READING ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

The reader likes the name: Zygmunt Bauman. It has a sci-fi twang to it, though Zygmunt Bauman is very much a writer working now. He is an Emeritus (retired) Sociology professor in Leeds (53 degrees North, 1 degree West), a city in central England with a museum to the work of sculptor Henry Moore and a soccer team known for it's passionate supporters.

The reader likes the name of the book.

Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?

The reader likes the words 'Few' and 'Us' and, in particular, likes the fact that the title is in the form of a question.

The book is short. Not like the more famous and more widely read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, which covers much of the same ground. The reader rates brevity.

Zygmunt Bauman is not convinced of the benefits of continuing economic growth. He goes back to John Stuart Mill in 1848 for the wisdom that

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement.

Zygmunt Bauman is not the first and won't be the last thinker to zone in on 'wealth distribution' not 'wealth creation' as the major problem facing the world.

Indeed, nearly all the increase in the gross national product that has been achieved in the US since the credit collapse in 2007, more than 90 percent of it, has been appropriated by the richest 1 per cent of Americans.

This is true not only in America. The reader senses that the word 'gross' is ironically appropriate and enjoys the two uses of the word 'appropriate'.

Zygmunt Bauman cites four tacit presumptions commonly accepted as 'obvious' (needing no proof) for the way that we live now and are predetermined to live forever.

Economic Growth is the only way to handle our problems.

Perpetually rising consumption is the most effective way to gratify the human pursuit of happiness.

Inequality of humans is natural.

Rivalry is a necessary and sufficient condition of social justice.

Zygmunt Bauman argues against each of the presumptions in turn, using inequality studies by diverse writers such as James B. Davies, Jeremy Warner, Stewart Lasnsey, Glen Firebaugh, Francois Bourguignon, Joseph E. Stiglitz and, perhaps his favourite, Daniel Dorling. The notes at the back of the book offer plenty of possibilities for further reading.

Instead it (economic growth) portends for an already overwhelming and fast-rising number of people yet deeper and starker inequality, a yet more precarious condition and so also more degradation, chagrin, affront and humiliation – an ever tougher struggle for social survival.

The reader enjoys the language. Using words like 'chagrin' and 'affront' in a book of political economy and philosophy pleases the reader. The book is rigorous and argumentative, but also engaging. Some of the sentences are overly long and occasionally infelicitous, but overall it's a good – short – read.

Does Zygmunt Bauman offer a response to these presumptions and the terminal illness they inflict on society? Not really. Having proved his point, he chastises himself with the thought, developed from the work of Elias Canetti, that there is a gap between our words and our deeds. He offers writers to us as people who may help us bridge that gap.

Ask people about the values dear to them and the odds are that many, probably most, will name equality, mutual respect, solidarity and friendship among the top most. But look closely at their daily behaviour, their life strategies in action, and one can bet that you'll derive from what you've see an entirely different league table of values. You will be astonished to find out how wide the gap is between ideals and realities, words and deeds.

Zygmunt Bauman gets a little Beckettian at the very end of this fine book, when he writes

We will never know unless we try: again and again, and ever harder.

The reader notes that you can now have Beckett's great injunction from his novel Murphy printed on a key-ring, a mug, a tee shirt or the case for your smart-phone.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

The reader thus notes that more writing by Zygmunt Bauman and others may be necessary to bridge the gap between words and deeds in the face of The Four Great Presumptions of our age.

It may be almost as hard as bridging the gaps in one of Henry Moore's statues in Leeds.

Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?; book; Polity; Cambridge; 2013

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WRITING THE GHOST OF JEAN MCCONVILLE

In the only photograph of Jean McConville, taken in 1965, she stands beside a row of her children. She’s pregnant, her arms folded, hands hidden, wearing an apron. Her head is tilted, dark wavy hair pulled back and eyes scrunched up against the light.

Recent events involving the arrest of Gerry Adams TD bring the ghost of Jean McConville before us. She and all the other ghosts of the conflict in Ireland remain with us. As a woman, she was 'disappeared'. As a ghost, she remains with us forever.

