By Quentin Cockburn

Arriving at Devizes we marveled at the truly eccentric Caen Lock.  I heard that “Only the english could arrive at this sort of solution”.  Indeed there was something so very dogmatic about the engineering, not an elegant solution, but a marvel of exactitude nonetheless and perhaps an abundant supply of willing cheap labour. 
Funny that it’s quaint to us, but in its day a demonstration of early capitalism, Blake-ean Mills, and the reality of Transportation of a more final kind.  There in front of us a hill, perhaps 100 metres in height. Before us an upward procession of lock gates, all 33 of them!  Each, with white painted lock spars, (the bit you push), and the railing, (also white), the stone surrounds and the lock gates a neat rectangle of steel and timber, before and adjacent a pool of water, as a sort of reserve pool for heavy traffic.
And incomprehensibly the same again and again, until improbably the nostalgic inference of Constable and Hogarth gave way to Escher’s excruciating sense of illusion.  Practically speaking, we were told it took almost the entire day to negotiate the system, People were less time deficient then, and I could understand the stagnation along the canals, why bother?  But as a feat of engineering – unstoppable!!!

An aside, perhaps it was during our canal journey we observed once again the reluctance on behalf of the English for incidental small talk.  We’d pass people and give a good natured wave and in return either get a perfunctory nod or as they trudged along the pathway, almost a surly, sneering, grudging recognition.  Perhaps it was the climate we mused, it had been a long winter, but so often the sun was not mediated though a sunny disposition.  We could be wrong.  My son and I stayed at the Black Bear Hotel, we ate breakfast in style.  The three females had to content themselves with a surly B & B matron, an advertised spa that was ‘Out-Of-Order’, a dinner that was ‘off’, and a bed of sorts.  Once again, life was “funner” in the boys club.

We stayed at Devizes, and made the journey back again, less revelatory, but interesting, and then by a curious quirk of navigation, found ourselves inadvertently at Stonehenge.. But that’s another story.   Cheers

Read Performance enhancement by Paddy 0′Cearmada  14 August 2013 here

The purpose of the exercise was to ride from Bath common to the picturesque town of Devizes.  Once there, we’d camp for the night and return.  The promise was evocative, 30 or so kilometres of pastoral scenery slipping by as we pedaled with minimum energy through it.

Bikes tested and tyres inflated we set off.  The barges floated by, and we were cocooned within a tunnel of deep foliage, then on into an eternalised realm of stonework, lightly covered with a patina of moss.  And of lock gates; creaking apertures of steel and timber.  These massive structures, which in common with Roman siege engines, grind upon wrought iron ratchets worn through over-use, the metallic clank of cogs transferring the weight of the gates into the onrush of water.   Then the  release.   The dark, grey green backwash of gurgling, laughing water.   Solidity, ancient of days as distinct from the lightness, the texture, inky black and mirror smooth.

Along the way, leaf shrouded in dark greens and vivid turquoise the path a sand coloured ribbon of dappled sunlight led us along an embankment cut into the side of hill. Perhaps once as industrialised as the thread of a modern highway, now softened and deeply textured by the coppices of Chestnut, Elm and London Plane, between them the roseate hue of Copper Beech and Hornbeam, mixing the canopy above us into a patter of leaf and serrated edge, sunlight shining through the cracks and fissures of leaf weighted tree.

We spent the rest of the day enjoying this journey somewhat lost in time and space.   And between the “closed” embrace of trees, with the intermittent prospect of small villages, defined as always by pleasant stone bridges, the ubiquitous pub, and a milling throng of tourists, we observed the ceaseless flow of traffic upon the canal.

There’s an extraordinary multiplicity about the canals and the boats that travel them.  The sense of travel is “ slowed” to the dull methodical plodding of a horse, a timbre measured in hours, distance being more or less immaterial.   There is “observable” movement. And for the vast majority,  the procession of pencil thin “ narrow boats” confirmed something intrinsically “English”.   This is a community, a water borne community that represents all we terrestrials take for granted, yet unlike the mortgage, the car, and the education, the impression is that this exists as an emphatic statement of being.   It is intrinsic and inviolable and the panoply of passing traffic confirms in essence a streak of very divergent Englishness..

There are the smart boats, beautifully decorated, shining brass, and funnels, possessing all the grace and celerity of the Lusitania upon receipt of the coveted blue ribband.  Then there are the boats for hire, the workaday boats, still smart, but somewhat uniform in utility and appearance, and between them, and their methodical  plodding are the moored boats, the semi abandoned and the “Unfinished Project”.

