Basque rapper Zekan Askalari’s latest track ‘Erantzun’ is directed by Yaser Akbari, an Afghan asylum-seeker from Iran. It was produced by Leah Rustomjee while volunteering for ReFocus Media Labs an NGO on the Greek island of Lesvos that trains asylum seekers in filmmaking, photography and journalism skills.
‘Erantzun’, is a rap song in the ancient European language of Basque calling on ordinary people to wake up to the injustices and corruption happening around the world.
In the video, Yaser represents a state of being controlled by a dominant neoliberalism through warehouse and product imagery. As the song progresses, we witness the ‘products’ unboxing themselves to reveal individual identities. This is clearly a metaphor for the masks we assume in order to operate in today’s social structures.
Askalari has been Rapping since aged seventeen, in both Spanish and Basque. He has been involved in squat culture and anti-authoritarian movements in Barcelona, having moved there over ten years ago,
That was until he moved to the Greek island of Lesvos as a volunteer withNo Borders Kitchen a non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist and self-organized group of ‘cooking activists’ comprising locals, asylum-seekers and international volunteers. He now organises rap shows on Lesvos, ‘Rap Against Borders’ featuring a mix of rappers from Afghan, Greek and European backgrounds.
Video director Yaser Akbari is a twenty-year old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who has been living on Lesvos for the past two years, waiting for the Greek authorities to approve his status, which thankfully has just occurred.
He joined ReFocus in 2019 as a student and has since gone on to produce work for BBC, Al Jazeera and National Geographic. He now works for the organisation as a teacher. This video was his first opportunity to produce work apart from the refugee crisis – which he was finding exhausting and boxed in by.
Whilst the number of refugees on the Lesvos has decreased significantly from 18,000 to 2,000 over the past year, with many having been moved inland or are now on their way to Germany, the inhumane conditions inside the camps persist.
Greece has employed Frontex officers, detention sites and undercover police officers to strengthen its pushback regime since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in order to create a hostile environment.
Organisations like No Borders Kitchen and ReFocus exist in Lesvos to allow rare moments like this to happen, which bring together people from different backgrounds to build connections and create together despite the challenges.
Making the video was a community effort; locations were provided by an NGO warehouse; the cast and crew that feature in ‘Erantzun’ were a mix of volunteers, asylum-seekers and local Greeks; and transport and tech support were provided by local NGO’s Maker Space and #LeaveNoONeBehind.
English translation
Sick of the daily lives
the voice: broken, the strength: renewed, we only have one chance left, you have generated our response. After so many scams, so many tricks, so much corrupDon, now it’s our turn, so many scoundrels, so many fascists, Ifinally took the pencil in disgust. Innovative poems against the system, because the losers are always the same. it is clear who shuffles the cards here, But stop that, things are going to change. It’s enough, the years go by and the difference is greater, the rich man laughing and we in chains, While the fucking rich go up the poor go down! Time to change your attitude it is a clear reality, not an opinion. After reflection, yes, action comes, That is why we are clear about it, the answer has begun. ANSWER to their lies, ANSWER to blows and insults ANSWER to the leaders ANSWER how? ANSWER like this! This is going forward; it cannot be stopped. Each of our actions has a purpose. We have afirm intention, listen: bring down your system, crush it, destroy it.
Ready for conflict, rest assured. We are not afraid, we are anxious. We learned from past struggles that we have to give our lives for our dreams, eh! It’stime to hit hard, let them taste the anger of the people. Your comfortable life isfine but after eating the full menu, it’stime to pay. Straight from the streets, different initiatives from each area, we have organized, there will be no ceasefire, win or die, there is no more. ANSWER their lies, RESPOND to blows and insults RESPOND to the leaders ANSWER how? RESPOND like this!
Music is a language and languages are musical. My life has always been about that: an exploration of these two elements and how they are deeply connected and influenced by one another: music and languages perpetually coexisting in balance.
I grew up in Milan, Italy, and as a child I remember constantly being exposed to classical music: my parents got me a piano and arranged a teacher when I was six; I was then sent to music school to learn violin and sang in the La Scala children’s choir.
That went on until I realized that I preferred to play and sing my own compositions having become curious about other genres.
I was always attracted by introspective and melancholic yet dreamy melodies, which reflects a part of my character. Although I can’t recall what came first in my life – the gloomy piano composers or a contemplative, silent nature.
In contrast, another part of my musical formation was deeply influenced by electro, new wave and indie music, which turned me into a devotee of underground clubbing back in the Milanese period, and then Birmingham (!), and later on – when I moved to Lisbon I started to work as a DJ, which went on for quite a few years.
DJ Cat Noir.
In the meantime, I managed to find similarities between synchronizing different beats while spinning records at night, and simultaneously listening to one language and translating into another when working as an interpreter during the day; in a way it all made sense, except the lack of sleep.
However, I felt like I had space for more. As soon as I arrived in Lisbon, I enrolled in the city Music Academy to take up the piano again. Soon afterwards I joined the bandThe Loafing Heroes to play concertina.
The idea of wandering and loafing in slowness in the fashion of French flâneurs always appealed to me, and I have remained a member of this morphing, dream-folk collective for the past seven years.. Along the way, I have added the autoharp, keyboard, vocals and percussion to the mixture
I never imagined focusing on a single activity in life, as our society often suggests , or narrowing down my field of interests. At times I struggle when friends or family look askance at this way of being, but I try to listen to an inner voice, which is always whispering in my ear, not to surrender, and follow my instincts in calm or stormy weather, as the time we are given in life is too short to do otherwise.
I believe human nature needs more sources of inspiration and these can come in many different forms.
For example, without traveling far and or to different places outside the culture that I grew up in, there would hardly be any music in my life (or languages, for that matter).
The simple act of moving from one place to another, getting out of our usual space and time conceptions, leaving aside our constructed identities and comfort zones for a while and experiencing alterity or otherness, makes us see reality in different ways and leaves us open to unexplored fields of imagination and art.
We are often held back by our holding blindly on to assumptions about reality. In many cases, it is these uninspected assumptions which are the root cause of our living in a painful state of perpetual contraction, of fear.
It is not only Indian music that inspired my spirit and techniques, but the experience of India itself (in the day-to-day living and travelling with its smells, sounds and images); it is not only traveling around Greece that influenced the way I compose but also embracing Greek poets through the ancient and modern Greek languages, recalling the myths and traditions of their soil, feeling a sense of wholeness and synthesis in the elements; then everything becomes undivided and starts revealing in an uncontaminated way, in the form of inspiration.
That is how my recent project Storm Factory was born, which is a duo with the Portuguese musician Rui Maia.
The idea was to develop a new aesthetic path from the fusion of my neoclassic and minimalist piano compositions with Rui’s experimental and ambient electronics.
It is a dialogue between different universes, the search for a dreamy and cinematic soundscape where a sensory piano inspired by sea travels and ancient myths encounters a full set of industrial and unsettling sounds.
Aesthetically reframed objects and materials come together as with completing a puzzle, drawn by the noises of cities, factories, people, water, abandoned houses and crushed leaves.
Most of these piano compositions were born during the first lockdown, when I also started painting and longing for the places I still hadn’t been to.
My CoronaCity, 2020.
This yearning for places that I couldn’t travel to led me to come up with another project called Zephiro. It is a podcast that I decided to create, produce and release by myself.
