[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”11″ gal_title=”Magda”]
Being self-taught, I am constantly seeking to reinvent what is familiar to me, and tap into the unknown through experimentation. This is my form of self-exploration and self-discovery. That said, I dabble in two distinct styles; I go back and forth between making portraits (but not strictly) that echo the old and rich textured abstracts. My attempt to bridge the past with the new, as these influences bind me inexplicably.
Come on in. Try our new Chicken Selects.
Forget food. We should send them luggage.
Watch this sexy star win in just five words.
Do you like who your party elects?
You could always reverse your mortgage.
A better demographic is diehard nerds.
We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
Get cash: Sell us your diabetes strips.
What’s worse than all is that the world won’t end.
Buy “Flip This House” and be a millionaire.
Call now to book amazing summer trips.
You’ve typed up your break-up. Now hit send.
Won’t you take a moment to show you care?
We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
Here’s one weird old trick to get rid of belly fat.
Go on. Guess who just got a Guggenheim.
It’s true. Everyone says you drink too much.
A great run of growth has finally gone flat.
It’s pointless in our time to use rhyme.
You really are just entirely out of touch.
We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
A mob has formed outside the convention.
We have no way of knowing what’s kept offshore.
Please hang up now or choose an extension.
We’ve never seen a storm like this before.
Ernest Hilbert is the author of three collection of poetry, Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, and Caligulan, which was selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer, opera librettist, and book reviewer for The Washington Post. His poem “Mars Ultor” will appear in Best American Poetry 2018.
My paintings are inspired by the simplicity and perfection in Nature, revealing what our soil provides for us.
I am moved by other botanical artists, portraying plants in a natural way, sometimes illustrating the features of each plant scientifically, or simply picturing their beauty without getting too methodical.
Painting Nature is a way for me to connect with the constant motion of plant life, exhaling flowers and leaves. But often what we see is stillness.
Thanks to botanical art and my background as an environmentalist I moved into Organic growing and horticulture.
These experiences have brought a deeper respect for soil, and its capacity to create through my daily waste.
I have always traced life to its origin in the ground, and how we effect other beings on Earth.
Learning about horticulture has added more clarity to my art.
Thanks to the NCAD community garden I have learnt how to build soil from wastestuffs: horse manure from stables; vegetable waste from the Smithfield market; coffee grinds from local baristas, wood chip from tree surgeons. Once you add these together, with the help of beautiful earthworms, compost is formed, which improves Soil.
Every plant I draw is the expression of what the Soil provides for us as human beings. A beautiful gift from Mother Earth we meet every day, even in cities: amazing colours and different shades which come from this beautiful dark matter.
If we connect with this energy and we work with Nature we build this connection, receiving gratitude in the vegetables and flowers that nourish and give us pleasure.
I develop a close connection with plants while I paint them, appreciating their movements and importance to us. The Soil is the most important ingredient of life on Earth and we must respect it, knowing that it is not necessarily immutable, which may not be immediately apparent.
We can respect, co-create and understand the circles of life which the Soil requires to regenerate and become fertile.
The beauty of our flowers and plants cannot be taken for granted. There is danger whenever we neglect these patterns of creation, which form the fertile Earth around us.
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”32″ gal_title=”Giulia Canevari”]
Bitcoin and the Blockchain are perhaps the most hyped technology today, rivalling even Artificial Intelligence for extreme predictions and outrageous claims. We need to talk about the ecology.
Bitcoin is a cryptographically-backed, anonymous, pseudo-currency invented by the otherwise unknown Satoshi Nakamoto. It has a dollar value because it is traded on the market, as can be seen here. It is used to trade in everything from lattes to guns, and is always free of jurisdictional monitoring and hence taxation. In other words it enables criminal transactions. The value of Bitcoin has grown quite predictably since its creation. This is not my main problem with Bitcoin.
The Blockchain, on which Bitcoin is built, is a hideously inefficient means of computing a tally of transactions. There are many superb descriptions of how it works, such as the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9KAnkZUjU
It is sometimes perceived as an intellectually-elegant formulation, provably sharing a settling of a kind of account. However it costs too much. Picture a train of carriages. There is a first carriage, normally with an engine. Other carriages may be attached to this engine. Any human can get on and off the system of carriages at any time, by adding their own carriage, and may insist that everyone else who ever entered a carriage witness this, mathematically, by adding each carriage to their own description of where the carriages are positioned in the train. This is a huge computational load on all the witnesses.
This is the fundamental purpose of the blockchain. It provides a mathematically sound proof that a certain computational task has been performed and does it in such a way that it can be demonstrated by anyone else in the chain.
While the asymptotic nature of Bitcoin is implied in the above it makes sense to put this in context. An asymptote is a limit to which a function can computationally approach. In Mathematics we can use purely analytical techniques to describe the overall behaviour of such functions, indeed these techniques are fundamental to the theory of Calculus. When we have to determine the stepwise approximation numerically matters can become quite complicated and require significant time and effort.
An example of this asymptotic approach, though not necessarily the most correct, is the value of the fundamental constant Π. We learn in school that Π has a value of roughly 3.14, and this suffices for schoolroom exercises. Archimedes created techniques that foreshadowed Newtonian calculus by over a thousand years in his ingenious calculation of this transcendental number‘s digital expansion. We can now determine Π to billions of places of precision, but we will never know it as accurately as its simplest formulation: the area of a circle is Π times the radius squared. In other words, the idea of Π as a proportion is vastly more accurate than any numerical approximation. Bitcoin utilises this asymptotic approach to guarantee that the number of Bitcoins it is possible to calculate has an upper bound of 21 million, and that it gets proportionally harder to do so.
Most, though not all, contemporary encryption relies on one simple and strange fact: it is vastly easier to multiply two prime numbers to get another number than it is to do the reverse. Thus it is easier to multiply 5 and 13 to get 65 than it is to analyse 65 to determine what two prime are its divisors. This gets harder the bigger the number. Why this is so is deep and suggestive and still not properly understood. Indeed the study of prime numbers is perhaps the single greatest motive for the entire subject of Mathematics. They are bizarre, profound, and remarkably useful, far past their role in encryption. In particular Bitcoin, via the Blockchain, uses the very well studied SHA-256 hash function.
As a result all the theoretical constraints outlined above and elsewhere, Bitcoin is inefficient. Like a giant out-of-control paper clip machine it now requires more energy per month for it’s computations than the Republic of Ireland’s. This is a clear signal we are not communicating effectively with regard to distributed proof-of-computational-work schemes. Indeed the very mention of schemes calls the work of Alexander Grothendieck to mind. He would regard this as no soaking of the walnut. (He preferred not to crack a walnut of a problem using advanced techniques but soak it instead in his understanding, so that it might be peeled apart with the fingers of his mind and thereby yield much deeper understanding).
And now we come to the real problem of Bitcoin. It is trying to solve the wrong problem. We have long suffered the Identification/Authentication/Authorisation problem. Even DNA analysis, which can be very accurate, takes significant effort to compute. Adding a requirement of secrecy to this, while constrained by modern understandings, imposes unacceptable computational cost.
Bitcoin solves the wrong problem, badly. We can and will do better, by using more sophisticated Mathematics, to develop more efficient distributed proof of work.
Right now there are far too many exploitative people working in Finance, Computer Science, and even alternative Politics, who are jumping on the Blockchain Bandwagon, and encouraging others to do likewise because they can profit, monetarily, through their comparative sophistication.
Put it another way, no working mathematician I know recommends Bitcoin, yet every single one recommends the study of Number Theory. Who do you trust more? Financiers or Mathematicians?
Eoin Tierney is the Science editor of Cassandra Voices.
Harry Gleeson was wrongfully hanged for the murder of Moll McCarthy in 1941, and fully exonerated in 2015 after the case was re-investigated by the Innocence Project in Ireland.[i] Gleeson was framed by the police, with the collusion of elected representatives, for the murder of Moll McCarthy, by reputation a ‘lady of the night.’
There followed what amounted to a show trial in which the judge and prosecution barrister concealed evidence, and conducted proceedings in a wholly inappropriate manner. On the eve of his execution Gleeson met his junior counsel Seán MacBride who, expecting an admission of guilt, instead was confronted with an assertion of innocence and plea that one day his name should be cleared.
