Wakey Wakey!!!

Been a bit slack here of late, but active offline. Attended the first "Transition City London" event on Tuesday this week at the LARC (London Action Resource Centre) in Whitechapel.

It's still hard to see how this would work on a city wide scale, especially in a city on the scale of London. A general feeling is that dividing the city by its boroughs would be an appropriate approach - which does split the city into more manageable sized units and works with rather than against pre-existing social and political structures. However London boroughs are also quite large units (too large?) and I wonder how identified Londoners are with their borough per se. Many Londoners live in one borough, work in another and perhaps socialise in one or more others... Well this is all stuff that needs to be worked through.

Meanwhile Transition Town Brixton is off the starting blocks, Sustainable Haringey is looking at Transition Culturing and if this stuff happens organically and from any grass roots level at all it's going to work much better.

Anyway here's some of the brainstorming over what a sustainable London might look like:


Excitingly there's also a UK wide tour of events "Wakey! Wakey!" trying to raise consciousness about Peak Energy just kicking off, learn more about it here.

ALSO: New FLICKR slide show of my photos in the sidebar ->
I've got other Permaculture related photos on the Naturewise FLICKR site.

Orphic Trinity - Orphic Resonance

Last night I attended the first of the Gaia Foundation’s 2007 evenings, this one with Brian Goodwin, leader of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher college (and thus a close colleague of the previous speaker Stephan Harding’s whose talk I covered here).

As you would expect there were many parallels with Stephan Harding’s talk, and both were based around new publications – in Harding’s case Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, in Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Both speakers made the case for holistic versus reductionist science and for a reappraisal and acceptance of animism – the belief that a “soul” or “spirit” existed in every object, even if it was inanimate.

Goodwin asked us to reconsider the stories of science, by telling different stories we find a different path. Following a Jungian, archetypal model Goodwin identified a “new” story that has emerged in our culture, which is actually the re-emergence of an old story – which alters our perceptions on science and opens up through animism a new connection with nature. This story is the myth of the Orphic Trinity – Chaos, Gaia and Eros.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim
Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros,
fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and
overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men
within them.”
Hesiod, Theogeny (c.700 BC)

Goodwin posited the era of the 1960’s as the genesis point of this archaic revival, first with the re-emergence of Chaos in the work of mathematician Edward N Lorenz. Lorenz attempting to apply mathematical modelling to meteorological phenomena and weather prediction discovered that apparently small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. These variations in initial conditions could be so numerous and so slight that they made accurate prediction of future effects impossible. What he described as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow has become better known as Chaos and has become an important part of mathematical and scientific enquiry. It would appear, as some anarchists and magickian’s claim: that “chaos never died”.

"Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Edward N. Lorenz, paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972)

“For the mass of practicing scientists... the change did not matter immediately... But they were aware of something called chaos... More and more of them realized that chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data... chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science.”
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

The second element of this archaic revival was the re-emergence of Gaia in the pioneering earth systems science work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This work finally gained its crucial nomenclature as a result of a conversation between the neighbours Lovelock and novelist William Golding in 1969.

“Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.”
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”

The final element of the trilogy is Eros, the force of love, also known as Eleutherios, "the liberator" and through that shared role connected with Dionysus – god of intoxication, music, peace, the civilizing urge – and thus also connected with Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries (I wrote about some of this previously in The Rebirth of Orpheus over at Rubedo). Goodwin asked the audience “who here lived through the 1960s? Can you recognise anything familiar here in the aspects of this deity?”

“THE COURT: "Erotic," did you say?
THE WITNESS: Erotic.
THE COURT: E-R-O-T-I-C?
THE WITNESS: Eros. That means love, your Honor.”
From the Court Testimony of Timothy Leary at the trial of the Chicago 7 (1970)

“Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.”
Lennon/McCartney, All You Need is Love (1967)

Goodwin indicated that we are still in the process of integrating these archetypal forces into our science and into our culture, with the attractive force of Eros suffering from most neglect.

