Cassandra Voices

Category: History

  • Confronting ‘the Russia in Ourselves’

    The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a native cunning in need of taming. Throughout the nineteenth century British imperialists looked on their seemingly ursine counterparts with a mixture of dread and superiority. William Makepeace Thackery’s poem ‘The Legend Of St. Sophia Of Kioff’ (1855) contains a typical portrayal of their Asiatic barbarism:

    Down they came, these ruthless Russians,
    From their steppes, and woods, and fens,
    For to levy contributions
    On the peaceful citizens.

    The ‘Great Game[i]’ of that time involved intrigues between British and Russians agents. India was the ultimate prize, with the ‘Near East’ forming part of an expansive theatre. Curbing Tsarist Russia’s encroachments brought British military expeditions into Central Asia. There they met the bellicose Afghans – who dished out one of the most ignominious defeats in British military history: the 1842 retreat from Kabul, when all but one European and a few Indian sepoys from Sir William Elphinstone’s 4,500-strong army limped back to base in Jalalabad.

    Great Game Cartoon from 1878.

    These colonial intrigues endowed the English language with a term now more commonly used in a sporting context: ‘pundit’, originating from the Sanskrit word ‘pandit’, meaning ‘knowledge owner’, or ‘learned man’. These local informants provided intelligence on the warlike peoples inhabiting the inhospitable terrain between lush India and the endless steppe. Tales were embellished to please the ear of the listener, moulding enduring Oriental stereotypes. Today’s pundits on international affairs also draw, perhaps unwittingly, on historic accounts, and are similarly prone to over-statement.

    By Jingo

    Nineteenth-century British Russophobia popularized the term ‘jingoism’, which can be traced to a song commonly sung in Victorian musical halls:

    We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
    We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
    We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
    The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

    The Anglo-French victory in the Crimean War 1853-56 checked Russian designs on a Mediterranean port, but the dispute simmered, as Tsardom became a byword for tyranny – ironically, given the brutality of the simultaneously expanding British Empire. Projecting one’s worst characteristic onto to a remote ‘other’ is not restricted to individuals.

    By the end of the nineteenth century British imperialists felt more secure in their hold over the ‘jewel in the crown’, and another, Teutonic, enemy had arisen, aspiring to weltmacht (‘world power’): Germany was upsetting the balance of power in Europe, and required containing.

    Détente with Russia – which from 1891 had been in alliance with the French – followed, culminating in the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, and eventual alliance during World War I. Long before the unexpected Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, however, British policy makers were worrying about the consequences of a Russian victory on the Eastern Front.

    These concerns reached fever pitch after the October Revolution, and the triumph of the Reds in the Russian Civil War, which included an unsuccessful intervention by Allied forces in support of the Whites. But by 1920 the Red Army was in command of most of the former Russian Empire, and had reached the gates of Warsaw. A shattered Germany, experiencing Communist insurgencies, lay ahead, before ‘the miracle of the Vistula’ – the victory of the Polish forces under Marshall Pilsudski, supported by the French. The Polish-Soviet conflict was resolved by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, bringing respite for two decades.

    In the Western imagination, during the 1920s and 1930s the Russian menace merged with the Red Peril, and a layer of ideologically-driven ruthlessness was added to the character. American reactionaries used the scare to destroy the labour movements that were then making inroads. The clampdown on the American left involved draconian measures (instigated by, among others, a young J. Edgar Hoover) against ‘subversives’, such as five-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, sentenced in 1918 to a ten-year prison sentence for urging resistance to the military draft, later commuted to three years. The media played its part, including disseminating the forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which established the myth of Jewish Bolshevism. America would bend principles where necessary to keep out the ‘Commies’.

    In Europe in 1939, the uneasy peace on the Eastern Front ended with the unlikely Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, ushering in the fourth, and most savage, partition of Poland. Hitler repudiated that Pact in 1941, with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing alliance between Britain (and eventually the United States) with the Soviet Union decisively changed matters. The murderous Red Tsar, Joseph Stalin, was affectionately known as ‘Uncle Joe’, as long as the Nazi foe persisted.

    Predictably, relations deteriorated rapidly again after the war – especially after the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 – but the prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) brought a Cold War, lasting forty years.

    John le Carré

    From an imperialist perspective, World War II was a pyrrhic victory for Britain, which completed its metamorphosis from global hegemon to medium-sized client-state in the bipolar geopolitics of superpowers. The shambolic invasion of Suez of 1956 was the dying gasp of the British Empire, and the ‘winds of change’ swept through Africa during the 1960s.

    To a large extent, the United States inherited Britain’s role as the world’s policeman, although the U.S. has shown greater reliance on proxies – ‘divide and conquer’ – the extension of ‘soft’, cultural power, and economic manipulation – with the Iraq and Vietnam Wars notable exceptions.

    As part of a contiguous Anglosphere, the United States nonetheless inherited various tropes about a Russian ‘other’, extending back into the nineteenth century. The McCarthyite witch hunt in the 1950s against Communist sympathisers, especially in Hollywood, showed the U.S. at its most paranoid.

    The excesses of the American intelligence services both internationally, through the CIA, and internally, through the FBI under its long-time director J. Edgar Hoover, are well documented. These included targeted assassinations, foreign coups and mind control experiments (the MKUltra project saw U.S. citizens being dosed with LSD, generally without their consent or knowledge). In any intelligence war, the U.S. could play just as dirty as its opponent.

    In the latter half of the twentieth century a new layer to the Russian mystique was added by the Cold War literature of John le Carré, and other spy novelists. Karla, a recurring le Carré character, emerges as the archetypal devious, ruthless and ideologically driven Russian spymaster.

    That is not to imply that the Soviet and successor Russian regime have not been villainous, and manipulative. According to Ben MacIntyre in his account of the extraordinary career of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who spied for the British, the KGB ‘had long excelled in the art of manufacturing ‘fake news’;’ taking ‘’active measures’ to influence public opinion’, and ‘sow disinformation where necessary’[ii].

    But the organisation was also beset by money-grubbing corruption and institutional decay, especially as ideological fervour wavered in the great chill of the final decades before glasnost and perestroika, under Mikhail Gorbachev. After being posted to Copenhagen in the early 1970s, Gordievsky discovered that the recruitment of informants was ‘an invitation to corruption’, since most officers invented their interactions, falsified bills, ‘made up their reports and pocketed their allowances.’[iii] Upon being posted to London at the end of that decade he then found that most of the information sent back to Moscow by the heavy-drinking KGB bureau chief was ‘pure invention.’[iv]

    The Russia of the Western imagination refuses to conform to reality. Indeed, the threat may be aggrandized by self-serving writers. It is in the interest of the powerful Military Industrial Complex, for U.S. society to remain on edge, at war-without-end. In one rare slip, Lockheed Martin Executive Vice-President Bruce Tanner revealed to a conference in 2015 that his company would see ‘indirect benefits’ from the ongoing war in Syria.[v]

    Al-Jazeera reported that the ‘black budget’ of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn – under President Obama’s watch – in 2013. That was only for the secret programmes, not the far greater intelligence and counterintelligence budgets.[vi] These agencies at times use mouth pieces in the press, and academia. The import of information being released to the public by U.S. agencies competing for funding and survival surely requires careful analysis.

    One former CIA station chief in the Middle East, characterised the diverging roles of the main agencies to the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh as follows: ‘Don’t you get it Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks … And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes.’[vii] U.S. spooks are every bit as manipulative, and far better funded, than their Russian equivalents in a discipline the former CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton described as ‘the wilderness of mirrors’.

    Vladimir Putin is not a mass murderer in the mould of a 1930s dictator, intent on imposing an inflexible ideology on the rest of the world. Crony capitalism or strongman rule could be used to describe his regime. Importatnly, his ambitions appear to be limited to restoring the territory of the Soviet Empire to Russia, rather than fomenting World War III.

    The Russian President is probably best viewed as a Shakespearian villain, whose violent impulses, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, ‘stop short at ten or so cadavers, because they have no ideology.’[viii] This offers scant consolation political prisoners in Russian prisons, but Putin has certainly shown no genocidal tendencies. Soviet technology has been in decline vis-à-vis the West since the 1960s, and with the breakup of the Union the rump Russian state lost important technological and industrial centres, such as Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine; but the English-speaking world remains fixated on the threat.

    Russia’s ‘strengths’

    The academic author Timothy Snyder is a leading purveyor of Russian history, and mythology. In a recent interview he stated:

    Throughout the Cold War, Russia was always better than us when it came to penetrating their enemies and breaking them down from within. Rather than smashing things overtly, they would work from behind the scenes to cast doubt on things. They’d insert their people into enemy organizations and slowly create chaos from inside. They’ve always excelled at turning people against each other.

    The British, in particular, by the end of the Cold War had gained the upper hand over their Soviet counterparts, with their man in London’s KGB station feeding her Majesty’s government almost anything they would wanted to know, including that then Labour leader Michael Foot had been in the pay of the KGB until 1968.[ix] Gordievsky’s intelligence-gathering was of an enormous assistance in Margaret Thatcher’s (and Ronald Reagan’s) establishment of good relations with the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev. Also, by the early 1980s the CIA had over one hundred covert operations underway inside the Soviet Union, and at least twenty active spies.[x]  Nonetheless Snyder insists on the fiction of an omniscient Soviet spymaster transitioning into a Russian web guru:

    Russia lost the Cold War because the Cold War was decided by economics and technology; it was a material competition. But after the Cold War, we moved into a different world, a world defined by the internet, and that’s a much more psychological world. The techniques they’ve been honing for decades are much more powerful in this new digital world, where emotion dominates and everyone is connected and there is so much information floating around. This is a world of information warfare, and that suits Russia’s strengths.[xi]

    Snyder’s anachronistic generalisations about the Russian character belie the distinction between the ideologically-driven Communists under the Soviet Union, especially prior to the Prague Spring of 1968, and the more venal aspirations of the successor Russian regime.

    One academic review of his recent book (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, Tim Duggan Books, 2018), portraying Putin as a latter-day Nazi, sets the record straight:

    The fact that Timothy Snyder is an influential public intellectual and respected historian is no reason for scholars not to challenge his facile and polemical analysis of the contemporary Russian state. By obfuscating the broad debate on Russia, Snyder denies the need for a serious, unbiased analysis of those features of the Putin regime that could be characterized as fascist. Distortions, inaccuracies, and selective interpretations do not help illuminate what motivates the Russian leadership’s self-positioning on the international, and in particular the European, scene. Simplistic reductionist techniques and invalid reasoning further confuse the analysis—and bias policy responses.[xii]

    Snyder’s polemics appeal to the mass media market, and “bias policy responses”. It is as if failings in our own civilisation appear to demand external explanation.

    Timothy Snyder, historian and author, teaching at Yale university in 2017.

    ‘The Russia in ourselves’

    In his account of the career of Carl Jung, Laurens van der Post recalled, ‘many post-war occasions when he [Jung] spoke with increasing urgency of the necessity for us all to understand that the Russian problem in the external world could never be resolved without more disaster unless we first dealt with the Russia in ourselves.’[xiii] Through the Cold War and beyond, from South America to Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S. acted with just as much contempt for human rights and international law as the Soviet Union, or Russia. Even under Obama’s Presidency, drone strikes – extra-judicial assassinations – were a recurring projection of U.S. power.

    The main difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’ has been, for the most part at least, domestic preservation of the Rule of Law, including freedom of expression, in the latter. This has permitted criticism on the fringes, if not in a mainstream media often beholden to corporate interests.

    The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s stoked Russian fears of encirclement, bringing a desire for a strong, militaristic, leadership to protect the country from outside interference after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. More recently, EU leaders sought to absorb the Ukraine into the Western orbit. This is despite many parts of that country containing Russian-speakers with a nostalgia for the predictability of life under Pax Sovetica.

    Ukraine’s fertile plains were the bread-basket of the Tsarist and Soviet Empires, making many Russians understandably apprehensive about a complete divorce. Moreover, Russia’s military planners see these flat lands as military indefensible, and her ‘natural’ frontier as extending to the Black Sea, Carpathian mountains, and flood plain of the Vistula.

    Squeezed in the middle, Ukrainians labour under kleptocratic and tyrannical rulers serving interests in both East and West. But many Western commentators have failed to acknowledge the machinations of the latter, while magnifying the role of the former amidst a twenty-four hour news cycle that offers little time for dispassionate reflection.

    Trump-Russia

    The arrival of Donald Trump at the U.S. Presidential helm may prove to be one of the worst disasters to afflict the world’s environment. He is the quintessence of a loud-mouthed American who knows nothing of the world, or even his own country, while irrationally believing in his powers of divination, and capacity ‘to get the deal done’.

    For many commentators the success of his malignant buffoonery requires an external explanation, drawing attention from the disgust that many ordinary Americans justifiably felt towards a Washington capital seething with lobbyists, spooks and over-paid bureaucrats. Enter Vladimir Putin in the Karla role – himself an ex-KGB agent – manipulating not only Trump, who is supposed to have been captured in flagrante delicto romping with Eurasian hussies, but also the American people who – according to this narrative – have been stupefied by Russian trolls: “Russia’s strengths” according to Timothy Snyder.

    Whatever about the veracity of any claims of Russian collusion, or the idea that U.S. intelligence community could so easily be outflanked, psychologically we appear to be obscuring the ‘Russia in ourselves’. The United States is an increasingly dysfunctional and unequal society. Aside from the dismantling of Medicare, the appeal of Trump to blue collar American is not entirely irrational. He promised to protect indigenous U.S. industry, and ‘drain the swamp’ of a widely despised capital. ‘Lying’ Hilary Clinton was correctly seen as an establishment figure who would do nothing to alleviate the continuing decline of working class America, bedevilled by obesity and drug addiction, while real wages have stagnated for decades.[xiv]

    No doubt Putin sought a friendly regime in the White House, but pundits habitually exaggerate the Russian leader’s influence, just as many journalists blithely accepted the nonsense about Saddam Hussein constituting a threat to global peace. The accumulated myth of the sly and aggressive Russian has been given a new lease of life.

    A Colossus of American Journalism

    Seymour Hersh is a colossus of American journalism, who has interrogated the structures of power internally and externally since the 1960s, invariably setting the record straight. His real breakthrough was exposing the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; he went on to reveal chemical and biological weapons programmes in the late 1960s; internal repression of anti-War groups by the CIA; mafia intrigues; the foreign policy dirty tricks of Nixon and Kissinger; the hypocrisy of JFK’s Camelot, U.S. links to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes in the 1980s; and the horror of Abu Ghraib. Without his tireless work we would know a great deal less about Uncle Sam’s unseemly side.

    It is reassuring that neither Hersh, nor his family, were harmed over the course of an ongoing award-winning career, contributing especially to the New York Times and The New Yorker. He records just one death threat in that time, from a prominent mafia fixer in the 1970s.[xv] Among the American establishment there were, and still are, progressive forces resisting foreign misadventures and barbarities, such as using a sack full of fire ants to extract information from an internee, as occurred during the so-called War on Terror.[xvi]

    Seymour, ‘Si’, Hersh, photographed in 2004.

    Fascinatingly, however, in his Reporter: A Memoir, Hersh bemoans the unwillingness of editors in the New York Times to support investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s, which frustrated him at one point to such an extent that he hurled his typewriter out the office window – the following day the window was replaced and nothing more was said of the incident.

    Hersh recalls:

    Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed had won … the courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and an Attorney General in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.[xvii]

    The point about freedom of expression in the English-speaking world is that mainstream media only generally conduct investigation into threats to political and economic stability. The Watergate investigation was permitted, as this was an illegal attack on half of the U.S. political establishment; also, a significant proportion of America’s elite began to viewed the Vietnam War as unwinnable after the Tet Offensive in 1968, permitting critical articles form Hersh and others. But investigating white collar crime can be to the detriment of advertisers, and therefore altogether more difficult to pursue.