McBride was moved, and thereafter, having served as Minister for External Affairs between 1948 and 1951, campaigned against the death penalty. He was instrumental in setting up Amnesty International, for which he ultimately received the Nobel and Lenin peace prizes.
That case betrays the closed nature of Irish society in the 1940s. But with pervasive patterns of corruption, apparent state criminality, including targeting of individuals, can we say governance today has improved? The late Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman gave a disturbing account of the conduct of ‘the force publique’ over the past number of years in his dissenting judgment in DPP v JC (2015)[ii], citing a former President of the High Court to the effect that ‘proper discipline has been lost from An Garda Síochána.’
If anything, state-sponsored illegality may be worse than ever. Recently our police force, perhaps in collusion of Tulsa and the Department of Justice, subjected an innocent man, Garda Maurice McCabe, who was perceived as a threat, dissident or whistleblower, to an horrendous allegation of child sex abuse.
Rather than being pensioned-off, high-ranking Gardaí and their lawyers, should be brought before a court capable of identifying a new species of crime, as occurred at Nuremberg after World War II. Framing people for abuse or murder is no ordinary offence, but amounts to a Crime against Humanity by agents of the state, a breach of an obligation ergo omnes, offending fundamental principles of Natural Law, and universal human rights.
The crucial point about framing people for sex abuse, or indeed state-sponsored murder, is that it fatally undermines the integrity of the justice system. When the gatekeepers are themselves criminal, as was the case in Nazi Germany, or in Serbia under Milosevic, it erodes trust in government, and any sentencing should take into account this profoundly aggravating factor.
Radbruch’s formula
In this context, it is notable (in Streletz v Krenz ECtHR, 2001[iii]) that East German Border Guards were retroactively convicted for shooting people as they escaped over the Berlin Wall; even though, at that stage, they could argue that they were merely complying with commands.
The German Constitutional Court and indeed the European Court of Human Rights utilised the great anti-Nazi German jurist Gustav Radbruch’s formula that positive law must always yield to fundamental principles of morality. Any law compelling servants of the state to shoot fellow citizens – in circumstances where clear threats to public safety are absent – does not comply with fundamental principles of justice.
The defence of following orders, which the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann had offered at his trial in Tel Aviv in 1961, is not available. Evil is evil, no less so for being the banal plea of a bean counter that he was merely putting people on trains. Perhaps we may one day also hear: ‘I was only doing my job working for Goldman Sachs.’
Kenya
In Kenya, my client Mr. Kimani has been on death row for seventeen years. While still a teenager he was caught on the same bus as where a brutal crime was being committed. Thereafter, he stopped at a restaurant and was arrested, brutalised and charged.
During the ensuing trial he was provided with sub-standard representation (too mildly referred to as ‘ineffective assistance of counsel’) and, despite no meaningful evidence, the judge directed a decision of guilt, violating the presumption of innocence, which Lord Sankey described as ‘the golden thread of the common law’, in Woolmington v. D.P.P (UKHL, 1935). Thus his youth has bee snatched away after seventeen years on death row, prior to the ongoing intervention of the Innocence Project.
My involvement came about after Elizabeth Kimani, a former student, visited me in Griffith College, where I taught at the time. She had just returned from Kenya, after a break of many years, where she had attended her sister’s funeral. There she discovered her nephew’s plight. She requested my assistance, and I consented after some deliberation. This resulted in a trip to Kenya accompanied by Michael Gallagher, a student caseworker, to present submissions to the then recently constituted Committee of Mercy in Nairobi, under the elegantly named, but dubiously relevant Power of Mercy Act, 2011.
I arrived in Nairobi with a degree of trepidation, having heard it is the seventh most dangerous city on Earth. Thankfully, I was greeted by a waiting guide, who provided an armed guard and armour-plated vehicle to chaperone us through teeming streets to the secure sanctuary of the Stevroy Stanly Hotel. There followed a pause for breath, a quick shower, and then another three hour journey through the Rift Valley to Naivasha prison, perhaps the most hostile prison in all of Africa.
When Michael and I arrived we were kept waiting for another three hours before the scheduled meeting with the Committee of Mercy took place in a small dark waiting area. It was no more than the size of a large kitchen, and contained at least ten prison guards in combat uniforms, who floated in and out with sub machine guns poised for action. At the end of what I think a not accidental ordeal, the hearing, which again took over three hours, was conducted in a packed room in circumstances of polite formality, but underlying hostility.
The runes and smoke signals of an altogether different culture are difficult to interpret, but age and professionalism masked my nervousness. I proceeded to point out the utter improbability of my client having any involvement in the crime, with the aid of a clearly traumatised but remarkably articulate client, who despite being downtrodden was secure in his plea of innocence.
Second Visit
Circumstances beyond my control compelled a return flight the following day, but a second appearance over the summer was finally agreed. The issues of the original case were re-ventilated, including victim impact reports. The relatives of the crime were also allowed to express their distress, which had no bearing at all on the guilt or innocence of my client.
Long hours passed before I requested a break for coffee and a cigarette: ‘Of course sir, please come this way’, I was told. I was then led through security checkpoints down from the sixth floor we were on, and driven half a mile up the road to the top floor of another building, where a dusty annex of a bar served as a smoking area.
President Kenyatta had in fact banned smoking in all public places in Kenya and, I was informed by a senior government official that two American tourists had actually been arrested for lighting up in a public building the previous day. At the time the social impact of the crime of smoking in a public building seemed almost humorous to me by comparison with the distortion of justice inflicted on Mr Kimani.
After this diversion, the Committee of Mercy asked me to draft a supplemental set of submissions, addressing a section that had not attracted attention. It enquired, notwithstanding my client’s innocence, whether he could fend for himself on the outside. This reflects recent trends in the administration of justice, symptomatic of a neo-liberal tendency to apportion human rights according to economic status, an evolution in the direction of homo economicus, on which more later.
Since then there has been silence out of Kenya: reconstituted committees, dithering, managing of the message and now a power vacuum, during which Kenya has had no government, after an invalidated election. The fate of Mr. Kenyatta and his government, and by extension Mr. Kimani, hangs in the balance. So I await the long deferred outcome, more in hope than expectation.
Born Free
Thereafter I took a brief safari to see what wild animals survive, and encountered the wonderful Lake Naivasha. I also visited the former house of the writer of Born Free, Joy Adamson, and her husband, both of whom had been murdered by local vigilantes for their outspoken views. On both trips an informative guide issued a series of coded warnings.
That very day, he said, the country’s most prominent human rights lawyer had been murdered at the behest of the government. He warned that our activities had attracted their attention too, and our movements were being monitored, a situation not altogether unfamiliar to me in Ireland. Aside from the pleasure of discovering the National Museum, and a truly fabulous flea market, it was with some relief that I boarded my plane out of the country, landing in another country with a Third World legal system: Ireland.
Flying back, I was deeply unsettled by the outrage perpetrated on Mr Kimani, and the sinister weighing of his life post-release in terms of his economic status. I also dwelt on the murder of the human rights lawyer, and the desperate plight of wildlife, which constitutes ecocide. A light bulb went off in my mind, as I saw a common systemic source for all this injustice.
I consider Goldman Sachs, along with certain other multinational corporations to be war criminals, as they have perpetrated Crimes Against Humanity and universal breaches, ergo omnes, of economicide and ecocide. Ruthless economic exploitation and environmental destruction work hand in hand. So let us convene a virtual reality Nuremberg hearing, a new International Criminal Court directed against the corporate criminals of the New World Order.
It must remain a virtual for the moment as the perpetrators now manipulate the machinery of the state, but the wheels of justice keep on turning. Our Earth is in constant motion too, but humanity is playing its final rounds on a doomsday roulette wheel.
Corporate criminals who design and profit from the excesses of human exploitation should be brought before international tribunals, along with those who would callously consign people to fend for themselves after unlawful incarcerations. At least, with the help of the Innocence Project in the US, after his exoneration Sunny Jacobs secured a measure of compensation, allowing her to open the Sunny Jacobs Centre on the not altogether sunny west coast of Ireland.