She was a witty woman and she liked a laugh.

The laughter of the ghost of Jean McConville resounds with the grim laughter of all the dead.

The dead abound, the dead abound.

How do we keep them in the ground?

The past remains, the past remains.

How do we satisfy its claims?

The truth cries out, the truth cries out.

How do we still that urgent shout?

That urgent shout is now a clamour. Every day ghosts appear among us, manifesting their own pain and triggering pain among the living who anguish, then berate themselves for failing to satisfy the claims of the past in a way that would give rest to the ghosts.

The needs of victims and survivors are complex and multi-faceted.

Four areas have been identified that need to be addressed, namely:

Acknowledgement; Truth; Justice, and Reparation.

Addressing these fours areas is both a personal and a public matter. The personal grief of the injured survivor and of the loved one left behind can be told in small occasions of sharing, in acts of silent witnessing, in gestures of solidarity and kindness and in the endeavours of citizens of good will to re-create a civil world.

The public address to these four matters is more complex. It occurs in a contested arena of politics. It is a locale of war continuing by means other than military, involving state and non-state actors.

A narrative needs to be constructed and that a collection of existing narratives should be made out of which, with additional material, the contours of a narrative can be constructed, without conflicting narratives being adjudicated. This will inform the process of moving into a future in which the past will not repeat itself.

Who will write this narrative? Who will collect these existing narratives? Who will not adjudicate the conflicting narratives?

The ghosts will not write it, though their stories are the core of it.

She said no, she had done nothing wrong, and she was not running from anybody. We talked that night. She asked me what I wanted from my life. She told me she missed Arthur and she said she hoped I would find a good man. She gave me a cigarette.

The living are writing it, many of them victims and survivors themselves.

It shouldn’t have happened.

And in the writing of it, they can give rest to the ghosts and succour to themselves, the living, by asserting that it never will happen again.

It was my mother’s first place of her own. Four rooms with an outside toilet, but it was her wee palace. I remember her buying material to make curtains, and going down to Smithfield Market to get junk.

AH 6905; stage-play; Dave Duggan from Plays in a Peace Process; Guildhall Press; Derry; 2008

Advice on Dealing with the Past: A Victim Centred Approach; Commission for Victims and Survivors; Belfast; 2014

Diary; London Review of Books; Volume 35 No. 24; Susan McKay; London; 19.12.2013 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/susan-mckay/diary

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WATCHING CALVARY

The cinema-goer sits in a packed cinema in Castlebar (54 degrees North, 9 degrees West) on Good Friday, watching Calvary. The film is reviewed as a comedy, particularly by media outlets in London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West).

No one in the cinema laughs.

And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.

Castlebar is near the settings in Sligo (54 degrees North, 8 degrees West) where the majority of the film is beautifully shot by Larry Smith. The cinema-goer says 'hats off' to Larry for his fine work throughout.

The film is in the sentimental tradition of the (in)famous John Hinde postcards of the west of Ireland. It is packed with quirky characters, straight out of post-modern Oirish central casting. They are engaged in a picaresque meander through a plot-less drama, where the antagonist – The Roman Catholic Church – gets off lightly.

The protagonist and other characters are fey and whimpering. They lack agency. They are boozers, variously violent, abusive, hurt, traumatised and odd. Except for the bereaved French woman, who is beautiful and steadfast, even when the baggage-handlers at the airport insult her and the remains of her dead partner by leaning on his coffin as it waits beside the plane on the tarmac.

Is there a degree of self-loathing in the film-making?

That image contrasts with Bill Doyle's images of a funeral procession on Inis Oirr, in his book, Island Funeral. Never sentimental and, elevated by Bill Doyle's artistry, they are beyond real, yet rooted there.

The cinema-goer wonders how much inter-play there is between realism and surrealism in the film-makers' minds.

And, of course, there is an appeal to irony. Is it possible to be ironic on film?

