RIP John Martyn

“u should be reading the excrement nigga!”

Fuck the BBC Part 2

Got this response from the BBC to my complaint:

Thank you for your e-mail.

We note your disappointment at our decision not to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise funds for Gaza.

We decided not to broadcast the DEC’s public appeal because we wished to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of covering a continuing news story where issues of responsibility for civilian suffering and distress are intrinsic to the story and remain highly contentious. We also could not be confident that the aid resulting from audience donations could reach those it was intended for at a time of a fragile ceasefire and sporadic border access. We will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza.

So they couldn’t broadcast the appeal because they didn’t want to give the impression that one side or the other was more responsible for the suffering of the people of Gaza? Forget the basic humanity of the thousands of suffering people in dire need of food and medicine, people who have just had to bury more than a thousand of their own, the BBC is cowed into this ridiculous cowardice by the fact that some people *might* score a political point over the broadcast. This regardless of the fact that the DEC’s appeal was explicitly given as an appeal on behalf of the people of Gaza, not of the victims of Israel’s bombardments.

Every such appeal could be viewed as politically contentious on grounds such as these. However the point of a humanitarian appeal is not to point fingers but for non-politically aligned charities to ask for help from the public for people who are desperate. Therefore, in order to appear consistent the BBC cannot now broadcast further appeals on behalf of victims of war or any disaster which has resulted from decisions made by some political grouping because of the potential controversy. And how would an impartial coverage of the humanitarian story be that different from asking for money to help its victims in terms of “issues of responsibility” — in both cases the question of responsibility is going to arise?

I’m also interested to hear how the BBC could be in a position to so easily dismiss the assurances of the DEC that they will be able to deliver the aid without the interference of Hamas. Are the DEC politically compromised?

At the end of the day the fact is that Livni said there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the BBC are scared of coming across as anti-Israel: it doesn’t matter if the facts themselves are resolutely anti-Israel, that only a zealously uncritically pro-Israel partisan could argue that Israel wasn’t primarily responsible, a false balance must be struck.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Picture misleading as Huck and Jim were nude for most of their raft trip.

Seems like I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about American idealism and about the mythology of the American dream recently; what with the fever pitch of Obama’s inauguration having passed only a week ago it’s been hard to avoid.

I just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last Sunday. For many people Twain’s most celebrated work portrays a halcyon vision of a mythical golden age in American history, with the naivete and innocence of Finn personifying the simplicity of a nation during those supposedly carefree days.

This view persists despite the fact that one of the central themes of the book is the enslavement of blacks in the southern states and its inherent injustice. Indeed the plot follows the attempts of Huck Finn and Jim, an escaped house slave, on a quest for freedom, Finn from the clutches of civilisation and Jim from the shackles of slavery, on a raft down the Mississippi.

But the book seems to shy away from too harsh a depiction of slavery, with Jim the slave portrayed extremely paternalistically as a guileless manchild. Twain also seems to struggle with reconciling the fact, which he scarcely addresses except indirectly, that many of the slave owners in his book are decent and morally upright, indeed good people: that ultimately slavery was such an integral part of a society for which he had such fondness.

I suppose Twain hadn’t felt seriously compelled to address this as most of his audience at the time were completely blind to any kind of ethical paradox here, as he probably was himself; and although the book has some harsh things to say about Midwestern and Southern American culture, it is essentially gentle (though wry) in tone. It’s true that Twain was profoundly obsessed by the absurdities which habitually beguile most people , but even so he never seems directly confrontational or ever allows his cynicism to go too far without being diluted by a customary dose of affection for the targets of his befuddlement.

Overall, however, the book undoubtedly deserves its reputation as one of the crowning masterpieces, and founding works of American literature. Indeed it is hard for me to believe it was ever considered a children’s book given the sophistication and depth of the themes Twain considers and the subtle bite of his pitch black humour. That is it’s hard to consider this a children’s book up till the final few chapters when Twain lets his sentimentality run away with him. It is then that Tom Sawyer makes his reappearance and the focus of the book shifts onto his pathologically elaborate fantasy schemes to break Jim loose from imprisonment in his uncle’s shed. The book becomes way too sugary and a tad tedious too. But Twain’s exquisite skill for observation, his sharp eye for human grotesquery and folly make the preceding chapters, with their depiction of Huck and Jim’s adventures as they float on down the Mississippi, endure and they are now rightly part of our cultural heritage.

