The Ant
The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?
OGDEN NASH
Ants and Stories
colum mccann
Life Tripped Me Up
‘Life tripped me up’ is a line from a poem dictated in Turkish over a phone line from a prison, a series of which have held the poet since he was 21.
Participation in a protest over the government’s treatment of Kurds sent him into a cell as a young man. He confessed to crimes he had denied before torture that has left him scarred for life.
His pre-trial detention lasted for twenty-two years before his sentence to life imprisonment was confirmed. He wrote recently that he ‘can’t touch or communicate with other people or animals’.
AVE Acronym
Caveat emptor: the things that flow through my consciousness are not always pleasant, complete let alone right.
Ave!
Psychopathy and sociopathy seem to feature large in everything this week. Failures in duties of care dominate the news.
I needed an acronym to make it easier to write about. I’ve chosen AVE as my acronym for Abuser, Victim and Exploitation. AVE as a shout of farewell. AVE as greeting. Two meanings. Going and coming. Double standards. Mental reservations. Ave Maria. The Hail to Mary who despite never having had sex, fell pregnant. It’s long been considered quite an honour to bear a son for a god. Her consent isn’t recorded. This scepticism is no more blasphemy than faith is scientific. Should we not continually question moralities and ethics from our evolving viewpoints? Shouldn’t we ask whether something said or done ever occurred.
© Simon Robinson 2018
Rank Ambiguity Persists
279:409:4 ‘He was afraid she might have a scar.’
A ten year old daughter has her whole life ahead of her. This most human of fears resonated with me. But this is The Holy Land and she is already dead.
319:301:1 ‘Smadar’s face was left perfectly intact.’
A thirteen year old daughter has no life ahead of her. This most awful of human observations upset me. How can anyone call this place the Holy Land?
Apeirogon by Colum McCann is an exposition that will haunt me for the rest of my life. That’s a good thing in the same way that Primo Levi’s If This is a Man was a good thing too. I wonder if what makes a good real-life horror story work is an absence of self pity?
[Read more…] about Rank Ambiguity PersistsPersistent Ambiguity Persists
Opening Ambiguity
Some might argue that the giant tech companies are the Viking hordes of today. Today’s shopfronts might be likened to the walls of monasteries, masking a profound sense of loss after everything of value has been carried off, repurposed to the benefit of others.
Some have warned for decades that the tech giants need to be regulated otherwise they’ll recreate the monopolies like those of the American railways in the nineteenth century. The analogies for today’s supply chains include fibre as rail track and the servers as locomotives. Platform versus content. Utility versus consumable.
On Persistent Ambiguity
I was excited though not surprised when President Éamon de Valera walked down the aisle towards my grandfather’s coffin. Grandfathers can be hugely important and mysterious figures to kids so why wouldn’t the President of our country be showing his respect to my grandfather? The bar had been set quite high the week before with the TV coverage for Winston Churchill’s funeral. I had no other model for my first funeral, so to speak.
I was only ten and knew nothing much of the world beyond my family. Indeed, I wasn’t completely sure of that much within my family. Family gatherings, particularly those agnate, were generally fuelled by drink and thrived on stories of death by various mis-adventures. An oral tradition, the drinking and the storytelling both. The rituals often involved stormy nights under the flickering light of the damnable smokey coal fires of the era. The elaborations depended on the storyteller. ‘It was a late summer evening’ might become ‘One spring morning’ and we accepted such ambiguity because the outcome was assured.
How it looked to a great-grandson 128 years later.