They take death as their bride

Wrench-snatched from the rapacious hands of slow to start
Imperial Germany, Imperial England Victorious gave
To ever obedient Australia this tasty morsel of colonial
Land. The Trust Territory of New Guinea.
And Nauru Pleasant Phosphate Island, a second morsel to be savoured
And shared joint exploitation ANZAC & England. Captured, bypassed
Wither on the vine. And abused by the great torn up emptied.
And in 1989 Australia was sued for damages done to the island;

Islands placed in our trust as a token
North East quadrant of sun swaying dreams.
Bird of paradise dancing warriors, emerald snails,
Fruit bats and friar birds. Crystalline
Wave against wave, shore against shore
Ruinous trust curse, for us and our children and
Our children's children.
Bismark blood and Ironbottom sound sea
Not enough, never enough to compensate
Slaughters of Flanders and the Troad.
For the damage done to our desires.

And Little Billy told Wilson and Goerge
and all the rest “
Strategically the northern islands
(such as New Guinea)
Encompass Australia
Like fortresses.
They are as necessary
To Australia
As water to a city. “

And the ruling bourgeoisie more and more seeks salvation in fascism.
And in 1942 when the inevitable war with Imperial Japan came,
A handful of diggers and a radio tower on Manus.
Air raids and bombings and then a landing, and the diggers
Dove into the bush, destroying all the could not carry
Private Coker commented
"A hand-grenade,
and run like hell,
did the trick!"

And fighting the jungle and malaria.
Lieutenant Palmer
(cited for the Military Medal)
“He was unable to walk for several weeks
For severe septic infection on his arms and legs”
“Weakness due to several attacks of malaria.”
SO
They carried him out.
And Lance-Corporal McLean
Took command the four man patrol &
Found the Lutheran Mission firmly
In Japanese hands. So they beat it out of there
Fortuitous, heavy, jungle obscuring rain
And the relentless beating sound
Of rain rain rain pounding covered the retreat.
Through swamp and jungle and cutting grass
And illness and starvation, and then on boats
The sailed the IJN cruised sea
And overland and over mountains
And final hope home Cairns in May.

The ruling bourgeoisie are trying to solve The problem of markets
By enslaving the weak nations,
By intensifying colonial oppression &
Repartitioning the world anew by means of war.

Finally February leap year day 29 1944
Diggers and Doughboys crawling up the Solomons Islands
And the Trust Territories landed Manus Island.
Guadalcanal, Milne Bay, Buna, The Bismark Sea, Lae,
Rabaul, Scarlet Beach, Kokoda. Diggers and Doughboys.
ANZAC sad sack dog faced privates fought with
Bayonet and machine gun and flame thrower and demo charge
And grenade and shovel and cannon and aircraft and bare hand.
And the things they saw and did died
Broke them 1000 yard shell shock stare.

Crawling mud, roaring insect, snake bite green hell jungle.
Pushing back venal bestial racist fascist
Anti-comintern ideology. Rolling back the fascist
Offensive. Manus Island attacked, and shortly recaptured.

Well, now time passed and now it seems.
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves.
Walking around with no one else.

Dreams of a land without the others, dreams of an end to history
And end to the stresses and uncertainties of capitalism.
Dreams of an obsolete discredited ideology.
Old man old school old timey dreams of controlling the external.
Dreams that somehow it will end differently, that we can close
Our eyes and everything will somehow be all right.
Fearful thoughtless dreams, relaxed and comfortable.
RATHER -

Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.

And now we can imagine on this very same spot -- wild eyed
Dare-death opium and hunger fuelled banzai attack
Shooting from the hip and shouting loud the Japanese Marines
Fall upon the position. Hacking and attacking and striking out
In all directions. Indiscriminate. And after the smoke and noise
Littered broken bodies of empty dreams the result of lies, a cynical
Grab-lust for power. Unbridled chauvinism. Rabid reaction.
Predatory war.

And then, as if a final spitting in our face
Historic irony, it was here, when we almost half-believed
In a new world, in a better world,
In a world that does not resort to war
And endless horror.
It was here on Manus
In 1950 Australia held the last trials
Japanese war criminals.

And did those geebungs and dubbos, did those inner city hooligans
Signing up for adventure, signing up for their first pair of shoes,
In fear and bravado, did they, shivering in their watery slit trenches;
Did they do all this, so much waste and horror, did they liberate
The camps so that now we too can have camps?

to mix art with activism

In the distance is the city, hidden from view.