Meanwhile, as U.S. Republicans luxuriate in destroying the welfare and administrative state, and a plutocracy attempts to secede from humanity, building safe havens against Climate Change, and boltholes in distant outposts, Mr. Kimani sees his life ebb away in the worst prison in Africa. We must hope the Committee of Mercy reconvenes quickly, and at least the stain of that singular injustice will be washed away, as, to quote Shakespeare’s Portia.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God Himself;
(The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1)
At the same time we demand a broader interpretation of justice, with humanity on the brink of extinction: at current rates of degradation to top soil we have sixty years of agriculture remaining.[iv]
As three-term former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) put it: ‘A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.’[v] We require a new Nuremberg for Crimes Against Humanity and Nature, evolving our understanding of mercy and justice, “above this sceptred sway.”
Crimes Against Humanity
I recently visited Chartwell House, once the permanent residence of perhaps the greatest politician to have ever lived: Winston Churchill. To paint him as a latter-day saint would be wide of the mark, but to a large extent it was his conviction that Nazism was a distinct barbarism that ultimately led to the Nuremberg trials.
In the wilderness years before World War II he was indeed a Cassandra voice. But any rush to judgment of our latter-day war criminals must be tempered with deliberation, thereby avoiding Herman Goering‘s charge at Nuremberg that ‘the victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’[vi]
In Roy Jenkin’s view Winston Churchill was the greatest prime minister of Britain, and I would concur. But tell that to soldiers annihilated at Gallipoli or civilians firebombed in Dresden. He too was directly or indirectly implicated in Crimes against Humanity.
It tends to be the little people who suffer, and away from abstract theorising, I will continue to lobby for the release of Mr Kimani. But let us still convene an International War Crimes Tribunal of the righteous holding to account corporate criminals, who endeavour to secede from the rest of humanity by retreating into gated enclosures.
An indictment can proceed from their own memoirs, as such characters are generally shameless. Let them bear witness to their depredations, and let us signal to posterity our opposition to their infamy, for as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera attested the loss a historical memory involves a failure to confront tyranny.
By drawing attention to their criminality, future generations may adapt, before it is too late for the natural world, and perhaps the likes of Mr Kimani may yet be welcomed back into society. Alas it is too late for Harry Gleeson, but at least he now may rest more peacefully.
[i] Erin McGuire, ‘How Harry Gleeson was wrongly hanged for murder in 1941’, Irish Times, 6th of April, 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/how-harry-gleeson-was-wrongly-hanged-for-murder-in-1941-1.2165731, accessed 22/11/18.
[ii] DPP v JC, Judgment by Hardiman J., [2015] IESC 31, http://courts.ie/Judgments.nsf/bce24a8184816f1580256ef30048ca50/285b25317187412480257e280050f5b4?OpenDocument, accessed 22/11/18.
[iii] Streletz, Kessler and Krenz v. Germany, ECtHR, 2001, http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-59353, accessed 22/11/18.
[iv] Chris Arsenault, ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/, accessed 14/11/18.
[v] Untitled, ‘11 Forest Facts and Quotes to Tweet or Share’, April 20th, 2015, Worldwide Fund for Nature, https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/11-forest-facts-and-quotes-to-tweet-or-share, accessed 22/11/18.
[vi] Gary Jonathan Bass, ‘Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals’, October 29th, 2000, The New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bass-vengeance.html, accessed 22/11/18.
If you are complaining about Climate Change, Brexit, Donald Trump, and all the cozening of late capitalism, I will not take you seriously if you have accepted, without very much thought, that there is only ever an arbitrary relationship between a signifier and what it signifies.
I will say to you that you are closer than you realize to being an embodiment of the world’s problems, and I will ask: have you considered how our future shall have been changed if the divine is awakened in man through poetry?
A widespread feeling of intellectual decrepitude among my generation is bound up with acceptance of the pseudo-philosophies that spread from France in the late 1960s. A dumbed-down account emerged in Terry Eagleton’s best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction, now in its second edition.
Each January I lecture on critical theory at Sarum College in Salisbury, and have grown increasingly frustrated outlining Jacques Derrida’s assumption of Ferdinand da Saussure’s argument that meaning in language is a simple matter of difference. In that lecture I explain – mostly to retired vicars or shamans, or both – that a sign is made up of a ‘signifier’ (like a written word) and a ‘signified’ (its meaning).
Then I quote from Eagleton: ‘The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one’: there is no reason why the three marks c – a – t should signify cat. He continues: ‘Each sign in the system has meaning only by virtue of its difference from the others … meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is functional, the result of its difference from other signs.’
Such a theory may be correct from a strict scientific or linguistic perspective, but from a poetic perspective it is a negation. For W.B. Yeats, as for any other great poet, meaning is immanent in a sign. To disagree places functional rationality above a divinely creative imagination: perpetuating the potentially lethal metaphysical imbalance at the heart of our society.
In fact, Derrida can be a relatively exciting author, but I get the impression he is rarely read in the original, outside of France, and a simplified account of his work has become a dangerous dogma. It is now a political tool used in the academy to excuse people from teaching or studying the literary cannon: why would you bother with Shakespeare or Milton any longer? This is a New Age delinquency in desperate need of Reformation.
Eagleton further claims: ‘Poetry is a sort of trick, whereby an awareness of the textures of signs puts us in mind of the textures of actual things. But the relation between the two remains quite as arbitrary as in any other use of language; it is just that some poetry tries to ‘iconicise’ that relation, to make it appear somehow inevitable.’
I will counter Eagleton by quoting a more circumspect Romantic perspective than my own: that of the American poet Wallace Stevens who described the real as being constantly ‘engulfed in the unreal’. Poetry, he stated, ‘is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.’ Elaborating this belief, he knew:
A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has only to be presented as best one is able to present it.
Great poetry makes you apprehend, more than cool reason ever comprehends, that there is a sacred bond between word and thing or word and idea, expressed in the very making of poetry, work which is, as Stevens imagined, ‘on the threshold of heaven’. A great poet should be capable of teaching a linguist to have faith in a ‘story’ that his discipline cannot fathom, so that it ‘grows’ in Shakespeare’s wise Hippolyta’s words ‘to something of great constancy; | But, howsoever, strange and admirable.’
George Santayana had asked: ‘How, then, should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of reproach?’ Stevens knew: ‘It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most. | It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.’ Meditating on Santayana dying in Rome, the poet apprehended the philosopher almost literally at the end of his poem: ‘He stops upon this threshold, | As if the design of all his words takes form | And frame from thinking and is realized.’
These works I have listed could be a kind of mirror. If you believe that the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one, you will see that you have a quasi-hipster beard and haircut, and that you are engaged to be married to an intellectual hippopotamus. The shepherd-king’s curse might stick:
For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause. For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love. Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand.
As René Guenon has warned: ‘The word ‘satanic’ can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of traditional truth?’ I am convinced that post-modern literary theory has Satan as its right hand man.
Edward Clarke’s last book was the Vagabond Spirit of Poetry. He is the Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. His poem Psalm 41 appeared in the previous edition.
The Catalan independence movement may seem like a throwback to a bygone age of nationalism. But the disproportionate reaction of Spain’s central government to the referendum in October has served, perversely, to make the break-up of the country more likely. Along with wider curbs on freedom of expression, the repression orchestrated by a ruling Partido Popular (PP) mired in corruption scandals, is an unsettling reminder of Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–75). Disturbingly, mainstream media and the judiciary are failing to check these trends.
E.M. Forster once remarked that if a choice came between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. Anyone who formulates such an opposition may be said to have no country if by that we mean: a sense of belonging to a broad set of principles identified with the state.
Thus, most Americans, notwithstanding their differences, submit to ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ expressed in the US constitution, which includes restraints on the excesses of presidential power. The appeal of belonging to a country declines when its government, even acting lawfully, becomes an immoral instrument of power.
George Orwell might have lost some friends if they had known he had provided a list of writers with Communist sympathies to MI5 in 1949. But he did so for the sake of friends he saw as countrymen, at a time when Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union.
