The Protest of Negotiation

  Someday I may be arrested for not paying my debts to the banks I use.  I will be found guilty.  I am not interested in trying to argue out of this as it will be true but I am more interested in the reasons of why I am guilty.  In short I want to try to understand if I have good reasons for being guilty.  I also want to find out what the moral thing for a person in my position to do.

  There are two reasons for wanting to be arrested, one I want to feel as if I had some power over my life and in the society I live in and two I want to try to negotiate what is good moral criminal activity and what is not.

  I’ll try to explain what I mean in the second instance.  People break the law.  People break the law knowing that they are breaking the law.  People of all strata of society break the law may it be a robbery or may it be through tax evasion.  People who break the law are sometimes caught and punished.  Some aren’t, whether they are not caught or that they are caught and not punished.  Many corporations don’t pay tax.  This is cliché.  Some banks are involved in drug cartels and financial crashes.  Some people protest the installation of a fracking industry.  From this we find that some people are more punished than others, though it may be inproportion to the amount of damage they actually do.

  Why is more important to contain and keep protestors under constant watch than it is to take away bonuses from bankers?

  This is the society I live in and so how should I react.  What should I do as a good citizen or as a morally good person?

  If we are unable to punish the irresponsibility by legal mean the citizen should try to punish them in their own non-violent ways such as changing to different banks or by not paying the debts we owe them.

  I feel justified in not paying my debt to my bank because I had to take out an overdraft in order to pay off my living fees at University because I had to take a year out due to mental illness.  Out of University I had great trouble getting a job and even if I were not protesting I would still be unable to pay off the debt before the interest is applied.  I may be guilty and I may be put to jail but is this really the most appropriate way of dealing with the large questions of economy and even larger questions with what are we really supposed to be doing with our emerging adults?

  There will be more of me; more intelligent, able people who are not put to use, who are not involved in their community, whose futures look uncertain from the start.  This in the world’s sixth richest country makes little sense to those who want the best for themselves and for their children.

  For me I see two things going on that has allowed this to happen.  One, the legal corruptions of those in highest positions in politics and in business, and two, the majority of people who are unengaged, unconcerned, with the way society is run.

  For me election day can’t come soon enough, the day when I will be able to try and put a government that might actually tackle the deep economic problems as well as the environmental problems, and even then they might not do that.  What is it that I, someone who believes that society need to change the way it operates if our successors, namely our children and grandchildren, are going to have one?

  I feel powerless because I don’t feel like I have a hand or a say at how society should be organised, I feel powerless because I don’t feel that society cares for me or is willing to negotiate with me, I don’t feel like a citizen.  In Philip Blond’s ‘Red Tory’ he outlines the situation where public spaces are either in the hands of the state or the hands of the markets.  In Michele Houellebecq phrase we are more ‘service users’ of our country.  I want to change that.

  I may be put away but that will not put away the reasons as to why I am guilty.  This is a plea to everyone that we must put on hold our everyday business and try to negotiate a way of living that does a better job of sustaining the environment that we need to survive and that does a better job of making our lives worth living.

  I don’t believe in giving my money to people who hold others with contempt and who break the law in such a way that changes the livelihood of neighborhoods.  This is why I will not be paying my debts even if I was in a position to pay them off.  I may be punished but there are greater things at stake here that need to be negotiated, things that need to be protested.          

Types of Anime

Anime has a young audience, probably because of the form of animation appeals better to younger people, but it also can appeal to adults as well.  The films of Hayao Miyazakihave made families in the west more aware of Japanese Anime but it is not films I wish to concern myself.  As an adult who watches anime I can suggest some very good anime that is not overly kiddish and off the top of my mind there are five worth checking out:

Kino’s Journey

Kino and her motorcad with sidecar (which is also her sidekick) travel, as the title suggests, across a fantastical land.  They only spend three days at each town and each one of them offers up a different philosophical thought experiment and reflections.  Such towns are those that have discovered the secret of mind reading, those that banned the reading of prohibited books and those that force people to fight to the death in a tournament to improve their circumstances.  Each episode (of which there are thirteen) is stand-alone but does eventually come to a conclusion.  Kino is packed with deceptive simplicity where much more deeper and bigger issues are at play so that repeated viewing is rewarded.   