It is about travel literature and contains original music and sound effects, which I capture with special field recording equipment.
In each episode I talk about a travel book that inspired me and that can motivate people to read and travel. The book selection is made according to the following criteria: alternative ways of traveling; spirit of adventure; inner transformation of the traveller; and getting out of their own comfort zone.
The music component of the podcast is of great importance, as I composed ad hoc music for each episode which is inspired by the countries and characters appearing in the story. The sound design is specifically forged to accompany the travels to help create a unique listening experience.
In this period, I also dedicated a lot of time to meditation, to the understanding that all the activity of our minds is not who and what we think we are. It is tragic how we are taught since the beginning of our lives to identify with the activity of our minds, our thoughts and feelings, their related turmoil.
It is important for me to get a sense of the space within which all this activity is taking place and recognize the silence in which all our inner sounds can arise.
Fernando Pessoa’s said: ‘my language is my homeland.’ I feel the same about my mother tongue of Italian, and also about music. I bring these with me anywhere I go, like rivers flowing in an eternal, sacred space that mean I only very rarely feel lonely.
Rushing down the lane to the beach, I race in the direction of clarity; the compliment of sand and sea. We have all been there, a tractor to our right, sheep to the left and the walk, the walk to a fantasized destination. On occasion, the way is filled with hope. Other times there isn’t an absence of hope, but an emptiness overrides any enthusiasm. Conflicted in the inner space… of a Sunday.
Often, my mind has already arrived at the beach, tuned out from the hedging hawthorn, resilient nettles, and therapeutic dock leaves. Distant from the morning sunlight, that gurgle of machinery, and waft of sillage. There’s a battle of brambles, and satisfying chop of secateurs. My march renews me at the altar. I’m rushing towards a release only provided by sanctuary.
Sometimes, on the way down the lane, I think to myself… Walk slower…, and then I don’t. In a hurry, I scale to the top of a dune. Sand, stones, and sticks intermingled, create a perch. My eyes follow a seal slumping into the waves, a limp stillness in the ebb and flow. A carefulness not to exert himself in the grey torrents. Not at all fazed by that unceasing nature found in the mother of all beasts. Blindly following this seal’s faith in his safe return to the shore, I entirely miss the fox scoot up behind me, in arm’s reach from my shoulders. Sensing a shift nearer a natural haven, I then lock eyes with its wildness. Silent footprints, black tips at the ears, and that marvelous tail.
Looking for scraps, he probably came to the right place.
Historically speaking, humour wasn’t welcome at a sanctuary, shrine or holy place. The joke might undermine meaning or take away from teachings. In writing, it can be seen as using a security blanket, as always relying on a joke when navigating near feelings, to lessen the seriousness, in case the subject is too raw. To act as an airbag on impact. Humour is a powerful coping mechanism, a tool for thinking and expression. It doesn’t have to take anything away from anything. It can actually provide perspective and contribute to the spirit of the place. There is a time to be serious, and a time to have a laugh. I might misread the appropriate response, so to be safe, I bring both. In truth, sometimes I don’t know which one is which.
Feature Image: Common Seal (Phoca vitulina vitulina)
The prize painting in the National Gallery of Ireland is, without a doubt, Caravaggio’s depiction of The Taking of Christ. The painter presents us with an iconic image of Judas in the act of betraying Christ with the sign of a kiss, as previously arranged with Roman legionaries, who are depicted in costumes from Caravaggio’s own time.
In fact, Caravaggio even depicts himself in this great work, bearing a lantern so that he might better see the image of Christ.
I am always reminded of the Rolling Stones song on Exile of Main Street in which Jagger sings ‘don’t talk to me about Jesus, I just want to see his face!’ And of course, Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable lines taken from The Ballad of Reading Goal:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
So, betrayal in art, and particularly embodied in the Biblical figure of Judas, is nothing new. In fact, when I first saw some of Michael Corrigan’s Judas poems, which was around this time two years ago, while co- editing the April edition of Live Encounters Poetry and Writing with Mark Ulyseas, I was immediately reminded of Brendan Kennelly’s Book of Judas (Bloodaxe Books, 1991) .
So, I was intrigued. It was high time – twenty year separates the publication of these books – that a poet from this most treacherous of isles penned a few poems treating of the monumental and time-honoured theme of betrayal.
Indeed, James Joyce never stopped harping on about how Irish history was full of tales of treachery. A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist (1916) begins with the parents of the young artist in question arguing over the betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Continuing on the political scene – as a Cork man – how could I miss an opportunity to bring up the assassination of Michael Collins…!
But enough, if I keep enumerating all the treacherous, low down dirty deeds that have been committed down through Irish history and immortalised by writers, and artists I’ll never get started on this review!
But one final word: isn’t it interesting that both Michael Corrigan’s book and Brendan Kennelly’s were published in the UK?
Achtung, “The best way to serve the age is to betray it”…. The Book of Judas. Brendan Kennelly. 17/4/36-17/10/21. RIP. – Bono pic.twitter.com/S7rWFC6kHG
The title poem of the book greets the reader on the first page, here is the final verse.
On the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,
in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,
I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold
to touch, I believe I heard her mournful sigh;
“nothing is new, nothing is new,
I have seen it all before.”
The poet, imagining himself as Judas makes the figure contemporaneous, which he also does quite successfully with other Biblical figures in the collection, such as Maryfrom Magdala. This last poem offers a really poignant insight into the Bible’s most notorious harlot who washes the feet of Jesus with her hair; indeed it is said by some to be that she was the sexual partner of the man from Nazareth – he the son God, the lover of a prostitute! Say what you like, but by God that book (the Bible) is a cracker. No wonder it’s a bestseller!
In Ephesus her end of days,
nights shallow with shortening breath,
a mill beneath the small bare room,
millstones grinding, dark sea lapping at her door.
I also love how in the first verse the poet informs the reader of Mary’s wealthy origins. As an Irishman, Corrigan understands people’s innate prejudices; as we are far more likely to forgive someone coming from a ‘good’ home, in other words a wealthy family, than a person from a poor background.
This goes back to Max Weber, who recognised a correlation between wealth and respectability, perversely conflated in the West with spirituality. This idea of respectability, signalled very early on in the very first poem – see again above – underscores the whole collection The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot; especially how such a notion, being respectable, makes traitors or ‘Judases’ of us all. It is into this constantly recurring idea that the poet mines, to wonderful effect.
She sang sea music, fluent in the rise and fall,
knew deep, dark places that calved the biggest waves.
From the flat roof of a prosperous house in Magdala, Galillee,
watched the purple gather of every winter storm
chase small boats to harbour before an angry swell.
I don’t know how historically accurate any of the above is, nor do I particularly care. Poets were never well known, or appreciated, for their attention to facts, at least in days of yore; metaphor being their quarry to a far greater extent.
It is only recently, I believe, that poets actually have had to literally embody their work in both life and deed, literally breathing words of blessed scripture. Good lord, good luck to them!
Vineyards in the Champagne region of France.
Terroir
Another particular feature of what, I believe, is Mister Corrigan’s second superlative collection is the irreverent and humorous nature of some of the poems.
At times, I was reminded of another stalwart in the recent Irish literary canon, and that is Paul Durcan. Michael Corrigan, being but a few years older than myself, is of that generation that grew up during the Depression in 1980s Ireland, and his humour is deeply informed by the experience of busts and booms, in that particular order.