Such dilemmas are rarely in black and white, or represent good versus evil. Even under the Nazis there were presumably, among others, nurses tending to the sick who played no role in the machinery of death and destruction. Under late capitalism states bear less responsibility than transnational corporations for destructive technologies, ecocide and grotesque inequality. State power and that of supranational institutions needs to be bolstered, but underpinned by transparency, representative democracy and accountability.
With large corporations exerting unaccountable influence, states, such as the Spanish, controlling public discourse and harbouring a compliant judiciary, may be tyrannical institutions.
The current impasse in Spain appears to be an old-fashioned conflict over national identity. Any nation, as far as most historians are concerned, is an imagined construct. ‘Imagined’, as Benedict Anderson put it, because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion’. Nations loom out of an ‘immemorial’ past, generally based on dominant vernacular languages. A number emerged ascendant in Modern Europe from a stew of idiolects that co-existed in transnational empires, before the homogenising effect of Guttenberg’s printing press.
But language is not the only source of identity. An English speaker living in Wales may feel either Welsh, British or Muslim depending on the occasion. The particular identity selected to represent oneself shifts according to moods and settings, and can be stoked by demagoguery.
After observing the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 Michael Ignatieff wrote: ‘Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only when the surviving communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.’ Today, we find Yugo-nostalgia among many Croats, Slovenes and Serbs who lament the dissolution of their historic friendship. “Nationalist hatred” is also the product of manipulation in Spain today, and appears to provide a smokescreen for corruption within the ruling Partido Popular (PP).
Once upon a time I knew Barcelona reasonably well, having rented an apartment there for a summer with friends after finishing university in 1998. In the days before euro-inflation the price of living was jaw-droppingly cheap, especially when it came to purchasing food in the colourful markets off Las Ramblas. Catalan was spoken widely, but we heard little talk of an independent state. Nonetheless, I was surprised by an assertion from one adult child of immigrants from another part of Spain that she was often made to feel a second class citizen.
Growing up in Ireland, I was accustomed to daily news bulletins reporting sectarian murders. This honed an awareness for potential divisiveness around identity. I have watched, therefore, with concern the increasing stridency of Catalan nationalism. The last time I visited Barcelona, two years ago, the streets were festooned with flags hanging from windows, amid rumours of intimidation of those who did not wish to participate. I could not help wondering whether separatism was a product of the region’s relative wealth compared to the rest of Spain: the region accounts for approximately sixteen percent of the Spanish population, but twenty-five percent of all Spanish exports. These pressures have increased in the wake of Spain’s economic crisis, culminating in Eurozone finance ministers agreeing to lend the country up to €100 billion to shore up its banks.
However, the jackbooted response of the Guardia Civil to the Catalan referendum in October, which left hundreds injured, has imperiled an often tempestuous relationship between Catalans and Castilians. The kingdoms of Aragon (essentially historic Catalonia) and Castile formed a political union in 1469 in the wake of the marriage of their respective monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Catalan has remained the lingua franca in the former Aragonese territory until the present day, although large scale migration there from other parts of Spain, and elsewhere, diluted this; just over half of its population appears to feel Spanish, based on the 2017 election results.
In the wake of the Nationalist victory of Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which Barcelona played a prominent role on the Republican side, thousands were imprisoned and the Catalan identity was systematically undermined. During that long dictatorship (1939-1975) schools were banned from teaching the Catalan language and sources of Catalan identity whitewashed. With the introduction of democracy in 1975 a modus vivendi developed between Madrid and Barcelona – the Basque country became the nationalist flash point – until diminution in regional sovereignty in 2010 allied with the Economic Crisis gave rise to the current strife.
Since the violent scenes in October many Spaniards have pointed to the illegality of the referendum to justify the conduct of the Guardia Civil, which makes neither moral nor legal sense. Editorials in the apparently liberal El Pais often refer to the Catalan leadership as ‘Golpistas’. The word ‘golpe de estado’ is the equivalent of coup d’etat or putsch, and implies that Catalan separatists have been using violent means to bring about independence, thereby justifying the thuggish scenes.
El Pais’ Managing Editor, David Alandete, remains obdurately unapologetic, likening Catalan separatists to Far Right extremists: ‘This is the exact same situation as The New York Times under Trump, the UK press under Brexit, German press under Alternative for Deutschland’. Like most established print media around the world, El Pais has experienced significant financial troubles in recent times. John Carlin, a sacked former columnist has argued that the parent company Prisa reflects the wishes of Madrid’s political class.
Catalans might justifiably wonder whether their national friendship with Castile can withstand the failure of mainstream media and television to hold its government to account, and provide a reasonable witness to the events. To compare Catalan separatists to Alternative fur Deutschland is a gross distortion.
How has this all came to pass? We are living in a European Union which guarantees free movement of labour and capital, and Spain has been a democracy for over forty years. There are certainly heirs of Franco who want to impose linguistic and religious homogeneity on the rest of the country. Individuals with connections to the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei exert what many consider an unhealthy influence over the Spanish cabinet, but the PP holds power without a majority in the Cortes.
We appear to be witnessing a sophisticated distortion of reality, where crucial components of the media have been co-opted into serving the interests of a governing elite now mired in economic scandals. This is not to say that the Spanish media is a monolith: reports continue to emanate from sources including El Pais furnishing evidence of government impropriety. But when it comes to reporting on the burning issue of Catalonia keen observers claim that balance has been lost.
One disturbing hypothesis is that polarisation is actually Spanish government policy, permitting a slide towards centralised, autocratic rule. As A. Reynolds put it in his recent article for Cassandra Voices: ‘Spain remains to a large extent a liberal democracy, but there’s an unsettling authoritarian trend, which is being orchestrated by its main conservative party.’
Oppression of Catalan separatism is part of a wider draconian policy, extinguishing civil liberties, aimed at perceived enemies of the people. This month the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence against rapper Valtonyc, for lyrics deemed offensive to the monarchy and supportive of terrorism. The court’s contention that the lyrics of the Mallorcan native represented an incitement to terrorism are implausible, especially considering he refers to the Basque separatists ETA, who have been in permanent ceasefire since 2011. The wholly disproportionate sentence – the same week a man was sentenced to two years for paedophilia in Palma – simply draws attention to his songs, one of which has had almost a million hits on YouTube in the wake of this latest miscarriage of justice.
Enrique López, one of the judges in the 2014 High Court case, offered the following rational for his decision: salvar la democracia de sus enemigos, aunque sea sobre la base de redefinirla como disciplinada o autoritaria: ‘to save democracy from its enemies, it may be necessary to redefine it as disciplined or authoritarian’. He was referring to the German concept of Streitbare Demokratie, ‘well fortified’, or ‘battlesome democracy’, used to justify extreme measures against extremists who wish to dismantle democratic institutions. To compare Catalan nationalism to Neo-Nazisism is another perverse distortion, legitimating the most appalling excesses. If Lopez’s approach was accepted through history, the world would still be made up of empires.
Ironically López himself was forced to resign from the bench in 2014 after being found driving with blood alcohol levels six times above the legal limit. He is aligned with the PP, and now laments that separatists parties cannot be banned.
The playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by nationalist militia in 1936. By then he had written his eerily-familiar ‘Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard‘ (1928) which begins:
The horses are black.
The horseshoes are black.
Stains of ink and wax
shine on their capes.
They have leaden skulls
so they do not cry.
With souls of leather
they ride down the road.
Hunchbacked and nocturnal
wherever they move, they command
silences of dark rubber
and fears of fine sand.
They pass, if they wish to pass,
and hidden in their heads
is a vague astronomy
of indefinite pistols.
…
(translated by A.S. Klyne)
No doubt these words of Lorca still offend certain Spanish sensibilities, and could conceivably land a poet in jail if he wrote them today.
Furthermore, an exhibition called ‘Political prisoners in Spain’ has recently been shut down by the authorities in Madrid, while a book about cocaine smuggling in Galicia which mentions a PP mayor originally convicted for involvement, but absolved on appeal, has been banned.