The discovery of DNA by Rosalind Frankin (Crick, Watson, Wilkins etc.) in 1953, with its beautiful double helix formation began a quest in the biological sciences to decode the organism and gain some total understanding of life. Goodwin quoting Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene presented the case that the completion of the human genome project had, rather than bringing such a total understanding, in fact revealed how large the gap is between genetic information and biological meaning. How the particular structure of organisms develop largely remains a mystery, there is some embodied meaning in the cells which is inaccessible to consciousness. Goodwin posits that the development and organisation of form by cellular DNA occurs through the action of a kind of language – and that particular forms are the stories told in that language.

Thus herbalists may develop the ability to read the story of a plant as manifest by its form and intuit the qualities of that plant. The holistic enquiries of wise women and cunning men from the era before reductionism took hold may have genuinely born a “shamanic knowing” that is not only dismissed by our modern science but is beyond its conception. Goodwin stated that meaning is “immanent” not “transcendent” – when science attempts to de-particularise and abstract, it in fact moves further from rather than close to meaning.

So Goodwin asked, how do we engage with this? How do we go about re-integrating this sense of nature in our science and culture? How do we achieve harmony with our fellow entities? Relating this back to the Gaia Foundation’s work and the influence of theologian Thomas Berry, Goodwin suggested that by beginning to change our conceptions we participate in a greater change in consciousness, that this is part of “engaging in the great work” – the alchemical transformation of ourselves and society – the paradigm shift which might be understood as the Magnum Opus.

An Inconvenient Truth

Another tip from Keith, the full version of Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Watch it here by clicking above. Taken from the source on Daily Motion.

(To good to be true (inconveniently) the producers would prefer you not to see this film for free I'm afraid. It's now been taken down)

The official site for the film is here, and features more information including a free downloadable "companion educational guide".


Support the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Sites for sore Is

There’s been a slight site redesign, more forced on me than chosen by the “modernising” ethic of the new blogger… anyway that’s boring geekspeak, I’m falling asleep already myself. In the course of putting the site back together again I had to re-upload the banner links in the sidebar, and this seems a useful point to reflect on those:

The Oil Depletion Protocol

“A Plan for a Sensible Energy Future...
As we move into an era of oil depletion and energy constraint, everything from transportation to medicine to food to climate change response strategies will be affected. Almost everything we do is dependent on oil.
The transition to a future of reduced oil supply will require the development of clean, reliable, and renewable energy sources and reduced oil production and consumption. The Oil Depletion Protocol will allow us to accomplish both - simply, conservatively, and cooperatively. It is a plan for a sensible energy future.”

The oil depletion protocol is a plan to move the planet through the end of the fossil fuel era by getting the countries of the world to sign up to a simple plan: oil importing countries reduce their annual imports by the global depletion rate; and oil exporting countries reduce their annual exports by their national depletion rate.

My good friend Keith has recently added a new e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website calling on the UK to sign up to the Oil Depletion Protocol; you can add your voice to the call here.

Richard Heinberg author of the book The Oil Depletion Protocol has been interviewed recently speaking on the subject here.

Irrepressible

This Amnesty International campaign seeks to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. Bloggers around the world are encouraged to carry the Irrepressible badge which will display material which has suffered from attempts at political censorship. Individual are also encouraged to sign up to a pledge on Internet Freedom. Learn more here.

Stop the War/Stop Trident March

Slumming It

"The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it'll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway."

Mile Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt in “Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities”

On Monday evening I went over to RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) to see a talk by Mike Davis, the American cultural historian, political activist, social commentator etc. (you may remember me linking to his piece on Dubai in a post last year). Davis is in London all week doing a series of events on different subjects ranging from the future of the “New Left” to his new book: Buda’s Wagon: A Brief. History of the Car bomb.

The RIBA event was billed in different places as being about “Architecture and Climate Change” or his earlier book Planet of Slums. I was happy to hear about either, and it actually turned out to be about both and about much more. The issue of climate change was neatly folded back on to and revealed in the light of the economic hegemony of neo-liberal globalisation.

Having become pretty disillusioned with “leftist” politics and generally feeling that, while the intellectual analyses and critical techniques of Marxist and Socialist thought were still valuable, close association with these as part of a political programme was an ideological trap that kept us in a dualistic dead end – it was amazingly invigorating to be shaken about a bit by a serious hardcore mind from the Left.

The social and ecological strands met in an examination of the emerging “landscapes of inequality”, where resource depletion and climactic change are already causing the migrations and tensions over migration which many see as an unavoidable part of the global future. Davis focussed on the American South West, especially the US/Mexico borderlands – the area he is most familiar with – but also referred to the analogous spaces of the Mediterranean, and the near Middle East.

