RosieBell

Friends and Enemies

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

Those of course are the last lines of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting.  The dead soldier tells what his life could have been to the soldier who killed him.  

This poem was brought to my mind by an item on the Today programme the other morning. 

During the Falklands War an anti-aircraft gunner shot down a fighter jet and thought he had killed the pilot.  He then found out that the pilot had survived.  The gunner went to meet him, now a retired Commodore and living in a village in Argentina.  The Commodore had no hard feelings and said:-"Each one of us had to fulfil our duties". 

It's common enough for soldiers to return from wars with admiration for the enemy's fighting prowess and bravery.   Soldiers, sailors and airmen who once tried to kill each other can meet, shake hands and say that was what they had to do. However, the torture victim cannot greet his torturer with such easy feelings.  He may agree to forgive, after something like a truth and reconciliation process, but this is not the meeting of equals.  Nor would the women of Berlin in 1945 be ready to say, it was your duty, to the Soviet soldiers who raped them.  The aftermath for them was horror and shame and suicide.  You can be shot at by an impersonal force, but not deliberately humiliated, tortured or raped.  You are in some kind of relationship between human beings that has gone grossly awry. 

So further to Robert Fisk's reaction to the Marines urinating over the dead Taliban,:-

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.

There is a reasonable aspect to this argument. If atrocities are run of the mill, that should be known.  The public like to think that there can be such a thing as a clean war, not many hurt, everything sorted out.  With any war in the offing they should realise that it's not just the killing and maiming, destruction and mayhem but the chance for humiliation, rape and torture.  Also, remember that humiliation, rape and torture are a great pleasure for some men and that the taste for them can spread among a platoon or a regiment. Giving a man a gun is giving him brief and petty power - and some will become Caligulas and Uday Husseins.   So if bringing to mind the horrors of war can prevent more wars, all to the good. 

However I don't think "war is the total failure of the human spirit "- Auschwitz is, and Hiroshima is, and rape and torture and atrocities are.  But war?  All wars, for whatever reason?  

"For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses."

It's the Marine Corps' job to kill these men.  You can call it a terrible job, you can say they're involved in an unjust war, but that is how wars are conducted.  You kill or disable the enemy.  You don't inflict gratuitous humiliation on him, even after death.  Wars happen, and they are horrible.  It is better though that there are things like Geneva conventions and political leaders who are embarrassed when they are conducted with unnecessary cruelty (see Normblog on this). 

Pacifists say "war is murder".  But that is not generally accepted.   We don't do the dulce et decorum thing any more - Wilfred Owen was one who taught us not to - but we acknowledge the necessity of war in certain circumstances, carried out for certain ends.  Those fighting it will at their best regard those they are fighting against as caught up in something larger - duty perhaps, or professional pride or patriotism.  So they can meet afterwards without personal animosity.    They can say, I am the enemy you killed, or tried to kill, my friend. (Wilfred Owen was a soldier as well as a poet.)

But you can't say:-

I am the enemy you raped, my friend
I am the enemy you tortured, my friend
I am the enemy you pissed over, my friend

Decline and fall

I've always thought the saying “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” was self-eivdently stupid, both physically and emotionally. I can't imagine a crowd of amputees,  paraplegics and others crippled from nearly fatal accidents chanting it in a chorus.  As for the realms of feeling, the bad things that batter you can toughen you or weaken you or leave you pretty much as you were.  There are no rules there and no consistency.  Now Hitchens is finding out the hard way that this maxim come from bravado rather than experience, truthfully reported.

Hitchen is dwindling.  The cancer, and its treatment, are assaulting him violently.  Swallowing is torture, and he's losing the use of his fingers so he is in fear of being unable to write.  However he can still put the words together and bear witness to the state of himself. 

I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. . . . . To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.
. . .

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise?

He quotes John Betjeman's poem Five O'Clock Shadow, with its vision of the modern unsupernatural hell that most of us will go through one day:-

This is the time of day when we in the Men's ward
Think "one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight."
When he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly:
This is the time of day which is worse than night.