FUCK THE BBC

Forget the whole Brand-Ross palaver, this is the most fucking obscene disgusting cruel thing the BBC have done for a long while. In fact it’s absolutely absurd. Complain to the BBC, but more importantly donate to the DEC Gaza appeal:

https://www.donate.bt.com/bt_form_gaza.html

Fuck your TV license, send the money to Gaza.

I was walking through the leafy grounds of the main campus today during a luminous blue dusk, and I looked up and was startled by the sight of the trees and their stark naked jagged branches silhouetted against the deep velvety blue of the sky. The sheer presence of these huge natural monoliths towering over me awakened a sense of wonder, maybe even an atavistic awe and dread: an animistic urge to see everything actively shivering with life.

Visually the scene struck me as being uncannily reminiscent of a Caspar David Friedrich painting; the hushed stillness and icy serenity of it all. Friedrich is my favourite painter and it’s precisely because he is able to invoke the magic of nature, and to capture something of the reverence which we used to feel in the face of its inscrutable, and utterly unfathomable mysteries — which in certain chemically enhanced states some of us still do. But of course as a culture you inevitably lose this profound sense of being overwhelmed by nature if you see it merely as a vast repository of material resources.

As I walked further through the grounds, in all the faces I encountered I saw a blank unfriendliness, a kind of chilly indifference to me. Maybe it was just my state of mind at the time, I was feeling alone and neglected, or maybe as I’ve often suspected students just tend to be that little bit more wrapped up in themselves. I guess for those three or four years they have unlimited license to indulge themselves in endless navel gazing and self regard. I’m so jealous, how I wish I had those years back again!

Finally I got to the library, which had been my destination, and there on the grass verge on either side of the bisecting path along which I was walking there were planted hundreds of uniform short white sticks each representing a life that had been lost during the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza. It made what had been distant and somewhat vague in the minds even of those of us who had felt so deeply against it chillingly manifest.

Withdrawal

My friend and teacher Prince Paddy A. K. A. Reverend Spook and I chatted yesterday on skype. He’s at a very low point at the moment having suffered a crushing emotional rejection at the hands of someone who he loved very dearly and on whom he’d pinned so many of his hopes. In his torment and despair he told me he was thinking of doing something really stupid — which I hope he hasn’t.

He also told me how disillusioned he was with the whole music making process given the widespread indifference his music had attracted: how it made him feel that he had nothing to show for all the effort and the toil and most of all the heart that he along with his collaborator and friend Dr Tedley had put into making the music. That all the creative effort that had gone into making these amazing, recklessly, passionate pieces of music, electric with sensuality and charged up with the magick of esoteric and occult symbolism had been ‘unproductive’.

To make music so alive, and that spoke so vitally of such extreme and desperate states of being and to encounter little in the way of reaction must be incredibly demoralising, the blank non-reaction coming to feel like a deeply personal rejection of your inner experience and of your creativity. He said he was thinking of giving it up. I told him not. I tried to convince him that it was a problem of distribution. If that prick Stevo had done his job at all glitchgore would have for sure made an impact. It wasn’t Spook or Tedley’s job to distribute and promote their music as well.

The fact is that even though Spook and Dr Tedley’s music is so honest and so raw I’m pretty sure there is an audience out there for it. And it’s not like this hasn’t happened to lots of other musicians, writers, artists, visionaries who’ve had to suffer long and painful years of neglect before getting their due — after which point the world can’t praise them enough.

Anyway, I have posted Spook’s latest, though hopefully not last, piece above with an accompanying video. Here the predominance of green symbolises the female tantric deity Tara.

NIL DESPERANDUM, friend.