As with Valtonyc’s case, keeping these subjects from public attention does not appear to have been the primary purpose of the censorship. We live in the age of the Internet. The BBC exhibited the photos to the world and the book was soon selling ten copies a minute on Amazon. It seems to be part of a wider policy of drawing battle lines between patriots and traitors, which takes the sting out of ongoing prosecutions imperiling the PP elite.
Financial irregularities also feature in the affairs of politicians from the PDeCAT, the centre-right party of the Catalan bourgeois, and historical ally of the PP, who are late converts to the independence cause. But the number of PP politicians that have been investigated for corruption in recent times is staggering. This includes a scandal involving a large number of high level PP politicians in Valencia in 2016.
Notably, in this region, neighbouring Catalonia, Valencian, a dialect of Catalan, is widely spoken. The kingdom of Valencia was historically within the realm of Aragon. Although Valencians have always been wary of the big brother in Barcelona, a discredited PP could leave room for the ‘contagion’ of Catalan separatism to spread. The distraction of a confrontation with Barcelona takes the heat off corrupt officials.
It is also instructive that the Valencia branch of the Popular Party (PP), under the leadership of one-time premier Francisco Camps, played a determining role in ensuring Mariano Rajoy’s survival at the helm of the national party in 2008, when he lost a general election for a second time to the Socialist Party. Ever since, Rajoy has offered stout defence to a supporter who was at the helm of a region that became a byword for corruption.
Corruption is far from being restricted to the provinces. The Madrid branch of the PP was raided in connection with the Púnica ring, also in 2016, which is alleged to have unlawfully awarded as much as €250 million in public contracts to beneficiaries in return for bribes. The origin of the Operation Púnica investigation was the discovery of Swiss bank accounts held by, among others Francisco Granados, once the right-hand man to Esperanza Aguirre the former President of the Madrid region. It is telling that Swiss banking authorities, rather than an internal investigation, reported: ‘aggravated money-laundering operations’. This compelled an investigation leading to a trial in 2017 involving 37 suspects.
Franscisco Correa, a businessman at the heart of the scandal allegedly liked to be known as ‘Don Vito’, after the character played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, making his protestation that he did not realise he was committing any crimes ring rather hollow.
The confrontation between Barcelona and Madrid has been brewing for some time in a football-obsessed country. Rather than acting as a lightening rod to diffuse tensions, the morbo rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC fuels hatred. The success of Barcelona infuriates Madridistas, and vice versa, explaining the outlandish sums both sides began to spend on players, even as the Economic Crisis was in full swing.
It also might explain why the former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, a supporter of Catalan separatism, has been harassed by the Spanish authority. His private jet was boarded by police, apparently in search of exiled former Catalan leader Carles Puidgemont. Also, a car in which Guardiola’s ten-year-old daughter was travelling was stopped and searched by Police.
Sides are being chosen. The apparently centrist Ciudadanos which claims to disavow nationalism is increasingly eager to assert its ‘Spanish’ credentials. The leader of that party Albert Rivera was recently photographed with a Spanish flag wristband, which was hardly an unintentional gesture. He has also expressed the uncompromising view that ‘putschists can never be part of any negotiation‘, sticking to the falsehood that separatists are violent insurrectionists. The Spanish Socialist Party have been similarly spineless, supporting the ban on the recent exhibition on political prisoners.
Spain is still coping with the legacy of the Economic Crisis, and the introduction of the euro which substantially drove up the price of living. Youth unemployment now stands at levels close to 50%, and entrenched poverty co-exists with fabulous wealth. Populist nationalism, on both sides, distracts attention from day to day concerns, cloaking the real inequities and corruption at work. But the authoritarian sentiments expressed by politicians and judges associated with the PP are especially worrying. The idea they are defending democracy represents an Orwellian inversion.
Fellow Europeans must pay greater attention to the erosion of civil liberties and the Rule of Law in Spain, perhaps registering their disapproval by avoiding travelling and doing business with Spanish regions that support the PP. Pressure can be brought to bear on home governments to isolate the Spanish government in Europe, until negotiations begin and liberation of political prisoners occurs. Perhaps the territorial integrity of Spain can still be saved: national break-ups are rarely achieved without significant bloodshed, and often regretted afterwards. After all, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’.
Frank Armstrong is the Content Editor of Cassandra Voices. You can find an archive of his published work here.
Feature Image: Hector Castells
I quit. I had wanted to say those words for a long me and that day they arrived. Leaving a job during the Irish recession, being mum to three children under six and having a husband who worked for himself – circumstances were such that it was neither the easiest move nor possibly the wisest decision to make. But I made it.
I texted my husband saying what I had done. ‘Great!’ was his reply.
That evening I put Yazz, ‘The Only Way Is Up’ into the Spotify search bar and turned it up loud.
Over the following two months, we decided to move to Oslo, Norway. The main reason we decided to leave Ireland was economic. Before leaving my job we had applied for a mortgage for a simple property in a rural town in the West. We were turned down. Our housing options seemed small and not very inviting. To stay in mediocre rented accommodation, paying more in rent than we would have been paying for a mortgage did not make good sense. I felt stuck; we were paying high taxes and yet my son went to school in a dingy prefab, playing on the tarmac during the lunch break with not even a swing in sight let alone a playground. The school property was surrounded by barbed wire. Poor quality and very expensive childcare was a constant topic of conversation and anxiety between parents with young children; we had an employment system which made it near impossible to place the care of your family first. This low quality of family life all fed into the decision to leave our homeland.
I was brought up to be proud of Ireland, and yet I felt the needs of my young family – the future generation of Ireland – were being ignored. They weren’t even being given serious thought, let alone priority. As parents, we bring up our children to be purposeful, clever and compassionate citizens, yet in our case, Ireland won’t reap the benefits of these good souls.
Ireland was not able to hold us. She lost us. And not just us, but so many more. Figures show that at the time that we left for Norway, summer 2013, ten people an hour were emigrating – that is one thousand Irish citizens per week leaving the country.
Until I was one of those people who had decided to leave I had no idea what a challenging decision it was to make. Nobody can know until they do it themselves.
Deciding on where to go came easily enough to us; Norway made sense as we have good friends there and, thankfully, the country’s economy was booming. Plus, it is only a two-hour flight from Ireland, so the distance wasn’t too daunting.
Our move relied on getting rid of as many possessions as possible. When we had edited our life, we were left with a stack of cardboard boxes on 2 pallets – that was all our budget could allow. We rang around transport companies to see who could give us the best deal and most importantly, whether they delivered to Oslo.
To edit one’s life means getting very familiar with car boot sales, Buy and Sell, Facebook and learning how to stage backyard book sales. All of those things I had held on to over the years were fair game. This included the the kitchen table, a treasured gift from an old family friend. That piece of furniture I bathed my three babies on is now in a coffee shop in Athlone. I sold vintage typewriters, writing desks, my great aunt’s wedding dress; anything that was no use to us in our new life didn’t make the cut to get on the pallet.
Each Sunday on the run up to our departure my mum and I were to be found at the Carrick-on-Shannon car boot sale. We would pack the car to the brim the night before, make a flask of tea and head off at the crack of dawn to ensure a good place, one where you would get the most footfall.
I became a pro at selling and sealing the deal, but it took a while. At first an array of emotions came up:. Did I look desperate? Had it come to this, trying to get at least a tenner for my 5-year-old’s bike? We decided that all of the money we made would go towards our petrol. We would drive from Carrick-on-Shannon to Oslo. We’d put the children in the back, the dog in the boot and off we would go: Wales, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and finally the ferry across to Oslo.
I became a natural at the car boot sales. I remember the people I met: the Latvian father of the toddler who got our children’s entire DVD collection for five euro. The wheeler-dealer guy who craftily whittled me down to a bargain price for a never-used picnic basket straight from Avoca. The fastidious grandmother who denied herself a hand-woven lace tablecloth for fear that the guests would notice the stain in the corner. The old farmer who examined a pair of black leather shoes that I’d bought in a panic on the way to a family wedding. He looked at the soles, holding them away from himself for a better view until finally he said ‘I’ll give you a fiver’ … ‘Done’, I said! I wonder, to which special occasions in his life has he has worn them? Will he be buried in the pair of shoes he bought from me at the Carrick on Shannon car boot sale?