    Holding his nerve

    Hersh delivers a withering assessment on further media decline in the Internet era:

    We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.[xviii]

    The problems are by no means restricted to the purveyors of fake news, external or otherwise:

    The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[xix]

    He concludes: ‘it’s very painful for me to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today.’[xx]

    As an old school reporter that pursued stories as doggedly as his body permitted, Hersh now considers himself an odd-man-out, and has found his recent reporting falling foul of editorial disfavour, even in supposedly progressive outlets such as The New Yorker, and The London Review of Books. Thus, while investigating the assassination of Osama bin Laden, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who had close ties to the Obama administration, complained about his use of the ‘same old tired source’, much to the grizzled Hersh’s bemusement.

    Perhaps more surprisingly, The London Review of Books delayed publication of another article he wrote challenging ‘the widespread perception that Bashar Assad had used a nerve agent two months earlier against his own people … The article, which was taken by many as an ad hoc defence of the hated Assad and the Russians who supported him, and not the truth as I found it’,[xxi] worried the editor. As a result Hersh took the story to Der Spiegel.

    Corroboration arrived in early 2018 when Defense Secretary James Mattis diverted from the previous narrative about the chemical attack, saying: ‘We do not have evidence of it’. Mattis can hardly be described as a Putin supporter, considering he resigned over Trump’s abrupt announcement that he would pull U.S. troops out of Syria – which presumably gives a free hand to the Russians. An investigator as formidable as Hersh generally has his ducks in a row.

    Russia Today

    In many respects, the state news agency Russia Today acts as a mouthpiece for Putin’s government. At times it does purvey what appears to be fake news, casting a fog of uncertainty over the reliability of everything it publishes. But to suggest mainstream media in the West is not also serving vested interests would be naïve, and fails to recognise that what is delivered as news is a product of editorial decisions: facts do represent opinions, contrary to one banal advertising slogan of the Irish paper of record.

    Any online publisher, even a reputable state broadcaster such as the BBC, measures success in ‘clicks’, albeit the bait must be sophisticated if it is to ensnare the educated reader. A bare-chested, unapologetically homophobic Vladimir Putin performs the role of pantomime Russian villain with aplomb. Even The Guardian is not immune from dangling half-baked investigations before its consumers.[xxii] Seymour Hersh, notwithstanding his contempt for the U.S. President, stated in 2017: ‘Trump’s not wrong to think they all fucking lie about him.’[xxiii] The Trump-Russia affair may prove to have more to do with inter-agency disputes – cops and robbers – than Russian machinations.

    But the buffoon Trump must have been manipulated by the Eurasian spymaster, whose agencies have ingeniously transformed the Internet into a labyrinth of conspiracy theories and distracting nonsense, right under the noses of the CIA, FBI and NSA. This allows us to avoid assessing the ‘Russian in ourselves’, and acknowledging the pathologies of Western societies, from social media addiction to ever-widening inequalities, and ecocide.

    With mainstream media failing to pursue vested interests, the greed that Seymour Hersh points to may have won, for the time being at least. It is simpler to blame a straw Russian bear, rather than examining the serious failings in our own societies.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] See Peter Hopkirk’s canonical account: The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, New York, Kodansha, 1992.

    [ii] Ben MacIntyre, The Spy and the Traitor, London, Penguin, 2018, p.46

    [iii] Ibid, p.26

    [iv] Ibid, p.130

    [v] Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani ‘DEFENSE CONTRACTORS CITE “BENEFITS” OF ESCALATING CONFLICTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST’, The Intercept, December 4 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/12/04/defense-contractors-cite-benefits-of-escalating-conflicts-in-the-middle-east/ accessed 15/1/19.

    [vi] Jonathan Turley, ‘Big money behind war: the military-industrial complex’ Al-Jazeera, January 11th, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/big-money-behind-war-military-industrial-complex-20141473026736533.html, accessed 14/1/19.

    [vii] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.300.

    [viii]  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, New York, Perennial Classics, 1974, p. 173.

    [ix] It is believed that most of these payments were used by Foot in order to keep afloat the left wing newspaper, Tribune, he edited. When the cabinet secretary, the politically neutral Sir Robert Armstrong, was presented with this incendiary information he elected not to inform the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, assuming, correctly, that Foot would lose the forthcoming election in 1983. MacIntyre, 2018, p.142

    [x] Ibid, p.200

    [xi] History News Network, ‘Yale’s Timothy Snyder says Russia pioneered “fake news”’, May 4th, 2018, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168751, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xii] Marlene Laruelle, ‘Is Russia Really “Fascist”? A Comment on Timothy Snyder’, Ponars Eurasia, 9/2008, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/russia-really-fascist-reply-timothy-snyder, accessed 15/1/19.

    [xiii] Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, London, Verso, 1976, p.22.

    [xiv] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, 7th of August, 2018. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xv] Hersh, 2018, p.234.

    [xvi] Ibid, p.318.

    [xvii] Ibid, p.247.

    [xviii] Ibid, p.3.

    [xix] Ibid, p.4.

    [xx] Ibid, p.5.

    [xxi] Ibid, p.330.

    [xxii] Erin Durkin, ‘Trump: report FBI investigated him as possible Russian agent is ‘insulting’’ The Guardian, January 13th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/13/donald-trump-russia-new-york-times-washington-post-fbi-putin, accessed 14/1/19.

    [xxiii] ‘Tyler Durden’, ‘Seymour Hersh: “RussiaGate Is A CIA-Planted Lie, Revenge Against Trump”’,  ZeroHedge, 8th of February, 2018. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-02/seymour-hersh-2018, %E2%80%98russiagate%E2%80%99-cia-planted-lie-revenge-against-trump, accesseed 14/1/19.

  • Mary Beatrice Midgley – An Appreciation

    Mary Beatrice Midgley was a giant among philosophers, though she only published the first of her nineteen books at the age of fifty-nine, a feat which is unfathomable today in more than one respect. That anyone could start so late and produce so much, and so vibrantly (she produced in addition over two-hundred-and-eighty articles) is close to miraculous – her last book What is Philosophy For? appeared just a few days before her ninety-ninth birthday. But more than that, that a philosopher could wait until she was actually ready to say what she wanted to say is something that is hardly permissible today – ‘I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I’m jolly glad because I didn’t know what I thought before then’, she explained.

    Mary was an adult among adolescents, but she remained in a permanent state of youthful rebellion. One of the constant themes of her work is meta-philosophical. ‘Despite its irritating features’ she tells us, ‘philosophy is not a luxury but a necessity’. Humans need philosophy whenever things get difficult: politically, ethically, personally, psychologically, scientifically, emotionally. Any area of the messy, brilliant, muddle that is human life can be an occasion for puzzlement or anxiety, and this is where philosophy, with its ability both to get down to the nitty gritty and to bring the big picture into view, comes in handy. It is not an affair reserved for the ivory tower but an activity as much part of human life as raising children or preparing food.

    Philosophy ought not to be produced hastily to satisfy assessors or auditors. Work of that sort, Mary observed, is almost bound to be negative — to work quickly one must almost invariably accept the background assumptions of predecessors and complain only about the details. In contrast, Mary’s work, and her view of philosophy in general, was both positive and holistic; while the philosopher needs something of the doggedness and rigour of the lawyer, she also needs the vision of the poet; to be able to see how things connect, to understand how thought gets mired in confusion when the myths in terms of which certain concepts are intelligible no longer serve us. And in this case what is needed is an ability not only to diagnose but to create– myth, image and metaphor. Mary’s exemplification of her own image of what philosophy should be, and involves, was peerless. Her prose was starlit by quick and vivid turns of phrase that took thought in new directions. Philosophical argument, she writes in her last book, is more like chasing rabbits than mining for nuggets of gold.

    Two myths that no longer serve us resurface in Mary’s work repeatedly; the myth which see humans as opposed to animals, and, relatedly, the myth of the social contract which pictures us all as unconnected to each other as atoms stranded in the void. (Mary reminds us that the myth was created for seventeenth century male house-holders performing their civic duty on behalf of their household: it forms part of the background picture against which female emancipation seemed to many incoherent).

    Both myths, transposed to the contemporary scene, are destructive to human life, and the task of the philosopher – whom Mary compares to a plumber – is to sniff out the problem and to replace stagnant concepts with those that aid the flow our thinking and living. In picturing human in opposition to beast, we constrain possibilities for theorizing and acting in relation both to each other and to animals. If we change the picture and think of ourselves instead as a kind of beast—a human kind—we open up a different ethical vista. We might now recognize each other as creatures of passion, instinct and habit (as much as creatures of reason) and—as Cora Diamond has put it—also come to see other animals as our fellows.

    Likewise, in thinking of ourselves as featureless individuals or egos, loci of choice and unconstrained liberty, we dishonor and fail to make central in our philosophical theorizing the material reality that should be our very topic: how to live, and how, as human animals, social animals, we are radically and essentially dependent on each other. Mary’s work teaches us, reminds us, that our lives are held together through all manner of affective ties, fragile and precious, sometimes volatile, as well as the bounds of friendship and love. And this insistence brings into view another current of Mary’s thinking. Traditional philosophical ways of thinking about the human subject are gendered. A philosophy that falsifies women’s experience is bad philosophy.

    In turning again and again to the human scene, our shared forms of life, our human nature, and our capacities to create myth, image and narrative, Midgley evinced a philosophical attitude characteristic of three other distinguished moral philosophers of the last century, all of whom were her contemporaries at Oxford during World War II: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. All these writers, like Midgley, are recognised as re-appropriating a classical emphasis, derived from Plato and Aristotle, on human nature and virtue, which they then electrified with the teachings of Wittgenstein. In the years immediately following the war, the Quartet met regularly at Philippa Foot’s house in north Oxford to discuss the orthodoxies of the day, which, as Midgley wrote recently, they saw as disastrous and to which they voiced a unanimous and joint “No!’.

    This story of the Quartet is important, not just from the perspective of gender activism in philosophy, but because it reminds us of precisely those facts that Mary’s philosophy makes so plain. Philosophy, like human life, is not a pursuit for an isolated individual but for a group, a collective, a gang. An isolated thinker soon becomes drawn to fantasy, consolation, and narcissism: this group of friends in Philippa Foot’s living room remained firmly grounded in reality.

    The collaborative nature of philosophy is something that Mary has taught us, not only by her writing but by inviting us into her living room, where for the last three years we have regularly shared tea and biscuits and talked about topics as various as G. E. Moore, octopi, and Brexit. Mary animated the past for us as she painted vivid pictures of herself and her friends discussing Plato’s forms, plotting against R. M. Hare, ice-skating on the frozen Cherwell. She helped to make real the philosophy of A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin by locating it in space and time. But these conversations, so precious to us now, became something more than philosophical ‘research’ (a label Mary despised).

    As our friendship with Mary grew we came to rely on her sane, wise and philosophical outlook to help us not only with our work but with our lives. Philosophy as therapy came to life in Mary. In her living room our gripes about the impact agenda, the marketisation of the University and the pressures of the REF were transformed into occasions for philosophical work, historical reflection and calls to action: ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’, she would ask.

    Mary’s imagination and sense of a job to be done remained inexhaustible even as her bodily frailty diminished her physical territory to a couple of small rooms in Jesmond, Newcastle. Philosophers around the world were sent missives from her computer—‘Is history of philosophy still being taught?’, ‘Is it true that no-one reads Kant these days?’, ‘How can I find out more about Transhumanism?’. And she would send us out on missions too, waiting patiently for reports, while we went about looking in archives, chasing references, interviewing friends and giving talks about the Wartime Quartet (or, as Mary suggested, the Re-Socratics). We are terribly sad that we won’t have a chance to tell Mary about our latest trip to the Anscombe Archive in Philadelphia (‘Find out about Elizabeth’s family’, we were instructed. ‘We absolutely must know what was going on there!’).

    Something feels strangely amiss in the idea of an ‘Obituary’ for Mary Midgley – not least of all the discovery that Mary was not, after all, immortal. An obituary gives notice of an ending. It does so by isolating an individual, treating her as a single organism whose complete life can now be told. But Mary’s story and the story of her contribution to philosophy is, for us, only just beginning. That story places Mary back in her context, among friends, one dazzling half of a hundred conversations still unfinished—she was writing to collaborators on the morning of her death. Those conversations must now go on with new interlocutors and under these sadder conditions. It is up to us to weave Mary’s work into our intellectual lives and in doing so make it part of a continuous shared effort to ‘make sense of this deeply puzzling world’.

    This article was originally published for the Insitute for

  • A Life in Love with Music

    It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness; lulls to sleep the fretful child, and transforms the darkest landscape of a man depressed into a golden glowing cape.

    It is not just the spice of life, but our very life blood, perhaps the central issue in human and animal wellbeing, giving complete absolute freedom, psychologically, inwardly, then outwardly, through singing, dancing or playing instruments.

    It arrives with humour, typified by Enbie Blake, the ragtime pianist who, when asked, aged ninety, by Alastair Cooke, for his ‘Letter from America’, what he attributed his longevity to, replied: ‘I guess it was them French fries’. Or Jimi Hendrix, who before he died at twenty-seven quipped: ‘Once you’re dead, you’re made for life’. Likewise Thomas Beecham, the internationally acclaimed British conductor, who once suggested at a choral recording: ‘if the ladies will look more closely at their parts and see where the gentlemen come in, it will make for better reproduction.’

    It also inspires poetry, such as the ‘Dance and Provencal Song and Sunburnt mirth’ of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy’

    As my friend Jan Skrdlik put it: ‘Music is a special language to communicate everything from the heart’. Just hear him and his consummate pianist Petra Besa play with a passion, almost unheard-of in contemporary Classical music, to see how valid is that epigram.

    Go back two hundred years to the Rev. Sidney Smith, who the American ambassador called ‘the wisest man, if he had not been deemed the wittiest’: for Sidney music was ‘the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth’, the former unfortunately no longer, considering the price of a ticket to Glastonbury Festival, or Grand Opera.

    It is a dazzling world, from the first known song, the Hurrian Hymn no. 6 from 3400 BCE in Syria (would they have song now instead of bullets) to the 1264 pop variants of 2018 AD; if those first singers could see the variety of the folk/ethnic/jazz/blues/soul/RnB/Classical/electronic spheres they would surely gasp in awe. How quickly did it grow?

    Of the three main strands, Classical and Rock come from the folk of cottage and hut. Classical Indian ragas, arrived well before the monastic parchments of Europe, which engendered late medieval composers like Lassus (listen to his glory on the Christ Church College Choir recordings, conducted by Simon Preston).

    The stream of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque era of Bach (1650- ) and Handel’s legendary Messiah, a river flowing into the torrent of the Classical Age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (c. 1800); surely the latter brought us to the high water mark of musical expressiveness.

    I wonder had any among the thirty thousand who flocked to Beethoven’s funeral heard all nine of his symphonies (including the 9th with its ‘Ode to Joy’), the last five string quartets (Op. 135 the final one, with a slow adagio movement that arrives from no where, has a beauty so simple and pure that perhaps only the Busch, Amadeus and Hollywood quartets have captured its sublime essence in a recording), or his piano sonatas, thirty-two in all with the Op 111 at the end giving one a vision of Paradise, as played by the Jewish-Austrian Artur Schuabel, whose preeminent gifts were expressed in his comment: ‘the notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the resides.’?

    The rich Romantic nineteenth century saw a spread of greatness from France to Belgium – Cesar Franck’s violin sonata is unmatched – Spain, Russia (including the universally loved Swan Lake ballet of Tchaikovsky) to Italian opera. No way will we ever have another chain of composers like Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini; nor Belcanto singers who grew out of their greatness: Melba and Caruso are the best known, but can they rival Claudia Muzio the soprano, Fernando de Lucia the tenor, or Mattia Battistini the baritone?

    I – The Irish Mist

    Before looking in more detail at outstanding singing, let me dwell on the Irish miracle. From peat bogs, sparse sunlight, tragic potato famine, English oppression, less than five million living there today, the Irish have swept the world with intoxicating jigs and reels: so deft, poised, and elegant in set dances or even integrated with disco dancing, which I discovered at one New Years Eve party in Dublin that is burnt into my memory. It brought to mind Robert Herrick’s poem ‘When as in silks my Julia goes / then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows / the liquefaction of her clothes’.

