The Right To Write

and read and share over long distances
is something we take for granted.

But it was something that the citizens
sent to the death camps could not imagine,
long before they were arrested in their homes,
along with all their many neighbours-
and given an hour's notice to pack
a suitcase apiece, including the children,
as their sole possessions for the foreseeable future,
about which they had been deceived beyond belief.

Could you put all your life
into a large, strong, shopping bag
-the sort you fill with food every week- 
and leave everything else behind for the unknown?

That is what they did, not knowing how,
if even just a few of them got back,
there would be nothing and nobody left
for them to return to. 

What ever was there when they left
had been either obliterated,
or parcelled out to strangers.

In reality, for several years,
before they were arrested,
their right to think or reason
was slowly being constricted. 
As propaganda and the new laws
hid how between 1935 and 1945,
across Eastern Europe,
the landscape became dotted
with 'work camps', opened by Nazis
and maintained by local collaborators. 

The right to speak and hear about this
was banned back then. It is not banned now.
But those who try to speak out now,
who write, read, and want to hear the stories 
will still find the freeze,
in the old ban from the past
as a living echo inside of them, 
as they make it their duty
to bear witness to what resisted
being born clears witness to before.

How Long Will This Item Take To Sell Out?

Given the message it should be a slow but steady seller
as the self confessed procrastinator puts off
making the purchase until the last minute
in the hope that the item getting cheaper
the longer it remains for sale. 

 

Guns And Drugs

I recently watched a well made BBC documentary
on how North Korea seeks to beat the regime
of sanctions that works against it,
and trade with the world in spite
of it's socioeconomic isolation.

I watched as outsiders from other countries
identified with the outsider country, N. Korea,
and travelled the world meeting wealthy men
who would pay North Korea to make things for them.
What did these wealthy men want? Guns
and illegal drugs, with which to make
even more money, as they denied the values
of the countries named in their many passports.

'How like Northern Ireland' I thought.
In the time of 'the troubles' (1969-1997)
guns and drugs were the shadow economy
that became the currency of popular capitalism,
whatever the shops and the shoppers thought and did.

Beneath the acronyms the paramilitary warlords, 
were all basically the same. They all competed
to lengthen the shadow of the shadow economy,
to the loss of civil society which was in retreat.

When, at last, civil society recovered itself
it found that what weakly bound it together
was what had previously divided it;
a puzzled sense of loss that continues,
though what was lost should be clearer.

We will never know what ordinary North Koreans think,
any more than that country will retrieve a shared sense citizenship.
It's history of hereditary dictatorships-a black hole into which
all power retreats-has removed all sense of citizenship with it,
and the back hole has been deepening by the day-since 1950.  

With Age Comes Increased Respect For Figures From The Past

Though getting there seems quite painful, as we
make the mistakes from which we might learn
without knowing which mistakes are the right ones
for learning from. One of hardest mistakes to recover
from is knowing how a body needs rest with another
but finding the fellow body/person we are comfortable
with, and with which doing nothing seems easy 
for both is a rarer and greater gift than we knew.   

 

Taking The 'Arian' Out Of 'Majoritarianism'*

The pink star is now well known
in the small constellation of coloured stars
that social and racial minorities in Nazi Germany
were labelled with, as whatever the colour
they were packed into trains and despatched
from that country's civil society to the work
/death camps that dotted the German countryside.

Camps that the local population knew about,
but had to deny for the sake of their liberty and sanity.

Pink stood for 'gay', the choice of sexuality
that only in the late twentieth century
in wealthy liberal countries has been accepted
as nearer normal. But what of the other colours?
The yellow (the Jews), the brown (the Roma),
the purple (Jehovah's Witnesses) the blue (emigrants)
the red (political prisoners and the Freemasons)
the green (ordinary criminals), and last
and far from least the black star (the vagrants,
drug addicts, the indolent, and the prostitutes).

What is a society without these choices?
And where are they all in my society?
Why don't they join us in recognition
of their previous loss? Is it still 'too dangerous',
for them to make themselves known
through the commemoration
of their absent forbearers? 

Perhaps many in those groups prefer to side
with the quiet majority and quietly add to the gaiety
of the country they belong to, and let their losses be.
Or let other people account for their history. 

Job done, for this year at least.

*Majoritarianism means majority rule, or a majority monoculture,
in societies where the undeclared aim is a consensus that both
makes minorities vital to the economy and socially invisible,
and does it in ways that said minorities can't resist.
Example; The Jim Crow laws in the USA .   

Fascists both appropriate and dislike majoritarianism.
They will use it for the cover it gives them with the majority
of a given population, but they also know that by definition
they are a minority who should never be naturally popular.
Easy acceptance is against their nature, which is to divide others. 

But still they feel that they are a minority whose destiny
is the right to rule, and majoritarianism is part of the path to power.

The Music Room-A Room Of One's Own

How people arrange their houses matters.
One of my fondest memories as a youth
was discovering that my new friends
refreshed their friendships through
keeping open the physical space
where they shared their interests,
which allowed those interests to change.

I met my earliest friends via my school,
a space where I did as I was bid. I chose little.
Outside the school my friend and I had nothing in common,
but through music we tried to create conviviality. 

I was 20, and mad about music, when I made friends
who would last. They were all just enough older.
They had plenty of evenings for sharing music they liked
and teaching to me why their music was good
after I recovered from being amazed
by the variety of design of the record covers.

Before then I had been starved of such choice.
The family house was set up around the television
and what my father thought were good programmes.
This meant sport and other non-verbal competition,
the communication of which taught me nothing.

Music, even recorded music, meant musicians
agreeing with each other through how they played.
However much music was non-verbal, dad had ears of tin.
The din of hierarchies forming themselves were the key
to how his hearing worked. Dad loved seeing others
make themselves the boss, with no sense of process.

But my friends were different,
hierarchies had to be accidental
and would always be subject
to the great leveller, change.

None of us knew who Virginia Woolf was
but we would have 'got' her 1929 feminist plea
for women to have space and money to be themselves,
rather than be confined within the image of their family.

The best thing about rooms for sharing music
is how the host inspire their guest to create their own.
Whether guest, or host, that is what I did....     

The Tourettes Of Technology

When technology gets us alone,
it always make us ruder
than we can admit that we are,
with other people.

This is not about porn
which most adults know about,
where the secret with it is less
that we know how to find it
and more that what we hide from ourselves
is how our wanting it is proof that we are bored
with the more evasive, but socially acceptable, agendas.

Who knew that boredom multiplied so easily? 

The rudeness I want to point at
is what happens in the home
when the printer wont listen
and obey it's controller, they both act
as if they have had an argument,
and we feel like we are the losers
when we can't print what we want.
They won't listen to us or each other,
that is when the tourettes of technology takes over.