Serial Experiments Lain

The female protagonist of this series (also thirteen episodes) deals in complexity but is rather more swallowed up by it that successfully navigates it.  Lain is a seemingly ordinary schoolgirl who, after the suicide of one her friends, gets involved with the world of the web and discovers sides to herself that she never knew existed.  Lain is also worth repeated views but this may not clear anything about it’s plot development as it is a deeply puzzling piece of work that will often leave you thinking that you missed something.  This is anime as French New Wave film and if you like that style than you might like the disaffected tone of Lain.   

Eden Of the East

A bit more accessible than Lain, this anime packs in a lot in it’s much too short thirteen episodes.  The quick version of the story is about this boy who has lost his memory and finds himself in possession of a God-like phone that can do almost anything for him.  It’s a brilliant idea and it’s excellently executed, up until the last episode that is but focusing on the good things.  Very clever and satisfyingly original but won’t take you too long to get through. 

Texhnolyse

This anime is a moody piece set in the technological future where a boxer crosses the line and gets his arm cut off by a gangster group only to replace it with a robotic one, he then goes for vengeance.  Interwoven in this is a girl with a creepy mask and a man with a backpack and we follow them as they go deeper and deeper into the city.  Is quite violent at times and is certainly not for children (not so much because of the violence but because of it’s pacing, they would be bored silly).    

Paranoia Agent

It’s difficult to say out of these which is my favourite but on most days it is this one as it is all the things I love, a clever idea well done, disturbing story and most of all memorable scenes.  It’s about several different people who are all attack by a kid with a golden baseball bat and roller blades and about how they recover as well as uncovering who the kid really is.  This will knock you off balance as it comes to it’s unexpected conclusion and though it is only thirteen episodes long it really is a perfect number as each episode does more than it’s fair share in engaging the viewer with avid interest.

So there we are, anime doesn’t have to be just for the realm of children’s entertainment but it can also but used to create adult (or at least adolescent) art.  Some may be disappointed that I have not mentioned Death Note or Cowboy Bebop but I thought that five was a good enough number to start with, though they are short, and maybe if I watch more I will have more to write. 

The Twinning of Michael Haneke and Franz Kafka

 Michael Haneke is the perfect person to adapt Franz Kafka.  This was my first thought when I saw the film The Castle in the library.  Watching it I am only confirmed in my opinion.  He is perfect because his films depict an acute coldness in a random, violent world.  He was the filmmaker who directed the sadistic Funny Games, where two young men torment a family, a work in the genre of ‘house invasion’.  The White Ribbon, which shows death in small town Germany, The Time of the Wolf about an apocalyptic world and a family’s attempts at survival and Benny’s Video where a love interest shoots his possible girlfriend with a secretly acquired bolt gun.  A bundle of laughs he is not.

   

This is what makes him great at adapting Kafka; he understands the terms of the cruel absurd that the Czech author was writing under.  Haneke is ok with a story that is neigh-on impossible to interpret, he’s ok with showing humanity in some of it’s worst lights and he is more than capable of rending the images of the book into cinema.  He is, as I say, the perfect choice.

  

 When I read The Castle I was struck by how visual it is and its sense of desolate beauty was potent.  If there is any work of literature can accurately depicts the dark logic of nightmares it comes from Kafka.  This is also what makes Kafka a problem; he makes reading into a torturously painful experience.  It is quite an experience, especially when you think that he never really finished most of his longer stories, so to think of them that they could go on is fairly unbearable.  There has been nothing I’ve read that has scarred me so piercingly, only Paul Auster’s Oracle Night comes close, so treat this is a sort of warning.  As someone once wrote ‘when I read Kafka’s novels I feel for him, when I read his diaries I feel for his family’.

