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| Dog in Water 2014 Watercolour |
From My Diaries
I
I had the
impression, at least with some, that I was getting through.
There was an ease,
an absence of something, that would get me thinking. If my efforts caused me no
embarrassment, I’d go on, encouraged and quite confident; having mastered the
accent as a feat of mimicry, I was able initially to create the impression that
I was, if not fluent in the language, at least sufficiently competent for some
kind of exchange.
But then came the
reply, with native fluency, and I was stymied. I felt, and must immediately have
appeared, a fraud, an interloper, and usually at that point I sensed that any
sympathy or curiosity gained just flowed away, and one of us quite quickly
would turn and move off.
~0~
There are a few
who still refer to The Great Capitulation. You can’t necessarily assume they
like the term any more than I do, but it radiates enough bitterness. For some,
that’s important. Many, however, say there was never a moment of mass dawning
when everyone, everywhere, and around the same time, became aware that a fight
was coming; that they’d need to try and get away, at the same time knowing it
would probably be futile; that they’d end up giving in, or be restrained by
force.
Something must have
happened though. Something to prompt the
change from undisguised autonomy and unguarded agency, to a state where you
must hide all of that and play along.
If there was
anything like a revolutionary spirit it arose when it was already too late.
When the handover was already so complete that we couldn’t have made a place
for ourselves. It seems clear now, that everything was designed for separation
and subjugation. Everything. How did it go so far before anyone noticed what
was happening? In retrospect it’s not clear, but it was certainly efficient and
thoroughly done. Once it began, the assertion of an alternative view would have
seemed too ludicrous for words.
~0~
When one finds
oneself in a room full of strangers, a useful rule is that one needs quite
early on to approach someone and start a conversation. Chances are they’ll be
happy you made the approach, and you’ll talk, and for the rest of the evening,
you’ll have a sort of ally; someone you now know, in a way, and can return to
as you drift around, for further conversation or just a witty remark in
passing. The principle is a useful reminder that if you leave it too long, waiting
for someone else to make the first move, beyond some point it’ll be too late.
When you’ve all been wandering around for a stretch of time, waiting until it
is acceptable to leave, it becomes more and more awkward to make an approach.
It’s less likely then to appear natural or spontaneous; more likely that your
approach will seem forced …a necessity…just stiff and uncomfortable. That’s why
you have to make a move early on.
~0~
Now, apparently,
no one ever wanted it to be like that. Every little part of the system is
having to be rehabilitated, not least the concrete design of things; apart,
that is, from a few eccentric and incongruous exceptions. These moments of
“sensitivity” I find variously charming and naïve, and inadequate, to say the
least. Here’s an example: You run a major
highway though a grassland passage, having it cut clear across a crucial route
between two positions. You later realise that this was a misguided bit of
planning – or absence of planning, if you ask me - and you add a bridge that
spans the highway, allowing unbroken passage from one end of the route to the
other. So as not to cause alarm to its users, you contrive a continuation of the
soils and flora so that the surface of the bridge becomes in effect a narrow strip
of the same “fabric” as the grassland.
It works, but you can see why it might have caused some quietly to smile.
~0~
Although in cities
we live apart, and despite our physical isolation from the rest in separate
comfortable places, word gets around, as they say.
B.A.
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| An Incident 2014 Acrylic on wood panel |
“…In our
extremities the captain and people told me in jest that they would kill and eat
me, but I thought them in earnest and was depressed beyond measure, expecting
every moment to be my last. While I was in this situation, one evening they
caught, with a good deal of trouble, a large shark, and got it on board. This
gladdened my poor heart exceedingly, as I thought it would serve the people to
eat instead of their eating me; but very soon, to my astonishment, they cut off
a small part of its tail and tossed the rest over the side. This renewed my
consternation, and I did not know what to think of these white people, though I
very much feared they would kill and eat me.”
From the diary of Olauda Equiano, a
Nigerian born in 1745, kidnapped and sold into slavery.
~0~
“Every ruling
minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom
it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret
of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades [of uprising] break that
present.”
John
Berger, G, 1972
~0~
…Jacques
Derrida in his lecture and essay of 1997, The Animal That Therefore I Am,
on the now legendary interaction he had
with his cat.
He
continues, accusing the greats of western Philosophy of neglecting – or
denying? - what to him seems critical…
…...”But
since I don’t believe, deep down, that it has never happened to them, or that
it has not in some way been signified, figured, or metonymized, more or less
secretly, in the gestures of their discourse, the symptom of this disavowal
remains to be deciphered. …”
~0~
”It is as if a court, at the moments of their
conception, had sentenced them all to have their heads severed from their necks
at the age of fifteen. When the time came, they resisted, as all workers
resist, and their heads remained on their shoulders. But the tension and
obstinacy of that resistance has remained, and still remains, visible – there
between the nape of the neck and the shoulder blades. Most workers in the world
carry the same physical stigma: a sign of how the labor power of their bodies
has been wrenched away from their heads, where their thoughts and imaginings
continue, but deprived now of the possession of their own days and working
energy.”
The photograph is
of a group of members of DISK, the left confederation
of Turkish trade unions which was declared illegal after the coup d’etat of
1980. Many of its members, and members of political parties also declared
illegal, were arrested, tortured and killed.
John Berger describes a photograph showing a
row of men in And Our
Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, 1982
~0~
“…The public purpose of zoos is to offer
visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a
stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze
flickers and then passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They
scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can
any more occupy a central place in their attention.…That look between animal
and man which may have played a crucial role in the development of human
society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than
a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied
zoo visitor is alone. …
Modern zoos are
an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man. …”
John Berger, from Why Look At Animals, 1980
~0~
Outside, the
Irish chugger called Roy, collecting for Save
The Children, said, “Take care of the children and they’ll take care of the
animals.”
~0~
Like our bodies
and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which
is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has
been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of
which no-one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”
W.G.Sebald The
Rings Of Saturn, 1995
~0~
Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past
40 years, says WWF
Guardian, 30 September 2014
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| Dog and Hands 2014 Acrylic on paper |
