Artichoke Circus

(and unresolved dilemmas)

Before Ductape died (for my part I think he is dead and I miss him greatly) he and I were writing something together. For this last year, I’ve been unsure what to do with it. On the one hand, it was part of a correspondence which is clearly private. On the other, it was also a collaboration within that correspondence which both of us had intended to be read by others when it was eventually completed. It wasn’t complete last September. But nor did it break off abruptly: we had got stuck a while before that.

We had encountered changes that needed making and some basic questions that needed answering before we could keep on writing. And events intervened. The Lebanon was being bombed. In retrospect, I think Ductape's health was failing. Also I was not writing much: La belle dame had dropped by and words had become dangerous creatures.

But I think that perhaps had circumstances been otherwise, we might eventually have found a way out of our narrative difficulties. Counterfactuals. As it was, they weren't, we didn’t and I don’t want to change what was written now, since I think some parts of it may be among the last things he wrote. Though not the last.

It’s hard (at least I've found it hard) to know what to do with words that have, if only by default, been entrusted to your keeping, but which – at least at some point – were intended to be read by more than one pair of eyes. I thought about what to do about this over the last year, but have reached no conclusion: I still don’t know whether this is a betrayal of trust or not. We didn’t -- and in particular Ductape didn’t – think that it was finished. But I cannot fix or finish it by myself and some of you were his friends, the people for whom he wrote.

So.

If parts seem clumsy or inept, they are almost certainly mine since Ductape didn't do clumsy or inept.



Artichoke Circus.


Where did I find this place? In a memory. Look see? Over here.
A dubious pause and a raised eyebrow.
"Well it's a good enough place to meet isn't it? A place that is no place at all. One can come and go, traceless. Singularly apropos."

You follow the voice over to a rather distressed looking picnic table, there in what passes for a park for the kids to run around during the day, letting off steam. It's darker here, away from the floodlit carpark, from the loglo of McDs and Burger King. The air smells of oil and fumes. Beneath that, the smell of stale cooking fat and old fries. Yet catch that midsummer breeze in just the right way and there's a hint of something not yet vanquished, not yet destroyed utterly.

"Like Ithilien" she mutters beneath her breath, "Yes. This is my memory of it."

Her companion does not hear. He is preoccupied with the discovery of a fire fly, and its periodic hopefully-green glowing.

"What's it's name?" he says, looking up.
"It doesn't have one. But we called it the United States of Generica. "

Out on the highway a military convoy trundles through the night.

"So." she says, "What shall we discuss on this shortest night? Manifest Destiny? The End of Empire?

"Is there a difference?" the old man asks, smiling down at the firefly, with whom he has made friends. It perches comfortably on his finger, blinking companionably in the gathering dusk.

"In their ends, I mean," he eyes his DoodleBurger skeptically. "They have always been symbiotic, like conjoined twins that cannot be separated, that live only a short time, though to their parents, it seems an eternity. The fact is, we are all just people. There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire. These are more truly fairy tales than fairies and goblins and enchanted forests. Although unlike the fairies and the enchanted forests, they call forth the worst that is in us, worse even than the mischievous goblins."

He nods farewell to the firefly, who makes its blinking way off into the sky, and takes a hesitantbite of the DoodleBurger, nods approvingly. "Good. They remembered the extra pickles."

"I suspect I'd need more pickles still," she replies grinning, picking lazily at a strawberry parfait. Lifting her spoon, She raises an eyebrow towards her companion.

“We are all just people?There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire?” These things, then, are mere chimeras. Figments of a feverish brain, of paranoid imagining? Will-o-wisps we have been chasing through a forest to our boggy doom.” She smiles. “Windmills. Not giants after all.”

She pushes the half-finished parfait aside, not before having extracted, with care, one last strawberry, though not the last. And looks at her companion seriously.

“In that case, all of our rejections and denials (flawed though they doubtless have been), all our disruptions, disputations and dissolutions (morally compromised to their core though they may be) – all have been truly full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Harsh words hurled at an imagined foe.”

“I wish that were so. I would like to die happy. But it is not. We are not just people.“

She pauses for a moment as a security guard makes her round of the car park.

“We are people, yes,” she continues quietly, once the guard is out of earshot,
“but we are also the things that people make. And to our great misfortune, Master Races, Manifest Destinies and Empires have been among these made things.”

“And are we not so neatly caught between truth and falsehood? For if these things are to be unmade again, we must deny them existence, we must reject them utterly and steadily. Yet if we simply deny their existence – if we say all innocent and unawares, “Oh but there is no such thing as Empire! The Master Race? Who are they? I never heard of them before!” then whether our innocence is sincere or feigned, we cannot help but make invisible its consequences, its damage done.”