The day came to leave, but on waking we still had 2 futons, our own handmade double bed frame and a drying machine to get rid of. A post or two on Facebook and by that afternoon all was gone.
As well as stuffing our Volvo to the brim with clothes for a family of five to last us the journey, our beloved 9-year-old springer spaniel Sage Huxley needed space. She had her passport and all the necessary vaccinations. It broke my heart when my mum looked at us all and said, you cannot bring her with you. The fact was there was simply no room for her. I knew my Mum was right. The memory of saying goodbye to Sage, not sure of when we would see her again, can still bring me to tears. My Mum and Dad looked after her with such enthusiasm and grace that I will be forever grateful.
Our families waved us off from the pier at Dun Laoghaire harbour. The sun was high; it was a stunningly beautiful July day. Looking back I see how I was very much in coping mode, staying focused on the tasks at hand. I did not cry until my Dad pressed 50 euro into my hand and said ‘Get yourself something nice on the ferry’.
Settled above on deck, an older lady struck up a conversation with my six-year son asking him where he was going. ‘We are emigrating’, he told her. And there it was. As the Stena Line ferry pulled out of the harbour and our parents stood to wave us off, we emigrated.
We drove for thousands of miles. I say ‘we’ but it was my husband driving while I sat shotgun. My visual was mostly fast-travelling juggernauts loaded with metal freight containers overtaking us on four-lane motorways. I would hold my breath and pray – all I could do was pray. Passing through Northern Germany huge industrial landscapes crowded the view, the inner sanctum of our Volvo the reverse of what was going by our window. We listened to Danny the Champion of the World on the car CD player, the children chattering away in the back. There we were, our family car keeping up at the breakneck speed expected on those roads, listening to the sweet tones of the narrator, a pocket of our familiar life traveling away from all that we had known as home.
After overnights in England, Belgium and Germany we made it through Denmark in a day. We woke that morning in Hamburg and Gordon said ‘I want to get this done today. I want to be in Oslo tonight.’ I looked at the map and thought he was crazy but could see he had decided. Gordon had his first motorbike at 14; he is well-used to road trips. During our courtship we rode his BMW R60 from Leitrim to Granada, Spain travelling through the winter, a journey that I remember fondly. That morning in Hamburg as he went to check the car and get ready for the journey, I knew there was no arguing, I knew that, God-willing, we would make Oslo by the following morning.
We arrived in Northern Denmark and took the ferry to Southern Norway. On the ferry, we found a spot to sleep. Exhausted, the three children and my man promptly fell asleep. I remember that evening with clarity; I was not sleepy: tired yes, but not sleepy. I cozied my brood and kept watch on that ferry crossing. I had recently read Star of the Sea by Joseph O’ Connor and my heart now turned to those poor souls who had also left their homeland in search of a better life. We were in an incomparably better situation, but I felt that I could empathise, knowing now what it is like to feel it necessary to leave your homeland, finding that your dreams were not to be brought to fruition there.
For the first time during the journey, I let my mind reflect. Apprehensive thoughts came quickly. My children would grow up Norwegian; they would not know their grandparents in the way that their cousins would. The place they would call home would be different from mine. Before now these were everyday expectations that I had taken for granted. One big fear of my own was to do with the landscape. My Dad being a forester meant I had grown up being told that all of the forests of Ireland were mine. What a fabulous gift to bestow upon a child and thus I had always felt very at home in the woods, in the countryside. Irish land was my land, I recognized her landscape, her trees, her plants, her animals. She was my solace. I was nervous that on moving to Norway this familiarity with the landscape would disappear. This frightened me. I remember Googling to see if Norway had Hawthorn trees.
As we disembarked from the hull of the ferry, a huge electrical storm blew in. The sky crackled and flashed, and I tried to see it as a good omen, a display of the wonderful energy and celebration we would find in our newly chosen land. Leaving the port behind, we saw our first road sign for Oslo – 250km away.
The children settled into sleep again, Gordon and I enjoyed the aftermath of the storm. Our music for that part of the journey was Daft Punk; their words from ‘Get Lucky’: ‘we have come too far to give up who we are so let’s raise the bar’, kept my spirits in form.
We made Oslo at sunrise, pulled the car in upon a hill that overlooks the outskirts of the city. We got out and gazed. We held each other’s hands tightly. There it was: the city of Oslo that was to be our new place to call home.
Claire McAree lives in Oslo with her husband, three children and their seven-month-old Springer Spaniel, Blue Huxley. Claire has been producing cultural events, including Irrgønn literature festival, as well as curating Future Library. She currently manages new product development at Expology, an experience design studio based in Oslo and Stockholm.
Breathe. Focus. It’s the biggest rapid I’ve ever run. I’ve spent half an hour scouting and visualising the perfect line. I’m as fit and sharp as I’ll ever be. Still the doubts enter my head. Why am I even doing this? The adrenaline has made me feel nauseous, and I try not think of the consequences.
Everything has been checked and double-checked. I splash water on my face and launch my kayak into the river. Two or three strokes and I’m committed. Then it flows. The fear stops. Everything is in fine focus, each stroke in high definition. The thinking mind stops: in its place comes complete presence in the moment. Everything happens in slow motion. I find the perfect line and, at the bottom, elation.
I’ve been trying to write these words for nearly two years now. It is hard to write when you know what you want to say runs against the current. I’m thirty-nine, and the days when adrenaline and risk ruled my life seem from another lifetime.
For a decade, pushing my limits on Class 5 whitewater was what I lived for. I spent two seasons as a river guide on the Zambezi river in Africa in the late 90s, at a time when the sport being revolutionised.
For a decade I chased my dream around the world, pushing my personal limits. I took more than my fair share of risks. I kayaked with many of the best in the world at the time, did exploratory first descents and participated in expeditions to Iran, the Indus in the Himalayas and Blue Nile.
The line between the best day ever and the worst is a thin one, and is one I came to know only too well.
That stage of my life ended about ten years ago, and since then I have taken a different path, embracing meditation and yoga, even though the river still calls me.
II
You never feel so alive as when you are close to death. Time and again I would hear the same refrain from friends, all around the world, that ‘kayaking makes me feel alive’. It does make you feel alive, that beautiful flow state connection when time stops, the conscious mind is stilled, and you move into an higher state of awareness, totally present in the moment. The river saved me at times when everyday life seemed just too mundane, confusing or painful.
In twenty-five years of whitewater kayaking I have lost many friends to the river. I would like to say they made worse decisions than I did, but in reality, it probably came down to luck. Where once I only saw the incredible life-affirming power of adventure, I now see the consequences. You can’t teach wisdom, it only comes from experience, but this is the story of how my perspective on risk has evolved.
My experiences with death affected me deeply. These are names of friends who died on the river, great life affirming people with so much life to live: Dugald Fox Wilson, the warrior Scot and Zambezi legend, who drowned in his kayak on a raging Futaleufu river in Chile in 2003. Hendri Coetzee, the great African explorer, killed by a crocodile on a tributary of the Congo in 2010. My young friend Shane Murphy who was knocked unconscious and drowned while pushing his limits on one of Ireland’s harder rivers in flood in 2014.
The toughest loss of all to bear was of my friend and student Conor, who drowned while in my care in a freak entrapment on an easy stretch of the Soca river in Slovenia in 2015. Despite our very best efforts we could not get him out in time.
I remember with a sickness in the base of my stomach that worst day of my life. Everything again was in perfect focus and high definition, but this time no elation, only despair. Time slowed down. It was like being in an intense, slow-motion nightmare that I couldn’t wake from. Even now, three years on, the memory is crystal clear, etched into my mind.
The sun shone that beautiful alpine spring day on our frantic, increasingly desperate, effort to free Conor from the tree. His arm was trapped, and head barely submerged: a foreboding of tragedy as the seconds ticked by, the rational mind knowing it was too late. The hopeless feeling of doing CPR for real. The years of training and experience kicking in, keeping calm. Autopilot. Looking after everyone else. The detached objective voice in my head saying ‘I never thought this would happen to me’.