K9 moved back into the combat area – Standing now in the Chinese youth sent the resistance message jolting clicking tilting through the pinball machine – Enemy plans exploded in a burst of rapid calculations – Clicking in punch cards of redirected orders – Crackling shortwave static – Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeep – Sound of thinking metal – “Calling partisans of all nations – Word falling – Photo falling – Break through in Grey Room – Pinball led streets – Free doorways – Shift coordinate points –”

Nova Express. Burroughs

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Estranged Labour. Marx.

---

My four days of mona foma.

I was fortunate enough to get a festival pass to the 2014 mona foma. And so my thoughts.

Fishing boats high hot summer evening - wave upon wave fractal innumerable myriad. Ole timey working working places. The mystique of the proletariat. Sail boats sailing along the the setting sun wind.

So what did I like about the festival? The bands, the music. While I did not love everything I saw, and while I was not able to see every event, I have to say there was nothing I saw that was terrible; nothing I saw did not deserve to be there.

But the absolute highlights for me had to be Sun Ra Arkestra, The Julie Ruin, and the Ada Project. There were several acts that I was unfamiliar with and I was very glad to have had the exposure. I also greatly enjoyed The Ada Project. So much so that I saw it four times!

There was, as I said, very little I did not like. And the things I did not like, were more my perception as opposed to the music being made. For example I am not a great fan of the techno dance sort of sound. So I tried to understand the acts in what they were trying to do, more than what I would have liked them to do.

It is to the credit of the hundreds of staff that organise these events that very little went wrong. There was a slight hiccup on the first night, when the scanner had difficulties reading my ticket. But on subsequent days there was no issue. I am sure there where a few back stage dramas, but as a viewer I knew nothing of that, and things seemed to flow quite easily from one act to the next. Food and drinks were plentiful if a tad pricey, but not so much that one would think it was out of the ordinary. If one did not care about alcohol, and wanted to get a juice, there was no line and it was easy to purchase. I did notice some very long lines, but as it was not me waiting...

So at best only minor things went wrong, at least from an outsiders point of view, so any complaints are more in the category of quibbles and not complaints. Hats off the the many staff who worked on the stalls, and collected tickets and etc, as much as the musicians, this regiment of staff should be seen as integral to the smooth functioning of the festival. Or as Brecht said in his poem A Worker Reads History, “Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army?”

What would I change? I found the MAC Backstage room to be a stuffy, anxiety creating venue. This could have been just me, as the room was often filled with people, digging the music, bopping and having fun. Some people have complained about the ticketing and entry for the Faux Mo nightclub. I admit I did not attend this so I can not comment, but will note it as something I heard.

The smithies, working in the forecourt to create looped beats and a metal sculpture, were a great hit. As much as the work they were doing was interesting in itself, they also provided a focus for the gathering crowd. I was a bit surprised as to how little the forecourt was used by the event. To my mind there seems no reason why it could not be filled with local performers, buskers, fire eaters, spoke word artists and the like. This would provide an outlet for local artists, as well as giving them a bit of encouragement, and would also give spectators more fuel to allow them to speculate, and recharge.

And of course the main change I would make, would be to somehow make the event more woman friendly. I would like to see, in future festivals, something like one day of the four day festival be given over to only female artists. I know that some will say “ Do we have to have this discussion again?” While others can say the exact same thing, but with a slight change in emphasis and so “Do we have to have this discussion again?” But one only has to look at the program and see the overwhelming preponderance of male artists. Well over half were male, or male dominated performances. With only a few breaking this penile mold. The fact that The Julie Ruin was one of the few shows bent towards women proves in a rather ironic way this truth.

I know that such a suggestion would be controversial. But to me any back lash to the idea of creating a more gender balanced event would again prove the truth.

What did the festival make me think about? One thing that jumbled around my brainpan was the idea of the distinction between (for lack of better words) music driven and word driven music. Music driven seems to flow more organically and more freely, more like the proverbial river. With lyrics there seems to be more of an architectural feel, the music is built up around a scaffolding of words. Maybe a thing to do would be to investigate incorporating improvisational lyrics into songs.