I went to the talk imagining that Davis would be outside the energy descent sphere and that I would be taking what he said and doing my own mental associations and analysis to assimilate what I learnt there with what I’m learning from elsewhere. It quickly became apparent that I wouldn’t be required to make the connections alone – “peak oil” and “peak water” rolled off Davis’ tongue with familiarity, he referred to suburbanisation and Kunstler, he could see what was coming.

When it came to the environmental issues, Davis reinforced what I’m increasingly learning: that the necessity for consensus in the IPCC report, and the lead in time on the data it is produced from mean that it reflects a “moderate” view far from the beliefs and predictions of many serious and significant climate analysts, and that new information is already radically reshaping our view of what might be currently occurring. Most significant is the rising body of opinion and data indicating rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves, concomitant sea level rises, the passing of several significant tipping points, and the possibility that, as Lovelock suggests, the Earth is adjusting to a new hot state – that we could be seeing the end of the Holocene.

After years of it being on my list of “to reads”, Davis’ compelling prose style has finally led to me picking up his “LA book” City of Quartz, which is excellent and I think that pretty much everything else he has written is going to have to follow… One thing I am especially interested in following up on, is encapsulated in the quote at the top of the entry. A lot of my current thoughts are about the possibility of Transition Cities - a scaled up version of the Transition Town idea. My gut feeling was that a city the size of London (let alone one the size of Bombay or Karachi say) could not effectively and sustainably function in a state of energy descent. Recent conversations and other inputs (not least Stewart Brand's "City Planet" lecture at the Long Now Foundation) have encouraged me to re-examine this supposition. I will return to this issue as my ideas develop.

Rethink Trident

I’ve talked about this before – nuclear weapons are a nonsense. In the UK we have an opportunity again to call a halt to this madness. Let’s not replace Trident.

Today the Compass Parliamentary Group launched RETHINK TRIDENT with a front page story in the Independent.

This is what they have to say on the matter and how you can help:

"The Government is proposing to replace the UK’s fleet of Trident nuclear submarines and extend the life of existing missiles in plans that carry an estimated cost of £20bn. But they have given MP’s, scientists and campaigners just three months to weigh up the proposals, due to come before Parliament in mid-March.

Jon Trickett MP, Chair of the Compass Parliamentary Group, has been working to construct an umbrella group of organisations who believe that the case for the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent has not been sufficiently made, and that the timeframe for parliamentary approval of the decision is premature and insufficient.

The initiative - RETHINK TRIDENT – is supported by the following organisations: United Nations Association of Great Britain, One World Trust, Friends of the Earth, Scientists for Global Responsibility, War on Want, National Union of Students, British American Security Information Council (BASIC), SERA, MEDACT, People and Planet, Greenpeace, Oxford Research Group, CND, UNISON and CWU.

Today RETHINK TRIDENT released a statement endorsed by a Committee of 100 including faith leaders; academics; prominent politicians from all parties; leading authors and poets; musicians; and celebrities.

The full statement reads: We believe that:

- Britain should not be rushed into a premature decision to replace its “Trident” nuclear weapons system;
- More time should be taken for Parliamentary and public scrutiny and debate;
- The urgent need is both to halt the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries, and for all states which possess them to move more rapidly and substantially towards nuclear disarmament;
- Therefore the priority for the UK government should be launching a renewed diplomatic initiative to seek a breakthrough in disarmament and non-proliferation negotiations, as it has taken a lead in relation to such global challenges as climate change and acute poverty.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams; Professor Stephen Hawking; Bianca Jagger and Vivienne Westwood are amongst those who put their names to the statement. (view the full list).

The statement and the broad-base of support that we have worked to secure are intended to encourage MPs to support an amendment along the same lines as the statement. The Compass Parliamentary Group will work cross-party to ensure the amendment gets the necessary support.

This is our only chance to mobilise in the Commons to prevent Trident being renewed – calculations are that we will not win on an outright ‘no’ vote but have much more chance on a ‘the case hasn’t yet been made’ vote. If the Bill goes through as the Government proposes it will be the end of the matter for the foreseeable future."