   

There has also been some talk about exactly how ‘great’ Kafka was.  I read an article that argued how he was vastly overrated and that he really couldn’t be understood unless you lived in Prague about the same time as he did.  This impossibility to interpret Kafka gives rise to whole schools of Kafka studies making it, like some other modernist texts, more like something to do with the occult.  I appreciate the uncompromising strangeness of his writings, which can make anything meaningful out of it obscure, and perhaps there is something to be said of deconstructing them in a way that removes the author’s intentions more away from the critical discourse, but I believe that it is his images that remain relevant to people decades on. 

   

The images in Kafka are the images of being in-between things, of rationally not knowing what to do; of being stuck and inadvertently guilty of something we did not realise was a crime.  These are images, I imagine, that people can respond to as they call out to our pity and compassion to these hopeless protagonists.  Certainly they resonate with me.  It must also resonate with Haneke as he displays the barbarous bureaucracy in delicious beauty and poise.

   

Kafka is difficult and maybe it is best just to treat them as stories that have no meaning outside of their words, and, really, is that not enough?

A Gothic Place

'I do not know this place,

Though here for long I have run'

I have been brought to this place.  By who I do not know; however I do not think I arrived here by myself. 

  This place is old.  The ground where the church rests upon is ancient, which may account for the familiarity I feel for it.  I do not remember ever coming, or being, here.

'Summer's pleasures they are gone like to visions every one,

And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.'

The sun is strong and falls golden over the grass and the graves, through the branches of the trees resting between the shadows.  As I open the decorative gate I see a picture crystalised by light.  Though it is bright my skin is cold and I walk slowly up the path closing the black gate behind me.  All I know, all I know about these steps I take is that I must follow the bright angels; but where have they gone now?  The plants are too green and too pure a colour to be real.  I feel myself living in a dream of an unknown sleeper.  This landscape seems solid enough to walk on but in the edges of my eyes there is a blur of shades.  Just what is happening to me?  I watch myself absorbing this scene and I feel that everything looks perfect.  There is a silence in the sky that not even the birds will break and my voice has evaporated in the serenity.  This beauty's source comes from an unkown yet undying fountain.  The roots of this beauty's fountain run down deep into the earth. They are strong and well nourished.  Beside this my body felt like a wasteland with my muscles as dry as dead wood and my heart as dust.  I felt barren and hard.  I feel that I have lost a thing and in wishing to mourn do not cry.

'I have seen this turning light,

For many a day.

I have not been away

Even in dreams of the night.'

Inside the grey stone of the church the air feels cooler, like the feeling of a weightless breeze, and the light rejuvinates the coloured glass of the stained windows.  This is something old and there is a sense of returning to a different childhood; it is like mine but wholly unlike mine.  This sense of this moment is recurring, it is a sound caught in an echo, eternal but fading in and out of my awareness.  I sat down on an oak pew and my mind caught in the space between the roof and the floor, above the beams, by the arch, I am unravelling my tight knitted bonds and the sensitive flesh recoils in pleasure.  At heart there is a stronger sense of pleasure of what name I have forgotten by remember feeling long ago.

'Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent

Of summer gardens; these can bring you all

Those dreams that in the starlight silence fall:

Sweet songs are full of odours.'

I still feel tight inside as something will not let go.  I know that I have been followed by ghosts.  I'm sure that they watch me now.  I am tired from running and all I wish to do now is to lie down and sleep.  I do lie down but t is not nearly as comfortably as I need it to be.  I close my eyes and pretend that I really am drifting off into that place of sleep.  Only I know that I cannot fool myself and so soon I get up with dread and with insomnia of living.  The weight of myself is heavy enough to be not lifted yet also not able to rest properly.  I have been scared for so long now that I am numb to the frightened feeling.  Will this really continue on this way...will it not end...?  I can no longer comfort myself, not even with the thought of death for I know that it will not come for me yet.  I am sure there are ghosts in this place.  They are here somewhere.  I wish that I could see them and talk to them.  They have to hide away from me but not leave me alone.  I am death-in-life.