This is something that you simply cannot imitate. The French have the term terroir which is particular to their culture. They use it principally to describe the distinctive flavour and taste of a certain cheese or wine that can be traced to the particularities of weather and soil of the place it comes from in France.
Champagne is an obvious example of this cultural phenomenon. No other sparkling white wine can use the term unless it comes from this specific region. The French feel other sparkling drinks, such as Prosecco, come from very different terroirs with different soil and climates and so cannot possibly be described using the term.
The particular terroir that Michael Corrigan comes from is a feature informing the aesthetic of his work; like the shells in the soil that inform that old white wine that comes from Bordeaux and whose name escapes me now…
When the dark waters of sleep
close across my resting butch face
and I become a fat Ophelia
floating down the weedy slope
of memory, hope and duck billed platitudes,
back to childhood, back to faith,
where a diarrhoea fountain
of bare-knuckled nationalism
provides us with its dullard troops
each one trained to shit on sight,
the brightest and best promoted to teach
in the places that smelled of failure and feet.
There are many so-called poets who are praised for their satirical nature. Many is the time that I have read their work and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Poetic trends, like any, come and go . But verse such as the above would certainly qualify as satire of the very highest order. God knows every particular cuntry has its own exasperating strains, and dear old Ireland is no exception.
Embracing Mediocrity
I remember being at an exhibition in one of the older more established art galleries in Dublin and a very famous photographer, who had made his career abroad, commented on how in the Republic we make a point of embracing mediocrity
It is this particular phenomenon, again, that I think Mr Corrigan is particularly good at eking out. Begrudgery being another!
when masters came to class tooled up
and the biggest looters wore the best suits,
Every society has its particular issues. I’ve lived long enough in France to spot some there, and having lived with an Italian for over twenty years, I am qualified to identify that country’s or rather its peoples, foibles.
What Corrigan is particularly good at putting his finger on here (both of the above quotes are taken from Unlearning my Place) is the atrocious competitiveness produced by living on a small island, where everybody is fighting for their portion of the land.
You also find it in the novels of Andrea Camilleri describing Sicily. The cold, brutal violence of the mafia in his case. In the Republic of Ireland, things are a lot less dramatic. Dead is the word. Everybody is caught in a kind of entropy that James Joyce identified on page one of Dubliners – PARALYSIS.
The disease has not gone away. Irish society, in general, is still plagued by it. The absolute awfulness of social convention. The tiresome scene that informs everything. Even poetry!
Choose friends wisely,
enemies will self-select,
smiling like tigers or growling like bears,
an arm around your shoulder
while pissing down your leg,
the welcome will be warm
before you’re taken out and shot.
The indirect nature which seems to govern everybody’s speech, the coded chatter, the back stabbing nature that it all creates. All the atrocious hallmarks of the ‘Irish’ when at home; behind the smiling eyes: the daggers in their bones.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot – Poems by Mick Corrigan is a wonderful collection of both poetry and verse. The first is infused with Biblical insight and learning, while the latter is concocted with sharp and bitter knowledge won, no doubt, first-hand by the author who thinks so little of the slights by now that he has made it the stuff of polished rhymes and memorable phrases.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot: Poems by Mick Corrigan Dionysia Press Ltd, 2021
59 pages – £15.50
We all see things with different eyes and it gets you nowhere hoping that one in a thousand will see things your way. J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980).
In his droll 1999 essay, ‘Reader’s Block’, Geoff Dyer describes suffering from what he calls a creeping condition whereby he finds himself staring blankly at his bookshelves noting all the books he hasn’t read and thinking “there’s nothing left to read”.
Such was Dyer’s malady that even so-called “quality fiction” seemed a waste of time. He was forty-one. Back in his twenties he had imagined he would spend his middle age reading the books he didn’t have the patience to read when he was young. But it was not to be, and now he found himself resigned to leafing through the pages of the in-flight magazine when traveling abroad rather than reading the books he brought for the journey.
Being roughly the same age as Dyer, I identified wholly with his piece back then, and in a way still do. But my malady, my “reader’s block”, is more specific: it was fiction that got on my nerves at the onset of middle age, and years later it still does. I don’t suffer from reader’s block, but rather fiction reader’s block, or to be more precise, novel reader’s block.
Occasionally some fiction does slip through the net. Jennifer Potter and Ferdinand Dennis are on my bedside table alongside the handful of old favourites that I occasionally revisit: Sam Selvon, Chester Himes, Shelagh Delaney, Stuart Dybek, W.G.Sebald and Ann Quin. But it is to non-fiction that I mostly turn and have done for over twenty years.
Currently I’m engrossed in Patrick Wright’s monumental The Sea View Has Me Again, an extraordinary telling of the German writer Uwe Johnson’s lost decade on the Isle of Sheppey. Johnson drank himself to death in bleak surrounds of the Sheerness Sea View Hotel in the 1984.
But what is this affliction? It’s not laziness or distraction, nor the inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t offer immediate gratification. Patrick Wright’s multi-layered opus is a densely packed seven hundred page micro-history of both Sheppey and Uwe’s self- exile, and is not remotely daunting. Likewise, Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s detailed study of Sebald’s life and work comes in at over six hundred pages, and is not a page too long in my view.
In interviews the highly-regarded contemporary writers Kevin Barry and Rob Doyle can be interesting, but the preoccupations they display in their fictions are those of young men and are of no interest to me at all at my stage in life.
Now to be sure, I’m of the wrong demographic for Sally Rooney or Nicole Flattery, but I can’t hack the imagined worlds of the Colm Toibins or John Banvilles either – in form and content they’re just not my cup of tea. It is of course a question of taste, but I can’t abide the narrative armature of story-driven literary fiction with those wretched character arcs – as Shakespeare fully understood, people do not change.
My inability to read literary fiction doesn’t bother me, and I don’t need my ideas of the world to be shaped. My view of the world is fully formed and doesn’t need to be textually generated or reinforced.
But I am a reader, and always have been, even though I grew up in a non-reading household. Even when I was boy, I knew where to look for my reading material. I was a discriminating reader. As an eleven-year old I knew Edgar Allan Poe was good and H.P. Lovecraft was bad. I could see that, unlike Henry James, William Golding wrote in clear, straightforward prose to elucidate complex themes.
As a young adult in the counter-culture era of the late 60s, I recognized that Mervyn Peake was a singular talent and a great stylist, and that Tolkien was a dull and pedestrian writer. Jean Cocteau, even in translation was great and Burroughs’ debut Junky/Junkie was a fine example of taut, economical writing that surpassed his later experimental fiction.
Recently I was chatting with an old friend. He’s an exiled Corkonian living in Italy, and an erudite man of letters. We spoke about my aversion to fiction and he echoed my sentiments. Somehow our conversation turned to Flannery O’Connor. I’m an admirer of her short fiction but now find myself confused and a little wary of her after the revelations in 2014 of the racist views expressed in her correspondence.
My friend had never read O’Connor. Could O’Connor be saved from herself? I don’t have the answer, but her fiction can stand alone. I told my friend how in the 1950s reviewers were constantly vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. My friend lit up at this: “I like the sound of that! I can’t stand being told what characters think and feel. I just want a description of where they go and what they do.” Simply and succinctly put.
