Raggle-Taggle-Roma-O

Quelle surprise:

DNA tests on Dublin Roma girl 'show she is part of family'

Police removed the seven-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl from her home in the Tallaght area.
The parents told police the child was their daughter, but officers were not satisfied with the explanation, nor with the documents that were produced.

For there never were any blonde-haired, blue-eyed Roma. And all Roma births are properly registered with the Gadje. And no hospital ever makes error with its records. And all Roma lie to the police all the time anyway. And all gypsies steal pretty little blonde children where'er they spy them.

All those DNA tests are going to start costing the taxpayer a pretty pile of coins.

Samizdata from Babel: Final Reflections 2

[Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors in this or the previous post. I mislaid my spectacles en route to Darkest East Southamptonshire and the world of words is very blurry.]

In Babel, human ingenuity, co-operation, bravado and curiosity are rewarded, by a fearful and vengeful Deity, with the damnation of incommunication, fragmenting their solidarity and driving the population to the corners of the world. It's a perplexing moral story, especially following soon after the Flood. Humankind seems incapable of learning to obey. Drown them and they want to build towers. Give them a thousand languages and they speak, write and read in them, leaving behind libraries of good and ill knowledge and ideas. Perpetually exercising that pesky free will, they seem always to invent new ways to affront those who command respect and obedience. May their memory be forever honoured.

This blog, an idea born in a whimsical conversation and pursued as a pragmatic solution, has actually proved to be a useful and sound tool and vehicle. (With a more resiliant cripple-spirit (h/t Carol) a lot more of my reading and thinking and ranting and research during the long hiatus between terms would have made it on to the blog, but I was more inclined to lie around feeling sorry for myself and being too doped to think in sentences.) Its fragmentary and  dilettantish structure and entirely uneven tone and incoherent subject matter suit my mentality perfectly.

More seriously, the interwebs are the modern inheritor of the traditons of the broadside ballad and the samizdat, the place (at the time of writing) where an individual of modest means and no objective power can speak of any matter to a wide audience, can forge alliances and resistance movements, share.information and speak their own truths without the mediation of any form of authority. (No one may read, watch or listen, of course, but that's their right too.) As such. I may put my web-site building head on and actually re-locate to a fully realised site, something which would also resolve the issue of copyright which haunts this place. How electronic media would connect to what I still regard as the core activity of drawing has yet to be seen, but there is some relationship which might be developed which addresses both sides of my 'equation', of image and audience, art and function.

But this is, always and in the end, about the pencils and what they let me do. I never expected that, that it would be pencils. I thought I was probably a painter. Turns out, all I really want and need (and it does have a strong element of physical craving to it) to do is document that wild territory on the borders of Reason and Imagination with my box of pencils.

'To which no concept is adequate': Final Rellections 1

...or ghosts of pure form in the libraries of babel.

I have spent an inordinate amount of my life in libraries. I have made trips abroad to visit particular libraries. I have gone through the many idiosyncratic and obstructive procedures libraries impose in order to access their special collections. I have worked hard to get on the right side of some truly irascible librarians, who hold the keys to special cabinets, while rolling my eyes at the antics of those who treat such librarians as defective waiters or domestics. And I've experienced that peculiar brand of academic ecstasy at uncovering some previously unknown text, lost to the sands of time, or at proving what I suspected to be likely, after carefully untying the cords holding together a fragile and broken miscellany of paper that began life as a book. Handling something rare, maybe the sole survivor of its kind, the object itself a document of struggle and censorship, always brought a visceral thrill, a kind of subtle reverence for where this book had come from and where it had been in the intervening years.

                     Erik Desmazieres, illustration for Borges' The Library of Babel

The freestyle hermeneutics of 'The Wall and the Books', in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti when he ordered the building of the Great Wall and decreed the burning of all books gives the lie to the simple historical explanations for the phenomena. 'There is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.'  Hunting for the larger meaning, Borges notes that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, and thus begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: 'Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.' Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

Rather than a search for a grand narrative or an encompassing ideological truth, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books 'touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows'.  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Contingency, speculation, contemplation, individual interpretation, all fly in the face of the face of the single-voiced authority. As a library is a cacophany of views and theories and demands, so even a single text can be a starting point for a multiplicity of perhapses, none of which need to be completely correct. This is not, by the way, the absurdity of historicism, but the pleasure of thought, of human ingenuity.

In contrast, there is the voice of Authoritah.

Like this, Climate Change Minister Edward Davey's speech 'Climate Change, Acting on the Science', delivered on June 4 2013 to the Met Office, warning of the 'danger' of giving a platform to those who would question the corrupt Religion of Gaia:

Some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups who reject outright the fact that climate change is a result of human activity.

Some who even deny the reality of climate change itself.
This is not the serious science of challenging, checking and probing.

This is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.

This tendency will seize upon the normal expression of scientific uncertainty and portray it as proof that all climate change policy is all hopelessly misguided – from pursuing renewable energy to emissions targets themselves.

By selectively misreading the evidence, they seek to suggest that climate change has stopped so we can all relax and burn all the dirty fuel we want without a care.

This is a superficially seductive message, but it is absolutely wrong and really quite dangerous.

 Not so very far from the Chinese Emperor, then. Nor from that darling of the Progressives, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract, in which the individual is subsumed into the herd for the greater good, here outlining his ' Civil Religion':

There is a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished to death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.

If anyone behaves as if he does not believe them...  This is Goya's Reason-shorn-of-imaginative-play run to its chilling extreme, where the contents of the individual mind remains incarcerated within a socially-co-operative body. Like Kafka's perfect son and worker in Metamorphosis, there will come a point where such a conformity turns into frank monstrosity, to be met with even greater monstrosity from the external world.

 Imagination, creativity, difference, contestation, play, wit, satire, slippage, all represent a threat to the grandest of narratives of Authoritah - be fearful, be safe. Such a story long left behind the underpinnings of the European Enlightenment at its most brightly lit:

An aesthetical Idea [is] an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us (Kant, Critique of Judgment)

Every or any book from a finite or infinite library - even a seemingly incoherent book - has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a sentence spoken in the hope of being understood, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.