Please lobby your MP to support the RETHINK TRIDENT initiative! For details on how to contact your MP click on to http://www.upmystreet.com/commons/l/

If you’re not already, please become a member of Compass and help support our work including this important campaign, join at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/join.asp

Sign up to the RETHINK TRIDENT public debate taking place at 7pm in Parliament on Tuesday 27 February 2007, full details at: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/events.asp

Sign the petition against TRIDENT at the 10 Downing Street website:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/trident/

March against TRIDENT on 24th February assemble 12 noon at Speakers Corner then proceed to rally in Trafalgar Square. Flyer here: http://www.cnduk.org/pages/24feb.pdf

Memories of romance

Yesterday I walked over Golders Hill Park and Hampstead Heath to visit the Keats House, where the poet John Keats lived before leaving for Italy in an ultimately vain attempt to recover from tuberculosis. The disease had killed his mother and brother before him. Tuberculosis was known at the time as consumption or 'phthisis' from the Greek for wasting. When I reflect on the fact that he died aged 25, his poetic achievements seem outstanding, and his loss seems such a waste too.

I spent a while in the garden of the house afterwards and my mind travelled back sixteen years to a trip I had made alone around Europe, partly in pursuit of the romantic poets. I went to the Château de Chillon on Lake Leman where Byron set his poem "The Prisoner of Chillon" and where his scrawled name still remains carved in the wall; I went to the Villa Diodati near Geneva where Byron and the Shelley's and Dr Polidori sat up telling ghost stories, the genesis place of Mary's "Frankenstein" (and I was thrown out of the garden - it is a private house); I went to Pisa where Shelley lived and wrote "Adonais"; I went to Rome and to the rooms by the Spanish Steps where Keats died; I went to Rome and to the Cimitero acattolico where Shelley and Keats are buried (and now Gregory Corso too).

The Protestant Cemetery is a beautiful place, when I was there a rain shower came and went and the Autumn sun that followed returned the water to the sky in twisting spirals of mist between the gravestones and the trees. Shelley himself wrote that "It might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place", and so he was - the stone of his tomb engraved with lines of Arial's song from The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/into something rich & strange". Shelley drowned off the coast of Tuscany aged 29.

In the course of my trip I also had the chance to see how wasted modern youth could get too.


Wasted Youth

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)


In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.


IMAGE: Keats House, Hampstead; Shelley's Tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (1873) by Walter Crane [actually shows Keats' gravestone]; Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.

Weary of Time

Last Sunday the Renoir Cinema had a screening of “Ah! Sunflower” a 1967 documentary on Allen Ginsberg in London originally shot for WDR Television in Germany (now available on DVD from The Picture Press). The screening was introduced and later discussed by the novelist psychogeographer Iain Sinclair who had participated in the films production. The programme also included some short films, loosely gathered under the sobriquet “Beat London”.

In the introduction Sinclair read from Kodak Mantra Diaries, an account of the period which formed his first prose work (recently republished by Beat Scene magazine). Forty years old, some of Ginsberg’s words at the conference The Dialectics of Liberation sliced through the intervening period. Prescience or a further record of how long we have had knowledge and not action?

We can leave the planet
We can destroy the planet
We’ve never had history with those possibilities
We’ve had little wars in Asia
Or wars between America & Europe
But we never had a whole planet that could blow itself up
Or could destroy itself WITHOUT even blowing itself up
By destroying its forests
& changing its weather
& making carbon dioxide all over
Raising the temperature of the earth
Melting the polar ice cap
Causing a flood again

Art (not just) for Art's Sake

Last year I read the revised edition of Suzi Gablik's 1984 book Has Modernism Failed which dealt quite a lot with how divorced from the "world" art was becoming in the 20th Century - disappearing up its own fundament in a post-modern frenzy of self-congratulation and self-flagellation.

Well here we are in the 21st Century, I wonder if anything is different? I think there is a movement towards more meaningful engagement - but perhaps that is because I don't really look to the art world "greats", the largely male celebrity figures of the art world for my artistic fix. I'd rather stick with the marginal figures, the unknowns, the gallery system rejects and refuseniks. I don't really want some totalitarian style social realism, neither am I normally turned on by agit-prop - nevertheless I do sometimes enjoy an art piece which actually says something.