A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,
A doctors' foursome out of the links is played,
Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:
This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.

Below the windows, loads of loving relations
Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,
Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly:
"Well, we've done what we can. It can't be long till the end."

This is the time of day when the weight of bedclothes
Is harder to bear than a sharp incision of steel.
The endless anonymous croak of a cheap transistor
Intensifies the lonely terror I feel.

Havers and Blethers

The Captain's Bar is putting on another Havers and Blethers show for the Edinburgh festival.  That's an hour of spoken word performance from various poets and prose writers.

Venue:- 
Captain's Bar
4 South College Street
Edinburgh EH8 9AA
Dates:- 1st August - 20th August
Time:- 7:30 - 8:30 pm

I'm performing Friday 5th August and Wednesday 10th August

It's a great little venue, right in the heart of Festival land and also what the fringe Festival is supposed to be like, instead of the huge venues with their 50 different stand up comedians at £15 a show it's become.

The Captain's Bar is also putting on The Early Word.

Dates:- 1st August - 20th August
Time:- 9:30 - 10:30 am

A different author/poet each day will present their work to you in a special one off performance.  It's a breakfast show so you get a coffee and a cake thrown in with the ticket price.

The Ogre's Drivel

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

W H Auden

H/t  Diamond Mine

Now a small group, a group of young people, who were given hallucinogenic pills, raided police stations here and there like rats, they raided barracks. They used relative safety and security that Libya enjoyed, and they raided some barracks and they also annulled their previous criminal records. But I don’t blame these youths. They are young people: sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They are emulating what is happening in Tunisia. They are imitating what is happening in some cities, like they heard something about raid on a courts building and they say: “We shall do it in our city”. But there is a sick group that is giving money and pills, these hallucinogenic pills, to these young people, very young people, pushing them towards this side of war. The people who were killed are the members of the police and armed forces but not those who were behind them [presumably the killings]. They [those behind the killings] are in their houses  outside of the country, enjoying the safety and their families and children. And they are encouraging you and your children, giving them pills and we start slaughtering each other, encouraging to slaughter each other.

(Full speech here).

When Proverbs Come True

I note that recent events have contradicted the positive outcome that “engaging” with the Clan Gaddafi was supposed to bring about. Now I hear pundits falling back on old proverbs eg When you sup with the devil use a long spoon; The leopard does not change his spots and (not yet, but will come), Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled by it?   It’s like Kipling’s The Gods of the Copyright Headings.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Words Without Music

Last night I was at an event at the Let’s Get Lyrical festival.   A bunch of poets and/or performers each read out a favourite lyric.  Everyone made a good fist of it, reading the lyrics in such a way that you didn’t immediately start putting the tune behind it, which is what I normally do if I read a lyric on a page.

This one was new to me and rather topical:-

 

A very nice young woman said she had taught her grandfather to use Youtube and  that the old man never looks happier when finding songs of his youth:-

 

That sounds so innocent now, with the coy hints about honeymoon couples.  

If anyone had asked me I’d have done this one:-

 

I heard Mark Knopfler on the radio saying that he had been in the appliance store and heard one of delivery men grousing about the MTV.  Knopfler took the words down verbatim, and there was a song.

Now look at them yo-yo's, that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on the M.T.V.
That ain't working, that's the way you do it
Money for nothing and your chicks for free

Now that ain't working, that's the way you do it
Let me tell you them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb

We got to install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We got to move these refrigerators
We got to move these colour T.V.'s

Or maybe I would have done this one:-

 

This is our season of regret
Your adolescent dreams of fame
Tracing your autograph on a polished bar
Didn't get you very far
All pop, no star

No this should have been your rags to riches
Instead of detox wards and stitches
Left all the luxury of drinking under the stars
And sleeping in your car
All pop, no star

It really was an inspired ideda for an event, which was held in The Caves, an astonishing space of arches and vaults with dungeon-like rooms leading from one to another. There was water dripping down the wall by the stage and it was freezing.  I expected to find manacled prisoners and a rack and thumbscrews lying round.