Kiefer's Monumental Tomes

Anselm Kiefer Meterorites

 

 

 

Height 9 feet
Weight 6.6 tons

The uningratiating, even abrasive, visual qualities, the towering scale, the implied footnotes, the defiance of beauty, is too much for some critics. They respond with  words intended to condemn Kiefer as elitist, as insufficiently relativist, or pomo, or something. They term the work bombastic, pompous, ponderous, theatrical, cerebral, remote, refusing to see the significance of this mordant monument to the desolate, distressed, unconsoling, the wreckage of cultural knowledge heaved into a gallery by crane.

Anselm Kiefer, The Hight Priestess/Land of Two Rivers

Height 12 Feet
Width 25 and a half feet
Depth 1 and a half feet
1985-89

Twin bookcases, labelled Tigris and Euphrates, containing approximately 200 lead books.

The cradle of human civilisation turned into impossible books, memorialising the cultural apocalypses of the Inquisition and Wahabi'ism and foreshadowing the Theatre of Progressive War under the directorship of the Simian-in-Chief and Pope Tony.

Dusty, cobwebbed volumes, too hefty to lift, with inaccessible or indeterminate content, are an affront to modernity and the utopia amours of Progress. Kiefer refuses to forget his cultural inheritance and insists on the power and resonance of old ideas and old artifacts.

Ubique: For the CRE at Babel

---

Rudyard Kipling - Sappers

---

WHEN the Waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!

When the Flood come along for an extra monsoon,
'Twas Noah constructed the first pontoon
To the plans of Her Majesty's, etc.

But after fatigue in the wet an' the sun,
Old Noah got drunk, which he wouldn't ha' done
If he'd trained with, etc.

When the Tower o' Babel had mixed up men's bat,
Some clever civilian was managing that,
An' none of, etc.

When the Jews had a fight at the foot of a hill,
Young Joshua ordered the sun to stand still,
For he was a Captain of Engineers, etc.

When the Children of Israel made bricks without straw,
They were learnin' the regular work of our Corps,
The work of, etc.

For ever since then, if a war they would wage,
Behold us a-shinin' on history's page -
First page for, etc.

We lay down their sidings an' help 'em entrain,
An' we sweep up their mess through the bloomin' campaign,
In the style of, etc.

They send us in front with a fuse an' a mine
To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line,
But bent by, etc.

They send us behind with a pick an' a spade,
To dig for the guns of a bullock-brigade
Which has asked for, etc.

We work under escort in trousers and shirt,
An' the heathen they plug us tail-up in the dirt,
Annoying, etc.

We blast out the rock an' we shovel the mud,
We make 'em good roads an' - they roll down the khud,
Reporting, etc.

We make 'em their bridges, their wells, an' their huts,
An' the telegraph-wire the enemy cuts,
An' it's blamed on, etc.

An' when we return, an' from war we would cease,
They grudge us adornin' the billets of peace,
Which are kept for, etc.

We build 'em nice barracks - they swear they are bad,
That our Colonels are Methodist, married or mad,
Insultin', etc.

They haven't no manners nor gratitude too,
For the more that we help 'em, the less will they do,
But mock at, etc.

Now the Line's but a man with a gun in his hand,
An' Cavalry's only what horses can stand,
When helped by, etc.

Artillery moves by the leave o' the ground,
But we are the men that do something all round,
For we are, etc.

I have stated it plain, an' my argument's thus
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
There's only one Corps which is perfect - that's us;
An' they call us Her Majesty's Engineers,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineers,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!

Drawn Waters (Borrowdale)

Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (natural and machined graphic on steel armature)

The image above puts something which is apparently (I've not seen it in real life) beautiful and mimetic of the natural world into the most antiseptic, frigid environment imaginable. The second example below serves the work much better - a quasi-industrial environment nods in the direction of the mining of graphite which the work references with Borrowdale. The fact that she constructs her own works in design and in the space, for me, positions her as a worker-artist, perhaps why she was attracted to such a culturally and historically distant place as the Borrowdale graphite mine.

Teresita Fernandez has made objects that could legitimately be called 3D-drawings, but perhaps it's just as well I can't go to galleries very easily these days, since the temptation to help oneself to such an abundance of graphite would be hard to resist.

TERESITA FERNANDEZDrawn Waters (Borrowdale) 2, 2009 natural and machined graphite on steel armature 121.19 x 43.5 x 86 inches 307.8 x 110.5 x 218.4cm

In Drawn Waters (Borrowdale), precision-machined, polished panels of graphite and massive fragments of the raw, mined material are assembled to create a large-scale sculpture of an undulating, dissolving waterfall. Alluding to Leonardo da Vinci's studies of moving water as well as to Robert Smithson's land pours, Fernández turns the idea of a drawing into tangible form, making a solid sculpture that is in effect a three-dimensional gestural graphite drawing, a line dragged through the gallery space. For Fernández, to assemble the sculpture is to engage in the act of drawing.

Books and Babel-Knowledge

1. Not everything I draw is a page from a book.
2. The trick is to know the difference between what goes on a wall and what goes between covers.

I've spent a lot of time this term agreeing with Joanna Drucker (The Century of Artists' Books) that an artist's book in form must be coherent with the contents, that the work must represent a totality, not an arbitrary solution, only to find that I was generating a forced solution to a belief that the moth series must be a book. It isn't a book. It isn't even a fully thought-out series.

I can self-diagnose the factors that would keep the drawings off the wall and on a table or shelf. Somewhere between folk-like-me don't get their pictures hung in those posh people's galleries and a desire not to limit whatever art I can make to the modern white-cube cathedrals, a book will always seem a more egalitarian, demotic thing.

But the Babel sequence is a book, responding as it does to the authority and legacy of The Book. What form that 'book' will take is still evolving but I'm inclined to think (today, this week) it will strongly resemble a conventional book.