We looked at these boats, some like garden sheds, overgrown, tarpaulins pitted and holed to reveal crumbling walls, decks stained and fissured, with the telltale signs of ropes, green with age, sagging with the boat in sympathetic communion.  Elsewhere, boats “customised” with elaborate deckhouses identified themselves as long-termers, their superstructure broken, fissured, textured and abandoned, crumbling inwards in recognition that they’d never fit under a bridge.   And the saddest of all, boats, whose roofs, held aloft an entire life, registered in old bicycles, weedy pot plants, car parts, coils of useless rope, children’s toys, and the remnants of a broken clothesline.   A life in passing, this boat and the next as decayed rustic homilies dedicated to the passage of time and human frailty.

Abandonment in all its honesty.  More pathetic than the solitary chimney in the countryside,  a remembrance of lives long gone, stories sinking bit by bit into the oft oozing mud.

Read Suppository of Wisdom  by Paddy 0′Cearmada  13 August 2013 here

by Cecil Poole

Oh, no, no, truly, let it be no!  It must be here.  In my wallet, front sleeve, middle opening.  First thing I always see –  my Visa card.  Passport to my world.  And it is not there.  And its not stuffed in the note part with those miscellaneous dockets, the odd mixture of $A, US$, and  Sterling.  Fool, I mutter, stupid fool.  It must be in my pocket, no, the other pocket, hip pocket, shirt pocket.  Bugger.  I’m in Federal Triangle Station, attempting to buy a Metro Ticket.  I’ve pull out the wallet, opened it as usual to be faced with an empty space in the VISA place.  Empty feeling in my stomach too.  Many expletives attempt escape, yet none is satisfactory for the situation.

OK, calm down.  Yes, think of Manny in Black Books and ‘The Little Book of Calm’.  Of course I smile, I laugh as who could not at this thought.  Shoulders release a little, head and neck feel looser.  Mind races through what I’ve been doing, where it could be – backwards.
Washington Mall – Museum of American History – yes, yes, transport exhibits – but no, definitely no purchases – before that then – the Museum of Natural History – well that was a waste of time, so packed with children and families right now in the middle of holidays.  Again no purchasing.
Hmm, ah, Sculpture Garden – with the brilliant polished stainless steel tree, the Escheresque house, the headless figures under the trees – oh and the beer – but no, Quentin bought that.  Well, back to the Washington monument, the confrontingly dreadful WWII monument (opened in 2004, to a Jingoistic design of the 19th C,) the Vietnam and Korean War memorials, dignified, with no hubris, and the Lincoln memorial, and the friendly rangers – no purchasing at all.

Well, hey, I know, we’d ridden in from Arlington on Capital City Bikeshare bikes – and that is where I last used my VISA.  And that was five hours ago. FIVE HOURS AGO!  So many people have had the chance to take my card.  To use it, to spend all my money.  To ensure I end up in jail!   God, they even have the CCV number.  What a shopping spree!  What are they buying?  At this very minute.  Maybe it will melt. Hopefully it will melt.  I must phone the bank and cancel the card.  NOW.

Quentin, by way of comfort, says “it’ll still be there, I can feel it, it really will.”  Bullshit is my unspoken reply. “Yes it will,” he persists.  No it won’t, I respond with my eyes.  We get tickets and take the train back to Court House, the Metro nearest our apartment.  I’m not worried, too old for that, understand its futility. Yet I need to get back and cancel the card.  Up the elevators we go, and face a labyrinth of exit tunnels each with vaguely familiar names.  I choose one – I’ve been here before a few times, and should know.  We come into the sunlight, turn around and see the familiar facade of our Breakfast Bagel Shop (where they make the best bagels ever, right there in the shop).  Yes, the bike station is just down the alley near that shop.

I try to look cool as I ‘stroll’ past the rack of bikes towards the pay station.  I try to remember how many bikes were there when we took ours, now 6 HOURS AGO.  Surely many people must have taken bikes.
I reach the pay station.
I look in the card slot.
And there it is.

“I have quested all my life for truths and I wallow in bromides.  The bromides themselves wallow in truth.”    (From My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn 1959).  How apt this seems to your hosts, for we have quested after truth, never more so than here in the US of A.  Yet bromides keep appearing, more real than life itself.  In Richmond, Virginia, at the Museum of the Confederacy we have been subject of the most warm and open hospitality (when perhaps what we deserved was hostility (or contempt) for our naivety).  Then as Albert (Einstein) says “Of course we don’t know what we are doing, that is why it is called research”.  It seemed to us that the South were still trying to justify their actions and demean those of the North – not without a little justification.  Yet….