    Did one man, Sean O’Riada, mainly, inspire, from the 1940s and 50s, a flood of famous bands like De Danaan, Planxty, The Chieftains, the Bothy Band and instrumentalists like Jackie Daly who almost reinvented the melodeon; at a recent Milton Malbay Festival I listened to sixteen playing slow airs, with Jackie, Sam Burke and Brendan Begley having me in tears. Also there, during an Irish Set Dance ceilidh, Martin Hayes played such spine-tingling fiddle solos of fantastic grace and fluidity that it is scarcely surprising that his new group ‘The Gloaming’ should have elicited such critical responses as ‘Brilliant’, ‘Exceptional’, ‘Blissful’ and ‘Exquisite’.

    At a pub in Spiddal, near Galway, you will find Johnny Óg Connolly, often with his Dad, playing melodeon; after Milton Malbay, you would not dare dream of encountering such rich tone colours, patterns so delicate, and virtuoso runs celestial, imbued with a poetry, arising from his great humanity, characteristic of the Irish in all walks of life. One cannot conceive how many instruments they can play from the utterly haunting uilleann pipes, via bodhrán (with its gentle and imaginative beat) to the tin whistle of Mary Bergin and Packie Byrne. And weekly, you can hear sessions for free in pubs throughout the land, from Kerry to Donegal.

    As a singer, both for ballads, lieder and opera, John McCormack alerted with his unsurpassed natural tenor voice how deeply the human voice can delve in to one’s spirit, this mantle now assumed by those like Mary Black, Tommy Fleming, Dolores Keane, along with a unique group of sean-nós singers, uniquely expressed in Gaelic and unaccompanied. The discovery of the year for me was Marianne McAleer at the Sidmouth Folk Festival in England. One of her song moved me to the extent that she stepped forward to hold my hand. No greater testimony to the unifying force of music, and generous Irish nature.

    II – Rock ’n’ Roll

    Cross the Atlantic for a twentieth century musical revolution, led mainly by African-Americans and Jews. Beginning with the 1920s New Orleans Jazz of bands like Jelly Roll Morton, simultaneously of Leadbelly and other formerly enslaved Blacks who sang the Blues to combat sadness; there sprang up gradually the modern jazz of men such as Charlie Parker, Tamla, Motown, Atlantic Soul, R&B, Trance, Dance, Rap and onwards.

    Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’, is magnetic like so many Blues numbers, and inspired Johnny Cash and folk supremo Pete Seeger to sing and perform it.

    A high point of traditional Jazz was highlighted to me by an Exeter estate agent I once knew bursting into tears after listening to ‘Blue Horizon’ from the 1945 Blue Note recordings of Sidney Bechet, then on the crest of his soprano sax playing career. Dancing to the English Traditional band of Chris Barber in the late sixties, was also an unforgettable experience, confirming what joy Afro-Americans have bestowed on mankind.

    From the Atlantic soul most must know the enveloping power of Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, but few can have sat down to supper with a daughter, Acacia, thinking the cream would be an eight-year-old bottle of Chablis, only for her to press the repeat buttons so as to hear Otis Redding’s ‘Those Arms of Mine’, twenty-seven times!

    The legendary Louis Armstrong, trumpet hors concours and entertainer, becomes a symbol of the African-American love of life and laughter, with words like: ‘all music is folk music – I ain’t ever heard no horse sing’.

    Erykah Badu is a sublime example of her community’s musical talents; aged seven, given a piano, she wrote twenty songs in the first week, crying ‘Music is kind of sick’. So free from modern constraints that she had three children by different men, home educating them in subjects like quantum physics and rare languages.

    But is music now in poor health? And does technology help or hinder?

    The early years of American pop/rock/country saw not only Buddy Holly, John Denver, but also Otis Redding die in plane crashes, in part down to having to play too many gigs. Since then, how many stars, and their fans have ruined their lives with drink and drugs, which is almost unthinkable in the folk and Classical spheres?

    The deafening, distorting sound of PA equipment is another downside, or thrill, depending on how you respond. The plethora of songs and possibilities for delight is illustrated by my son Hawthorn pointing out how I can put four hundred thousand songs on a hard drive, which he worked out would take thirty-four years, listening three-and-a-half-hours daily, to get through. The fever of this passion is shown by almost two hundred thousand tickets for the Glastonbury Festival selling out within fifty minutes.

    III – Musical Contrasts

    Two countries can act as a sublime contrast. Have you been lucky enough to hear French chanson or the mystical, almost metaphysical sound of Indian sitar or sarod, grounded by the drone of a tambura, which with the light intricate drumming of a tabla leads to a deeply relaxed meditative state?

    Thanks to my third daughter Natasha (you need family, as well as friends, to make you explore music), I tried to learn how to sing. Then sing in a classical raga mode. Talk about a revelation: going back to the first few words about complete absolute freedom, it is almost what singing Indian classical ragas allows, except that you move in the seven note, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni scale.

    I was taught by a Frenchman Gilles Petit, who can sing, dance, play any instrument from sitar to trumpet like an angel: but then he gives music by many routes a spiritual dimension. However, to learn how to sing ragas is a lifetime’s devotion, as with sitar. So beguiling an instrument that the Beatles combined with Ravi Shankar.

    Taking their elegant language, their refinement, joie de vivre, the French gave in Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ an incomparable lightening of heart. Could this be what the seventy-percent of English people, who are reportedly depressed at some point daily, require?

    As a young man seeing Maurice Chevalier at the Paris Olympia sing not only with voice but elbow took me into shocked joy; listening to Gilbert Becaud’s ‘Et Maintenant’ was dramatic, thrilling, statement about despair: ‘And now what I am going to do with the rest of my life … All the nights for what, for who / And this morning  returns for nothing … I’m going to burn all these nights / In the early morning I will hate you … I really have nothing to do’.

    Hardly understanding a word, I was, nonetheless, rivetted. The great signposts in this exhilarating genre are Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, and Jacque Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’, which offer romanticism gone wild: ‘I will offer you pearls made of rain, coming from countries where it never rains …. I will ride right there to see you dancing and smiling … Let me become the shadow of your shadow.’

    Ignore French musical culture at your peril!

    IV – Belcanto

    An Italian baritone born in 1856 at the crest of the Belcanto age, whose voice was marked by coruscating runs, and an ever-golden tone, Mattia Battistini shone in the French opera of Gounod and his singing of Gomod’s song Le Soir is perfection.

    Alas Ed Gardner’s description: ‘Opera is when someone gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings’ only hints at how exciting, ravishing that world can be. Through withdrawing from the stage for the three summer months, Battistini, uniquely, practised seven hours a day: how many could have matched his thirty-seven encores after one legendary recital?!

    Sadly what was Grand Opera is now a shadow of its spectacular singing: the last truly great tenor Jussi Bjorling died in 1960. But at least the English Touring Opera still capture its magic through superb direction and staging.

    I suggested you find De Lucia, the tenor, and Claudia Muzio, the soprano, to discover how expressive this art form can be.

    Rarely nowadays one has the luck of hearing a throwback to the golden nineteenth century in the form of Ileana Cotrubas. In an almost unknown opera at Glyndebourne, her singing of Cavalli’s ‘Calisto’ was so warm, beautiful, captivating that she became the recipient of a case of vintage champagne (Louis Roederer, Blanc to Blanc, 1966).

    Like Clara Haskil, and Alan Hacker, she has a sublime affinity with Mozart. If you are switched off by Classical piano, I doubt you could have resisted Clara’s playing it, I was certainly converted – in Chartres’s Cathedral Museum!

    V – Czech and English

    How does one yield to another musical genre? Is it great music or wonderful playing that is the key to Aladdin’s Cave?

    Alan Hacker, the clarinetist and conductor, is a glowing example of what is possible. Rather than giving up after being paralysed by a virus from the chest downwards as a young man, he became what William Mann in The Times called ‘a musician to be treasured in our midst’. He was surely the equal of Anton Stadler and Richard Mulhfeld for whom Mozart and Brahms wrote renowned clarinet quintets, equally adept on an 1804 boxwood clarinet and the modern Boehm.

    He inspired modern composers, taught so wisely at York Univeristy and Dartington, conducted both symphonies, some with original instruments, and opera – including Mozart in Stuttgart.

    When interviewed by the BBC, in saying there were too many notes nowadays, he pinpointed how virtuoso fast runs by players had sidelined the prime of music: tone colour. The descending triplet in the finale of his first recording of Mozart’s Quintet is an exquisite example of his playing. But as the saying goes, ‘Behind every man …’ there is no doubt that his wife Margaret contributed hugely.

    If you feel reluctant to move from orchestral to chamber music, begin with Schubert’s String Quintet (the first one that hit me) live from Prades with the Vegh Quartet and Casals, or a 2015 recording of Franck’s violin sonata in its cello version with the aformentioned Jan Skdrlik and Petra Besa. These Czech artists, like many from that land, are quite out of the common run; so don’t visit Prague only for the beer! The Lobkowitz Palace there has both two Canaletto paintings of London in the seventeenth century, and Beethoven manuscripts, surviving there after the court supported him at a critical moment.

    Due to Rock/Pop dominance the extraordinarily rich and human folk scene, except in Ireland, is marginalized. However, the English put on almost three hundred folk festivals annually, much enlivened by new young talent and encouraged by the ground-breaking Spiers and Boden.

    The breadth on offer is enthralling: Roy Bailey, an Emeritus Professor at Sheffield University, became a pioneer in songs about social justice – ‘Alyandabu’ with haunting harmonica from Rory Mcleod, is about an aboriginal woman who, when her rich husband died, and having had her children confiscated, fights back, is a marvel. Similarly Pete Morton’s ‘Two Brothers’.

    I don’t care who started it, I just want to see you play
    I just want to see you smiling in the glory of his day
    … Israel give him his hall back. Just stop all the noise
    I can see your two very overtired little boys
    … Palestine I saw you kick him, Israel sit still
    … Put aside all your anger, all the sorrow and all the pain
    … One day in the future this won’t mean a thing
    …. …. , as brothers you’ll sing

    A tour de force of a prolific, rhythmically-alive singer-songwriter who has transformed traditional songs like ‘Little Musgrave’.

    The Folk World in the U.K. breathes balance, with song and dance, moderation and harmony, after the miracle, around 1900, of Cecil Sharp collecting, in only fifteen years, six thousand songs and dances; Rev Sabine Baring Gould got a further thousand plus, while Alfred Williams accumulated hundreds.

    Sharp shows what we need to recover in music by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century folk song in rural areas was still an unbroken tradition. Whether labourer, thresher, cowherd, ploughman, pinder, goose woman, woodcutter, shepherd, cress-gatherer or bird-scaring boy, all trudged home to the accompaniment of song. Indeed in 1800, the poet John Clare’s father knew by heart over one hundred ballads.

    But English folk’s salient feature is humour. Thus Colum Sands between songs always tells funny tales, including one about his aunt, who, aged seventy-five after getting electricity for the first time, would only turn on the light to find the matches to light the oil lamp. Or when playing to the Inuits of Northern Canada, he met a woman who told him that in her tribe the men outnumbered the women ten to one. So he said: ‘The odds are good then’. She quick as a flash, riposted ‘Yes the odds are good but the goods are odd’. The same element is evident in Roy Bailey’s famous children’s songs: Kangaroos like to hop / Zebras like to run / Horses like to trot / But I like to lie in the sun.

    And of course there is Martin Wyndham Read, the great discoverer of Australian folk music, which he sings almost Belcanto; he has a store of hilarious stories from sheep shearers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8WXnewzk1M

    VI – Musicals

    In the world of musicals does ‘Singing in the Rain’ not stand supreme, for making you feel happy? And is that what we seek from it? But as with all music, hearing it live is so much more entrancing.

    Umojo, a two hour explosion of South African black singers celebrating a century of music, caused the entire audience to go wild with applause at the end when I went to see it. For your romantic hunger, there is ‘Le Concert’, a French film featuring Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concert;  just as pulsating is ‘Strictly Ballroom’ where the pasodoble reigns, amidst much humour.

    Without the Jewish people, music would be a shadow of itself, in pop/shows/Classical: Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’, is one such marvelous testament. Try not to miss hearing Fritz Kreisler the violinist, revered in his time; will one of his stature ever appear again? His 1926 recording of the Beethoven violin Concerto is superlative in a field of one hundred or more versions. Might he give you a longed for musical breakthrough?

    *******

    A rounded perspective on music is incomplete without surveying other animals. The moving and beautiful film ‘The Story of the Weeping Camel’, set in the Gobi desert of Mongolia features yurts and people in magnificently bright clothing. When a she camel after a long and difficult birth refuses to suckle her new born the small village calls in the town musician with a small cello-like instrument to play, whilst a woman sings. Within minutes a magical transformation is achieved!

    Recently Kathryn Roberts began her Cornish recital with the sad tale of the whale that sings at 52 Hertz, a frequency making it impossible to find a mate. And you can hear dolphins in Valencia, City of Arts and Sciences through a PA system singing to one another. How many other living creatures share this staggering gift of ours?

    As a farewell, let Beecham take the stage once more. Probably the finest and certainly the wittiest conductor from the UK, and much loved on the Continent by composers and concert-goers alike, at his seventieth birthday celebration the telegrams read out included one from Richard Strauss, whose operas he brought to Covent Garden and Sibelius whom he championed, after which Beecham cried ‘Not Mozart?!’ Has there ever lived a more vivid interpreter of that man’s perfect music? I doubt it.

    The featured image of Richard Wilson sitting on the shoulders of his son Hawthorn was taken by Toby Sirota at Meribel in Les Trois Vallees, France this year.

  • Pandora’s Slippery Box

    It is difficult to speak of abstract forces without personalising them, or investing them, magically, with consciousness and will. When we (by this I mean you; I never do this) refer to the markets as ‘growing jittery’, or ‘recovering’, we (you) indulge in the same thinking that saw maidens being sacrificed to appease volcano gods. When we talk of a giraffe’s necks being ‘designed’ by evolution to reach high branches, or a bat’s ears for echo-location, it is acceptable shorthand, but it is also a fundamental misrepresentation of natural selection.

    So while it is strictly incorrect for scientists to ascribe moral virtues to inanimate processes, it is still possible to say that one of the virtues of the scientific method is that it is anti-fabulist. It is arduous, collaborative, impersonal, and counter-intuitive. It moves forward, as the process of evolution does, in hard-won steps more often than grand moments of individual inspiration, and although there may be room for the individual genius, and times when the lightning of pure spirit ignites and inseminates the fertile ground of laborious research, mostly it is donkey work that advances the project of universal knowledge, and it is not just unromantic but positively anti-romantic.

    And this is a virtue because oh my goodness just think what it would be like if we trusted our imaginations and narrative impulses – those most charming, fascinating, and childish part of ourselves – with the serious and useful business of determining the movements of planets, or making our mobile telephones function.

    Inspiration without moral authority is of course sacrilegious, which is why Frankenstein’s creature was an abomination, and why the original Prometheus was very properly housed on a rock facility and provided with access to vulture-based liver extraction technology.

    We no longer believe that the sun is dragged across the sky by a chariot, or that the behaviour of rivers and oceans are governed by the whims of gods and spirits. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are objectively and absolutely correct in this. Your Tinder profile is not powered by app sprites, but by logarithms and sciencey things to do with sums, which I do not pretend to understand, but which I know to be real because the little computer that I carry around with me in my pocket has a digital watch and can take photographs.

    There is no ghost in the machine, or divinity in the device. Your tablet was not delivered from the sky to a digital Moses on a mountain top; it was pieced together painstakingly by children in a sweat shop from lots of little bits of silicon or whatever, according to rules, principles, and facts assembled over the millennia by observation, trial and error.

