# Pointing Towards Syria

September 11, 2016

Honey on the elbow – try sucking and you’ll see.

Though even this prospect ‘s worth more than you or me.

Yet we are here, present and correct, while peace in Syria’ s

But a sweet smear; a smudge on the lens of war-past-war.

Was it ever thus? Is this still politics continued by other means?

In Geneva the protagonists play on, much as they always might

They are the high and mighty, after all.

In Aleppo young men with mortars play out their immortality to the last drop

You don’t have long, lads; aged 27 it turns sour, anyway.

But who knows what the people think? People more partisan

With every falling shell…or past caring whatever it was they once cared about?

Man in gown, transgender pink, not in the ballroom as you might think.

Admitted to hospital suffering from the effects of chlorine inhalation,

Brought on by a barrel bomb – no barrel of laughs in the swimming pool.

The hospital has moved above ground again. Back to normal? Only that the ground floor and basement are now full to overflowing, forcing the reclamation of upper storeys where the ‘walls are open’. Intentional or not, the Syrian doctor’s turn of phrase is undoubtedly poetic. She says again that ‘everything is not enough’. From her lips this is by no means a statement of infinite entitlement. According to another doctor, a Syrian-American who recently returned to the United States, they don’t even have painkillers. In which case the miracle is that people keep on coming.

And the point of pointing this out? The point is to point. Addressing atrocities in terms other than the immediate, means calling to you, dear reader, across the wasteland. It’s important, you see, to retain the capacity for we, renewed by reference to things more important than you and me. And if this makes us ambulance chasers or even vultures whose collective existence feeds on the dead and dying, let’s hope the true nature of our dependence, depends on what we go on to do with it. read more

#97 Moulded Yourself Into A Soldier

August 7, 2016

On 21 July 2016 Dean Carl Evans (22) from Reading died fighting with a Kurdish People’s Defence Unit attempting to re-take the Syrian city of Manbij from Islamic State. Afterwards another British volunteer praised Evans for having ‘moulded himself’ into a soldier during two tours in northern Syria.

Unprepossessing

Unfit for the Army
Asthma let you down
As your undershot jaw would lower
The score on Take Me Out

Unprepossessing

Less of the specified failings
More an awkwardness all round
That question remaining unanswered:
Just what to do with your mouth

Unprepossessing?

Yet you took hold of yourself
Flying out twice to Syria
Now killed in action
With the Kurds against IS

Fatal self-possession

Put paid to any personal
Doubt or insecurity
Though odd if for your counterparts
The motives were much the same

How strange if for your foes
The motive’s exactly the same.

(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

January 28, 2014

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope’s blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ.

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for ‘peace talks’ in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can’t be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms. read more

Painting With Light

December 18, 2013

Blown off – and not just the bloody doors. Exposed by explosions, the inside of a block of flats revealed like the set for West Side Story. Look at those balconies, crudely constructed out of iron bars: modernist Mondrian meets original Broadway set designer Oliver Smith – fantastic!

Beneath the flats, Breugel-people sift through white debris in search of survivors; asking themselves, ‘how can dust be so heavy?’ Milling around they merge into one: crowd, community, peasantry.

The whole scene is glazed with light. Did the bombs rain down at dawn? Exposed interiors brightened from Pantone PMS 7502 to PMS 7500 (beige to cream); suffused in the same way as Tintoretto, Canaletto, Fra Angelico.

This is Aleppo, rebel-held Syrian city in the aftermath of air raids, as photographed in this morning’s newspaper. The tint in the scene comes from the block of red (Pantone PMS 185) in the Vodafone advertisement on the other side of the same sheet of paper.

By dint of this, I stop to see these people and their torn city instead of turning over the page.

The Rhythm Is The Message

August 31, 2013

He got rhythm.

Seated at the conference table, flanked by guy-in-a-bow-tie (hey, buddy, the sign says ‘White House’, not ‘Barber Shop’) and baby-faced-woman with Lady-Exec hairstyle, the President is a picture of panache: Barack Obama, who doesn’t have to try….too hard.

Apparently effortlessly, he is establishing the likelihood of American air strikes against the Assad regime. Of course there are cracks to be covered, not least the anomaly of stopping to explain the effectiveness of imminent military action. Which can only have the effect of making it less than imminent, thereby reducing its effectiveness. But the way he speaks effectively conceals such flaws.

This presentation is a sit-down, low-key affair; cadences are reduced accordingly. The rhythm’s the thing. It is audible throughout the President’s remarks. We can hear it, for example, in his enunciation of the following four words:

‘The kind of attack’.

Here they are broken down to show the underlying rhythm:

The Kind-of-a Ttack. Daa da-di-da daa.

In 4/4 time, beginning on the fourth beat of the bar: Crotchet, Triplet, Crotchet, Rest.

Again: The (Crotchet)/ Kind-of-A (Triplet)/ Ttack (Crotchet)/ Rest (Crotchet).

Thus Obama’s phrase ‘the kind of attack’ is couched in rhythmic form. His words acquire their sonority from the rhythm in which they are couched. If certain phrases resonate with the public, it is because they are formulated as rhythm; because they are composed of rhythm between words as much as the words themselves.

It so happens that the phrase used above to describe Obama’s way of speaking, is similarly comprised of the exact same rhythm: ‘the rhythm’s the thing’; Daa da-di-da daa.

Exactly.

But the thing about rhythm is its combination of exactitude and variation. Obama’s speech pattern is four beats to the bar. Precisely. But it also sounds something like but not quite the same as the speech of previous Rhythm Kings such as Martin Luther Jnr. Who patterned the democratic aspirations of the day, who formulated the degrading experience of many into one uplifting note, so that Obama could echo that sound and evoke its democratic content 50 years later. read more

Scenes from Syria

June 8, 2012

Smoke, shouts and gunfire. Hauling a body – dead, wounded? – into the back of a van. The sound of man a crying. In a different film, you would take it he was singing, but this is ‘amateur video’ of the attack on Houla, Syria. Another film shows dead bodies from the village of Mazraat al-Qabeer, now dressed in their best clothes and composed – arranged like flowers – for the camera’s worldly eye. The lens lingers over them, and the accompanying voice calls for action against the forces of President Assad. But because there are children among the dead, twenty-first century decorum dictates that we must look at a white blob where their faces would otherwise be. It turns the whole scene into an outtake from the X-Files. So much story-telling, too much narrative, means we can’t see, we can’t see.

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