I was to a certain extent disappointed with some of the electronic boyz and the sounds they were making. It seems to me, and I am happy to be proven wrong, that with all the computing power at hand, with the vast of array of electronics willing to due the maestro's bidding that something better than a constant pumping 1,2,3,4 beat could be found. It seems to me that we have the ability to make electric music that sounds like angels signing. There is no need for a beat, as the computer will never miss. I want something to dance to that is different. Of course the crowd went wild, so who the hell do I know. I did, for example, like the poly-rhythmic sounds of HIVE, their use of old and new ways to produce music.

In a similar vein the festival made me think and cower in wonder at the process. A puff of air, the vibration of a string or skin, the rush of electrons. More a way things happen, than a thing. Nothing but vibrations. Resonance. And I can not even find the words to describe the flow of images and thoughts that crowded my mind, like the crowded venue floor, surging and swaying. From almost nothing comes music, in the way that a monsoon is little more than warm moist air rising from the ocean, so to the music is simply the vibrations moving through the air. And both the storm and music emerge from the chaos become so much more.

Over the four days of the festival the temperature rose and fell here in Hobart. Dangerous climate conditions caused distress on the mainland. Bushfires burnt up the east coast of the big island.

Daily the news spoke of increasing confrontation in the northern seas. Shots were fired across the bow of ships filled with children.

Compassion is becoming a dirty word. The assault, the counter revolution, is gathering pace. Education and disability care, and education are all in the firing line. Same sex marriage is being brushed aside, howled down in a mocking chorus of convenient morality. The “be excellent to one another” idea of Jesus is being ignored, and in America anyway there is talk to rewriting the bible more in line with tea party politics.

We are trading our freedoms for the idea of an illusionary choice. Are we to control the machines, or are we to be controlled? Are we to simply be an adjunct to the machine, or the machines to liberate us. Computer technology in many ways starkly shows the Marxist idea of alienation, of working people building a productive capacity is which is then used against them. A vast network of control that can constantly monitor citizens. The greatest, never tiring, surveillance network every made. Is this to be our future? Should we not make the machines work for us? Maybe lower the hours of work to only 20 hours a week, allowing more time for creation of life, family, of art.

The PM is off skiing in France, while the media slumbers contently after a long and tiring campaign of social control.

We live in an age of urgencies. We are hurtling headlong into a crisis, into the abyss. I felt that foma missed the opportunity to highlight these urgencies. I did not see all the bands, so I may have missed some important things. Most of the acts I saw at best only hinted at, or spoke indirectly about what is to be done. From what I saw only The Julie Ruin seemed willing to discuss directly the problems we face, and to offer some sort of a solution.

The solution being to mix art with activism, to build community.

Penna Mona Penna

---

The three girls were sick, that left us boys to go to see Theatre of the World at MONA by ourselves. Nothing too bad, just colds and general sleepy day dreamy lethargy.

I had no reason to set the GPS. I did it, more than anything, out of habit, and a childish love of all things geek. When I glanced at the clock for the first time it was 12:34. Adding to ten this is my favourite time of the day. A cheery wizard omen. The theatre of clearing and forgetting. The second part of The Beatles White Album looms exactly to fit into the ride from Penna to MONA. From Birthday to Good Night.

And the divine divide is almost as beautiful as the study and the seat of the Muse is in some ways more beautiful, less beautiful, more disturbed by human hand, lest disrobed. Clear and disturbing obscure as uncensored night time visions. Coal Valley. Duck Hole Rivulet. Grasstree Hill Road. Sad jet faced microbe slow eating constant chewing fat black daughters of Hathor. On the side of the road they strand watching dozy dreamy wise the cars slowly fade into the past. The valley rich in sheep . Dull brown native hens greedy scratch at new sown fields green. And the valley rich in grape vines opens out from the crest of the ridge bright yellow and belligerent green new and fertile sweet and rich in abounding mechanic fields of industrial onion and lettuce and potato and the shiny green glade of fresh shown newly rained rapidly will to power to the sun loving grasping striving unto the sun and the former and shaper of life one earth and we are but interlopers and the wind through the trees and Henry Reynolds tells us the cries of dead rattle the trees. Without integrity...not a nation , but a community of thieves to listen to Xavier Herbert.