Love without hope

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves

How I love the snow

I haven't got a car to be dug out.  I haven't got children who miss school.  I haven't got an aeroplane to catch.  I don't make my living by driving a taxi or running a pub or growing root vegetables.  I'm not old and infirm and unsteady on my legs. In short, I am barely inconvenienced.  If I arrive late at work, the snow gives me an excuse (at least I arrived).

I love the icicles dripping off the traffic lights and the handfuls of white froth on bicycle seats.  I love the startling whiteness like raw meringue, so white that it flashes blue.  I love the sudden silence, the different light, instead of the usual grey lowering sky.  I love snowmen and the world becoming a playground for children.  I love that walking from work becomes an adventure. I love the camerarderie between those picking their way along icy paths or standing at bus stops.  I love the transformation.

London Snow

by Robert Bridges

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled - marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;
No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,
And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.
Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,
They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze
Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;
Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;
Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder!'
'O look at the trees!' they cried, 'O look at the trees!'
With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,
Following along the white deserted way,
A country company long dispersed asunder:
When now already the sun, in pale display
Standing by Paul's high dome, spread forth below
His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.
For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;
And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,
Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:
But even for them awhile no cares encumber
Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

 

Havers and Blethers

The wonderful "Havers and Blethers" is making a Christmas appearance at Captains on Wednesday 22nd December. Short performance readings from authors Gavin Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Andrew Wilson, Rosie Bell, Colin Bartie, Morgan Downie, Juliet Wilson and your favourite hostess Kirsty Jacqueline Lingard.

Be there for 6pm.

Music afterwards with Nuala Kennedy and Cammy Robson.

Welcome to the Captains Bar Traditional and friendly music bar

Captains Bar
4 South College Street
Edinburgh
EH8 9AA

www.CaptainsEdinburgh.webs.com

Captains Facebook Group "Captains Folk Music"

Dave Anderson

If you’re ever in Edinburgh, do check out the Captain’s Bar.  It’s a nice little pub with a good vibe and there’s music on there every evening, and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.   I was there the Saturday evening before last and a guy was playing the piano and singing - mostly standards like A Nightingale Sung in Berkeley Square:-

 

(I looked at a few versions of this e.g. Nat King Cole’s and Frank Sinatra’s but their arrangements were heavy with strings, so I chose Glenn Miller’s.  The song is so over the top romantic that it doesn’t need any of the extra lovey-dovey sound of strings.  It worked very well just with the piano and vocals.  Have songs like that been written in the last fifty years or so?)

The guy playing jazz piano and singing in an expressive voice was Dave Anderson,  who as well as being a musician is an actor, and a writer and director of musicals.  He’s the musical director for a piece called A Bottle of Wine and Patsy Kline which is playing in Glasgow in December.

So he did a fine version of Crazy:-

 

As well as the covers he did some of his own songs, which sadly have not been recorded.  Here are the lyrics to one of them:-

DEAD LIBERTY
When they take your work
Treat you like a jerk
And mock your poverty
Someone taps your phone
This is what is known
As Dead Liberty

When the hoods and crooks
Get to cook the books
And rob you endlessly
And the judge is bribed
This is best described
As Dead Liberty

And when your friendly neighbourhood cop
Seems to go right over the top
And to see his brief
As not to catch a thief
But to stop you complaining
By beating your brain in
When the guys with guns
Are the lucky ones
Who get to wander free
Then the populace
Recognize a case
Of Dead Liberty

And when your daily newspaper tries
To pull the wool right over your eyes
And disseminate
Prejudice and hate
And the lies they’re expressing
And the truth they’re suppressing

When the cops protect
Those you most suspect
Of daylight robbery
Then it’s time to say
That there is no way
You can do this thing to me
We don’t need no Dead Liberty

 

This was written for the Wildcat Theatre production Dead Liberty about the miners’ strike.  It had a good tune as well. 

Next spring Dave will be touring a one-man show, called “Shoo-be-Doo! Or How to Talk To Old People”,  As well as being an accomplished musician and song writer, he’s a terrific entertainer who has a good rapport with his audience so check him out if he comes your way.