Viva Glasvegas

Last year my friend Lynne sent me some tracks by Glasvegas over Skype. I had read a lot about them in various articles, reviews of live gigs, and seen them on the front of a number of music papers. But I put off listening to the tracks for one reason or another in spite of, or perhaps because of the barrage of hype, though the corny name had a lot to do with it too. After a few months I finally got around to playing them, and I wished I’d taken the leap sooner because they were an absolute revelation. There was an authentic rawness to the songs, a level of freshness and originality that I thought was almost unattainable in the current musical climate, cynical and tired as it is.

More than that they were shot through with a earnest frankness and awkwardness, defiant in the face of prevailing infatuations and manias. The first one of the tracks I played, Daddy’s Gone, could have laid itself wide-open to the charge of worthiness and over earnestness in its presentation of its subject matter, a young boy’s resentful yearning for an absent father, but in fact it was a triumph and in its frankness easily laid to waste any accusations of trite sentimentality. Indeed Daddy’s Gone became their breakthrough single, and was executed with such passion and honesty and was so moving despite, or perhaps because of its hint of faltering clumsiness that Glasvegas more than silenced any potential cynics.

However, of all the songs Lynne sent me the one that hit me most at gut level was ‘It’s my own cheating heart that makes me cry’ which despite its long winded title was a work of sheer fluid poetry, instantly notable for making singing in a broad Glaswegian accent sound as natural to rock ‘n’ roll as Bob Dylan’s whiny twang or Lou Reed’s opiate New York drawl.  Compellingly theatrical in its evocation of deep emotional discord and yet thrillingly vital it was the song I played over and over again, feeling utterly exhilarated each time.

Listening to Glasvegas with their sincerity and their Godhonest lack of innate prettiness, felt exciting and a wee bit rebellious even, an antidote to the superficial modern cultural fixation on image and celebrity and our ironic glorification of attention seekers, plus of course the fact they were fellow weegies pissing all over the English music scene made it all sweeter.

Nowadays there’s very little room for the awkward outsider and most music is made by the equivalent of the cool kids in your school, the ones that sneaked off to the school toilets to smoke dope while you were busy scribbling at your desk. With the obvious result that the emphasis is squarely on surface and sheen with a correspondingly scornful contempt for the sincere. Don’t get me wrong here, there has always been more than ample room for souless superficiality and for privilleged drama/art school kids in music, indeed they’ve usually comprised the lions share of the music industry, but the problem now is that they don’t even have the decency to try to hide their background like Damon Albarn struggled to in the good old days.

So understandably I was extremely excited about getting the album… and then I heard it. Everything had been smothered in production, smoothed out and wiped clean, in order to achieve some kind of clarity or something, I dunno. Turned out the tracks Lynne had sent me were demos, or single versions and the ensuing stages of overproduction had stripped them of their primal rawness, the passion had been totally reigned in. The songs were too flat now nowhere near fuzzy enough, even the singing sounded less impassioned.

It was no wonder given this album and its glossy,  diluted down version of the energy and excitement they had brought to the music scene of the beginning of last year that Glasvegas have somewhat fallen out of favour with critics and fans and even started to court indifference, the worst thing in the world for a band like Glasvegas. Ach you were better off listening to the Frightened Rabbit album this year or the awesome Twilight Sad album from last year.

True Faith is never blind belief?

In William Chittick’s Science of the Soul, he claims that the Islamic mystical philosophers of yore held to the position that True Faith could never be blind belief — as much as dogmatic fundamentalists would like it to be;that it was possible to verify and realize Reality for yourself. Indeed according to Chittick this was the ultimate aim of the Islamic intellectual tradition. Personally, I find this one of the most deeply intriguing aspects of religion and of different religious traditions. I have also recently been reading a lot about the philosophy and conceptual framework underlying the practice of yoga — whose aim seems to be to rid oneself of attachment to all things, including philosophies and conceptual frameworks. Since I haven’t enough material to write something new right now I thought I’d repost a few paragraphs I wrote on reading the first chapter of Arthur Avalon’s Shakti and Shakti which are relevant here:

Shaktas are followers of the Goddess Shakti the divine consort of the great yogin Shiva. Shakti represents the active aspect of the universe, the energy that runs through every living being and every cosmic process. She is the active female aspect of the Universe, whereas Shiva represents the passive male aspect — She is His Power, but ultimately they are One and the same. The ultimate aim of the Shakta is to attain, through the practice of rituals and exercises designed to shape and develop her consciousness, a state of being that will allow her to experience the truths contained within the scriptures and mythology of the Shaktas. In other words, the Shakta aims to experience for herself the truth of the teaching that ultimately she is One and the same as Shiva and Shakti; to achieve the realisation that “[t]he individual/embodied spirit (Jivatma) is one with the transcendent spirit (Paramatma)”. The idea is that the act of merging oneself with the Deity becomes a form of worship of the Deity, indeed the supreme form of worship.

According to Avalon, the Shaktic scriptures, known as the Tantras, don’t spend much time justifying a particular view of the universe, but instead emphasise the necessity of Sadhana i.e., practise, as “the means by which happiness may be attained”; so that those methods which might in fact bring the initiate closer to these validating experiences assume a primacy. Therefore, while rational speculation invariably contributes towards one’s understanding of the Tantrist teachings, it should be seen to take second place to the attainment of those experiences that ultimately prove the truth of what one must otherwise take on faith (“Attain a pure disposition, and thus only will you attain that certainty, that experience which will render any questions unnecessary”).

As Avalon states of the Vedanta in general: “It is a fundamental error to regard [them] as simply a speculative metaphysic in the modern Western sense.” In fact reason is denigrated as a restricted version of the full manifestation of Shakti given in Samadhi — an interesting idea. The contents of the Vedanta, it is generally understood, are to be proved by direct experience, experience that is gained through spiritual practice: “nothing (in these matters) is established by argument”.

As the Shaktas’ scriptures and teachings have it, there are 2 different kinds of experience, whole/full and incomplete. The incomplete experience (that of ordinary non-enlightened mortals) is said to be experience of parts of the Whole, with consciousness outward looking, and the whole/full is said to be the Experience-Whole (it emphatically cannot be an experience of the Whole since that seems to assume there is some kind of vantage point outside of the Whole which is a contradiction). The essential limitation of the partial experience (which arises from the facility of the Supreme Being to perceive itself as divided into limited parts of the Whole) is that it is framed within time and space; whereas the Supreme Experience (called Purna) takes place outside of the categories of time and space and is therefore an experience of changelessness. The latter experience is of True Reality — reality as it truly is — since what is truly real is defined as that which is changeless.

The Tantras describe a process whereby the universe evolves so that the absolute unity (the union of Shakti and Shiva) present at the beginning is gradually broken apart by the power of Maya (‘The Will to Be Many’ in fact another form of the Supreme Power, Shakti) that separates Shakti from Shiva. It is interesting that the Shaktas do not regard partial experience as illusion. Maya, which is given as the power that contracts consciousness into many finite centres of awareness each stuck in its own reality tunnel is not as Avalon states “rightly rendered [at least in this context] as illusion”. In fact in Avalon’s interpretation, the Tantrists believe that man essentially is his limitations and that he cannot get past these constrictions, without ceasing to remain a man, as his constrictions define him.

The Tantrists claim, according to Avalon, that we can say of a changing thing that it is real — but only with respect to a finite centre of experience (it is even said that the Supreme Being cannot Himself experience what a mortal man can without bringing Himself down to our level and becoming man).[An idea that has tantalising parallels with the central Christian dogma that Jesus, seemingly a human being, was God Himself having taken on human form]

The human mind is defined the result of the limitation of the Universal Consciousness into a finite centre. There are none of the problems that usually arise in dualist philosophies regarding how immaterial mind substance could possibly interact with a material universe here: mind and matter are both manifestations of the power of Shakti and can consequently both being modes of Shakti can interact.