    It is one of the tenets of Creationism that creation cannot be in error, which is why fossilised Victorians in the Southern States of the United States cannot get their heads around the whole business of dinosaurs. In scientific methodology there is no room for error either, because if something is erroneous it is not science but nescience. And since no experiment conducted in good faith looks to a particular outcome, and the proper conduct of the scientific exercise scorns the idea of a ‘happy ending’, as priggishly as a vegan in a massage parlour, there can be no such thing as a failed experiment.

    Of course an experiment can feel like a success or failure. It is hard to imagine Dr Frankenstein rubbing his hands in triumph because he had managed through painstaking research to verify another way not to create life. The universal feeling of rightness or satisfaction that lightens the human heart at the correct conclusion of a fairytale, the narrative conclusion of a fable, or the almost audible click that Yeats observed as being a property of a successful poem – the inherent appreciation of the justness, or beauty, of anything, especially of an idea, is an instinct that, while valuable to the creation of advertisements, is above all things, suspect in the pursuit of truth. And don’t give me any guff, please, about the idea of objective scientific facts being in itself a kind of fairytale, you fucking student.

    Kepler is a hero because he recognised this; and Einstein is a figure of pathos because he did not. Kepler’s beatific vision originally reconciled the apparent irregularities of the heavenly spheres with the absolute elegance of Platonic solids. When the vision failed to correspond to his observed data, he wrestled with the data, urging it to conform. But he did not falsify it, or ignore the profound disappointment of a reality that fails to satisfy our equally profound, but not at all truthful religious impulses.

    Einstein, on the other hand, succumbed to the human heresy that the external universe must be morally comprehensible, and apparently had some kind of problem with dice.

    It goes without saying, I hope, that when I talk about Einstein or Kepler or the wider histories of human thought, I don’t really know what I am talking about. I know nothing about astrophysics or the precise differences between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, or indeed about Newton or Einstein themselves, except insofar that they are symbols in clever conversation.

    But I suspect Einstein’s search for elegance and intuitive beauty was similar to Newton’s work in alchemy.

    Their moments of inspiration are cultural nodes, and purely poetic. Is there a more prefect symbol than a falling apple for post-lapsarian revelation; what lovelier image for intellectual discovery than the journey on a beam of light?

    Anyway, what has all this got to do with poetry? Well if the first function of poetry is entertainment, then the use of narrative and those concentrated nuggets of narrative that we call symbols is useful and natural and effective. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are beautiful. And they can be true, after a fashion.

    They can be true if we demand from truth nothing more than emotional resonance. They can be true in the Freudian or Jungian sense of narrative being the only vector of meaning, which itself is fundamentally Romantic. If, however, we insist that poetry should address itself to actual truth, we are in a pickle.

    I do not use the word pickle lightly. Modernism challenged the idea of narrative truth and ended up in autoprocticism. We have still not thrown overboard our dissolute mythologies, which includes the very idea of story itself. The use of dramatic devices are suspect because they are effective. Thought gorges itself on story, as flies are coprophagic, but the uses of narrative – since we are obliged to take account of objective truth – are as intellectually defunct as appeals to the Greek pantheon are silly and pretentious. Gods and heroes have their place in contemporary culture, and that place is called ComiCon.

    The problem is not a new one, it is the corollary of the problem of free verse (Now don’t tell me that free verse isn’t problematic, you fucking beatnik). Q. Roland Lehr, the celebrated ‘sage, mage and king of rage’, has observed often enough, God knows, that formal conservatism in versifying is associated with narrow right wing politics. In certain cases – that of James McAuley, for instance – an understandable taste, and a developed talent for rhyme, metre, and syntactical sense found its expression in the perverse fabulism of orthodox Catholicism.

    (Orthodox Catholicism, says you, is there any other kind?) And I forgive you for you have hit on a point worth making: that although the tapestry of gorgeous lies that constitutes Catholic doctrine is intellectually and morally unacceptable to any evolved adult, it has this at least to justify it: that it was up until recently taken seriously, and literally, as an interpretive framework for understanding the world. This gives it clout, which is more than can be said for the Marvel universe say.

    But no matter its historical importance, and the sophistication and depth of its emotional and aesthetic appeal, the idea of the communion of saints is no more acceptable than the baroque minutiae of the sagas of Sith and Jedi: not simply because it is not true, but because its mendacity is grounded in an intuitive, and therefore inherently dodgy, appeal to a deep-rooted, primitive impulse to tell stories. And the rich linguistic imagination that may have been useful to our distant ancestors, while surviving a bewildering prehistory of poisonous berries, cave bears and anachronistic dinosaurs, is as embarrassingly dated now, and as destructive, as selling cigarettes to children.

    One good question about all this is who cares? To the morally sound atheist the whole business of poetry and aesthetics can sometimes seem simplistic, a gallimaufry of oxypygical nephelococcygisms.

    However, the value of a shared moral framework, either as crudely sanctimonious as editorials in The Guardian – or as cunningly wrought and intricately plotted as the storylines of the great English soap operas, which have been the United Kingdom’s crowning cultural achievement over the last half-century – is obvious. Whether this moral framework should have an aesthetic function as an entertainment, as the Iliad had, as well as primarily intellectual and theoretical function, as Emmerdale or Coronation Street have, is the question.

    Where can we find a system of art that is commercially responsible, aesthetically amusing and allied to objective truth? There is mysticism in the tremulous bob of a quark, probably, but it is unlikely to strike to the soul of the general reader as effectively as the hackneyed beams of a discredited moon trailing its tiresome beams on an uninspired sea.

    There is majesty and awe to be discovered still in the sight of a mountain range at sunset, if you like that sort of thing, and in the rank variety of living matter that continues to infest the planet in spite of humanity’s best endeavours to make the place more conveniently habitable. But these childish tricks of the light and inherited blood hardly have the gravitas that we demand of serious art (if they very idea of art as a serious pursuit is not in itself kind of ridiculous).

    We cannot escape from story any more than we can divest ourselves of language, which is to say no more than a bird can break free from the shackles of flight, or loosen the muzzle of song. And yet the scientific method that frustrates the narrative impulse, that offers its material and objective gifts in exchange for childish images, whose stern practise refuse to obey the tyranny of the story arc – that bent rod of servility that defines the slavery of human whim, has not yet yielded up a satisfying and rigorous alternative to childish mythology.

    Until we can imagine and describe our world in human language as accurately as we can using the divine language of mathematics, the best we can do is watch with a critical eye the rigorous moral thought experiments of Corrie, on ITV and Virgin Media One, with an omnibus edition on ITV2 every Sunday.

  • Ancient Irish Sagas

    The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages.

    I – The Second Battle of Moytura

    Cath Maige Tuired  (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 is the centrepiece of the extraordinary Irish Mythological Cycle, relating how the Tuatha Dé (‘god-peoples’) had been oppressed by their enemies the Formorians (Fomoire). It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. We meet a Tuatha Dé exhausted by impossible labours and tributes after the half-Formorian Bres becomes High King of Ireland. He replaces Nuada who had lost his arm and authority in battle.

    We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions Nuada a prosthetic silver limb in its place. In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure to humanity.

    In the account of Diancecht’s preference for an artificial arm over Miach’s more complimentary approach, the anonymous poet may be suggesting that the best healing comes from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs could represent ignorance of the cures freely available in Nature. It also appears that a professional body will seek to preserve its privileged position, in which case this remains a powerful metaphor for the modern pharmaceutical industry. A man with a silver arm presages the contemporary spectre of transhumance, whereby human beings propose to upload their bodies into computers, in fulfillment of René Descartes’s dualistic idea of a homunculus controlling a mechanical body.

    The ‘Second Battle’ parades scenes of Rabelaisian excess, especially involving one character, the Dagda, who undertakes a mission inside the territory of the Formorians. There he meets a distortion of hospitality, whereby he is compelled to consume vast quantities of porridge to a point where is belly is the size of a cauldron. Afterwards he must loosen his bowels before sexual congress with a Formorian princess. In Mark William’s ‘less genteel’ translation: ‘The girl jumped on him and whacked him across the arse, and her curly bush was revealed. At that point the Dagda gained a mistress, and they had sex’. Smutty Irish humour has long antecedents.

    In Jungian terms the Formorians seem to represent the nefarious shadow of the Tuatha Dé, an external, exploitative force that corrupt and indebt the native inhabitants, a narrative familiar to contemporary Ireland. However, the half-Formorian Bres is eventually succeeded by Lug, who is also of mixed parentage. Yet he combines all the highest attributes of the áes dána (skilled people). Lug and Bres differ in that the former’s father is Tuatha Dé and his mother Formorian, while the latter’s ancestry is the reverse.

    This might appear as simply an expression of approval of patriarchal descent. There is however a richer symbolic meaning available if we see a balance in Lug’s mixed ancestry between the thrusting, will-to-power of male energy on his Formorian mother’s side, and the earthier characteristics of the Tuatha Dé, that equate with female love, on his father’s side. He achieves wholeness when, paradoxically, the female characteristics arrive through a dominant male parentage wherein the thrusting Formorian energies are contained (Mf:Fm = Fm). Bres differs in that the ‘male’ Formorian outlook is ascendant as it arrives from a dominant male father, repressing his ‘caring’ Tuatha Dé ‘feminine’ energies (Mm:Ff = Mf).

    Another fascinating scene occurs after the Formorians are vanquished and Lug captures the errant Bres, who pleads for his life by proposing the Tuatha Dé should plant crops four times a year. Lug recognises this as impossible, or unsustainable, and only spares his foe when he reveals how the men of Ireland could operate a plough. According to Mark Williams in his indispensable Ireland’s Immortals: The history of the gods of Irish myth (2017): ‘the Formorians in the saga are characterized by a monstrously exploitative and unnatural relationship to the organic world, in a strange anticipation of contemporary agri-business’. This may be so, but Lug’s character also has a Formorian dimension, that, crucially, is contained positively by his (Fm) parentage. Similarly, in this episode, when Bres’s knowledge is refined from the approach of ploughing the earth four times a year, we find he confers a crucial skill. The relationship between the Tuatha Dé and the Formorians may also have been a commentary on the benefit of accommodating the skills of Norse raiders, then besetting Ireland, who also brought technological advances in agriculture and sailing.

    There are lessons here for a contemporary audience insofar as we need both a thrusting, male, Formorian, energy, to put a plan into action but crucially it is the caring, ‘female’ Tuatha Dé approach that should guide our endeavours. It is the dominance of the Formorian mind that brought us the Atomic bomb.

    II – The Wooing of Étaín

    Tochmarc Étaín (‘The Wooing of Étaín’) c.800-1000 is a colourful tale of romantic intrigues and magical spells, featuring perhaps the greatest femme fatale in Irish literature. Based on recurring shape-shifting, we find hints of belief in metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – preceding Christianity. Only fully translated in 1930, Irish Revivalists such as W.B. Yeats were besotted by the intrigues. Here the Tuatha Dé are reduced from the giants of the ‘Second Battle’ to ethereal síde, ‘faeries’, living in síd mounds, familiar in folklore today.

    When Midir of the Tuatha Dé demands that Aengus his foster son gives him the most beautiful woman in Ireland in compensation for the infliction of an accidental injury trouble begins. She is Étaín, who Aengus ‘earns’ by performing a series of tasks for her father, the high king of Ireland. Aengus then presents her to Midir, who, however, already has a wife in Fúamnach. She does not take kindly to the new arrival, eventually turning her into a giant bluebottle with a magic spell. Even in this altered state Midir finds fulfilment in her company, and the divine Calliphora vomitoria performs various miracles along the way. Furious, Fúamnach summons great winds to drive Midir’s buzzing consort away. Eventually, exhausted, she falls into the drinking vessel of a woman who swallows her and becomes pregnant, reproducing Étaín 1,002 years after her original birth.

    The beauty is then married off to another high king of Ireland Eochu. Unfortunately his brother Ailill, upon setting eyes on her, falls hopelessly in love, and starts to waste away. Ailill confesses his feelings to her whereupon the blood returns to his cheeks. In order to cure him fully the obliging Étaín assents to an amorous exchange, but insists, for the sake of propriety, this should not take place under the king’s roof. In the meantime, the apparently immortal Midir puts Ailill to sleep and assumes his form, revealing to Étaín their ancient love when they finally meet. She agrees to give it another go, but only if Eochu agrees to sell her. Naturally he refuses, only for Midir to win her from him in a game of chess after bluffing for the first two rounds. Still Eochu refuses to give up his wife, defending Tara, the seat of the Irish high king, with all his men. Undeterred, Midir miraculously appears inside Tara where the lovers embrace and transmogrify into swans that escape through the skylight together. In response Eochu orders his men to dig up every síd mound in the country. At this stage Midir plays a trick on him by returning a replica of Étaín, who, it transpires, is actually Eochu’s daughter, Étaín having been pregnant with her.

    Eochu’s fate is in an interesting inversion of the Oedipus myth, and echoes Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious whereby ignorance and unawareness carry the greatest offence. As van der Post puts it: ‘in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance where it serves as representative of inner unawareness.’ In this tale the folly lies in denying the expression of love, especially when the Tuatha Dé are involved. Nevertheless Étaín is a moral exemplar bound by social conventions reflected in her refusal to dishonour Eochu’s home with Ailill whose recovery reflects the benefit of giving vent to passions. Also, Étaín only agrees to return to Midir if Eochu consents. Having lost Étaín in chess he welches on the bet and is punished by unconsciously committing the taboo of incest. The enduring image is of two swans, who in nature mate for life, joyfully escaping. The idea of beauty inhabiting the generally disparaged bluebottle attests to a joyful relationship with Nature. As the Eesha-Upanishad says: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

    III – A Change in Attitude

    From 900 there is a shift in the name of the Túatha Dé, crystallizing as Túatha Dé Danann, ‘the Peoples of the Goddess Danu’ in about 1200 which Williams suggests may have been ‘a deliberate attempt at inducing mental estrangement’. In the later middle ages we find pseudo-histories such as ‘The Book of Invasions’ (Lebor Gabála Érenn) c.1150 which tells the story of Ireland and its various waves of settlers and invaders from the time of Noah’s Flood to the era of the Gaels or ‘Milesians’, meaning the ethnic Irish themselves. Here the Tuatha Dé are stripped of godlike qualities and are instead imagined as a race of pagan necromancers preceding the Gaels. Historicising the Tuatha Dé also winnowed the creative possibilities available to poets, and Irish language literature thereafter fails to scale the earlier heights. The Tuatha Dé become darker presences usually associated with human failings.

    Suspicion extends to their bewitching music. In one episode of the ‘The Colloquy of the Elders’ (Accalam na Senórach) c.1220 the character of St. Patrick expresses these reservations: ‘Good it was,’ said Patrick, ‘were it not indeed for the magical melody of the síde in it.’ Yet their creative presence is still acknowledged in traditional Irish music: the word for session is derived from síde.

    ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Lir) c.1450 is a tale familiar around the world. The story involves a wicked step-mother Aoife whose magic transforms Lir’s two sets of twins from his first wife into swans. Forced to endure what is portrayed as an unhappy fate their resolve is strengthened by one of them, Fionnghuala, who seems to have an inner knowledge of Christian revelation. Eventually they meet a saintly monk called Mochaomhóg who baptises them, whereupon the spell is broken and they become aged human beings who die and ascend to heaven. It is worthwhile comparing this to the ‘Wooing of Étaín’, where shape-shifting into swans is an affirmative escape into Nature.

    But according to Laurens van der Post:

    the bird always and everywhere from Stone-Age man to Stravinsky has been the image of the inspiration, the unthinkable thought which enters our selves like a bird unsolicited out of the blue, it was for Jung … one of the signs of confirmation from nature that sustain the spirit in its search for enlightenment and emancipation from the floating world of appearances.

    In ‘The Tragic Death of the Children of Lir’ a censorious cage is placed over the bird of imaginative possibilities, which fitted neatly with the domineering Catholicism of independent Ireland. The worth of life as a swan is rejected, as a dissipated human form is preferred, as long as salvation is available from the one true Apostolic Church.