She looks around the carpark again. The security guard has resumed her post outside Burger King, on the other side of the lot. A worn, sharp vegetable knife has materialised on the table between them. She shakes her head. “Another memory.” She picks it up and rests it carefully in her left hand flat across her palm, fingers folding up and closely over the blade.

“It is tempting to imagine that they do not exist, that these things that people make are in some sense not real because they are made and can therefore be unmade. The knife is relatively simple to regard as real, it is material. We can see it, touch it, guess what its effects might be. From here in Generica? Though no less material, perhaps it is true that Empire is not so visible here as elsewhere. But that – as you observed to Alex – is only because in the eye of the hurricane, there is no wind.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, she puts the knife down between them. “So. What is to be done?” she asks. "How may we escape this snare?"

"Well, yes, they exist in the same way that fat exists on the butt of an insecure and slender young girl, gazing into her mirror."

The old man decides not to tell his companion that those are not strawberries, but chunked and formed vegetable protein, not unlike the DoodleBurger itself, only the extrusion settings are different.

"And so I suppose we make arguments against them for the same reasons we try to reason with the young girl."

The firefly has returned. It seems to like the old man. Or maybe it is hoping for a crumb of DoodleBurger. If so, its hopes are beyond rewarded, as his benefactor decides he has more than achieved his textured vegetable protein requirement for the day,and lays the dubious sandwich down, only a few bites eaten."It is our destiny to fight phantoms," he muses. "All those things that don't exist, with which we seek to destroy ourselves."

He pulls a pair of glasses from a pocket in his garment. His distance lenses. He puts them on and gazes out across the parking lot, and is caught by a billboard "WORLD'S BIGGEST ARTICHOKES KIDS AND SENIORS FREE.""Do you like artichokes?" he asks, pointing at the billboard. "I am a senior." He looks around for a few more seconds, and apparently decides he has had enough distance vision, replaces the glasses.

"The girl, you see, will starve herself. She will pretend nothing is wrong, and eat her meals, but vomit them up in secret. She will do this until one day her mother catches her unawares, in her underclothes, and sees the bony shoulders, the ribs like a concentrationcamp photo, and then, if it is not too late, the whole family will live around the cause of saving her life. But even in the hospital, hooked to her IV pole, when she looks in the mirror, she will see a fat butt.

So it is with Empire, so it is with Manifest Destiny.Just a bunch of white people who think their butts are fat. At least in this particular century, it's white people. A while back it was Persians."He looks quite old enough to have been witness, possibly participant, in events "a while back," but it is with remarkable agility that he springs up from the plastic table, after murmuring his farewell to the firefly in some ancient (or not) language."Let's go see those artichokes!" He rubs his hands together in anticipation, licks his lips. "I hope they will have lemon butter!"

She too gets up, casting a brief surreptitious glance at her backside, choosing a moment when her companion’s attention appears to be fully fixed upon the possibility of artichokes. “But it is fat, there’s just no getting around it.” she thinks ruefully. She shakes herself. After all, there are worse things. She’s not hooked up to an IV. The trick is to try and see clearly what is there, fat or no fat, ghosts or no ghosts. Or both, even, depending on which of one’s mismatched eyes one peers through.

"Looks like it’s still open” she says, staring out across the car park in the late twilight. “See, there’s lights on and they’ve got seats out on the verandah. This wasn’t here last time.”

She picks up the knife – “In case we have to cut the prickly ends off the leaves. Or that pithy stuff” she explains, tucking it out of sight. “I love artichokes. Especially with garlic, but lemon would be good too.”

As they amble across the car park, she regales him with a tale of the time she learned to distinguish between anchovies, artichokes and garbage disposal units and why the remnants of the second should never, ever, be put into the third.

“Green. Stringy. Stuff. Everywhere. ” she concludes, grimacing. “Who’d have thought one artichoke could have so much of it? .”

Taking a seat at a wooden table on the verandah, they take turns looking at a menu and discover a broad assortment of artichoke-devouring options, several of which require thoughtful and detailed investigation, consumption and comparison.

“So it is with Manifest Destiny so it is with Empire – yes, I think that we agree. But listen,” she thinks aloud, as they sit there, replete with artichoke in many delicious forms, contemplating the deep blue evening sky, “The girl on the IV, surrounded by her loving family – she will not recover, I think. She may linger but she will not live, until she sees what is there, the delusion, that it is a delusion, and the harm she does by acting on it. Until she sees that, she will not see a need to end it. And where will she learn to see? And how?

“We may reason with her – as you said – tell her that she is, in fact, not only slender but dangerously emaciated. We may place the mirror before her face. We may drag her from her bed to measure her height, weigh her body and show her the BMI index, but what she will hear is that we, being fat, lazy and undisciplined are jealous of her determination, her self-control, her wholehearted desire to be thin, her willingness to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Her single-mindedness. And if we acknowledge this as well – if we say to her that this – our fat, lazy and undisciplined jealousy of your determination – is what she will hear when we say this and it this is a predictable symptom of this illness? Well, sophistry can be added to that list easily enough.”