I've recently seen a few things that "say something" which I've quite enjoyed. Graphic work by James Joyce for the Stop Climate Chaos campaign - some of his work is currently on display at The Social. Photo-montages by veteran trouble maker Peter Kennard (sadly I missed his recent exhibition). Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher's installation at the Gillespie gallery last year. In these works the politics, while central, do not take over to the denigration of their artistic appeal. That is to say that the aesthetics and the politics are in symbiosis, rather than one being in service to the other.

But for some reason I still find Mark Wallinger's Tate Britain installation "State Britain" a bit wanky. Not that I have seen it in the flesh, but the whole idea seems to be to take a political act and turn into an artistic one. I think maybe I'm looking for something going in the opposite direction?

IMAGES: Santa's Ghetto (2006) by Peter Kennard; Dump the Dinosaurs (2006) by James Joyce; the sound of stones in the glass house (2006) by Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher; and Brian Haw's Protest (2006?) photographed by Mark Wallinger.

Call Me A Kaafir

“The mother and father are your attachment to beliefs and blood ties and desires and comforting habits. Don't listen to them! They seem to protect, but they imprison. They are your worst enemies. They make you afraid of living in emptiness.”
The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (Harper, San Francisco, 1997)

“I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jackboot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all. Herein I probably differ from most people, who believe in Belief, and are only sorry they cannot swallow even more than they do. My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in that Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is: "Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief." ”
E.M Forster “What I Believe” in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Everywhere these days I seem to get into conversations about religion, about faith, about belief. As an adolescent I chose a vigorous atheism, a faith in science, in an enlightened secular society. I wanted to throw off a cultural attachment to unquestioning belief, an inheritance in which the past is our parent. But it didn’t really seem a difficult choice, I felt that the world was sloughing off false beliefs and moving toward a reasoned future, logic would eventually eradicate systemic flaws like monopoly capitalism, nuclear weapons etc etc. Since then I have mixed with friends who have traversed worlds of spirituality and mysticism – I’ve remained a tough nut to crack, but I have gained more respect, tolerance and open mindedness about the spiritual path. Not for religion mind, not for the religio – the obligation, the bond, the submission.

And now a debate I thought was over is all around me, fundamentalism in many forms manifesting in the world – Western Imperialist, Right wing Christianity, Zionism, Wahhabism. All of it to my mind - fascist.

That ‘spiritual’ belief can lead people towards violence, hatred, oppression is so amazingly depressing it’s difficult to know how to react to it. In me it evokes that adolescent spirit which determined to throw off unthinking for intelligence, for inquiry. It stiffens me as Forster says, it makes me say: "I am a Kaafir" – an unbeliever.

A recent television documentary - Dispatches – Undercover Mosque (Channel 4, 15^th January 2007) [widely available on YouTube] revealed some of the hate speak being traded in radical mosques – homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, intolerance. In conversation last night a friend and I despaired at this version of Islam, wished that other followers of the faith were more visible. Perhaps it is too easy to say “what about the Sufis?”, but isn’t it also too easy to concentrate on the purveyors of hate?

Those who trade in hate cover their weakness in many faiths, ideologies, politics – I have no wish to isolate radical Islamists.

I believe in a perennial wisdom that is in all faiths and yet is also felt by the faithless.

I believe in LOVE.

Like This

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this?

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God's fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
Like this?

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don't try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to "die for love," point
here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.
This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn't believe that,
walk back into my house.
Like this.

When lovers moan,
they're telling our story.
Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.
Like this.

How did Joseph's scent come to Jacob?
Huuuu.

How did Jacob's sight return?
Huuuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he'll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us.
Like this.

[Rumi, Translated By Coleman Barks]

In Barbarity There Are No Comparisons

“I will say nothing about Nuremberg. In barbarity there are no comparisons. Whether it is here or there, it is all “here”.”

Gandhi, Letter To Prema Kantak, October 16, 1946

In a ghoulish manner, but with an intellectual excuse to paste over my amorality I went on to YouTube last week found the full version of the Saddam execution and downloaded it (using firefox/greasemonkey) [I wont post a link to that, I’m sure you can find it yourself if you “need” to].