    ‘The Tragic Deaths of Children of Tuireann’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann) c.1500 returns to the subject-matter of the ‘Second Battle of Moytura’, but at this point internal rivalry bedevils the Tuatha Dé, leading to the murder of Cian, the father of Lug, by the sons of Tuireann. The sons attempt to bury Cian’s mangled remains six times but each time the Earth rejects his body, illustrating Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious where nature itself rises up against a nefarious deed. This idea is also found in Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1868) where a murdered husband haunts the landscape of those responsible for the deed, his wife and her lover who are driven to commit suicide together.

    Lug intuits that the sons are responsible for the deed and succeeds in gaining a commitment for them to pay éric, the legal compensation for homicide. Unsurprisingly the sons meet a sorry fate in their quests to satisfy this, but perhaps more interesting is the depiction of the Tuatha Dé as an enfeebled race incapable of contending with the Formorians. The illusion to the fractious politics of that period is obvious, and as Gaelic Irish culture crumbled after the Tudor conquest and subsequent plantations the vibrancy of the side diminished in parallel, until their resuscitation, ironically mainly via descendants of the conquerors, during the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  • An Irish Poet Attains Greatness

    I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.

    Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri’s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy, O’Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O’Siadhail’s journey through hell to ‘heaven’s vertigo’, ‘And summing up an era work the seam / Between the modern world and its aftermath’.

    T.S Eliot’s influence also lurks in the poem’s title – an allusion to his The Four Quartets – which, O’Siadhail writes in the introduction, ‘feels it needed a fifth part’, as it ‘never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, ‘demands an absolute / To order seas of doubt which rage inside’.

    Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in O’Siadhail’s schema. The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, ‘no place’, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.

    O’Siadhail’s muses are numerous, but ‘Madame Jazz’, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.

    Although each sacred book’s a lip-read score,
    Improvising there is always more;
    You jazz on what’s our own and our rapport.

    Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
    Grooves and tempos shifting without cease,
    We flourish in a syncopated peace.

    In all our imperfections we advance,
    Trusting in creation’s free-willed chance;
    Sweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.

    Her gyrations allow O’Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.

    In the final section, we also encounter Dante’s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O’Siadhail’s work seeks to heal:

    You mortals down below can fail to see
    how marvels coded in the universe
    reflect the face of God’s infinity.

    Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
    yourselves in steps and miss out on the dance –
    the scientists and poets don’t converse

    or celebrate each quantum of advance,
    discovering a heaven’s cameo
    in God, the gambler’s mix of love and chance.

    Laurens van der Post wrote: ‘For me the passion of spirit we call “religion”, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.’ O’Siadhail’s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.

    II – The badger and the fox.

    In the first quintet, Making, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or ‘saikus’ – a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists’ voices, channelled through O’Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.

    Thus, William Wordsworth’s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude represents: ‘All Foothills to the peaks you never reached’; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Youth’s promise’ was diminished ’in opium’s malaise’.

    That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a ‘sleepless hell’, as O’Siadhail condemns him for feeding ‘… the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn / Your nightmare’s broken trust denying dawn.’ While Pablo Picasso has become, ‘A famous for being famous millionaire’, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.

    For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire ‘to stanch life’s sufferings’, and having, ‘No truck with any cause but moral truth’. In his compassion we find a ‘glimpse of paradise’.

    Classical composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, ‘a lone wolf’, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O’Siadhail’s George Frederic Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre.

    I only want to hold the music’s line
    A flighty psyche focused on its goal
    So every voice can shine but not outshine,
    From all the woven parts create the whole.

    Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya’s ‘Third of May’ ’merits retelling:

    Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
    And bend to execute their point blank prey;
    My lamp of pity lights the victim’s face.

    The ‘Third of May’, by Francisco Goya.

    Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, ‘the churning digger / With its nose close to the ground’. O’Siadhail hails him as ‘the archpriest of sound’, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as ‘Old lecher with a love on every wing’, from the still smouldering Tower.

    But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: ‘scorning base-born products of base beds’, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, ‘dead and gone … That perfect past your mind’s own cul de sac’. Instead O’Siadhail urges: ‘Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on’.

    Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.

    O’Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce’s legacy, admitting to loving a language ‘burbling up in play’. From one great linguists to another, O’Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, ‘you’ll get to understand your punning riverrun’, but counters, ‘I know the charge of words, and yet and yet’.

    He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer’s works hold, ‘a microscope that is too small in scale’, and whether, ‘in the end does anything take flight’. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake’s circumlocutions.

    O’Siadhail is suspicious of a character ‘so proud and so obsessed’, for whom others are ‘walk on parts in your world’s play’. He scorns the, ‘dreamlike doodling of an introvert’. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, including a playful pun of his own:

    Still once at least, though in a woman’s voice,
    I didn’t pun or try to be opaque
    But spoke my shortest playful work of praise
    And yes, in Molly’s yes I did reJoyce.

    The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, ‘A kamikaze trusting in God’s wind’, who, ‘In hungry times’, paid the price’, for being a ‘peeping Tom who lusts for paradise’; along with praise for Brian Friel’s ‘impish wit’.

    Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O’Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility ‘for shaping a wider meaning’. He continues:

    Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.

    Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O’Siadhail’s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.

    III – ‘The Dismal Science’

    O’Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.

    O’Siadhail’s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet recalls the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world  in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.

    The bargain struck, the business done,
    The dealer’s will and drive for wealth,
    Our new concern with number one.

    One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland’s own Michael Fingleton:

    Still bent on short-term deals to boost
    A bottom line. A bonus-gained,
    Already on your way to ruin
    All caution to the winds – who cares?
    Ambitious tiger burning bright
    And brazen in your riot-run
    You do not know the dust you’ll bite.

    It seems unlikely O’Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:

    Small loaners find you’ll go to law
    To take your pound of flesh to pay
    What’s owed; for bigger borrowers
    You bend or buck to make the rules,
    Indulge whatever debts occur.

    There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire, permits ‘the hidden hand’ to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against ‘crafty dealers’ in league, ‘to fix a price and profit by intrigue’.

    O’Siadhail’s ‘modern mind’ cannot understand, however, Smith’s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes ‘Deep down in Durham’s shafts and pits’. He also points to the irony of merchants, ‘Whose mean rapacity you taunt’, adopting Smith as their first forebear.

    O’Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:

    Your thesis bites so near the bone.
    Malthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
    These times will know a darker tone.

    Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?

    O’Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees ‘as no one else had seen’, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the ‘constant gyres of boom and bust’, apparent in late capitalism.

    Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.

    But according to O’Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, ‘a know-all coldness at your core’. Indeed, being a ‘know-all’ is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O’Siadhail’s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, ‘Where conflicts would be reconciled’.

    We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a ‘Soft changer, saint of step by step’, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:

    The system does not cure itself;
    So maybe it needs money lent
    To make it flow and multiply

    Far less favourable is O’Siadhail’s assessment of Milton Friedman, another ‘know-all’, whose rigour ‘will room no doubt / Your mind demands all black and white’. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O’Siadhail chides him for using Keynes’s ‘one defect’ – of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply – to justify opposition to all state interference with the ‘hidden hand’.

    Instead we find: ‘Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains / But blows up bubbles that must burst’, where, ‘The wily then are winners all’. O’Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: ‘Where weak need not go to the wall’.

    One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.

    Society does not cohere in hate–
    All workers really want to emulate
    Their boss – the weak are would-be rich at heart;
    If Marx had not been wrong and me not right
    The poor would tear society apart.

    O’Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and ‘cub economist’, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the ‘love-dream born of Bethlehem’ the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.

    Tanner, through O’Siadhail, says:

    Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
    A heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
    Another revolution run roughshod?
    O no! It’s here and now we must uphold
    The common right of all to gifts of God.

    This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Christianity of this world’, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford.

    IV – The Art of the Possible

    The next section, entitled Steering, meditates on good governance. O’Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning ‘tweedle dee’ and ‘tweedle dum’ politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’

    O’Siadhail’s continues to inveigh against ‘know-all’ attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.

    Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
    Chilled compassion of the ideologue.
    What purports to pity broken lives
    Often hides a know-all arrogance
    That wants to own the future and the past,
    So refuses, starting from the now.
    Greedy for the perfect all create
    Hells of blood and soil and golden age.

    Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’, as an autocrat. Her parvenus attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen’s earlier insights into the aspirational, “would be rich”, working class:

    Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
    Carry in their bones a sympathy,
    Want to spare all comers such a climb;
    Others vaunt their courage and condemn
    Weakness they had fought to overcome,
    See all frailness as a threat to power.

    Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    In O’Siadhail’s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, ‘To rethink all in Milton Friedman’s words’. This leads to the tearing of society’s ‘love-ravelled fabric’.

    There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O’Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on ‘deeper bonds and ties’.

    Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O’Siadhail seems wary of ‘Brussels’ one-fits-all’ approach:

    Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
    Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts
    Heaven is no timeless superstate.

    In Canto 5 of this section, ‘A Beckoned Dream’, O’Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the ‘United Nations’ guiding star of peace’, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among ‘Ghosts of Europe’s once religious wars.’

    I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.

    I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in ‘Fractions less imperfect than before’, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: ‘Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity / Enmity we can thaw … ’

    V – God and Science

    The two final cantos Finding and Meaning, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O’Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.

    Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O’Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a ‘knotty crossword yielded clue by clue’ that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.

    In Meaning, O’Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante’s own terza rima) on the unknowableness of the divine:

    Allow our God a purpose not our own
    and here outside a timeless roundelay
    we dance within our fragile ecozone

    Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:

    Despite his detached mind’s strange solitaire,
    for all mad Nietzche’s overreaching claims,
    his genius shows how humans overbear;

    Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre – dismissed as a ‘a braggadocio of angst that sinks / to vanish in the nothingness of hell’ – Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders ‘What if the weak become our first concern / what if such love decides our balance sheet’.

    Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:

    this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
    the moments in our psyches which allow
    an amplitude, a deeper second sight.

    Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:

    Utopians who weave their gossamer
    ideal never see the here and now;
    for such far sight the present blur,

    We also meet O’Siadhail’s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:

    In your compassion, Bríd, I think I grow
    and understand how only love can heal;
    I learn to feel what others undergo.

    Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which O’Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each ‘interwoven with its counterpart’, ‘in curves of paradox which shape the light’.

    VI – Poetic Futures

    O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O’Siadhail fits Robert Graves’s description of a poet as, ‘the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.’ O’Siadhail keeps asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members’s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.

    The length of The Five Quintets also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.

    Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, published posthumously in 1850, had a ‘tremendous influence on future poetry’. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, ‘stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.’

    Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.

    May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.

    The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.

    I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O’Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake’s earlier pronouncements on the ‘necessity’ of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.

    Just as Shelley’s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.

    I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.

  • The Origins of Poetic Creation

    We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own.

    I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants a tale of the fire’s origin, her words embodied in physical expression, which inspires the band to adapt the tools to summon the first, intentional spark.

    In the flickering light that ensues the poet appears to shift shape. She is a streak of light morphing into the appearance of other animals of the forest. Her words are not common speech, but arrive in measured cadences, uncannily familiar to a mesmerised audience.

    The tale she recounts, though fantastical, resonates with commonplace experiences and includes practical insights. As the narrative arcs to a point of heightened tension the poet breaks the spell with a joke, seizing the assembly with laughter, but a few remain silent.

    Transfixed by the incendiary words, the band begins to chant; eventually a chorus chimes, integrating non-verbal melodies. Next a rhythm is struck, then a communal dance previously employed to intimidate a long extinct primeval beast, still lurking in our nightmares.

    For a moment the forest itself is convulsed by these energies. Afterwards, or even coinciding with this, a visual representation of the performance is crafted. It is kept as a sacred object for subsequent rites.

    Out of this poetic source I see four springs generating story, song, dance, and visual art. These intertwine and will eventually merge into an oceanic consciousness. The continuity between words, music and dance is apparent, while the symbol is not only the origin of painting and sculpture, but also of the word, ‘made flesh’, in script, which over time migrates from pictographic representation to alphabets, rejoining and completing its journey along the great river of poetry.

    The spoken word is an animating spirit and crucial catalyst joining language to a musical faculty. The written word records and even amplifies this. Only later does abstract, disembodied reasoning in the form of philosophy arrive.

    Musical Language

    According to Walter Ong: ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness’. The Greeks were not the first to develop it, but improved on earlier models by representing vowels for the first time, making literacy far easier to achieve.

    Through this the Greeks derived great technical and intellectual benefits, but it brought the danger of abstraction, and a distancing from Nature. Socrates, a confirmed townsman, claimed he had nothing to learn from fields and trees, but only men.

    In writing we encounter the dominance of the written word itself, a logo-centrism, which finds us in the narrow purview of the left hemisphere of the brain.

    But according to Iain McGilchrist the origins of language lie ‘in the empathic communication medium of music and the right hemisphere, where it is deeply connected with the body.’ There is no conflict he says between this belief, and the idea language developed out of gesture: ‘Music is deeply gestural in nature: dance and the body are everywhere implied in it.’ He continues: ‘To the extent that the origins of language lie in music, they lie in a certain sort of gesture, that of dance: social non-purposive (useless).’

    The origin of language, therefore, should not be seen in pure utilitarian terms.

    “Useless” play in language is the stirring of poetry, but a creation that is the catalyst of Art, which acts as a form of revelation, where metaphor, according to McGilchrist, ‘links language to life’. The absence of utility in poetry is therefore superficial. It is a creative spark, bringing perception at new vantages, and sight through different lenses. Art is the resolution of the image.

    Human communication is not uniquely ingenious, but we display a particular ability to measure speech in song and poetry – a mathematical sensibility in communication.

    According to McGilchrist, what distinguishes our music is that ‘no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing does instinctively’. It would appear that we gravitate to a musical order that was established in the West by Pythagoras, who divined that a musical note produced by a string of fixed tension could be converted into its octave if the length of the string was reduced in half, and its fifth when reduced by two thirds.

    Unlike ourselves, most bird species have a syrinx in their throats, allowing two notes to be sung simultaneously, as they exhale and inhale. But birdsong, however bewitching, is unmeasured. The dawn chorus is an unintentional unity, representing disconnected currents emanating from the varying concerns of often competing species; harmonious only as the voice of one Nature, spiritus mundi, or Gaia.

    At its lofty height, poetry combines the order of music with profound questioning and metaphorical vision. This is a mysterious hallmark of humanity.

    Grammars of Creation

    Artistic beauty in its ideal, unrealisable, state is the expression of the diffuse and infinitely complex voices within Nature’s harmony. What we consider aesthetically pleasing derives from an ascetic order in music that finds an analogy in all artistic forms. The spark is poetry.

    Poetry is the lute through which the voice of Nature sounds. But the instrument may be misshapen, perhaps through misuse. More tragic is when the pitch of beauty is too high for an audiences to hear.

    What is poetic has a dual nature: generative and disruptive. Just as in Nature Heraclitus envisaged a fire of renewal, so poetry devours and renews. Philosophy may define beauty, including justice, at any point in time, but this is primarily exegesis rather than creation. Thus Yeats argued ‘whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent’.

    Nature demands that plants and animals of diffuse species assist one another, but we appear to be alone in imaginatively standing outside our immediate frame, situating ourselves in the lives of others through fictions, as we see first in cave paintings.

    The paintings in Chauvet Cave in France were begun approximately thirty thousand years ago.

    To convey such imaginings required novel linguistic constructions. George Steiner points to a grammar of creation in the use of a future tense, allowing us ‘to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space a million years hence’.

    This, he says, looks to be specific to homo sapiens, as do ‘the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes’, which are kindred to future tenses. Steiner intuits that these emerged at the end of the Ice Age to discuss food storage. He links this to the discovery of animal breeding and agriculture.

    But I see a capacity for inter-subjectivity, including a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, arriving earlier: in the symbolic language of poetry, rather than to facilitate practical exchange. To chart this grammatical genesis I turn to Rene Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, which, he argued, emerged as a means of settling differences arising out of competition acquisition of scarce resources.

    ‘Man is not naturally a carnivore’, Girard writes, ‘human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.’ He argues that animal domestication arose out of the use of animals in sacrifice, not as food: ‘What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim’.