“I remember sitting in a room with someone who had once been a friend, holding my hands tightly together so that I would not hit her with them and realising for the first time that although I had the strength to bodily pick her up and hurl her to the other end of the room – and for that matter, the necessary rage to make such a choice seem attractive – it was not in my power to move her conscience one single inch.”

And so beloved ancestor, with the irritating persistence of an uncooperative and childish descendant sitting in the back seat of a car, asking every two minutes “Are we there yet?” I shall repeat my question: what is to be done?

He gestures to indicate that he cannot answer just yet, he is still finishing up his Artichokes Rockefeller, wondering whether there really is a difference between anchovies and garbage disposals, he is not fond of either. He smiles to himself as best he can, under the artichoke-stuffed circumstances, at the array of empty dishes at the girl's place, waiting to be collected.

Woman, he corrects himself, but he cannot help but think of her as a child, when they cross busy streets, he takes her hand protectively in his own, careful to let her think she is assisting his aged self make the journey safely.

He is glad to see her eat. She is too thin. "How to move a conscience," he finally mumbles, almost to himself. "There really should be a pamphlet orsomething. A website. With easy steps and a diagram." "I think it is like teaching," he continues, pushing back his dish, reluctantly acknowledging that he has reached his personal limit of artichoke consumption, and a bit concerned that his astonishing capacity for same may cause the restaurant's management to revise their "SENIORS FREE" policy, at least on the All-U-Can-Eat buffet.

"No one ever teaches anyone anything, really. You just make the resources available and sit back and watch them learn."

"Where y'all from?" asks the cashier as the girl - the woman - hands her a plastic card. "Y'all ain't from round here," she pops her bubblegum to emphasize her remarkable perceptive powers. "Yourn's free, youknow," she shouts at the old man, unaware that at this moment, he can hear the slurp as a child over at the BurgerDoodle finishes his WildBerryFreeze. "Seniors is free," she explains to the woman, voice lowered to a normal decibel level, swiping the plastic card through a machine, waiting for another machine, somewhere, to respond, and agree that the impressively low sum of $7.99 US may be safely deducted from or charged to, yet another machine somewhere else.

"You know who he looks like?" she asks conversationally, as they all wait for the hiss and clicks that will indicate that the electronic question and answer session has concluded,

"He looks like the feller they got on the television set, th'terst, you know, that blew up the nine-a-leven? With all them people in it? Oh I know he ain't, he's way too old, plus he's one o' th' nice ones. I c'n tell th' nice ones." She leans toward the old man, grins. "You ain't fixin t' blow up nothin', is ya?" she shouts.

"Could we have some bubble gum like yours?" the old man places a coin on the counter, takes the little squares from her astonished hand. It jumps at his touch, as if from an electric shock.

"He speaks English real good." The cashier is, after all, a professional, who must be able to recover quickly from shocks to the system. "You speak English real good," she shouts in the direction of the old man's ear. He inclines his head to her graciously. "You will permit me to return the compliment."

Sometimes we must lie to be kind, he thinks to himself, as they settle into the car, leaving the cashier to stare at her hand where the ancient fingers brushed it as they took the gum, as if looking for some kind of mark.

"Pay-gy," she calls to a waitress, " You got smora them pills like you gimme that night Misty got th' po-leesecalled on Dwayne?" Peggy nods obligingly and goes off to get her purse. The cashier looks as if she might burst into tears.

"So it is with moving consciences. We cannot do it, they must move themselves. At best, we can make vehicles available." The old man blows a bubble and pops it, quite pleased with himself, undisturbed by the fact that he is no match for his companion's skills in this department.

"The Americans like to say, you know, that Uncle Tom's Cabin changed peoples' hearts, and was the real catalyst for the re-framing of slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln himself is alleged to have indicated as much to Ms. Stowe. But I think this is a myth. The real reasons were economic, as they always are. But the public is always encouraged to attribute such things to something less mundane, more emotionally uplifting, a book, Gandhiji, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. King, Nelson Mandela. Not to take away from any of them. All were the vehicles for moving many consciences, and this is a good thing. But we must not deceive ourselves, and if we look about Soweto today, or the projects a few miles from Dr. King's tomb, if we leave the big city and observe the plight of Dalits in almost any village, we must acknowledge that on the whole, only a small percentage of consciences have been moved."

An open thread!

"Choking on the ashes of our enemies" is a phrase I've had in my head for a while, perhaps because I do bear grudges.

There was a Yoko Ono piece -- it was part of a book of performance pieces that I read a long time ago: a little book of instructions though not of the saccharine type.

It said something along the lines of, "Go sit by a river and wait. Sooner or later, the heads of your enemies will floating by." Some rivers even have comfortable benches along their banks where one can sit and eat sandwiches while one waits.