The terrible logistics of tragedy. Talking to the local police. The air of suspicion. No one wanting to look you in the eye. The unbearable call to Conor’s parents to tell them he was dead. On a trip I was responsible for. The stunned silence at the end of the line. Hearing the hearts break. Nothing can prepare you for that.
Then the aftermath. Seeing how trauma affects people in different ways. The fear, anger, anxiety, depression. Looking after everyone but yourself will catch up with you eventually.
I remember too, as much as I try to forget, the chaos and uncertainty of that grim July day in 2007 as we searched the swollen Sjoa river in Norway for the bodies of two Russian rafters and six survivors strewn over miles of flooded river. Victims of bad decision-making and perhaps a cultural machismo towards death. I remember sharing a beer with them around the campsite the night before, all smiles and everyone feeling so alive.
Ian Beecroft. Niamh Tompkins. Dee Conroy. Brennan Guth. Chris Wheeler. Colm Johnson. Louise Jull. Juan Antonio de Ugarte. Gary Manwaring. Gavin Winsborrow. These are names of some of the acquaintances or friend’s of friends who have drowned on the river over the last twenty years. I could name many more. Often on rivers I had paddled. More often than not, their fate was down to bad luck rather than poor decisions.
Their tragic demises shared over a late night phonecall, or email, or a social media posting of devastation and loss. Each of their deaths affected me, even those I had never met. The trauma of their loss is like a nuclear explosion to family, close friends and those who witnessed them drown, but the effects ripple around the world.
Each name does not tell the nightmare of the recovery of the body – where it was even possible – and the challenge of repatriation from remote corners of the globe.
III
Death challenges all your preconceptions. I struggled to get back on the river. I would ask myself: what for? I remembered W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, about a First World War fighter pilot
I know that I shall meet my fate,
somewhere among the clouds above
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love…
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death
I do not subscribe to that fatalistic view of life, but I understand it.
I now know that there is too much to lose. Sigmund Freud, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, refers to thanatos, the death instinct, competing with eros, the instinct for survival. Thanatos drives us to destructive and risky behaviour. ‘The goal of all life is death’, he famously said.
Agree with him or not, many people at the extreme end of the adventure sports spectrum hold a certain fascination with death. Close encounters with mortality can be very life-affirming. Extreme sports can offer an escape from what is mundane or challenging in ‘real’ life
Dr. Gabor Mate, who has twenty years of experience working with addicts in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, defines addiction as ‘any behaviours in which the individual finds temporary relief or pleasure in – and craves for that reason, despite negative consequences’. For most people, adventure sports offer a positive and life-affirming outlet, which brings joy into their lives. For some, however, the motivations can become unhealthy and self-destructive.
I can’t help wondering how different the narrative would be if any of my deceased friends had died from alcohol or drugs. That is not so say any of them were addicted to risk or adrenaline. Most were just unlucky. Some were well within their comfort zone. But a few took risk-taking to extremes.
IV
As someone who has worked for 15 years in outdoor education I am very familiar with the personal growth and development that comes from people testing their limits in nature. Crossing the threshold and leaving your comfort zone should be encouraged. The psychological urge for the hero’s (or heroine’s) journey to explore the limits of the known world is as old as mythology itself, as Joseph Campbell pointed out in his Hero of a Thousand Faces.
Finding your edge is a challenging process often accompanied by fear and anxiety. There is often no edge without an element of fear. In my experience the greater the fear before a new challenge, the greater the learning and reward on the other side.
The ability to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy fear is of vital importance for anyone involved in adventure sports. Since Galloway came up with the concept in ‘Inner Skiing’ back in the 1970s, sports psychologists have distinguished between healthy legitimate fear that protects us from bodily harm, and unhealthy imagined fear that is really holding us back. In reality the line between the two can sometimes be blurred.
The paradox is that extreme risk-taking, while often vilified in a modern risk-averse society, is also glorified. In the age of the GoPro hero who earns a living by social media presence, risk-taking is taken to further and further extremes. The current generation of adventure sports athletes have taken both skill levels, and risk-taking, to new levels.
Each new generation attempts to build on and surpass the achievements of those that came before. The problem is that social status among young kayakers is often based on how hard you can go on the river. Is it possible to separate personal development through adventure, from ego based or unhealthy decision-making?
Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, who was influenced by Zen philosophy, had this to say about the upper echelon of adventure sports: ‘I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 per center. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn’t appeal to me’.
The problem for the current generation is that, in the pursuit of new challenges, they embrace more and more risk. I discussed this recently with my old kayaking friend Steve Rogers in British Columbia. In our early twenties Steve and I worked as kayak guides on the Coruh river in Eastern Turkey. In that wild and free time we took many risks we were lucky to get away with.
Since then Steve has been a fixture on the British Columbia kayak scene, as well as being for a time the official photographer for Whistler/ Blackcombe ski resort. This has given him a unique vantage, in that not only had he known many generations of the world’s best kayakers, he also personally knew some of the world’s top extreme sports athletes in skiing, climbing and base jumping. All is not as well as it seems in the world of elite extreme sports.
Steve’s take on risk is interesting. Our generation of whitewater kayakers, he said, still had plenty of new rivers to explore. For that reason, it attracted a certain rebellious and free-spirited type, who were interested in exploring rivers in remote locations. We were the last pioneers on many rivers in the early years of the new millennium, before the advent of mass hydro projects and Google maps lessened the opportunities to explore the unknown.
My own first descents in Iran and northern Norway remain peak life experiences. The feeling of literally paddling into the unknown is something I’ll never forget. Taking risks triggers dopamine release. It feels good. Really good.
For the current generation, there are fewer and fewer unrun challenges. So instead of seeking the geographical unknown they mostly push the boundaries by going more and more extreme. The new challenge is to run a river at its highest level, or faster than ever before. This, of course, hugely increases the risk.
I certainly admire their skill: doing multiple laps of formidable whitewater runs in record times on former test pieces like the Stikine, the minus Rapids on the Zambezi, or the Rondu gorges of the Indus, are awesome technical, physical and mental feats.
My generation ran those rivers too, sometimes at huge flows. But the difference now is the frequency. Those were once in a lifetime experiences for the kayakers involved. Now these river get run at record flows, more often and faster than ever before.
Social media plays a part too. We generally see highly talented athletes, at the peak of their powers having a good day, making very dangerous things look easy. Less often do we see the crashes and near misses.
Both Steve and I felt lucky to have gone through our peak years of crazy before the arrival of the GoPro camera and social media. As young men and women we all need to test ourselves as a rite of passage. In the past, manhood was proved by courage in the hunt or on the battlefield. What are our modern day rites of passage?
A pioneer of adventure education in the UK, Colin Mortlock, has long championed the personal growth inherent in the adventure experience:
‘Thirty years of experience with adventure in the outdoors has convinced me, that not only is there an instinct for adventure in the human race, but that failure to provide a suitable outlet for this instinct in the younger generation, has made a marked contribution to the sickness of western living’.
He identifies the potential lessons when things go wrong, saying ‘the misadventure experience can be a most valuable teacher. Nature teaches in a much more powerful way than a human teacher.’ However, he balances this with the argument that the goal of adventure is not fame or glory, but self-awareness and humility.
V
As a recently graduated psychotherapist I have witnessed the mental health challenges from depression to PTSD among adventure sports athletes, as they readjust to a less extreme life. It was only when a caring, wide-eyed Canadian girl asked me, after I had tried to surf a notoriously dangerous Mexican beach break at night after way too much mescal: ‘do you have post-traumatic stress disorder’, that I realised I too might have a problem.
My own transition out of kayaking was difficult. It had been my life and identity for over a decade. I still kayak frequently, and sometimes challenge myself, but now I enjoy much more just being on the water with my friends, or simply being in nature. A few years ago I solo circumnavigated Ireland by seakayak, an experience that held its fair share of hazards, as anyone familiar with the power of the north Atlantic will attest. But as I grow older an egotistic desire for status and recognition has been displaced.
That is not to say it has disappeared, for the ego is a many-headed hydra. You think you have chopped it off, then it re-appears in another form. But the difference is that I now kayak for myself. I don’t have anything to prove to myself, or anyone else. I have a few photos and a video from my Irish voyage, for myself, not for social media. It was the best trip of my life.