In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor wrote that for some reason he could only guess at, “the novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character. One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of himself”.
It is this process, embedded in the mechanics of fiction, of identification and absorption into a psychological world, that in time becomes for me recognizable and tedious. So maybe it is a case that non-fiction – and certain rare types of fiction that bypass identification in favour of evocation of a world and its details – doesn’t use itself up in the telling. It stays with us. And so, in the meantime and undoubtedly for the rest of my life, I will follow my instincts, knowing that non-fiction will more likely give me what I want.
There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense.
Whenever I hear a song, an eddy of radio-speak, a casual exchange, unfurling in Irish, I go quiet, caught in the webs of a faltering familiarity. Likewise, when I return to them, I find that the recollections I have of my grandparents are locked in a grammar of (often palpable) absences: I’ll not see their like again.
By choosing Irish placenames as titles for a number of poems in my new collection, Phantom Gang, linking the elegies I had composed for my grandparents with the landscapes I associated with them in north Leitrim, I was trying to register, in outline, the forms of loss under which the poems had been written: the twin river-banks – an unreachable language, an irretrievable time – between which my memories had flowed since their deaths.
So in “Achadh Bhuachaill” (meaning, literally, ‘Boy’s Field’, and transliterated to ‘Aghavoghil’ in English), the townland’s emotional cartography begins to shift, as the poem slowly unearths a seldom mentioned incident from the local past, relayed to me by my granduncle: “The land here / dreams in silhouettes // our bodies learn to read”.
The relationship between land (and its changes) with the memories that mark it, of course, is as old as poetry itself. It recurs as a shaping concern in the work of John Clare (1793-1864), the so-called ‘peasant poet’ of the late Romantic period. “Oh, words are poor receipts for what tie has stole away”, he wrote, remembering the open commons he had known in the Northamptonshire of his youth, one of many areas in rural England directly affected by the 1801 Inclosure Consolidation Act, converting communally tended landscapes into real estate. “There once were days, the woodman knows it well”, he said, “When shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush”:
There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt, There once were paths that every valley wound – Inclosure came, and every path was stopt[.]
This truncation, and the subsequent disappearance, of the much-cherished social and ecological terrain of his upbringing, can be sensed in the knotted, quickening language of Clare’s pastoral poems, often scintillating in their natural notations, even as they crackle under the weight of the vexed environmental histories they record. The communal fields and woods, the trilling heaven of the poet’s boyhood, seemed increasingly irrecoverable to Clare, having been carved up, indelibly, “[in] little parcels little minds to please”, leaving “men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.”
Phantom Gang attempts to pay tribute to this distant figure, a “loss-eyed wilder-man”, who was also, at different points in his life, a kind of “hierophant // of dirt-in-bloom / and revelry”. Tuning in to the fierce, burnished weathers of his work, the book simultaneously tries to sift through the swarming static of contemporary history to a new zone of clarity, where the spectres (of poverty, displacement, homelessness, environmental corrosion) that so ruled Clare’s world, two centuries ago, might be recognised afresh in our own – “our age / of wilting seas // and homesick, lock-out blues.”
In all of this, among other things, I discovered that reading poetry is not so very different from the writing of it. We bring what we have – our small store of hopes and memories – to the threshold of another life, trusting in the possibility of recognition or discovery. The words on the page, I now believe, form a living monument to that possibility, creating a space where lost presences might be acknowledged, where the vitality and freedoms of an uprooted world can be sensed anew, pressing through the topsoil of everything left over, no matter how scarce. That, I think, is what the poem, “The Commons” (dedicated to Clare), reaches towards, near the collection’s close:
To feel at all: an act of intimate dissent,
as gentle-hearted heretics have ever felt and known.
Is this, then, our one inheritance, the ache where voices grow?
My poem’s a lifted echoing, as if they might continue.
Feature Image: Lough Melvin, County Leitrim, Ireland.
Do you know the feeling of wanting to discover secrets that aren’t being spoken aloud?
For a while I thought it was an esoteric way of preserving knowledge. I imagined there were savants to seek out, to turn to.
And in search of traces, I became passionate about chasing and searching for the threads of various human cultures, intertwined for thousands of years, starting from the perspective of Sicily, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.
At a certain point I began to realize that the secrets were no longer alive: the people were gone, without leaving a cultural legacy behind.
Impossible, you will say. Everyone leaves an enduring oral imprint on the people around them. And yet, through passages less emphatic than the burning of books, or the eradication of cultural witnesses, a culture may be overwhelmed and deleted by a dominant culture, leading to the progressive decay and then complete disappearance of a cultural legacy over a few generations.
Cultural Imperialism
We are the result of five thousand years of cultural imperialism, which has slowly led to the affirmation of the strongest and most violent group, which now presents itself as an international, global monoculture that has drastically overwhelmed all others. It is the culture of today’s contemporary globalized world: capitalist, patriarchal, monotheistic and consumerist, in which a few cultural differences found at various latitudes appear almost as commercial nuances – variations on stimulating consumption.
As soon as I realized that I was living in an era directed by a total cultural monopoly, I began frenziedly passing on, divulging, recomposing and reviving those shreds of a subaltern culture that I could find; whether they were dying, or perhaps already immortalized by a lone enthusiast, annotated and then recorded over the past centuries; although often in forms not suitable for preserving the enduring ferments in the material of oral tradition.
I sought the secrets “between the lines” of verses or stories: after all, we know that this way has always been used to preserve and pass on things: concealing them in a joke, a rhyme, a riddle, a bell, or a proto-memory.
I searched inside song traditions, oral stories, and in the repertoire of oral tradition, which they have not been able to completely eradicate from memory: precisely the songs of oral tradition which has the potential to preserve and pass on secrets about the meaning of life, the most important baggage that generations have the burden to pass on – at all costs and through all possible stratagems – in case of censorship and oppression.
Women’s Songs in the Sicilian Tradition
In the last few years I have been primarily interested in Women’s Song in the Sicilian tradition, which constitutes an even more fragile niche in the midst of the general fragility of the heritage of tradition, since it suffers in addition from the perpetual minority suffered by the patriarchal cultures that have followed one another since the third millennium B.C..
It is a repertoire scarcely paid attention to, liminal to other stronger and more manifest repertoires, more excavated and documented; and in any case predominantly investigated from a male perspective; from a point of view that is still and always hegemonic, in terms of the gender question.
This is the most fertile repertoire for those who, like me, are in search of handed-down secrets: women represent a particular segment of social reality, in which the needs of the private and family sphere interpenetrate uniquely with the needs of the public, socio-economic sphere; women have the task of ensuring the survival and growth of the social actors of the future, the children, and women, have the task of turning the economic wheel of the family micro-society. Always.
Lullabies
The musical repertoire of women is often a mixture of different genres that refer both to the classic cycle of life – including lullabies, engagement, wedding songs and funeral laments – and to the sphere of work, as well as to the religious sphere, in a diversified way according to the religion of reference.
Often the added value that we find in the fragments of female repertoire is that there is a greater purity and resistance to the assimilation of the hegemonic cultures, alongside a tendency towards fusion.
Having been maintained and handed down in an intimate and private setting, and almost always in the absence of musical instruments, they have not been subject to admixture and transformation to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, resulting in the loss of content and precision of message.
