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Monthly Archives: October 2015

#63 Alienation Across The Mersey

October 17, 2015

Something twisted this way comes,
Male voice mixed with metal
Iron in the soul – mirror shades without the wearing of:
No way none of yews is coming through to me.

Out on the rob with a one-armed bandit – scally lad (18) and an older man (30) with only the one hand. Broke into an estate agent – that will get you a house and a purposeful life of paying for it, as if.

Stolen cash, stolen fishing tackle (people pay good money to perform their solitude), and a stolen Mitsubishi pick-up that’s red rag to a pig. Police car chase through Wallasey in the early hours, racing past the use-by dates of late Victorian streets.

Forty minutes on, local cop throwing down a ‘stop stick’ (tire deflation device).

Not stopping, the vehicle ploughs, mows, drives off. Three days afterwards Clayton Ronald Williams admits causing the death of family man PC Dave Phillips (34). In courtthe charge against him is read out: murder.

A jury will decide. But who decides when adolescent alienation may be integrated into society? And please don’t define this attitude as ‘testosterone’, as if modern Man is only age-old monkey glands.

On different days this could have been Mercutio, inviting death by Tybalt with irony in his soul.  Or Johnny Rotten pantomiming the Anti-Christ. Or first across the wire and into the enemy trench. All of them shielded by the same conviction:

No way none of yews is coming through to me.

#62 Have You Been Hajj’ed? Fate, Fatalism and Free Will

October 4, 2015

People were climbing on top of one another just to breathe.’

At temperatures pushing 50, more than a thousand Muslim pilgrims died – either crushed to death or suffocated – in a ‘crowding incident’ shortly after 9.00 local time on 24 September, the last day of this year’s Hajj.

Bodies of the barely living; remains of the already dead. Bare flesh, brown skin, white terry-towelling; dress code (male), dead or alive.

Minutes before, being with other people was very heaven.
Millions of pilgrims following the path of piety in the footsteps of the faithful: blessed is this way of all flesh, walking together to fulfil our bounden duty and service.

Then without warning the wave coming the other way and there are people drowning in other people: that’s what hell is.

Only a few make it over the high railings; many more manage to squat down and survive. Where everyone can do this, no one is trapped without air. But there are pockets – it’s a huge crowd with big pockets – in which this proves impossible.

And afterwards, the argument. Seeking to close down Iranian and African criticism ofSaudi officials in charge of the Hajj, the Grand Mufti declared that ‘as for the things humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.’

‘Tautology’ is Greek rather than Arabic or it could be his middle name: Saudi Arabia’s highest cleric has hereby pronounced that the inevitable…is inevitable.

But is there also an iota of insight in what he said (if not how he meant it)? Thestreaming millions, looking from afar like outpourings of a heavenly shredder, or a case-in-pointillism, have willingly entered into a situation where the volume of other people also entering into it means they must all but suspend their individual will.

Accordingly, as pilgrims become part of the righteous crowd, so the suspension of free will becomes the substantive part of righteousness – the path to piety. read more

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