Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

The small private acts of life

I mentioned Mobi Ho’s introduction to his translation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness in my last blog.

Thich Nhat Han suggested to Mobi that he do the translation slowly and steadily, in order to maintain mindfulness. And he translated just two pages a day. Translating a text such as this is of course rather different from typical daily life. But it is a reminder to give our full focus, our full mind, to each task, however trivial.

It would be good advice for writing a blog.

But what of life on a public – on a world – stage, the other side of life? There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the conflict in Syria and the focused and private attention given to a translation – or any private activity.

I’m reminded again of that building in Syria used down the centuries as both a church and a mosque.

What we’ve lost in Syria is a way of life which held Christian and Muslim together. It may be a decade, or decades, before we can bring them together again, in a way where they can share again the small (and all-important) private acts of life.

We must hope it will not be forever. History tells us it so easily could be.

Compassion and conflict

This is a longer blog than I would wish. But the subject doesn’t allow of anything else.

I’ve been reading the early pages of Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the brutal skirmishes between British and Vichy France troops in 1941, with Palmyra and Tripoli both figuring in the conflict. It brings home again how key down the centuries Syria has been, as a pivotal territory in the battles between countries and empires. And how, until recently, Aleppo and Palmyra had survived.

The Australian troops who came out of Syria alive then found themselves Japanese POWs after the fall of Singapore, suffering a different and sadistic brutality – the main theme of course of the novel.

On another tack …back in the 1960s Thich Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam. It ‘drew young people deeply committed to acting in a spirit of compassion’.  They refused to support either side in the Vietnamese conflict and ‘believed that… the true enemies were not people but ideology, hatred and ignorance’. Several were kidnapped and murdered. (Quotes from Mobi Ho’s introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.)

The juxtaposition of these two conflicts in not intended to draw out any comparisons. In Vietnam the School was at least able to function, at a sometimes terrible cost. Syria in 1941 and today is a different and terrible kind of all-out conflict.

But compassion – is there any room for compassion in conflict? The battle in Syria is a battle for a way of life, against a perverted ideology. The practice of compassion is such circumstances is a mighty challenge. But compassion, and specifically the saving of life, must come before any desire or insistence on retribution or punishment. If in this case there is scope for working with the Assad regime – not an easy case to argue – and by extension with Iran, and also with Russia, then we should do so.

The PM in the House of Commons today spoke of Assad ‘butchering his own people’. Even so, treating with the Assad regime, and bringing to an end one conflict, may be the only way in which we can focus on IS and Al-Qaeda, with whom we can never treat. I’m sure this is already being discussed behind the scenes: it will take extraordinary diplomacy to achieve.

We should not delay. I read today that an Al-Qaeda-related group has seized a strategic airfield in Syria near Idlib. The momentum is still moving in the wrong direction.

Jeremy Corbin – the future?

Enough now to say that I supported Michael Foot 35 years ago, and realised my mistake.

I love the idea of Jeremy Corbin. The socialist, the rebel, supporter of the disadvantaged and the outsider, a rallying-point for opponents of austerity. But his solutions of another time, not least nationalisation, soft on Europe, careless in his national (certain trade union leaders) and international friends (for example, Hugo Chavez) – to be of the left is a sufficient credential. He’s rowing back toward the centre now that the leadership is within his grasp. How he copes if elected, how much he accommodates, how, come the Labour Party conference, he copes as the new leader – that will all be telling.

Debate, passion, moral purpose – they are all there in the Labour leadership debate. And a remarkable level of sanity and even camaraderie in the face of big differences of point of view.

What there will need to be if Corbin is leader is a hard realism as well as the passion. History is littered with unintended consequences. Without that hard realism Labour will fragment and we will be left without an effective opposition. No longer do we have the LibDems holding the Tories in check. Labour could easily – I fear probably will – score a spectacular own goal.

By the rivers of Babylon

The second day of September, the rain has relented, it’s 7am and the sun is shining, and down by the Thames the Canada geese have gathered, and I have as usual to navigate my way around both them and their droppings. The perils of running.

All so peaceful, though I can hear a gentle sloshing from the river if I stop beneath the big sycamore, and listen.

I run back into traffic, and a little bit of civilisation, although schools are still not back, and the roads still have a hangover August holiday calm.