Back to the Blog – which has had a wonderfully eclectic mix this week.
Starting with Quentin’s “The House and The Boat”, wherein he states “Houses and boats, are like books.  Only when they have been caressed by a sympathetic hand, imbibed by a sympathetic mind, and the ideas and voices within are shared in a symbiosis of mutual regard can there be a ‘transference of soul.’”

We introduced our first Restaurant Review, with Carol Barrow.  She loves family-owned ones – “You know the kind: where the waiter is the owner and he remembers you and your family and what you like to eat.  He makes sure your water glass is full because he cares.  He wants you to come back.”

On his very first visit to America Quentin had this to say, “The further I went the more the contradictions rain down upon me, I am losing my sense of  definition, black is not necessarily black and white has gone fuzzy and in between, beyond this, the general “friendliness” of the locals is deeply unsettling.” in First Impressions

“Silent Sam” by George Entenman is the story of an ongoing saga around the meaning of a statue of a Confederate Soldier erected at the University of North Carolina in 1913. Passive and not so passive complicity abound!

Endette Hall is having difficulties with the Lower Orders, Ira Maine reporting “because of my mother’s failure to maintain properly acceptable standards during her stay, it has been difficult to hold my head up as I go about my duties”

In our Musical Dispatch this week “Flight or Fight” Bob Marley’s Babylon system gets a mention:
We refuse to be
What you wanted us to be;
We are what we are:
That’s the way  it’s going to be. If you don’t know!
You can’t educate us
For no equal opportunity.
Followed by a reference to Fear and Loathing with regard our 2013 election campaign.  The racially based and debased Intervention continues.

Poetry Sunday brings us “a glorious poem by Seamus Heaney concerning another great man: his father.” with such insightful comments from Ira Maine.  Enjoy this work.

Regards

Cecil and Quentin
Somewhere on the Mississippi

Passive Complicity is delighted to welcome the renown Australian Political Commentator, Paddy 0’Cearmada, to our pages.  He will comment on the progress of the election campaigns of players on the Australian Federal stage. Here is his first report

The second coming  by Paddy 0’Cearmada
And John in his prison sent messengers to Jesus to ask: “Are you the one who is to come or do we have to wait for someone else?” Matthew chapter 11.

I set out to vote on 24 November 2007 with my daughter.  We walked the few blocks from my house to the local high school and as it was her first time to vote she was asking me what to expect.  I explained that the process was quite simple, and that people from each party would have how to vote cards.  Waxing philosophical I explained that I always politely accepted these from all parties, as the secret ballot, an Australian invention, was a treasured right.  My daughter could see right through that conceit commenting wryly that our Kevin 07 t-shirts she had bought online would rather negate any secrecy.  For a moment I wondered aloud whether we would be allowed into the voting hall, bearing as it were across my middle aged chest and her fine young breasts a political slogan. My daughter asked if we should turn back and change and looking at her youthful figure I asked if she was wearing a bra, when she said a little hotly ‘yes’ I said if challenged we would just take them off. Fortunately this was not required and no one in the leafy surrounds of Balwyn North lost their composure or their breakfast as a consequence.

My journey to the polls almost 3 years later on October 5 2010 was solitary and sullen.  The hyped hope of the Rudd-slide had turned into a mudslide with a choice of a fractured Labor party under Julia Gillard or the leering ambition of Tony Abbott.  I walked past the party volunteers ignoring the whispered advice from the shiny young Liberal to ‘stop the boats’ and took the Greens how to vote card.

Now at the end of a first week of campaigning I am no wiser.  In a breathless reportage of which ill-chosen candidate said what to make a fool of themselves, or what atrocities have been revealed about the bullying tactics of other candidates, or which superannuated Premier has been persuaded to stand in a possibly winnable marginal seat, policy, vision and most certainly truth have been invisible.  Kevin Abbott and Tony Rudd each present themselves as messiahs, prophets from a wilderness of their own making, furiously agreeing with each other while finding crueller and meaner ways to seem tough.