    After mining anthropological literature he found a ‘common denominator’ of a ‘collective murder’ of a scapegoat, attributed to animals or men. To conceive of this reconciliatory victim required a subjunctive ‘if’ clause, enabling the band to channel their grievances away from self-annihilation.

    When an animal victim is chosen instead of a human and ritually slaughtered the smoke rising from the sacrifice is seen to appease the gods. Thus, in the Odyssey after Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaca, he shares a meal with his loyal servant Eumeaus who performs the necessary rites of sacrifice:

    The swineherd, soul of virtue, did not forget the gods.
    He began the rite by plucking tufts from the porkers’ head,
    threw them into the fire and prayed to all the powers,
    “Bring him home, our wise Odysseus, home at last!”
    Then raising himself full-length, with an oak log
    he’d left unsplit he clubbed and stunned the beast
    and it gasped out its life …
    The men slashed its throat, singed the carcass,
    quickly quartered it all, and then the swineherd,
    cutting first strips for the gods from every limb,
    spread them across the thighs, wrapped in sleek fat,
    and sprinkling barley over them, flung them on the fire

    In Christianity this culminates in the ‘lamb of good that takes away the sins of the world.’ The language of these fictions, therefore, appears to originate in symbolic representation, which is a hallmark of poetry.

    These new grammars imparted a capacity for planning, and an understanding of natural cycles, which can lead to the outlook of the suzerain: the ‘keeper or overlord’ personified by Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who says: ‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent’.

    But it also engenders empathy with other life forms, which recalls the Isha Upanishad: ‘Of a certainty the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.’

    McGilchrist writes: ‘I believe that the great achievement of human kind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for inter-subjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether.’ That is the essence of true poetry.

    Poetry and Justice

    Art often awakes sensitivity to injustice indirectly, as the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Johan Sulzer observed:

    Wisdom knows about everything that man ought to be; it points the path to perfection and happiness which is related to it. But it cannot give strength to go down that often arduous path. The fine arts make the path smooth and adorn it with flowers which by their delightful scent, irresistibly entice the wanderer to continue on his way.

    A shift in sensibility created by exposure to the beauty of Art operates unpredictably on ethical choices as, unlike a rational choice, shifts in sentiment rarely involve a decisive, eureka moment, when an argument is settled.

    Rather, encountering beauty may lead to impulsive moral decisions based on heightened sensitivity, as where a person refrains from eating meat, when it does not ‘feel’ right.

    Encountering a crowning achievement in music or poetry may awaken action in an apparently unrelated domain. Great music, and other Art, stills the mind, and engenders benevolence.

    In divine rapture the poet builds a mythology out of imaginative materials located in Nature, and in the process incubates conventions and laws: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Percy Shelley.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822.

    Firm moral convictions may bring a poet into conflict with temporal power, and demagogues appropriate and distort mythologies. The false poet, and prophet, appeals to the vanity of a sovereign.

    A poet may feel compelled, nonetheless, to compromise with a patron – even a tyrant – to allow their work to reach fruition. In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ the artist mocks a haughty ruler before posterity:

    I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

    A true poet’s opposition to political power is, however, based on principle, not an anarchic reflex, and he may support a wise and just regime. For example, Dante favoured the Holy Roman Empire, as he saw a strong transnational authority as necessary to maintain peace in the Italian peninsula. A contemporary poet could support the notion of a European Community, or the United Nations, for similar reasons.

    Poetry remains a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Defining its nature is elusive, and perhaps futile, but it is apparent that philosophers are increasingly drawn to its revelation.

    It is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer aspires to it. Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Knowing how to go on and to go further in the use of the expressions of a language is that part of the ability of every language-user which is poetic. The poet by profession merely has the ability to a preeminent degree’.

    Shelley saw poetry in metrical verse as being its ‘imperial form’, but recognised its presence elsewhere. ‘The parts of a composition may’ even be poetical, ‘without the composition as a whole being poetical’, he said. Poetry inhabits the best prose as a flow that carries a listener into the vision of the writer.

    Poetry is perhaps best defined by what it is not, which is the everyday speech often imitated in novels and plays. It aspires to originality and even prophecy, as Aristotle says: ‘it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen’.

    It has an essential orality. Thus Yeats wrote: ‘Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved.’

    The Sacred Spring

    Poetic language need not be extravagant, but the true poet is never entirely in control of composition. Thus Socrates complained that a man cannot accede ‘to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses.’ This seeming loss of consciousness in a deep flow state may lead to extravagant language, but this is unintentional.

    Kathleen Raine points to the lofty style that distinguishes poetry from regular speech. She notes how Jung, who generally disliked high-flown speech, found that when what he called ‘mana, daemons, gods or the unconscious speaks in words its utterances are in a high style, hieratic, often archaic, grandiose, removed as it is possible to be from the speech of that common man the everyday self’.

    Raine identifies this with a primal poetic impulse she encountered in the composition of folk songs: ‘The singing of the ballad was by no means in common speech. It was extremely slow, dignified and highly mannered’. She concludes that: ‘It is a mark of imaginative inspiration and content to write in a high and mannered style, removed from common speech; as it is of the absence of imaginative participation to write either in a conversational tone or to write in a deliberately vulgar idiom.’

    Raine further opines that: ‘What was written for the sake of easy comprehension is precisely that part of poetry which becomes incomprehensible within a few years.’ This we find in the lyrics of most contemporary popular music, which sounds dated almost at the point of release.

    On the other hand, today we see a widespread trend whereby difficulty is equated with quality. This may originate in contemporary economic structures, where many professional poets survive on government grants, and as academic specialists. Linguistic obscurity may be a cynical calculation, which contributes to a widespread, and tragic, alienation from poetry.

    It appears to have a meaning and form internal to itself, beyond any individual poet. Jahan Ramazani observed, ‘time and again’, how poems, ‘reasserted themselves as poems even in the moments of seeming to fuse with their others.’

    Similarly, when Dadaists and Russian futurists tried to fabricate new languages they found their imagined syntaxes led back to established moulds. Any poet travels a path overlaid with uncountable footprints guiding their course. The poem knows where it wishes to travel in the anticipatory stillness of creation. The great challenge in today’s digital fog is to encounter this tranquillity.

    Poetry in Language

    Many poets agree that composition is an ongoing revelation, conventionally attributed to the muse. But in the discussion of poetry there is perhaps too great an emphasis on individual genius, although the individual experience cannot be discounted.

    We find in creation a dialectic between individual expression and the treasures hidden in all languages. The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that it is intrinsic to language every one of which ‘is itself a collective art of expression.’ He asserts that ‘An artist utilises the native esthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.’

    Similarly Marcel Duchamp wrote: ‘Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.’ The poet, however, renews and recasts these materials, sometimes bringing new colours to the palette, and reviving the use of others.

    In some cases we find a mingling of tongues as new words enter languages in neologisms, as in Shakespeare’s heroic contribution to the English language. But this process is fraught with the risk of contrivance. Great poets are not necessarily polyglots, though they often are.

    The expression of poetry should not be seen as an evolutionary display of verbal plumage, although troubadours will always seek to enchant. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke firmly rejects meretricious verse. ‘Young man’ he warns:

    it’s not about love, when your voice
    forces open your mouth – learn to forget

    your sudden outburst. That will run out.
    True singing is a different breath. A breath
    around nothing. A breeze in the god. A wind.

    Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926.

    The mythos of poetry is an intuitive response to life’s challenges, unconnected to the logos of philosophy, or scientific observation.

    Its wisdom adds layers to a mystery lying beyond direct inquisition. ‘The abstract is not life’, Yeats wrote on his deathbed, ‘and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence’.

    The poet is never in control of the process of composition, and eminent authorities such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Milton have attributed inspiration to their dreams.

    Charles Simic criticizes: the assumption … that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and that the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas: if this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what had been said and thought before.’

    Untuning the Sky

    William Dryden, the first Poet Laureate, proposed in his Essay of Dramaticke Poesie that, ‘if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection’. Rather than affirming an alternative role for poetry, he was suggesting it should be informed by natural philosophy, as science was referred to until the 1830s.

    In fact George Steiner observes a contrary trend: ‘Where the sciences, pure and applied, wherever mathematics came to map, to energize, to expand human experience and possibilities, the retreat from the word proved correlative and ineluctable.’

    The greatest poetry looks beyond the real world of immediate perception and reinvents it, travelling at a different pace to the often linear progression of a philosophical argument. Thus the work of hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago may be compared with, and often exceeds in quality, the best available today.

    The poetic vision arises from a sensitivity that sees the tears of a sycamore tree, as opposed to its biological classification. Nontheless, the greatest scientists – such as Alexander van Humboldt – have been animated by poetry, and poets, of course, do learn from science.

    There are signs of stultifying premeditation as opposed to poetic vision, in Dyrden’s Grand Chorus to ‘A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), signalling the Final Judgement.

    So when the last and dreadful hour
    This crumbling pageant shall devour,
    The trumpet shall be heard on high,
    The dead shall live, the living die,
    And music shall untune the sky.

    The idea of music, which is the expression of harmony, signalling the end of days is troubling, and almost paradoxical. Samuel Johnson described this image as ‘so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place’.

    *******

    A poet can be foolish, even sinister, without this undermining the aesthetic appeal of her work. Poetic ability does not equate with individual moral virtue. Posterity excuses the obnoxious behaviour and statements that are not intrinsic to the poetry itself, assuming Art to rise above the mundane, and that its beauty will engender justice.

    Artistic censorship is a grave danger for any society, but in an era of free speech we may be facing greater dangers still, as George Steiner warns: ‘The patronage of the mass media and the free market, the distributive opportunism of mass consumption, could be more damaging to art and to thought than have been the censorious regimes of the past’.

  • History’s Dead Hand on the Middle East

    Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against what many there regard as a latter-day ‘Crusader’ state, a term with particular resonance in that region.

    Krak des Chevaliers, Crusader Castle, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    No other city juxtaposes such piety and passion as Jerusalem. It is sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and located close to the birthplace of civilisation itself. All the dominant empires of the Mediterranean and western Asia have battled for possession of this strategic gateway to three continents, and on it goes.

    With Europe enjoying a long, and increasingly complacent, holiday from its bloody history, and with the U.S. finding itself in ‘united states of amnesia’, the past is often forgotten; but in the Middle East – a heavily-laden term itself – a symbolic inheritance smoulders and crackles.

    Thus, when Islamic State, or Daesh, burst into Iraqi and Syrian politics and declared a short-lived Caliphate in 2014, they claimed they were destroying the despised Sykes-Picot border. These ‘lines in the sand’ (somewhat altered after the war) demarcating post-colonial states were the product of a secret alliance between the Allied Powers to carve up the Ottoman Empire in 1916, against the claims of Arab nationalists.

    The reason this latest gesture of U.S. support for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu – and nod to a domestic Christian fundamentalist audience – is a cause of such outrage lies in the profound meaning attached to the ancient city, which, ironically, derives its name from a Bronze Age ‘pagan’ deity Shalem; the preceding ‘Jeru; is a corruption of the Sumerian word ‘yeru’, for ‘settlement’ or ‘cornerstone’.

    For Jews it is an historic capital, and site of the First and Second Temples, of which only the Wailing Wall survives after its destruction during the Great Jewish Revolt against Roman Rule (66-73 CE). The city also has profound associations with Christianity, as the site of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ; furthermore among the Evangelical Rapture movement it is believed that the rebuilding by the Jews of their Temple will anticipate the Second Coming, which explains the devotion of many U.S. Republicans to the cause of Israel.

    Islam is also deeply-embedded in the city. Many Biblical traditions contained within Judaism and Christianity were accepted by Muhammad in the Qur’an, although he explicitly denies the doctrine of the trinity (though, surprisingly, not the virgin birth) in verse 171 of the 4th Sura: Do not say, ‘Three’. Stop. It is better for you, Allah is but one God. He is far above having a son. This doctrine of tawhid or ‘oneness’ is crucial to any understanding of Islam, especially the Sunni variant.

    Above all the Muslim presence in Jerusalem is located in the shimmering Dome of the Rock completed by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in 691 CE on the site of the Second Temple after the Islamic conquest in 638 CE.

    The Dome of the Rock. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In the The Crucible of Islam G. W. Bowersock points to a Qur’anic verse inscribed on the north door of the structure in which Muhammad condemns polytheism. This was a charge that could be leveled against Christians with the trinity in mind. Bowersock argues this did not augur well for future sectarian relations: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock arose on ground that was shared by the great monotheisms, but it proclaimed only one of them and offered no path to coexistence with the other two(1)’.

    This lapidary statement of intent contrasts with the relative benignity of the lightning conquest by the followers of Muhammad of a great empire stretching from the Iberian peninsula to Persia. As Bowersock puts it: ‘Archaeological evidence which has been cultivated for this period in recent years confirm the lack of any substantive impact of the Muslims on local populations.’

    Adherents of other monotheistic religions in that region simply had to pay jiza – a head tax – and a tax on land known as kharaj. Despite their initial opposition, and alliance with the Sassanid Empire in Persia, Jews were far better treated under their Islamic lords than their co-religious under ‘Christian’ rulers in Europe. Those who appeal to history in the Middle East, on all sides, tend to be selective in their recollections.

    II ‘Middle’ or ‘Near’ East?

    The term ‘Near East’ was coined at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, while the expression the ‘Middle East’ was used for the area that intervened between the ‘Near’ and ‘Far’ ‘East’. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire, however, the ‘Middle East’ migrated westward and came to include the ‘Arab’ states that had emerged from the Ottoman Empire. This, in turn, heralded the emergence of ‘Central Asia’ to describe what had been the ‘Middle East’.

    This has given rise to the argument, advanced in particular by Edward Said, that the term should be expunged from use. Said was reacting to an enduring European discourse used to justify imperialism, often treating the region as a special case requiring tutelage.

    According to a contemporary ‘Orientalist’ Bernard Lewis (d.2018): ‘The Middle East as an area of study for scholars in the western world presents peculiar problems different from those of most other areas. It is different than a situation in which we study a part of our own society. That I think is self-evident.’

    Western imperialism did not cease with the end of the British and French mandates in Iraq, Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon whose borders are the legacy of Sykes-Picot. The presence of vast oil reserves has given rise to constant meddling. David Frum, formerly a speech writer of George W. Bush, who coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’, records that Bernard Lewis was invited to the White House in November, 2001, ‘to explain his views’.

    Frum approvingly noticed ‘a marked up copy of one of Bernard Lewis’s articles in the clutch of papers the president held(2).’ The extent to which archaic Orientalist opinions retain their appeal, and more importantly a propaganda value, emphasising a distinction between ‘democratic’ West, and ‘tyrannical’ East, lends credence to Said’s thesis that: ‘the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority(3).’

    Does the term the Middle East to describe a great swathe of territory from Morocco to Iran retain any usefulness therefore? Nikki Keddie argues the term retains an explanatory usefulness for ‘an uneasy but still adapted blend of pastoral nomadism and settled life’ in the region(4).

    This has roots in the ideas of the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s who pointed to a perpetual conflict between badu (nomadism) and hadar (urbanites) in the region. He claimed the superior ‘asabiyya (group solidarity) of the badu brought successive victories against hadar. However, after a number of generations this ‘asabiyya is corrupted by the more luxurious of life in the city, and the cycle continues(5). Even today one can see certain of these dynamics playing out in conflicts from Syria and Iraq.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    Today, the term the Middle East approximates with the region subjected to the first wave of Muslim conquest (the Iberian peninsula apart), and arguably that legacy is still evident. This is not, however, to equate the region with the ‘Islamic World’, or more vaguely ‘Islamic government’, since ‘Muslims in power’ took on varying forms in places such as in India during the Mogul Empire, where it was the minority creed.

    Nazih Ayubi argues that the jizya and kharaj taxes imposed by the original ‘Islamic’ state were the basis of a ‘tributary’ mode of production, involving wealth being extracted by the politically and socially superior from the politically and socially inferior. This survived into the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), under whom all land was owned by the state, and where until the seventeenth century, armies were composed of slaves requisitioned from the populace(6).