Like many other mystical schools, the Shaktas also accept the validity of that identification of microcosm with macrocosm — a teaching which we in the occident are more familiar with in the form of the expression “As above so below”. For example, “What is here is elsewhere. What is not here, is nowhere” from Visvasava Tantra (Interestingly modern physics apparently rejects this: the subatomic world best described by quantum physics seems to be governed by laws substantially different from those assumed by classical physics to be best suited to describing our everyday world; the laws that constrain macrocosmic phenomena differ fundamentally from those that constrain microcosmic phenomena). Self-knowledge is crucial here, the exhortation to “know thyself” is validated in an important sense by the fact that the “life of the individual is an expression of the same laws which govern the universe”.

The most interesting aspect of these teachings for me is the idea that it is possible to verify them through potential experience; that they needn’t be taken on faith. That man can reach a state whereby he can for himself experience the “Infinite Consciousness” instead of the mere limitation and contraction of this Infinite Divine Consciousness that is his usual reality. What I find interesting, specifically, is the idea that you yourself could reach a state of certainty that would brook no possible doubt. The crucial issue here is whether I can experience truly for myself, as a seemingly finite mortal being, an infinite divine being such as God. Can I have a truly objective experience that occurs out side of any subjective frame of experience? Can I experience something outside of those categories of space and time that seem to frame my every experience?

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

Last month on the train back home to Glasgow I finished ‘Hunger’ by Knut Hamsun, a book I’d been reading for the last month or so. It’s fair to say I had been a bit intimidated. ‘Hunger’ has a daunting reputation as one of the cornerstones of modern literature and I’d been hearing about it for years. This along with Hamsun’s singular standing as an author and literary influence preceded it by a considerable distance, leading to an inevitable sense of disappointment and frustration when I finally got round to reading it and didn’t quite feel the same transcendent rush everyone else seems to have got.

I mean, if a book is described as ” [o]ne of the most disturbing novels in existence”, an opinion repeatedly echoed by any number of sources, and you end up coming away from it without feeling suitably traumatised or horrified, you think well either there must be something wrong with me, I’ve become depressingly inured to something, or with everyone else for being so easily taken aback. And I’ve often been in this situation of coming away from some piece of art disappointed at my own reactions having built up this mass of expectation in advance.

However, even if it didn’t manage to engage me as profoundly and deeply as I’d hoped and anticipated given the hype, I did nevertheless really enjoy it and found it a thrilling master work by a rightly lauded author.

The book is written in a strangely detached first person narrative and details a short, extremely traumatic period of time in the life of a disturbed young Norwegian writer living in late 19th century Oslo, then called Kristiania (the opening line of the book sets the scene beautifully: ‘It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him…’).

Opening with the narrator at the very onset of a downward spiral fraught with shame and despair, the book ends with him standing on the verge of a total breakdown, a fate which he escapes, or postpones, only via drastic means: by completely foregoing Kristiania herself and offering himself up as a deckhand on a ship bound for Egypt via England.

At the beginning we find him deeply dissatisfied with the meagre, parlous state of his lodgings and aggrieved by the general destitution into which he has begun to sink. But a much deeper source of hurt and discouragement lies in his inability to persuade anyone to publish the articles into which he pours so much of himself. He starts to feel worn out by the continual rejection by newspaper editor which of course he knows he doesn’t deserve.

The narrator not only struggles to sell any of the pieces he writes or to find any other means of scraping together enough money to ensure he has anything to eat or a roof over his head from day to day, but finds one of his main sources of adversity in his struggle with his sanity, or to put it another way, with reality itself. In fact, in one particularly memorable passage of the book, he just about manages to convince himself that he hasn’t suffered the complete breakdown of his mental faculties he suspects months of living in total destitution, on the edge of starvation, have brought about due to the fact that he has retained the ability to be observant of his surroundings, rather astutely as he boasts in his narrative.

Throughout the book the narrator’s behaviour is manic, constantly veering from merely highly strung towards dangerously erratic, impulsive and unreasonable, his mood suddenly turning volatile, and, his thoughts thick with chaos and absurdity. However when he does turn violent, the violence is always directed into himself, he becomes its target.