Consider the scene when the priest's daughter returns to London. She is seen on a balcony, against a backdrop of high-rise glass and metal towers and in front of a clean-cut cappuccino. Are the bandages removed from her wrists? This could be read ironically. She has been 'healed' by leaving Ireland and returning to London? No one in the cinema finds it comedic. Do we find London modern and desirable? Better than our home-place?

After watching Calvary the cinema-goer reads glowing reviews in the press and on IMDb. They bear no resemblance to the cinema-goer's experience.

Why do we see the priest shot in the head, twice?

Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny 


Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd 


The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.

No one laughs. Does 'black' comedy really mean 'bad' comedy?

www.biblegateway.com Luke: 23:32-34

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

Richard II; line 2098; stage play: William Shakespeare; London; 1595

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THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY. AND TIMELESS.

The recent state visit by The President of Ireland to Britain highlights many facets of the relationships between the peoples of the two adjacent western European islands.

No, it's not much. Just a place and some memories and time passing into ever shortening futures. But you survived, too. You're a survivor.

In particular, it highlights the opening line of L.P. Hartley's novel, The Go-Between

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

The most excitable reaction to the presidential visit from the London media was to the attendance at a dinner in Windsor Castle of Martin McGuinness. He is Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and formerly a leading figure in the Provisional Wing of The Irish Republican Army, a decommissioned anti-state military organisation.

The same London media outlets who focused on Martin McGuiness' attendance and his past also frequently carry stories and opinion pieces in which the people of Northern Ireland are urged, entreated and exhorted to move on from the past and move its legacy from current events to history.

They forget that the past is multiform and is forever present. The past is eternally a current event, held in many different views. The London media view, though dominant, is only one such view.

There is no go-between to negotiate the troubled past of a conflict in which thousands of people lost their lives over four decades and which is rooted in colonial relationships between the two islands over many centuries.

The remarks of former London government Minister Norman Tebbit, in which he looked forward to the occasion when a dissident republican would shoot Martin McGuinness in the back of the head, illustrate the pain victims of violence experience on a daily basis, long after the tragedy that was visited upon them has past. His remarks do not illustrate the grace of other victims of violence associated with the conflict in Northern Ireland, as offered by people such as Gordon Wilson and Kay Duddy. The reaction of victims of violence are as varied as the persons themselves.

I'm a survivor. I survived. Through all the pain, anguish, hurt, grief, history, time and blood. I survived. That's my legacy. Your legacy too.

Norman Tebbit's remarks and the focus of the London media on Martin McGuinness' attendance underline just how difficult and painful the legacy of the past is.

Simply asserting that it must be dealt with is not enough. The legacy of the past is a site of continuing contestation. It need not be violent, but it is a struggle and it is painful.

Arriving at a set of agreed understandings of the nature of the conflict may not be possible. For some it was a terrorist, law and order matter. For others, it was a war of defence, survival and liberation.

Look, war is about targets. Collateral damage. Lists getting longer. They do this, we do that. One of ours, one of theirs. Some in uniforms, some in civvies, Some legitimate, some illegitimate …

All dead.

All dead. The lowest common denominator. The bottom line.

If it became possible to agree such a frame-work of understanding, then it might be possible for state and non-state combatants to acknowledge what they did. And from such acknowledgements, may come genuine justice and possible prosecutions. Or amnesties, if agreed by citizens.

No guarantee. Simply calling on victims to 'move on', particularly when such calls come from the power centre of one of the main protagonists in the conflict, is not sufficient. It feels like the victims, the foot-soldiers, the dead and the maimed must 'get over it' on terms that suit and do not disturb the powerful.

The bomb didn't start it. Talk started it. And talk will finish it.

And new games, with new rules. If we can find them.

Genuine attempts to create processes and practices to resolve matters from the past are grounded in the truth that it is indeed another country, though not a foreign one. We can visit it with open-eyed and generous-hearted wisdom. And with an assertion that things will be different. So different that the new past we now make will not be the same as the old one we made.