Early in the module, while toying with the Babel notion, I discovered a story by Borges I had never read before, 'The Book of Sand'. The initially delightful and subsequently horrific reality of the infinite, ever-changing book provides me with a kind of totem figure for the Babel book, setting the idea of book-knowledge against the shifting sands of human experience. In other words, if I could make it, I would.

The Book of Sand (translated from the Spanish by Antonios Sarhanis) by Jorge Luis Borges

…thy rope of sands…
George Herbert (1593-1623)¹

Lines consist of an infinite number of points; planes an infinite number of lines; volumes an infinite number of planes, hypervolumes an infinite number of volumes… No, this, this more geometrico, is definitely not the best way to begin my tale. Affirming a fantastic tale’s truth is now a story-telling convention; mine, though, is true.

I live alone, in a fourth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano. One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and in walked someone I had never met before. He was a tall man, of indistinct features. My myopia perhaps made me see him that way. Everything about him spoke of an honest poverty. He was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise. I sensed immediately that he was a foreigner. At first I thought him an old man; later I noticed that what misled me was his sparse hair, an almost-white blond, like a Scandinavian’s. Over the course of our conversation, which would last no longer than an hour, I learnt that he hailed from the Orkneys.

I showed him his seat. The man paused a moment before speaking. He exuded a melancholy air, as do I now.

“I sell Bibles,” he told me.

Not without pedantry I responded:

“In this house there are several English Bibles, including John Wyclif’s, the first of all. I also have Cypriano de Valera’s, Luther’s — which, as a piece of literature, is the worst of the lot — and a copy of the Vulgate in Latin. As you can see, it’s not Bibles I have a need for.”

After a brief silence he responded:

“I don’t sell only Bibles. I can show you a sacred book that might interest you. I aquired it in the outskirts of Bikanir.”

He opened his valise and placed the book on the table. It was a clothbound octavo volume which had undoubtedly passed through many hands. I examined the book; its unexpected heft surprised me. On the spine was printed Holy Writ and below that Bombay.

“From the nineteenth century I’d hazard,” I observed.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known,” was the response.

I opened it at random. The characters were unfamiliar. The pages, which appeared to me worn and of poor typographic quality, were printed in two columns like a Bible. The text was cramped and arranged in versicles. In the upper corner of each page were Arabic numerals. It caught my attention that the even-numbered page bore, let’s say, the number 40,514 and the odd-numbered page that followed 999. I turned the page; the overleaf bore an eight-digit number. Also printed was a small illustration, like those in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by a child’s unskilled hand.

It was then that the stranger told me:

“Study the page well. You will never see it again.”

There was a threat in what he said, but not in his voice.

I took note of the page and shut the volume. I reopened it immediately.

In vain I searched for the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my discomfort, I said to him:

“This is a version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, right?”

“No,” he replied.

Then he lowered his voice as if entrusting me with a secret:

“I acquired the book in a small town on the plains for a few rupees and a Bible. Its owner didn’t know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people couldn’t step on his shadow without contamination. He told me that his book is called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end.”

He suggested I try finding the first page.

I placed my left hand on the cover and opened the book with my thumb and forefinger almost touching. All my efforts were useless: several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as though the pages sprouted from within the book.

“Now search for the last page.”

Again I failed; I only managed to stammer in a voice not my own:

“This cannot be.”

Always in a low voice, the Bible seller said:

“It cannot be, yet it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite. No page is the first; none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps it’s to demonstrate that the terms of an infinite series include any number.”

Later, as if he were thinking aloud:

“If space is infinite, we are in no particular point in space. If time is infinite, we are in no particular point in time.”

His musings irritated me. I asked him:

“You’re a religious man, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I’m sure I didn’t cheat the native when I gave him the Lord’s Word in exchange for his diabolical book.”

I assured him that he had no reason to reproach himself, and I asked him if he was just passing through these lands. He replied that he was thinking of returning to his homeland in a few days. It was then that I learnt he was Scotch, from the Orkney Isles. I told him that I had a special affection for Scotland because of my love of Stevenson and Hume.

“And of Robbie Burns,” he corrected.

While we spoke, I continued exploring the infinite book. With a false indifference I asked him:
“Do you intend to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum?”

“No. I offer it to you,” he said, and offered a high price.

I replied, in all honesty, that the price was too high for me and I remained in thought. After a few minutes I had come up with a plan.

“I propose a trade,” I said. “You obtained this volume for a few rupees and the Holy Scripture; I offer you my retirement funds, which I’ve just been paid, and the Wyclif Bible in gothic lettering. I inherited it from my parents.”

“A black-letter Wyclif!” he murmured.

I went to my bedroom and I brought back the money and book. He turned the pages and studied the binding with the fervour of a bibliophile.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

I was astonished that he did not haggle. Only afterwards did I realise that he had entered my house with the intention of selling the book. He didn’t count the bills; he put them away.
We chatted about India, the Orkneys and the Norwegian jarls who had governed them. Night had fallen by the time he had left. I never saw him again, nor do I know his name.

I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left behind by the Wyclif Bible’s absence. In the end I opted to hide it behind several misshapen volumes of Thousand and One Nights.

I went to bed and could not sleep. At around three or four in the morning I turned on the light. I searched for the impossible book and turned its pages. In one of them I saw printed a mask. In the corner the page bore a number — I don’t remember which anymore — that was raised to the ninth power.

I showed my treasure to no one. Against the joy of possessing the book grew the fear that it would be stolen, and later the suspicion that it was not truly infinite. Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.

I had few friends still alive; I stopped seeing them. Prisoner of the Book, I almost never left the house. I examined the worn spine and cover with a magnifying glass, and I discounted the possibility of some kind of artifice. I found that the small illustrations were spaced two thousand pages apart from one to the other. I noted them down in a small alphabetised notebook, which did not take long to fill. They never repeated. At night, in the scarce intervals insomnia withdrew its hold over, I dreamed of the book.

Summer was coming to an end and I realised that the book was monstrous. There was no consolation in the thought that no less monstrous was I, who perceived the book with eyes and touched it with ten nailed fingers. I felt the book to be a nightmarish object, something obscene that slanders and compromises reality.