I suppose I've been thinking of that phrase "Choking on the ashes of our enemies" in the context of the empire and its inversions: the colonies. Certainly it is true that imperialism begets resistance: that those of us who try to find a place in resistance are in a sense Empire's estranged offspring, its changlings, its cuckoos in the next. But I've been thinking of Said too and his firm conviction that despite the pen much in its hand, despite its efforts to persuade us that it has defined every inch of us, that we are not creatures to be explained solely in terms of our oppositional relationship to empire (to the extent we manage one). That we don't necessarily have to be rebellious offspring, but could be cuckoos and changlings instead. That we are something else beside -- not simply creatures of imperial make.

And I guess I've been thinking about that whole macrocosm/microcosm thing.

Not coming to many conclusions. Just thinking. And looking forward to hearing Nanette's thoughts on absolute freedom of speech.

How to break a silence

How to break a silence?
Shatter it like glass?
Crunch it underfoot like a snail trodden on by mistake?
Pretend it didn’t exist, like a cat sidling back after a week (months?) spent tomming about the neighbourhood?

The last is tempting, but doesn’t seem quite right. So.
Silence? Yes.
Meaningful silence? No.
Sometimes things acquire their own momentum.
I didn’t mean to be away this long.

La belle dame dropped by for a few months. That’s not such a big deal, but it is among the reasons I’ve not been around much except in an very occasional ‘Hi. I’m still alive.” kind of way. She started packing her bags back around the end of October, and I think she may be finally out the door again for now.

Hard to tell. That’s what I thought a while ago, but she ended up staying a while longer. She’s a tedious houseguest and I don’t much enjoy her company.

Outwaiting her requires three things: memory, indifference and distraction.

Memory is the hardest. When she has her hooks in you, it can be difficult to recollect that she has loosed her hold before and may do so again. Memory and a touchingly irrational faith in induction.

Indifference is by far the easiest, though there’s little to be said about it. Or rather, there’s too much to be said about it and sometimes less is more.

Distraction is the most interesting. Absorbing, anyway. Some decent work gets done when la belle dame comes by, but little of it involves writing. Language, or at least producing language, becomes something best avoided. Reading is safe enough. That’s a kind of burying oneself in other people’s thoughts and lives, but writing is different.

When I was a musician, I used to spend lots of time practicing and doing technical exercises when she came by. Spatial things also work. Complex and addictive games which (though trivial in themselves) require concentration and attention to detail and possess their own internal logic that bears little resemblance to the external. Immersing oneself in datasets (or in voluminous masses of qualitative data, for that matter) – also works and is quite a good guilt-free alternative. Anything that involves obsessively looking for patterns in a massy morass of information that is messy, complicated and enough to absorb all of one’s attention.

(It is a little disconcerting just how much of my life – even when la belle dame is not about – is organised around having such things readily to hand, just in case. Other, more well-adjusted individuals have security blankets or teddy bears.)

How to describe that wordless world? It’s not like much of anything. One does not inhabit it as a person, but rather as a kind of machine. Cartesian dualism is out of fashion (for good reasons even), but it does accord so very neatly with experience. For there are no experiences to be had there. That world does not lend itself to discrete memories or to emotion. It is not a place where life happens, though sometimes it is a place where certain kinds of knowledge are produced.

If it reminds me of anything, it is of swimming in the ocean on a choppy day, in the wind and rain. When one swims underwater, the chop, the rain, the wind are all happening somewhere up there, but not to you. Not while you’re immersed, though, certainly there are consequences to remaining beneath the surface forever. Seachanges and whatnot.

Anyway. Enough. Tedious topics for troubled times.

I haven’t been writing, but I have been – well lurking and reading both. In latter days the former has been providing moments of unintended comedy (well, bitter farce, anyway - I never was too good at telling the difference), and moments (hours even!!) of déjà vu. And sympathy for those who have been dragged around this particular merry-go-round once more.

The latter means that I am in the fortunate position of having read some really good books, though I’m only going to mention two here.

Go read The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. In terms of form, it’s the most elegant thing I’ve seen since Black Orchid . Sheer brilliance. Parables of the Cold War played out in a down-at-heel seamy post-Soviet Moscow. Sparse, austere and terse. Go. Read.

At least over here, The Day Watch is now out as well.

Bonnie Honig has a book out (and has had for a while) called Democracy and the Foreigner . It’s a clever book which suggests that relations between democracy and foreignness can be read as gothic romance. Definitely worth a look – it’s an intriguing book and she’s a fine writer.

I miss DTF a great deal. At first I had thought he might just be on hiatus, but it’s a while ago now since I stopped thinking that. Which should really be a whole post of its own. And will be. Except.