It's very hard.

It is. We'll always be waiting.

Waiting ….. : Dave Duggan; stage-play; 2000; from Plays in a Peace Process; Guildhall Press; Derry; 2008

The Go-Between: L.P. Hartley; novel; Penguin Modern Classics; London; 2000

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PLANE DOWN! WHERE ARE ALL THE SPY SATELLITES?

Satellite's gone up to the skies

Things like that drive me out of my mind

The tragic loss of life following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 raises many questions, the most simple phrasing of which is: what happened?

A more complex question is: why weren't the plane's movements picked up by the spy satellites that orbit the planet?

The answer is obvious. There are no spy satellites orbiting the planet.

Using faint, hourly satellite signals gathered by British firm Inmarsat plc and radar data from early in its flight, investigators have only estimates of the speed the aircraft was travelling and no certainty of its altitude, Mr Houston said. Satellite imagery of the new search area had not given “anything better than low confidence of finding anything”, said Mick Kinley, another search official in Perth.

Would it were the case that Flight MH 370 went off course in a major Hollywood blockbuster rather than in the skies over The South China Sea! But things aren't straightforward, not even in a film.

All the Hollywood spy films we watch are now shown to be utterly fantastical, even false. There are no spy satellites that can pin-point, with razor-sharp accuracy, the location of a desperate terrorist intent on blowing up The President, just in time for a government agent to swoop and defeat the enemy. Or just in time for a drone weapon to identify and eliminate (i.e. kill) the target (i.e. person).

RESEARCH TECH #2

Sir. I've got a code here from NSA --

they're not gonna give us Keyhole

satellite clearance unless we have

sign-off from upstairs.

Who can give this clearance? And why wasn't it given to Research Tech #2? Or to Malaysia Airlines?

Who signs off?

If you wanted, you could pick your own secret missions. As I do. Name it, name it. Destabilize a multinational by manipulating stocks. Bip. Easy. Interrupt transmissions from a spy satellite over Kabul... done. Hmm. Rig an election in Uganda. All to the highest bidder.

Or a gas explosion in London.

Mm-hm. Just point and click.

Well, everybody needs a hobby.

So what's yours?

Resurrection.

Tragically, resurrection is not possible for the people on MH 370. There is no 'point and click' technology that will bring them back. No app that will salve the grief of the families who have lost loved ones.

No ace-screenwriter who can conjure up the lost plane and locate, using imagination and satellite wizardry, the handful of sterling survivors of flight MH 370, clinging to translucent coral that curls from an atoll in an azure ocean.

This tragedy proves there are no spy satellites. We are alone, with only the stars to light us.

I saw two shooting stars last night

I wished on them but they were only satellites

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?

I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care

Or alternatively, the families of the dead have not got clearance to use spy satellite data. They do not have sign-off.

From upstairs. Where the satellites orbit.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/loureed/satelliteoflove.html

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/billy+bragg/new+england_20018174.html

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/malaysia-changes-account-of-last-words-from-missing-mh370-1.1745684

http://www.dailyscript.com /scripts/bourneidentity.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1074638/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu

LETTERS OF COMFORT FOR ALL?

Look, here's a letter from him: the state hath


another, his wife another; and, I

think, there's one 
at home for you.

The First Minister of Northern Ireland in Belfast (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) threatens to resign over letters to people termed 'on the runs'. MPs in Westminster (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West) roar and shout. Journalists say 'I told you so'. Lawyers wax knowledgeable and rub their palms together in expectation of future windfalls.

A letter for me! it gives me an estate of seven


years' health;

in which time I will make a lip at 
the physician

All over a letter. Or almost 200 of them. Letters sent on the authority of various British Governments, including the current one. Some of them include pardons from the Queen of England.

Madam, a noble gentleman of Rome,


Comes from my lord with letters.

The putative criminals receiving these

pardons/amnesties/exemptions/letters of comfort are all alleged to have been involved in armed activity against the British State as part of militant Irish Republican campaigns.