I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book would be just as infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke.

I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retiring I worked in the National Library, which housed nine-hundred thousand books; I know that to the right of the lobby a curved staircase descends to the basement, where the newspapers and maps are stored. I took advantage of the librarians’ inattentiveness for a moment to lose the Book of Sand in one of the humid shelves. I tried not to notice how high or how far from the door.

I feel somewhat relieved now, but I do avoid even passing by Mexico Street.²

Translator’s notes

¹ The quote appears in English in the Spanish original.
² The National Library of Argentina is found on Mexico Street (calle México) in Buenos Aires.

http://anagrammatically.com/2010/03/08/the-book-of-sand-el-libro-de-arena-by-borges-translated/

'Praise this world to the Angel'*

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.*

Rilke's elegy calls on the reader to pay attention to the here and now, not just the glories of the great hereafter, and is a trembling (as in Kierkergaardian fear and trembling) meditation of the evanescence of being, a source of wonder and awe deserving of tribute and reverence, and not merely a shoddy and contingent waiting room to be endured until God calls.

To look, not just with eye and brain, but with sense-memory as well, elevates the most mundane thing, and makes experience - all those overlooked, unconsidered, unremarkable and unremarked experiences, which otherwise count for little or nothing - into a long moment that no other may dictate or define.

I think that one of the things that people tend to look for too much in art is meaning. And they tend to project meaning much faster than I would like them to. If I was a dictator, an art dictator, I would tie them up and say: ‘Here, look at this. And look at it again, and look at it again’. (Vija Celmins in conversation with Robert Gober, 2004

* Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegy No. 9

Anthropomorphism

It is regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits - spirits enemies to man - conceived and fabricated in the dark, and the very shining of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening at times it extinguishes the light; foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. (Moses Harris, 1840)

 Acherontia atropos
Acherontia Genus
Acherontia derives from Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld
Atropos is the Fate who cuts the thread of life
(The other 2 species of Acherontia are named in like style:

• Acherontia lachesis, after the Fate who measures the thread of life and determines destiny
• Acherontia styx, named after the principal and boundary river of Hades)

Common Names
English - death’s-head hawkmoth
German - Totenkopfschwärmer
French - le sphinx à tête de mort
Spanish - Esfinge de la muerte


So while one can be a little sneery about humanity's tendency to read everything in existence in relation to individual human destiny, markings which ought to be dismissed as purely arbitrary and meaningless in spiritual terms have attracted the attention of the populace of every nation where this moth has appeared - none has read it neutrally. And while the entymologists might claim to be naming it in a knowing joking manner, one does just wonder if they were hedging their bets with superstition.

Making (Drawings and Detritus)

It’s the representation in its material aspect that I want to bring out, but not at the expense of a represented, re-imagined world, because there’s no ultimate fact involved (it never becomes ‘just’ graphite on paper, which is another sort of fantasy). I don’t think there’s an alternative to essentially faulty images – they’re how we build the world we inhabit. What I do is a way to try to live critically with that, but also find pleasure in it. (David Musgrave, email to Kate Macfarlane, May 2010)

It's an exhibition I never saw, but encountering the name of David Musgrave's 2004 Norwich exhibition, 'Living Dust', sent me looking for his work and his thinking, part of the project of find-another-artist-who-draws-with-my-mentality. And Musgrave is someone I 'get' like that.

Transparent Head

2003

David Musgrave

Graphite on Paper

Extracts from Kate Macfarlaine, 'David Musgrave: Faulty Images' (Tate Papers 2011)

‘In making something’, Musgrave has said, ‘I think I’m always trying to embody the conditions that enabled that making to happen.’7 Musgrave feels ideas of immediacy and spontaneity in art are suspect. ‘You never make the first mark; there is always an archaeology or a history you can open up to a greater or lesser extent – sometimes a very specific history and sometimes a more general one.’2 .... Musgrave believes that artworks that are completely abstract struggle to communicate with the viewer at an emotional level. Our capacity to read the most rudimentary marks as representative of ourselves exists as a fundamental human trait. Musgrave’s oeuvre is characterised by an exploitation of this capacity and by an exploration of its limits: ‘His work is not, as some have suggested, predominantly an inquiry into anthropomorphism,’ Martin Herbert has observed, ‘except insofar as it spotlights a tendency to grab anthropocentric lifebelts while negotiating the rushing stream of an apparent abstraction’.8

Musgrave has widened the scope of his enquiry through curating exhibitions. Living Dust (2004), for example, was a show that featured works on paper from the sixteenth century to the present day.9 Works were chosen to demonstrate the transformative material capacity of the medium of drawing. Musgrave’s catalogue essay makes clear his frustration with the predominant conception of drawing as an expression of the artist’s intentions, thoughts and feelings.‘It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content,’ he wrote.10 ‘Sometimes an image drifts so far from its referent that only its immediate context allows it to be identified […] what is significant [in such cases] is that the representation doesn’t become an abstract sign we subsequently use to communicate with others who recognise it, but something to be treated as having a particular, substantial reality of its own.’11

Drawing can be a slow, contemplative activity, something that happens quietly and that involves an interactive process. A mark is made, reflection ensues; more marks follow, with erasures, and slowly an image builds, is teased out of the paper. It is possible to create an illusion through drawing with graphite on paper but the medium’s monochromatic nature and the paper’s surface (something that Musgrave likes to work with rather than against) impose particular limitations. Musgrave employs trompe l’œil to create an illusion – but the uncertain status of the image draws attention to the methodology of production. Recourse to simple decoding tools, such as nameable things or a story line, are out of the question. Nonetheless, we somehow know what these things are, even if we cannot name them or attach labels to them. ‘I’d prefer the work to be seen to be about fiction rather than illusion’, Musgrave has said, ‘because I’m not trying to fool anybody. You can see how it’s done – if the fact that something isn’t what it appears to be doesn’t become part of the experience, then the work has failed.’12

• 2. David Musgrave, email to the author, 8 June 2010.
• 8. Herbert 2003.
• 9. ‘Living Dust’, Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, September–October 2004.
• 10. David Musgrave, Living Dust, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Gallery 2004, p.11.
• 11. Ibid., p.12.
• 12. Musgrave, quoted in Arnolfini 2003, p.21.