John was right to send messengers to Jesus.  After all we know from all the gospels including those outside the Christian canon, that messiahs were everywhere at the time.  Indeed John had been confused as one, and the whole promise to the Jews by their God was based on waiting.   Jesus in reply confirmed by his actions the prophecies of his coming, a neat literary trick on the part of the evangelist who was after all writing for a Jewish audience in the wake of the destruction of the Temple.  70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a messiah was really needed and the propagandists seized their moment.  But it all could have been so different.  The most popular rival cult to Jesus of Nazareth was for Antinous, the beautiful Greek boyfriend of Hadrian, tragically drowned in the Nile.  If it had prevailed would we have Tony Abbott railing against a movement to heterosexual marriage?

I wonder in all of this about my daughter and her vote.  After all this election is being fought by two men who each had a part in destroying the first woman Prime Minister three years and a day after she removed Rudd.  Samuel Beckett knew about the absurdity of waiting.  Vladimir and Estragon continued a conversation about nothing for a person who never came.  Sadly at the end of this campaign the messiah won’t have come and instead one of the vagrants will be Prime Minister.

THE ASH PLANT
By Seamus Heaney

He’ll never rise again but he is ready.
Entered like a mirror in the morning,
He stares out the big window, wondering,
Not caring if the day is bright or cloudy.

An upstairs outlook on the whole country.
First milk-lorries,first smoke, cattle, trees
In damp opulence above damp hedges-
He has it to himself, he is like a sentry

Forgotten and unable to remember
The whys and wherefores of his lofty station,
Wakening relieved yet in position,
Disencumbered as a breaking comber.

As his head goes light with light, his wasting hand
Gropes desperately and finds the phantom limb
Of an ash plant in his grasp, which steadies him.
Now he has found his touch he can stand his
ground

Or wield a stick like a silver bough and come
Walking again among us: the quoted judge.
‘I could have cut a better man out of the hedge!’
God might have said the same, remembering Adam.

———————————————————————-

A glorious poem by Seamus Heaney concerning another great man: his father.  This is  Heaney watching his father taking on the decrepitude of old age.  Unlike Dylan Thomas, he asks nothing of his father, makes no demands that he fight ‘against the dying of the light’.
Heaney’s father’s faculties are fading and Heaney imagines for him that the old man’s panicked incomprehension of his state is steadied by his grasping of “the phantom limb’, the ‘ash plant’.
In those days, to knock down nettles, hurry cattle with a tap on the rump, break the necks of rabbits, kill fish, knock brambles aside or help you over rough ground, ‘an ask plant was your only man…’  This was a stout walking stick cut carefully from the common European ash tree (fraxinus excelsior)
If the proper care wasn’t taken in it’s fashioning, it would be noted and dismissively “judged’.

‘…I could have cut a better man out of the hedge!’

The term ‘man’ to indicate a wooden stick used as a tool to clean shovels and spades was common in England ’til quite recently.  The splendidly Bolshy writer John Seymour uses it again and again in his writings on managing a small acreage.

In Heaney’s part of the world I think ‘man’ is used more in the sense of the way the word ‘one’ is used, Perhaps ‘I could have cut a better ONE out of the hedge…’ I believe ‘man’  in Ireland is used in a broader sense than in England, and might be made to refer to almost anything.
Most of the poem is comprehensible.
‘…to raise a stick like a silver bough and come walking again amongst us…’ is not immediately clear.  but is followed by ‘…the quoted judge..’
In whose mythology does a man come amongst his people, holding a silver bough aloft, as a judge?

In Irish Mythology the silver bough, with its nine golden apples formed a door to the Other World.
Cormac Mac Art, High King of Ireland, heard the enchanted music as the apples (or bells) sounded and was so seduced by this music that he was persuaded into trading his wife and children to own the bough Years passed and, regretting the bargain he set off to be reunited with his family, He eventually came back ‘…to wield the stick like a silver bough and come walking again amongst us…’

So, Heaney’s father holds the key, the silver bough in his hand, the portal to the Otherworld, as we all will, when the time comes. But in Heaney’s world, the non Christian world, the extraordinary world of Celtic mythology, of love lost and life restored, his father will ‘come walking again among us:’

At the same time, in his father’s faltering mind, he IS walking among us, a stout silver ash plant in his grasp, a marvellous Summer day before him, and whose to hinder him, or to say his reality is any less valid than ours?

IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor

Continuing our Dispatch from last week, with this the second extract.  First published 10 June 2013.  Have you done your homework? 

We are all familiar with the ‘flight-or-fight response’. I looked it up. I found that one of many physical reactions in the flight-or-fight response is tunnel vision and that the “specific components of cognitions in the fight or flight response seem to be largely negative”.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Fear and Loathing has been with us a long time.
It is what drove a large number of Christians to break the sixth commandment when they sallied forth to stir the possum in the Holy land.
It is what drove Dubya’s nation to believe that there were tunnels (tunnel vision) chock a block full of weapons of mass destruction and sally forth to Babylon to break the sixth commandment.

