in the imprisonment and torture of Maher Arar in Syria. Ours is the world of Camp Mirage and Hotel Redact. State secrecy and abuses (officially: 'mistakes', 'exceptions', 'bad apples') in the name of ‘public security’ are now the norm. 

Yes, there is the incidental exposure - the ‘Pentagon Papers’, the recent Congressional report on CIA abuses, the O'Connor Commission – all of which repeatedly decry the lack of sufficient public oversight of covert state operations. But what feels new is how normalized has become the public view that ‘anything is acceptable’ to ensure our ‘security’. 

A few decades ago Hannah Arendt called this security/secrecy/abuse complex a ‘crisis’ for democracies, but she thought an independent media and election-time accountability would save the day. Now, writes Scott Horton in ‘Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare’, ‘the dynamics have shifted considerably in favor of national security elites. They have carefully calculated the points likely to alarm the public and stir it to action. More effectively than before, they use secrecy not only to cover up their past mistakes but also to wrest from the public decisions about the future that properly belong to the people’. Combine this with a media that thrives on violent crisis, and men like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his circle who see political advantage in public alarm and its further stirring, and we see the public opinion results of this week.

After posting this, my friend Tariq Ahsan wrote:  Hopefully public opinion will change for the better after an informed debate takes place, and the level of fear from recent scares in Quebec and Ottawa subsides.

In response: I wish to be hopeful on these matters, but don’t see many reasons to be so. Few experiences are as powerful as the feeling of insecurity, and few promises more deeply – instinctively? - attractive as the promise to be made safe.

Some days the men in the PMO seem like demagogues: - stirring and manipulating, for their own gain, the fears, racism, and limited cultural space to reflect independently; promising the ‘strongest’ action; accusing anyone who questions of ‘weakness’ and ‘naïveté’. But in the case of Harper and his associates, this suggests a kind of self-awareness that I doubt exists.

Instead, I think it more likely that there is something of an alignment between his own and widespread public views about race, ethnicity, dissent, social inequality, conflicts between cultural traditions and modernity, etc. Mix this with the experience of so many Canadians (inadmissible to consciousness, admittedly) of having no effective power to make the society we might want. Then a ‘leader’ like Harper appears, saying: I promise you power against unseen and ever-present threats, power to ‘defend our most precious civilized values’, power to avenge, certainty against uncertainty . . . . 

It’s worked many times before and it seems to be working now. The irony is that it offers us the appealing-mystifying ideals of the status quo while in practice keeps us feeling vulnerable and actually disenfranchised.

Busing with Ganesha

We should have read the signs earlier on the Jaipur-Nawalgarh [India] bus run: how the driver, as he pulls the bus into the frenzy of Jaipaur’s main street, sits sideways, chatting with the folks behind him, his gesturing hand searching by the bye for the steering wheel and gear shift. Or how he enjoys his horn, a rising four-note LET ME THROUGH number set on Loud Repeat. 

It's only later - careening through a needle eye between two on-coming TATA trucks (the ones with the glowering grills), forcing motorcyclists into the sandy margin and pedestrians into the next state - that I notice a clock over the driver's seat, main hands stopped at 7:23. Is that a.m. or p.m.? The start of the day or the end? Odd where the mind takes you when terror reaches down your throat.

A swaying bus, top heavy like us, fills our windshield. We swerve sharply, people tumbling into one another, hands grabbing whatever feel closest, Sorry, Sorry, as boxes and bags skither along the aisle. A cart driver and mule flash past ... a thud and CHLUNK sound somewhere beneath us. 'You idiot! Are you trying to kill someone!?' B. yells. The driver glances into his mirror and smiles. Several passengers look towards B., nodding in agreement, but silent. The driver's buddies, youths now settled around the windshield, have a laugh, their faces full of admiration. This guy's the real thing!

It's about now that every charred skeleton of every bus and lorry I've ever seen, from Java to Guatemala to Zambia, begins to appear, bottom up, along the roadside.

My eyes return to the clock, and it’s now that I notice a smoky image of Ganesha - that chubby smiling little Hindu elephant found at entrances and exits, god of learning, good fortune, slayer of obstacles . . . and always, always hanging in some guise around bus drivers everywhere.

Sure, I have a few questions for the fat little cross-legged guy - and would like quick answers too, just in case there's still time to jump. Which is it Ganesha: are you one of us, an anxious passenger, or another of the driver's joking, adoring groupies? And just what kinds of obstacles have you set out to clear today – that cement-filled lorry in our windshield, the cart driver, the forces of weight and speed and gravity that (naturally enough) want to catapult us into the ether beyond that cliff edge?

And that god of learning role of yours. Sure, fine, I’m open-minded about learning - usually. I would even agree, usually, that the best learning is full of risks. But here and now in this deathcrate on 14 wheels, I’d be happy to forgo lessons in the joys of ‘High Speed Swerves And Overtakes’ if only I could hear a lot more about the admittedly boring subject of 'I'd Like To Live Another Day'.

And that clock. Whose time is it anyway, Mr Ganesha?

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?