'I have questioned many a ghost

Far inland in my dreams,

Enquiried of fears and shames'

'The dark and winding way

To the day within my day.'

     

The Implications of Tom Stoppard

 There was once a theatre maker friend of mine who when I suggested that Tom Stoppard was a gifted writer he instantly dismissed him as ‘being Right-Wing’.  I found this opinion, for such a knowledgably director, to be questionable.  I asked him for examples but he couldn’t provide then and there.  Tom Stoppard is on record to be ‘comfortably conservative’ but I tried to argue that his politics were different from his drama and one should not dismiss any writer on face value of their political beliefs.  In plays such as Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead I failed to pick up any political debate or message, maybe this is my failure as an audience member, but really a play like that goes beyond politics, doesn’t it?

  When Stoppard becomes more intriguing is when he writes plays like Rock ‘n’ Roll where he depicts Left-Wing characters in a sympathetic light.  This is what I would like to focus on and try to see if his politics greatly affects his work.

  Firstly I should admit a prejudice for his work.  He has all the things I love about writing: working brains, sharp wit and philosophical ideas that he juggles with craftsmanship.  He is both an entertaining and a thoughtful playwright. So, I like his work.

  Secondarily it might be useful to keep a definition of the political idea of ‘conservatism’, which is different to what it once was.  Today’s conservative is a neo-liberal and goes about business with a different attitude.  He reminds me of old-fashioned conservatives such as Roger Scruton whom I also find interesting.  I’m not so well versed in the nuances of the conservative party so I am unable at this time to give a succinct definition, but what I want to concentrate on is his portrayal of Max, the communist philosopher in Rock ‘n’ Roll.

  There is a running joke that whenever Max, who is as old as the October Revolution, says to somebody that he is a communist they will say to him “aren’t you missing something?” because it is clear to them that to believe in communism after the tragedy of early modern Russia you would have to have a lapse in reasoning.  Max says to his student, Jan that maybe communism didn’t work at that particular time but there is no reason why it couldn’t work in the present.  Jan goes to work in the Czechoslovakia at the time of state censorship and the Velvet Revolution falling away from Marxist belief.

  Max is frustrated at the state of things and though he is a deep thinker he cannot convince his students that he is right about the world or the human mind.  When Margaret Thatcher comes to power he complains that ‘the working-class vote could make this a socialist country permanently, and they voted in millions for the most reactionary Tory government of modern times.  We give them crap.  They eat crap, they read crap, they watch crap, they have two weeks in the sun, and they’re content.  Why aren’t they angry?’ 

  There is pathos in his certain belief that communism would make society a better place while all the while he watches the world make all the wrong decisions.  Despite being a philosopher he can’t explain the behaviour of the wider world.  Is Stoppard portraying someone who is misguided and deluded or is he portraying him as a noble character that only wants to do better in a world of mediocrity?

  It’s not clear-cut as though no-body else really believes in what Max has to say we don’t necessarily believe that he is entirely wrong.  He is an enduring character because of his political commitment even if he is pushing against the tide.  I don’t get the sense that Stoppard is pushing a political agenda in this play.  He doesn’t, because he is a conservative, want to dismantle Max’s belief but only to understand it.  It is an exercise in empathy and because of that I find it hard to dismiss his plays merely because he is ‘Right-Wing’.  He knows where his affiliations lie but that doesn’t stop him from sympathising with those he doesn’t agree with.  Tom Stoppard is, as well as being brainy, witty and philosophical, a robustly humane writer.