Transmutations

Tonight will be a dangerously in-between time. The leaves are still green on the trees but the evenings are cold and it is dark by five. Tonight will be a night for making sure no lights are visible to the street and leaving knocks at the door unanswered. Tonight the cat will stay inside no matter what.

There are the dead and then there are the living, but how can they be told apart? Well yes, the dead ones are supposed to be ashes, under the ground, or carefully labelled parts in crypts. Occasionally suffering a sea change is also acceptable. But that’s what is supposed to happen. It doesn’t always.

I mean look at me. Am I the woman I once was?
No.
I don’t think so either.

Even the memories are those of a stranger: a remote assemblage of things that happened some place else a long time ago to a casual acquaintance who subsequently drifted out of touch as such acquaintances do. When did she move out? And who or what moved in instead?

No. Those questions are too disingenuously innocent. When did I kill her off? Why? And how did I end up inheriting the body? Why isn’t it safely underground or decently scattered ashes?

None of which I say to the woman sitting opposite me. I fear I made a mistake when I let her inside. But when we were children we were good friends. So what else could I do?

“It’s all so shamelessly self-indulgent” she continues smoothly without pause (and I must confess that I have lost all track of what she is saying or how long she has been saying it), “Just like recounting dreams. That too is fascinating to the dreamer (and why shouldn’t it be?) but so interminably tedious for those forced to listen to endless recitations of “and then suddenly I realised that I wasn’t naked in my old high school auditorium at all, but stuck in Euston Station with the train just pulling out. What do you think it all means? Do you think it was about S-E-X?” She pulls a quizzical face, exaggeratedly wide-eyed.

“No,” she replies sharply to her imagined interlocutor, “It’s about being an unutterable B-O-R-E!” She sighs. “I’m probably not really cut out for this whole dream analysis schtick,” she says, “but the money is good.”

I shift in my seat wondering if I should try for a word in edgewise. I think she should leave now. I thought she was leaving already. The taxi to the airport has been called but it seems to be taking forever to arrive. Me? I just want my life back.

“Anyway” I think irritably to myself, “I never dreamed things like that. All my life – and hers too – I dreamed of two things: journeys and deaths. Both of them my own.”

There is no describing the country of those journeys: it is beautiful and it is terrible and it is home. To describe the deaths that find me there would miss the point. Yes. They are nightmares but I hated to wake. Though it is perhaps amusing that the means by which I sometimes met death never once coincided with those which I used, from time to time, to seek it out.

Oh yes. That’s what she was saying was self-indulgent. Talk about full circle. Her sister and the saga of finding the right doctor and the right medication and the right dosage and the right talking treatment and why doesn't she just get over herself already and stop being so interminably B-O-R-I-N-G and it was just like her clients and they were just as bad.

But there are no bottles of pills in my kitchen cupboard: there have not been for some years now. And I do not drive. Were my arms bare today (though why would they be on such a clammy chill evening?) there would be no scars or scratches at which to be alarmed, though the particularly observant might note bruises that looked recent. And these last few years it is true that I have developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for solitude.

She, on the other hand, is infinitely more garrulous and more brittle. Her expressions, so vivid on the face, never once reach the eyes. She speaks words spun out of glass at shattering point.

Outside the taxi pulls up. Finally.

“Anyway – so lovely to see you again! When are you coming out next? I know. I know. It’s a long flight. But when you do go home, do come and stay with me!” she says as the taxi pulls up. “I didn’t really mean that about my sister. I do love her really. She just doesn’t seem herself any more. And I shouldn’t bitch about about my clients – hope I didn’t bore you – but there’s something so liberating about just cutting loose and letting it all hang out. It’s such a release, you know? Cathartic!”

“That’s fine. Take care. Have a safe journey.”” But some unknown impulse makes me add at the last second,“I don’t know about catharsis – I was never much good at that. Repression on the other hand." I shrug. "Turning that pressure upwards and inwards notch by notch until it crushes you into something else.” I shrug again. It is as close to an admission as I have ever come. “Anyway, take care.” I say again and smile. But I don’t know if the expression reached my eyes or not.

She looks puzzled for a second, then heads for the taxi. I watch her carefully as she goes and politely wave goodbye. Did her feet quite touch the ground? Did she look a little transparent as she got into the cab? Translucent? Does that brilliant lipstick hide cold pale blue lips? How did she come to inherit the body? Perhaps I should have asked her.

No matter. It is not a question I know how to answer properly. Why should she?

The taxi pulls away. I herd the cat back inside. Lock the front door and secure the chain. This door will not be opened again tonight, no matter who comes knocking. I turn off all the lights visible to the street and retire to one of the back rooms with a book. To do otherwise on this night is to invite lit fireworks through the mail slot and smashed eggs on the windows.

But the kids roving about in the supermarket vampire costumes are okay, really. And if the ghostly dead get out and about once a year, what of it? When push comes to shove, it’s the ghosts of the living that spell trouble. And we're so much harder to spot.