Mountains rise dreamy sheer a curtain wall of fear of multistoried green multihued mystery winding gear grinding curves of wide sweeping turns from the bend of the cutting. Deep dark gullies of eternal winter cold and damp and moss and the hilltops open to the warmth and the hilltops are drier. Round and round slow and lazy like time to observe and reveal all things hawks gliding to the swerve of the rising warm air and helical. And she missiles down from out of the sun talons extended and flashing bright and shinysharp and uncaring to kill the rabbit. For the weak must die. She has her own fingerlings to consider.

The factions and parties and elements are slipping apart and some called for civil union but equality like the call of accretion must be universal and absolute, or it shall not be at all. There can be no second rate no back of the bus no separate but equal and some brag of more or better morals the antiother.

Down down downity. Down shifting the hill glistening of the engine car ear aware of the sounds of human hand and mind made solidreal. The latest and the greatest. Down to Risdon Cove flat spongy sword beach of genocide invasion landing place. Flat past the sea historic ghost storey whipping post Richmond captive fictional Ikey Fagin named Artful Oliver oil twist and my baby girl not five years old was too scared to visit the gaol winding roads whaling rows windy ways sky sea sandy land matrix free hand mountain line steam smoke nickel smelter steam snow mountain cloud gathering oaken river wide and windy white capped waves  medieval tortured winter mandatory grapes cut down to silent size put in their prayerplace Mt Wellington gloomy table top overseeing Father cape town stern block head wooden top Pertrloo hero fire and smoke and soft spreading bullets tearing. And as we climb down the hill helter skelter the thin smelter yellowing mould wound in the corner of the we got trouble river city. The glue turns dry and brittle and the wall paper comes away from the wall and extends slow slowly. It lives. A nightmare of history. Unable to awake.

All for one and one for all for we are the mighty talon mighty  extending sweeping eagle eyed from silent down the sky unseen unheard hawks. And it all went off down urine one sixty pint of glumness rock on and bright orange vomit sort of an evening now a night of the book and a book of the night. Of dreams and absurd history culture 20 000 years and more and we are now fine again awake. The heartening of dreams and forgetting of horseshoe crab nightmares and turtles and stuffed open mouthed talon flashing fury of idioms messaging owls and glassy eyed Whiteley stare starting out opium calendar bay blue laden whirly surrealist shapes and pig cashable Normandy battle brash smooth stones loved. Hunks of hacked hair felt and simulated. Conversing with a stranger passion and the bluest cobalt blue excitement.

The Beatles White Album, the watusi second half from Birthday to Good Night almost the twist exact equity the time my house to old and new. Walking running playing dafter and son giggling imaging extending the iron work cement truck and here is where the rockets go. They make the truck go fast. Waiting Ticketing. High ceiling entrance. Down dark circle cycle stairs descending Dantesque subversive divine adult Disneyland comedy the walls hewn from bedrock the sewage tunnel hallway. Dystrophic future exoplanet factory setting. Addams family Gomez Cara Mia Crimea love house of rooms and arsenic and old lace old timey duchess and cabinets milk and ice cream mixed merchant seaman ti jean would scrapyard understand garage sale helter skelter football pell mell bob tail and tag rag and bone man Steptoe Sanford salvage and sons big fat timey wimey wibbly wobbly of next to next of side by side contrast and compare kaleidoscope that got away from me...

Radical harkening back to old stool timey museums set commode of the muses receding the circles of hell deep and deep dark dank past Tantalus...dug the ell-square pitkin. Poured we libations unto each the dead. Ply upon ply. Speaking to the shades shaking afore the shadows of what once was shades of long gone languages and spirits and gods and spirits and nymphs and each one alive and with a soul the river the tree the rock the prey the corn plundered gold rush the rubber terror or the sheep's back land grab given away not legal and the sealers mad the whalers and sooners and guano diggers and the carpet bagging money grubbers seizers of power and diverters of language. And now no more, so much no more. Never again. No more stories nor dreams. At the heart of this terror of smallpox gonorrhoea the bible bile and the boozy beggar bottle cheater of the ruse flag of the crafty one. No one despondent of Calypso pour libations and for the great king of the world of the world of protective mother and wavy cephalopod love unto fiery death no more and the pope sits in the frozen circle plug of icy cold hell as the mutinous angel Lucifer squats and farts for all time. No more. Gone for all time. Theatre of forgetting and bringing back to life with blood and wine to dialogue and which hand held this and painted this and concerned this. What maker?