'Living Dust' - it's a good name, a Janus-label that looks two ways at once, to both the materiality of graphite on paper and to evoking (not mimetically representing) the resonance and life contained even in the most unremarked detritus in the world, or perhaps especially in that. The unconsidered ordinariness of things, their tactility, the memory of them has a vividness that grand concepts lack. The stone in the shoe or the smell of damp or a flickering floresecent light conjure a place and a time sensorily, sensually, where words do not, for words are slippery things, thuggish things, while our body memories are ultimately our most personal possessions.

But for my purposes of finding someone who might better articulate my own garbled intent, this sentence is important:

It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content.

The drawing has, in and of itself, a material existence which is not explicable by or reducible to the artist's quotable declarations. It's a drawing, not a text, and must be experienced as such, looked at, not 'read' or 'decoded' as if it were a string of signs or words. The concept of 'immaterial perception' is valuable here, to me, since it describes much about the origins of a drawing and the process of producing one as a material object. In a curious concatenation between mind's eye and finger ends, the drawing is a felt thing, felt out in its rendering.

Progressive Porn

How the Do-Gooding Know-Besting Take-Control Progressive Elitists salivate at the prospect at having humankind on their knees on a chain.

The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, published in 2007, relished the prospect of the authoritarian form of government they deemed necessary, 'but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power', oh those self-sacrificing souls, putting their knowledge and their lives at the service of the masses they would dominate.

Their masterplan is clearest in its real intent when they are describing the universities of this authoritarian, liberty-impoverished future:

“The freedom to pursue knowledge as the individual sees fit is a mistake, for freedom must be considered in the context of the needs of society as a whole.... The Real University will have an agenda, which includes priorities for those tasks to be pursued that are essential to the future well-being of humanity.”

Why have I picked on this? Simply because this is a prize example of the new montrousness. Where once such a book would have been have regarded as the product of fascistic thinking, and as inimical to the true purpose of academic study, post-modernity has arrived at a place where these ideas are the property of the liberal, the left, the progressive - the world has turned upside down at the behest of those who would control our every action and thought up to and including what we are permitted to learn and speak of.

And in that mindset, book-burning becomes amusing, as seen in this now-deleted image from the San Jose State University Meteorology Department web page. The caption from the SJSU website read:

This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute. The book is entitled “The Mad, Mad, Made World of Climatism”. Shown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.

Government by expert, technocracy, or progressive tyranny, or an attempt to bring into being Plato's philosopher-king, the dispassionate, clever and principled autocrat, every single one of these leave the ruled mass waiting for the knock on the door, denouncement as a dissident, or holding mumbled conversations with like-minded folk in the shadows, perpetually looking over the shoulder for the righteous thought police. Denormalisation will soon be the general rule and it seems that it is only those who have long had a tenuous grasp on social acceptance, who are accustomed to be lectured and hectored by the man-from-the-council and the woman-from-the-social before shrugging and turning away, who have noticed the ramping up of efforts to police the minutiae of behaviour, preparing the ground for some imagined utopia of order, cleanliness, ponies and rainbows.

No, no, no. These people think we are their pets. The trouble is, when a pet turns vicious or 'sick', a one-way trip to the vet is perfectly legitimate.

Who are the monsters?

Mining Graphite

From 'Gangue Minerals and Pigment Earths' by Michael Shaw

Graphite is an allotrope of carbon, a black semi metal also known as plumbago or black-lead. The mineral was known of by the monks of Furness Abbey who are reported to have used it to mark their sheep (Lax & Maxwell 1998) and to rule guide lines in documents[4]. By the late 16th century it was certainly in use as a drawing material and probably for rust proofing iron (grate polish etc) (Camden 1610). The mine passed through many hands including in the early 17th century the Hechsetter brothers, as a private venture rather than as part of their Mines Royal activity. The most significant uses during the 18th century were for moulds for cannon balls and other iron munitions, crucibles and lubrication for ship’s rigging. These uses gave the material immense value, £3,500 a ton being noted c.1800 [4]. The material led to the development of the Keswick pencil industry in the late 18th century with locally mined graphite being used for the best quality pencils until stocks were exhausted before the First World war, mining having ceased c.1891. Graphite occurs as pipes, lumps, nodules, sops or bellies up to 1m by 3m, often following quartz strings.

         [4] http://www.conistonlocal.co.uk/striking-black-gold-in-the-lakeland-fell-tops-1.692082?referrerPath=home

Seathwaite graphite was 98 per cent pure carbon and had a melting point of 3,927C. This made it wonderful for blacking fire grates but even better for greasing the blocks and pulleys on Royal Navy ships and for making rifles and canons fire faster and more accurately.

So important was this national resource that an Act of Parliament was introduced in 1752 to prevent the stealing of graphite. Among the punishments was transportation.

By 1800 graphite was worth £3,500 a ton and a time when lead was worth just £15 a ton and the average miner was earning a £1 a week.

Armed guards patrolled the mine site and miners were searched at the end of work to try and prevent pilfering – with limited success.

The pieces missed by the guards were sold at local pubs and possibly gave rise to the expression black market and to a wad of money.

Paper and Light

Almost everything now is drawn on translucent paper. The heavier and more transparent the paper, the better. It's a fragile surface, hates liquid, is unforgiving of creases or dents, but equally will take endless erasure and a very thick build-up of graphite. But that isn't the most important thing about it. It's about what's left free and empty and open.

In effect, I want the paper not to be a consideration, not to have tooth, or colour or presence, and transparent or translucent slick paper provides that 'thought-free' quality as well as giving a liquid, opalescent luminescence to the finished drawing, hovering behind the element doing all the work, the graphite.

"Milton", SWOON, 2009
Linoleum cut, on tracing paper on found door, hand-colored, signed, 221 x 93 cm
Exhibition: "SQUINCHES AND PENDENTIVES" 

I can't find any working artists using this paper for drawing as a finished piece. Plenty use it to make paper sculptures. A few use it for collage or assemblages, and it's cropping up in contemporary darkroom photography, but not simple drawing.