I think of Sangatte, and the migrant crisis further afield in Europe as I head back home. Good fortune hardly describes my situation. We rejoiced so much in the Arab Spring, and it’s turned out to be the last and terrible throw of the neo-con mentality, where we assume that our western democratic ways are somehow inevitable, that history is pre-determined. I trust we will never think or feel or argue that way again.  It may be the highest aspiration of mankind, but the wholly unnecessary and unpredicted fate of Syria, visited on Aleppo, on Homs, on Palmyra, and the open channels for migrants through Libya, remind us that we meddle at our peril. We may affect to dislike the el-Sisi regime in Egypt, but we know it will serve a purpose in the end. Syria was on a slow irregular and tortured path before 2011, but it was stable, and the old country survived alongside the new middle classes in the cities.

I will read again William Dalrymple’s description of traveling through Syria in From My Holy Mountain. The image of a building shared as a place of worship by Christian and Muslim communities stays in my mind. And there was Palmyra to visit, a place of wonder.

Sometimes I run quietly and enjoy the silence and, God willing, the sunshine. On other days the thoughts come flooding in.

Palmyra

All I can do here is mark the attempt to destroy temples at Palmyra, and remember how others burnt the library at Alexandria and destroyed the Buddhist library and university at Lalanda, in the 13th century AD. Lalanda it seems was lost almost through inadvertence, simply not understanding what you destroy. Did the Turks mean to destroy Smyrna so totally in 1922?

Destroying Palmyra is about the destruction of heritage and culture, at the highest level that makes us human. And it’s intentional destruction. That’s what sets it apart. Brute invaders wantonly destroying had little understanding of what they destroyed, Here we have something different: history seen as a perversion and a visible sign of a debased humanity. Calculated and willed destruction. Whereas we see Palmyra as its highest expression.

There’s an Islamic notion of paradise intertwined with all this destruction. IS would do well to read Dante, and the different levels of hell he matched to the levels of the misdeeds of their earthbound perpetrators. Or to reflect of the notion of karma, reaping what you sow.

But we are of course In a different world, where different and crueler criteria apply.

I have no solutions, and I’m not writing this in anger, though I have felt fury. I’m writing this simply to mark the threat to Palmyra and to record my own sense of how much it matters.

In a country of so much human suffering should we care, and does it matter? And, yes, of course, it does.

Watching and listening

Saturday evening gave us a beautiful sunset and we sat outside and watched the bands of red build and fall away. Our last, almost our only supper in the garden this summer?

Retreating indoors there was that marvellous final sprint from Mo Farah in the World Cup 5000 metres. Would I could have seen it live. Then, by way of total contrast, listening on the iPlayer to Andras Schiff playing the Goldberg Variations at the BBC Prom. A lightness of touch and an intensity, and a profound hush across the RAH.

A few seconds and a full hour – both will stay with me.

And that sunset wasn’t half bad.

Gooseberries …

Today I’ve planted a gooseberry bush. There is a first in one’s life for everything. For now it’s straggling, but I look forward to a rich harvest, and gooseberry crumbles and fools and ice cream in years to come. I read that gooseberries and gooseberry bushes were especially popular among cotton-spinners in late 18th century Lancashire, which may in a minuscule way explain why we had one in my North Cheshire edge-of-spinning-country garden in the 1950s. I have I believe a silk-weaver in my Lancashire (Leigh) family tree. But I’ve yet to find a cotton-spinner.

Cotton mills were well-established in Manchester by the early 19th century. Up to 80,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Fields at the time of the Peterloo Massacre. Spinning had been industrialised on a massive scale, and there would have been no space for vegetable patches, and no gooseberry bushes.

High-rises don’t allow for small spaces out back. They remain emblematic of an older, more stable and (as we imagine it) quieter life, preserved now maybe in smallholdings and the gentle art of pottering.

The apple tree, the gooseberry bush and the rhubarb patch: part of old England…

Exploring multiverses

Now for something just a little more heavy duty …

I’m intrigued by multiverses, one version being that every possibility that exists in any and every moment could exist somewhere, spawning an infinite number of universes. We’re only aware of the one of which we’re a part. Robert Frost wrote about the road less travelled. Imagine each road as a universe. It would be simple if there were two roads. But we know there could be many, infinitely many, diverging out from each of our lives, from everyone’s life.