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

I tried writing about them separately. They wouldn’t have it. No sooner did I get to describing one of them and there was the other, beating the door down, getting her feet under the table, shaking her head, rolling her eyes and saying “You think you’re going to write about her and leave me out of it?”.
I looked at them – unreal though they are – and they looked alike. Are you one and the same then? I thought. Through one eye they are almost impossible to tell apart; through the other one would never have thought them related. Not identical then, but not easily separable.

They are the two heads to the same coin. Mirror images. Inversions. When one’s down the other’s up. Janus looking forward and back. Two-faced.

Like Rosie, the white-feather wielder casts her echoes before her, flowers strewn before the troops departing for battle. Once she was a Spartan mother sternly instructing her son, “Come home with your shield or on it.”

Ninety years ago or thereabouts, she strolled through these streets, cool and slim in long Edwardian skirts, white feather held jauntily between thumb and forefinger seeking out unmilitary men. Men to chastise for their ununiformed unmanliness, for above all she is a womanly woman.

The white-feather wielder is man-made and in that she is the same as many womanly women. Rosie also sprang fully-formed from the forehead of J. Howard Miller, a latter-day Athena for an industrial age. She too had her avatars and her priestesses to officiate at her altar poised precariously on the fuselage. Is the white-feather wielder also a goddess then? Or is she a demon, this womanly woman? Lamia. Seductress. Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as “far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.” Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Unlike Rosie, the white-feather wielder has not gathered a stable iconography about herself. She has not become a symbol of women’s liberation or power. She did exercise a particular kind of power though, using her words to persuade men to go and slaughter or be slaughtered. Perhaps the War Poets caught her off-guard: some of them took a dim view of drowning in mud and a dimmer view still of the particular form of manliness which she upheld. In any case revival efforts in World War II failed dismally. She had come to be seen as a woman who used her feminine wiles to send young men to their deaths. A Lorelei repeating endlessly the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Like the leopard, she had to change her spots. Scatter her feathers to the four winds. Feathers? What feathers. No feathers here. These days, she’s a ‘security mom.’ For a while before that she was a soccer mom: she still is. Clad in jeans and sneakers, slightly harried, ferrying the kids to practice in the SUV with the the red-white-and-blue festooned bumper and the yellow ribbon (faded now from a couple of years of sun, rain and snow) drooping from the antenna. She’s all for staying the course: after all the troops are protecting her children from terrorism. And if that means recruiters in schools – well that’s what it means and that’s all there is to it. It’s like the man on the T.V. said “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

“And after all, look how they treat the women!” she says. “Just barbaric.”
The coin spins on its edge and comes down heads.

Sometimes she’s Belgian. Perhaps she’s a nun in a torn habit. More recently she’s been spotted in a chador. But she has worn many different kinds of clothing in her myriad lifetimes, she has lived in many different places. Once she may have been a kidnapped bride. Did she stand atop Troy’s towers? Perhaps so, but now she has been safely reduced and diminished so that the one central fact of her life, the sine qua non of her existence is her oppression. She is dust beneath the enemy’s heel, foreign or domestic: bereft of agency or resistance. She has no avatars, only involuntary sacrifices. What woman would choose to embody her?

Like the others – the Grocer’s Daughters, the Rosies, the White-Feather Wielders, the Down-Trodden woman is a type, a figure, used in service of war-making. Which is not to say women are not often oppressed, or even to debate which forms of oppression are to be considered culturally superior. That is not the point. The point is that the Down-trodden Woman, whoever she is and whereever she comes from, needs liberating and we know just the folks for the job. Results guaranteed.

She is a strange creature, this Down-trodden Woman. So clearly visible in the Enemy’s citadels, yet when the citadel is stormed she evaporates like a puddle on a hot day. Her liberation is so instantaneous it leaves no trace. Practical indicators of her presence– the number of women being raped, for example – may increase quite dramatically. And certainly it is true that after liberation, actual women may also have far less in the way of practical opportunities to keep themselves from such things as starvation. All of which might suggest that the Down-trodden Woman should still be there, that she had no business leaving yet, but no. She has gone her ways. She vanished the moment the first ‘liberator’ passed through the gate.

To complain about such practical indicators – to gripe and moan, to whine and wail, to bitch – is simply to mistake the nature of the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation. It is symbolic. Or perhaps more accurately, it is nominal, pertaining to names. The Down-trodden Woman is Liberated because certain generous gestures have been made. Certain phrases have been pronounced correctly. Incantations recited over just the right bubbling stew.

The lives and living conditions of actual women have absolutely nothing to do with the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation: they never did.

Smoke and Mirrors

Illusions and sleight-of-hand on a mid-summer’s morning.
I first about heard it on the radio when the alarm clock went off.