Updated...
So a few hours later the postman delivers my first tin of the Derwent XL graphite blocks whose novelty appealed and whose reality is simply, as my friend in the North would say, 'lush'. And on the tin is a graphite drawing by Ian Hodgson, a new name to me.

And I think, looking at this, here's someone who has really mastered graphite as a medium, in and of itself, soft and hard, shiny and dark, luminous and shaded. And that fingerprint? Apart from any other meaning, it's a frank statement of the hand-madeness of a drawing, the physical work that goes into real drawing like this, no short cuts, no technology. And his artist's statement contains a paragraph which is genuinely interesting:

 The drawing techniques that I use expose other, seemingly invisible layers, and here the drawing process acts as a metaphor for the physical and psychological experience of my journey, as fragments of what went before are revealed on the paper.

Translucent paper tends to leave behind the traces of what was there, even with erasure, since the drawing always has two sides. And the 'wrong' side can tell a more 'authentic' story about how the drawing came to be, through mistakes, changes and adjustments.

What monsters may come?

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Teaching Hamlet used to make me tired and bored. No effort seemed enough to prevent it becoming a seminar-by-numbers, about angst and revenge, procrastination and action, melancholia and sanguine heroism, fighting the tendency of teenagers to over-identify with Hamlet, his unloving mother and his unpleasant stepfather. It seemed a play of callowness, of tedious self-absorption, until Fortinbras arrives, deus ex machina, to tidy all that muddy psychodrama away with civic order.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is a story that could just have easily been told by Kafka, of the individual cut adrift, by virtue of education, geography, institutional drift and arbitrary power, left to stumble their way through half-lit corridors and shadowy motivations cloaked in obfuscating legalistic verbiage, unable to recognise landmarks, signs, the orientation of what once seemed transparent and right side up. Hamlet is Gregor Samsa or Josef K, cockroach or man on trial, awakening to a strangely changed reality. He sees differently. And is seen differently. That's all it takes to end up being killed by the regime.

Dwelling on the understanding of this process, that is what conjures up the monsters. 'Monster' is the name the regime gives to those who see differently. 'Monster' is a name for the nightmares that come when the regime turns its eye on you and finds you monstrous.

Horace's Eye

What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds that what is presented to the trustworthy eye.
                                                                         Horace

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part Three

If I have long been accustomed to having a very good visual memory, I now seem to have a far more acute case of synesthesia.

Pain is coloured. The constant companion ache comes in shades of violet, turning more greenish as the ache grows deeper and wider. The variable pain which is dazing and mutable comes in shades of orange, from a peach blush to a harsh neon, almost (confusingly) blinding. Shades of graphite grey are a sanctuary from riotous colourful pain, perhaps.

But, more importantly, the act of drawing something conjures its presence, be it fur or feathers, dry cracked paint, bark, thorns or hair on skin. The better the drawing the more acutely I can feel it under my finger tips. Tis a curious sensation, with seeing and feeling merging to become the self-same thing. This is new. Where before there was a huge gap between the looking and the act of the drawing that needed to be bridged, all calculated, grafted for, now touch, sight and motion are melded when a drawing is going well. But it only works with pencils. A seamless extension of the hand, no need to worry about replacing caps or some such thing. The immediacy of application, the lack of hesitancy, the reassurance of erasability, all contribute to a Thing which springs from a place where feeling and seeing become indistinguishable from one another.

Maybe it's some compensatory equivalent to going blind and having better hearing, that the correlation of being forced to be so aware of the body (hell, some days now I can feel each individual vertebra) is a heightened ability to feel other things in curious ways.

Dictum

Life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance.
                                                               Gauguin

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part Two

I thought I was attuned to the experience of being 'outside' of the inside, the working class oik at grammar school and university, bridging two worlds which did not understand each other; driven out of all the normal tropes of childhood by years of experiences of dark and depraved violence, knowing far too much about all the wrong things, acquiring a skill set no one should ever need; unapologetically a psychiatric patient, declining to hide behind the taboo.

And now I find I am being mocked in the street or on the bus by strangers, because my walking is so laboured, or glared at as if drunk or talked to as if retarded. And I'm slowly coming to realise this is a new outsider identity I've had forced on me - disabled.

I can be so slow about these things. I shouldn't be surprised. I've enough disabled friends through the years to know the reality, that people do stare, are rude, are discomforted by someone different or odd
looking and turn offensive from fear or anger. But all of a sudden it's me, quite proud of myself for having walked to the supermarket, who realises that there are a loving couple in their early 20s pointing and sniggering, while they mimic, sat down, my lurching shoulder movements. I stared back, she reddened and mumbled to him, they both looked away.

I've lost count of the number of times that shop assistants have waited for me to reach out for my change (or not waited and dropped it) while I try to say 'My arms don't go that far any more', and some will look at me like I'm being lazy or superior or maybe even racist, and then I'm leaving the shop humiliated, so useless I can't even collect my change without making a fuss. There's no dignity to this outsidership, no high ground of history to stand on, no narrative sense to transform it into resistance against lies and myths and ideology. I'm dragging around a hurting, broken carcass and the world wants an apology.

I am stuck with this reality defining the form of the art I can make, along with a host of other mundane stuff. I do not want it to define anything else about it. But that may be wishing thinking.

Ugh, self-pity is an ugly and worthless emotion.

NOT AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT Part One

This is the art of making the best of it.

The gap between what I would be doing if I were healthy and what I am doing is getting wider all the time. Accommodating the limitations imposed on me by my own corporeal existence means an endless series of compromises, negotiations and parallel solutions to make an equivalent of what I want to do.

I can't manipulate large pieces of paper at all so I have to work small. When your arms actually don't stretch wide enough to handle A3, the scale of the world shrinks.

Pain and weakness mean I can't apply sufficient pressure to the tools to make the etchings I would settle for making, let alone the woodcuts I long to make.