    European colonisation, especially after World War I, dragged much of the region into the world economy, sweeping away political structures in the process, but underlying cultures endured, and the architectural inheritance of the region serves as an important reminder.

    Thus, the shared historical experience of much of the Middle East, under the original ‘Islamic State’ and especially the Ottoman Empire, in combination with enduring nomadic social structures suggests a regional congruence. Colonialism had a significant impact, and distorted borders, but the region is also a product of a far longer history, which encroaches heavily on the present.

    III Israel’s Iron Wall

    Contrary to the image of a technologically-advanced, forward-looking society, the ghosts of history also exert a magnetic pull on Israeli society.

    The conduct of the Israeli authorities reflect the ideology of the Likud Party, now led by Netanyahu, which has been the dominant political force in Israel since its foundation in 1977 under Menachem Begin.

    The Arab-Israeli wars which greeted the foundation of Israel in 1948 (known as al-nakba – the catastrophe – to Palestinians) brought a succession of Israeli victories, especially the 1967 Six-Day War which effectively neutralised Gamal Abdel Nasser, the erstwhile champion of Arab Nationalism.

    Their ascendancy in the region was affirmed by the demise of the Soviet Union, and establishment of the U.S., Israel’s Cold War patron, as lone Superpower. The Palestinian case was further weakened by PLO support for Iraq before the first Gulf War in 1991, and the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

    But despite accords with neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, Israel faces perpetual conflict as most Arabs have a fixed view on her as a colonial, oppressive presence in the region. Only continued autocratic rule in Egypt and Jordan (maintained by vast U.S. ‘development’ aid) keeps these sentiments in check.

    The Israeli electorate has consistently favoured leaders unwilling to countenance concessions, and the expansion of settlements is a fixed policy. Withdrawal from Gaza in 2006 was a strategic realisation that it was untenable to maintain 10,000 settlers inside a grossly over-populated strip of land containing over a million and a half Palestinians. Better to focus on shoring up the fertile parts of the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

    To explain Israeli intransigence it is necessary to explore the basis of Likud ideology, which can be traced to three principle sources: first, the writings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky; second, the experience of the Holocaust; and third, the emergence of religious Zionism after 1967.

    Zev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky.

    Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a Russian born Jew, is generally viewed as the spiritual founder of the Israeli Right. In 1923 he wrote an influential article entitled ‘On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)’ in which he asserted that a ‘voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future’, since, every indigenous people ‘will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the dangers of foreign settlement.’

    In response to resistance Jabotinsky advocated ‘an iron wall’ of military might which ‘they [the Arabs] will be powerless to break down.’ Only then ‘will they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers. Only then will extremist groups with their slogan ‘No, never’ lose their influence, and only then will their influence be transferred to more moderate groups.’ At that point he envisaged limited political rights being granted.

    Jabotinsky’s metaphorical “iron wall” was given literal expression by Ariel Sharon’s construction of a ‘security fence’ in 2003 cutting through the West Bank, although the anticipated acquiescence of the Palestinians, in Hamas at least, has not materialised.

    The second major influence on Likud, and Israeli society in general, is the trauma of the Holocaust experience. The collective memory of passivity in the face of genocide mandates a policy of fierce reprisal in response to the taking of Jewish life. Restraint is characterised as appeasement.

    In his book A Place Among the Nations (New York, 1993) Benjamin Netanyahu dwelt on the lessons of appeasement of Nazi Germany, and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. Arabs are likened to Nazi Germany, Palestinians to the Sudeten Germans, and Israel to the small democracy of Czechoslovakia, the victim of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler.

    This Holocaust motif was also harnessed by opponents of Yitzhak Rabin after he signed up to the Oslo Accords in 1991. Inside the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) two Likud deputies proceeded to open black umbrellas comparing Rabin’s deal to Chamberlain’s Munich capitulation, while effigies of Rabin dressed in SS uniform were set alight at right wing demonstrations.

    The ferocity of Israel’s response to Hamas, however, works against the moderate leadership that Jabotinsky’s model requires. Likud policy exceeds the methodology of the ‘iron wall’, and perpetuates conflict.

    The last major influence on Likud is religious Zionism, especially that generated by the optimism of the 1967 victory. Those enormous territorial gains were interpreted as a sign of divine favour, and settlement of the land became a religious imperative.

    Its force was demonstrated by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which effectively de-railed the Oslo Peace Process. Rabin’s killer was a young extremist by the name of Yigal Amir. During his trial Amir told the court that according to halacha (Jewish law), a Jew who gives his land to the enemy and endangers the life of other Jews must be killed.

    IV The Wahhabi Formula

    Alongside uncritical support of Israel, the other plank of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been a long-standing alliance with the Al-Saud family, who gave their name to the country of Saudi Arabia in 1932. As Guardians of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to which all Muslims are called on to make a pilgrimage hajj at least once in their lifetime, the hand of history lies heavily. The ruling family have used a Wahhabi blueprint to project their power both internationally and domestically

    The writings of Muhammad Abdel Al-Wahhab (1703-1792), a religious scholar brought up in the strict Hanabali school, repudiate unorthodox practices such as saint veneration. This was common among the Shi’a (faction), which had broken with the dominant Sunni – faithful custodians of Muslim practice (sunna) – after the murder of the fourth caliph Ali in 661 CE.

    Al-Wahhab exalted the doctrine of tawhid: ‘God’s uniqueness as omnipotent lord of creation and his uniqueness as deserving worship and the absolute devotion of his servants’, which is reflected in the inscription on the Dome of the Rock.

    In 1744 Al-Wahhab entered into an accord with the tribal lord Muhammad Al-Saud. The politico-religious alliance generated vast conquests in Arabia as previously warring tribes were once again united under the banner of Islam. In exchange for ideological justification and recruits for the conquests, shari’a, religious law, as interpreted by the ulama, the religious scholars, was imposed on the territories.

    In his writings Al-Wahhab emphasised that obedience to rulers is obligatory even if the ruler should be oppressive. The commands of the ruler (the imam – ‘commander of the faithful’) should only be ignored if he contradicts the rules of religion.

    The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia adopted this Wahhabist formula once again at the beginning of the twentieth century, but a shift in the balance of power has seen the temporal authorities, bolstered by oil wealth, largely dictate to the ulama. This led Helen Lackner Lackner to opine that ‘the fiction of Wahhabism which has lost its real roots with the destruction of the age old desert culture can only be maintained by an intellectual petrification.(7)’

    However, by the 1970s Islam had become according to Kostiner and Teitelbaum ‘a two edged political instrument – as the kingdom’s primary medium of self-legitimisation, and as the main venue of protest for opposition elements.’ Given how formal political protest, in the shape of political parties, had never been tolerated, unsurprisingly, opposition emerged from the religious milieu, culminating, arguably, in Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda.

    State application of Wahhabism also leaves the Shi’a as a persecuted minority (5-10% of the overall Saudi population) perpetually at odds with the regime, and subject to repression.

    Mohammed bin Salman with U.S. President Donald Trump, March, 2017.

    Just as history imprisons the Israeli government in their tyrannical treatment of the Palestinians, similarly Saudi Arabia is bound by its inheritance. The current Crown Prince, thirty-two-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, courts Western approval by granting women the right to drive, but has done nothing to alter the male guardianship system, where male relatives or husbands have control over almost all aspects of women’s lives.

    More meaningful is Saudi participation in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, which serve as bloody proxies for internal contradictions. The age-old conflict with Persia/Iran is, similarly, linked to a battle to preserve conformity in the country itself.

    V Monotheism v Polytheism

    No one cause explains the complex origins of conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, arguably violence is inherent in the human condition, and those of us living within the relatively peaceful confines of Europe and America are perhaps living through a golden age of relative peace. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the wars of the Middle East have boiled with almost unmatched intensity since the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1922.

    Oil wealth and vast military arsenals have played a role, as does the proximity to Europe which bequeaths embroilment in destructive alliances. But a society that had been so dominated by the instructors of a monotheistic faith now appears devoid of leadership, while the other two that emerged in the region also claim dominion. It seems in the nature of each one to suggest that the other is intolerable, despite the obvious similarities.

    For centuries the Ottoman Empire imposed an orthodoxy that brought relative tranquility, but this was predicated on exploitation by social superiors. The popular appeal of Arab nationalism faded with Nasser, and failed to alter the social structures to forge genuinely fair societies. Political Islam appeared as ‘the answer’ in the late 1970s, but it has often been the only avenue for the expression of discontents, and contains within its inheritance repressive tendencies towards competing belief systems, including atheism.

    Palmyra, Syria. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    In 2015 the world looked on in horror as so-called Islamic State set about destroying the remains of the Hellenic city of Palmyra, which I had the pleasure to visit in 2003. One may have assumed it was vandalism on a grand scale, but its destruction appears to have flown from the doctrine of tawhid. The disorder of the present was viewed through the prism of pre-Islamic Arabia, as Bowersock explains:

    The tribes, clans and gods of Arabia at this time worked to the advantage of external powers. It was precisely this diversity and disunity that would be a threat to Muhammad when he first began to receive his revelation from Gabriel and would be resolved only as the Islamic movement gathered strength(8).

    No rival could be allowed to stand before submission (Islam) to one God.

    One of the pantheon of gods worshipped at Palmyra is called Allat (earlier known as Ailat). She is often depicted as a consort of another pagan god Allah, whose name Muslims appropriated for the one God of Islam. A Jungian analysis would suggest a symbolic severance from the eternal feminine, which gives rise to enduring conflict; the vehemence directed at the so-called Satanic Verses, purportedly featuring a dialogue between Muhammad and that deity, are revealing.

    Jewish monotheism is not only characterised by one god but also by one people deserving of God’s intercession, which could explain the single-minded attitude of Israel towards the rest of the world. Nor has the idea of a tripartite Christian deity diluted a singular conviction legitimating the destructive colonisation of most of the planet, in the name of God. All of the monotheistic faiths are characterised by a disjunction with the feminine, and perhaps Nature itself.

    Aqaba, Jordan. Photo: Frank Armstrong, 2003.

    The wounds of the Middle East continue to fester, with no end in sight to the conflicts in Israel, Syria and Yemen. Religion continues to play a divisive role and forgotten are the days of the first Islamic Empire when individual conscience appears to have been respected, at least beyond Arabia. One fears that calamities will continue until a radical reappraisal of our religious traditions occur.

    Frank Armstrong completed a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures in the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS) in 2004, and lived for a period in the Middle East.

    Feature Image: Kevin Fox, all rights reserved.

    (1) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

    (2) David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, (New York, 2003) p.171-175

    (3) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p.128

    (4) Nikki R. Keddie, ‘Is the a Middle East’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 4 (1973) p.269

    (5) Nazih Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: State Politics and Society in the Middle East, (London 1995) p.30

    (6) Ibid, p. 39

    (7) Helen Lackner, A House Built on Sand – A Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, London, 1978 p.217

    (8) G. W. Bowersock The Crucible of Islam (London, 2015), p.158

  • Big Plans in Little Jerusalem

    June 1985: I was at work in my garden shed, when I heard someone talking. I looked out and saw a man with a sub-machine gun. He was guarding the back of the old synagogue, that had become the Irish Jewish museum. President Chaim Hertzog, who was raised in Dublin, was opening it that fine day. Security was stronger at the front, and an ambulance with its engine running was at the door. Mr Hertzog did his duty and was whisked away.

    There were few of his faith left in this quarter once known as Little Jerusalem. Their national school around the corner had closed, and its contents thrown into a skip. There I found old ledgers, listing those who had donated money to Jewish refugees from Germany. I gave the ledgers to the museum. It was a small place, but visited by people from all over the world whose parents and grandparents had lived here. The neighbours were proud of it.

    Almost thirty years later, I was again in my garden shed when I heard men talking at the back of the museum. Plans were afoot to enlarge it; the Office of Public Works was apparently in charge. I wrote to the OPW, asking if that was so. Soon afterwards I received a call from the museum’s new board, bothered by my concern.

    When the plans were reluctantly displayed, the whole neighbourhood was concerned. The old synagogue ‒ the last one in the city – along with five adjoining houses would be demolished, and rebuilt in pastiche. A theatre would be built underground. The back gardens would be built over, to house an archive, a Holocaust memorial and restaurant. It would be guarded by bomb-proof concrete, shatter-proof glass, security lights, sensors and cameras.

    This would enlarge the original museum by 600%. It seemed wrong to shove all this into one of Dublin’s smallest residential streets. We suggested that it be built on a bigger site. There was one vacant down the street opposite the Jewish bakery. Why not there?

    Suggestions and objections were not welcomed. Residents hung out banners, but these were torn down, or slashed with knives at night. Cars were keyed, eggs thrown at windows. Local protest meetings were arranged by email; mysteriously, the emails were hacked.

    In 2013, the year of the Gathering, the museum hosted a week of lectures, which the Israeli ambassador came to attend. Mysteriously, I could not receive BBC Radio 4 that week. When the lectures ended and the ambassador had gone, my reception returned. Presumably, the Long Wave had been blocked. It felt like the West Bank. The new chairman was from Israel, and seemed baffled by us. What was our problem? Planning permission had been granted. They had won.

    The residents’ appeal was heard at An Bord Pleanala’s grimy building in Marlborough Street that same year. The museum’s lawyers, from London and Tel Aviv, exuded confidence ‒ rightly so. They had the OPW on their side, and a letter of approval from the Taoiseach. The appeal was refused.

    A neighbour, recently retired from the higher ranks of the Civil Service, felt free to divulge the obvious truth. The government of Israel wanted a stronger voice in Ireland, to counter support for the Palestinian cause. The word was given to our government, who passed it on down the line. Planning permission was to be granted, and if locals didn’t like it, well, tough.

    But the pesky residents persisted. The museum board’s crudeness and misjudgement backfired. The expected millions in US dollars did not materialise. The inflated project was abandoned. The old museum is still there, a small place that tells the story of a small community. May it flourish.

  • Venezuela Sinks in the ‘Excrement of the Devil’

    It is as if anyone writing about Venezuela must pass through the red channel, for all have something to declare. The competing narratives of Left and Right offer ideologically-tainted accounts, often saying more about any commentator’s domestic politics than Venezuela’s predicament. But even diehard supporters of the country’s charismatic former President Hugo Chávez cannot deny that Venezuela is now facing a humanitarian disaster under his incumbent successor Nicolás Maduro, with a refugee crisis in train, and rampant inflation amid reports that nearly nine in ten of the population have difficulty purchasing food, while three out of four have lost weight – an average of nineteen pounds in 2017 alone.[i]

    I determined to find out for myself what has happened to a country that was a beacon of hope for the Left. Thus far, my main interaction with Venezuelans has been as a teacher to those wealthy enough to study in private colleges in the U.K.. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I cannot think of any one of them who displayed affection for the country’s charismatic former President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, having held the presidency, with one brief interruption, since 1999. Chávez built a political movement out of marginalised sections of that society, which sought to use the country’s fabulous oil wealth to develop a socialist state. With Cuba’s Fidel Castro as a father figure, he reprised his countryman Simón Bolívar’s ultimately vain pursuit of Latin American unity.

    Naturally, I arrive at an analysis of Venezuela with my own set of assumptions, such as that oil wealth, which depends on little toil or ingenuity, corrupts all but the most ordered of societies (like Norway); and that central to the U.S.’s long-standing Monroe Doctrine – claiming Central and South America as a U.S. ‘sphere’ of influence – has been the development of a comprador class of go-betweens, often working to the detriment of their own societies. I endeavour to avoid doctrinaire assumptions, however, as I am aware how apparently socialist regimes often breed apparatchiks, who plunder the resources of the state and commit human rights abuses. Indeed, Antonio Gramsci, the great Marxist Italian political theorist, recognised that ‘(t)he prevalence of the bureaucratic in the State indicates that the leading group is saturated, that it is turning into a narrow clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or even stifling the birth of oppositional forces.’[ii]

    A trip to Cuba in my twenties disabused me of the notion that Caribbean Socialism brought any kind of utopia. The level of prostitution at the time was staggering: as European males we were accosted by women who were clearly desperate for money, rather than for us. Moreover, notwithstanding the reputation of its health services, we found anecdotal evidence of Cubans being unable to afford basic medicines. Also, major cities were in an advanced state of dilapidation, which can be charming for tourists but less enchanting in a tropical storm. Much of that poverty can be attributed to the American embargo at the time, but equally Uncle Sam could be used as an excuse for petty corruption and repression. Nonetheless, what Cuba has achieved in terms of life expectancy and a low-input agriculture compares favourably with most of the failing post-colonial states in the same region, all of which share a legacy of genocide against native communities, slave plantations and attendant ecological destruction, along with over two centuries of self-motivated U.S. interference.