Bob Marley’s Babylon System:

We refuse to be
What you wanted us to be;
We are what we are:
That’s the way  it’s going to be. If you don’t know!
You can’t educate us
For no equal opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5EoiQX7u5k

Fear and loathing that drove the nation that gave us Schiller and Schubert to exterminate other humans as if they were vermin.

Fear and loathing, fight-or flight, that drove homicidal fanatics to fly planes full of humans into buildings full of humans.

Fear and loathing, fight-or-flight that drove supposedly civilised humans to throw other humans off planes into the Atlantic Ocean.

Fear and loathing, fight-or-flight that drives the Nation of Zion to periodically bombard the neighbouring ‘untermenschen’.

Fear and Loathing… from Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population:

“A native with his child, surprised on the banks of the Hawksbury river by some of our colonists, launched his canoe in a hurry, and left behind him a specimen of his food, and of the delicacy of his stomach. From a piece of water-soaked wood, full of holes, he had been extracting and eating a large worm. The smell both of the worm and its habitation was in the highest degree offensive. These worms, in the language of the country, are called Cah-bro; and a tribe of natives dwelling inland, from the circumstance of eating these loathsome worms, is named Cah-brogal.”

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2007…

Alleged widespread dysfunction, paedophilia and ‘rivers of grog’ that drove the denizens of the ‘Clever Country’ to believe that ‘something had to be done’, which the authorities sure did!  With bi-partisan support an emergency was declared in the Northern Territory, the Intervention.
…thank you Jesus, thank you Lord….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E3Z_dvkVcs

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2013…

So is reversing that travesty, the assimilationist behemoth that is the Intervention and its decade long relabelled extension (‘Stolen Futures’) on either major party’s election platform? No Sir!

Pride of place on the hustings in the Nation of the Fair-Go is taken by ‘Stop the Boats’

The main rationale being presented by our political leaders for ‘Stopping the Boats’ is to discourage people from jumping non-existent queues and to thwart the ‘People Smugglers’.

That fear and loathing may have some relevance and that we are a nation of xenophobes is not mentioned. Don’t mention the war!

Yes folks, this is dinkum! Google ‘people smugglers business model’ (I just did) and you get more than two million ‘results’!

Breaking the ‘business model’ of people smugglers is now (after getting into the World Cup) Australia’s greatest aspiration.

Close the Gap, Stronger Futures, Stop the Boats ….Can’t take your slogans no more……. No more sweet talk from the hypocrites…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD6C3vX4cSg

We will complete this dispatch next week with the third part.

Silent Sam was always about more than Soldiers by George Entenman

It’s 1913, in the middle of the night, and a group of University of North Carolina (UNC) workers have just brought a heavy load to McCorkle Place in a rented Mule-Haul.

It’s the statue of a Confederate soldier.

Quietly they place it on a pedestal, facing North, his rifle ready. The workers steal off into the night, leaving Silent Sam to greet the rising sun.

When the citizenry woke up, they found the new statue and knew that it simply represented the students who had fought for the Confederacy.

This of course is not what happened. In the UNC library you can find a 20-page speech by James Carr, the man who raised money for the statue. He read these words when he dedicated Silent Sam.

Unlike the writers of the impassioned letters and recent op-ed in the Chapel Hill News, James Carr knew that the statue did not simply honor students who had served during the war. Yet some people are aghast at a recent proposal to put a new plaque on the statue, a plaque which would “thoroughly explain the context in which the monument was erected.” This plaque would discuss race.

People opposed to the plaque claim that the statue has nothing to do with race. History, they believe, shows that the statue simply honors war veterans.

Why don’t we let James Carr himself settle the matter? He raised the money for the statue. He dedicated it. Who better than Carr to explain the history behind Silent Sam.

I propose that the plaque have the following sentences from pp 9-B and 9-C of James Carr’s dedication speech:

“The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – when the ‘bottom rail was on top’ all over the Southern states – and today, as a consequence, the purist strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.”

“I trust that I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with double-barreled shotgun under my head.”

Of course Silent Sam was intended to honor Confederate soldiers. But that’s not all it was meant to do The words “succeeding the war” refer to Reconstruction, not the war itself. The words “Anglo Saxon race” are self-explanatory.

George Entenman lives in Chapel Hill.