Old skool nauseam and sacred silent place of dreamy wavy gravy chaired learners with pinned horseshoe crabs from boyhood home and crucified butterflies and great busted open shingle crystalline random slabs of geology and taxonomy on mortified branches well practiced taxidermy twittering birds of shimmering garish colour. The ordered shiny bugs the squatting ghouls and luck bringing fetish. Next to the this very afternoon up to date.  The cataloguing of the rapidly changing diving world the voice stifled the songs no longer sung. The craft left to gather dust of disuse. Lonely in drying drawers of humidity contoured basements. The counting and cataloguing of bumps and blemishes and gall shaped wounds to separate the ocean from the insane. The moving forward.

Dark and sharp labyrinth. Dedalus crafty artificer. The beast born of god ordained insane bestial coupling. Dedalus built wide shining apparatus Pasiphae Hathor white armed fine ankled cow eyed Hera. Kandinsky abreast side by side by Sondheim. Limestone CO2 hieroglyphics magic writing who carved and penned and concealed sanctified symbols and independent totem colour. Here Picasso and his mistress Dora Maar are the unwobling pivot. The masques of differing volume and intent and the modern up to date.  Rootless? Nihil tradition bebound to Beefheart repeat or to Stardust shock or simply to bore Joe six pack. Glad dark not glade gas candle optic illusion. Illusory sphere of light to passion and to touch to put out ones mind hand. Cretan octopus sarcophagus motif wide brawny curvy lines likes the roads that curve and wonder and switchblade jack knife through low hanging fruit mountain cutting hills.

Countless flies stuck to canvas thick and glittering bright in the light french polish of beetle wings cracking gold like the flowers like the darling daughter of Psapfo. Three photos put together a naked man lining down. Headless. A tiger on the prowl Flashman glaring at the Victorian viewer muggings ready to pounce. A group of world war soldiers shooting at an unseen enemy. The shoddier comrades all behind a quick thrown together barricade. Haystacks like the ones Monet painted, now lit by rifle shot and the angry flames jumping from seventy five millimetre hell mouth rapid fire cannon. A foot stool of a young woman crouched foetal ball disturbed the boy and resulted in a quick move to view the hand made Mercedes Benz  inspired coffin.

Cackle my unknown subscription to the redirection pleasures binary and cuneiform next to next face to face toe to toe heart to heart lumber up limbo down absorbing the beauty with my locked embrace stumble round eyes. Ancient some 4000 years ago what hand held and made what school boy held the stylus and when did she cut the shapes and words meaning numbers Krypteia secret codes of the precision caste. To dominate and monopolise knowledge of things that are and are not.

Tales of the ATO MONA send the messages atwitter and face book abuzz with abused bit and bytes and I let my small voice be heard in supporting the gallery.   And this. For the exhibit spoke to many of the things I hold close. The Greeks Joyce Hegel the helix the making of connections the tendrils of chemical interplay stretching and grasping one anointer skipping and sliding away and deforming in an instant and voices like my name being called in the wind. So the drunken liberal rush of drooling words and the droogy eruptions and wandering cul-de-sac rocks and the curves and the winding roads. This should not be viewed as criticism, I am not in a position to discuss the works from any sort of a mechanical point of view. However I can embellish the passage I made with my son through the gallery. I have tried to use words to dissemble the key features of the exhibit. This is a document of my impressions of the exhibit. The words are meant to convey the synaptic freeing of firing connections, to show the ramshackle exploration of making. Content and connection yet lacking in context notably a political narrative.

The grand knock 'em down fight to the finish no hold barred nature nurture. For we are, the philosopher wrote a species whose nature it is to be artificial. The great and melancholic Dane, sobbing into frigid Elsinore blasts. Down the generations down the centuries. if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all -- what then would life be but despair? It is up to use to make the connections for ourselves, Theatre of the World invites us to, nay compels us to make connections.

The nine year old boy was able to pronounce the exhibit wizard.  As the mind of the child is still growing still plastic and striving after connection, how better to wander an exhibit of connections, but with a child.

My concerns are small and relate to context in the main. No political thread to allow us to return from the depth of the Minotaur born of sexual perversion and madness entombing labyrinth.

None to follow. The artists have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. We are left wondering, what is to be done?