Myoclonic jerks mean I can't safely handle anything sharp or pointed, and anything involving wet media is asking for trouble.

One could, from a glass-half-full perspective, label it as necessity being the mother of invention. All last summer, immobilised and coming apart at the seams with pain, while waiting helplessly for Bill to complete his terrible passage to death, I drew. Every day, all day, with the 'humble' graphite pencil, between doses of dihdyrocodeine, I drew hundreds of things, without thinking, or judging or planning, stumbling or occasionally crawling between bed and desk in a drug and pain daze. I wasn't trying to do anything, learn anything, achieve anything, other than find something I could do which helped. And it did: when nothing else was making any sense, the drawing did. But I think I must have learnt stuff by default, by sheer quantity of doing.

It was the only source of sensory pleasure in my life for those months, holding a pencil, putting graphite on the paper. When every other thing about being a body was hard or disgusting or problematic, the physical act of drawing brought me joy. I had never been fond of the shinyness of graphite, still aren't to be honest, but there was something so seductive about the slickness of pencil on translucent paper (when the rest of me creaked and squealed and growled), combined with the ability to create areas of infinite faintness or a thick mat of graphite, which made the act of drawing and the drawings themselves into an arena of controlled manipulation and invention. I could make a world of my own with a pencil over which I could gain mastery, a curious combination of conquest and liberation.

Holding the pencil became a non-obvious act, since its position in the hand became important in making it do certain things. And short pencils became precious because they were useful in ways long pencils couldn't be.

I learnt about different ways of sharpening pencils - cone points and bullet points. Online shopping brought me different kinds of graphite tool, brands of pencil, graphite sticks and blocks and powder, since I was going through about a dozen pencils a week with ease. I never got picky or snobby about brands or series but discovered the strengths and weaknesses of each, how oily or crumbly they were, how well they adhered to slick paper, how variable the xB designations seemed to be.

But. With all that said, there persists that gap between ambition and actuality. Wishing won't change it. Nor will trying to override it. (I've tried both.) There sits in my head a sense of my self and my drawings not as artist and art but as a child playing with pencils. Yeah, yeah, I hear the objections, but sitting with a pencil in my fist drawing the things in my head makes my feel like a kid. And it's hard to view the products of the act as 'art'. I want them to be, I really do. I want to get better, to understand the medium I've got 'stuck with' and deploy it to its full extent. But ultimately I'm still the kid with the box of pencils and the drawings of her dreams.

Monsters (De)Forming at Dusk/Half-Way

This post has been in various states of incompleteness for several weeks, so I shall use it as a half-way, formative-assessment-directed reflection. 

 We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
   (T. S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding', Four Quartets)

How do I articulate what can seem so... fragile, flickering, intangible, un-graspable by a fist made of flesh or law? In infinite and shifting shades of graphite, it finds some degree of expression (there/not-there), ambiguous, delicate (or uncertain), blurred, smudged, indeterminate. In words, though, it's too clean, too up front. This, a fragment from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is some kind of approximation:

A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.

Approximations, like perception at twilight. No clean, cold, bright (illusory) knowing designed to warp the (self-)perception of the viewing subject. Not surveillance, surveys, clinical or legal judgements, objective evaluations, all tending towards suasion, herding the masses through inculcation, internalisation (no big sticks required).

It's not dawn (O brave new world...). It's crepuscular.

Eleanore Mikus, Tablet Litho #3 1968

'The worst/Are full of passionate intensity'. 'Look', say all the authoritarian politicians, when interviewed and challenged. Never 'Listen', always 'Look'. At what?

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~W. B. Yeats

This comes closest (linguistically):

I see well what limits my gaze; and it is precisely there, against those high insurmountable walls, that I like to get lost…

To give a name to this joy would be to mislay it … These are approximations because the mystery remains whole …

Writing. By tiny brushstrokes, tiny hard brushstrokes. Brevity, from the heart…

Shadows that arise and lie down as evening comes on, lengthening shadows that cross the hills and that I watch until they disappear, with a final leap, beyond the last ridge where I know that they will continue to break up and fade yet where also, it seems to me, inexplicably, a kind of speech gathers them together...

The wound at the edge of the heart, the tireless night cricket, and the sculpting of the sky amid the crackling of the solar grass are all nourished by the same hope…
(Poem Fragments by Pierre-Albert Jourdan)

  Or, more/most briefly, in Jourdan's words:

The abyss is likeable when you can find lodgings in it.

The slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was 'Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato' (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). Soon even this tiny nook in Blogland is likely to be drawn inside the state should I persist in mentioning contemporary news events. I shan't be seeking lodgings.

"Cut the Wires"

And so it begins:

Max Mosley, the former Formula One Boss turned privacy campaigner following a News of the Word sting, has told MPs he supports "cutting the wires" to internet sites who publish "the worst" pieces in breach of press regulation.

He was speaking alongside press regulation campaign group Hacked Off at Department of Culture, Media And Sport select committee into press regulation, 24 hours after MPs agreed a landmark Royal Charter.

 Favourite response, a tweet from Mark Wallace:

Quite quaint that Max Mosley seems to think that the internet works like a tin can telephone.

And one gloriously combative solution:

You newspapers know who the front-men are in Hacked Off and you know some of the backers. Let’s take a prominent example. Hugh Grant. Here’s what I would do right now if I were you. I’m speaking to all newspapers here. All you have to do is comply with his demand for privacy to the letter.

Delete every story in your archive that mentions his name.

Delete every photo of him in your database.

Delete every review of everything he has ever been in.

When reporting on Hacked Off in future, refer only to ‘a Mr. Grant’ and do not include a photo. Better yet, use a pixellated photo and caption it ‘blurred to respect Mr. Grant’s demand for privacy’. Even better yet, use a pixellated photo of Shrek.

Report nothing on the man in any way at all. Do not cover any films or other roles he appears in in the future. Show no pictures of him and do not mention him when reporting on any showbiz parties or awards ceremonies.