An Interpretation of the Persistance of Memory By the Right

 The existence of political parties, which is a term that should be qualified, of the BNP and Ukip is akin to Surrealism in policy making.  They are the parties of the irrational, the impulsive, the unconscious, the associative, a reflection of fear and paranoia of anything cultural and passive.  They, in short, should not be taken seriously.  Rascism is written in the manifesto of the BNP that asserts the right of the ‘indiginous people’, while Ukip call for 40% of the budget to be put into defense.  They are parties of the fortress that attack and defend for their own sake hollowing out anything else rendering existence narrowly meaningless.

  I was told that the Green Party were a party of expression but to my mind they are much more humane and rational compared to the parties on the Right that turn atuomatic-writing into policy.  It seems that their only wish is to batter and bully others listening only to their instinct that overides reason.  They turn selfishness into a public service and instutionalises it without regard to the humanity of others.  These are the parties of monstrous individualism.

  Even while this goes on the Conservitive (read Neo-Liberal) should not be left off the hook with their implicit encouragement to these parties.  It was not the BNP who sent vehicals around the country telling illegal imigrants to go home as well as putting up advertisments suggesting to Easten Europeans, who might want to come to Britain to work, not to bother.  The Conservities hides their racsim but it is racism nonetheless.  However unlike the other Right-Wing parties they are not surrealists but mad Greek warriors who are strong and destruction-fuelled slaughtering all that surrounds him.  These Ajax individuals are insane and without any conception of consequences, loving the pain of others and fighting invisible enemies.  They are repressed, inwardly angry and unable to have a mature feeling.

  For the Right culture is unesscserry unless it is able to make money and nature has no intrinstic value, which makes it ripe for exploiting.  They, George Monbiot says, cut the artiries and spill the blood that the Left has to patch up.  The President of Uruguay gives up to 90% of his salary to charities while this Government helps big companies to not pay tax.  The Lib-Dems and Labour seem to endose everything the Conservatives are doing leaving opposition to the Greens.

  The Right-Wing psyche is unpleasant to think about for too long but Right feeds onto Right and makes hatred the offical line out of cruel fustration of their own emotions, corroding the surrounding culture.  They embody the darkness of the human mind and are unembrassed by that fact and this is why their members like it.  In liking it they no longer have to pretend to be cilvilised or cultivated they can go back to the vicous hunter-gather time where the world was, in their eyes, a lot more fairer.

  They provide an atmosphere of de-humanisation where people are made to defend their basic rights from health to security of job while they profit from it.  When will politics give back dignity to people and stop giving them patronising junk instead of workable solutions.  Jose Saramago spoke out about the legisaltive hatred from a belief of human decency and it is what writers should do.  When will the cruelty stop?

Traveling Companions by Augustus Egg

This painting is the painting I wake up to every morning and the painting a think about as I fall asleep.  It consists of two women on a train compartment in big grey Victorian dresses and round hats with a red feather on their laps.  One of the women is reading and the other is asleep.  I wonder about their occupation thinking that they might have been part of the Salvation Army, but Egg was painting during the early 19^th centaury and I’m not sure without checking if they even existed at that point.  They could be Governesses as depicted in the novels of the Bronte’s.  I feel that their dresses is some kind of uniform or it may reflect they lack of consumer choice in clothing.  In the background you can see the sea and a little village or town by it.  The hills or mountains remind me of the Welsh coast and so they could well be traveling into Aberystwyth, which I like.      

 

What I really like about this painting is that it reflects my attitude towards travel, best done on a train where you can either look out of the window, or rest, or read moving from one to the other depending on what is comfortable at the time.  It feels safe and looking at it you feel included in their private world.  It is a world within a world.  I also like how they have oranges in their basket, the fruit I most like to travel with due to their organic wrapper.  I also like it because it is possible parodied in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass. 

Despite the stuffiness of their dresses they seem to be at ease and relaxed, exactly how traveling should be.  It is also this continuity of train travel that connects the present age with the Victorian age and I feel that when I step on a train with a book and some oranges I am taking part in some mechanical tradition of being an experienced traveler.