If you push your limits for long enough, you’ll eventually find them. I encountered mine in 2007 on an ill-advised descent of Amot Gorge on the Sjoa river in Norway in raging flood. I came within seconds of blacking out and drowning. The river was way too high, too much water compressed into too narrow a gap with nowhere to go but back on itself.
Only luck saved me that day, a roll of the dice, a surge of the river and I too would have joined my friends who died on the river. But I lived. The experience humbled me.
The river taught me everything I know. Eventually even the hard lessons of humility and respect.
Much as I’d like to say otherwise the fact I am still here, and some of my friends are not, is down to luck. I’d say if they are honest with themselves most of my generation who pushed their limits in adventure sports would say the same. We all had times when we lost control. Whitewater is surprisingly forgiving, until one day it’s not.
VI
It is much harder to see the beauty in the everyday. To seek for what great minds of East and West call the middle way, a path of moderation avoiding extremes. Aristotle called this the ‘golden mean’, and Buddha the ‘middle way’. The tale of Icarus who flew too close to the sun reminds us of the perils of excessive risk-taking.
Our culture rewards being the best, the first, the greatest. People are often conditioned to measure their self-worth against what they achieve, rather than finding an intrinsic value in being themselves. In the testosterone-heavy-environment of my early twenties on the Zambezi, status came from skill levels and courage. I have learnt since then that it is better, and wiser, to value a person for who they are and how they treat others.
Who cares how good a kayaker/ surfer/skier you are if in your personal life you leave a trail of destruction behind you? After my river years, I ended up living on Maui, Hawaii, the world centre of big wave surfing. My friends there who had firsthand experience with the Mavericks and Peahi scene told me of the dysfunctional personal lives of some of the big wave surfers. On the flat days many turned to drugs to fill the void. I heard the same story when I was in Puerto Escondido in Mexico. The struggles of legendary surfers like Andy Irons and Darryl Virostko with drug addiction are tragic and well-documented.
Taoist philosophy places a major emphasis on balance and the harmony of yin and yang elements: if you push too hard be prepared for the response. Karma, very simply, means the same thing. Every action has its consequences. Often, people take risks for the sake of short term exhilaration without acknowledging long-term consequences. The consequence of dying young, no matter how gloriously you have lived, is a lifetime of heartbreak for the relatives and friends you leave behind.
Writing this, I am conflicted. Part of me remembers how good it felt to be that free, to take those risks and feel immortal. I returned to the Zambezi last summer for the first time in 16 years, and running Rapid 9 again still felt like one of the peak experiences of my life.
I still feel the draw of the river. But I’m older and wiser now: I know the trauma of losing loved ones. I do not regret for a minute the risks I took. But I now realise that the path to genuine happiness lies in balance and harmony, not extremes. That most wise of ancient books, the Tao Te Ching states the ‘sage casts off extremes’, likewise Aristotle counted ‘him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self’.
So take risks, explore your limits, learn about yourself by overcoming fear. Be aware, however, that it is not being the best, or going the hardest, that defines you as a human being. Sometimes it is better to walk away. Life is beautiful and very much worth living. A shot of adrenaline is not worth the price of a life.
Flow state can be found in the everyday, in being present in the moment. The closing words I leave to my friend Hendri Coetzee, the African river warrior, who took more risks than most, and for a time seemed invincible. Before his last, ill-fated expedition to the Congo, the one he would not return from, he sent me an email in which he said it would be his last major expedition. He looked forward to exploring other aspects of his life having ‘finally realized that my search for adventure was a search for the Stillness that I found in the eye of the storm’. That realisation of stillness comes to us all eventually, for some it is just too late.
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A film made by the author of kayaking adventures around the world 1999-2001
We are currently seeing relatively intense media focus on veganism, but I am worried this is another false dawn. All social movements go through peaks and troughs, and today’s coverage reminds me of what happened in the 1980s and 1990s. It is quite possible we are seeing the beginnings of a repeat cycle. If we are, then we need to learn how to improve our claims-making capacity in response to negative vegan stereotyping.
The 1980s witnessed a huge peak in animal advocacy and interest in the ‘animal issue’. British groups like Animal Aid, founded in 1977, were young and energetic and, in North America, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) emerged in 1980 as a brash, fresh, champion of other animals. This was at a time when the idea of animal rights – meaning the moral rights of other sentient beings – was being taken more seriously than it is today, and often articulated as rights-based animal rights.
PeTA was a radical grassroots group in the early years, before it morphed into the toxic, racist, sexist, and ableist, welfarist corporation it is now. Tom Regan’s seminal The Case for Animal Rights was fresh off the presses, and things were really buzzing. At one point in England, a journalist (who was ideologically opposed to animal advocacy) estimated that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) were carrying out around six actions per night. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection had been radicalised, and that gave grassroots campaigners throughout Britain access to funds and materials.
Any new generation of social movement participants wants to break with the conventions of the old brigade. As Jake Conroy notes in this recent video about activism in the 1990s, recent 21st century claims about the ‘first ever open rescue’ in the USA, and the ‘largest animal rights march ever,’ ignore the history of the animal rights movement. As regards the latter case, referring to a march in Israel, in 1990 a ‘March for Animals’ in Washington attracted a crowd estimated at between twenty-five and seventy thousand participants. The organisers claimed 55,000, far more than the number who are believed to have taken part in the recent Israeli march.
I acted as a press officer for an animal rights organisation when mass media coverage of animal advocacy shifted in the 1980s. The message got a lot darker. We were getting used to being referred to as ‘animal freedom fighters’, and ‘rescuers’, and weren’t prepared for the ‘terrorist turn’ in mass media characterisation of animal activists. Our reputation wasn’t helped by how the Animal Liberation Front literally ran out of safe homes for liberated other animals. This led to an increase in the incidence of what in those days was called ‘economic sabotage’. Other factors, such as a Mars Bar poisoning hoax, and the development of incendiary devices based on firelighters, which the press invariably called ‘fire bombs’, added to the burden on those doing media interviews.
With the benefit of hindsight it seems to me a smart move for embattled 21st century animal farmers, and the animal user industries in general, to attempt to re-establish a link between animal advocacy and terrorism. I want modern day advocates to be more prepared for the backlash than we were.
The animal user industries will surely attempt to ride on the wave of the current moral panic about terrorism. For example, some farmers have recently claimed to have received ‘death threats’ from ‘militant vegans.’ I notice from reports on social media that farmers have been asked to verify these threats but have failed to do so. Expect dirty from an animal user industry backlash.
For example, Mr. Alan Newberry-Street, the Director of the ‘British Hunting Exhibition’ – a mobile bloodsports display supported by the British Field Sports Society and the Masters of Fox Hounds Association, was jailed for planting a nail bomb under his own vehicle in a bid to discredit the animal movement. At his trial he had the audacity to ask for other similar offences to be taken into consideration.
If the tactic of linking vegans to violence is smart, we need to be smarter. The angry vegan stereotype has already been reventilated on BBC’s Jeremy Vine Show national radio. Playing up to that image, as happened sadly, is naïve and counterproductive. Any explanation as to why vegans may be angry must be couched in a calm manner. Moreover, 21st century activists must avoid joining in with this rhetoric, as some British national animal groups did in the 1980s. Sadly, there is already evidence of this occurring. In my experience paid-up staff in the movement are unlikely to defend grassroots campaigners if negative labels have been successfully attached to their activities in the mass media, however justified and merited such activities may appear.
Drawing on Tom Regan’s ideas (see video above) and a rights-based animal rights approach and a rights-based animal rights approach, I appeal to a new crop of vegan spokespersons, firstly to diversify: there are too many male voices. Secondly read up on rights-based philosophy in order to respond to the characterisation of veganism as welfare-based. This counters the argument ‘we have the best welfare standards in world’ which all representatives of users industries are likely to throw at you. Welfare standards are not relevant to the rights-based case for animal rights: rights violations are never excused by the regulation of atrocities. Be smart, don’t fall for their traps.