In the repertoire of female gender, the first place – cultural universal – is entrusted to the chapter of maternity. That is to the lullabies and dirges that women in every part of the world sing to their children to quieten them and accompany them in their sleep.
The lullaby is the song of intimacy and privacy, it remains contextualized to the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship.
I am convinced that the valorization – the patrimonialisation of this enormous cultural baggage, immaterial heritage of the human race – restores strength, health and richness to the woman, and to her social role. It is a wide and shared documentation of this infinite repertoire, allowing for the patrimonialisation of a real hidden and almost unused treasure.
My two latest albums from 2019: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo and of 2020: Viva Santa Liberata. Sicilian Women Folksongs, are dedicated to the traditional female repertoire. They are the culmination of many years of research – an audio production project investigating, witnessing, and passing on this repertoire.
The path of research on lullabies has been going on for twenty years. It includes field research, the testimonies of women in the first person through intercultural workshops, archival research, and even authorship in some cases.
Above all it has come about in meetings, not only with women but also often with sensitive men who have a strong sense of the magical power of the lullaby.
Collaborators
The opportunity to record an album of lullabies presented itself in 2018. Thankfully, the idea received a warm welcome from the singer friends to whom I proposed a collaboration, under my artistic direction (Simona Di Gregorio, Costanza Paternò, Clara Salvo, the very young Rawen Laid).
Each had the task of testifying some traditional lullabies, not only Sicilian but looking to a wider Mediterranean culture for inspiration, with freedom of choice in the type of processing and repurposing; the disc: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo (2019) represents one more instrument with which to carry out the project.
VIVA SANTA LIBERATA is a record that was created as a tribute to women’s singing, in particular narrative singing, another branch of the female repertoire that has fallen into almost total disuse.
The songs of mothers and daughters, grandmothers and mothers-in-law, sisters and aunts, cummari, majare and soothsayers, midwives and nannies, complainers, healers; the song of girls and ‘teachers of water.’
The title was born from a provocative play on words in relation to the iconography of the feminine in Christian cultures, proposing a synthesis of the dualism between virginal sacrifice and chastity on the one hand, and self-determination and sexual freedom on the other.
Santa Liberata
Santa Liberata claims her atavistic freedom, starting from sexual freedom, the source of all her other powers connected to life and its balance, in the cyclical nature of time, and her source is the fountain of Living Water.
Santa Liberata (in Sicilian “Libbirata”) is the character that continues to guide my work in the last two years. She presents herself in appearance as the Catholic saints, and requires the usual celebrations reserved for the patron saints, such as Santa Rosalia in Palermo and Santa Agata in Catania, that is, required at the annual preparation of a Fistinu, in which her qualities and merits are magnified and her precepts divulged.
PART II – A World Music Festival in Sicily
But the Fistinu is not only this, it is an enterprise involving dozens of artists, workers and associations that have joined my adventurous proposal to build an event around the music, which puts at the centre the idea of a healthier community: a mixed community in which identities and traditions intersect, intertwine and develop; a concrete community that integrates with the natural world; that welcomes it in a symbiotic and non-competitive way, rebuilding the good traditional ecological practices.
It is the heritage of our ancestors; a community of individuals aware of their right to well-being, to care for themselves according to their own free choice, as symbolized by the medicinal hemp, symbol and ornament of Santa Libbirata; an idea of liberation of conscience that starts from the liberation of women, and for this Santa Libbirata.
The Fistinu is an event in which people can find the beneficial dimmension of the participatory FESTIVAL, using the traditional techniques of music, song and dance.
The feast is an occasion in which people dance together, as a communal rite of reintegration of well-being ‘individual through the collective and collective through the individual.’
The popular or folk music has among its functions to bring together the community in a particular occasion, merging together in an experience of total participation, physical, mental and emotional, with the support of rhythm and song; each tradition retains its key to open the doors of participation through dance and song, a ritual and archaic dimension that helps to recreate social harmony and community well-being.
We endeavoured to recreate a tradition of FESTIVAL in Sicily, which in addition to supporting itself through the indigenous cultural traditions, such as the contradanza or the ballittu, inevitably recreates itself by opening and dialoguing with other musical traditions, the cultures that coexist in Sicily today, which can point a magnifying glass on the processes of migration and cultural metissage.
Cultural Crossroads
Looking at the past, centuries of real experience of cultural cross-fertilization between different and distant traditions – including Arabs, Vikings, Greeks, French, Turks and Americans – are the basis on which Sicily’s own musical tradition, the most archaic, has been constituted.
Looking at the present, Sicily is the junction and crossroads of the great migrations of the third millennium, on its territory different experiences and cultural languages continue to meet, dialogue and merge.
Since the third millennium A.D. began we have witnessed the transformation of the whole world. There are no longer borders for information, culture, fashions (unfortunately still too many borders for the dignity of human beings on the move): inevitably the transformation leads to global métissage.
The culture of global métissage is like a river in which everything is mixed; if the course is too wide, values sink and rot at the bottom, the surface becomes one sterile insignificant reality, enslaved to the market and the economic system; but if the course is alive, the identity of our ancestors does not fade in the midst of everything, but is enlivened alongside the others – roots that intertwine and strengthen each other.
Then the métissage becomes our strength, the new strength of the individual of the future.
SI LU CHIù FORTI A’SSIRI SCANNATU
LU CHIù DIBULIDDU E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
SI LA PETRA FERMA A’SSIRI MARTIDDATA
COMU ACQUA CHI CURRI E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
C’ARRIFRISCANNU SCURRI E UNN’è DI NUDDU
L’ACQUA CURRI SUPRA LA MUNTAGNA
SCURRI LENTA MA PASSANNU CANCIA
CANCIA IDDA E CANCIA LA MUNTAGNA
LENTAMENTI L’ACQUA LA TRASFORMA
The music of cultural identity, of the roots, the language and the words of our ancestors, contain within themselves a permanent force. This is like water that flows and slowly manages to shape even the rock, which can allow us women and men of today to face the contemporary world with love, to bring our positive contribution to the creation of the society that is currently getting out of hand.
Micro Identity
That’s why I want to continue to sing in Sicilian, and not only in Sicily, in Italy, and in the whole world. The micro-identity doesn’t close, doesn’t stop and doesn’t die out, but can be offered to the world without fear, allowing us to open up and confront each other, bringing knowledge, esteem and enrichment that strengthens all our resolve.
And I want to meet and get to know closely your stories in your dialects and your songs and dances, to be able to see the strength of the recognition of the message: Acqua di stu chiaru fonti, that secret that has been handed down to us from the past of generations by our Ave.
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BIDDIZZI E D’ACQUA CHIARA
CA CU CI BIVI CI LASSA LA MENTI
UNDI CAMINI TU L’ARIA SCARA
PERNI E DOMANTI SU LI TO SBANNENTI
DI TUTTI LI FUNTANI SI CHIù RARA
E SUNNU L’ACQUI TOI LI CHIù LUCENTI
PRI TIA LA TIRRA STISSA SI PRIPARA
LARGA LU MARI CISSANU LI VENTI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI ARANCI
NA BEDDA COMU A VUI NUN SI PO PINCIRI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI D’ANCILI
CUI PASSA DI STA STRATA LU FA MPINCIRI
TU SI FUNTANA DI TUTTI BILLIZZI
NTRA LU TO STICCHIU C’E LA MIDICINA
QUANTU MALATI C’è TANTU NNI SANA
C’A LI MALATI LIVATI LA SITI
A CHIDDI MORTI LI RISUSCITATI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
Speaking to the Ancestors
But from what past are the ancestors speaking to us? Or rather, how far back is this past from which these rhymes emerge? The rhymes speak of a feminine entity superior to the human dimension, whom one addresses face to face, like a mother or a companion, but whose praises are sung in music, as to a Goddess. It is an emergence of the prehistoric Mediterranean Culture of Mothers.