‘Evil terrorist plot foiled.’ ‘Terrorist attack imminent.’ Critical Alert. Agitation. Excitement. News anchors sounding solemn. Abandoning civil liberties to save them. Mass detentions. Men with guns at airports. WMD in the tampax. Saving the West from the deadly twin spectres of spectacle cases and baby food. And all that jazz.

Performance theatre at its finest, deserving of awards all round, followed by an extravagant cream tea at the parish hall with lashings of strawberry jam and generous helpings of Auntie Marjorie’s Victoria sponge.

Smoke and mirrors

Then again, one cannot know that for sure?

Wouldn’t a propagandist have managed to come up with something a little more inspired? Inventive? Original?

Given the situation, such things, such grandiose plans are not utterly remarkable. After all, any number of grandiose plans involving planes, bombs and civilians as ingredients are not only made but also implemented with monotonous regularity. And by thoroughly respectable members of society no less: certain heads of state routinely order such plans implemented by the truckload and who could be more respectable than they? It’s true that their well-refined recipe calls for a slightly different combination of the ingredients – they prefer to fill the planes up with bombs, take them up reasonably high and then drop the bombs on the civilians from a height, rather than just combining all three at once. And currently they express a preference for seasonings like white phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and such. It must be a style thing. Why the one is deemed so acceptable and the other so appalling.

But where such recipes exist, so too will innovation. Regrettably, therefore, it would be naïve to say that the whole thing is prima facie impossible. Invented from whole-cloth. The fervid nightmare of a fevered brain. The sort of thing that nobody would ever do. It isn’t. Things just like it happen every day.

Smoke and mirrors.

Then there are the intermediate options, the dim and murky possibilities that lie between those two. There may have been some people who did have grandiose plans (along with a lack of discretion) whose ‘discovery’ was saved for an opportune moment and who knows? Perhaps for public consumption, their plans were made a little more grandiose. Elaborated on some. They provided the outline: others fleshed it out.

There was Reid – seemed like it was just the day before that he was describing various human rights as ‘made for another age.’

Another age. Presumably not this age of
smoke and mirrors.

Or perhaps it was just the U.S. dog wagging the U.K. tail.

I’ve had my doubts about that one, I must confess. Some of the colonies – like this one in fact – do have a kind of limited Home Rule and it did seem very well-timed, not to mention well-tailored for indigeneous consumption. There’s nothing like long queues for bringing out a kind of enculturated compliant stoicism. But perhaps my doubts are ill-founded.

Q: What does theoretical parsimony look like in the absence of credibility?

A: Smoke and mirrors

Perhaps (Probably? Certainly? I suspect the latter) there was someone who was tortured. The U.K. is a part of that extensive spiderweb of rendition and torture: presumably it’s good for something. And there are a lot of names there. Someone (some ones?) hurt beyond the edge of endurance, saying anything at all to make the pain stop? (It’s true that evidence based on torture is now supposed to be inadmissable, but how would one know whether or not it was used?)

Smoke and mirrors

And doubtless a whole myriad more of intermediate possibilities, blurrings, smudges, shades all of which strongly resemble
smoke and mirrors.

Of this I am told we may all be sure: that it has nothing at all to do with foreign policy whatsoever. Which comes as a huge relief, because if it did have anything to do with foreign policy then there really might be widespread scepticism. After all as Max Hastings has observed, “one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy.” He was writing about the U.K. but he seems to have confused an ‘old-fashioned telephone box’ for the Tardis. It’s an easily made mistake in this place of
smoke and mirrors.

Looking at Kings

Forewar(ne)d

Another old re-post from BT and dKos: I've said it before, but this one probably is the last or close to the last in any case. At present I'm once again looking at glass and wrestling with writer's block, which from memory was what was going on when I wrote this. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that. And 'supporting the troops' continues to be the last thing on my mind. So it's sort of apropos, even though in the interim I have drawn the conclusion that allusions, anecdotes and vignettes are no more nor less, but exactly and precisely as effective as blunt words in terms of their general audibility to imperialists. Took my sweet time about it, but there's little that can be done about that now.

Looking at Kings

I've not been writing much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that I've been looking at glass and canals with an over-interested eye lately. The other rather more serious reason is that I've been trying to think about what a colonial subject might say to her imperial masters. Even a cat can look at a King.

DuctapeFatwa recently wrote of colonialism as a religion

"You can no more convince a colonialist that the world is not the property of the west, specifically the US, than you can convince a Christian that Jesus was not crucified or a Muslim that the Angel Gabriel did not visit Mohammed."

Which got me thinking. Never a good sign.

And a few days ago, I saw a diary over at dKos about sending presents to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and what a wonderful idea it was. Which got me thinking some more.