In the presentations I do on ITN and Reuters news material as part of my job I often like to find archival material that reflects or interacts with contemporary news events. The film of Saddam's execution and the resulting controversy seemed an excellent topic to pursue as it includes moving image technology and "news value" as an inherent part of the story.

An obvious historical event to use as a point of comparison seemed to me to be the Nuremberg trials and subsequent executions of leading Nazi's - so I went back and took a look at the newsreel record of that.

Gaumont British News devoted a whole issue to the verdict and sentencing of the Nazi's - however it states that they were not allowed to film the sentencing. Using images of the court doors being closed in front of them they overlay audio of Goering being sentenced to death by hanging. Gaumont did not cover the executions themselves at all (in the first issue after the executions took place Gaumont leads with racing from Newmarket).

British Pathe News issued a story over the dilemma of whether or not to show the executions, preceding the hangings they ran a screen and press publicity campaign asking their audience their opinion. They received 980 replies. 950 of which stated they did not think the hangings should be shown. The Pathe story also mentions questions being asked in the House of Commons regarding the showing of the executions.

The American edition of Universal News, illustrated the execution part of their coverage with footage of American soldiers hanging a weighted dummy from the gallows, thus getting their money shot without showing the real deal.

British Movietone News featured the American reporter Kingsbury Smith, the only journalist to witness the executions, speaking about what he saw of the Nazis being hanged, including the detail that following the hangings the dead body of Goering (who committed suicide a few hours before the executions) was brought in to demonstrate to the witnesses that he too was dead. Kingsbury Smith didn’t reveal in this piece, as he would in print, that a miscalculation of the weight of Julius Streicher meant that he did not die instantly:

“He went down kicking. When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body of and pulled down on it. We were all of the opinion that Streicher had strangled.”

Kingsbury Smith, The Execution of Nazi War Criminals, 16 October 1946 for the International News Service

Saddam Hussein's execution, in addition to everything else it is, seems emblematic of a new era of the audio-visual medium – one that circumvents the mainstream media, News or otherwise. This event was filmed on a mobile phone, spread around the world using P2P technology and then further distributed, manipulated and repurposed on web 2.0 sites like YouTube.

It shows what the mainstream news media will not show (and perhaps for very good reasons). [The Guardian faced harsh criticism, including from a large percentage of its own journalists for showing a still from the film on its front page]. It fits into a genre that includes the militia beheadings from Iraq - and has a relationship with the "last messages" of suicide bombers, Jihadi propaganda from around the world (check Internet Archive for the Chechen and Ossetian end of this), but also the footage taken in Falluja by US Marines helmet mounted cameras (available on YouTube in both "raw" formats and in versions edited to heavy metal soundtracks - glorifying the destruction taking place). Since Vietnam, battlefield coverage has largely been absent from the news, these new technologies are re-revealing what it's actually like in a war – fucking horrible.

Of course there is also that argument that it is pornography that leads new developments in audio-visual technology - and perhaps all this stuff is pornography too? Hearing about some piece of film featuring this internationally known figure in a compromising position that the media wont show, knowing that you can probably find it on the internet, searching for it, downloading it, sharing it with others - are we talking about the execution of Saddam Hussein or 'One Night in Paris'? What are our motivations?

It is poverty to decide that a child must die

“It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
Mother Theresa of Calcutta

The “Money” section of Saturday’s Guardian newspaper had a half page article titled “The green revolution: Why wheat is luring the breadwinners” – which detailed how commodity dealers are taking advantage of the increase in global wheat prices.

“After making millions from pumping up the price of copper, zinc and other metals to record levels last year, speculators are piling into “soft” commodities such as wheat and corn amid drought warnings and global shortages”

Is this what they mean when they say the market will find solutions to the problems of global warming, fossil fuel decline etc.?

At present these increases in price are happily absorbed in the shopping baskets of the West, pence or cents on bread being almost invisible to all but the poorest parts of the American and European populations. The wholesale disengagement of price from value in the west, where discounting, loss leaders, sales, just-in-time delivery, e-commerce, globalised production, packaged products and services etc have confused everybody to the point of not understanding what anything is really worth anymore – have made the poorest parts of society practically blind to price rises in individual products too (Although Monday’s The Scotsman reports that “BREAD prices are set to burst through the £1-a-loaf barrier because of rising worldwide flour prices” seeing this as another burden on the British public already facing energy price rises, and increased mortgage payments due to interest rate rises). Avid readers will remember me touching on this issue last November.