His proneness to these hysteric spells is of course exacerbated by a lifestyle of scarcity and dire need — but at the same time his instability, his inability to make his way with others, seems to be the chief cause of his descent into squalor. It’s as if he suffers from some kind of near relation of Tourettes’: stopping strangers on the street or knocking on random doors in the midst of some kind of delirium, taking a perverted pleasure in gauging their reactions to absurd and senseless acts and most of all, to his random and colourful extemporaneous lies, lies which he finds so compelling that he almost immediately begins to believe them himself.

Of course it would be all too easy to label such a character with some pathology and dismiss him as some species of lunatic, but Hamsun’s genius here is to make the narrator’s unfolding version of events deeply compelling, getting the reader to not only sympathise but also to identify with him. He does this not only through the lucidity and immediacy of the writing but by making the narrator’s retelling of events cogent and rational, as if we were privy to a still functioning voice of rationality in the narrator’s head aloofly scrutinising his spontaneous madness; in general Hamsun doesn’t attempt to directly manifest the narrators’ instability and madness in his manner and style of narration.

The narrator is occasionally able to channel his intense manic spontaneity into some form of worthwhile creative endeavour, into the impromptu writing of articles and plays which often come to him as if by a possession — but only when the inspiration hits him; otherwise this manic creativity becomes the engine of his madness. He is an extreme example of the archetype of the creative artist driven by, and helpless in the face of an incessant need to re-create and refashion his reality in an attempt to externalise some kind of surplus inner vitality: mental illness and the artistic impulse sit side by side the one merging into the other.

As the plot advances, aside from a few brief moments of respite the trajectory of the narrator’s decline is relentless: although perversely his situation never seems to deteriorate as rapidly as his ability to cope with it. Things begin to look up during the few moments the narrator gets to spend with Ylajali, the pretty girl he starts to take a romantic interest in and who, on her part, is also deeply drawn to him — even taking it upon herself to appear face covered by a black veil, keeping a silent anonymous vigil outside his lodgings at night on a number of occasions.

As their relationship develops beyond this initial mutual fascination, Ylajali (the absurd imaginary name the narrator gives the girl) starts to pull him out of the extreme solipsism into which he is sunk, and with so much at stake he starts to suffer from a unprecedented level of self-consciousness of his behaviour and actions. He notices how much his looks have starts to wither as a result of extreme living, is deeply ashamed by his gauntness and relentless hairloss – his hair is literally coming away in clumps as he sits across from her — and the tattered rags he is forced to wear, the uniform of his destitution.

Of course it can’t last. Having been invited up to her flat and finding himself alone with her and her extremely responsive to his physical advances, he makes the disastrous decision to take the opportunity offered by their intimacy to confess everything to her of his squalid condition and his degradation. But of course his confession leaves her utterly stunned and rather distraught, understandably so. To make things even worse, the heavy-handed clumsiness of his ensuing attempt to salvage something from the night and to renew their intimacy as if nothing had happened, results in his shameful exit from her apartment and, to his mind given the overwhelming blow to his pride, the end of their relationship.

Things go from bad to worse to staggeringly worse, and in the final part of the book the narrator’s desperation in striving to keep a roof over his head and avoid falling back into his previous condition of want and helplessness, leads him to completely jettison any last vestiges of dignity and pride he may previously have held fast onto — indeed he is now convinced that a misplaced sense of self worth had previously been his downfall — into a sort of craven timidity. But even his complete and utter humiliation at the hands of the scummy family who own his lodgings cannot secure him much of a reprieve and having debased himself he ends up back on the street.

Finally he has to throw the towel in and accept failure, to recognise that the only way out of this spiral is for him to leave and to put as much distance between him and the site of all of his defeats as he can. Give up and start all over again.

For me of power of the book lies in its remorseless honesty. Hamsun never flinches in his depiction of his narrator’s most shameful and pitiful moments and invests them with a kind of brutal and awful truthfulness that must have its roots in the authors own personal experiences of the more grim side of the human experience. Maybe in the end it didn’t disturb me as much as it had others because I still saw a lot of hope in the mere fact of the narrators persistence, in his reluctance to admit defeat, the fact that he keeps on at it, and even at the end, especially at the end when things looked so overbearingly bleak he still manages to escape, to find a reprieve.