Back to home threading the narrow town streets helter skelter smelter and the bridge and the airport and the pitt water and the mountains reflecting the sunset lagoon pinks and blues and browns and greens blurring the marriage of heaven and hell.

---

Dream Factory Manifesto

---

How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.

Erida - Goddess of Strife

---

A couple of paragraphs from the Iliad. Two sections where we see the external nature of war. Of how the feelings of soldier are manipulated by larger forces. In this case the will of Zeus, but let us see it as a metaphor for our society, where War seems natural and opposing your neighbour passes for society. I used more words in these translations, as it was important to create some context for the passages, as we are only dealing with a few lines out of over 15,000 in the epic.

Book IV of the Iliad, Strife and Fear and panic stricken rout arise with Strife and discord. A love of the sound of battle of the clots of blood. She spreads discord and strife among Charming Ilios and the Danaoi. Strife starts off little and then grows; until, with feet striding the land her head is in the heavens. And I am reminded of the blood lust of my fellows and the generals and politicians and the perverters of language, and the mockers of democracy and how we must honour our dead by keeping the wars going. So strife feeds on strife and storms the very gates of heaven, suffocating in blind remorseless fury, the children of the poor.

I am sure one who is smarter than I am will find a deep misogynist strain in Homer, and his feminising of discord. As for myself, I struggle with simple translations.

Book 4 starting line 439

Some are called forth by Ares, some by iron eyed
Athena. So arises Fear and panic stricken
Terror. And Strife who desires cruelty,
Sister and concubine of Ares destroyer of men.
Small she is, to start, armed, but soon
Her head rises to the heavens. Across the land
She strides. She spews strife to all sides
Equal, as she goes among the tumult,
Increasing the lamentations of men.

---

Book XI of the Iliad. Those who feel that history is made by great men, and that history appears as a series of wars and violence will find much to hardened their positions by reading this epic. It seems to me wrong to discuss the Iliad with modern eyes, as the poem seems to me to be denying modernist ideas of free will. In the beginning of book eleven the Achaeans have suffered badly at the hands of the Trojans, and many are dejected. It is the plan of Zeus that the war continue. He sends Strife down to the encampment and she screams and fills the hearts of the army with hatred, with love of battle, sweeter even then the thought of going home.

Book XI starting line 14

And then Erida rose to her full height -
Eyes dripping blood. She called out great
And terrible. Penetrating into the hearts
Of the Achaeans. At once war become
Sweeter than going back in the hollow
Ships to the beloved land of their families.

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Can we see our own throwness in the works of Homer? Torn asunder from our beloved land we are captivated by our supposed freedom. The power of Capital toys with our lives, in a similar way to how Zeus toyed with warring Greeks and the Trojans. He set them to strife and even goaded them to second effort when they began to falter. This was his plan, Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth. War was his answer, and it was only too easy for him to find willing accomplices in their own extinction. As it is only too easy to find today many who wish for war, and forsake multilateral solutions and worship at the cenotaph. Empty tombs of the empty lives of our dead, honoured by old men. Or as Lenin said there was no crisis from which the bourgeoisie could not escape provided the working class was prepared to pay the price.

We are not as superstitions as the ancients, but we still sacrifice our children on hard stone altars, praying for a wind that will blow an invisible hand onto our scales, allowing us to fight our enemies, and to gain great wealth. It is, of course, wrong to see Capital as a supernatural power. Yet for the vast herd that roams the land having no understanding of what drives them, no grasp of simple history, of how the world became this way, having nothing but disdain for the workings of the scientific method, knowing nothing of the intricate web of interconnected wealth which builds up the foundations of everyday life, and of thought itself, they act and move as if controlled by far off gods who drink and love and mock the tiny ones who live not a true human life, but rather a shadowy passing of time. Lacking above all curiosity and imagination.

And yet both the Gods of the old days, and the Wealth of our modern age, are nothing if not our creation, the common structure and therefore the common inheritance of countless hands and hearts and minds.

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The image is Achilles getting new armour from his mother. He is going back to war Why? His friend was killed, and the only way to honour his death is to add to the pile of death.

War and Anti War

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I was reading an only moderately interesting book about the Trojan War. Among the cliches of a conflict of cultures and the battles of East and West, I came across some good quotes from out of Homer.

So like a good little geek, I had no choice to look up the original, and make a stab at translation. Mucking around a bit with what I ended up with, lead me to this two little pretend imagist works posted here.