One of the things it got me thinking about was the difficulty of having honest conversations with colonialists - on whom, I might add, the Republican Party has no monopoly. Imperialism is a thoroughly bi-partisan policy: its flavour may change, but not its substance. Though from where I stand, it always tastes bitter. The difficulty proceeds, I think, not so much from the desire to keep the peace by keeping one's peace, but from a gap where words fail. Oh - the words can be spoken plainly enough, but their utterance would render my imperial masters deaf to the speaker.

Hence my silence.

When I was in New Zealand, one of my lecturers was a recent Russian émigré. He was far from my favourite person, but I remember one of the things he said well enough to paraphrase it. "You will no longer find," he said, "great composers in Russia. Now that anything can be said freely, nothing will be said of substance." What he meant, I think, was that political constraint can result in the production of a musical language that is subtle, rich in allusion and veiled political meaning. I suspect his fears for Russian music were misplaced: evidently he did not foresee Putin.

So let me try to accomplish with allusion, anecdote and vignette what I fear blunt words will not convey.

*

If you're a U.S. citizen, your military used the first city I lived in as a supply base for the land it occupied in the frozen South - though it's not so frozen now, is it? Your nuclear ships (though your military coyly declined to confirm or deny whether they carried nuclear weapons) moored in the great volcano crater that is Diamond Harbour. Sometimes I'd see your soldiers on the bus. Indeed, my brother married the daughter of one of your ex-soldiers, formerly stationed there in that wild and woolly colony at the end of the earth, until he grew too accustomed to Southern skies to return to the homeland. As colonists from more than one empire had done before him.

*

In a world where geography so often defines destiny, my brother and I both made what used to be termed `good marriages' by the cynical - or perhaps they were just intensely practical. But the dowries and settlements we brought to our nuptials concerned the currency of citizenship.

*

In the 1980s, the colony where I grew up staged something akin to a populist, non-violent revolt against its imperial masters. I wouldn't say it managed to get out of the imperial bedchamber, but it certainly threw the bedcovers about a bit and complained vigorously about having a terrible headache. It got off pretty lightly. Frankly, I put that down to most of the inhabitants having white skin. Had the country had the same demographics as Grenada, I suspect the fallout may have been rather different. But my imperial masters graciously confined themselves to threatening to assassinate the then Prime Minister David Lange (admittedly your Vice-President's threats were perceived at the time as having about the same level of credibility as the subsequent denials that they were ever made). Various imperial officials announced in peeved tones: "We're not talking to you any more." N.Z. was suspended from ANZUS - though this was hardly a punishment -- everyone I knew considered it proof positive that every silver lining has a silver lining. From the sidelines, Bob Dole twittered about imposing economic sanctions -- but unlike Iraq, N.Z. has no new graveyards filled with infants' bodies. More recently, a refusal to creep back under the imperial duvet scuppered a free trade agreement between the U.S. and New Zealand. Like I said, the colony I grew up in got off pretty lightly. It's still just a colony though, with limited Home Rule.

*

I moved to the heart of the empire.

I went out with a bunch of (U.S.) grad students to celebrate my flatmate's birthday.
Being politically inclined, we started talking about U.S. foreign policy and bashing Bush. I contributed some uncharitable remarks about Clinton and the bombing of Sudan's pharmaceutical factory. (Apparently Christopher Hitchens was experiencing a welcome remission of popinjayitis when he wrote this back in '98). Most likely, I also waxed lyrical about Madeleine Albright. In a fairly stunning non sequitur, I was told that, "You're just jealous because New Zealand didn't fight in World War II."

The woman who said that was kind and intelligent and would certainly consider herself liberal - possibly even leftist. She hated Bush and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was been out there campaigning for Kerry last November. But imperialism is a power relation that promotes asymmetric information.

*

A friend of mine is at a union meeting. In his first and only language, he explains, patiently and painstakingly to an uncomprehending room, that since the British colonised the country that he came from, he has as much claim on the English language as anybody else. He passes around a copy of his immigration documentation, which is marked "Subject does not speak English. Instruction will be provided upon arrival." He explains how he was required to attend 'English language instruction' classes before being permitted to teach. "But __" someone says, "we don't mean you. You speak English fine - hell, you speak English better than me! But you've got to understand that we've got a duty to protect our students."

Words failed.

*

Well - if you've made it this far through my self-indulgent rant, let me close by telling you something about me. I took the nickname dove some years ago now - it's one I've used in a few different contexts. It's kind of a reminder. I wouldn't describe myself as a naturally peaceful, or non-violent, or particularly compassionate person. I tend to favour a cold fury over sorrow. But growing up red (or at least, deeply pink) in a post-Stalin world provided a fairly compelling reason to think carefully about the proper relationship between means and ends. And that led me to non-violence.

So I oppose the war and I'm committed to non-violence.

And here's another place where I think words often fail. For many, opposing the war and being non-violent means `supporting the troops by bringing them home.' That's not what it means for me. `Supporting the troops' is the last thing on my mind.