Digging into history, I wondered when it happened, and how such an unbalanced way of life took over; I was lucky enough to discover the work of prehistoric archaeology by Marija Gimbutas, who reinterpreted prehistory, in particular the time period between 3000 and 2000 BC.
This was before a prolonged period of invasion, when a different culture was widespread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, up to Ireland. From the archaeological data, she concluded this was non-hierarchical, mutualistic, and based on the balance with the natural elements, in which women kept the most valuable skills related to survival, and were responsible for the welfare of the community.
Wayne Dyer called this Gilanic culture, joining equally the Greek roots: -gyn feminine and -an masculine with the unifying letter lambda.
Extra-Europeans
There was a time when those who now pretend to be the original indigenous citizens of Europe were only the new comers, the ‘Extra-Europeans’ of the past. They established their presence by means of wars and violence, trying to destroy or to exploit for their own aims the civilisation they found. They have been trying since then to impose their own single set of truths, values, gods. Now we can say that they failed in doing so at least for two basic reasons: first, we are still here to prove the existence of that earlier civilization, the goddess civilization, because they cut and burnt the trees but didn’t eradicate their/our roots; secondly, what has been achieved through violence and a monocentric male paradigm of dominance is a society based on malaise, destruction and death without regeneration and growth. Now we need a new science, a new politics and a new history, that is no more just his–story.
What have been called disdainfully ‘matriarchal studies’ indicate that egalitarian forms of social structures have existed in the past and are still in existence today in some parts of the world. In ‘matriarchies’ women are at the centre of culture without ruling over other members of society: their aim is not to have power over other people and over the natural world, but to have the power to nurture cultural life based on mutual respect.
…
Our task, therefore, is to transform the hope originating from all these discoveries about our Archaic Past into bursting energy to Realize now, as Mary Daly calls it, our Archaic Future.
Luciana Percovich, Barcelona, 2003.
So I found the tangle of the skein, and what’s more, I found myself with the thread in my hand. When a woman finds herself with a thread in her hand, the archaic instinct is to start weaving.
And from time immemorial, you have to involve others to weave together, if the fabric is endlessly wide.
Weaving then, it is in that time that songs are born: it is there that the story is always made goddess.
This is what Percovich means by Her-story. But let’s go in order.
Tangle of the Skein
The tangle of the skein is in this nebulous prehistory, out of which for decades now has emerged a new truthful narrative that speaks of a better world, or at least another possible one, through the archaeological evidence of a culture that refers to and strongly overlaps with the Utopia of the twentieth century, a better world, Huxley’s Island.
It opens a glimmer of hope: they almost convinced us that we are losers, utopians for an equalitarian and mutualistic world, they corroded our confidence in the ideal, and instead we have the archaeological evidence of the Neolithic, up to the Minoan culture in Crete, as witnesses of a better world.
And we know that this culture that was its bearer has been overwhelmed and prevaricated by an invading culture, which continues to prevail.
Once we have assumed this fact, the rest is all downhill, we simply need to reinterpret all that we known, and all that we will still learn with a new key, free from the intent of the dominant culture to make us slaves and oppressed, forgetting our identity. We haven’t been taught and told where we really came from, now we have to sew up the whole thread of history, to regain strength and courage, and self-confidence, and build our better world. Our archaic-future.
The Culture of the Mothers
The thread, I was saying, I found it in my hand. Digging into the archaeology of Sicilian songs, we can find these poetic fragments clearly ascribable to the spirituality of this culture of the Mothers, gilanic, and connected to the cult of Water and Waters: they are the retropapiri of our spiritual and ritual repertoire!
They can be a nucleus around which to sew up the fragments of memories of songs that have managed to reach us from this archaic culture, and by recomposing a fabric, we contribute to the re-emergence of a cultural identity in which we can feel at ease and heartened by our true roots.
Sicily is like a cauldron, the seething cauldron in which the cultural interactions between the migrant populations of history and the wandering of the merchants in the Mediterranean have stratified: among the sediments there are traces of cultural persistence of an ancient, prehistoric culture that unites us and reflects us: the culture of the Mothers.
It is the land of the golden apples, perhaps here rests hidden the Fata Morgana. If she is resting here, she is resting behind a magic mirror, and Circe is singing to call back from sleep all the sirens of the sea and invite them to a feast.
Women, says the song, let’s take back our customs, the feast must be done at least once a year, the feast where we can sing and dance and meet to tell our stories and our songs. In order not to disappear, to prevent our culture from dying out.
It is for this reason that from Sicily SANTA LIBERATA SENDS AN APPEAL.
From Sicily to all the islands, both territorial and cultural: sisters we are, capitals of cultural persistence!
In us is the germ of resistance, if after so many millennia we can still resist with a memory of the stories, voices and songs of our ancestors, who handed down their island culture.
We bring together in a project a path of meetings of songs and sharing, a project of permanent chorus of the archaic feminine, we constitute an OPIRA OF PUPE.
Singers and performers, bearers of traditions, passionate, willing weavers, Santa Liberata is building the road, from Rome to Sicily. Spring 2022.
In our latest podcast Ben Pantrey interviews former musician of the month Bartholomew Ryan in Lisbon. They discuss his new album ‘Jabuti’ composed while on retreat in Brazil, just prior to the pandemic, as well as the creative process and the importance of loafing.
We previously published the lyrics to Ryan’s song ‘Iguatu‘.
Ben also recites an important passage from Milan Kundera‘s 1995 novel Slowness which served as the original inspiration for Ryan’s musical project.
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.
Enjoy!
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Or, at least, I was in the same room as him, no more than thirty or forty feet away, for several hours. Not much further than Macron recently in Moscow.
In August and September 2000, the last time Ireland was lobbying for a seat at the UN Security Council, I was an intern of the Irish diplomatic corps at the United Nations in New York.
My job was to record the speeches of the Heads of State. I was present for the speeches of the heads of state and government at the Security Council and General Assembly, including Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro.
I felt, even then, that Putin’s energy was very dark – a psychopath perhaps, devoid of empathy.
There is no doubt in my mind that this war is morally unjustifiable and wrong, despite the questionable wisdom of expansionist Western foreign policy (from a Russian perspective).
At the same UN summit in 2000, Tony Blair gave the most incredible speech. I was taken in, hook, line and sinker, by his incredible rhetoric and passion. His forked tongue only became apparent later. How could we be so manipulated?
A false representative of the light you could say. That which appears to be of the light, but is deceiving.
Whether by intent, or design, is another question, but nonetheless he is a man with the blood of many on his hands. Of course, he can still argue that the war in Iraq was justified.
That’s what they alway say, these power-hungry men, as the blood of innocents flows. For the victors, that is how history is written.