In the Third World though these same price rises of staple foods can be devastating, and where they represent, as here, scarcity – inevitably lead to malnourishment, hunger and famine. If global climate change is responsible for the poor harvests, as it appears to be, then here we are seeing again how the poorest of the world, the wretched of the earth will feel the pain of our folly first.

Much is currently being written about how last years fall back in oil prices, reflected the Third World just being priced out of the market. Countries that cannot afford oil at $50 a barrel or above have just stopped buying - freeing up some supply for those who can, filling the gap between rising demand (in the West, China, India etc.) and static supply.

Climate change, peak oil – the world’s poor are acting as our buffer, but for how long? And what about the resulting effects – events on the Horn of Africa providing a current obvious example. Floods followed by drought in the late 1990s set the desperate stage for the actions that have followed in Somalia. The photograph of the dead child above is from the 1992 famine in Somalia, according to the World Health Organisation currently a quarter of Somali children die before reaching the age of five. Is it any wonder that people turn to extreme action, fundamentalist faiths in the face of this situation? As the USA bombs there, as another front of its “war on terror”, I wonder how many of the children who survive will grow up understanding their actions, understanding the behaviour of the West.

A Day of Permacultural Fun

Anybody out there in the London area thinking about Permaculture, but feeling they need to know a little more about it before committing to an Intro course or full Design course? Then this may be the event for you:

A Day of Permacultural Fun

* Ever wondered about Permaculture?
* Wondering where to take your garden's design next?
* Want to be more involved in active sustainable solutions in your
neighbourhood?

Join us on the 13th Jan 2007 for introductions and celebrations from 2-5pm @
the Hornbeam Centre, 458 Hoe Street, E17 (nr Bakers Arms junction).
The cafe will be serving up South Korean vegan fayre, coffee and cake from 11-4

Regular weekly organic fruit and veg stall from 10-3pm selling wide range of
fresh produce and including seasonal specials.

2-3pm: Introduction to permaculture. Designing for people, communities and
the environment. Find out about weekend courses in North London - guaranteed
to make you view problems and solutions differently.

3-4pm: Video showing 'The Power of Communities'. Your chance to see this
inspirational video documenting Cuba's experience of Peak Oil and
trasformation to a low-energy society. Followed by short discussion about
local opportunities for action.

4-5pm: Exclusive 'book launch'- Earth Writings by Graham Burnett. 3 decades
of 'earth right' articles and artwork from punk to permaculture - with
readings and discussion.

Brought to you by:
Organiclea Community Growers www.organiclea.org.uk
Naturewise www.naturewise.org.uk
Spiralseed www.spiralseed.co.uk

for more info contact 07786657713

Low Energy Computing?

A couple of stories I saw today reminded me of the computer stuff I was going on about a while back. Sparked off by a Ran Prieur piece (Ran's site seems to be down in 2007 anyone know what's going on?).

Andrew Brown has an anti-Vista broadside on the Guardian online site, indicating the continuing inefficiency, pointlessness and greed associated with software upgrades. The raft of subsequent comments ran the point home.

This is put in further relief by the latest news regarding the $100 “One Laptop Per Child” project for schools in the developing world which should be launched this year. The BBC Online site notes:

“The computer runs on a cut-down version of the open source Linux operating system and has been designed to work differently to a Microsoft Windows or Apple machine from a usability perspective. Instead of information being stored along the organising principle of folders and a desktop, users of the XO machine are encouraged to work on an electronic journal, a log of everything the user has done on the laptop.”

Apparently the machines will be powered by a 366-megahertz processor from Advanced Micro Devices and have built-in wireless networking. They will have no hard disk drives and instead use 512 MB of flash memory, and have two USB ports to which more storage could be attached.

This could be exactly the kind of stripped down computing we should be aiming for on a grander scale. Hopefully these small machines will be lower energy users, there has been talk of wind up models – solar power would be another obvious winner if the technological and sustainability hurdles can be leapt over. The One Laptop Per Child Wiki suggests that a retail version may become available for sale to help cross subsidise the units sent to the developing world. These apparently may have some enhanced capabilities such as built-in Ethernet and extra flash RAM.