    Venezuela shares much of this inheritance with its Caribbean neighbours, but its history since the early twentieth century bears the influence of another salient feature: oil. Venezuela has greater reserves even than Saudia Arabia, making it ripe for investment, and outside interference. Oil exerts a profound effect on the entire social fabric. According to Miguel Tinker Salas: ‘Like a lubricant coating the various parts of an internal combustion engine, oil literally permeates every aspect of Venezuelan society in ways that are not apparent to an outsider.’[iii]

    While acknowledging that any commentary arrives via individual bias, we tend to place more trust in the dispassionate analysis of august publications such as The New York Review of Books. After reading its March 8 – 21, 2018 edition, however, my confidence was somewhat shaken. I am referring to the article by Enrique Krauze on Venezuela entitled ‘Hell of a Fiesta’ which appeared on the front cover. Krauze states that between 2013 and 2017 the country’s GDP fell more precipitously than that of the U.S. during the Great Depression, or in Russia after the end of Communism, but he omits to emphasise that in that period the price of oil, overwhelmingly Venezuela’s main export, more than halved in price. Krauze is building a case, and by giving such prominence to his article The New York Review of Books appears to be endorsing his stance.

    Krauze points to the serious current humanitarian crisis brought on by government mismanagement – which appears largely indisputable – as well as evidence of repressive measures taken to curb dissent, all of which cohere with Gramsci’s account of a bureaucratic state at saturation point. But to say: ‘The full responsibility lies with the Chávez and Maduro regime … which for fifteen years had a windfall of petroleum resources comparable only to those of the major Middle Eastern producers and yet wasted that income recklessly’, accords no relevance to the legacy of Venezuela’s troubled history, and ignores entirely the progress that had been made in alleviating poverty.

    For Krauze Venezuelan history appears to have begun at about the point the historian Francis Fukuyama made the outlandish claim that history had come to an end.[iv] Krauze’s critique recalls the great U.S. writer Gore Vidal’s description of a ‘United States of Amnesia’, where the past is wilfully forgotten. Vidal identified striking similarities in media accounts of ‘democratic’ elections in post-invasion Iraq, and the coverage of events in Vietnam forty years earlier. An editorial in The New York Times in 1967 might have appeared in response to that later conflagration:

    U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror… A successful election has long been seen as the keystone to President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.[v]

    There exists a similar suspended reality to U.S. coverage of Venezuela, heightened by the presence of the key strategic asset of oil. Crucial to U.S. success has been the projection of ‘soft’ power, especially of a middle class wedded to U.S. consumer lifestyles. Advocates of U.S.-led globalisation, such as Krauze, trumpet the need for ‘free’ elections, and ignore gross inequalities. If human rights abuses are committed by regimes supportive of the U.S., these tend to be forgotten, or absolved as ‘a son-of-a-bitch but our son-of-a-bitch’.

    Krauze is a Mexican public intellectual, and apparently a liberal, a term that means very little any more. He has advocated privatising the extraction of oil in his home country, for reasons of efficiency, and in pursuit of shale oil and gas[vi]. In an article in 2015 he described Chávez’s attempt to emulate Cuba politically as an ‘an inexcusable choice.’[vii] But considering the dire poverty and inequality in Venezuela when Chávez came to power, describing his socialist policies, which would not be out of place in Norway, as “inexcusable” seems rather an extreme assertion. Krauze conveniently overlooks how by the end of his tenure Chávez had cut poverty in half and reduced extreme poverty by more than seventy percent.[viii]

    Little now remains of Venezuela’s indigenous civilisations. As is the case across the Americas, the native population was almost wiped out by a combination of conquest, enslavement and contagious diseases. Perhaps the most stirring cinematic depiction of that period is Werner’s Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre Wrath of God, starring Klaus Kinsky as a deranged conquistador in search of El Dorado – a land of gold that has given way to ‘Oil Dorado’.

    The origin of the name of the country is subject to controversy. The best indication is that the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (whose own name survives in two continents) was reminded of Venice by the thatched palm-covered residences erected on wooden poles over lakes by the native Arawak people. Later the humanitarian writer Barolomé de las Casas is credited with using the term ‘little Venice’ on a map he sketched after visiting the area. By 1528, the name ‘Venezuela’ had appeared on another map used by the Spanish Crown.[ix]

    With the native population all but wiped out, creole settlers chose to import African slaves to work on their plantations, especially chocolate and coffee. Slavery was carried over into a state, which first declared independence in 1811, with lasting repercussions. Venezuela’s most famous revolutionary son was El Libertador, Simón Bolívar (1783-1830). His Irish aide-de-camp Daniel Florence O’Leary noted in his memoirs that Bolívar’s ‘imperious and impatient temperament would never tolerate the smallest delay in the execution of an order.’[x] Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1989 novel The General in his Labyrinth paints a picture of an exiled leader driven to the edge of reason by the enormity of his ambition to reform the post-colonial society he inhabited. According to Tinker Salas: ‘the wars of independence may have resulted in a rupture with Spain, but they did not produce a social revolution that altered pre-existing class relations or redistributed wealth.’[xi] Ultimately Bolívar would despair: ‘I blush to say this: independence is the only benefit we have acquired, to the detriment of all the rest’, but his legacy of attempting to bring unity to the region remains an intoxicating elixir to his heirs.

    The ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery was not abolished in Venezuela until 1854, and leaves an enduring legacy, as elsewhere, of exclusion, racism and sense of entitlement among elites. In 1918 ‘non-white’ immigration was prohibited, while Europeans continued to be encouraged to settle in the country. There were no segregation laws, however, and miscegenation was common. In 1944 the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco coined the term café con leche to describe the Venezuelan racial makeup.[xii] Nevertheless, Hugo Chávez was subjected to racist taunts over the course of his rule.

    Social exclusion and the low education levels of so much of the population meant democracy in Venezuela could not take root throughout most of the twentieth century. The first peaceful handover of power by one regime to another only occurred in the 1960s. Gramsci believed that ‘democracy by definition cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can be skilled, it must mean that every citizen can ‘govern’ and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this.’[xiii] Likewise, any understanding of Venezuelan democratisation must recognise that the low level of development in the country has created disorders that ‘free’ elections do little to cure. What is more, mere technical education is insufficient to incubate the capacity of any Venezuelan citizen, in theory, to govern.

    After tapping into oil wealth, Norwegians drew on the austere historical experience of a homogenous society on the polar frontier of human habitation, and a ‘Protestant’ work ethic including a strong educational tradition, to develop an egalitarian democracy. Norwegians believed themselves to be the equal of one another, permitting, abstractly at least, any Norwegian to govern another. Venezuela, on the other hand, after the discovery of oil, was saddled with hierarchies of wealth and race, and a tropical climate, which makes labour challenging. Equipping the poor with technical skills, as Chávez’s government sought to achieve, did not instil a capacity to govern. Moreover, mutual trust evaporated in the class war which at times he appeared to foment. True democratisation is a process that usually takes decades, or even centuries, to engender a stable and representative political system. The material improvements Chávez brought to the lives of the poor could only be a precursor to the real adjustments, in education in particular, that any society requires in order to develop harmonious governance.

    Looking back, the exploitation of oil, which began in earnest in the 1920s, created a stratum of society susceptible to the corruption associated with unearned wealth, allowing US oil companies to get along with the job of extracting the black gold. The windfall led to the country becoming a net food importer by the 1930s,[xiv] which served to diminish food sovereignty, reflected in the high prices of staples today. Especially after World War II, radical, including Communist, ideas filtered through to the Venezuelan people, leading to periodic outbreaks of violence. In response oil companies formed an ‘Industrial Security Council’ to coordinate security with the American embassy and its military attachés. Tinker Salas claims that the Pentagon was behind a coup d’etat in 1948.[xv]

    Awareness was growing among the wider populace of the incredible wealth the country possessed, and that this was not being devoted to the betterment of the population at large. On the international front, Venezuela was one of the founding members of OPEC in 1960, and domestically pressure mounted on the government to nationalise reserves. U.S. attitudes to the country are epitomised by a Newsweek cover from 1964 entitled ‘The Promise and the Threat’, featuring an image of President Rául Leoni with Fidel Castro looming behind him.

    In 1976 one of the chief Venezuelan architects of OPEC, Pérez Alfonzo, published a collection of essays entitled Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo, ‘We are sinking in the excrement of the devil’, which concluded that after nationalisation ‘el petróleo es nuestro, lo demás lo importamos’ ‘the oil is ours, everything else we import.’[xvi] He revealed an intuitive understanding of what economists call ‘the natural curse’, or ‘the paradox of plenty’, which diminishes self-reliance and entrepreneurship. That same year the government finally nationalised the industry. The U.S. companies were not entirely displeased, however, as the law allowed for contracts with foreign firms. Venezuela had become a classic rentier state which derived all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the ‘rent’ of indigenous resources to external clients. A two-tier society endured, with the higher echelon embracing a U.S. consumer culture. A particular feature of this was a veneration of female beauty, indicative of a society where women are treated as ‘luxury mammals’, to use Gramsci’s description of the wives and daughters of American industrialists between the wars.[xvii]

    A proliferation in beauty pageants yielded seven Miss Universe and six Miss World crowns on the international stage, and transformed an ideal of female beauty into a national obsession. This stimulated demand for cosmetic products, exploited by organisers of the pageants who distributed a wide range of beauty treatments, and brought a thriving industry in plastic surgery. The ideal of beauty that was promoted was distinctly white European.

    In 1999 the country was subjected to a series of mudslides, the Vargas Tragedy, that witnessed the deaths of between fifteen and thirty thousand people. The uncertainty around the number of fatalities is indicative of a lack of concern for those living in shanty towns on the part of the governing elite. Successive governments had permitted houses to be built in unsuitable locations before the ‘natural’ disaster took place.

    Thus, the phenomenon of Hugo Chávez cannot be abstracted from Venezuelan history as Krautze in his New York Review article suggests. As a post-colonial society, Venezuela brought a host of problems into the twentieth century, especially the social exclusion of the bulk of the population and a toxicity in ‘race’ relations. The challenge of development in a tropical environment also cannot be discounted.

    Over decades of oil wealth, Venezuelan elites had failed to distribute the nation’s resources effectively, a pattern seen throughout the developing world. In these circumstances, for a left-wing populist such as Hugo Chávez to emerge was predictable, if not inevitable, but many of his aspirations can be lauded. During 2002 poverty gripped 49.6% of the population, with 32% destitute. This had fallen to 27.8% and 10.7% respectively, by 2010.[xviii] Chávez’s period in office as president between 1999 and 2013 incontrovertibly brought substantial improvements to the lives of the poor. Whatever about the methods employed, or the current crisis under his successor Nicolás Maduro, the achievements of that period cannot be ignored.

    A constitution promulgated in 2000 established access to education, housing, health and food as inalienable rights guaranteed by the state. The standing of women and indigenous communities was also raised, while special status was bestowed on the environment, with the state committed to guard against ecological degradation. Such aspirations would not appear out of place in the constitution of a mature democracy.

    Chávez’s rule was far from exemplary, however, as corruption became rife, but the continued intransigence of the wealthiest stratum destabilised the country to a point where a coup d’état was launched in 2002. The U.S. government, if not involved, was clearly supportive. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer claimed that Chávez had brought the coup on himself, while, perhaps more surprisingly, an editorial the day afterwards in The New York Times read, without irony: ‘with yesterday’s removal of President Chávez Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.’[xix] Chávez survived the coup after a popular uprising, which underlined his appeal among the most marginalised in that society. Tinker Salas discounts the view that this was based purely on client-patron relations, and suggests that national pride, left-wing policies, his African heritage and a general loss of faith in the political process all played their part.

    According to Tinker Salas, Chávez’s death highlighted the strengths, but also the limits, of ‘an all-powerful hyper-presidentialism expected to resolve the country’s deep-seated problems.’[xx] His successor Nicolás Maduro is not of the same calibre. His survival, having emerged victorious in the May 2018 election, whose validity is contested, depends on the extent to which he can continue to mobilise the support of the poorer sections of society. As regards Venezuela’s long-term possibilities one can only hope that more is done to heal a corrosive addiction to oil revenue – “the excrement of the devil” –  which has bred corruption and complacency since its discovery. Venezuelans would do well to learn from how Cuba survived oil shortages at the end of the Cold War, especially when its agriculture was denied access to petro-chemicals.

    Moreover, the status of Venezuelan women as “luxury mammals”, dependent on beauty for their status, is a clear pathology. As Gramsci points out: ‘Until women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations, the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics.’[xxi] Finally, coverage of the country has often tended to highlight poverty and violence, but Venezuelans often have a happier disposition than is evident among people living in stable democracies. This point is affirmed in successive polls, and accords with my own dealings with Venezuelans.

    *******

    In The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London, Fourth Estate, 2005), Robert Fisk describes the role of the journalist as being to write the first draft of history. This ought to be the case, but the reality is that the market now demands obsessive focus on a self-perpetuating news cycle, which Benedict Anderson characterised as the ‘obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing.’[xxii] The slower pace of the journalist-historian who carefully interrogates sources to develop evidence is increasingly rare. Today, a figure of Fisk’s type, writing independently from a conflict zone, which he knows intimately, for decades, is, if not extinct, then highly anomalous. The new reporters are often unprofessional bystanders who live stream events on camera phones, while the digital medium we increasingly rely on lends itself to distraction and manipulation. Now the ideology of a newspaper or broadcaster often trumps integrity. During his long career, Fisk witnessed the extent to which news could be manipulated to justify military invasions: the “United States of Amnesia” at work. The justification for any humanitarian intervention remains elusive as international institutions fragment, but once the cost-benefit analysis is complete, it could be Venezuela’s turn for the ‘tough love’ of the West.

    [i] Centre on Foreign Relations, ‘A Venezuelan Refugee Crisis’, Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 33, February 15th, 2018. https://www.cfr.org/report/venezuelan-refugee-crisis, accessed 14/11/18.

    [ii] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith, London Lawrence & Wishart, 2003, p.189.

    [iii] Miguel Tinker Salas, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, p.3.

    [iv] Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

    [v] Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, p.55, London, Little, Brown, 2006.

    [vi] Enrique Krauze, ‘Mexico’s Theology of Oil’, New York Times, October 31st, 2013.

    [vii] Enrique Krauze, ‘Rough Seas for Venezuela’, New York Times, February 15th, 2015.

    [viii] Mark Weisbrot, ‘Venezuelans Will Vote with Their Wallets’, New York Times, June 20th, 2016.

    [ix] Tinker Salas, 2015, pp.18-19.

    [x] J. B. Trend, Bolívar and the Independence of Spanish America, New York, Macmillan, 1948, p.225.

    [xi] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.39.

    [xii] Ibid, p.79.

    [xiii] Gramsci, 2003, p.40.

    [xiv] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.66.

    [xv] Ibid, p.85.

    [xvi] Ibid, p.104.

    [xvii] Gramsci, 2003, p.306.

    [xviii] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.192.

    [xix] Editorial, ‘Hugo Chavez Departs’, New York Times, April 13th, 2002.

    [xx] Tinker Salas, 2015, p.217

    [xxi] Gramsci, 2003, p.296

    [xxii]  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso, 2006, p. 34.