Putin and his long-time confidant Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Evil in the World
There is no doubt in my mind that evil exists. The light exists, the dark exists, and the false light exists. The false light is that which masquerades and deceives: a complex Luciferian archetype.
We like to believe that we are on the side of good, and the ‘other’ side is evil. The truth is much more complex, and permeable. In a world where we like to define things as black or white, there are many shades of grey.
Good people can do unspeakable acts of evil, while even evil acts can have positive consequences.
Anger is sometimes a necessary and appropriate emotion when our boundaries are violated, on a personal or national level. Sometimes, in the face of unprovoked aggression, the only option is to fight back.
When we are feeling strong emotions, however, we are open to manipulation. Any time I feel a strong emotion of anger or fear due to a situation in my life or through what I see in the media – as I am feeling now – I ask myself, am I being manipulated? If so, by who, and for what end?
Who will benefit, if due to my anger and dismay at the brutal and morally wrong treatment of Ukrainian civilians, I somehow begin to fear or hate Russia or Russians?
What if I decide, in my anger, to fan the flames of hatred, anger, and war, rather than douse them? Are we to support the spread of this conflict, rather than hope for peace?
If there is one thing I have learnt over many years of diving deep into the metaphysics of light and dark it is that there is much that we are unaware of. We are all pawns in a greater game than we are aware of, you could say.
If it turns out that the game is rigged, and no matter which side seems to come out on top, the house always wins, then the only option is to stop playing the game.
Hitler’s prophecy speech of 30 January 1939.
What is the Influence of Evil?
The genius of evil is that it influences us through our deepest fears and weaknesses. If, for example, your deepest fear is failure, being attacked, overwhelmed or destroyed. Perhaps this is the result of an unsafe and traumatic childhood.
This could manifest as paranoia, fear, or deepest shame at the loss of personal or national prestige, as is perhaps the case with a ‘strongman’ such as Putin. This is perceived as a threat to your very existence.
When some external event triggers this terrible internal fear, the very personal and overwhelming nature of this trigger is how evil influences a person. Evil finds our unconscious hidden weaknesses, and exploits them ruthlessly.
How do we recognise the influence of evil on ourselves? By hating another person, race, or nation, we are acting under the influence of evil.
This is the genius of evil: it realizes our deepest fears through the prism of our distorted perceptions. It preys on our weaknesses, separates us, divides us, makes us hate instead of love.
It is rare indeed, for someone to wake up in the morning saying “today I choose to be evil”. There are also those who can be described as pure evil – consciously evil – in the sense of acting with intentional malice, but these people are rare.
For the most part, evil slides in unseen, unconsciously, through our psychic blind spots. What lengths would you go to, to avoid your deepest fears? To avoid a perceived existential threat to you, your family or nation? This is how ‘normal’ people do the most terrible things. Evil locates our deepest fear and weaknesses, plays on them, magnifies and exploits them.
Like a computer virus exploiting a line of faulty code, evil exploits the faulty code of the human race. Shame, fear, anger, and trauma are the gateways into the body, poisons, faulty code, through which evil may stem, if allowed. These are known as the three kleshas or poisons of Mahayana Buddhism: ignorance, attachment and aversion, from which evil arises.
Projection of the Shadow
The great psychiatrist Carl Jung elaborated on the projection of the shadow being the greatest moral threat of our age.
A threat to the very future of humanity, and one the majority of people are utterly unaware of.
We psychologically project that which is disowned, unbearable and unconscious in ourselves, onto the other, thereby ridding ourselves of the need to make conscious decisions, take responsibility for our actions and integrate our experiences.
Thus Jung writes in Archaic Man that ‘Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’
He adds in Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934:
Modern people … are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.
If we do not acknowledge and own our shadow, we project our inner darkness onto the unfortunate recipients of our projections, as human beings have been doing for millennia of wars and cycles of destruction.
Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mytholog by Lorenz Frølich.
Mythology and Psychology
Invariably, humans fall pretty to some great mythology, whether it is nationalism, tribalism or religious belief, which assures them that their cause is just.
We are not far removed from the Crusaders in this regard, who believed they were saving Jerusalem from heathens – in the twenty-first century as much as in the twelfth.
The psychological projection of the shadow is how mostly men are capable of inflicting barbarous acts of evil onto the ‘other’, who has generally already been thoroughly dehumanised and demonised.
Recently, a former officer of the US Navy Seals Special forces, one of the men who led the hunt for Bin Laden, told me how easy an operation this was to undertake.
He said that one of his main responsibilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was to keep his men in line, reminding them of the humanity of the enemy. In a warzone, how easy it must be to forget.
In his book on evil The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who also designed the Stanford Prison experiment, wrote:
I don’t believe anybody’s inherently evil. I believe we’re inherently good. And until they get put in a bad barrel. And there are a lot of bad barrels. A lot of jobs that we take encourage us to cheat, to lie…. If you’re a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you’re domineering, you’re dominating them, you’ll shoot to kill then that’s the image. I believe in the goodness of human nature. And it’s being put into situations that corrupts that.
Zimbardo defines evil as exercising power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), destroy, or commit crimes against humanity.
From his psychological analysis of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who committed atrocities on the Iraqi POWs, Zimbardo shows that evil is situational.
Like it or not, we all have the potential to be a Nazi prison camp guard in us, given the right situation and dehumanisation of the enemy.
The Russian people have perhaps a greater understanding of this than most, given their brutal history and capacity for resilience and suffering. As one of their greatest novelists, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’
Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.
The Red Peril 2.0
How easy it is for us in the West to demonize the Russian threat, the hapless Slavic soldier from the steppes, conscripted as they have been for centuries to die as cannon fodder in a war they did not want.
This appears to be a reawakened Communist threat. Indeed, the idea of invading hordes from the east is a deep fear ingrained in the West, since the time of Genghis Khan and beyond.
In recent times it has been the threat of militiant Islam, the Muslim horde overrunning Europe, but our collective Western shadow is now projected elsewhere.
In some bizarre, surreal joke of history, we are apparently witnessing Chechen fighters, suffering from severe historical amnesia, from a land so terribly brutalized by Putin, take part in the invasion of Ukraine.
Likewise, and in a perfect mirror of a paranoid Putin – a dinosaur whose thinking is conditioned by bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War and Great Game of the nineteenth century – the West with its expansionist foreign policy represents a threat to the very survival of his beloved Russia.
Apparently, this existential threat is to be countered at the cost of total war.
Ukraine and the West believes it is protecting itself from the threat of Russia, as has proved to be the case.
Putin and his acolytes believe they are protecting Russia from military encirclement as a result of the eastward expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War. These have become two disastrous self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus both perspectives have turned out to be valid on their own terms.
It’s history repeating itself, even so far as Putin making the same strategic mistakes as Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942 in greatly underestimating the vastness of Ukraine and over-extending supply lines.
Hitler, of course, committed the same folly in reverse in the 1930s, emphasizing the need for Lebensraum, living space, for the German people, who were apparently threatened by the great Slavic hordes to the east.
Hidden Forces
What would you do, if you felt as if your nation or family was under an existential threat, and only you had the vast power to stop it?
Do you think you would commit acts of evil to ‘protect’ yourself, believing this to be for the highest good in the circumstances?
There are hidden forces at play here. I use the word hidden intentionally, knowing that some will understand what I am trying to say. Those who have ears to hear will hear.