These lines are Odysseus speaking to Agamemnon. Things are not going well for the Greeks. Odysseus lets his captain know that this is the lot of soldiers, and they will have to fight until they die. He seems to be pointing to the cruelty of the gods and their callous disregard for human life. Maybe we can see the gods as standing in for the historic and economic forces in our lives, and how it can seem to the unexplored mind that war is natural and a normal part of life.

When in fact we all know that it is possible to end war.

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(Iliad Book 14.86)

This Zeus has assigned.

We are to endure,
From insolence
Into grey age,
Painful war,

Until we perish.
Everyone.


In this second quote, Odysseus is even more clear as to who should wear the blame for the war. It is clearly the work of the gods, and Zeus in particular. He seems to see the war as a toy of the gods, and the death of the many as being of no importance to the deathless ones.

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(Odyssey 14.235)

Along this hateful path
Far sounding Zeus
Led many
Knee bent men
To their death.

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The image depicts the battle about the body of Patroclus, and is from a greek vase. More can be found here
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/BattlePatroclus.jpg

A free and frank city

The Suppliants: lines 399 - 408



Herald:

Who is the ruler of this land?
To which one shall I announce
The proclamation of Creon?

He has mastery of the lands
Of Cadmus, since Eteocles
Died under the blows of his own
Brother Polynices, outside
Thebes of the seven towers.


Theseus:

You begin your tale
Falsely, stranger,
Seeking tyrants here.

Not for us the authority
Of one man, rather we are
A free and frank city.

The people rule and are ruled
In yearly turns. And what's more wealth
Will not grant you the most, for even
With the day labourer are they equal.

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Theseus killed the Minotaur. He became one of heroes who brought the Greeks into the light, into the world of the city.

I was struggling my way through the final chapter of "Politics in the Ancient World" by M.I. Finley, when he quoted from the Euripides play "The Suppliants." Anything to have a break from the arid style of the former Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. And anything in these dreary days of apathy across the Angloshpere that speaks to progressive ideas is a boon.

Knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and with more enthusiasm than fluency, I dove into an attempt at translation.

I used ruler as opposed to tyrant in the first line, as I wanted to see this brief exchange as a critique on our own democracy. Euripides himself was both a supporter and critic of democracy. This is as it should be, criticism and self criticism. I thought it was important to use the world frank to describe the free city of Theseus. The phrase in the original is eleuthera polis, which means free city. I thought I had to go deeper, as it seems as if free is a heavily loaded word, one which means many different things to different people, one that over the years has lost some of it's lustre. A few of the synonyms for eleuthera included free, liberal, open, unencumbered, open to all, as well as my final choice of frank. One of the positive features of Athenian democracy was the idea of frank speech, even if only in theory. A citizen who was to speak before the assembly was expected to speak truthfully, including being truthful with themselves. This what is meant by the motto "Know thyself." How much this was actually followed in daily life I dare not say. Australians only have to look at their own mythology of mateship and the fair go to make their own conclusions as to how moderate and self aware the Ancient Greeks really were.

Beyond the 'woolly' idea of being able to speak frankly in the assembly, this simple exchange allows us to sneak a peek between the curtains, into a window on Athenian democracy in action. The people rule and are ruled in yearly turn. The citizens are expected to rule, to take an active part in the actual running the government, as well as debating and voting on policy and strategy. Ruling and ruled in turn. Beyond what we learn from Euripides, we know that Athenian democracy included payment for work done for the state, as well as the use of lotteries to allocate positions. Citizens were questioned before they took up their appointed roles, and reviewed at the end of the yearly appointment. We also know, if only negatively from the constant complaints of the literate aristocrats, that democracy in Athens was for a time extended to the lower classes, the rowers and the day labourers. Side by side with the well born the day labourer was expected to speak, and his speech was expected to be heard. Again as to how equal the assembly really was, I dare not say. It does seem as if the sheer expense of the political contest, as well as the large size of some electorates, act as a ration card for political activity by the great majority of people. Lotteries also seem to have an advantage, in that it would be harder for positions to ossify, as they do in our current regime. Lotteries and fixed terms form all positions would end the idea of people being in parliament as a career.

With the current impasse in politics in the West, any idea that extends the ideas of democracy is worth thinking about and discussing.

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Pic from: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/gallery/theseusminotaur.jpg