It’s possible to challenge free will on the grounds that every action is pre-determined, every action whether human or physical has an inevitability. But according to quantum theory many possibilities exist, nothing is therefore inevitable, and it’s only the act of observation, when a wave function collapses, that crystallises a moment, and then it’s the case that ‘all actions [that a wave function allows] will actually occur’.

Even more does this make my own life unique: the thought that could be countless other ‘me’s, generated each nano-second of my existence.

I may worry about my identity, and losing it at my death, but I could have countless identities. It’s simply that we don’t know about each other.

Buddhism allows for this possibility. There is no restriction on births in time or indeed space. But there is no place for karma in quantum physics! And rebirths in Buddhism could eventually lead to enlightenment, and there is no enlightenment in a quantum world. Just extraordinary and infinite subdivisions of time and space .

And that is my thought for the day.

There is still a place for karma, and rebirths, if you believe in them. Mathematicians may explore and explain other possible universes, an infinity of them, but we have the world as we live and experience it.

So, much as I wonder over Schrodinger’s cat, and achieve a feeble half- or quarter-understanding, I’m in the end content to wake each morning and wonder at this extraordinary world of which we’re apart.

One world is wonder enough.

Blackberry breakfast

Walking on a summer’s morning in Bushy Park, by a river (no name!), between the river and a stream, where no-one else goes. I can run, walk slowly, meditate as I walk, stop and linger, hear the slightest of sounds, watch fish swimming upstream, catch burdock burrs on my shorts, break a hemlock stem, pick early blackberries.

I see but don’t read articles on secret places in newspapers. They tell you where they are. Any special place that depends on quiet. Where? They tell you. There is space to fill in newspapers.

I will not divulge the whereabouts of my secret corner.

I’d not had breakfast that morning, and the two blackberries which melted in my mouth at maybe about 9.30 were my first food, and first of the year. And that was the high point of a beautiful day. Silence and sweetness and all things simple focused down to a single moment.

Ravilious and Rembrandt at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Place in our modern world has been usurped by space, extended space, we’re always looking beyond the boundaries, for the next place along the line, rather than exploring where we stand….

The Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is all about place, about the artist’s acute sense of landscape, and all the man-made items (fields, chalk figures, fences, ships, propellers…) which give each landscape its identity.  I’m reminded of Finlay MacLeod’s wordlist drawn from the Isle of Lewis (see Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, pp16,17): recording a living landscape woven through with the workings of man over many ages.

Ravilious is painter re-creating landscape, but the sense of place is almost palpably real.

Also in the Dulwich gallery is Rembrandt’s A Girl at the Window. This is enigmatic, extraordinary, a simple place, by a window, real, and yet imagined. Place needn’t be landscape!

Barbara Hepworth (exhibition at Tate Britain, summer 2015) identified not with a specific landscape, but with the forms of landscape, the Yorkshire hills of her childhood, and the hills and tors and megaliths of west Cornwall. Place is internalised and abstracted, but the sense of connection remains, and Hepworth’s work is all the more powerful if we’re aware of that Cornish link.

Also at the Tate just at the moment – Tracey Emin’s bed. If ever there was ‘place’ it’s this… but it’s momentary, woman-made, personal. And with no connection with any external landscape. Place without history and connections other than what we can glean about her own life story. Very much a place for our own time.

She was asked by the Tate if she’d like to choose two paintings to place on the wall near her bed – a curious kind of installation, and all the more so given that she chose two Francis Bacon paintings, one of a woman slumped over a settee, the other of a dog. The images are cerebral, disturbing and simple, they have no history, and the dog indeed needs a circle drawn around it to give it any kind of ‘place’ at all.

We need a place outside ourselves, place with history and with future, place where we’re part of a continuum. Ravilious and Hepworth do of course freeze place in time, but at the same time they open our eyes as observers, they enhance the experience of place. And as they moved on, to the next painting, the next sculpture, so do we as observers.

But in the case of the Rembrandt I have to admit I’m loathe to move on! There’s something in her gaze, and we don’t know who she is… There is history there, and a future, an enigma we’ll never resolve.