How else can we make sense of the ritual of bloodletting that so-called rational actors seem to periodically engage in, most clearly perhaps in the massacres of the First World War, when the most ‘civilized’ of nations sacrificed their best and brightest.
For what? How could humans behave in such a barbaric and irrational way?
Human beings often operate like actors on a stage, contending with forces greater than we can imagine. These might be described as the anabolic and catabolic forces of nature, involving endless cycles of growth, death, decay and rebirth.
My first experience with ayahuasca on Maui, Hawaii many years ago, demonstrated this to me very clearly. For whatever reason, I did not fear looking into the darkness. That night I left the safety of the ceremony and went out alone to stare into the unknown of the dark jungle.
Instead of fearing the dark, I wanted to understand it.
Nietzsche warned: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,’ but this was not my experience. I found that looking into the abyss gave me a greater understanding of the world.
Jung, so well versed in ancient knowledge and metaphysics, brought these themes to a psychological level, writing
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy will defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be (Carl Jung, Approaching the Unconscious).
The Metaphysics of Light and Dark
We live in a world characterised by duality – light and dark, good and evil. These are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other.
Irrespective of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, you may still find useful insights in spiritual traditions on the nature of evil.
In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition, it was believed that the universe is a battleground between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu). Angra Mainyu is not God’s equal opposite, but the destructive energy that opposes God’s creative energy.
It is essential for us to remember that this battle is not external to us as humans. It is an internal process in everyone.
Even in the Bible, Isaiah 45:7 says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.’ In other words, according to an Old Testament view, Yahweh (God) is the source of all things, light and dark.
The Taoist yin yang symbol captures the essence of this most beautifully. The seeds of light grow in the dark, the seeds of dark grow in the light.
Other metaphysical systems were all too aware of this too – that too much of anything becomes its opposite. The Mediaeval Jewish Kabbalists saw evil as a result of unbalanced force. For example, the benevolent dictator, motivated by the seemingly altruistic aim of protecting his people, can easily become a tyrant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the folk wisdom goes.
In a tremendously complex world bedevilled by unintended consequences, we are often unaware of the full consequences of our actions, yet we are still responsible for them. A classic example is the arming of the Taliban, formerly the mujahideen, by the U.S. in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions of bringing about the demise of the USSR in Afghanistan the 1980s.
In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism and a treatise on the ethics of war, we are told that Krishna (God) gave humans free will so they would have the volition to choose love, but ‘impelled by material desires, the souls engage in evil deeds and are subjected to others’ evil actions, as per the inexorable law of karma.’
Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows, by George Catlin.
Wetiko
Jungian analyst Paul Levy, in his seminal work on the origins of evil Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil brilliantly describes how humanity is suffering from:
a spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness.
Many traditions speak of a concept similar to that native American idea of wetiko. The Jewish- Christian gnostic mystic tradition, for example, draws on descriptions in the two-thousand-year old writings known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi – of the archons, who have imprisoned the divine spark of human souls in material creation.
Likewise, the Bible speaks of a ‘counterfeiting spirit’ deceiving humanity. The Tibbetan Buddists speak of humanity trapped in the matrix of samsara, of suffering.
The essence of evil is that it helps continue the illusion of separation of souls from universal consciousness, from source.
This is perhaps the deepest symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. The fall of matter from spirit, the loss of our connected state of original innocence.
Evil prevents us from recalling who we truly are. It separates us from each other and from whence we came.
A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March.
What can be done?
First, on a macro level, the consciousness of the human race must evolve to a point where war is no longer acceptable, for any justification, under any circumstances.
Otherwise, paranoid, wounded, power hungry men, for it is almost always men who start wars, will inevitably find a justification for their actions.
As the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said:
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
It will be necessary to make war an absolute taboo and to ostracize those who participate in it. It may take many generations and even millennia for this to occur, but happen it must.
Peace must be a conscious choice for humanity. As Margaret Mead put it: ‘Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a means of solving conflict?’
There are some encouraging signs that in this first European war of the social media age, this may be happening – via the compassion and condemnation of the international community.
But this cannot only apply to wars started by the ‘other’ side, it must apply equally to wars started by or supported by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Otherwise, Western hypocrisy and privilege continues.
For this to happen, a global shift in consciousness is required, if not rogue actors will easily take advantage of a more peaceful world.
It will also require a much more equitable world, one where justifiable grievances can be addressed and resolved equitably, before violence is resorted to.
Is it naive to believe such a world is possible? Perhaps, but in a world of nuclear weapons, we surely have no choice but to evolve and ensure our long term survival.
It will also be necessary to change the current structures of power, so that the concentration of political power no longer allows the egos of weak, wounded men to force wars and mayhem on their people.
As part of this evolution of human consciousness, some form of collective healing will be required to address the psychological wounds of the human race, the majority of which is traumatized as a result of centuries of war and oppression.
Otherwise, wounded man-children will continue to play out their traumas and pathologies on a world stage; handing these down to the next generation.
We would do well to remember the indigenous wisdom that the seven generations to come inherit the traumas of the past seven generations.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
Personal Responsibility
Secondly, on a micro level, as individuals, we must take personal responsibility for the psychological awareness of our shadows. Becoming aware that we are not always as good as we imagine ourselves to be.
As Jung put it:
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
We need to educate people on the need to make conscious what is unconscious, unhealed, unprocessed, unowned in them, before they find someone or something else to project their deepest fears and darkest thoughts on to. This is of the utmost importance for the survival of the human race, and not talked about nearly enough.
How can we expect peace in the world when we are at war with ourselves? If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves.
Our outer world reflects the state of our own inner psyche, individually and collectively. That our currently external reality is in such dire shape reflects the inner collective reality.
If we do not mend our ways the great ritualistic dance, the great cosmic game of growth, death and rebirth, construction and destruction, with human beings as mere unconscious pawns, will begin again, as it has for many of the past millennia, but this time with the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Feature Image: Mushroom cloud from the explosion of Castle Romeo in 1954.
Poems in the Manner of the Devil After Alexandar Ristović (1933-1994)
If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
The bounty of bedlam,
Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
Or Last Suppers.
Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
See the world now through the light of wine.
Do you have confidence in the morning?
Do you have faith in toast?
Each morning, do you spread marmalade
Under the clouds in the sky?
Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
To honour the martyrdom of little buns.
These trees that surround you,
Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
Holding peaches up to the clouds?
Where have all the flamingos flown?
Into the jaws of baboons in hell.
Columns, arches… shit!
Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.
But know also this,
That within all of this madness
There is one alone who sleeps quietly
Nestled in dreams like a bird
And she dreams of housing owls
While presiding over countless committees.
Break Fast
The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
It had a very simple olive pattern,
The kind you might find in a good café
Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
The kind you might find your hands floating over
Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
In order to settle the bill.
Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
The whole panoply of artifacts,
Suddenly is in freefall before you,
Like that last joke you heard before leaving.
The Familiar
Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
Over the same old living space. Here, then,
Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
And, in memory! The ontological shifts
Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
The words vibrating, each particular element,
Each particular word, key, shape or movement
Given the proper attention it deserves.
Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!
Janus
I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.
So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
Physically and you will have the opportunity
Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!
Putinize – a verb designated to describe
The systematic annihilation of either a person,
A place, an animal or a thing so that the object
Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.
Kyiv
After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
to either madness or so- called reason.