Of this my letters


Before did satisfy you. If you'll patch a quarrel,


As matter whole you have not to make it with,


It must not be with this.

No letter falls through the letterbox of family members of the dead, killed by State or paramilitary forces, in the civil conflict in Ireland. No letter for the woman whose son was killed; for the woman whose her husband was killed; for the man whose sister was killed. No letter of comfort, explanation, acknowledgement, regret or justice. No letter saying 'sorry' and 'it won't happen again'.

Welcome hither:


Your letters did withhold our breaking forth

Patience herself would startle at this letter,


And play the swaggerer

Armies look after themselves first.

the letters too


Of many of our contriving friends in Rome


Petition us at home

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

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READING RAINBOW OF DESIRE BY AUGUSTO BOAL

Augusto Boal is a global theatre guru. His Theatre of the Oppressed and associated methods are used in mainstream and alternative theatre work, in political and social emancipation work and in therapeutic settings.

The reader is wary of gurus and approaches this wondrous book cautiously.

Theatre is the first human invention and also the invention that paves the way for all other inventions and discoveries.

The reader considers this sentence good enough for a t-shirt. The book is full of startlingly delicious one-liners.

The human being not only 'makes' theatre: it 'is' theatre.

So we think light and we talk matter.

The book is divided into two sections: theory and practice. It is laid out in a welcoming, readable fashion. The reader enjoys the occasional arcane term, often usefully glossed in the wide margins: oneiric; aesthetic; concretisation; ascesis; osmosis; metataxis; agora; polysemies.

The reader has never met Augusto Boal, but feels sure that he is a fine man. The book passes the Holden Caulfield test as presented in The Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger. You have enjoyed the book if, after reading it, you want to talk to the person who wrote it.

The book cites four forms of catharsis, all of which are forms of purgation or purification. Catharsis in Theatre of The Oppressed is a route to disequilibrium, which prepares the way for action.

The rehearsal of an action is in itself an action, the practice of an action then to be practised in real life.

In Forum Theatre an intervention is said to be magic when, in order for it to succeed, it changes the given of the reality.

At times, in the case studies written up throughout, the reader senses Augusto Boal seeking to lead/direct/explain in the direction of reading actions and behaviour so that they are 'true'.

In theatre, the problem is not one of knowing whether someone is lying or telling the truth: the problem is seeing that someone is in the process of doing something, of acting. For even if the protagonist is lying, the action is always true.

The reader notes that the protagonist, the human, is always lying, in the sense of storying the world in order to make sense, not truth, of it.

Here the task is not to ask why; here, things are as they are, quite simply because they are as they are – but they might also be different.

Is it possible to gain entertainment from such theatre work? The reader reads that Augusto Boal seems critical of a man who simply wants to put on a show. This connects with the long tradition of treating play-actors, show-people and theatre makers with suspicion, for they are false and untrustworthy.

Because of the slowness, each gesture appears magnified; by their secretive tone, the words reveal their true content.

The reader wonders at the aggrandisement of play-acting techniques into prescribed, almost ritual, forms, no matter how much emphasis is placed on openness.

A rite is a conscious spectacle designed to be seen.

Even if Augusto Boal does not want to be a guru, do such language and theatre acts, as this book and the techniques within it, draw acolytes to them, who may use the knowledge 'over' others rather than 'with' others?

Is Shakespeare the reader's guru?

the purpose of playing,

whose end, both at the first and now, was and is,

to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature;

to show Virtue her own feature, 


Scorn her own image,

and the very age and body of the time

his 
form and pressure.

The reader wonders if the book could be presented less grandly as a work-sheet of a few pages of double-sided A4.

The methods cited are useful to mainstream theatre makers, whether the work is process-orientated or production-orientated. Or both.

The reader enjoys the book and will take its wisdom into the future.

The Rainbow of Desire: Augusto Boal; book; Routledge; London; 1995

Hamlet: William Shakespeare; Act 3, Scene 2; stage-play; London; 1600

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