No matter how outrageously he behaves, don’t report it. Not one word. Even if he wins the Nobbly prize for unelected petty dictator of the year, don’t report a single word.
He says he wants privacy from the Press but really he wants you to report the good stuff and keep quiet about the bad stuff. Give him total privacy. Absolute and unconditional privacy. Report nothing at all about him, ever. Either you can report it all or you report nothing at all. Allow no middle ground.

That might learn his censorious, dictatorial little soul.

Witkin: un dialogue inédit

Joel-Peter Witkin: Enfer ou ciel / Heaven or Hell

Sous la direction d'Anne Biroleau

 

Présentation

 

^"Le photographe américain Joel-Peter Witkin élabore depuis près d’un demi-siècle une œuvre singulière et troublante. Troublante par l’univers intérieur qu’elle révèle, à la fois tourmenté, étrange, et habité par la certitude d’une réelle présence du divin. S’il se situe au plus près de l’humain en choisissant ses sujets dans des milieux marginaux ou aux pratiques extrêmes (transsexuels, adeptes du SM, malades mentaux, handicapés physiques), il transcende l’anecdotique et le spectaculaire : la gloire et la misère de la chair manifestent dans ses photographies une inquiétude métaphysique et philosophique, voire mystique, qui s’enracine dans l’immense culture artistique de Witkin.

L’occasion était belle de souligner ici cette circulation constante des thèmes, en faisant entrevoir la richesse et la diversité de la collection d’estampes de la Bibliothèque à travers une cinquantaine de gravures précieuses, dans un dialogue inédit et fécond avec l’œuvre du photographe : Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, Rops, Picasso, Ensor…

Cette confluence des influences revendiquées et du travail de la photographie comme collage, comme palimpseste (avec ses grattages, déchirures, abrasions du négatif, appositions de filtres et d’obstacles divers entre le support et l’agrandisseur) donne naissance à une œuvre qui se situe dans la grande lignée de Sade, de Bataille et aussi des mystiques chrétiens. "

 

Witkin claims that his vision spring from an episode he witnessed as a young child, an automobile accident in front of his house in which a little girl was decapitated.

It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it -- but before I could touch it someone carried me away".

^{When you learn early in life that heads may fail to stay attached to their bodies, very little is likely to seem obvious or stable.}

Goya's Last Caprice

ununmbered plate from Goya's Disasters of War

Goya's handwritten draft title of the volume now known as Disasters of War was Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Amongst three unnumbered etchings gathered at the end of the sequence is the one above, usually labelled 'Proud Monster' or 'Fierce Monster', and usually placed first of the three, followed by the two concerning Truth. One of the 'emphatic caprices', all of which are connected by some element of allegory, there is a double ambiguity here, both in the nature of the creature itself (which finds a curious echo in the Montauk Monster), and in the direction of the bodies of humans in its maw - are they being devoured or disgorged?

Barbers Again

Soldiers - don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you - who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers - don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty. ('Barber' speech from The Great Dictator)

On not tolerating intolerance

It's the ultimate modern shibboleth. We've passed far beyond the quotation attributed (in The Friends of Voltaire, 1906, by S. G. Tallentyre) to Voltaire, that 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'. Now it runs 'I disapprove of what you say because it hurts my or someone else's feelings and I demand something be done to shut you up and make you pay!'.

'Hate Speech' is the new lucrative and exciting area for the state and the law(yers) in which to spread their tentacles. Saying hateful/hurtful words now appears to be a more serious crime, in terms of sentencing, than actual physical hurtful acts. Whatever happened to pointing and laughing at idiots as a way of dealing with their idiocy?

On 27 February 2013 the Canadian Supreme Court explained why expressions of intolerance are intolerable:

Hate speech is an effort to marginalize individuals based on their membership in a group. Using expression that exposes the group to hatred, hate speech seeks to delegitimize group members in the eyes of the majority, reducing their social standing and acceptance within society. Hate speech, therefore, rises beyond causing distress to individual group members. It can have a societal impact. Hate speech lays the groundwork for later, broad attacks on vulnerable groups that can range from discrimination, to ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence and, in the most extreme cases, to genocide. Hate speech also impacts on a protected group’s ability to respond to the substantive ideas under debate, thereby placing a serious barrier to their full participation in our democracy. (h/t Reason)

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision that punishing a man for expressing disapproval of homosexuality is perfectly consistent with freedom of expression...subject to 'reasonable limits' upheld the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruling against Bill Whatcott, who in 2001 and 2002 distributed flyers condemning the normalization of homosexuality in public schools. The  Tribunal ordered Whatcott to pay a $17,500 fine and to stop handing out anti-gay literature, citing a provincial law banning material that 'ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of' people based on various prohibited criteria, including sexual orientation. The Supreme Court concluded that two of Whatcott's flyers, headlined 'Keep Homosexuality out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools!' and 'Sodomites in our Public Schools', were hateful enough to be banned:

Passages of these flyers combine many of the hallmarks of hatred identified in the case law. The expression portrays the targeted group as a menace that threatens the safety and well-being of others, makes reference to respected sources in an effort to lend credibility to the negative generalizations, and uses vilifying and derogatory representations to create a tone of hatred. The flyers also expressly call for discriminatory treatment of those of same‑sex orientation.  It was not unreasonable for the tribunal to conclude that this expression was more likely than not to expose homosexuals to hatred.

The court said prohibiting such speech 'balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'.

But the cognitive dissonance of this apparently doesn't hurt the brains of the Court's judges as it does mine. I've met many Mr Whatcotts over the years, with sandwich boards and flyers, telling me that I'm going to Hell. Unless any of them had actually hit me with a sandwich board or tried to force feed me a flyer, it would never have occured to me to phone the police and whine about hurt feelings. Because, oddly, the Mr Whatcotts also have 'the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'. To stand outside in all weathers and risk mockery and attack means, if nothing else, that he really believes what he says.

But only selected groups get awarded the right to never be offended without recompense. In victimhood poker I hold a high value hand. But playing it would make me that most regrettable creature, a government pet. Coddled, protected, performing tricks on command or risking being put out in the back yard. Thanks, but no thanks.